“Intermediate” Pornography Mediating Presence with the Intimacy Kit

Abstract

To further describe intimacy choreography’s labor of developing common vocabularies, I turn to the technologies through which artists construct erotic presence—both digital technologies and physical objects like modesty garments and intimacy kits. As they attempt to simulate sex acts and nudity, many intimacy choreographers use modesty garments that cover genitalia and prevent genital contact. Despite the distance that modesty garments create, I suggest that there are important lessons that intimacy choreographers can learn from pornography. In this chapter, I analyze a theatrical depiction of pornography in Thomas Bradshaw’s Intimacy, another early play that influenced the development of the intimacy professional. I analyze the prosthetics, modesty garments, and digital media helped performers in Intimacy author their presence in the production and examine the digital screens that framed actors as “intermediate bodies”—caught between live and mediated performance. Intimacy choreography, like sex work, is creative labor on erotic culture. Performers as cyborg sex workers navigate scripts, camerawork, modesty garments, and identity formations to mediate erotic presence. As with sex work, even fictions can produce felt truths, and workers in theater can spin their work to be a source of pleasure—neither something amateur done out of love, nor something professional that is always drudgery, but something intermediate between the two.