‘I need you inside of me’: Gendered organizing of feminist pornography

Abstract

Pornography organizes bodies in ways that reproduce, challenge, or possibly even change norms of gender and sexuality. In this paper, we explore the gendered organization of pornography, responding to a lack of research on this issue. The study engages in rhetorical and queer listening to investigate feminist pornography, analyzing audio stories produced by an all-female sex-tech company that creates pornography for women through a female gaze. Drawing on literature on gendered organizing, the study shows how the female gaze in feminist pornography organizes bodies in sexual scripts. Furthermore, an application of the concept of happy objects illuminates the complex embodied and entangled relations between sexual subjects and objects of desire. Finally, we demonstrate how, despite a shift from a male to a female gaze, feminist pornography is still prone to the reproduction of heteronormative gender stereotypes. The paper thereby outlines potentials as well as challenges for the (re)organization of bodies in feminist pornography.