Troubling complicity: audience ethnography, male porn viewers and feminist critique

This article offers a self-reflexive account of an audience reception study conducted in Paris, France, examining gay, bisexual and heterosexual cisgender men's everyday (and everynight) uses of pornography. The study explores the gender dynamics at work in practices such as surfing, watching, reimagining and discussing pornography, based on in-depth interviews with 34 viewers, combined with the replication of their online sexual meanderings; this positions me as a viewer among others, with specific epistemic goals. The article analyzes porn audiences' accounts of pornographic tastes, fantasies and attractions, both in relation to the interviews' interactional setting and to normative public representations of the " responsible " viewer. As a verb, troubling refers to a strategy: I grasp viewers' multifaceted relations to pornography through the strategic use of complicit empathy and feminist contradicting. As an adjective, troubling refers to an aporia: while this study is oriented towards feminist goals, it implies my participation as an ethnographer in hegemonic complicity, the process by which female and feminist views are demeaned in homosocial male bonding.

Florian Vörös. Troubling complicity: audience ethnography, male porn viewers and feminist critique. Porn Studies, 2015, ⟨10.1080/23268743.2015.1052936⟩ - lien externe. ⟨halshs-01484110⟩ - lien externe