12.4: Do-It-Yourself Ethics, Class and Boundary Work
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- Heather Berg & Constance Penley
- University of California Press
In addition to resisting the vulnerabilities precarity brings, some porn workers describe precarity as both a potential job benefit and what allows them to be creative. Shifting between worker and manager roles is one way porn workers respond to precarity not by seeking greater stability but by exploiting flexibility to their advantage. Though some performer-cum-managers, like the iconic small business owner, simply prefer to be their own bosses, autonomous production is also a space in which workers refuse status quo labor practices, casting opportunities, rates, and representational politics. Worker-produced porn also makes managers of workers, generating conflicting interests and riven class positions. The medium trades in tensions that orthodox analyses of creative labor cannot account for.
At the most basic level, self-producing gives worker-managers control over the products in which they are featured. In an industry in which the most successful performers carefully craft their personal brands, what benefits a performer’s brand may be less advantageous to agents, directors, and studio heads. Authorial control can be a powerful tool. Performers may choose to wait to perform anal sex, for example, until they can command the highest rate possible, and many also perceive that slowly doling out new types of scenes to fans helps to ensure career longevity or, in industry speak, to avoid getting “shot out.” Agents, however, prefer performers who “do everything” right away, as this ensures more bookings (and thus commissions) in the short term. With a self-replenishing reserve army of labor, agents have little interest in counseling performers for longevity. Directors and producers too have ready access to new talent and are most invested in the current production’s profits. In this context, performers can choose to self-produce the sort of content, such as a first anal scene, that promises higher sales. Leading up to these productions, workers can use performances for other production companies both to gather start-up capital and to advertise the self-produced content from which they profit most. Worker-producers may also use self-production as a long-term planning strategy to the extent that continued sales can generate earnings for years, money that contract performers (who do not receive royalties) will never see.
Though mainstream porn is home to a proliferation of small production companies led by current and former performers, do-it-yourself (DIY) ethics are most strikingly embodied in amateur, independent, and queer and feminist porn. We now focus on these forms to consider the ways such small-batch production simultaneously responds to, perpetuates, and refuses precarity. Web technology has radically changed the landscape of the porn industry, making not only content but also production hyperaccessible. C’lick Me: A Netporn Studies Reader explores these shifts, foregrounding the role of DIY ethics in contemporary Internet pornography. Rejecting any static social meaning of pornography, the anthology’s editors recognize the ways porn producers and users (and where the two meet) modify pornography’s meaning through their interactions with it. Netporn “can contain a critique of commercial work ethics and gender roles,” they suggest. 25
Performers take on self-production to create alternatives to available work. Those who do not fit the metrics of physical attractiveness currently in vogue may find better luck producing their own content and creating a niche around their personal brand. Sites such as Suicide Girls and Burning Angel initiated the alt porn genre in the early 2000s to feature tattooed and pierced bodies that, while overwhelmingly white, cisgendered, and thin, did not fit into available porn genres at the time. Queer porn production emerged from the desire to include bodies invisible in mainstream porn, but also had more expressly political aims. Frustrated by the homogeneity of alt porn, Courtney Trouble developed No Faux, now Indie Porn Revolution, the first site to market itself as “queer.” Unable to find work in alt porn as a plus-sized performer, Trouble took to self-production in part to make space to explore her own desires on film. Imagining that others might desire such a space as well, they 26 wanted to create “something that’s truly representative of underground communities and give people a place where they can explore their desires on film.” 27 Those who may find a home in queer porn include transgendered and gender queer performers unwilling or unable (read: without surgically altered gender-conforming bodies) to work in mainstream “tranny” porn, plus-size performers who do not conform to the BBW (Big Beautiful Woman) genre’s own strict rules, those with visible disabilities, and some people of color. In her essay on the practice of directing and producing feminist pornography, director and author Tristan Taormino insists that pornographic representations are entirely bound up with production practices. As a feminist pornographer, she works to “capture some level of authenticity, a connection between partners, and sense that everyone’s having a good time. Think of it as organic, fair-trade porn.” 28
Amateur porn presents another space that privileges “authentic” self-expression. Trading on the idea of porn as a mode of self-expression, amateur sites and film distributors seek amateur producers who, as Farrell Timlake, the owner of the largest amateur porn distributor, put it, “want to be doing it for the exhibitionist thrill.” Timlake describes Homegrown Video’s scenes as an “authentic” alternative to “paint by numbers porn.” 29 We read this too as political. As with other forms of DIY porn, amateur emphasizes the experience of the performer as much as that of the consumer. Again, they may be the same people.
For others, mainstream work is available but requires performing in scenes they feel are degrading or otherwise politically problematic. Roles for black performers are extremely limited, for example, and those available often require workers to perform exaggerated tropes of racialized sexuality. These roles are also poorly compensated, black performers earning a fraction of the rates their white counterparts do. 30 Historian Mireille Miller-Young describes self-produced porn as a way for black women performers to assert control over the images they portray. At the same time, self-produced ventures need buyers to survive, so black women performers weave together mimetic performance of expected tropes with portrayals that refuse these roles. For black women porn site producers, she writes, “netporn proffers an intensely politicized space where the line between exploitation and empowerment, pleasure and peril, community and alienation is totally blurred.” 31
We find that blurriness compelling. That DIY porn is as much about process as profit contributes to ongoing discussions in media industries scholarship about the dialectics of precarity and creativity. Workers sometimes seek out precarious conditions to enable greater creative expression. With the exception of those self-producers, such as some black women performers who choose DIY in part because it can offer better pay, DIY porn overwhelmingly pays less than mainstream. Those amateur distribution companies that pay at all offer $500–$1,000 for a film, to be distributed among all those who participated. Queer production companies pay $200–$400 flat rates for a scene, regardless of performers’ gender presentation, race, body type, or the type of sex they perform. Mainstream rates vary widely along these lines, but a standard rate for female performers is $800– $1,200. 32 Mainstream productions typically employ a host of crew and support staff, whereas DIY productions are drastically pared down. There is no need for scriptwriters, after all, in “unscripted” sex. Films designed to appear more authentic require less postproduction labor.
From a sex-work organizing perspective, DIY porn might be understood to reinforce the idea that sex work is unskilled. More broadly, we are well aware of the widespread management strategy of replacing professional with amateur labor. But DIY, a medium workers initiated precisely in reaction to “professional” pornography, pushes against this critique too. To the extent that focusing on “authentic” sexualities stabilizes them as natural 33 as it frames them as unproduced (that is, unlabored), DIY may serve to stabilize identities as it destabilizes economies. Though DIY production entails greater economic precarity, is that such a bad thing among those for whom stability is personally and creatively toxic? This is, of course, a familiar coupling in the political economy of late capitalism. It puts in relief a set of tensions we cannot and do not wish to smooth over.