Post-Feminism’s Confessional Mode as Discursive Decoy: The Misclassification of Natasha Merritt

At the launch of the twenty-first century, the online pornographic photographs of Natacha Merritt, a young American woman (23 years old at the time of her rise to fame), were categorised by one reputable art critic, Uta Grosenick, as works of art (Women Artists of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries, 2001), precipitating a critical acceptance of her work as such. While this particular foray of pornography into an art context has not been critically contested, it seems to constitute a rare example of misclassification. Merritt’s ‘adult-oriented’ online digital photographs of herself and others, which claim to portray authentic sexual encounters in Merritt’s real life are, in fact, more persuasively situated within the increasingly prevalent online genres of the intimate blog and alt porn. Drawing on the work of feminist media studies scholars Diane Negra, Yvonne Tasker (Interrogating Postfeminism, 2007) and Melanie Walters (‘Sexing it Up,’ in Third Wave Feminism, 2007), who respectively describe the related modes of ‘self as project’ and ‘confessional’ as principal characteristics of postfeminism, this paper repositions Merritt’s work as pornography and, in doing so, asks how such a reframing alters our perception of her ‘labour,’ from artist to pornographer and porn star. In addition, it seeks to analyse the ambiguity and pervasiveness of postfeminist rhetoric and its role (both in the media and increasingly in criticism) in endorsing and legitimising women’s engagement with pornography, whether it does so by facilitating the misrecognition of porn or by conflating an interest in porn with a positive liberated sexuality