Editorial

This first issue of 2023 begins with a special section on the connections between pornographies, music and sound; an area of Porn Studies that remains extremely undeveloped. As our guest editor, Jessica Floyd, notes in her introduction, it is important to ask what makes music sensual, erotic or pornographic, how it is used to create broader social meaning and how, in turn, it is categorized and studied. The articles in this section explore ‘porn sounds’ in specific contexts – in the production and reproduction of Mexican pornicorridos, in the use of late 1960s funk sounds to signify porn, in the way that dialogue becomes part of a porn soundtrack and in the nature and categorization of chanteys, sailing work songs of the sea. While the way sound is used to represent sex is often taken for granted, these articles show how representations are shaped and structured, and how they may be reworked, reappropriated or reconsidered.

In the first of these articles, Jessica Floyd considers the labels erotica and pornography in relation to erotic chanteys, showing how these shape analyses of particular texts, how they are too embedded in contemporary debates to function and how they fail to address chanteys as speech acts or folk art or to recognize their production by a particular group of men for a specific purpose. Chanteys were sung at work on ship, used to match the rhythm and energy of a particular task and to ‘encourage comradery, bonding, and belonging’. Floyd argues that the term ‘bawdry’ – used to describe ‘lewd, obscene, or filthy talk’ – is more historically and culturally accurate and more useful for capturing the depth and breadth of chantey narrative and the elements of innuendo, puns and humour that characterize them.

Steven Dashiell examines the way that porn dialogue – ‘present, required, but often disregarded’ – can be understood as part of the background or soundtrack of pornography alongside other sounds such as music, grunts and groans. He shows that conversations in scenes of anal penetration in gay porn on the site Men.com tend to function as a sort of hegemonic patriarchal soundtrack between the top and the bottom, with the top acting as a ‘leader’ of conversation in 66% of the examples considered, presenting what might be considered ‘a soundtrack of inequality’.

S. A. Wilder shows that despite the fact that the soundtracks of 1970s porn films are characterized by a diverse range of music genres, it was the ‘bow-chicka-bow-wow’ sound, which probably came from the sound of the wah pedal in late 1960s funk, that came to stand as the sound of porn. He shows how its emergence at the same time as Blaxploitation in urban grindhouses led to an association with urban space and urban vice and with pornography across a range of cinema and television texts.

Yessica Garcia-Hernandez considers pornocorridos – porn versions of Mexican corridos or folk ballads that tell stories of marginalized communities – and how they have offered male audiences a bonding experience, a space to articulate anxiety about sex and an opportunity to disrupt respectable sexual norms and hierarchies. Although many pornocorridos can be seen as sexist and misogynist, they have also proved popular with some women and the genre has been taken up to present a feminist response which allows for the centring of women’s voices and desires.

This issue features three more articles which look closely at particular texts: fan art of Disney princesses, the user-generated ‘hypno video’ and Treasure Island’s Viral Loads (2014).

Philip Smith considers the pornographic depictions and tagging of popular Disney princesses by anonymous fans, finding that those with a greater porn presence belong to the most commercially successful films, have rebellious, determined and adventurous characters, and are depicted in a style associated with illustrator Marc Davis – as slender and big eyed, with hour-glass figures and coquettish mannerisms. The most popular of all are Jasmine from Aladdin (1992), Ariel from The Little Mermaid (1989) and Elsa from Frozen (2013). The princesses are most commonly pictured alone or with their canonical partner and some are associated with specific kinks (Snow White with the dwarves, Elsa and Anna with sex and sisters). Their features suggest that they are not interchangeable, but are depicted in scenarios that feel true to their character overall. In this sense they operate as forms of erotic adaptation that do not depart from the source material, but make the implied erotic elements in the original text more explicit.

James Mackay and Polina Mackay examine the popular ‘hypno video’: a user-generated film that combines porn clips with hypnotic imagery and sound, often apparently designed to ‘reprogram’ a viewer’s gender, racial or sexual preferences. Mackay and Mackay unpack how hypnosis has a history of being connected with the erotic, and in turn with ideas of ‘the hypnotic screen’ – cinema, subliminal messaging, ‘brainwashing’ and forms of mind control. They draw on this history to consider whether ideas about hypnosis (and by extension more current ideas about addiction) may function to frame porn viewing in a way that attempts to overcome shame.

Finally, Ryan Thorneycroft and J. Logan Smilges consider how the logics and figurations of disability pervade Viral Loads, which eroticizes the deliberate transmission of HIV. They ask whether, if HIV and same sex are understood as being related to disability, this deliberate transmission may signify the depathologization of all three things and whether the film therefore opens up a space for fantasizing about choosing disability. Yet in order for HIV to remain desirable, the film presents it as non-debilitating; the actors appear white, cis and non-disabled, unmarked by symptoms and separate from the populations most threatened by it – its invisibility key to its eroticization.