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ABSTRACT
The South Korean government enforces strict censorship against pornography. In spite of such regulations, there is a vibrant webcam modelling industry in Korea that operates under the radar. I examine how censorship influences perceptions of Korean webcam models and their viewers. The central questions that drive this article are: how does censorship against pornography impact the ways that individuals engage with their sexual desires in online spaces; and what are the broader sociocultural consequences of such censorship? I explore these questions in conversation with feminist scholarship on webcam modelling, censorship, and erotics. I argue that webcam models and their viewers form an illicit eroticism whereby they derive pleasure from defying the norms of sexual propriety. I argue that the illicit eroticism that forms as a result of censorship against pornography may have negative outcomes for how women’s sexuality is conceptualized in the Korean cultural context.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 I translated the video clip from Korean to English.
2 I follow the rules of the Revised Romanization of Korean in translating from Korean to English.
3 Beotbang has since become a banned word on the website. Hence, now, when one searches for the term on the website, a warning appears saying ‘The term you searched for is banned on this website.’
4 I translated the conversations between the webcam models and the viewers from Korean to English.