This thesis addresses the many forms of racism that are found in three apps that are popular in New Zealand, namely Grindr, Jack’d, and Blued, through the experience of gay Asian migrants. Among these are forms of online racism, the one-size-fits-all design of these apps that universalises experience and sexual representation, and the reflection of values and standards that are deeply rooted in a Westernised gay community. Although these apps are convenient for users, they are also spaces in which problematic issues become manifest. These dating apps not only allow them to seek sexual gratification, but are also crucial for new gay migrants to establish local connections quickly. This case study of Helix Studios performers’ tweets reveals both precarities and potentials of networked intimacy in gay porn.Īs sexual migrants who emigrate to liberal countries such as New Zealand that are more accepting of their sexuality, gay Asian migrants often rely on gay mobile dating applications to find sexual belonging by connecting to the wider gay community in a new environment. Networked intimacy, as a common condition for gay porn production and consumption in a hybrid media system, develops into a multilayer shape on social media platforms. Under this aesthetics of authenticity, intimacy is commodified to sell sex, and sexuality is essentialized into a staged congruity between sexual acts and desires.
Relational labour is dedicated to the authentication of performers’ professional persona through their private life. The networked intimacy pivots on the fantasy of the twink body, the romantic and sexual bonds among performers, and the fandom-facilitated interactions. It is found that a networked intimacy is constructed through performers’ Twitter self-presentation. This study provides a qualitative analysis of the Twitter feeds of performers affiliated with Helix Studios, a gay porn producer specializing in the twink genre. As social media afford more interactivity and flexibility for pornographic relationship-building, gay porn performers start to have an active presence on platforms like Twitter to not only promote their works, but also showcase what is ‘behind the scene’. The performer–viewer relationship premised on mediated intimacy is a pivotal element of porn.
This includes engaging with their understandings and experiences of porn genres, digital media practice, and representations of authenticity. From this focus, we propose the need to incorporate young people’s existing porn literacies into future education and research approaches. We extend this discussion to young people’s understandings of ‘authenticity’ across their broader digital and social media practices. Data from the literature we reviewed shows that young people make sophisticated distinctions between different kinds of pornography, some of which could be called ‘realistic’, as per do-it-yourself and amateur porn. This model of porn literacy tends to be heteronormative, where only conservative ideals of ‘good’, coupled, and vanilla sex are deemed ‘realistic’. We found few articles that present empirical data to discuss porn literacies, and those we found commonly frame young people’s porn literacy as their ability to critically read porn as negative and comprising ‘unrealistic’ portrayals of sex.
As part of a larger interdisciplinary project which consisted of a series of systematic reviews of literature on the relationship between pornography use and healthy sexual development, we reviewed articles addressing the relationship between pornography use and literacy.
This paper adds to recent discussions of young people’s porn literacy and argues that researchers must address porn users’ engagements with, and understandings of, different porn genres and practices.