Pornography and Cultural Studies

Pornography is a hotly debated area in academic feminist circles, with the pro-pornography feminists arguing that the pornographic text is polysemic with emancipatory value to develop transgressive desire (see Strossen 1995). The anti-pornography feminists, on the other hand, argue that pornography causes harm to women in both the production and consumption of pornographic material (see Dworkin 1981). To suggest that there was disagreement among the writers is to minimize the enormous differences between the various camps as to the definition, nature, effects, and legal status of pornography. Some of the central points of contention concern the nature of human agency, social structure, and cultural production. Those feminists who have adopted an anti-pornography position posit a social structure, which conditions, limits, and determines human agency. While not adopting a wholly social determinist position, anti-pornography feminists see women's lives as patterned and structured by macrosystems of domination that work to provide the pornography industry with a steady flow of bodies that can be used as raw material in the production of pornography. The anti-pornography feminists thus call for an analysis of pornography production that foregrounds systems of inequality where a ruling class has the power to own and control the means of material and cultural production.

The main focus of this discussion is to highlight the ways in which the debates within media studies can be applied to the study of pornography. Critical media studies scholars such as Kellner (2003) have for some time argued that cultural studies in the United States has lost its political edge by focusing primarily on the text rather than on the social and economic contexts of media production. The original project of cultural studies, developed at the University of Birmingham in England, was to create an area of study that would foreground the political economy of communication in order to develop a theory of dominance in industrial capitalist societies that would lead to social change. According to critical media scholars in this country, the political potential of cultural studies has been replaced with an apolitical approach that ignores wider questions of power and social change.

Political questions about the nature of cultural production are at the forefront of the academic study of the political economy of communication. These theorists, like the anti-pornography feminists, see the society as marked by inequality, oppression, and domination, where domination is seen as those practices used by the ruling class to control the conditions of production. Built into the analysis is a social activist agenda that calls for a transformation in both the material and the ideological levels of human experience, and while classical Marxism has privileged the former, contemporary Marxist critics have called for an analysis that links the material conditions of a society to its systems and processes of signification and representation.

In his article on the future of media studies, McChesney (2000) criticizes media studies for abandoning the central questions that a political economy of media raises. The result, he argues, is that much of communication research ignores the structural factors that influence the production of media content. This same criticism can be leveled against the pro-pornography scholarship in that the focus of analysis is the text rather than the context of pornography production. This is not to argue that a close reading of the text and the study of audience pleasures have little to offer the study of pornography, but that the privileging of these two areas of research fails to examine the political process involved in the production, distribution, and consumption of media texts (McChesney, 2000). Moreover, it is not enough to say that much of the contemporary research on pornography is uninterested in questions of political economy, but rather, that it actually trivializes this line of inquiry. In those few academic books that do look at how pornography is produced, there is a tendency to limit the discussion to either a first-person account by a “sex-worker” (usually Nina Hartley) or to focus on woman-owned or woman-produced pornography. While this type of research does shed light on the workings of the various sectors of the industry, it cannot stand in for a critical macrolevel approach that explores how capitalism, patriarchy, racism, and first-world economic domination provides the economic and cultural space for international, mass-scale pornography production. To focus only on those women who have the resources to produce and distribute pornography is as limited as looking at worker-controlled cooperatives to explore how labor is organized under capitalism.

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