Comradeship of cock? Gay porn and the entrepreneurial voyeur

Abstract

Thirty years of scholarship on gay porn have produced one striking consensus, which is that gay cultures are especially ‘pornified’: porn has arguably offered gay men not only homoerotic visibility, but a heritage culture and a radical aesthetic. However, neoliberal cultures have transformed the operation and meaning of sexuality, installing new standards of performativity and display, and new responsibilities attached to a ‘democratization’ that offers women and men apparently expanded terms for articulating both their gender and their sexuality. Does gay porn still have the same urgency in this context? At the level of politics and cultural dissent, what is ‘gay’ about gay porn now? This article questions the extent to which processes of legal and social liberalization, and the emergence of networked and digital cultures, have foreclosed or expanded the apparently liberationary opportunities of gay porn. The article attempts to map some of the political implications of the ‘pornification’ of gay culture to ongoing debates about materiality, labour and the entrepreneurial subject by analyzing gay porn blogs.

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