Defending Pornography: The Case Against Strategic Essentialism

This chapter offers a critical reading of the discourses employed in the context of the distribution of obscene publications through two recent legal developments in England and Wales. Firstly, in the recent case of R v Peacock, in which a defendant was charged under indictment with six counts of distributing obscene material under Section 2(1) of the Obscene Publications Act 1959 (OPA); and secondly, the recent Audio-Visual Media Services Directive (AVMSD) and its apparent targeting of ‘perverse’ sexual practices. However, rather than focusing on the discourses employed in arguing for regulation, I will to concentrate here on those used to defend pornography against the law. I argue that while in previous cases, classical liberalism tended to be the framing device used to defend pornography on ‘freedom of speech’ grounds, these two recent developments demonstrate that defence advocates and activists alike are utilising a strategic essentialism approach, affixing pornographic representation to sexual orientation or identity. While this approach is certainly strategic, this chapter will reflect on some of the drawbacks of this approach

Acid Feminism: Gender, psychonautics and the politics of consciousness

Psychedelic substances have undergone a transformation in the public consciousness over the last 15 years. However, the most influential first-person narratives of psychonauts and ‘scientist-shamans’ navigating the frontiers of consciousness have tended to entirely exclude women’s experiences and voices. Psychedelic feminism, has emerged to signify the role consciousness expansion and experimentation might play in rejuvenating feminism’s collective imagination, and undoing the historical silencing of women’s voices in psychedelic culture and research. Drawing on Mark Fisher’s work on acid communism, the feminist psychedelic humanities, narcofeminism and autobiographical life-writing by women on experimental psychedelic substance use, this article investigates the promise of acid feminism for the wider narcofeminist movement, and its implications for undoing some key precepts endemic in psychedelic culture and research

Prurience, punishment and the image: Reading ‘law-and-order pornography’

This article aims to expand interpretations of the representational and spectatorial politics of images by investigating what Wacquant has termed ‘law-and-order pornographies’. By this, he refers to images of crime and punishment accorded signifiers of the pornographic and the prurient in order to describe the fusion of the erotic and the punitive. The first part of the article brings into conversation the fields of porn studies and visual criminology. It examines more closely what is at stake in imbuing crime images with the grammar of the pornographic. The second part of the article argues that the application of the pornographic to images of law and order has been refracted back onto the sphere of adult entertainment, in particular, the phenomenon of ‘revenge pornography’

Is Consent Good for Women? A Feminist Symposium on Consent Culture

This symposium invites colleagues working across the spectrum of the arts, humanities and social sciences to critically examine the emergence of what, with Katherine Angel (2021), we might call “consent culture.” In recent years discourses on consent have exploded, with medicine, bioethics, and to a lesser extent law, being the greatest contributors to academic research. In contrast, cultural discourses focus squarely on sex and technology. For media discourses, consent is that by which people must orient themselves towards sex—especially, to how sex is implicated in and in turn implicates us in power/knowledge, orienting sex to power—as well as to one another. Whereas concerns about new media technologies often emphasise the more sinister, surveillant and extractive powers of governments and corporations. That is: where sex and technology are concerned, consent operates as a space of enunciation for the ethical dilemmas of living with/in power. The new social location of consent is forcefully realised where sex and technology interact, evident everywhere from the UK’s new Online Harms Bill to the controversies of Only Fans. Such debates, predominantly moral and legislative, are barely distinguishable from feminist cultural discourses that increasingly frame sexual ethics as matters of consent. Consent culture presumes a feminist vernacular; consent is presumed to be good for women. Yet these new aesthetics of consent, that attune our senses to the politics and intricacies of (non)sexual encounter, are reworking longstanding debates and discourses on power, agency and violence, with far reaching implications. This symposium seeks to foster new and emerging scholarship that treats consent as a site of complexity requiring urgent critical attention from multidisciplinary theoretical and practitioner perspectives. Rather than specify a universal or legally obliging definition, the symposium observes transformations to the articulations of consent—to what cultures of consent are doing at this cultural conjuncture. https://contestingconsent.wordpress.com/call-for-papers

The Techno–Barbie Speaks Back: Experiments with Gendered Hormones

In Testo Junkie, Preciado briefly introduces the figure of the ‘techno-Barbie’. Contrasted with his own Testogel-fuelled pornographic experiments, the possibilities of oestrogen or progesterone seem somewhat uncharitably foreclosed upon. Though Preciado draws our attention to the gendered politics of chemical enhancement and hormonal justice, it begs the question: where do we draw the line between experimentation and chemical domination? We engage with the figure of the techno-Barbie to explore our own experiments with hormones and gendered agency in the boundaries of advanced biocapitalism. Drawing on a range of allied texts, we explore the ambivalences of our own hormonal experimentation. What kinds of hormonal experiments are allowed to be cast as such? In response to this all-encompassing theory of domination, we ask: how might the techno-Barbie speak back

Guest editorial: Queer theory and criminology

In 2015, queer theorist Heather Love called for her fellow queer scholars to recognise the centrality of the study of norms and deviance to ‘the intellectual genealogy’ of queer studies. She argued that queer approaches and understandings, with their ‘embrace of a politics of stigma’ and ‘reliance on a general category of social marginality’, were ‘borrowed’ from mid-20th century social science studies of deviance (Love, 2015: 75). For most criminologists, it is axiomatic that this tradition is equally central to our own genealogy, and our concerns with deviance, normativity, social control and the production of power and marginalisation. Despite this shared set of concerns, queer theory and criminology have little contemporary crossover. We share Love’s concern around this state of affairs, but where she is primarily concerned about the stakes for queer studies, the focus of our Special Issue is on what criminologists can gain from greater engagement with the analytic and conceptual tools of queer theory

Anti-communal, Anti-egalitarian, Anti-nurturing, Anti-loving: Sex and the 'Irredeemable' in Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon

The work of Andrea Dworkin and Catharine A. MacKinnon on sex and sexuality has often been posed as adversary to the development of queer theory. Leo Bersani, in particular, is critical of the normative ambitions of their work, which he sees firstly as trying to ‘redeem’ sex acts themselves, and secondly as advocating for sexuality as a site of potential for social transformation. In this article, I argue that this is a misreading of their work. Drawing on Dworkin's wide body of writing, and MacKinnon early essays in Signs, I suggest that their work makes no such case for sex or sexuality. Rather, by bringing their analysis into conversation with Halberstam's recent work on ‘shadow feminism’, I contend that Dworkin and MacKinnon's antisocial, anti-pastoral and distinctly anti-normative vision of sex and sexuality shares many of the same features of queer theory, ultimately advocating for sex as ‘irredeemable’

Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell

Review of Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell (Katherine Angel. Allen Lane: London, 2012