Heather Brunskell-Evans (University of Leicester)
Pornography: The Performance of Sexual Freedom

The narrative of radical sexual politics is that pornography has the potential to liberate
individuals from traditional mores and values which repress sexuality. In this view
pornographic sex is ‘sex-in-the-raw’ stripped of the taboos which regulate sexual fantasy and
conduct. Of course proponents are fully aware the sex is staged and that performers are
acting. However, since the performers are both acting and having actual not simulated sex,
and since the consumer, in masturbating to the sex-acts, or indeed interacting with
performers in the virtual space of web-cams, is undergoing a fully embodied experience that
feel external to politics, then pornography is deemed to facilitate the free expression of the
visceral and of fantasy. To be critical of pornography is to be critical of sex itself, and to be
critical of sex itself is to be ‘sex-negative’ – to be morally censorious, to align oneself with
outmoded tradition or religious fundamentalism, and to be out of step with Western
democratic sexual freedoms. Moreover, in contrast to the radical feminist view, which
understands pornography as the eroticisation of male dominance and female submission,
sex-radicals insist pornography is not ‘one thing’ since it has many genres and sub-genres
that subvert hetero-normativity. Pornography is a rich resource for lesbian, gay, bisexual and
transgender people, whose non-normative sexualities are marginalised and disciplined.

In this presentation I will argue against this sex-radical narrative by calling upon the work of
Michel Foucault and the radical feminist Andrea Dworkin. Whilst it is true that there is a
diversity of pornographies – heterosexual, gay, lesbian, transsexual and so on – I do not
bracket minority pornographies as completely distinct from mainstream heterosexual
pornography. Firstly, the myriad of pornographies all fall into the category of what Foucault
calls a liberal ‘incitement to speak sex’: Pornography is a discursive practice by which we
self-subjectify as if our very democratic freedoms and individual psychological health depend
upon freeing an internal sexuality. Secondly, Dworkin argues pornography helps construct
rather than reflect human sexuality and as such reproduces historical and political monological
notions of female sexuality and ‘what a woman’s body is for’: Femininity is the
degraded physical Other through which men’s metaphysical assertion of self is fashioned and
symbolic representations of femininity and masculinity cross-cut most, if not all, genres of
pornography. Foucault and Dworkin invite us to examine radical sexual politics for the
normative status of its politics, for its (neo) liberal individualism, and for its complicity with the
pornography industry which incites gendered sexual imaginaries for profit. How then might
we re-imagine freedom, sexual pleasure and sexual ethics?

Heather Brunskell-Evans is a political philosopher. She is a Senior Research Fellow at the
Centre for Medical Humanities, the University of Leicester. Her research focuses on the
gendering of the body by contemporary discourses of sexuality and medicine. In particular,
she analyses the bio-politics of pornography, prostitution, the sex-trade, and transgenderism
as material practices that occur within the context of structural gender inequality, neoliberalism,
global capitalism and the proliferation of digital-technologies. She has published
widely on sexual and gender politics, including Performing Sexual Liberation: The Sexualized
Body and the Medical Authority of Pornography (Cambridge Scholars 2016, forthcoming)
and Internet Pornography: Disciplining Women Through Sexual ‘Freedom’ (Palgrave
MacMillan 2017). She is also politically active in campaigning for and advising on the Nordic
model of prostitution and she is a trustee of the newly formed charity FiLia, where she is the
Director of its Stop Violence against Women and Girls section.