Morby, Adam. 2024. WAIT, WHAT JUST HAPPENED? DESUBJECTIVATION, QUEERNESS AND REACHING FOR THE REAL IN CONTEMPORARY PORN CONSUMPTION. Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London [Thesis]

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Abstract or Description

While browsing for pornography viewers often appear to choose a clip that might initially seem to offer a prurient thrill. This thesis will ask the question of what the implications are if this choice results in an unfamiliar or unanticipated arousal. It will argue that these patterns of viewing may signal an ‘emergent sexual sensibility’, a way of engaging with pornography that operates apart from the individual’s understandings of their own identitarian frameworks of desire. It will define this pattern of porn viewing not as use, which suggests agency and intentional choice, or consumption, which suggests taking something into the body, but as a form of ‘radical exposure’ due to the unintentional nature of the affects that the pornographic materials have on the individual. Many of these viewers then articulate this arousal in what they write in the comments sections below the clip, which often express shock, surprise, anxiety or humour. This thesis will analyse this unintended arousal by examining these comments from the perspective of queer theory and philosophies of desubjectivation, Lacanian understandings of desire, post-truth political discourse and porn and sexuality studies. It is interested in the possibility that this ‘radical exposure’ is leading to ‘desubjectivation’, a term brought into use by Michel Foucault, and which signals a breaking down of an individual’s identitarian understandings of their own desire, which suggests a form of ‘primary queerness’. With regard to theories of desire, sexuality and pornography, the contribution that this thesis will make is in the way it argues that some viewers of pornography, many of whom seem to have a relatively normative understanding of their own frameworks of desire, appear to be exhibiting desubjectivising, or, as will be explained, queer manifestations of desire.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Identification Number (DOI):	https://doi.org/10.25602/GOLD.00037747
Keywords:	porn, Lacan, queer theory, desubjectivation, Foucault, porn commentary, porn comments, sexuality, desire, identity, anti-identity
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	Politics
Date:	30 September 2024
Item ID:	37747
Date Deposited:	18 Oct 2024 11:19
Last Modified:	18 Oct 2024 11:26
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/37747

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