The Politics of Describing Pleasure: The Discursive Limits of Categorizing Feminist and Queer Pornography

This master’s thesis explores the stability and ramifications of two emergent categories of pornography: namely, feminist pornography and queer pornography. Though these terms—feminist and queer—have histories that connote resistance and disruption, they have been controlled and institutionalized in pornography to create a broader visibility and a deeper impact. These terms are analyzed in relation to two institutions that seek to control their meanings—the Feminist Porn Awards (FPAs) and PinkLabel.tv—and fourteen pornography studios that identify with either or both labels. I collected data from preexisting documents by implementing a content analysis. Two crucial findings suggest that 1) despite the foundational tenets of feminist and queer porn, as outlined by the FPAs and PinkLabel.tv, the studios did not always abide by them, and 2) strategic essentialism is a mode of temporarily fixing these categories to wield power in resistance to the naturalized mainstream power. Since this thesis is about categories and queering, two seemingly opposed ideologies, it is concerned with how categories are queered, and how the queer can be temporarily stabilized to render itself visible and potent, ultimately leaving a trace that can be analyzed and contextualized historically, leaving room for catalogers to amend and alter content to fit categories prone to transformation