Punk, porn, & politics: the aesthetics of radical sexualities

Anderson, James Forsyth (2021) Punk, porn, & politics: the aesthetics of radical sexualities. Doctoral thesis, Northumbria University.

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Abstract

This thesis marks an attempt to think through the interrelationship between punk, the youth cultural form that emerged in the mid-1970s, and pornography, understood as the aesthetic field pertaining to the explicit representation of sexuality and sexual acts. This thesis presents a detailed discussion of the politics of representation that inform the production and circulation of specific case studies: all of which, in varying ways, demonstrate instances of pornographic imagery operating within punk-related cultural productions. Taking the form of a diachronic analysis, I examine how the relationship between punk-related cultural productions, pornographic iconography, and sexual aesthetics develops over time, stemming from the emergence of punk proper. In doing so, I discuss various examples of this cross-cultural exchange, witnessed in the work of self-identifying punk practitioners and designers responsible for the popularisation of punk style, as well as other artists who historically align with the emergence and development of the punk movement in Anglo-American contexts. I demonstrate that, contrary to prevailing assumptions about punk and its sexual themes, several prominent punk-related auteurs mobilised pornographic imagery to challenge the status quo and overturn gender norms, in more complex ways than have hitherto been acknowledged in scholarship.

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