Attwood, F.

(2014) Immersion: ‘extreme’ texts, animated

bodies and the media. Media, Culture & Society
36(8): 1186-1195

Immersion: ‘Extreme’ Texts, Animated Bodies and the Media

The term ‘pornography’, intended in Media and Cultural Studies to describe a

particular media genre, has often been used in public debate as a figure of
speech to ‘express many kinds of intense revulsion’ (Rubin, 1993: 37). This
public marking of ‘bad’ texts has become more widespread in recent years in
what Brian McNair has described as an era of ‘porn fear’ (2009), often focused
on the notion of the ‘extreme’ or signified by the use of the term ‘pornography’
for texts that are not necessarily sexual. It has become increasingly common,
not only in right wing, religious and anti-porn feminist debates, but in serious
journalism and liberal cultural commentary.

Martin Barker has drawn attention to the way that broadsheet newspapers make
use of the term ‘porn’1 to denote amongst other things; weakness, self-
indulgence, loss of contact with the self, the world or other people, and excessive
attention to feelings, emotions, sensations, bodies’. F o r m s o f ‘extreme’
pornography are seen as ‘not just at the edge and different’, but having ‘a
magnetic hold over the rest’, able to ‘drag everything and everyone towards it’.
Here ‘porn’ is not a cultural form but a force. This usage of ‘porn’ underpins a
range of commentaries about texts that are not produced as porn but are
understood as somehow pornographic, especially those containing images of
violence such as ‘rape’, ‘revenge’, ‘war’ and ‘torture’ porn. For example, Mark
Dery’s (2005) account of US soldiers’ grisly combat images of maimed and dead
Iraqis shared online describes these as ‘porn...of the most atavistic sort’; viewed
‘with a voyeuristic, high-fiving glee familiar to anyone who has ever watched
hardcore videos with a drunken gang of guys at a bachelor party’ and poking ‘a
1 Examples collected by Barker included references to animal porn, nature porn, food porn,
property porn, info-porn, techno-porn, emotional porn, status porn, and other oddities such as
word porn, commonsense porn, productivity porn, and abstinence porn.
stiff little finger into the killer-ape part of our brains, right where the desire to
fuck gets confused with the urge to fuck shit up’.

In this article I review a discourse that increasingly circulates around a range of

texts that are understood not only as pornographic but as 'extreme'. This
broader discourse about extreme media is often related to the development of a
particular kind of culture that is a cruel culture. I focus on the way that this
discourse expresses a set of concerns which draw on familiar notions of media
effects and the obscene, but are particularly concerned about the idea of media
as immersive and contagious and about a state where media and life are one and
the same, constitutive of culture itself.

This use of the term ‘pornography’ often condenses a set of preoccupations and
anxieties about media texts and practices. It draws on older notions of obscenity
that indicate things that are - or should be - kept out of sight - because they push
at the limits of the normal, solicit or elicit particular kinds of responses (Kieran,
2002) and gesture towards ‘the role of the senses in perception and knowledge’
(Dennis, 2009: 3-4). Obscenity has continued to be a key term in debates about
pornography, for example in prosecutions of US producers of adult films,
Extreme Associates and Max Hardcore in 2009. In the UK the notion of
‘obscenity’ outlined in the Obscene Publications Act (1857/1959) has played a
central role in deciding what can and cannot be represented, based on whether a
specific image might ‘deprave and corrupt’ the viewer (OPA 1959). In the light of
two recent high profile court cases prosecuted under the Act (R v Walker, 2009
and R v Peacock, 2012) - the first of which was abandoned on the basis of expert
testimony and the second resulting in acquittal for the accused through a trial
by jury - there have been claims that it is out of date, irrelevant and possibly ‘on
its last legs’ (Jones, 2012). New legislation which aims to restrict sexually
explicit representation has emerged, notably in the UK Criminal Justice and
Immigration Act 2008 on ‘extreme pornography’. This outlaws the possession of
‘extreme images' that are pornographic, focus on particular acts (for example
those which may result in serious injury to a person’s anus, breasts or genitals),
portray these ‘in an explicit and realistic way’ so that a ‘reasonable person’

2
would think they featured real people or animals, and are ‘grossly offensive,
disgusting or otherwise of an obscene character’ (CJIA 2009).

Sexual expression is also coming under increased scrutiny in other ways. Not
only are allegedly ‘violent’ online pornographies the focus of repeated attacks,
explicit images of drawn or computer-generated ‘fictional’ children may now be
classed as child pornography or ‘child-abuse material’ in some countries
(Gillespie, 2011; Stapleton, 2012, McLelland 2012). Flirtatious ‘sexting’ images
that young people take of themselves and circulate have been presented as self-
produced child pornography; a form of production that is ‘dangerous because of
the audience that it might find’ (Goldstein 2009). Calls for increased regulation
are often framed as part of need to fight against changes in culture, often
chacterized as a ‘sexualized’ or ‘porn culture’. Campaigns such as Object and
Stop Porn Culture, and books such as Pornified by Pamela Paul (2005) and
Pornland b y Gail Dines (2010) make the claim that ‘porn has taken over the
culture’ (Dines et al., 2010: 21), that ‘pornography is increasingly cruel and
degrading’ in line with the contemporary ‘cruel culture’ (Jensen, 2007: 17).

‘Extreme’ Media

A range of quite disparate texts have aroused concerns about the extreme.
‘Gonzo’ porn is frequently and erroneously cited as ‘extreme’ by campaigners
such as Gail Dines (Tibbals, forthcoming). A more precise term, ‘extreme post-
gonzo hardcore’, based on an earlier ultra-explicit aesthetic and associated with
producers such as Extreme Associates and Max Hardcore (see Maddison,
2009), focuses on very athletic forms of sex play in which the body is pushed to
the limit, on bodily fluids, and sometimes on apparently non-consensual
activities. Online pornographies associated with fetishes or revolving around
fantasy and roleplay scenarios, especially those in which violence is abstracted
and stylized, such as the now-defunct ‘death fetish’ site, Necrobabes, have also
been described as ‘extreme’. What is notable is that these types of pornography
have quite different aesthetics and sensibilities; the first focused on high energy,
‘raw’ performances (Smith 2012); the second with relatively little emphasis on
graphic spectacles of the body and a much more stagey performance style.

Concerns about ‘extreme’ media have also focused on a trend in contemporary

European art-house films that ‘have attracted attention for their graphic and
confrontational images of sex and violence, and which are said to employ
‘techniques that heighten the sensory and affective involvement of audiences’
(Horeck & Kendall, 2011: 2-3). Another kind of ‘extreme’ film belongs to the
‘torture porn’ horror genre which has been criticized because it is argued that it
presents pain and terror as spectacle (see Jones, 2013). Other ‘extreme reality’
texts are said to focus on cruelty, humiliation and suffering (BBFC, n.d: para
32). The BBFC has criticized films such as Bumfights: A Cause for Concern
(2002. Ryan McPherson) where ‘film makers persuade real homeless people
who are often incapacitated through drink or drugs to fight or take part in
dangerous stunts’ and ‘death films’ which feature documentary material ‘people
being killed or seriously injured’, featuring music and captions that ‘suggest that
the primary purpose of the work is to entertain’ (n.d: para 34). Some images of
this type that are taken from actual scenes of violence and recirculated have also
been described as ‘war porn’ (Baudrillard, 2005; Harkin, 2006), for example,
combat images posted by American troops in Iraq, or the photographs of torture
at Abu Ghraib prison.

A further set of images have been drawn into the debate about extreme media
especially when this focuses on what young people are able to access and
circulate online or on mobile phones. ‘Shock’ materials are images distributed
online, sometimes humorously intended, at other times sent in malice to ‘hijack’
viewers (see Jones, 2010), and most recently the focus of YouTube reaction
videos. They typically feature bodily fluids, injured bodies, and bodies that are
not considered to be conventionally attractive engaged in sex. The framing of
such images as types of ‘freakshow’ is evident in the way these are distributed
and the apparently ‘unexpected’ shock responses and ‘rodeo reactions’ of their
audiences (see Jones, 2010; Paasonen, 2011; and Kennedy & Smith, 2013 for
discussions of this kind of material)

4
It is hard to see how this range of texts can be grouped together in terms of their
producers, content, aesthetic, mode of distribution or intended audience - even
within a particular category such as torture porn there are substantial
differences between films (Jones 2013). They are not related in and of
themselves, but in terms of what they appear to represent for those who have
focused on them. In particular it is the kinds of responses they are thought to
call forth from their viewers that suggest their significance in representing
something important about contemporary culture which is understood as
‘extreme’; manifesting in a Western fascination with ‘extreme’ practices and
representations including extreme sports, ‘nature's aberrations’, natural
catastrophes war, executions and spectacular accidents, suffering victims,’ all
manner of sexual acts’, the gross and the display of ‘revulsion, disgust, horror
and fear’. These appear to typify a culture in which ‘knowledge for most people
has become a matter of spectacle, and everyday experiences and concerns are
mediated by the images it produces of itself'’ (Boothroyd 2006: 278-283).

‘A little porn…a little torture’: Cruel Culture

The linking of ‘extreme’ texts - sometimes also understood as ‘pornographic’ - to

a more generalized ‘cruel culture’ has been particularly evident in discussions of
the Abu Ghraib images which showed Iraqis detained at the prison being
humiliated and tortured by US soldiers. According to Susan Sontag (2004) the
Abu Ghraib photographs could be linked to porn in several ways; firstly, because
th ey ‘enter public view...interleaved with pornographic images of American
soldiers having sex with one another’, secondly because they borrow from
pornography (for example, they feature ‘a young woman leading a naked man
around on a leash’ which ‘is classic dominatrix imagery’), and thirdly because
they may have been ‘inspired by the vast repertory of pornographic imagery
available on the Internet - and which ordinary people, by sending out Webcasts
of themselves, try to emulate’. In turn, the photographs are presented as ‘part of
a larger confluence of torture and pornography’, which is linked to an
‘increasing acceptance of brutality in American life’.

What is interesting is that, according to Sontag, their cruelty cannot be

measured in terms of actual violence (which, she notes, statistics show to be
falling). Instead this is evident as a sensibility; emblematized by the ‘video
games of killing that are a principal entertainment of boys’ and ‘the group rites
of youth on an exuberant kick’, marked by ‘glee’ and ‘high-spirited play’, and
associated with a ‘culture of shamelessness’ which can be seen elsewhere in the
‘clamor to be invited on a television show to reveal’.

An extended discussion of the Abu Ghraib photographs in this context was given
by Carmine Sarracino & Kevin M. Scott in their book, The Porning of America
(2008); a discussion that manages not only to link torture to violent
pornography, but to porn per se, to sadomasochistic sex, military domination,
online shock sites, torture porn films, Nazi imagery in men’s adventure
magazines of the 1960s, a fascination with sexual murder that defined ‘the
nation that would become Nazi Germany’, American political commentary
which has become a form of ‘porned entertainment’, and masculinity (166-167).

In this narrative, the guards at Abu Ghraib are presented as ‘intensely involved,
on a daily basis, in porn’ and their records of torture are said to use ‘the visual
language of violent and degrading pornography’, a language in which, we are
told, the soldiers ‘were fluent’ (139-144). Torture is presented as a form of
‘sexual sadism turned into violent pornography’ (144-145), and set alongside
soldiers’ sexual relationships with each other, their enactment of ‘pornographic
scenes’ in front of their detainees, and the capture and distribution of torture
images as a form of homemade porn (148).

Sarracino and Scott’s account makes numerous links between perverse forms of
sex, porn and torture. They argue that the ‘mock violent, sadomasochistic sex’ of
the soldiers reinforced their sense of power over their charges, becoming a
‘reproducible rehearsal of sorts for their treatment of the detainees’. Evidence
that the soldiers had images of commercial porn, that they documented their

6
own sexual practices, and that they engaged in torture is refigured as an ‘easy-
to-imagine evening of entertainment’ - ‘a little porn, a little abuse, a little more
porn, a little torture, and then some more porn’. Although the authors do not
claim that the soldiers watched violent porn themselves, they argue that ‘it
seems likely that the guards perpetrating the abuse at Abu Ghraib deliberately
imitated the violent porn that now thrives on the Internet’ (149-153). The
multiple confusions of material abuse at the prison with perverse sex and porn
consumption is further extended in references to abuse-themed pornography at
sites such as Sex in War and Iraq Babes, online shock sites and the porn
produced by Extreme Associates in the US, to support a claim that hardcore
porn has increasingly ‘gravitated toward humiliation and degradation’ (157).

Much of the media reporting of the torture at Abu Ghraib lacked any discussion
of its context, in terms of conditions in the prison and Iran and in the broader
disregard for laws governing the treatment of prisoners in the ‘war on terror’
(see Salon, 2006). In accounts like the ones created by Sontag and Sarracino
and Scott this context of political chaos and state-sanctioned torture is replaced
with an imaginary scenario where reality and fantasy, sexual practices and
representations, sex and violence have become so intertwined that they cannot
be disentangled. The material war on terror becomes symbolic of a more
generalized cruelty and the abuse of Iraqi detainees is refigured as a form of
violent pornography. What disappears in this account is any conception of
pornography as a form of cultural production - indeed the authors explicitly
state that pornography ‘cannot be defined as acting or “performance”’ (157), or a
particular type of media different from the other kinds of media forms and
practices that are mentioned - and of the differences between the real and the
representational. Indeed, military domination and porn become the same thing
- ‘asserting one’s will over another’ and requiring forms of ‘othering’ and
objectification (139-144). Similarly, the pleasures of torture are aligned with the
reception of torture porn films. Here, the ‘steady, throaty laughter from young
men in the audience’ of those films becomes the aural equivalent of ‘the sheer
joy on the faces’ of the Abu Ghraib guards. In both, a hideous and perverse
confusion of response is detected: ‘orgasmic responses ...erotic joy’ (2008: 162).
While we are returned to a familiar ‘media effects’ discourse at various stages of
Sarracino and Scott’s discussion their account lingers on what is imagined as
gloating’ (2008: 159). In the process a view of ‘men’s violence’ is equated with a
series of sexual and textual perversions, and a similar system of equivalences
around power is drawn; to be a prisoner is like being a woman; to be a porn
director is like being a torturer or an enthusiastic viewer of horror films. This
peculiar and reductive understanding of power and its alignment with
masculinity is sustained despite the appearance of a number of women who
figure as key protagonists in Sarracino and Scott’s account; Lynddie England,
the US soldier at Abu Ghraib, Janet Romano, the director of the porn films
under discussion, and the characters of Mrs. Bathory and Beth who are the
protagonists in two of the four torture scenes from the Hostel films REF which
are described in detail. Regardless of who plays which part in any of these
encounters, the dominating role is always coded as male and the dominated as
female; thus, for example, Romano ‘as the director of violent porn movies -
controlling all the action…becomes the dominant male, with the victims of
degradation, as always, the females’ (2008: 159).

Media Bodies: Immersion, Infection, Animation, Possession

The kind of account constructed by writers like Sarracino and Scott is

underpinned by a notion of media effects which has proved tenacious in public
debate, despite its lack of theoretical basis, conceptual usefulness or supporting
empirical evidence (see Gauntlett, 1998; Barker & Petley, 2001). It also draws
on notions of obscenity and on the idea of ‘pornography’, conceived not as a
genre, but as a force and a sensibility that underpins the disordered production
and consumption of cultural texts. ‘Gender’ is also used to gesture at power
relations, regardless of its relevance. Alongside this runs a distrust of the new
opportunities for engagement afforded by media technology, the accessibility of
media materials, new modes of representation and the potential for particular
kinds of viewer response. Particular areas of anxiety are the ‘mixing up’ of
genres, of fictional and factual forms, and of media conventions related to the

8
‘representational’ and ‘real’. Concern is focused on the body and its responses,
both as depicted in media texts and as elicited in the audience.

As Mikita Brottman has argued, the media texts that disturb us the most are
often those that do not stay in their place. Defying genre boundaries they
become 'unclassifiable, and thereby culturally contaminating’ (1997: 99). The
death films referred to by the BBFC as forms of ‘extreme reality media’ more
radically confuse the separation of entertainment and documentation, media
and reality, 'refusing to fit into any existing cultural category’ (Brottman, 1997:
164). Porn is also seen as disturbing the broader boundaries between reality and
representation; criticized as a ‘poor substitute for ‘real sex’ and perceived as ‘too
real’ for performance because the sex it shows is unsimulated (Härmä & Stolpe,
2010: 110). This kind of boundary-breaking also takes place when genres that
are expected to remain on the peripheries of culture become more visible and
central, as they did in the case of ‘torture porn’ (Jones, 2013: 190). Like the
ideas of media effects and obscenity, the idea of media as contagious and
polluting is not new. As Debra Ferreday notes, it is possible to trace a
longstanding perception of reading practices as ‘immersive and potentially
transformative’, where ‘reality and fantasy become entwined through the act of
feverish, disordered reading’ (2010: 416). A variety of figures; the depressive,
the hysterical woman, the anorectic, the ‘youth enfeebled by autoeroticism’
(2010: 420), belong to this tradition. Susanna Paasonen has shown that this
kind of view was also evident in early accounts of women’s romance reading as
the occasion of dubious solitary pleasure and self-absorption, whereby ‘readers
were lost to the world, turned inwards toward their desires and imaginations’
(2010: 146). The act of reading was itself seen as dangerously isolating, leading
to an inability to tell fiction and reality apart. This suspicion underpinned the
later dismissal of ‘popular genres, particularly ones aiming at affective and
sensuous responses, such as romance, pornography, and horror’ (2010: 146).

As Ferreday argues, what often appears to be expressed by this kind of

representation is the fear of ‘an uncanny, vacuous form of consumption’;
inspired by and creating a form of ‘narcissistic self-absorption’ (2010: 419). In a
discussion of the way that this kind of concern has developed around film
spectatorship in the UK, Theresa Cronin shows how discourses of film
regulation have increasingly concerned themselves with viewing as problematic
because of its experiential and embodied qualities, so that the struggle over
representations has come to focus less on the meaning of a text, becoming
instead ‘a battle...fought over the body of the...spectator’ (2009: 4). The
acceptability of media representation comes to settle, not on the viewer’s
reading of a text, but on their presumed experience of it. This focus on the
internal state of the reader, imagined as a turning inwards towards themselves
and away from the world, also underlies the widespread depiction of
engagements with pornography as a form of addiction, in which men become
more interested in porn stars than their partners, lose their ability to get
erections, and otherwise suffer damage to their ‘authentic’ sexuality (Smith &
Attwood, 2013: 52).

Although this is not a new view of disordered reading practices, it may make
sense as a variant of ‘a body-as-performance relationship’ (Waskul, 2004: 31),
which resonates particularly with changes in the body’s significance in
indicating personhood (Waskul, 2003: 93), and in the use of media and other
technologies as part of that process in a ‘blending of flesh and media’ which
pro d uc es ‘media-bodies’ (Jones, 2008). Unease with the crossing of
representational boundaries is present throughout the accounts of ‘extreme
media’ I have discussed here, not only in terms of disturbances of genre and
category, but also of a perceived inseparability of media and bodies. The
separation of body and media implicit in much media effects discourse where
media is argued to impact on viewers seems to be less prominent here, with the
focus instead on media and bodies as merging and fused, locked in a
relationship conceptualized in terms of immersion, infection, animation, and
possession. Here media are galvanizing and it is not what they effect but what
they call forth and elicit that becomes the focus of concern. Images are imagined
as being in search of audiences; becoming a force in the world, while audiences
are no longer passive, but perversely active, gravitating towards unhealthy kinds
of images.

10
There is a sense here of media as ‘something we live inside as much as they are
technologies we use’ (Rothenbuhler, quoted in Deuze 2012: 27) and as
something that lives inside of us. Media become sites of intense horror in
discourses of extreme reading practices which focus on their inseperabilty from
bodies Becoming blank and vacuous or exhibiting ‘sadistic gloating’ and ‘glee’,
the media-body makes literal the notion of a depraved and improper reading. It
marks what seems to be a disappearing gap between reality and representation,
and a state of immersion whereby the viewer becomes horribly animated,
possessed and perverse. It marks the pervasiveness of media and of mediation
itself in which technologies appear to have closed the gap between real and
imagined worlds or destroyed our ability to tell the difference between them.

These shifts in the discourses of media engagement which are apparent in the
accounts I have considered here provide a way of tracing changes in the way
media are conceptualized. They are bound up with a larger debate about the
ethics of looking and how this changes when media images are increasingly
understood not just as images but as acts of communication. The accounts I
have discussed here run adjacent to that debate; Sontag notes of Abu Ghraib,
‘the horror that the photographs were taken’, becoming ‘messages to be
disseminated, circulated’. Looking is no longer ‘just looking’ but a way of taking
part, acting in the world. The accounts I have discussed are unable to
distinguish between film consumption, torture or war, or indeed between actual
groups of men and women located in specific and material contexts and as such
have little to contribute to this debate. All the same they point us to the likely
concerns that academics will need to take account of, and to the urgency of
developing critical work in this area.

References

Barker M and Petley J (eds) (2001) Ill Effects: The Media Violence Debate.
London: Routledge.
Barker M (2011) The problems of speaking about porn, Sex and Regulation
event, Onscenity Network, British Academy, 1.2.11.
Baudrillard J (2005) War Porn. International Journal of Baudrillard Studies
2:1. Available at:
http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol2_1/taylor.htm
BBFC (2005) Guidelines. London: BBFC.
BBFC Home Office Consultation On the possession of extreme pornographic
material; The response of the British Board of Film Classification. Available at:
http://www.bbfc.co.uk/classification/downloads
Boothroyd D (2006) Cultural Studies and the Extreme. In: Hall G and Birchall C
(eds) New Cultural Studies: Adventures in Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 271-291.
Brottman M (1997) Offensive Films: Toward an Anthropology of Cinema
Vomitif. Westport, Connecticut and London: Greenwood Press.
Criminal Justice and Immigration Act (2008) Section 63, Possession of extreme
pornographic images. Available at:
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2008/4/section/63
Cronin T (2009) Media Effects and the Subjectification of Film Regulation. The
Velvet Light Trap 63: 3-21.
Dennis K (2009) Art/Porn: A History of Seeing and Touching. Oxford: Berg.
Dery M (2005) Sex Organs Sprout Everywhere. Shovelware, 6.10.05. Available
at: http://www.markdery.com/archives/news/#000048
Deuze M (2012) Media Life. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Dines G (2010) Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality. Boston:
Beacon Press.
Dines G, Thompson L, Whisnant R & Boyle K (2010) Arresting images: Anti-
pornography slide shows, activism and the academy. In: Boyle K Everyday
Pornography. London: Routledge, 17-33.
Ferreday D (2010) Reading Disorders: Online Suicide and the Death of Hope.
Journal for Cultural Research 14(4): 409-426.
Gauntlett D (1998) Ten Things Wrong with the Media ‘Effects’ Model. In:
Dickinson R, Harindranath R and Linné O (eds) Approaches to Audiences: A
Reader. London: Arnold, 120-129.
Gillespie AA (2011) Child Pornography: Law and Policy. Abingdon: Routledge.

12
Goldstein, L (2009) Documenting and denial: discourses of sexual self-
exploitation. Jump Cut 51. Available at:
http://www.ejumpcut.org/currentissue/goldstein/text.html.
Harkin J War porn (2006) Guardian Comment is Free, 12.8.06. Available at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2006/aug/12/comment.media2,
Härmä S and Stolpe J (2010) Behind the Scenes of Straight Pleasure. In:
Attwood F (ed) porn.com: Making Sense of Online Pornography. New York:
Peter Lang, 107-122.
Horeck T and Kendall T (eds) (2011) The New Extremism in Cinema: From
France to Europe. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Jensen R (2007) Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity.
Cambridge, MA: South End Press.
Jones M (2008) Media-bodies and screen-births: Cosmetic surgery reality
television. Continuum 22(4): 515- 524.
Jones N (2012) Defending obscenity. Heresy Corner. Available at: http://
heresycorner.blogspot.com/2012/01/defending-obscenity.html Jones S (2010)
Horrorporn/Pornhorror: The Problematic Communities and Contexts of
Extreme Online Imagery. In: Attwood F (ed) porn.com: Making Sense of Online
Pornography. New York: Peter Lang, 123-137.
Jones S (2013) The Lexicon of Offence: The Meanings of Torture, Porn and
‘Torture Porn’. In: Attwood F, Campbell V, Hunter I.Q. and Lockyer S (eds)
Controversial Images: Media Representations on the Edge. Palgrave, 186-200.
Kennedy J and Smith C (2013) His Soul Shatters at About 0.23: Spankwire,
Self-Scaring and Hyperbolic Shock. In: Attwood F, Campbell V, Hunter I.Q. and
Lockyer S (eds) Controversial Images: Media Representations on the Edge.
Palgrave, 239-253.
Kieran M (2002) On Obscenity: The Thrill and Repulsion of the Morally
Prohibited. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 64(1): 31-55. Maddison
S (2009) ‘Choke on it, Bitch!’: Porn Studies, Extreme Gonzo and the
Mainstreaming of Hardcore. In: Attwood F (ed) Mainstreaming Sex: The
Sexualization of Western Culture. I.B. Tauris, London, 37-54.
McLelland M (2012) Australia’s ‘child-abuse material’legislation, internet
regulation and the juridification of the imagination. International Journal of
Cultural Studies, 15(5): 467-483.
McNair B (2009) From porn chic to porn fear; the return of the repressed. In:
Attwood F (ed) Mainstreaming Sex: The Sexualization of Western Culture. I.B.
Tauris, London, 55-73.
Obscene Publications Act 1959. Available at:
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/Eliz2/7-8/66/section/1
Paasonen S (2010) Good Amateurs: Erotica Writers and Notions of Quality. In:
Attwood F (ed) porn.com: Making Sense of Online Pornography. New York:
Peter Lang, 138-154.
Paasonen S (2011) Carnal Resonance: Affect and Online Pornography.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Paul P (2005) Pornified: How Pornography Is Transforming Our Lives, Our
Relationships, and Our Families. New York: Times Books.
Rubin G (1993) Misguided, Dangerous and Wrong: An Analysis of Anti-
Pornography Politics. In: Assiter A and Carol A (eds) Bad Girls and Dirty
Pictures: The Challenge to Reclaim Feminism. London: Pluto Press, 18-40.
Salon Staff (2006) The Abu Ghraib files. Available at:
http://www.salon.com/news/abu_ghraib/2006/03/14/introduction/index.htm
l
Sarracino C and Scott K (2008) The Porning of America: The Rise of Porn
Culture, What it Means, and Where We Go from Here. Boston, MA: Beacon
Press.
Senft T (forthcoming) Love in the time of snuff: critical internet studies meets
t h e ‘Neda video’. In: Koskela H and Wise JM (eds) New Visualities, New
Technologies: The New Ecstasy of Communication. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Available at: http://terrisenft.net/writing/Neda/senft_neda_1.24.11.pdf
Sontag S (2004) Regarding the Torture of Others. New York Times, 23.5.04.
Available at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/23/magazine/23PRISONS.html
Smith C (2012) Reel Intercourse: Doing Sex on Camera: In Kerr D and Hines C
(eds) Hard To Swallow: Hard-Core Pornography On Screen. New York:

14
Columbia University Press, 194-214.
Smith C and Attwood F (2013) Emotional Truths and Thrilling Sideshows; The
Resurgence of Anti-Porn Feminism. In: Taormino T, Parreñas Shimizu C,
Penley C and Miller-Young M (eds) The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of
Producing Pleasure. New York: The Feminist Press, 41-57.
Stapleton A (2012) Border Patrol: Trevor Brown, Aesthetics and the Protection
of Fictitious Children. In: Attwood F, Campbell V, Hunter IQ and Lockyer S
(eds) Controversial Images; Media Representations on the Edge. London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 115-130.
Tibbals C (forthcoming) Gonzo, Trannys, and Teens - Current Trends in United
States’ Adult Content Production, Distribution, and Consumption, Porn Studies
1(1).
Waskul D (2003) Self-Games and Body-Play: Personhood in Online Chat and
Cybersex. New York: Peter Lang.
Waskul D Douglass M and Edgley C (2004) Outercourse: Body and Self in Text
Cybersex. In: Waskul D (ed) net.seXXX: Readings on Sex, Pornography, and the
Internet. New York: Peter Lang, 13-33.