Articles and Book Chapters by Evangelos Tziallas, Ph.D
RAW: PrEP, Pedagogy, and the Politics of Barebacking , 2019
Slate, 2020
If hookup apps never deliver the things we want, why do we keep coming back?
Porn Studies
The article briefly sketches the concept of The Pornopticon, a digitized
version of the Panoptico... more The article briefly sketches the concept of The Pornopticon, a digitized
version of the Panopticon wherein porn, wherein publicized sex, is coded
into the process of surveillance and vice versa. The paper begins with an
overview of the Pornopticon and then moves into a discussion of the digital doppelganger, a data figure that is both the Pornopticon's source and object, and concludes with a look at "the Fappening".
Intercourse in Television and Film: The Presentation of Explicit Sex Acts, 2018
Chapter examines contemporary debates around gay and queer identity through a comparative analysi... more Chapter examines contemporary debates around gay and queer identity through a comparative analysis of Cruising (1980) and Interior. Leather Bar (2013).
This forum seeks to open a discussion about the conceptual, ideological, and possibly even physic... more This forum seeks to open a discussion about the conceptual, ideological, and possibly even physical overlaps between the broad categories of surveillance and pornography. Potential contributors are invited to interpret the definitions of “surveillance” and “pornography” however they see fit and are encouraged to be creative when thinking through their overlaps.
Contributors are welcome to submit abstracts on the below subjects or use them to help guide their own proposals.
Possible Topics
• Drone/CCTV porn
• Pornhub Insights and big data
• The UK’s Digital Economy Bill
• Mia Khalifa: Privacy and the challenge of challenging cultural taboos
• Hacking and blackmail (ex: Black Mirror season 3, episode 3)
• Revenge porn and legal responses/ramifications
• Webcam streaming and being recorded unawares
• From Bush to Obama: The rhetorical effects of “safe and secure”
Interested individuals are asked to email 100-200 word proposals to forum editor Evangelos Tziallas at [email protected] by March 15th, 2017.
Completed papers are due May 30th, 2017 and should be 1,500 words with citations and footnotes.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2016.1148329
Sexuality and Culture DOI: 10.1007/s12119-015-9288-z, May 5, 2015
It is taken for granted that face-to-face contact is the ultimate goal of gay male social network... more It is taken for granted that face-to-face contact is the ultimate goal of gay male social networking applications such as Grindr and Scruff. I, however, challenge this assumption and argue that these applications have succeeded not because they fulfill their tacit promise to connect gay men, but by doubling as do-ityourself (DIY) amateur porn platforms. Gay male social networking applications are screening tools that facilitate self-pornification through a process of gamified surveillance. I contend that the rewards for playing the game are often not the sanitized ones promoted by application creators and their public relations departments but the erotic exchanges and byproducts produced during the screening process these applications ambivalently disavow—nude images and erotic chat.
A variety of pressing questions on the current topics and trends in gay male pornography were sen... more A variety of pressing questions on the current topics and trends in gay male pornography were sent out to the contributors of this special issue. The answers provided
were then collated into a ‘virtual’ discussion. In a brief concluding section, the contributors’ answers are reflected upon holistically in the hopes of shedding light on the changing face of gay male pornography.
Psychology and Sexuality 6(1), 2015
This article argues that Michael Lucas’ Men of Israel was made in response to the rising populari... more This article argues that Michael Lucas’ Men of Israel was made in response to the rising popularity of Arab themes, performers, and locations in recent gay male pornography, particularly American studio-based productions. The article explores how recent representations of Arab society, culture, and men in gay male pornography employ varying degrees of performativity and authenticity in an attempt to break down differences and bridge connections between East and West, while Lucas and his film attempt to maintain that rigid imaginary border. I argue that the texts are a microcosm of the contentious and ongoing debates about homosexuality in the East and West and crystallize how gay identities are used as currency to push various cultural political agendas generally and through pornography sub-culturally.
écraNoSphère , 2014
This article argues that as surveillance becomes defined less as an idea of power-knowledge and m... more This article argues that as surveillance becomes defined less as an idea of power-knowledge and more as a representation or action conducted by, or contingent upon, moving images and related technologies, the specter of surveillance which was maintained sub-textually in moving images returns, rather than develops anew. It argues that surveillance is the return of the repressed; it is cinema’s uncanny double— its doppelgänger and alter ego. It uses the first two Paranormal Activity films as case studies to explore how the discourse and emulation of surveillance produces multiple, interdependent doubles engendering uncanny cinematic experiences. Ultimately it argues that the manufactured uncanny experiences mimic the way surveillance manufactures the self and physical reality as doubled, attempting to leverage the horror genre’s currency of fright to reveal this reality.
To See the Saw Movies: Essays on Torture Porn and Post-9/11 Horror, May 2013
In this chapter I explore how the representation and discourse of gamification and correction mar... more In this chapter I explore how the representation and discourse of gamification and correction mark the Saw films as a unique horror series. Building on arguments I made in an earlier paper about the Saw films and surveillance, I focus on how the films emphasize correction over punishment and how this goal is both buttressed by, and deployed through, the series’ gamified iconography and narratology. I use this framework to contemplate how this symbiosis is potentially reflective of a new cinematic paradigm shift and consider how the series, and to a lesser degree, cinema in general, engages with the development of new recording and monitoring technologies and the cultural-political effects which arise from these integrations.
Google Book Link: http://bit.ly/1fNjBc5
Conference Presentations by Evangelos Tziallas, Ph.D
Over the last few years, several fiction films and documentaries on the subject of AIDS have been... more Over the last few years, several fiction films and documentaries on the subject of AIDS have been released. I call this small cycle “Retro AIDS Cinema,” which among other films includes How to Survive a Plague (2012), United in Anger: A History of ACT UP (2012), Dallas Buyers Club (2013), Test (2013), and The Normal Heart (2014). Although appearing to transgress the tacit embargo on representing AIDS in film and discussing AIDS in mainstream culture, the movies are retrospectives on AIDS and not about AIDS in the here and now. Although presenting themselves as progressive texts, the films are both literally and figuratively regressive: by representing AIDS as a historical and not contemporary phenomenon, the Retro AIDS cycle contains AIDS in the past, in effect bolstering the embargo on AIDS.
The AIDS epidemic manifested what Foucault ([1975] 1995) termed “the spectacle of the scaffold.” Images of the sick and dying were publicly circulated as criminal evidence, becoming default moralizing and disciplining agents. I argue the Retro AIDS cycle constitutes the scaffold’s return, reincarnating at a time when condom use is in steep decline both on and offscreen. The cycle, I contend, is really a reaction to recent pharmaceutical advancements, namely Truvada, and the return of the behaviour that brought about the AIDS epidemic in the first place: barebacking.
Public discourse about chemical prophylaxes (Truvada) supplanting latex ones has been heated, with longtime AIDS activist Larry Kramer himself calling those who take Truvada “cowards” (Healy 2014). Barebacking haunts the Retro AIDS cycle. But rather than fear the epidemiological consequences, I argue the cycle articulates deep-seated anxieties about the social consequences of the condom’s removal: the loss of the fear of AIDS as a socio-political disciplining mechanism. Along with HIV criminalization laws and the 2012 ordinance passed by the County of Los Angeles (Measure B), the Retro AIDS cycle constitutes ancillary safer-sex discourse and a core part of what I term “Pornopticism:” the fusion of sex, technology, and representation inextricable from systemic geopolitical surveillance that continuously monitors and criminalizes private sex in service of “national security” and “personal safety.”
The presentation explores the phenomenon of sexual doubling in the era of diminished privacy and ... more The presentation explores the phenomenon of sexual doubling in the era of diminished privacy and heightened exhibitionism. Starting with an overview of the recent spat of leaked celebrity nudes dubbed “the fappening,” I explore the legacy and validity of the Panopticon as a metaphor and panopticism as a research method in the Porn 2.0 era.
In an age where simple interaction through media is inextricable from surveillance, the doubling of the self is unavoidable. The mining of the corporeal subject for data produces both virtual doubles and ghostly traces of their travels through the media sphere. The Pornopticon aims to describe a networked assemblage where pornography and the sexual self are bound to the logic and reality of surveillance, and where surveillance and the derivative discourse of security aim to control sex and sexuality through media and data.
Over the last twenty years, a rupture between mainstream and HIV positive identities has occurred... more Over the last twenty years, a rupture between mainstream and HIV positive identities has occurred within the broader Western gay male community. I argue that mainstream Western gay communities have begun to perceive HIV positive communities and people as specters of the past who threaten to thwart the various legal, political, and cultural advancements made by LGBTQ activists over the last twenty years, and that this fear over the return of what was repressed is primarily embodied by, and made explicit through, pornographic discourse.
Thomas Waugh (1996) and John Burger (1995) have lucidly demonstrated how pornography in gay male culture is a form of community building and cultural-political expression. In this paper, I will analyze some key recent pornographic texts to not only highlight the growing digression between HIV positive and mainstream identities/ communities, but to make the case that these works semi-consciously indict the changing ontology of the recording apparatus—from a communal tool of collective imagining to one of surveillance—as a promulgator of this division.
I will demonstrate that narrative driven porn studios use their status as unofficial ambassadors of mainstream Western gay culture to align condom use with normativity and privilege, and frame amateur technologies as dangerous tools of self-surveillance that produce archival material that can come back to haunt both the individual and the broader community as a whole. Conversely, I will show that bareback porn studios see these same technologies as potential weapons for gay men to transgress the antiseptic, safe, consumerist identities pedaled by the mainstream porn/media/culture industry, and create a new community that upholds the radical ideals of post-Stonewall liberation, embracing, rather than fearing, what Ulrich Beck (1992) termed the “risk society.”
At issue is the anxiety over the democratizing power of the apparatus that allows those that “should” be controlled to not be controlled. I argue that in contemporary pornographic discourse and gay male thought anxieties about the HIV positive body are aligned with growing fears over the recording apparatus becoming a tool for surveillance, and that both become the uncanny bodies of their normative counterparts that have returned to take back what was initially and what is “rightfully” theirs.
In the twenty-first century, the double has appeared with increase frequency in narrative fiction... more In the twenty-first century, the double has appeared with increase frequency in narrative fiction film. Why? Although there are discursive homoerotic undertones to all doppelgänger narratives that require consideration and unpacking, the figure of the double in this particular period, I argue, is invoked to articulate fears about the ubiquity and convergence of recording and computer technology: they primarily represent anxieties about surveillance and the loss of privacy and autonomy.
I discuss three recent films whose narratives revolve around confronting the monstrous double: Black Swan (2010), The Double (2013), and Enemy (2013), but I will focus most of my attention on Denis Villeneuve’s Enemy. An adaptation of José Saramago’s The Double (2002), Enemy tells the story of a young academic with an interest in the history of governmental social control meeting his exact double, an aspiring actor he catches a glimpse of in a movie. Using cinema as a conduit between these two bodies and psyches is crucial, as is Villeneuve’s decision to use the image of the spider and spiderweb to symbolize being caught in an inescapable web, visualizing what Mark Andrejevic terms “the digital enclosure” (2007, 2).
In a short piece by Forrest Wickman for Slate, Wickman contends that Enemy is “a parable about what it’s like to live under a totalitarian state without knowing it. It’s an Invasion of the Body Snatchers movie…” (March 14, 2014). I agree with Wickman, but I wish to go further and argue that the “totalitarian state” that Villeneuve engages is the state of media convergence, articulating concerns specific to the usurpation of film and recording technology by computer technology and the internet, or “interweb”. The lynchpin plot point—seeing one’s self but not one’s self on a computer screen in a movie—is a microcosm of the uncanny hypervisual world we inhabit; one where recording technology and one’s “televisual” or “image” double merges with computer technology and one’s, what surveillance studies scholar term, “data double” that combine together to create a second self that is more real and more in control of you than you.
Over the last two decades a burgeoning bareback subculture has challenged the heteronormative dir... more Over the last two decades a burgeoning bareback subculture has challenged the heteronormative directions of popular gay discourse and rights politics, while a growing demand for bareback porn has forced many performers and studios that use and promote condoms to capitulate to market demands by “going bareback” themselves. In this presentation I will look at the effects of L.A. Country’s “Measure B” (also known as the County of Los Angeles Safer Sex in the Porn Industry Act) on the gay male porn industry, and the formation of an HIV-positive, or “poz,” identity that has coalesced and is slowly coming out of the closet. I argue that this new poz identity has been cultivated through similar rhetorical and visual strategies used by Gay Liberation activists and that Measure B’s ultimate goal is to stop the visual manifestation of risky sex from spreading in the hopes of keeping this new “poz” identity contained in the closet.
I argue that the desire to consume bareback pornography may not be entirely based on the absence ... more I argue that the desire to consume bareback pornography may not be entirely based on the absence or presence of a condom, but the formal strategies and aesthetic qualities of a particular film or video.
The demand for gay male bareback pornography has exploded over the last decade; as a result, studio-based productions have had to come up with new ways to attract viewers in the face of increasing demand for condomless porn. One way the studio-based gay porn industry has set itself apart is by upping their production values: investing in star performers, grander set designs, more complex storytelling, and crisper and more dynamic cinematography. This, however, may not be the best strategy.
Higher budgets and more stylized representations of safer sex in studio porn may reinforce the sense that sex with condoms is alienating and lacks intimacy, framing safer sex as implicitly inauthentic.
Conversely, I argue that contemporary bareback pornography, particularly Treasure Island Media, poaches an autoethnographic aesthetic in order to sell affective visions of condomless sex and possible HIV transmission as a forms of communal intimacy and kinship. Evoking a “home movies” feel, these films project an image of the bareback community as a refuge and safe zone for gay men tired of antiseptic sex and rejection by consumer driven gay culture.
What I am arguing is that the condom or, lack thereof, metonymically mirrors the type of sex being performed, which is further supported by their respective aesthetics. The condom, then, comes to embody a type of cultural prophylaxis, and says more about a growing division between a normative gay culture that revolves around consumerism, and a growing one that revolves around carnal pleasure, rather than an "identity."
Uploads
Articles and Book Chapters by Evangelos Tziallas, Ph.D
version of the Panopticon wherein porn, wherein publicized sex, is coded
into the process of surveillance and vice versa. The paper begins with an
overview of the Pornopticon and then moves into a discussion of the digital doppelganger, a data figure that is both the Pornopticon's source and object, and concludes with a look at "the Fappening".
Contributors are welcome to submit abstracts on the below subjects or use them to help guide their own proposals.
Possible Topics
• Drone/CCTV porn
• Pornhub Insights and big data
• The UK’s Digital Economy Bill
• Mia Khalifa: Privacy and the challenge of challenging cultural taboos
• Hacking and blackmail (ex: Black Mirror season 3, episode 3)
• Revenge porn and legal responses/ramifications
• Webcam streaming and being recorded unawares
• From Bush to Obama: The rhetorical effects of “safe and secure”
Interested individuals are asked to email 100-200 word proposals to forum editor Evangelos Tziallas at [email protected] by March 15th, 2017.
Completed papers are due May 30th, 2017 and should be 1,500 words with citations and footnotes.
were then collated into a ‘virtual’ discussion. In a brief concluding section, the contributors’ answers are reflected upon holistically in the hopes of shedding light on the changing face of gay male pornography.
Google Book Link: http://bit.ly/1fNjBc5
Conference Presentations by Evangelos Tziallas, Ph.D
The AIDS epidemic manifested what Foucault ([1975] 1995) termed “the spectacle of the scaffold.” Images of the sick and dying were publicly circulated as criminal evidence, becoming default moralizing and disciplining agents. I argue the Retro AIDS cycle constitutes the scaffold’s return, reincarnating at a time when condom use is in steep decline both on and offscreen. The cycle, I contend, is really a reaction to recent pharmaceutical advancements, namely Truvada, and the return of the behaviour that brought about the AIDS epidemic in the first place: barebacking.
Public discourse about chemical prophylaxes (Truvada) supplanting latex ones has been heated, with longtime AIDS activist Larry Kramer himself calling those who take Truvada “cowards” (Healy 2014). Barebacking haunts the Retro AIDS cycle. But rather than fear the epidemiological consequences, I argue the cycle articulates deep-seated anxieties about the social consequences of the condom’s removal: the loss of the fear of AIDS as a socio-political disciplining mechanism. Along with HIV criminalization laws and the 2012 ordinance passed by the County of Los Angeles (Measure B), the Retro AIDS cycle constitutes ancillary safer-sex discourse and a core part of what I term “Pornopticism:” the fusion of sex, technology, and representation inextricable from systemic geopolitical surveillance that continuously monitors and criminalizes private sex in service of “national security” and “personal safety.”
In an age where simple interaction through media is inextricable from surveillance, the doubling of the self is unavoidable. The mining of the corporeal subject for data produces both virtual doubles and ghostly traces of their travels through the media sphere. The Pornopticon aims to describe a networked assemblage where pornography and the sexual self are bound to the logic and reality of surveillance, and where surveillance and the derivative discourse of security aim to control sex and sexuality through media and data.
Thomas Waugh (1996) and John Burger (1995) have lucidly demonstrated how pornography in gay male culture is a form of community building and cultural-political expression. In this paper, I will analyze some key recent pornographic texts to not only highlight the growing digression between HIV positive and mainstream identities/ communities, but to make the case that these works semi-consciously indict the changing ontology of the recording apparatus—from a communal tool of collective imagining to one of surveillance—as a promulgator of this division.
I will demonstrate that narrative driven porn studios use their status as unofficial ambassadors of mainstream Western gay culture to align condom use with normativity and privilege, and frame amateur technologies as dangerous tools of self-surveillance that produce archival material that can come back to haunt both the individual and the broader community as a whole. Conversely, I will show that bareback porn studios see these same technologies as potential weapons for gay men to transgress the antiseptic, safe, consumerist identities pedaled by the mainstream porn/media/culture industry, and create a new community that upholds the radical ideals of post-Stonewall liberation, embracing, rather than fearing, what Ulrich Beck (1992) termed the “risk society.”
At issue is the anxiety over the democratizing power of the apparatus that allows those that “should” be controlled to not be controlled. I argue that in contemporary pornographic discourse and gay male thought anxieties about the HIV positive body are aligned with growing fears over the recording apparatus becoming a tool for surveillance, and that both become the uncanny bodies of their normative counterparts that have returned to take back what was initially and what is “rightfully” theirs.
I discuss three recent films whose narratives revolve around confronting the monstrous double: Black Swan (2010), The Double (2013), and Enemy (2013), but I will focus most of my attention on Denis Villeneuve’s Enemy. An adaptation of José Saramago’s The Double (2002), Enemy tells the story of a young academic with an interest in the history of governmental social control meeting his exact double, an aspiring actor he catches a glimpse of in a movie. Using cinema as a conduit between these two bodies and psyches is crucial, as is Villeneuve’s decision to use the image of the spider and spiderweb to symbolize being caught in an inescapable web, visualizing what Mark Andrejevic terms “the digital enclosure” (2007, 2).
In a short piece by Forrest Wickman for Slate, Wickman contends that Enemy is “a parable about what it’s like to live under a totalitarian state without knowing it. It’s an Invasion of the Body Snatchers movie…” (March 14, 2014). I agree with Wickman, but I wish to go further and argue that the “totalitarian state” that Villeneuve engages is the state of media convergence, articulating concerns specific to the usurpation of film and recording technology by computer technology and the internet, or “interweb”. The lynchpin plot point—seeing one’s self but not one’s self on a computer screen in a movie—is a microcosm of the uncanny hypervisual world we inhabit; one where recording technology and one’s “televisual” or “image” double merges with computer technology and one’s, what surveillance studies scholar term, “data double” that combine together to create a second self that is more real and more in control of you than you.
The demand for gay male bareback pornography has exploded over the last decade; as a result, studio-based productions have had to come up with new ways to attract viewers in the face of increasing demand for condomless porn. One way the studio-based gay porn industry has set itself apart is by upping their production values: investing in star performers, grander set designs, more complex storytelling, and crisper and more dynamic cinematography. This, however, may not be the best strategy.
Higher budgets and more stylized representations of safer sex in studio porn may reinforce the sense that sex with condoms is alienating and lacks intimacy, framing safer sex as implicitly inauthentic.
Conversely, I argue that contemporary bareback pornography, particularly Treasure Island Media, poaches an autoethnographic aesthetic in order to sell affective visions of condomless sex and possible HIV transmission as a forms of communal intimacy and kinship. Evoking a “home movies” feel, these films project an image of the bareback community as a refuge and safe zone for gay men tired of antiseptic sex and rejection by consumer driven gay culture.
What I am arguing is that the condom or, lack thereof, metonymically mirrors the type of sex being performed, which is further supported by their respective aesthetics. The condom, then, comes to embody a type of cultural prophylaxis, and says more about a growing division between a normative gay culture that revolves around consumerism, and a growing one that revolves around carnal pleasure, rather than an "identity."
version of the Panopticon wherein porn, wherein publicized sex, is coded
into the process of surveillance and vice versa. The paper begins with an
overview of the Pornopticon and then moves into a discussion of the digital doppelganger, a data figure that is both the Pornopticon's source and object, and concludes with a look at "the Fappening".
Contributors are welcome to submit abstracts on the below subjects or use them to help guide their own proposals.
Possible Topics
• Drone/CCTV porn
• Pornhub Insights and big data
• The UK’s Digital Economy Bill
• Mia Khalifa: Privacy and the challenge of challenging cultural taboos
• Hacking and blackmail (ex: Black Mirror season 3, episode 3)
• Revenge porn and legal responses/ramifications
• Webcam streaming and being recorded unawares
• From Bush to Obama: The rhetorical effects of “safe and secure”
Interested individuals are asked to email 100-200 word proposals to forum editor Evangelos Tziallas at [email protected] by March 15th, 2017.
Completed papers are due May 30th, 2017 and should be 1,500 words with citations and footnotes.
were then collated into a ‘virtual’ discussion. In a brief concluding section, the contributors’ answers are reflected upon holistically in the hopes of shedding light on the changing face of gay male pornography.
Google Book Link: http://bit.ly/1fNjBc5
The AIDS epidemic manifested what Foucault ([1975] 1995) termed “the spectacle of the scaffold.” Images of the sick and dying were publicly circulated as criminal evidence, becoming default moralizing and disciplining agents. I argue the Retro AIDS cycle constitutes the scaffold’s return, reincarnating at a time when condom use is in steep decline both on and offscreen. The cycle, I contend, is really a reaction to recent pharmaceutical advancements, namely Truvada, and the return of the behaviour that brought about the AIDS epidemic in the first place: barebacking.
Public discourse about chemical prophylaxes (Truvada) supplanting latex ones has been heated, with longtime AIDS activist Larry Kramer himself calling those who take Truvada “cowards” (Healy 2014). Barebacking haunts the Retro AIDS cycle. But rather than fear the epidemiological consequences, I argue the cycle articulates deep-seated anxieties about the social consequences of the condom’s removal: the loss of the fear of AIDS as a socio-political disciplining mechanism. Along with HIV criminalization laws and the 2012 ordinance passed by the County of Los Angeles (Measure B), the Retro AIDS cycle constitutes ancillary safer-sex discourse and a core part of what I term “Pornopticism:” the fusion of sex, technology, and representation inextricable from systemic geopolitical surveillance that continuously monitors and criminalizes private sex in service of “national security” and “personal safety.”
In an age where simple interaction through media is inextricable from surveillance, the doubling of the self is unavoidable. The mining of the corporeal subject for data produces both virtual doubles and ghostly traces of their travels through the media sphere. The Pornopticon aims to describe a networked assemblage where pornography and the sexual self are bound to the logic and reality of surveillance, and where surveillance and the derivative discourse of security aim to control sex and sexuality through media and data.
Thomas Waugh (1996) and John Burger (1995) have lucidly demonstrated how pornography in gay male culture is a form of community building and cultural-political expression. In this paper, I will analyze some key recent pornographic texts to not only highlight the growing digression between HIV positive and mainstream identities/ communities, but to make the case that these works semi-consciously indict the changing ontology of the recording apparatus—from a communal tool of collective imagining to one of surveillance—as a promulgator of this division.
I will demonstrate that narrative driven porn studios use their status as unofficial ambassadors of mainstream Western gay culture to align condom use with normativity and privilege, and frame amateur technologies as dangerous tools of self-surveillance that produce archival material that can come back to haunt both the individual and the broader community as a whole. Conversely, I will show that bareback porn studios see these same technologies as potential weapons for gay men to transgress the antiseptic, safe, consumerist identities pedaled by the mainstream porn/media/culture industry, and create a new community that upholds the radical ideals of post-Stonewall liberation, embracing, rather than fearing, what Ulrich Beck (1992) termed the “risk society.”
At issue is the anxiety over the democratizing power of the apparatus that allows those that “should” be controlled to not be controlled. I argue that in contemporary pornographic discourse and gay male thought anxieties about the HIV positive body are aligned with growing fears over the recording apparatus becoming a tool for surveillance, and that both become the uncanny bodies of their normative counterparts that have returned to take back what was initially and what is “rightfully” theirs.
I discuss three recent films whose narratives revolve around confronting the monstrous double: Black Swan (2010), The Double (2013), and Enemy (2013), but I will focus most of my attention on Denis Villeneuve’s Enemy. An adaptation of José Saramago’s The Double (2002), Enemy tells the story of a young academic with an interest in the history of governmental social control meeting his exact double, an aspiring actor he catches a glimpse of in a movie. Using cinema as a conduit between these two bodies and psyches is crucial, as is Villeneuve’s decision to use the image of the spider and spiderweb to symbolize being caught in an inescapable web, visualizing what Mark Andrejevic terms “the digital enclosure” (2007, 2).
In a short piece by Forrest Wickman for Slate, Wickman contends that Enemy is “a parable about what it’s like to live under a totalitarian state without knowing it. It’s an Invasion of the Body Snatchers movie…” (March 14, 2014). I agree with Wickman, but I wish to go further and argue that the “totalitarian state” that Villeneuve engages is the state of media convergence, articulating concerns specific to the usurpation of film and recording technology by computer technology and the internet, or “interweb”. The lynchpin plot point—seeing one’s self but not one’s self on a computer screen in a movie—is a microcosm of the uncanny hypervisual world we inhabit; one where recording technology and one’s “televisual” or “image” double merges with computer technology and one’s, what surveillance studies scholar term, “data double” that combine together to create a second self that is more real and more in control of you than you.
The demand for gay male bareback pornography has exploded over the last decade; as a result, studio-based productions have had to come up with new ways to attract viewers in the face of increasing demand for condomless porn. One way the studio-based gay porn industry has set itself apart is by upping their production values: investing in star performers, grander set designs, more complex storytelling, and crisper and more dynamic cinematography. This, however, may not be the best strategy.
Higher budgets and more stylized representations of safer sex in studio porn may reinforce the sense that sex with condoms is alienating and lacks intimacy, framing safer sex as implicitly inauthentic.
Conversely, I argue that contemporary bareback pornography, particularly Treasure Island Media, poaches an autoethnographic aesthetic in order to sell affective visions of condomless sex and possible HIV transmission as a forms of communal intimacy and kinship. Evoking a “home movies” feel, these films project an image of the bareback community as a refuge and safe zone for gay men tired of antiseptic sex and rejection by consumer driven gay culture.
What I am arguing is that the condom or, lack thereof, metonymically mirrors the type of sex being performed, which is further supported by their respective aesthetics. The condom, then, comes to embody a type of cultural prophylaxis, and says more about a growing division between a normative gay culture that revolves around consumerism, and a growing one that revolves around carnal pleasure, rather than an "identity."
Putting recent works about barebacking by Tim Dean and AIDS activist documentaries by Roger Hallas into dialogue, I argue that bareback pornography is a reconstructed “personal” archive of the activity which brought about the AIDS pandemic, while presenting itself as ahistorical and without memory. They are anachronistic fantasies of gay life had AIDS not happened, leaving the reality of living with AIDS off screen, potentially contributing to the spike in AIDS amongst youths and young adults in North America.
Grindr is a screening tool. It is an application which does not appropriate, but is itself a medical gaze, one which conditions users to endlessly examine both the other and the other’s body and one’s own body and self in the pursuit of not just knowledge, but truth and perfection. It not only uses surveillance technology (GPS), but inspires one to appropriate and implement a surveillance gaze as part of a natural and necessary method of engaging cyber-sexually and carnally.
Users create profiles, upload pictures and information, and contact others (or are contacted by others) for various reasons, often for sex. Because of the nature of this interaction, it often requires one to list detailed descriptions of one’s goals, desires, and self, and make available images for the other’s scrutinizing gaze and approval, likewise inducing one to continually perform this surveillance on one’s self.
Crucially, these images and interactions are then stored in the application making these “folders” retrievable whenever one desires. These sexualized “folders” blur the lines between pornography, screening and interaction, necessitating and actively creating what Deleuze referred to as “dividuals,” engendered by these personal archives cum databanks.
Grindr is only one aspect of recent gay male culture which is marrying neoliberalism and surveillance, naturalizing its symbiosis. As a counterpoint to this embrace, I will discuss how the website “Douche Bags of Grindr” appropriates disciplinary visibility to punish and resist Grindr’s conservatism and power-agenda, and the contemporary queer film Pornography: A Thriller which reflexively and anxiously engages with the recent history of this problematic acquiescence.
Up until the 21st century, Arab men did not exist as sexual, and, therefore, social subjects in the popular gay male consciousness. After 9/11, however, gay male porn producers refocused their lens on Arab men and “Arabness,” forming an international circuit of texts which reinterpreted classic Orientalist fantasies, adapting them to specific histories and geopolitical relations with “The Arab.”
Each of the three discursive fields I wish to focus on negotiate the concept of “Orientalism,” reinterpreting this history to fit a specific cultural paradigm. The Citebeur videos from France sexualize the post-colonial Franco-Muslim and his “ghettoness,” while American studio productions playfully fetishize, while critiquing, Hollywood’s Orientalist past and current media landscape.
These industrial visions are resisted by DIY videos created by Arab men themselves, challenging the hyper-masculine, exoticized visions put forth by mainstream producers, as well as popular conceptions of Arab men as “terrorists” and homophobes, asserting themselves as (homo)sexual citizens in global gay male culture.
Importantly, all of these textual fields, whether intended to or not, challenge conservative concepts of race and ethnicity, foregrounding them as performative, questioning racial borders in an increasingly borderless world, with the DIY videos simultaneously highlighting democratized digital media’s counter-cultural potential.
The film, I argue, attempts to “re-brand” Israel using the Jewish/Israeli male body and landscape as a visual catalyst for promoting a pro-Zionist agenda by merging them into a Mediterranean visual economy. In essence, Lucas is attempting to “de-Other” “the Jew” and the Israeli landscape, in order to make it more palatable to a Western consumer and further bridge political affiliations between the West and Israel. In “re-branding” Israel, Lucas seeks to smooth over political instabilities and further marginalize and “Other” the Palestinian/Arab. In doing so, I argue that Lucas is attempting to covertly politically align the Western gay male spectator with Israel and, therefore, against Palestine.
This will be demonstrated through detailed textual analysis as well as extra-textual analysis of interviews with Michael Lucas, opinions about the film and Lucas’ intentions from gay/porn blogging sites, as well as a thorough excavation of the film’s promotional website, www.menofisraelxxx.com; a website which boasts, “In a sea of hostility and intolerance of the Middle East, Israel is the beacon of freedom.”
I argue that O’Neal’s films are meant to challenge popular Western conceptions of Arab men and culture as entirely homophobic, oppressive and backwards. He is resisting post-9/11 American dialogues about Arabs, while Lucas’ representations, reacting to these progressive representations, posits Israel as a white, liberal, capitalist Western nation which is both superior and in opposition to the surrounding East.
By way of conclusion I’d like to juxtapose these high-budget studio productions of “the everyday” to amateur/self-made videos on XTube in order to consider how the deployment and aestheticization of “reality” challenge the studio productions’ rigid categorizations and fetishizations of nation and ethnicity.
My core interest is investigating the phenomenon of “tagging” and how this method of taxonomy in this virtual, rather than physical, archive alters cultural and cinematic pornographic discourses. “Tagging” is the act of attaching labels to videos as a way to retrieve videos via an internal search engine. Videos can be tagged according to general themes (fetish), specific actions (blowjobs), iconographies (blondes), or any other culturally recognized categories (“hipster”, “twink,” “daddy,” “MILF,” etc.).
The transition from celluloid, to video, and finally digital changes the overall event from being conceived as “cinematic,” to a moment of captured “surveillance.” Pornography is rarely consumed anymore as a full length film, or video, but rather as a variety of disjointed clips scattered and stored throughout the virtual space of the internet. It is precisely this fragmented search to stitch together our own personal virtual archive where the “tagging” phenomenon becomes crucial.
Questions I explore in this paper include: How does tagging shape the content of the visual image? How does the decentralization of power from the archivist to the archive user, and from the industrial/profit driven producer/director to the non-profit or independent entrepreneur alter the representations? How does the intensified competition brought about by democratization influence what gets captured and how it is aesthetically presented? To what degree are we simply re-performing the studio produced pornographied images which have saturated our minds and what are the implications of this self-surveillance and our subjectivity?
In exploring these self-made pornographic texts I intend to demonstrate that the digitization of the body, memory, identity and sexuality, indicates yet another ideological shift in the cultural gaze. I argue that the appropriation of surveillance technology is ambivalent, but shows signs as a potential form of resistance, redefining sexuality, power, and the everyday. This ambivalence forms a two way relationship, with the everyday altering traditionally conservative nodes of power- surveillance and the archive- and vice versa.
I base my methodological challenge on a case study of XTube, a pornographic, “Do It Yourself” website similar to YouTube, discussing its relationship to the archive and surveillance, specifically self-surveillance. XTube is essentially a massive, yet democratized archive which anyone can access. The website’s open-access is emblematic of how DYI culture, patterns of consumption, and representations challenge studio/narrative power/gender/sexual/ racial discourses.
Specifically, I explore how searching for porn becomes similar to cruising an archive, an act which makes the consumer his/her own editor, stitching together fragments into their own cohesive product. The videos themselves develop the autoethnographic film genre, a genre which has a long history of sexual exploration, from self-documentary to self-surveillance. This is primarily expressed through aesthetic changes (long takes and long-shots, blurry and grainy images) and cultural changes viz a vis the website being a manifestation of “surveillance culture,” a culture where panoptic visibility becomes a form of entertainment and self-expression.
Traditional methods of production, exhibition and distribution have been invariably altered and this paradigm shift requires we re-evaluate our methodology. What my paper offers is a way to begin this process.
Surveillance as a theory is often related to Foucault’s writings, for obvious reason, yet the surveillance saturated world which we now inhabit problematizes Foucault’s positions on power and discipline. Surveillance is often thought of in ominous, negative terms, again for good reason, but surveillance is a much more diffused and complex phenomenon and my paper wishes to explore how artists and filmmakers are re-appropriating surveillance as a form of resistance and as a informational tool and to contemplate the problems associated with practicing, what is essentially, a theory.
Surveillance is often associated with security, yet increasingly in cinema and in general culture, the ability to document and capture digital images has highlighted the fraught relationship between security and visibility. One here can think of the images caught on cell-phones at the G20 riots in Toronto this past summer or during the Iranian election crisis in 2009. An ideological conflict arises between surveillance and “sousveillance” (resisting surveillance by performing surveillance on those who place you under surveillance), between surveillance as a theory and surveillance as practice and specifically, as a form of resistance.
When does a resistant practice simply become complicit, feeding the fire it seeks dull or extinguish? How does pleasure enact or detract from a work’s resistant politics when experiencing said text or work, and how does this problematize practicing theory as a form of resistance?
The discipline formed in the 1970s, during feminist criticism, cultural identity politics and psycho-semiotics’ apex. Laura Mulvey’s manifesto, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” was a groundbreaking psychoanalytic textual analysis of gendered pleasure and although it has been extensively criticized, it has solidified a relationship between voyeurism, narrative and analysis. However, technological evolutions are rapidly altering the cinematic text and the broader social consciousness, challenging formulations of voyeurism and their methodological configurations.
How are surveillance technologies altering the concept of “desire” and how can voyeurism retain its critical force when notions of privacy and invisibility are eroding at alarming speeds? Unable to explore this phenomenon in depth, I will use the film Paranormal Activity 2, a “mockumentary” horror film which is experienced partly through an amateur hand-held camera and partly through a multi-camera surveillance system to exemplify my argument.
My exploration will be framed by two questions. Firstly, what does it mean to experience a narrative “surveillantly” rather than “voyeuristically,” and how does this challenge prevailing methodologies in Film Studies? And secondly, what does a film like Paranormal Activity 2 reveal about the overlooked history of panopticism and technology’s relationship in contemporary narrative cinema and the historiography of narrative cinema?
Box-office grosses indicate that it is not only the genre’s spectacular effects which continue to attract audiences, but that the genre’s grand-narrative and its subsidiary tropes have tapped into the popular consciousness, filling an unconsciousness need.
I argue that the superhero genre is not only responding to social and political anxieties about insecurity and insurrection in America after 9/11, but actively attempts to shape the social and political consciousness by pushing and legitimating the value and necessity of the police state. The superhero genre is an extension of contemporary media panopticism, both an appendage and conditioner of new visual and political realities. The desire for security outside the frame is satisfied within it, but in conflating the borders between the frame and nation, a potentially dangerous psychic transference occurs whereby the false consciousness and security of one space can be, and wants to be, extrapolated into the other. It is my initial research and views on this conflation between media and cultural-politics that I am interested in presenting in this presentation.
Key questions I explore include: What historical role has surveillance played in defining and creating queer sexuality and how is this being changed in the age of surveillance culture? What role does the “confessional” play with respect to privacy, considering the two are somewhat antithetical? What significance does the film’s incorporation of personal diary cinema and coded reference to Caouette’s Tarnation (2003) have, and what does Mitchell want to tell us about the history of “personal diary” cinema? In the film, Caleb’s voyeuristic gaze partly transforms into an act of surveillance as he not only watches James, but at a crucial moment intercepts his attempt at suicide. What then are the cultural and political implications of the merging between scopophilic voyeurism and the disciplinarian/institutionalized/interventionist surveillance gaze?
The overwhelming amount of actual surveillance (Closed Circuit Television, databanks, government spying) and our appropriation of surveillance technology and ideology as a form of personal expression and entertainment suggests our understanding of the Foucauldian disciplinarian society requires revision. It is this crucial intersection which Shortbus sub-textually engages with and whose reflexive tagline, “voyeurism is participation,” slyly points towards.
I argue that in order to understand the crisis in contemporary queer cultural politics heavily influenced by the rupture in uniform safer-sex practices we must trace the lineage of figurative identity through fiction and hard core film back to its post-Stonewall incarnation. Homosexuality exists outside the field of the visible, but the gay and queer do not. I argue that through film and porn metaphysical identities were strategically manufactured which queer individuals were and are coerced to identify with and mimic, culminating in an ideological and representational schism in the twenty-first century whose effect on lived experience has had significant consequences. It is my ultimate contention that the strategic deployment of homogeneous identity via social, personal, and sexual identification with the image double became a way to control the streets without having to be on the streets. Representation became, and remains, a brilliantly insidious form of social engineering and not a path toward liberation and freedom.