Abstract
The digital revolution has impacted every area of social life. Bodies of work: The labour of sex in the digital age, authored by Senior Lecturer in Digital Media and Communications Dr. Rebecca Saunders, is one in a series of books published by Palgrave Macmillan looking at how technological change has transformed where people work, when and how. Saunders is interested in the relationship between pornography and digital capitalism, including how value is accumulated in this space, how labor is understood, how consumers’ attention is secured and sustained, and how the genre regulates the sexual body. Centrally, Saunders contends that in the digital age, pornography has shifted from representing sexual pleasure to representing sex as labor.
The book is divided into three sections. The first considers how digital pornography is frenetic in its presentation, assailing the viewer with digital visual excess. Saunders coins the term “sexual datafication” to describe how the viewing patterns of pornography consumers are extracted, analyzed, and re-presented to them. In section two, the author makes the case for contemporary pornography increasingly being presented as “work” and argues that the extreme violence within part of the genre represents the “fury of unrestricted capitalist labour” (p.187). Saunders suggests that this violence is not subversive but, rather, deeply conformist, reflecting “capitalism's murderous excesses” (p.187) and the normativity of sexual violence in digital porn culture. In the final section of the book, Saunders explores how alternative aesthetics of pornography, developing particularly in feminist and queer spaces, seek to de-fetishise the “visual,” represent a more authentic and slow-paced sexual imaginary and (re)foreground “sex” over “labor.” Saunders astutely notes, however, that the non-heteronormative sexual fluidity espoused within these alternative digital spaces is just as subject to capitalist exploitation as mainstream pornography. The author closes by considering the potential of “interventionist pornography.” This approach recognizes the relationship between the sexual body and contemporary capitalism and seeks to politicize pornography by binding performers, directors, and company owners into working collectively for community enrichment. Here, Saunders contrasts the mainstream heteronormative capitalist regime involving the “private, consumptive spectacle [of pornography] to be consumed by anonymized digital viewers” (p.283), with a post- or neo-capitalist space where hetero and queer pornography is a public, co-created, and co-consumed display of “mutual bodily use” (p. 285).
Saunders has meticulously researched her subject and draws on history, sociology, literature, and media theory to develop her theoretical arguments. There were two areas of the book that I found difficult. First, the author's prose is very technical in places. This is countered by a tendency to repeat ideas in their development through the chapter, which I found helpful in reinforcing my understanding. However, it makes for an intense read. Second, and relatedly, Saunders segues seamlessly between quite dense academic commentary and explicit description of site content and pornographic labor. Her unflinching eye and theoretical contemplation and innovation are impressive. At the same time, I found the juxtaposition disconcerting. I wanted to hear more about the lived experiences of the performers and understand better Saunders’ reflexive and ethical experience of identifying this research issue, and of collecting and analyzing the data used. This would have helped to illuminate the human-emotional as well as the sexual-material-intellectual dimensions of the writing of this book (particularly sections one and two) and would be very useful to other researchers approaching this area of work.
The nature and intersections of capitalist practice (particularly the influence of neo-liberal philosophy), digitalization and human relations, are key issues of interest in the early twenty-first century. Saunders seeks to move beyond the binary of “good” and “bad” in relation to digital pornography, and instead tries to deconstruct “how” and “why.” She brings a critical lens to both mainstream and alternative. Given the unrelentingly grim picture offered by Chapter 6, it is not surprising the author points to the possibilities of new forms of practice, “interventionist pornography,” which seeks to ally performers and producers with issues of social justice and workers’ rights and positions pornography as a collective resource. Some commentators would see pornography as fundamentally exploitative in what they see as objectification of the body, attachment of monetary value to sex through commercial production, and reification of inequalities, foremost gender, class, sexuality, age, and ethnicity. Others would argue that some of the current cultural manifestations of pornography are problematic, rather than pornography per se.
The call for modes of ethical production and consumption are common to a number of areas of contemporary leisure activity, both within the sex industry and in sectors such as tourism and retail, for example. Saunders does not believe this requires a rejection of capitalism, but rather a harnessing of capitalist logics for collective good. However, while she gives concrete examples of this occurring on a small scale, the question is whether this could ever move beyond niche to the mainstream. The attention-arresting and algorithmic tactics and visualization glut of contemporary digital porn, which the author details in the book, may be re-wiring sexual tastes in a way that makes such a change in consumption habits harder still.
