ABSTRACT This article is a personal freeform essay on Canadian political scientist, feminist philosopher, and performance artist Shannon Bell and her special calling as an ‘auto-porn-artist’. The subjective engagement of the author, a radical gay male moving-images and sexuality academic, and porn expert, with Bell’s risk-taking work, including her engagement with ‘sex offender’ and civil rights champion Robin Sharpe, is elaborated. Biographical convergences and divergences between subject and author are explored, as well as their respective entanglement – or not – with academic regulation of sexuality at their respective universities, York and Concordia. The article includes reflections on Bell’s notorious public play with ejaculation, masturbation, body modification, and hair extensions, and cinematic depictions thereof.

ABSTRACT So-called ‘facial’ cumshots, when a man ejaculates onto a woman’s face, are very common in heterosexual pornography. While they are frequently said to be degrading and misogynistic, the fact that women are usually shown as enjoying this act should make us think again. Facials may instead be rooted in male insecurity: of a fear that an aspect of how men orgasm – semen – is disgusting to women. By contrast, the fantasy, which pornography makes vivid, is that women might not just tolerate but celebrate and eroticize both ejaculation and its product. The way mainstream pornography presents facials is often misogynistic, but it does not have to be, and it is not always.

ABSTRACT The labour of porn performance is often framed through a binaried lens of either sexual liberation or exploitation. This article, in contrast, conceptualizes the labour of porn performance through the affective bind that Berlant labels ‘cruel optimism’. For Berlant, cruel optimism refers to a ‘relation that exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing’. In other words, cruel optimism designates a relationship in which one’s attachment to an object, perceived as optimistic, impedes the very flourishing that it otherwise ostensibly promises. In the contexts of porn performance, the dynamic of cruel optimism emerges in complex ways, where the promise of sexual expression, financial independence, and avoidance of straight work becomes entangled with conditions – such as stigma, risk and precarity, and commodification – that undermine those aspirations and attachments. By bringing Berlant’s framework into dialogue with (former) porn performer narratives and industry scholarship, this article seeks to provide a more complex and nuanced account of porn performance that avoids binary thinking and instead foregrounds the ambivalent, contradictory, sustaining, and constraining affective attachments and economies that often lie at the heart of pornographic and sexual labour.

ABSTRACT In 1995 Julie Lee co-wrote, co-directed, co-produced and starred in Hong Kong’s only commercial pornographic film, Trilogy of Lust. Since then, Julie Lee has been vilified in the popular media, leaving her contribution to Hong Kong film culture and beyond either marginalized or obscured within the scholarship on Hong Kong film history. This article provides a needed corrective to Julie Lee’s erasure by examining how the reception of Julie Lee and her film exposed widespread moral panic in Hong Kong around pornography’s impact on youth, along with allied issues of obscenity, morality and freedom of expression in advance of the 1997 handover of the former colony to China. We argue that despite being culturally denigrated, Julie Lee’s hardcore performance in Trilogy of Lust forged an alternative vision of Hong Kong identity to challenge the former colony’s cosmopolitan middle-class version of Hong Kong citizenry, thereby exposing an uneasy tension between the sense of belonging and unbelonging in pre-handover Hong Kong.

ABSTRACT This article examines the rhetorical strategies and legal frameworks used to shutter sex robot brothels. Drawing on media coverage of sex robot brothel controversies across Asia, Europe, and North America between 2004 and 2024, the article reveals how sex dolls, sex robots, sex workers, and the sexually trafficked are conflated and interpellated as subhuman threats in need of regulation. In conversation with critical race and queer inhumanist analyses of sexuality, technology, and humanity, the article examines the role of Asian sex workers and of municipal legal regulation in these debates, with particular attention to Eurocentric humanist ideas of Asian sex workers as inhuman/subhuman and to techno-Orientalist conflations of Asian labourers as robots. The article considers what may emerge when Asian sexual subjects turn towards the robot and away from the norm of the Eurocentric human. Drawing on the example of Cybrothel’s ‘Analogue AI’ offerings, it is suggested that sex doll/robot brothels may help spawn alternative and expansive affections and ways of living.

ABSTRACT This article explores the impact of governance developed and enforced by payment intermediaries on the working conditions of performers working on adult labour platforms. At the level of the payment infastructure, credit card networks Visa and Mastercard and payment processors set requirements for (adult) platforms on allowable content and how this should be moderated and verified. These rules are subsequently implemented by adult platforms. Based on interviews with 16 industry insiders, fieldwork, document analysis, and a survey amongst 117 online sex workers, the article demonstrates the impact of development and enforcement of these rules on sex workers. We argue that the rules set by payment intermediaries structure the industry in a way that prioritizes the interests of platforms over performers. These dynamics reinforce the already unequal labour relationship between platforms and performers, both by increasing the dependencies of performers on adult platforms and by creating content guidelines, content moderation, and consent verification systems that defer the risks onto performers. Sex workers experience substantial (financial) uncertainty and precarity, which is structured unequally. In particular, they contend with reduced opportunities for stable income, exacerbated health conditions, and increased reliance on third parties and undesired forms of work.

ABSTRACT This article draws on the researcher’s training and experience as a certified intimacy coordinator to examine how labour from professional sex work to intimacy coordination necessitates nuanced approaches to consent. What I call consent work – practices of communication, negotiation, and boundary setting – supports bodily autonomy while guiding portrayals of intimacy and nudity in film, television, theatre, and erotic media. I begin by discussing intimacy coordinators’ communication and consent frameworks to create context for my ensuing investigation. Next, utilizing data from interviews with online sex workers, I explore their sophisticated personal and community-oriented harm reduction techniques that, without formal training, dovetail with those in the intimacy coordination industry. Continuing my qualitative analysis, I describe the ways in which my interlocutors’ use of knowledge from consensual BDSM reflects the breadth of practices that inform consent work while illuminating the links between kink and intimacy coordination. Finally, I unpack how consent models remain entangled within systems of inequality and exclusion while owing much to marginalized communities’ contributions to contemporary understandings of bodily autonomy. Overall, consent work and its capacious lineage contribute to the expanding literature on intimacy coordination and highlight the field’s under-researched intersections with adult content creation.

ABSTRACT The purpose of this article is to establish a heuristic relationship between porn studies and animality studies. Using specific pornographic genres and subgenres as an analytical starting point, we will draw on the notion of animality to explore the deep epistemic scheme that informs contemporary hardcore production, and some of the forms of subjectivity that it articulates and re-produces within this scheme. More specifically, this article seeks to understand how pornography deploys the human/animal opposition as an anthropological machine aimed at constructing a specific sovereign subject.

ABSTRACT There is growing need for greater empirical understanding of the data violence experienced by online sex workers. Popular discourse about image-based sexual violence (IBSV), or ‘revenge porn’, often fails to identify the widespread proliferation of this practice within sexual services. This occurs as both consumers and adult-services platforms surreptitiously record and post performances on porn sites without consent, which can have severe implications for workers’ mental and social well-being. First, I apply a workerist lens to the neoliberal sexual agenda, which governs the (in)visibility and (un)freedom of online performers (OPs) across a variety of institutional settings. This exposes how top-down ideological power relations disappears OPs from legislative approaches to IBSV. Second, I show how IBSV emulates the tendencies of the platform business model, such as data appropriation and surveillance. I conclude with solutions including protections based in technology and human rights law, alongside platform cooperative development within a wider decriminalization framework.