Pornography, Indigeneity and Neocolonialism

Tim Gregory

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781032173726
• eBook ISBN: 9780429513879
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Pornography, Indigeneity and Neocolonialism examines how pornography operates as a representational system that authenticates settler colonies, focussing on American and Australian examples to reveal how pornography encodes whiteness, pleasure, colonisation and Indigeneity.

This is the first text to use decolonial and queer theory to examine the role of pornography in America and Australia, as part of a network of neocolonial strategies that "naturalise" occupation. It is also the first study to focus on Indigenous people in pornography, providing a framework for understanding explicit representations of First Nations peoples. Pornography, Indigeneity and Neocolonialism defines the characteristics of heterosexual pornography in settler colonies, exposing how the landscape is presented as both exotic and domestic – a land of taboo pleasures that is tamed and occupied by and through white bodies. Examining the absence of Indigenous porn actors and arguing against the hypervisual fetishising of Black bodies that dominates racialised porn discourse, the book places this absence within the context of legal, political and military neocolonial Indigenous elimination strategies.

This book will be of key interest to researchers and students studying porn studies, media and film studies, critical race studies and whiteness studies.

1 Colonial pornographic exotica

Pornography produced within settler colonies is part of broader cultural strategies that identify what types of bodies are allowed to live and reproduce. All settler colonies have an anxious relationship to population as both the elimination of Indigenous people and the rapid growth of the colonial population is required (Wolfe 2006). These two objectives are never independent, however the narratives, law and politics of a settler colony holds them as separate tasks.¹ Colonial cultural practices predominantly focus on the growth of the population by weaving it into narratives of survival, triumph and nationalism. The elimination of Indigenous populations, on the rare occasions that it is depicted, suggest it is the cause of colonisation in an abstract sense (as a symbol of modernity) but never directly attributable to any particular act of colonial violence or colonial strategy. In the eyes of colonisers, Indigenous subjects are assumed to either be already dead or belonging to the past and so in the process of dying. Pornography is the most direct cultural signifier of population growth, as it is the only cultural form that can explicitly depict bodies fucking. The decisions of who, where, why and how often bodies fuck are pedagogic devices in settler pornography. This chapter focuses on Australian heteroporn to unpack the operation of these pedagogic strategies, in particular, it focuses on the development of the “pornoexotic” (the exoticisation of heterosex). The Australian pornoexotic is made for an international audience, functioning as advertising for white migration. It depicts a land of, and for, white people, in which the expansionist demands of the colony result in excessive sexual proclivity. Excessive sexual activity and desire is portrayed as constructive rather than disruptive, deviant or problematic. The pornoexotic transforms the exceptionality of pornography into a national narrative by conflating explicit sex with white reproductive futurity and the domestication of difference.

Australian heteroporn projects how the colony wants to be seen, and how it sees itself. I examine this through four heteroporn feature films – John T. Bone’s Lost in Paradise (1991), Pierre Woodman’s The Fugitive 2 (2000), anon.’s Victoria Blue (1999) and Aja’s Outback Assignment (1991). These films imagine Australia as strange and familiar, accessible and distant, licentious and structured according to Western morality. This flattens difference to contrived locational, symbolic and racial exotic cues, and “naturalises” settler sexuality and desire. In the films examined this is achieved by activating “Australianness” appropriated from pre-existing media representations, through the role of the outsider protagonist who acts as witness and judge of the exotic fiction, and through homosociality disguised as mateship. This chapter focuses on this explicit vision as the first part of the operation of pornography in a settler colony. Chapter 2 focuses on the less visible but just as important second part – the extinction narrative, which deliberately removes Indigenous people from cultural representations of sexual agency, desire and reproduction.

The pornoexotic

In an expanded sense, the term pornoexotic refers to any means by which pornographic content is distanced from its intended viewer. This is most commonly achieved by activating stereotypes of race, class and geography to signify to the viewer that what they are witnessing is not part of their community. The pornoexotic has links with the larger category of exotic representations, which commonly allude to fantasies of sexual licentiousness and deviancy. We can clearly locate exotic erotica as part of the representational system of colonisation. As Pease (2000, p. 128) states,

The exotic lies outside the restrictive operations of classical rules and opens up an entirely unexplored imaginative region. Pornographic notions of the Orient, just as hegemonic cultural notions, do not necessarily reflect any specific reality of the Orient, but, as Edward Said has suggested, do reflect a particular European definition of itself as contrasting image, idea, and experience to its exoticized other.

The exotic is a spectacle that generates curiosity, and in doing so excuses the viewer for the act of viewing. For Said (1993, p. 159) ‘the exotic replaces the impress of power with the blandishments of curiosity’, which is often represented in depictions of the ‘unrestrained sexuality’ of non-Europeans (Nead 1990, p. 332).² While the exotic and the Oriental should not be conflated, they both manipulate the politics of representation of an unknown other for an ignorant audience. Such representations focus on recently, or yet to be, colonised people and act on an audience who are ‘aroused at signs of empire’ (Waugh 1996, p. 298).

Orientalist paintings are the dominant example of the eroticisation of the exotic. The distinction Foucault (1978) makes between scientia sexualis and ars erotica describes how the West saw itself in opposition to the East. In Eastern cultures (ars erotica):

truth is drawn from pleasure itself, understood as a practice and accumulated as experience, pleasure is not considered in relation to an absolute law of the permitted and the forbidden, nor by reference to a criterion of utility, but first and foremost in relation to itself.

(Foucault 1978, p. 57)

The Orientalist paintings of Ingres, Gerome and Delacroix generated a loophole for soft-core pornography to be seen in France. Through heavy Oriental coding, these paintings were at once spectacular and pedagogic. They work to produce arousal at the sign of empire – both the vanquished empire represented by crumbling mosaic arabesque and looted interiors, and the powerful French empire reporting back the depravity it encountered. Yet as has been extensively discussed in the disciplines of art history and postcolonial theory, Orientalist representations are nothing more than the fantasy of the West, with many of these artists never having travelled to the regions they depict.

Apparent in these paintings are racial hierarchies that place white (female) bodies as the object of eroticisation. Although typically in the position of a slave or sex worker, the white female is commonly attended to by people of colour. It is clear how these paintings can be considered both pornography and propaganda at the same time – they are both spectacular and explicit, and imbued with the racial logics of colonialism. Indeed, Orientalist exhibitions in metropoles were hugely popular, particularly with women. This may seem strange, especially as the pedagogic intent was to warn women of the dangers of being unchaperoned in public (the unfounded fear of a white sex slave trade was, and still is, a constant theme). The eroticisation of the exotic produced what Nash (2014, p. 3) describes as ‘complex and unnerving pleasures’. Somewhat paradoxically, Orientalism became one of the few sexual outlets for women by depicting fantasies of lesbianism and interracial sex that suggested the possibilities of pleasure outside of heteronormativity. However, these deviations from heteronormativity were always focused on the white body, specifically the exposed female or the voyeuristic male (most famously in Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingre’s Le Bain Turk 1863, where the audience is the voyeur looking through the ‘keyhole’). In such works, the focus remains on the colonial white body but the background changes, providing the necessary distance to excuse their promiscuity, while making certain that erotic agency is never projected onto non-white bodies. In this way the normative/colonial is the explicit measure of deviance/otherness; that is, the normative “deviation” of white sexuality is the only allowable representation of otherness.

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries different approaches achieved the same end. For example, Picasso’s Cubist paintings were directly influenced by the colonial spoils contained in The Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro. His depiction of prostitutes in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), clearly references the conventions of pornography, with the subjects looking directly at the viewer who is no longer a voyeur but is implicated in the act of looking. This pornographic gaze in art history has been classified as “naked”, meaning the subject is aware of being looked at; the nude is more distant, as the subject is ignorant of the viewer (Berger 2008). Orientalist paintings are nudes, whereas Picasso’s models are naked. The danger with naked bodies is that the viewer cannot be excused for their gaze, as it is explicitly for them. Orientalist paintings had to be nudes, for it was not only the viewer but the process of colonisation itself which was at risk of being implicated in the “depravity” depicted if the gaze was returned. Their status as public (and hence erotic not pornographic) required the careful navigation of symbolism and composition to ensure that their integration into the sensible (art history) avoided discussing their domestic appeal and use. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is not distanced geographically, as the location is identified in the title. Rather, the exoticisation is achieved through the style and subject. The distorted and flattened perspective, the appropriation of masks from Gabon, Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea, and the blocks of colour with heavy outline are signs to the audience to read the work as carrying a “primitive” representative power. The white women are able to be stylistically depicted as “savages” who can be feared and desired because they are sex workers. They are made savage through Picasso’s use of colonial symbolism. This deliberately connects the public exposure of sex workers to the colonial framing of Native sex and nudity as always already public and hence available to the coloniser. In all the above examples, racial and cultural cues are employed to distance and excuse the viewer while maintaining the spectacular and arousing content fixed on white bodies. Held in the rubric of contemplation rather than masturbation, Orientalist and Modernist paintings were unproblematically integrated into the cannon as depictions (documents, diagnostics, experiments) of ars erotica by scientia sexualis artists.

The pornoexotic has a less visible history alongside erotic art, with nineteenth century examples of pornographic photography using Oriental props to signify distance. There are examples of these signifiers being painted on top of pornographic photographs. In these we see the literal superficial layering of exotic symbols over the white female pornographic body. The fiction of distance placed on top of an otherwise heteronormative image is precisely how the pornoexotic operates – the two layers have no relation to one another; in other words, there is no interaction, hybridity, diffusion, infection or conversation. The pornoexotic is a subcategory of heteroporn that sits between pornography and exotica. Because of this, the pornoexotic also inhabits a space between public and domestic as it relies on references to non-pornographic representational systems and symbols to be understood. Pornoexotica differs from standard heteroporn because of its reliance on these public symbols of exotica that signify geographic distance. Morris and Paasonen (2014, p. 226) argue that ‘porn is about place being dominated by flesh … In porn, space is deflated by the fascinating presence and actions of bodies’. However, in pornoexotica the recognition of place allows the fascination of the audience without judgement (internal or public) for its prurient fascination. The pornoexotic can afford to be more openly unexceptional because of this conservative distancing of the pornographic. The circular logic of the pornoexotic activates stereotypes of racial and cultural difference to distance pornography from the audience, yet these same sexualised stereotypes connect the audience’s desires and domestic use of pornography to their public participation in, and maintenance of, exclusion based on difference. Pornography and difference are tied together in the pornoexotic in ways that reveal, and are part of, the systemic sexual violence of colonisation.

The pornoexotic is one of the most popular genres of professional pornography. While there are a variety of reasons for the genre’s popularity, a notable factor is that in the United States, during the 1960s and 1970s, “foreign films” were often code for pornography. Distributors like Radley Metzger imported European pornographic films as a way to get around censorship laws and show white bodies that were also exotic (playing on the stereotype that Europeans were more sexually exploratory than the puritan United States). Sexploitation films like these continue today, typically set in Eastern European countries where an “outsider” with American dollars or euros is able to buy sex from anyone they encounter. Contemporary pornoexotica represents economic imperialism as the power to make anyone a willing sex worker. Operating in a late capitalist context, the audience’s arousal is drawn from displays of particular currencies as new signs of empire.

The most commercially successful pornographic feature film of all time, Pirates (Joone 2005), is a clear example of pornoexotica.³ It is an interesting example of the pornoexotic that distances the viewer in time and place because it is set in a generalised, non-specific Caribbean and in a generic mythical sense of time. Pirates does not take place here and now, but it also does not take place specifically there and then. It uses the pirate as the exotic, immoral other who resists, yet is a symptom of, colonial expansion. The pirate, as a generic fantasy of depravity and of a lost age, is the perfect pornoexotic character as it allows for the “unwilling” female actors and the male pirates to all be white without disrupting the exotic context. However, Pirates’ ultimate success was because of its reliance on Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, which was launched in 2003. Pirates promised what the Hollywood films could not, a pornographic closure of the exotic narrative. Unlike countless of other pornographic spoof films, Pirates was a pornographic film built on, and extending, the cinematic fantasy of Pirates of the Caribbean. The representation of sex in cinema is necessarily distanced because fucking cannot be shown. As Žižek (1992, pp. 110–11) demonstrates, there are different ways cinema distances sex – from humour to symbolism to direct manipulation of the fantasy. This suggests that the ‘congruence between the filmic narrative (the unfolding of the story) and the immediate display of the sexual act, is structurally impossible’. For Žižek, the pornographic and the filmic narrative are mutually exclusive. Yet the pornoexotic contests this – instead of distancing the representation of sex it distances the audience through filmic narrative. For this strategy to be successful the narrative must operate alongside the fucking and, even in its tokenistic, humorous and stilted manner, must be invested in. This narrative is reinforced and made serious through the use of easily recognisable cultural references (as Pirates did). The pornoexotic demonstrates how pornography is structurally connected to filmic and social narrative. This is not widely understood or accepted because it is assumed that when the fucking starts the narrative is ‘no longer taken seriously and starts to function only as pretext for introducing acts of copulation’ (Žižek 1992, p. 111). The pornoexotic’s reliance on narrative, a narrative that is not opposed to the fucking, shows us that porn is primarily filmic, social and political. The opposition that Žižek sets up naturalises sex in porn and ultimately naturalises the colonial narratives that structure the fucking. If we start with the narrative and analyse towards the sex, rather than the inverse, we avoid this opposition and can denaturalise both porn’s narratives and explicitness.

The indexical power of pornography (that it is what it depicts) applies to the fucking and narrative symbolism. This was seen when Pirates was refused classification in Australia because of a CGI scene of two skeletons fighting (Stardust 2014). The classification of pornography does not allow violence of any type (even violence that would otherwise be allowed in a G rating), presumably for fear that representations of violence will produce actual violence in the audience. In other words, both the fucking and the narrative are assumed to be consumed by the audience as real rather than phantasma – even in the case of CGI skeletons. The inverse, that the fucking could be read as phantasma, was not something the classification board considered. Despite the refusal of classification, Pirates’ success was due to the fact that it was both conservative heteroporn and a film that could be talked about (or alluded to) in public as a film. The pornoexotic more readily enters public discussion than other forms of pornography. As I argued in the Introduction, the paradox of pornography is that it is not exceptional and yet trades on exceptionality. The pornoexotic is the most easily identifiable non-exceptional pornographic genre. It can be more openly non-exceptional because the fucking takes place “a long time ago, in a galaxy far away” (as Porn Wars attests). The pornoexotic suggests that fucking can be read as both phantasmic and real (as a process of naturalising fantasies). I argue that pornography deliberately absorbs explicit fucking into narrative and into broader non-pornographic representational systems.

Fantasy pornoexotic films like Pirates operate in their own appropriated universe. However, when the pornoexotic uses and references real locations with histories of colonisation, the integration of the pornographic into the exotic presents the possibility for the exotic myth to be disrupted by the explicit fucking of the other. The colonial pornoexotic is the opposite of Orientalist erotica as it is produced in the colony, rather than being a mise-en-scène of the exotic produced in the metropole. This opens up a moment in which the fantasies of the oppressor, the outsider and the tourist are confronted with an image that cannot sustain its own characterisation. In order to mitigate this, the colonial pornoexotic rhetorically references the other for salacious effect, but at the same time ensures that it remains symbolic – that is, unfuckable. Genre expectations combined with exotic narratives of subjugated difference could potentially destabilise the modalities of viewership. In other words, because the pornoexotic contains the pornographic it must prove that the exotic is a facade, not only to align with the normative desires of its audience, but also to prevent the possibility that it might accidentally represent the very sexual oppression that the exotic masks as erotic. The exotic is paused so that heteroporn can sit on top of it. This is an inversion of the pornographic photographs of white bodies taken in studios in France with Orientalist symbols painted on top. In colonial pornoexotica, the white body is always placed over a paused exotic (land, culture, community and so on). Colonial pornoexotica takes a more conservative approach than Orientalism to ensure racial boundaries are maintained and that the settler’s desires are ignited by place but only satisfied through other settlers.

The Australian pornoexotic

Australia functions as an appropriate site for what Said terms the ‘domestication of the exotic’ (Said 1994, p. 60). Since British invasion, Australia has been paradoxically perceived as an alien, harsh environment that would absorb problematic elements of English society and as a readily tamed landscape for the replication of England (Gould 2011). Contemporary Australia, as an exotic location, is an exemplar of Paul Theroux’s (1986) notion of “homeplus”, where the landscape offers the spectacular “plus” while the ongoing process of settler colonialism ensures a comfortable, non-threatening “home” experience for Western tourists/immigrants. When Australia is used as the location for narrative pornographic films it...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Colonial pornographic exotica
• 2 The absence of Indigenous people in pornography
• 3 The colonial cumshot
• Bibliography
• Index