Conceptualizing, researching and writing about pornography
Abstract
Despite an ongoing incitement to speak about sex (Foucault Citation1990), the way we are encouraged to talk and write about sexual issues is strongly policed and ways of conceptualizing and researching them have been constrained and often contentious. While a scholarly approach to sex has historically been one way of legitimating speech about sex – a way, perhaps, of cleaning up something that is perceived as ‘dirty’ – sex remains a problematic area of study. This is particularly true of pornography, towards which, as Linda Williams has famously noted, ‘it is difficult to strike a proper attitude’ (Citation1991, xi). As part of our continuing concern with developing a critical porn studies (see Smith and Attwood Citation2014), in this special issue we explore the problems of ‘striking a proper attitude’ and the ways in which different conventions of writing and speaking may limit porn studies, as well as their potential to be productive of new ways of thinking. Elsewhere we have noted two overriding conventions in the organization of public discussions of pornography (Smith and Attwood Citation2013). Firstly, the persistence of an anti/pro structure in much public discourse has made it difficult to articulate complex responses to pornography, enforcing a structure which encourages argument and opposition – not to mention hostility – and provides no means of moving forwards in any significant way. Porn is often positioned in terms of a battle between the extremes of pro and anti standpoints which ‘ordinary’ people must then judge (Smith and Attwood Citation2013). Secondly, anti-porn rhetoric – which provides the most widespread set of conventions for much discussion of porn – associates porn with ‘feelings of hurt, anger, frustration, fear and nausea’, producing a discourse of ‘negative affect … as the acceptable reaction to pornography’ (Paasonen Citation2007, 47; original emphasis).