PORNOGRAPHIC PERMUTATIONS

摘要

The article provides a response to comments from Lisa Henderson directed to myself, in relation to my short opening paper delivered at the International Communications Association Conference in 2007. Henderson queried an over-hasty condemnation on my own part of the hypersexuali-sation of contemporary young women's commercial culture and the main-streaming of pornography as sex entertainment. Henderson encouraged me to revise the paper, and here I argue that current pornographic permutations, within a liberalising discourse which celebrates the newfound freedom of young women to participate, there are nevertheless new modalities of exclusion and a seeming shoring up of the heterosexual matrix. At the same time within this more relaxed matrix of heterosexuality there are generation-based tensions and evasions and undesignated same-sex desires which refuse the labels of gay, queer or lesbian, as political, or as belonging to previous generations. This whole terrain requires that feminists return to the anti-censorship and pro-sex writing from the 1980s and 1990s, with a view to update and re-conceptualisation.