Giffing a fuck: Non-narrative pleasures in participatory porn cultures and female fandom

TY - JOUR

T1 - Giffing a fuck

T2 - Non-narrative pleasures in participatory porn cultures and female fandom

AU - Hester, Helen

AU - Jones, Bethan

AU - Taylor-Harman, Sarah

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2015 Taylor & Francis.

PY - 2015/1/1

Y1 - 2015/1/1

N2 - Pornography has long been associated with the development of leading-edge technologies and new media forms, so it should be of little surprise that adult entertainment now circulates online in the form of moving-image GIFs – the 256- colour compressed image files ubiquitous within digital culture. Several critics and cultural commentators have picked up on the rise of this so-called ‘microporn’, linking sexually explicit GIFs with supposedly diminished attention spans in the internet age. These discussions emerging around microporn can be somewhat problematic in that they risk replicating and intensifying many of our culture’s uncritical assumptions about porn’s consumers – that their engagement with the image is passive, thoughtless, and wholly receptive. In this article we argue that microporn is in fact a key indicator of the centrality of participatory practices to twenty-first-century female porn fandom. We undertake an analysis of audience engagement with microporn to ask: what are GIFs and how do they function within the realm of porn and microporn? What are their distinctive pleasures? In what ways do GIFs augment or displace long-form hardcore? In what ways might this emergence challenge conventional scholarly theorizing of the role of narrative within the genre and what might it tell us about female fan culture and pleasure? Existing understandings of the porn consumer, we suggest, are complicated by the proliferation of pornographic GIFs, and new understandings of consumption and pleasure practices can emerge through a consideration of microporn fan cultures.

AB - Pornography has long been associated with the development of leading-edge technologies and new media forms, so it should be of little surprise that adult entertainment now circulates online in the form of moving-image GIFs – the 256- colour compressed image files ubiquitous within digital culture. Several critics and cultural commentators have picked up on the rise of this so-called ‘microporn’, linking sexually explicit GIFs with supposedly diminished attention spans in the internet age. These discussions emerging around microporn can be somewhat problematic in that they risk replicating and intensifying many of our culture’s uncritical assumptions about porn’s consumers – that their engagement with the image is passive, thoughtless, and wholly receptive. In this article we argue that microporn is in fact a key indicator of the centrality of participatory practices to twenty-first-century female porn fandom. We undertake an analysis of audience engagement with microporn to ask: what are GIFs and how do they function within the realm of porn and microporn? What are their distinctive pleasures? In what ways do GIFs augment or displace long-form hardcore? In what ways might this emergence challenge conventional scholarly theorizing of the role of narrative within the genre and what might it tell us about female fan culture and pleasure? Existing understandings of the porn consumer, we suggest, are complicated by the proliferation of pornographic GIFs, and new understandings of consumption and pleasure practices can emerge through a consideration of microporn fan cultures.

KW - Audiences

KW - Fan pleasure

KW - GIFs

KW - Microporn

KW - Narrative

KW - Prosumer

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84962705319&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1080/23268743.2015.1083883

DO - 10.1080/23268743.2015.1083883

M3 - Article

AN - SCOPUS:84962705319

SN - 2326-8743

VL - 2

SP - 356

EP - 366

JO - Porn Studies

JF - Porn Studies

IS - 4

ER -