Porn Studies

ISSN: 2326-8743 (Print) 2326-8751 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rprn20

Auto/ethno/pornography

Zeb Tortorici

To cite this article: Zeb Tortorici (2015) Auto/ethno/pornography, Porn Studies, 2:2-3, 265-268,
DOI: 10.1080/23268743.2015.1059649

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2015.1059649

Published online: 07 Sep 2015.

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 Porn Studies, 2015
Vol. 2, Nos. 2–3, 265–268, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2015.1059649

FORUM
Auto/ethno/pornography

Pornography’s presence on college and university campuses has increasingly mani-

fested itself in multiple ways in the United States and internationally. Alongside the
increasing academization and institutionalization of ‘porn studies’ – despite occasion-
ally vitriolic battles waged by some university departments, faculty, news media, and
local community members – porn is decidedly making its way onto campuses in both
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theory and practice, in the curriculum, and on the screen. My own experiences navi-
gating my status as a porn performer for a largely gay male audience when I was a
graduate student, going on the academic job market with porn in my past, and now
teaching queer history, gender/sexuality studies, and archival theory as a professor
attend to the complicated ways that investments in the history of sexuality and in por-
nography can inform one another personally, politically, and professionally. This brief,
inchoate reflection offers some insight into those experiences; but, more importantly, it
traces the ways that, for me, queer sex, theoretical interventions, archival practices,
and historiography have become interconnected.
In 2002, during my first year as a PhD student in the Department of History at the
University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), I decided to answer an advertisement I
had seen repeatedly in the UCLA school newspaper, The Daily Bruin, which solicited
the following: ‘MALE MODELS. UP TO $1000/day immediate pay. Paid screen test!
Must be 18–23. Great face, nice body. Nude magazine/video work SURFER/JOCK/
STUDENT, teen-looking preferred’. Inspired by that advert (and by a graduate course
on Queer Choreographies I was then enrolled in), I pursued what was to become for
me a fascinating foray into acting and performing in sexually explicit photographs,
largely solo gay porn video work, and eventually more independent webcam and
indie porn sites. Given that I used my real first name (‘Zeb’) in my porn work, that
I was open with many friends and colleagues at UCLA about my experiences, and
that eventually I allowed myself to be interviewed about sex work activism by the
same undergraduate school newspaper where I had initially discovered the above
advert, it came as no surprise that word spread quickly through my department
about my porn work.1 What did surprise me, however, was that a small group of
graduate students in my cohort – unbeknownst to me – took it upon themselves to
lodge a complaint with the department chair, arguing essentially that my work in por-
nography degraded the UCLA Department of History and devalued the doctoral
degrees that we were all working hard to attain. No action was taken, and fortunately
the chair never raised the issue with me. If anything, however, the prudishness exhib-
ited by some of the doctoral candidates in my department strengthened my resolve to
perform in pornography, and to be even more public about it. In 2008, for example,
I published an autoethnographic essay about my porn experiences in the anthology
Queer Youth Cultures, in which I argued that bodies in gay male pornography

© 2015 Taylor & Francis

 266 Forum

(always coded in terms of race and age) simultaneously perform, perpetuate, and
subvert notions of masculinity, femininity, and codes of heteronormativity (Tortorici
2008).
This was merely one of many complicated entanglements that I found myself navigat-
ing as I publicly engaged in sex work and pornography as a young scholar who was con-
currently researching and writing academically about the bodies and desires of others in
the past. Having been trained academically as a historian, most of my archival research
focuses on criminalized sexuality in seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century Latin
America. In my historical scholarship, I explore sexual acts – masturbation, sodomy,
and bestiality – that the Church deemed ‘sins against nature’ in that they did not lead
to procreation, thereby challenging social and gender hierarchies and the institution
of the family. In this work, I delve microhistorically into the explicit bodies and desires
of historical actors; I put their bodies on display in ways that they themselves perhaps
would not have wanted to be remembered or permanently archived (for audiences
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that they themselves have no control over) (see Tortorici 2014). While I no longer act
in gay porn videos or pose for porn photographs, archives of my sexualized body still cir-
culate – in ways that I myself have no control over – online, where colleagues, fellow pro-
fessors, and students can (and occasionally do) come across them. Yet perhaps for me the
most productive interaction with pornography is one that I am only recently beginning to
think through, one that compels me to theorize the ways in which bodies (including my
own) come to be archived, recorded, documented, and remembered in vastly different
cultural and social media contexts, be it a historical archive or the internet.
Although perhaps an unfair critique, I find it somewhat disconcerting that while
many historians of sexuality are comfortable describing (often in salacious detail and
abstruse academic jargon) the bodies, desires, and emissions of long-dead historical sub-
jects, they often leave their own bodies and subjectivities out of the dialogue, at least in
any overt sense. Given that I have dedicated the past decade to archival research on crim-
inalized sexuality in colonial Latin America, I now want to more explicitly explore the
links between my own subjectivity and desires, and the disciplinary impulse to put the
bodies of (historical) others on display in my scholarship. In retrospect, the most inter-
esting and theoretically provocative part of my own experiments in pornography has
been thinking through how my sex work and my scholarship implicitly and explicitly
inform one another, especially around questions of power, consent, exposure, and
agency. In recent years, for example, I have begun to draw theoretical links between
the exposure of my own body – autopornography – and the exposure of the seven-
teenth-century and eighteenth-century bodies about whom I write professionally – eth-
nopornography.2 Thinking about autopornography and ethnopornography as
interconnected practices is an exercise in historical vulnerability that might allow for
some queerly cross-temporal affective and corporeal encounters between bodies,
desires, and texts in the past and in the present. This is, of course, not to say that the
exposure of my body is in any way analogous to the exposure of the bodies of historical
actors that I myself write about. Rather, I am interested in thinking through the compli-
cated ways that explicit bodies – whether textual, visual, or aural – come to be archived in
the first place, and how they subsequently circulate in largely uncontrollable ways. The
burgeoning field of porn studies offers us a theoretical language to think through these
processes, in part by conceptualizing pornography as a critical category of analysis.
Now, as an assistant professor in the Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Lit-
eratures Department at New York University, teaching and researching primarily in
 Porn Studies 267

the fields of colonial Latin American history, gender and sexuality studies, and archi-
val theory, I have sought to further this dialogue on various fronts. I am, for example,
currently co-editing an anthology titled Ethnopornography: Sexuality, Colonialism,
and Anthropological Knowing with Pete Sigal and the late Neil L. Whitehead. Here,
we explore ‘ethnopornography’ as being key to the legacy of the ethnographic gaze,
as practiced not only by professional anthropologists and ethnographers but also by
other cultural commentators (including colonists, travellers, medical practitioners,
and intellectuals). With Ben Cowan and Mir Yarfitz, I have co-organized multiple con-
ference panels on the topic of ‘Obscenidades: The Pornographic and the Profane in
Latin America’, with the goal of producing and theorizing a historiography of porno-
graphy in Latin America. In 2014, my colleague Laura Torres-Rodríguez and I co-
organized a two-day symposium at New York University titled ‘Critical Pornogra-
phies’, which sought to intellectually centre pornographic modes of viewing within
the histories and literatures of colonialism and post-colonialism, genealogies of cen-
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sorship, artistic production, and social activism in Latin America and the Iberian
Peninsula. In my current academic work and my past porn work, these endeavours
coalesce in ways that are productive, challenging, and not easy to resolve, partly
due to discrepancies of power between the pornographer and the pornographic
subject, or between the historian and the historical subject.
Cultural theorist Susanna Paasonen has recently asserted that ‘Pornography’s
ambivalent position as a public secret – ubiquitous yet effaced and silenced, widely
consumed yet defined as miasmic filth – has fed and fueled the affective dynamics
of public debates, academic studies, and regulatory practices’ (2011, 2). As the field
of porn studies comes to be increasingly (although no less ambivalently) present on
campus, the links amongst and between these affective dynamics are well worth sus-
tained intellectual inquiry in order to allow subjectivities to sometimes collide. In all
of my own auto/ethno/pornographic endeavours, I have found it particularly pro-
ductive to think in terms of pornographic modes of viewing, speaking, depicting,
writing, and representing. While any given definition of pornography is frustratingly
unclear, such indeterminacy is useful in terms of pushing our own epistemological
boundaries regarding what we think pornography is and is not, and when a certain
body, text, image, or speech act might function in a pornographic (or voyeuristic)
mode. Pornography is about discourse, but also about auto/ethnographic modes of
encountering and rendering the other (and the self) somewhat more legible. The per-
sonal, the political, the theoretical, and the pornographic can and should be in
dialogue with one another. Considering pornography as a form of history, and
perhaps framing history itself as a mode of pornography, might allow us to begin to
do this.

Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank Lynn Comella and Mir Yarfitz for their helpful comments, sugges-
tions, and criticisms.

Notes
1. The article ‘Battling a Stigma’ that was published in The Daily Bruin – replete with the stereo-
types, biases, and incorrect assertions of the author – was, without my knowledge or consent,
 268 Forum

archived permanently online. Despite my best efforts in 2011 and 2012, when I was on the
academic job market, to have the article taken offline, it can still be read online (Bloomekatz
2005).
2. This is a project I began as part of an interdisciplinary conversation with two friends and col-
leagues. See McNamara, Tortorici, and Tovar (2015).

References
Bloomekatz, Ari. 2005. ‘Battling a Stigma. Students/Sex Workers Commited to Reshaping
Industry Stereotypes.’ The Daily Bruin. Accessed February 19, 2015. http://dailybruin.com/
2005/05/08/battling-a-stigma/.
McNamara, Michael, Zeb Tortorici, and Virgie Tovar. 2015. ‘“Serving It”: Werq Queers Our
Sex, $ex Queers Our Work.’ In Queer Sex Work, edited by Mary Laing, Katy Pilcher, and
Nicola Smith, 43–52. London: Routledge.
Paasonen, Susanna. 2011. Carnal Resonance: Affect and Online Pornography. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press.
Tortorici, Zeb. 2008. ‘Queering Pornography: Desiring Youth, Race, and Fantasy in Gay Porn.’
Downloaded by [117.245.73.96] at 02:59 24 November 2015

In Queer Youth Cultures, edited by Susan Driver, 199–220. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
Tortorici, Zeb. 2014. ‘Visceral Archives of the Body: Consuming the Dead, Digesting the
Divine.’ GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 20 (4): 489–520.

Zeb Tortorici
Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures
New York University, USA