Hardcore and the Politics of Consent: A Woman’s Stupid Smile, or Toward Something Else

This article is an investigation of sex: in its capacity for expansivity and generativity, but also in the particular threat it holds to us, our social ties with others, the symbolic, material, or intersubjective ground upon which those ties are made. This article makes the argument for an alternate politics of consent, away from the affirmative and toward the limit, examining the potentially radical possibilities therein for transforming subjectivity and sociality toward something else. Drawing from the form and content of hardcore pornography toward fleshing out its argument, this article proposes a model for the sexual that erodes at the global and interpersonal orders of being. Through a Lacanian notion of feminine sexuality and through Deleuze and Guattari’s “body without organs,” this article proposes a transformative model of self-shattering through the bodies of pornographic actresses in Bryan Gozzling’s pornographic series Hookup Hotshot. In its disorganizing, void, open, wet, faceless, repetitive, unnamable, shattering, impersonal, unificatory potential, sex proves to be fertile ground for the cultivation of a something else that would both threaten and transform us.