“Pornographic Bodies: Constructing Corporeality in Adult Film” explores how the body is theorized within pornography through issues of materiality, spacing, form, libidinal organization, and subject/object relations. This dissertation challenges the way existing porn studies scholarship has taken body to be a self-evident vessel containing the psychosexual dynamics of the performers and spectators. This project approaches pornography without bringing to it a preexisting theory of the body, instead examining how corporeality is theorized by individual pornographic texts and analyzing how these understandings shift over time and across subgenres. In doing so, it explores how the limits, boundaries, and parameters of the body are investigated and challenged within pornography, as well as the way in which different conceptualizations of the body afford and mobilize different sexual fantasies. Each chapter takes up a case study in which questions of corporeality are clearly foregrounded, focusing on pornographic texts that attempt to challenge or expand upon how the body is depicted in mainstream porn. Chapter one demonstrates how Cartesian mind/body dualism has come to dominate our approaches to studying, analyzing and making pornography through an examination of its centrality to feminist critiques of, and interventions in, the genre. Chapter two examines how science-fiction extends this privileging of mind over the body in fantasies of disembodied sex through an analysis of popular culture depictions of future sex. The third chapter takes up how the body is constituted in pornography in terms of an imagined threshold between physical interior and exterior, contrasting how this line operates in mainstream porn versus medical sexology. The final chapter focuses on BDSM porn to show how this form challenges the prevailing binaries through which we understand embodiment in its resistance to any “truth” or meaning that can be mapped on the exteriorized body. Through this project I demonstrate that the seemingly self-evident sexual body is in fact the product of extremely variable strategies for capturing the scientific and erotic reality of the body. This history, I argue, constitutes more than mere changes in taste, legality, or access, but is inextricably related to medico-scientific and sexological discourses that demonstrate parallel efforts to depict material corporeality. Our understandings of the body inevitably shape how we read pornography as viewers and scholars, and this project sheds light on the way that traditional dualisms have thus far governed our approach to analyzing pornography in ways that have hereto gone unexamined even within the field of porn studies.

Creator

• Scott, Karly-Lynne

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-s92x-nm16

Subject

• Film studies

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• etdadmin_upload_944948
• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:16345

Keyword

• Media
• Corporeality
• Film
• Pornography
• Body

Date created

• 2022-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright