Guest lecture by Prof. Rebecca Sullivan, University of Calgary

Documenting the Pornographic Sex Scene: Agency, Consent, and Documentary Ethics

21.11.2024, 16–18
University of Turku, ARCANUM, Vatselankatu 2, 20500 Turku
Room: ARC A355/357

Documentary and pornography are in an uneasy epistemological relationship in which both imagine a spectator who desires deeply to know – albeit about starkly different subjects. Thus, ethical considerations are paramount for filmmakers as they sort out their obligations to both performer/subjects and audience. While documentary holds greater prestige for its sociocultural contributions, I argue that pornography producers have made the greater strides in developing ethical frameworks that centre the sex performer as a cultural worker. The documentary desire to know what happens when the pornography camera captures sexual acts has frequently led to harmful consequences for sex worker documentary subjects. While documentary filmmakers may insist these consequences are either unintentional or inevitable, I argue that they are in fact preventable.

I closely examine two moments when the documentary camera appears to be filming with consent the lack of or withdrawal of consent to the pornographic camera by its sex worker documentary subject. The first film, Not a Love Story: A Film About Pornography (1981) was directed by Bonnie Sherr Klein for the National Film Board of Canada’s Studio D: the first (and only) state-funded feminist filmmaking unit in the world. The second is the 2015 Netflix-produced documentary, Hot Girls Wanted, directed by Jill Bauer and Ronna Gradus and co-produced by Rashida Jones. Both include graphic and disturbing scenes of withdrawn consent on a pornography set but the filmmakers’ response both in the moment and after the films’ release suggest that documentary ethics do not suffice when the topic is pornography. My selection of films may seem odd as they are over thirty years apart. However, they provide a stark view of how little documentary ethics have evolved to meet the changing politics of sex worker rights.

Dr. Rebecca Sullivan is a Professor at the University of Calgary, specializing in feminist media and cultural studies. She is the author of Bonnie Sherr Klein’s Not a Love Story (2014) and the co-author (with Alan McKee) of Pornography: Structures, Agency and Performance (2015). The research for this presentation is made possible by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Insight Grant.

The lecture is organized by the research consortium IDA–Intimacy in Data-Driven Culture, funded by the Strategic Research Council (SRC) at the Research Council of Finland, in collaboration with The Critical Sexuality Studies Network (CRISSE) and the International Institute for Popular Culture (IIPC).

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