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Safe for Work: Feminist Porn, Corporate Regulation and Community Standards

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Orienting Feminism

Abstract

As global corporations overtake the role of national classification bodies as arbiters of “community standards,” online pornographic content is now largely regulated by payment processors, hosting services and streaming platforms. From a vantage point as both porn performer and porn researcher, Stardust examines the ways in which women’s body fluids and queer sexualities are disproportionately targeted, experiencing arbitrary and unjustified removal. Featuring qualitative interviews with Australian feminist porn performers and producers, this chapter argues that the regulatory shift from national classification frameworks to platform governance has moved the threshold test for pornography from indecency and offensiveness to profitability and market risk. Privatised regulation produces content that is safe, sanitised and risk-averse and poses new challenges for demanding transparency in decision-making about what constitutes “community standards.”

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Stardust, Z. (2018). Safe for Work: Feminist Porn, Corporate Regulation and Community Standards. In: Dale, C., Overell, R. (eds) Orienting Feminism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70660-3_9

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