Porn factory: a feminist dystopian inquiry into porn (re)produced worlds

Abstract

A story is trying to form at the edges of knowing. There is no particular author. There is no “one” here to tell the story. There is no “one” to know how the story may end. This story takes the form of a Hop-on Hop-off Bus tour of a factory. The bus has no human driver. It is driven purely by appetition.

This thesis is a production of the whole that takes a feminist new materialist lens to (re)think subjectivity in the counselling room by opening up to the more-than human and the role of inhuman forces. The inquiry draws heavily on the work of Erin Manning and aims to foot-fall into a neurodiverse perspective towards its informing. The study begins in a relational field of affective tonality where inflection emerges from coloured shadow. The researcher makes felt her appearance as a conduit of expression for the milieu rather than speaking from her own-lived experience. Through traversing spaces, the inquiry works to examine pornography’s industrial processes and forces of technical subjugation and control in contemporary digital pornographised worlds. The research examines the ethical dilemmas of working with clients who present with issues around pornography and follows lines of flight to avoid capitalist capture. The inquiry (re)imagines new futures for those who have already inhabited the affective space of porn (re)produced worlds. Finally, the inquiry yields and fades to black.

The research, open to the force of form, has emerged as a pseudo pornography website produced collectively. This website is a minor activism which aims to enter the pornographic networks. The writing, the part of the inquiry which tuned to language, must be accessed through the website but can also be downloaded and printed off without further exploration. The whole is not a unified whole and its organs are left together and disparate.