Porn, Business and Morality: Examining Discursive Repertoires in Doing Feminist Porn

In this study, we examine how persons working in feminist porn make sense of their practice. Feminist porn is a media genre made for profit that at the same time sets out to be an alternative to the mainstream by promoting liberal views on gender and sexuality and being committed to depicting diversity in gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, body size, ability, and age. We thus understand feminist porn as a movement that seeks to moralize the pornographic market. We collected both primary and secondary data that we approach with poststructuralist feminist discourse analysis. We outline three discursive repertoires: feminist porn as an alternative and inclusive product offer; feminist porn as an ethical product; feminist porn as socio-political activism. With these findings, we contribute to scholarship on porn as an industry by showing how feminist porn, as a moralized segment of this market, consists of a complex set of discourses with inherent tensions about commodifying feminism into a moral product and the ethics of authenticity in commercial fictions. We thus bring nuance to the pro vs against debates around feminist porn, put a much needed emphasis on the organizational and economic dimensions of discourses in feminist porn, and take the voices of feminist pornographers seriously. [