Seeing Yourself On Screen: Queer Pornography, Queer Theory

Abstract

Since academic research first began to consider pornography, it has remained a key reference point for discussions of representation and sexuality, particularly for scholars in the fields of feminist and queer studies. The more recently emerging genre of queer pornography—popularly understood to be pornography made by queer people for queer people—thus offers a particularly interesting example for questions about genre, representation and queer politics. This thesis considers what comprises queer pornography when it is situated in a series of related but not identical fields— “porn studies”, theories of representation and identity, genre studies, and feminist queer theory. The first chapter considers how we write about pornography in the academy, tracing in particular the use of anti-pornography feminism within the field of porn studies. The second chapter uses queer pornography to unpack what it means to want to “see yourself on screen”. Across the collected fields of feminist, cultural, sexuality, and screen studies, the concept of “identification” has been key to analysis of pornography but has also become key to understanding the form and effects of pornography outside the academy, with different accounts of identity and representation being tested against pornography. Using feminist film theory, the thesis considers the allure of identification and intersectionality in both academic and popular settings. In the concluding chapters, this thesis asks how the objects of queer pornography and queer theory might speak to each other. Chapter three outlines a genre definition of queer pornography, focusing on its audience and reception, while chapter four takes this account of queer pornography as a site for understanding the queer theoretical debates about anti/normativity. The final chapter draws on the work of Robyn Wiegman to consider how we engage with our scholarly objects in feminist and queer theory. It argues that queer pornography provides insight into queer politics in a post-gay marriage world and contends that queer pornography, and its affective terrain, ultimately represent a kind of queer utopia.