Editorial

This general issue offers a number of reflections on the place of pornographies in various communities of practice, while our Forum considers some of the potential pitfalls of digital desires.

In ‘Moderating the “Worst of Humanity”: Sexuality, Witnessing, and the Digital Life of Coloniality’, Jacob Breslow focuses on the behind-the-scenes work of social media ‘cleansing’ – the widespread and troubling activity of moderating commercial online content is, of course, highly topical at this moment. Breslow’s exploration of what he terms the ‘digital life of coloniality’ illuminates the significant politics of this activity: first, by discussing the kind of sexual moralizing and heteronormativity at work in regulatory decisions about what content to exclude on social media sites, and then through his examination of why the Philippines is seen to be ‘best placed’ for content moderation (significantly because of its colonial relation to America). Crucially, Breslow considers the trend for outsourcing the labour of moderating sexual expression as ‘fundamental to, and co-constitutive of, the regulation of sexual moralism within and beyond the space of the nation’. This approach builds on but also turns around Postcolonial Studies’ exploration of the ways sexual regulation has attempted to restrict and pathologize the sexuality of subjugated colonial populations – content moderation reverses that regulatory gaze so that it is ‘specifically directed at the sexualities of the former colonizers’. Breslow argues that content moderation ‘is as much a reversal of the usual framework for understanding the direction of the sexual colonial relation, as it is the production of an ambivalent sexual subjectivity in the former colony’, and thus his argument makes an important contribution to scholarship that attempts to re-think the ‘multiple directions of regulation and subject production’ that sustain colonial logics. Witnessing and accountability are also explored here, with a focus on the ‘psychic and political work that offshoring allows in relation to … being accountable for the “worst” of humanity’ (the title of his article). The ‘post-colonial relation … facilitated by content moderation instigates a form of labour that displaces the very potential for witnessing to an elsewhere that sits “beyond” the nation’. While the problems of political content are frequently a subject of debate, specifically sexual or pornographic content is often deemed so obviously unethical that there is no necessity to ‘bear witness’ to it. But, of course, as Breslow reminds us, ‘cleaning up the internet’ might limit the reach of that content (in the West) but it requires others to do that hidden work, thereby displacing where the images are felt, not that they are.

The various spectatorial pleasures of pornography are expanded in Crystal Jackson et al.’s article which explores the relatively new phenomenon of porn tourism. In ‘Porn Fans as Sex Tourists?’ Jackson and her co-authors seek to widen our understanding of sexual consumption to take account of the interrelations of porn, sex tourism/sexual consumption, and relationship status. Arguing that these phenomena need to be studied as a whole, rather than in parts, the authors suggest that this will push theory and analysis beyond the simple notion that consumers of porn are, de facto, ‘bad, mad, sad men’. Recognizing porn tourism is key to thinking through one of the central questions addressed by Porn Studies – ‘Who are porn viewers?’ The article reflects on the results from a survey of 481 individuals attending the 2009 Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas and examines how two dimensions of a relationship – relationship status (monogamous, open, or single) and travelling with a partner – affect attendees’ interests in engaging in sexualized activities outside the event – visiting a strip club, visiting a swingers club, meeting someone for sex, and paying someone for sex – and thus have implications for understanding how couples create and navigate relationship boundaries in relation to pornography and other forms of sexual consumption. Their article highlights how Las Vegas operates as a social space that both enables casual, temporary sexual experiences (alongside drinking and gambling) while at the same time eschewing the stigma associated with such behaviours – the tourist destination becomes a potential playground for adventures which may or may not conflict with prevailing constructions of heteronormativity and monogamous relationships.

Our third article in this issue, ‘Women’s Sex/Porn Sanctuaries and Social Movements in Hong Kong and San Francisco’, presents an important discussion of sexual cultures and queer activism. Katrien Jacobs explores two very distinct socio-geographical and political contexts of Hong Kong and San Francisco in order to examine how conceptions of ‘queer’ and queer pornography are related to the cultural practices of the participants in her study. Through an interpretation of Judith Butler’s (2015) writings on performativity and assembly, Jacobs formulates an understanding of contemporary activism and body politics in an article which outlines how certain practices might be understood as ‘queer’ and how these relate to queer functions of performativity in two different but connected places and their distribution, networks, sexual activism, and gendered contexts. Drawing on interviews with individuals working within different sex-related professions, such as porn producers, artists, sex-shop owners, educators, archivists, and LGBTQ activists, the article presents a rich and immersive account enabling Jacobs to argue for a reimagining of ‘feminist and queer sex/porn spaces as “sanctuaries”, or spaces dedicated to sex and pornography industry and/or culture that intersect with a broader social mission of social and political reflection and engagement’.

Sexual subculture is also the focus of Joao Florencio’s article ‘Breeding Futures: Masculinity and the ethics of CUMmunion in Treasure Island Media’s Viral Loads’, which combines a close reading of the 2014 film Viral Loads with a new take on the issue of barebacking. This is an important and timely contribution to the body of literature around sexual subcultures and the output of studios like Treasure Island. Tim Dean’s (2009) Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking brought ‘barebacking’ and the sexual cultures to which it belongs into broader view. His account of the pleasures of risky sex – ‘bareback’, ‘raw’, and ‘bug-chasing’ gay sex – ran counter to previous explanations of ‘unsafe’ sex, showing how, for some men, barebacking offered the pleasures of transgression, forms of community, and enhanced intimacy. Drawing on Dean’s work but also recognizing its historical specificity, Florencio offers an exploration of Treasure Island Media’s output in its more contemporary social, cultural, sexual, and pharmacological context. His article attempts to formulate new ways of thinking about barebacking and its representations – for example, in Viral Loads’ attempt to document and make visible the moment(s) of HIV transmission – that has significance for our understanding of formations of desire off-screen and how ‘post-AIDS’ gay masculinities may complicate modern understandings of the body, of autonomy, queerness, and community.

Troy Bordun’s article turns to the heteroporn niche of ‘solo girl’ and takes a historical approach, pinpointing 2005 as the immediate prehistory to the moment when the porn industry embraced standardized modes of content production, distribution, and circulation, particularly with the creation of tube sites and the rise of ‘Porn 2.0’ and its shift from producer-created content to user-generated content (Attwood 2010; Paasonen 2011, 66). Although heteroporn, particularly that aimed at male consumers, is constantly referred to in public and policy debates, there is little sustained research into its various contours and niches. Within this critical context, Bordun is unapologetic in his exclusive attention to solo girls circa 2005, because it enables him to explore how the subgenre functions and to show how individual performers and their personalities/characters are significant to fans/consumers, while his discussion of online forum Freeones and its performer profiles enables fans to communicate with each other and foster a porn community of their own. Contrary to the stereotypical image of the porn consumer as an isolated, lonely individual, Bordun shows that ‘solo girl’ fandom can engender active participation with other pornophiles. This kind of sharing and communicating has resonances with the discussion in Crystal Jackson et al.’s article also in this issue.

Communication through the platforms provided by pornography is the subject matter of Jonathan Allan’s ‘The First Rip Off: Anti-circumcision Activism in Men’s Magazines’. Focusing on articles and letters in 1970s editions of Hustler, Allan explores how the notoriously provocative magazine offered its own unique intervention in the circumcision debate. The ‘intactivist movement’ fought both religious and medical justifications for the widespread practice of circumcision (during the 1950s, the procedure was carried out on almost 90% of US male neonates) but Hustler brought its own, more specifically sexual, arguments to bear by highlighting the ways in which circumcision might well interfere with erotic function. Allan takes us beyond the usual focus on Hustler’s provocations to explore the politics of its stance and the ways in which its status as a pornographic magazine allowed for the discussion of topics ruled out of bounds in more ‘respectable’ media. Hustler was able to directly address its readers' concerns about physical feelings and about the erotic possibilities of an intact foreskin, and could highlight the ways in which objective medical thinking might well be influenced by the prevailing sexual repression of the times. His account both addresses the specificities of the intactivist argument and illustrates how pornographic publishing might contribute to wider debates and interests beyond purely sexual motives.

Much has been written about gifting, sharing, and bartering economies and these may be particularly important for thinking about how pornography circulates, both in analogue ecologies (the ‘porn fairy’s’ distribution of porn mags in fields and woodlands as well as the circulation of super-8 and VHS in homosocial networks) and now in the digital era with fileshare, torrent, and tube sites. Drawing on 676 South African survey respondents and 25 interviewees aged 18 years and older, Yolo Koba introduces the concept of the ‘socio-sexual circuit’ as a means of mapping out a more rigorous and materialist account of sharing forms of consumption and meaning-making in relation to pornography. His discussion of social networks of sharing situates the circulation of porn images in the context of restricted financial resources, amongst three types of consumer nodes: buyers, bargainers, and borrowers. Even though online porn sites like Pornhub, XVideos, and Xtube provide explicit content for free, such material is never really ‘free’ because internet access always involves costs and in South Africa the internet penetration rate is well below 50%. The concept of the ‘socio-sexual circuit’ enables Koba to explore the networks of connected individuals whose various methods of porn acquisition include commodity purchase and social compacts which translate to free exchange of sexually explicit material. This analysis builds on and expands some of the work on the circulation of pornography already published in this journal; for example, in Arroyo’s (2016) and Tziallas’ (2016) contributions to our Forum section on pornography and movement, in Hester, Jones, and Taylor-Harman’s (2015) ‘Giffing a Fuck: Non-narrative pleasures in Participatory Porn Cultures and Female Fandom’, and in Joseph Brennan’s (2018) ‘Microporn in the Digital Media Age: Fantasy Out of Context’ published in our last issue. In its focus on race and income in a non-North American and non-European setting and context, alongside the presentation of hard numbers and interview data, Koba expands these discussions into fruitful new territory.

Finally, our Forum section seeks to interrogate the discussion of pornography in relation to questions of surveillance and the digital self. In his introduction to the Forum, Evangelos Tziallas offers a ‘new’ concept – the Pornopticon – an alternative to the ongoing Foucault-centric discursive and analytic model of the Panopticon (Foucault [1975] 1995) which has, he argues, particular implications for thinking through surveillance and Porn Studies. The authors gathered by Tziallas in this forum section outline how data analytics and graphic user interfaces give the illusion of digital freedom and choice while making digital experiences more restrictive and controllable by for-profit corporations (in Patrick Kielty’s ‘Desire by Design’); how biopower, data analytics, and pornographic consumption are related (‘An Engine of Confession’ by Kwasu Tembo); and how and why the terrain of consent, privacy, and pleasure are so tricky (Julia Chan’s ‘Violence or Pleasure?’) in an exploration of up-skirting aesthetics.