ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the colonisation of mainstream culture – its pornographication (McNair, 1996, 2002)1 – by texts in a variety of cultural forms, genres and styles which borrow from, refer to, or pastiche the styles and iconography of the pornographic; which are often referred to under the umbrella term of porno chic. Porno chic is not the pornography which fills the pornosphere, nor is it necessarily
erotic in form or function. While some forms of porno chic may seek to appropriate the eroticism of pornography, and thus to be sexy or arousing to their target audience (and perhaps sexually transgressive in the context of the space where they appear), this is not their defining characteristic or essential raison d’etre. Porno chic, as I use the term, is not necessarily celebratory or approving of pornography. On the contrary, there is a sub-category which references porn chiefly for the purposes of condemnation or critique. The UK Channel 4 documentary Hard Core (Stephen Walker, 2001),2 about the US pornographer Max Hardcore, was in this category, as in a more nuanced way was Pornography: The Musical (Brian Hill, 2003), also first shown on Channel 4. Both presented on mainstream free-to-air TV what were relatively explicit accounts of the porn industry, but in a context of critical commentary. Why define such texts as porno chic? Because their existence is a measure of the
emergence into mainstream visibility and popular consciousness of pornography. Porno chic need not be pro-porn, in other words (although most examples will be, if not explicitly approving of porn, at least non-judgemental). Porno chic can be characterised as the echo, or shadow, of the low culture form of pornography in
non-pornographic cultural spaces, including those of art, pop, journalism, fashion and academia. In porno chic pornography sheds its status as unambiguous trash – as the ‘pariah of representational practices’ (Ellis, 1992, p.158) – to be associated instead with a variety of other cultural forms such as comedy, news and entertainment, sometimes in the context of sex-political campaigning and protest, not to mention higher education and the scholarly discourse of books such as this one. Porno chic can aspire to be funny, or trendy (literally, chic), or politically
and morally subversive, as well as educational and informative about sexuality and the erotic. Porno chic is, from that perspective, an exemplary form of post-modern culture – one manifestation of the late twentieth century’s rise of mass culture and the associated breakdown of high/low culture distinctions associated with modernity.3
