[Linganth] extended CFP: The Illicit Image: Pornography, Image-Making, and Moral Aspiration

Tue Apr 14 15:06:19 UTC 2020

*Please find below a panel proposal for the 2020 AAA meeting. If
interested, please send a 250 word abstract to  jgfriend at berkeley.edu
<jgfriend at berkeley.edu> and esrapadgett at gmail.com
<esrapadgett at gmail.com> by Sunday, May 10th. Feel free to reach out with
any questions you may have!*

*The Illicit Image: Pornography, Image-Making, and Moral Aspiration*

ORGANIZERS:

Esra Padgett (The Graduate Center, CUNY)

Juliana Friend (University of California, Berkeley)

DISCUSSANT:

Gayle Rubin

ABSTRACT:

While this year's AAA theme asks us to secure a more "capacious,
progressive vision of the human," this panel looks at a particularly
contested and often ignored or rejected site of human interaction and
representation: pornography. Studying pornography anthropologically exposes
particular understandings of personhood-notions of the representable
semiotically loaded with moral and ethical assumptions-as well as forces
existing frameworks for the interpretation of images into the light. Indeed,
moral orientations to porn - among its producers, consumers, and those who
identify as neither but nevertheless interact with the conceptual category-
bring into relief morally charged ambivalences about the agency of images.
These can manifest as uncertainties about an image's potentiality as merely
a text, the "promise of flesh," or an experience of the flesh itself
(Rancière 2007) or judgements regarding an image's "tendency" (Mazzarella
2013), its performative potential to stir immoral impulses in viewers. In
other contexts, illicit images are understood to presence occult spiritual
forces (Meyer 2015) or otherwise alter proximity to religious or divine
figures, transforming ethical and spiritual practices (Buggenhagen 2010,
Sansi 2013, Van der Port 2005). Alternately, the obscene can produce
embodied reactions to moral transgression that force those moral
transgressions into public debate (Allison 2000, Larkin 2008). This panel
builds on these efforts to situate illicit images within broader contexts
of image-making and moral aspiration.

While some scholars in the social sciences have attempted to provide
historical context for shifting notions of morality as it pertains to
pornography (Rubin 1984; Lancaster 2011), others have seen academia as
beholden to particular ethical stances on porn, as most famously
represented by the feminist "sex wars" of the late-twentieth century
(Duggan and Hunter 2006). Ethnographic work that focuses on the experiences
of porn performers (Miller-Young 2014) has contextualized notions of the
moral within the "political economy of pleasure" of the transnational sex
trade; a perspective reiterated in work focused on sex workers more broadly
(Kimberly Kay Hoang 2016; Maia 2016; Frank 2013; Bernstein 2018).

While the 'moral,' and even the "pornographic" are highly contested
categories, this panel offers these terms not to be defined or secured, but
as keywords for an exploration of the relationship between formulations of
moral selfhood and various illicit image practices. What sorts of
interpretive frameworks for truth, digital embodiment, and moral selfhood
emerge through individuals' or groups' orientations to pornography? Through
what semiotic processes do these interpretive frameworks become
naturalized? For instance, how are notions of personhood (e.g. the porn
star, the contaminable viewer, etc.) constructed and reinforced by
particular classes of images ("pornographic" or "obscene" images),
themselves defined by divergent and highly contextual frames of
interpretation (e.g. religious doctrine; legal discourse, social reform
movements, extralegal media censorship regimes)? To what extent are these
interpretive frameworks open to contestation or critical reappropriation?

Pornography and related techniques of image-making can expand
taken-for-granted understandings of the human by mediating and multiplying
bodies. At the same time, contested legal, religious, and political
construals of obscenity may exclude associated actors from the domain of
"the human" to which a given community is morally responsive. With this in
mind, the panel seeks papers centered broadly around the topic of
pornography as a site for exploring how frameworks for the interpretation
of images co-constitute moral discourses, including ideas of an "ethical
self"; notions of the representable, the transgressive and the real.

Among other topics, papers might explore:

   - Emergent and novel trends in pornography and technology (i.e. "Deep
   fakes"; "revenge porn")
   - How pornographic production and consumption is mediated by shifting
   formations of capitalism (i.e. direct-to-consumer models of business and
   labor such as Onlyfans; Modelhub; webcamming...)
   - The imbrication of pornography with the economy, commerce, and notions
   of value
   - Contestations of moral discourses vis a vis sex worker's rights
   activism
   - Morality and the material, corporal dimension of images
   - How modes of digital embodiment (re)distribute or redefine personhood
   - Relationships between illicit image-making, religious practice, and
   techniques of ethical self-making

*Works Cited*

Allison, Anne 2000. Permitted and Prohibited Desires: Mothers, Comics, and
Censorship in Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Bernstein, Elizabeth 2018. Brokered Subjects: Sex, Trafficking, and the
Politics of Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Buggenhagen, Beth 2010. Islam and the Media of Devotion in and out of
Senegal. *Visual Anthropology Review* 26 (2):81-95.

Duggan, Lisa and Hunter, Nan 2006. Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political
Culture. New York: Routledge.

Frank, Katherine 2002. G-Strings and Sympathy: Strip Club Regulars and Male
Desire. Durham: Duke University Press.

Hoang, Kimberly Kay 2016. Dealing in Desire: Asian Ascendancy, Western
Decline, and the Hidden Currencies of Global Sex Work. Berkeley: University
of California Press.

Lancaster, Roger 2011. Sex Panic and the Punitive State. Berkeley:
University of California Press.

Larkin, Brian 2008. Signal and Noise: Media, Infrastructure, and Urban
Culture in Nigeria. Durham: Duke University Press.

Maia, Suzana 2016. Transnational Desires: Brazilian Erotic Dancers in New
York. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.

Mazzarella, William 2013. Censorium: Cinema and the Open Edge of Mass
Publicity. Durham: Duke University Press.

Meyer, Birgit 2015. Sensational Movies: Video, Vision, and Christianity in
Ghana. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Miller-Young, Mireille 2014. A Taste for Black Sugar: Black Women in
Pornography. Durham: Duke University Press.

Rancière, Jacques 2007. The Future of the Image. London: Verso.

Rubin, Gayle 1984. "Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the
Politics of Sexuality." In* Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female
Sexuality.* by C. Vance (Ed.). New York: Routledge.

Sansi, Roger 2013. Encountering Images in Candomblé. Visual Anthropology,
26: 18-33.

Van der Port, Mattijs 2005. Visualizing the Sacred: Video Technology,
''Televisual'' Style, and the Religious Imagination in Bahian Candomble´.
American Ethnologist, 33(3): 444–461.

-- 
Juliana Friend
PhD Candidate in Anthropology
University of California, Berkeley
Contributing Editor, Society for Cultural Anthropology
www.many-to-many.net
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