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Women’s porn sites—Spaces of fissure and eruption or “I’m a little bit of everything”

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The woman’s duty, as a member of the commonwealth, is to assist in the ordering, in the comforting, and in the beautiful adornment of the state. —J. Ruskin,Free and Ennobled, 1983, p. 291

Abstract

The historically significant but superficial divide between public and private spaces and identities has shaped women’s lives, subjectivities, and sexualities. In this article, I analyze women’s self-sponsored and self-published porn sites. Specifically, I focus on sites that demonstrate complex articulations of identity and subjectivity—sites that can be read as identity projects that appropriate cultural expectations of sexuality.

To foreground this analysis, I first explore past work analyzing the public/private dichotomy and suggest that computers and virtual spaces are used to reinforce the flimsy separation between public and private. Using these discussions as scaffolding, I then read a selection of women’s porn sites, arguing that these women Web authors are inserting their embodied subjectivities into public space, and forcing a remapping of the lines of the public and private in ways that rupture public representations of sexuality.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of American Thought and Language, Michigan State University, 48823, East Lansing, Michigan

    Dànielle DeVoss

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  1. Dànielle DeVoss
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‘Scarlet collar’ workers are the feminists of the modern age, say psychologists, free from coercion and the dangers of the traditional, male dominated business. In the past two years they have moved away from traditional activities such as prostitution and lap dancing to become the majority of cyberporn owners. —Cherry Norton, 2000, online

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DeVoss, D. Women’s porn sites—Spaces of fissure and eruption or “I’m a little bit of everything”. Sexuality & Culture 6, 75–94 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02912229

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