Porn: Law, Video & Technology
https://cis-india.org
daily12013-04-16T03:42:17ZPornography & the Law - A Call for Peer Review
https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/pornography-and-law
<b>Namita Malhotra's research project on "Pornography & the Law". is a part of the Researchers @ Work Programme at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore. Her monograph is an attempt to unravel the relations between pornography, technology and the law in the shifting context of the contemporary.</b>
<p>It is these shifts that push the arguments here to be relevant beyond specific occurrences or phenomenon in the digital world (the moment of video pornography, interactive cyber sex, webcam sex, camfrog, social networking and sexual behaviour, chatroulette, facebook, confessional and sexualized blogging, sexting and mobile phones, etc.) to attempt to understand the nature of affects that surround pornography, especially as reflected in the law and its desire to contain it, and how law’s desire to contain is also about subjectivities and practices around technology. The structure of the monograph is somewhere between a willful literature review and a dressing room, where various concepts, ideas, images or visions around law, film/video, technology and new media are tried on for size to explain or unravel parts or whole of the picture around pornography in the Indian context.</p>
<p>The Researchers At Work Programme, at the Centre for Internet and Society, advocates an Open and transparent process of knowledge production. We recognise peer review as an essential and an extremely important part of original research, and invite you, with the greatest of pleasures, to participate in our research, and help us in making our arguments and methods stronger. The first draft of the monograph is now available for public review and feedback. Please click on the links below to choose your own format for accessing the document.</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/law-and-pornography" class="internal-link" title="Law and Pornography Word File">Word</a></li>
<li><a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-pornography" class="internal-link" title="Law & Pornography">PDF</a></li>
</ul>
<p>We appreciate your time, engagement and feedback that will help us to bring out the monograph in a published form. Please send all comments or feedback to nishant@cis-india.org or you can use your Open ID to login to the website and leave comments to this post.</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/pornography-and-law'>https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/pornography-and-law</a>
</p>
No publisherpraskrishnahistories of internet in IndiaObscenityResearch2012-12-14T12:12:17ZBlog EntryPrivacy, pornography, sexuality (a video)
https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/privacy-pornography-sexuality-a-video
<b>The video is an attempt to use the material collected for purposes of provoking a discussion around privacy, pornography, sexuality and technology. It focuses largely on an Indian context, which most viewers would be familiar with. The video is pegged around the ban of Savita Bhabhi – a pornographic comic toon – but uses that to open up a discussion on various incidents and concepts in relation to pornography and privacy across Asia.</b>
<p>
</p>
<p> <object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/iku2SafHlMs&hl=en_GB&fs=1&rel=0"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed height="344" width="425" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/iku2SafHlMs&hl=en_GB&fs=1&rel=0"></embed></object></p>
<p align="right"><br /><object height="344" width="425"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/RXKN_2Hbu1I&hl=en_GB&fs=1&"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"><embed height="344" width="425" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/RXKN_2Hbu1I&hl=en_GB&fs=1&"></embed></object></p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p> The project on pleasure and pornography will generate
outputs in different formats, but especially since it is meant to be
interdisciplinary (legal, critical, feminist, cybercultures, media and cinema
studies) it would be interesting to use different ways of communicating the
ideas that the project will develop. Several interviews have been conducted
(ranging from length of 30 mins to 2 hours) with contemporaries in India whose
work in different ways (quantitative research, historical research, filmmaking,
academic writings) intersects and relates to pornography – this includes Bharat
Murthy, Manjima Bhattacharjya, Nishant Shah, Ratheesh Radhakrishnan, Shohini
Ghosh and others.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>The video above is an attempt to use the material collected
for purposes of provoking a discussion around privacy, pornography, sexuality
and technology. It focuses largely on an Indian context, which most viewers
would be familiar with. The video is pegged around the ban of Savita Bhabhi – a
pornographic comic toon – but uses that to open up a discussion on various
incidents and concepts in relation to pornography and privacy across Asia. For
instance what is the role of technology and how has it altered or not altered
relations between the citizen and the State, what are the stakes of the State
in sexual subjectivity of the citizens and what are the relations of gender,
pornography and debates around privacy in public discourse.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>In this post I would gesture towards the last category that
has not been touched upon earlier, in relation to countries such as Malaysia
and Indonesia. It has become important during the course of this project to
draw connections to work done in the global South. In legal studies, comparative
work around legal concepts of obscenity, pornography, vulgarity are most often
only in relation to America and United Kingdom, either for a strong tradition
of free speech and expression in both countries and because of historical
connections to common and legislative law in UK. However it is important to
examine the trajectories of similar legal paradigms (Malaysia) and even
different legal paradigms (Indonesia)
across Asia to understand the mechanics of how pornography is constructed and
understood in legal and possibly cultural terms as well. </p>
<p> </p>
<p>Here we look at instances of material that are described as
pornography in legal terms and how that legal category avoids taking onto
itself what could be described as hard core pornography, and instead focuses on
material that in the Indian context are described as obscene (see <a href="https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/the-blindfolded-gaze-of-the-law-and-pornography" class="external-link">first blog post</a> on Indian law). In other parts of Asia, very often laws
that describe what is pornography play an important role in controlling women
and reinforcing gendered modes of access to media, information or to public
spaces. <br /></p>
<p><br /> </p>
<p>The Indonesian Anti-pornography law instead of protecting
the privacy of individuals, regulates and controls the ways in which women can
participate in the public sphere. The law deals with appropriate garb, behaviour,
forms of artistic and video practices under the broad umbrella of the term <em>pornoaksi</em> or pornographic action. In Indonesia as in other
parts of Asia, there has been over the last 4-5 years a flood of mobile and
webcam pornography uploaded by people themselves (couples and individuals),
which forms a large part of the erotic consumption in the country. The sheer
volume and circulation of these videos points to how technology is enmeshed in
sexual practices in even in the global South, contrary to what is written about
sexuality and technology that largely focuses on the phenomenon of
technology-sexuality in the global North around platforms such as Second Life<a name="_ednref1" href="#_edn1"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[i]</span></a>
or aspects of virtual reality. However the new law (passed in 2008) does not address this phenomenon directly even though that was the reason for promulgation of the law, but instead focuses of the dubious and vague category of pornoaksi.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>The law also allows for ordinary citizens to complain about obscene behaviour. According to gender and human rights activists in Indonesia, this gives a lot of leeway to the more socially conservative elements to complain and even attack film festivals, gatherings etc. In an article (unpublished) about the anti pornography law, Julia Suryakusuma (a columnist and writer in Indonesia) says -</p>
<p>
"But is the so-called ‘Anti-Pornography Law’ indeed aimed
against ‘pornography’, or is really directed against women and the freedoms won
through post-Soeharto democratization? The Law, I will argue, is, in fact,
based on a social construction of ‘morality’ and womanhood that masks as
religion but which is, in fact, a potent combination of social conservatism and
political opportunism."</p>
<p> </p>
<p>The video ends with a very moving press conference
by the Malaysian State Assemblywoman offering her resignation because intimate
(but not pornographic) pictures of her had been circulated without her consent
by her ex-boyfriend. The incident was a transparent ploy by an opposing
political party to denounce a formidable opponent and attempts to use public
discourse around obscenity, vulgarity to limit the politician’s participation
in the public sphere.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>The video was also part of a discussion around privacy,
agency and security organized at the recent Internet Governance Forum in Egypt
in November, 2009<a name="_ednref2" href="#_edn2"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[ii]</span></a> and was
screened at the beginning of the workshop to spear head a discussion between
varied participants. The workshop was organized by Alternative Law Forum, Association for Progressive Communication - Women's Networking Support Programme and Center for Internet and Society. The IGF saw an intense focus on issues of privacy
especially in relation to issues of data aggregation and control over private
and public data of individuals by corporate entities. The video and the session
was an attempt to bring into the focus of such discussions, issues more
pertinent from a feminist, queer or theoretical perspective.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<div><br clear="all" />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<div id="edn1">
<p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a name="_edn1" href="#_ednref1"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[i]</span></a> Coming of
age in Second Life, Tom Boellstorff : An ethnography of Second Life that looks
at various aspects of practices online including friendship, sexuality,
marriage, aspirations and desires.</p>
</div>
<div id="edn2">
<p class="MsoEndnoteText"><a name="_edn2" href="#_ednref2"><span class="MsoEndnoteReference">[ii]</span></a> More
details of this workshop (concept note, speakers) are available on the IGF
website at <a href="http://www.intgovforum.org/cms/index.php/component/chronocontact/?chronoformname=WSProposals2009View&wspid=275">http://www.intgovforum.org/cms/index.php/component/chronocontact/?chronoformname=WSProposals2009View&wspid=275</a></p>
</div>
</div>
<p>
</p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/privacy-pornography-sexuality-a-video'>https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/privacy-pornography-sexuality-a-video</a>
</p>
No publishernamitaDigital subjectivitieswomen and internetCensorshipObscenity2011-08-02T08:37:19ZBlog EntryNegative of porn
https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/looking-closer-at-porn-with-x-ray-spectacles-savita-bhabhi-mms-video-and-others
<b>The post deals with what has been written about Savita Bhabhi in an attempt to make sense of her peccadiloes and with the seeming futility of Porn studies located in America to our different reality. I take the liberty of exploring my own experiential account of pornography since I feel that in that account (mine and others) when done seriously, certain aspects of pornography emerge that address questions that are about cinema, images, sex, philosophy and how desire works. The title is mischeviously inspired from Dr. Pek Van Andel's recent video of MRI images of people having sex.</b>
<p>Jonathan James McCreadie Lillie in his article “Cyberporn,
Sexuality and the Net Apparatus” while talking about academic engagement with
pornography (by Kipnis, Hunt, Waugh, Kendrick) points to how they share “a
common concern with analysing pornography within the various cultural
constructs and social spaces in which it appears, and in which people encounter
it”. He says that a new agenda for cyberporn research has to acknowledge that
“people have produced pornography in many different forms for many different
purposes, and the reasons why people use it or do not use it, and what meanings
they make of it, are equally diverse”. (1)</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Lillie points towards cyberporn reception studies – the
home/office terminal as a site of cyberporn reception – as a possible starting
point of further work on cyberporn. My interest is located in how does one
understand your own consumption of internet porn, located as it is in the
context that is not the global North and more specifically not male and not heterosexual.
Attempting to do that through the readings in porn studies (Porn studies,
edited by Linda Williams) (2), or specifically net porn studies (C’lick me –
Net Porn Reader) (3), has not been entirely fruitful though what is talked
about is highly interesting. One of the problems perhaps lies in what Lillie
says about the need for analyzing pornography within the various cultural
constructs and social spaces in which it appears, rather than separate or
floating above them. The Internet does not entirely make protean beings
(cyborgs?) of us after all, and the relevance of porn studies elsewhere can
only be partially relevant to a study here.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>[Curiously though the debates within feminism and the
women’s movement around pornography in the global North – the familiar rhetoric
of the causal links between pornography and violence, do have a resonance in
similar debates in the women’s movement here. At a roundtable discussion on the
role of media at the recent Courts of Women organized by Vimochana (4), many of
the sentiments expressed by activists and organizations see a causal link
between explicit sexual material, violence and its direct negative impact on
morals, attitudes and behaviour of people.]</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Linda Williams begins the volume on Porn Studies by stating that
there has been a movement from the deadlock of pro-censorship and sex positive
feminist discourse on pornography, to a stage where there is a veritable
explosion of sexual material that is crying out for analysis, and that sexually
explicit imagery is a fixture in popular culture today (obviously referring to
America but to some extent true for other contexts as well). In some ways there
is an attempt amongst academics, intellectuals, journalists and other writers
here to make sense of the pornographic material that has crept into our media
saturated cities. Many recent articles spawned by the ban on Savita Bhabhi
attempt to understand the unleashing of desire around Savita Bhabhi (from a
rock song to unashamed fandom) and to analyse the reasons for the ban or rather
what makes Savita Bhabhi threatening.</p>
<p> </p>
<p><strong>Savita Bhabhi, the [porn] [toon] [star] </strong></p>
<p>Itty Abraham undertakes a fairly detailed analysis of what
is happening in twelve episodes of Savita Bhabhi and perhaps unconvincingly
places the crux of the story of Savita Bhabhi on her cuckolded husband, Ashok
(5). He says “Their family life is relentless modern, nuclear, bourgeois, if
also gendered in familiar ways. The couple eats together (and at the same
time), they watch TV together in the evenings, and sleep in the same bed.” For
Abraham, the comic is about “these new sexual possibilities.. that begin from a
new kind of freedom to which the modern urban woman has access”. The article
suggests that we seem to be faced with a choice between the free untrammeled
Savita and her easy occupation of urban spaces protected by an aura of class
and her husband Ashok who is the hard worker earning enough to keep alive
her/our illusion of abundant urban neoliberal existence. Interestingly the
article is not attempting to make a point about pornography in relation to
ideas of culture, tradition, vulgarity or other familiar motifs in the debate
on obscenity.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Shohini Ghosh’s article takes on the task to find out what
precisely is so transgressive about Savita Bhabhi (6). Savita Bhabhi is poised
between the family and husband and illegitimate desires (similar to themes in
Charulata, Hum aapke hain kaun). She points that the pleasure of the comic is
not just that there are hard core sexual scenes as much as that the husband or
a similar character cannot look at what you look at. The Indian erotica (or
pornographic text) scene too is replete with tales of incest and transgressions
with domestic workers or servants|maids as they are called in the stories.
Ghosh while acknowledging the harm-violence debate within feminism on
pornography, states that she is anti-censorship – that although it is obvious
that media, images have an impact (otherwise why would they be cause of study)
there is no neat causal link between porn and sexual violence. She ends by
saying that “pornography then is a phantasmatic arena. It does not reflect
people’s ‘real’ sex lives so much as it articulates the desires and aspirations
for imagined ones.”</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Both articles make important linkages to other and pre-existing
debates on neo-liberal agendas, occupation of urban spaces, feminism and
obscenity. Ghosh seems to also be referring to a broader category of Indian porn and the problems posed by it. She also gestures towards the problems that might be posed if Savita Bhabhi were a real person and not a comic, but by and large most journalistic writing/analysis of Savita Bhabhi flattens out the field – asking questions as if comic characters were real persons, and not taking into account aesthetics, technology (mode of delivery) or where and how it is viewed (reception) by people. There is a difference in the way I respond to a comic about sex than to an MMS or hidden camera porn where I am aware of
the ‘realness’ of atleast some aspects of the image I’m looking at.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>The ‘realness’ raises certain dilemmas – the anxiety is not
as severe and troubled as in the case of Mysore Mallige which is haunted by
urban legends of the couples or only the woman committing suicide, forced
marriage at a police station etc. Nonetheless to encounter the MMS video, when
the woman is looking directly at the camera often so it does not seem like a
hidden camera or non-consensual video, is to acknowledge the taking of pleasure
at the expense of someone else which may or may not bother you, but does render
the activity far more illicit and scary. My feeling of
fear|anxiety|secrecy|aloneness when surfing pornography, whether in the office,
home or anywhere where I can be discovered, is an added layer to the experience
even if the various aspects of violation of privacy, vulnerability of the woman
in the video or the existence of a pornography industry are not uppermost in
the mind when actually viewing the clips. One of the few works done that do
address this complicated set of affects that circulate and attach themselves to
pornography is Bharath Murthy’s film on Mysore Mallige ( the next post will be
on this film and interview with Bharath Murthy). (7)</p>
<p> </p>
<p>This is why I would insist that the comic is a different
space for a viewer – some things such as anxieties about who this person I’m
looking at is and what happened to her do disappear, while others such as a
comic is bright, colourful and highly visible on my computer screen (for
instance) become more important. It is harder to hide surfing Savita Bhabhi in
an office than reading erotica or even downloading and discreetly watching a
small video. The aspect of how
Savita Bhabhi being a comic/drawn character changes how a viewer relates to the
material is an area of study that needs to be looked at more closely, perhaps
with the help of existing work that looks at the manga, anime, hentaii
phenomenon in Japan and parts of South East Asia.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>The makers of Savita Bhabhi were anonymous till the ban and
after what seemed like a rather brief struggle with authority (SaveSavita
campaign on twitter and a blog) they vacated the public scene. As a consequence
of no real contest, the ban persists. But perhaps what is admirable is that
many people have learnt to use tools that allow them to still view Savita (and
to expose them here would be just foolhardy). In an interview online the makers
of Savita Bhabhi state .. “For one, it (comic) is a unique medium in the
context of Indian porn. We’ve had MMS’s, videos, stories, etc, but no porn
comics. Also a comic allows us to explore the fantasy in a much more vivid way
than any other medium.” This fantasy life however cannot be dismissed, as it is
indeed very real, or as they say – “based on real life fantasies of our authors
and fans. They are all something that a normal full blooded Indian male or
female would be fantasizing about on their commute to work or a lazy evening at
home.” In a short interview with the makers of the comic more recently and
subsequent to the ban they said that probably it was Savita Bhabhi’s popularity
that led to her downfall and that they set out to explore Indian sexuality,
which “obviously is a big No”.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>To return to Lillie’s call for a cyberporn reception studies
perhaps it is time in relation to looking at such material that we step away,
even if briefly, from these debates on feminism, vulgarity and obscenity in
Indian culture and others. In an interview dated 5th September, 2009, Ratheesh
Radhakrishnan says that what needs to be looked at when studying pornography,
is not the questions of Indian culture, religion, roles of women and gender (as
for questions related to obscenity) but the aesthetics of pornography. In his
own work Radhakrishnan deals precisely with this question in relation to the
category of ‘soft porn’ and how Shakeela becomes a star through soft porn
cinema – a star not entirely governed by the narrative of the film but
seemingly existing beyond the limit of the film itself. (8) By doing this, his
work deals with the question of how desire works in such films, which perhaps
is one of the more important question to ask about pornography. In the same
interview, he states that there is “something that takes place between the text
and the person watching” and that is what he is interested in.</p>
<p> </p>
<h1>Anti-porn</h1>
<p>Radhakrishnan’s position is interesting in relation to this
project as it opens up questions that are beyond the feminist deadlock on
pornography and also goes beyond rhetoric of the liberating potential of the
explosion of the polymorphous perverse online. The latter is where a lot of
porn studies undertaken in the global North seems to get lost. The breathless
recounting of the pornographic in the everyday, does not help since it becomes
very obvious that any analysis would not be relevant to a vastly different
context in India. (9)</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Walter Metz in his article on Open Water (10) challenges the
ethics of porn studies – though he acknowledges that pornography is more a
symptom rather than a cause of anti-social behaviours that it is often linked
to (violent rape, aggressive behaviour, sexism etc.), but still raises the
question as to whether there are significant reasons to put the brakes on a
rabid, radical celebration of the liberating potential of pornography. Metz
talks about the need, within porn studies, to look at the positive and negative
impact of pornography (possibly he would extend that to looking at violent
martial arts film and other strands of cinema/new media).</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Metz’s paper as such deals with Open Water as an
anti-pornographic film (here referring to the generic practice of pornography
rather than political positions) and this might be an interesting productive
mode to understand the affect produced by pornography. Though Metz qualifies
that he’s not using pornography as a genre, but rather “as a reading frame. If
one keeps thinking about pornography while watching a non-pornographic film,
what is the resulting interpretation?” Since I haven’t seen the film Open Water
perhaps my interest in such an analysis is misfounded. Metz describes the
frustration depicted in the film Open Water between the audience expectations
for a reasonably good looking, tanned, blonde couple to get-it-on and what
happens to their bodies instead in the open water of the sea and prey to
sharks, is similar to the disjuncture that takes place in one of the films part
of the Destricted project. (11)</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Destricted is an interesting artistic|intellectual|new
media|film experiments in the global North around pornography. It is a series
of short films that resulted from an invitation to seven well known artists and
filmmakers to try to respond to sex and especially the phenomenon of
pornography in the contemporary. One of the films Death Valley by Sam
Taylor-Wood borrows from the Biblical tale of Onan and places a man
masturbating in the heaving, throbbing landscape of the Death Valley (the
hottest place in the Western hemisphere where the earth’s crust is constantly
changing and shifting). For precisely 7 minutes and 58 seconds, the protagonist
of the film masturbates uncomfortably without reaching ejaculation and/or
release. The painful un-release of this film, perhaps is meant to be juxtaposed
with the assumed ease of pornography’s answer to desire. However peculiarly it actually
is probably an accurate description of the experiential account of pornography
– of looking, searching, finding, downloading on painfully low speeds, watching
short clips that are blurred, shot only from one angle, badly drawn comics or
looking at largely uninspiring material which is not acquired or found easily.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>In some ways the experience of watching either of these
films sounds similar to watching certain kinds of MMS video porn. For instance,
one video was of a couple doing oral sex in a toilet cubicle. The angle of the
camera was from the top and perhaps the intention behind this was to obscure
the faces of the two persons, since only the top of their heads are visible. It
did not seem like the couple were unaware of the video camera, as much as
performing for it almost unwillingly and only if the anonymity was preserved.
The video was low quality and highly blurred, to the point of any features
being indistinct beyond blackness of hair (maybe) and generic skin tone which
could be Indian, Iranian or generic South Asian. The resemblance to the
Destricted video is because again of the time it takes to reach ejaculation –
there is a painfully long uninspiring blowjob sequence. The video remains scary
and leaves one with a feeling of claustrophobia, discomfort and peculiarly
boredom or distance from what is happening. Yet perhaps it is here that the
question of realness and the affect it produces enters again. The question that
intrigues me is whether the affect produced by the video is because
there are certain gestures of the woman that seem recognizable, because she
seems like you (ethnically, racially ofcourse but also in sexual spaces she
occupies and behaviour). After having accomplished the task of coaxing semen
out of the uninspiring penis she is faced with, she folds her legs and speaks
indistinctly. In that moment she seems uncomfortably familiar, like watching a
friend having sex or maybe an aspect of yourself.</p>
<p> </p>
<p> It is perhaps
interesting that it is amateur pornography these days that seems to inspire the
most complicated set of affects (unlike the schooled|disciplined and
predictable response to cinema) – shocked recognition of yourself and desire to
see it again, titillation, boredom but yet unwilling to look away, love for
celebrities, pleasure of viewing a body like yours and even sometimes a
recognition that this is what you look like during sex, fear about your own
privacy, disgust for what seems unacceptable and provokes the
moral|visual|auditory sensibilities and contempt for the material and the
people who possibly are genuinely engaged with it. The article on Pam and
Tommy’s video in Porn Studies infact displays these varied affects and
underlines William’s assertion that this bracket of material, behaviour and
practices that get termed pornography/pornographic does indeed deserve
analysis, otherwise a potentially unique and interesting way of understanding
the contemporary would be lost for squeamishness. </p>
<p> </p>
<p>There are many aspects of the Minette Hillyer’s
analysis (12) that are specifically relevant only to the American contexts –
the notoriety of both the stars, the pre-existence and glorification of home
videos in most families and the acknowledgement of amateur couple porn as even
a healthy practice, perhaps suggested for couples with dull sex lives. In
India, it was infact unknown people who were catapulted into the public eye with the circulation of their video, online and offline that was later titled Mysore Mallige ; not just
the private spaces, holidays and fucking habits of already-celebrities like Pam
and Tommy.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>What might be relevant here from Hillyer’s analysis is the
pre occupation with the realness of amateur pornography. The article follows the travels of the Pam and Tommy home video
between different categories/genres, depending on different aspects of its
realness. The video as such, contains scenes from the normal domestic lives of
the stars and a eight minute sequence of sex in an almost fifty minute length
video. So the questions of realness are answered not by the sex in the video,
but the mundane recording of their lives, holidays, house and other details.
This question of what exactly it is – home video or pornography (domestic/private
or pornographic/public) is relevant to questions of legality (for damages upto
90 million dollars), how it circulates (a pornographic video of Pam and Tommy
without the domestic padding perhaps would not be considered real and saleable)
and genre which relates to some aspects of how people respond to the work. Ever since the advent of (cheap) video technology, pornography is rendered less
cinematic and more concerned with the presentational act (of sex) than its
representation (ibid). With MMS videos and hidden camera porn, though questions may no longer be about representation, they are still complicated questions about the aesthetics, reception of pornography and our relation to the technology that delivers it and for me viewing pornography today as only presentational does not help to understand the affects that surround and attach to it. Perhaps many strands of what is
explored in this article can be explored in relation to Mysore Mallige in the
next blog post.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>Just as I finish this piece, after an interview with Nishant Shah at Center for Internet and Society, another question enters the frame in relation to pleasure, moving it beyond those raised above. Is pleasure now a question that
is less about finding the corporeal thrill through pornography online, as much as
pleasure that comes from simulation and the added rush of simulating cities,
lives, personalities online. And is that pleasure, pornographic?</p>
<p> </p>
<p> </p>
<p>End notes:</p>
<p> </p>
<p>1. Jonathan James McCreadie
Lillie, “Cyberporn, Sexuality, and the Net Apparatus”, <em>Convergence</em> 2004; 10; 43</p>
<p> </p>
<p>2. Williams Linda (ed), <strong>Porn Studies,</strong> Duke University Press, London and Durham, 2004.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>3. Katrien Jacobs, Marije Janssen, Matteo Pasquinelli (eds),
<strong>C’lick Me: A Netporn Studies Reader</strong>,
Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam, 2007.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>4. Courts of Women, Vimochana Bangalore, 27-29 July, 2009.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>5. Itty Abraham, Sex in the Neo-liberal City: On Savita
Bhabhi, Available at The Fish Pond at <a href="http://thefishpond.in/itty/2009/on-savita-bhabhi/#comments">http://thefishpond.in/itty/2009/on-savita-bhabhi/#comments</a></p>
<p> </p>
<p>6. Shohini Ghosh, The politics of porn, Himal South Asian
Magazine, September 2009, Vol 22, No. 9.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>7. Bharath Murthy (director), Mysore Mallige, 2007.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>8. Ratheesh Radhakrishnan, “‘The
Mis-en-scene of desire’: Stardom and the case of soft porn cinema in Kerala!”
Unpublished work. Contact author for copy.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>9. Bloomingdale's now sells Tom of Finland shirts and
trousers, housewives celebrate their birthdays by piercing their geni- tals,
college students dance naked instead of waiting tables to pay their tuition,
and middle-level managers schedule a session with a dominatrix in their
favorite dungeon after a game of racquetball at their regular health club. From
Joseph W. Slade, Pornography and Sexual Representation: A Reference Guide,
Greenwood Publishing Group, 2001.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>10. Walter Metz, “Shark
Porn: Film Genre, Reception Studies, and Chris Kentis' Open Water” Film
Criticism, March 22, 2007</p>
<p> </p>
<p>11 Destricted: explicit films, Marina Abramovic, Matthew
Barney, Marco Brambilla, Larry Clark, Gaspar Noé, Richard Prince, Sam Taylor
Wood (directors), 2006.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>12 Minnette Hillyer, “Sex in the suburban: Porn, Home movies
and the Live Action Perofmance of Love in Pam and Tommy: Hardcore and
uncensored”, <strong>Porn Studies</strong>, Duke
University Press, London and Durham, 2004, p.50.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/looking-closer-at-porn-with-x-ray-spectacles-savita-bhabhi-mms-video-and-others'>https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/looking-closer-at-porn-with-x-ray-spectacles-savita-bhabhi-mms-video-and-others</a>
</p>
No publishernamitaFeaturedArtCensorship2011-08-02T08:35:34ZBlog EntryPleasure and Pornography: Impassioned Objects
https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/impassioned-objects-unraveling-the-history-of-fetish
<b>In this post, a third in the series documenting her CIS-RAW project, Pleasure and Pornography, Namita Malhotra explores the idea of fetish as examined by Anne McClintock (i) . This detour is an exploration of the notion of fetish, its histories and meanings, and how it might relate to the story of Indian porn. </b>
<p><br />The etymology of fetish derives from the word fetico (Portuguese) which means sorcery or magic arts. In 1760, it was used to refer to primitive religions, especially in relation to the growing project of imperialism. In 1867, Marx coined the term commodity fetishism – using the implied meaning of primitive magic to express the central social form of modern industrial economy, whereby the social relation between people metamorphoses into the relation between things. It was only after this, in 1905, that Freud transferred the word, with all these meanings still clinging to it, to the realm of sexuality and perversions. As Anne McClintock points out, in her useful account and re-understanding of the fetish in the book <em>Imperial Leather</em> (ii), psychoanalysis, philosophy, and Marxism all take shape around the invention of the primitive fetish, which conveniently displaces what the modern mind cannot accommodate onto the invented domain of the primitive. She states that the not-so-concealed rationale of imperialism is fetishism. Fetishists (racial, sexual and other) became a mode of warranting and justifying conquest and control -- whether it was the policing of sexual fetishism for control of classes in Europe and colonies, or the invention of racial fetishism central to the regime of imposing sexual surveillance in the colonies.<strong> The imperial discourse on fetishism became a discipline of containment</strong> (iii) .</p>
<p>On the other hand in the realm of sexuality, fetish becomes a question of male sexuality alone -- male perversion par excellence. There are no female fetishists, either for Freud or Lacan, for to speak of female fetishism would involve displacing the basic precepts of psychoanalysis -- namely the scene of castration leading to phallic fetishism. However, McClintock points to the usefulness of studying female fetishism, as it allows for certain things to happen. First, it dislodges the centrality of the phallus in this discourse, which surprisingly makes way for the presence and legitimacy of a multiplicity of pleasures, needs, and contradictions that can’t be resolved or reduced merely to the desire to preserve the phallus. Very often, feminists such as McClintock read the Lacanian insistence on the centrality of the phallus as itself a fetishistic nostalgia for a single, male myth of origins and fetishistic disavowal of difference. Such a notion of fetish, embedded in phallic theory, gets easily reduced to sexual difference and does not allow/admit race or class as crucially formative categories as well; thus, race and class remain continuously of secondary status in the primarily sexually signifying chain.</p>
<p>“The racist fetishizing of white skin, black fetishizing gold chains, the fetishizing of black dominatraces, lesbians, cross dressing as men the fetishizing of national flags, slave fetishism, class cross-dressing, fetishes such as nipple clips and bras in male transvestism, leather bondage, PVC fetishism, babyism and so on -- these myriad different deployments of fetishistic ambiguity cannot be categorized under a single mark of desire, without great loss of theoretical subtlety and historical complexity.” Also McClintock points to racist, nationalistic and patriotic fetishes -- such as flags, crowns, maps, swastikas (or for instance chaddis) -- that can’t be simply rendered equivalent to the disavowal of male castration anxiety. <br /><br />McClintock calls for a renewed investigation of fetishism -- to open it up to a more complex and valuable history in which racial and class hierarchies would play as formative a role as sexuality. Rejecting the Lacanian and Freudian fixation on the phallus as central to psychoanalysis would call for a mutually transforming investigation into the disavowed relations of psychoanalysis and social history. In a way, it would be the bringing together of the varied ways in which fetish has been used -- by Freud (in the domain of psychoanalysis) in the realm of domesticity and the private, and by Marx (in the domain of male socio-economic history) in the realm of the market and possibly in the public. If these meanings were to speak to each other, what we discover is that fetish is in fact the historical enactment of ambiguity itself.</p>
<p>Fetishism involves the displacement onto an object of contradictions that the individual cannot resolve at a personal level. These contradictions could indeed be social, though lived with profound intensity in the imagination and flesh of the person. The fetish -- rather than being a merely an insignificant sexual or personal practice -- inhabits both personal and historical memory. It marks a crisis in social meaning -- the embodiment of an impossible resolution. This crisis/contradiction is displaced onto and embodied in the fetish object, which is thus destined to recur in compulsive ways. By displacing this power onto the fetish, then manipulating or controlling the fetish, the individual gains symbolic control over what might otherwise be terrifying ambiguities.</p>
<p>The fetish then can be called an impassioned object; something that emerges from a variety of social contradictions, rather than merely from the scene of castration or phallic centric domains. Hence they are neither universal, nor are they entirely about personal histories alone, but are about personal and historical memory or a social contradiction that is experienced at an intensely personal level. “As composite symbolic objects, fetishes thus embody the traumatic coincidence not only of individual but also of historical memories held in contradiction” (McClintock). This reading of fetishism gives rise to far richer possibilities of cultural analysis.</p>
<p>Fetish was neither proper to African or Christian European culture, but sprang into being from an abrupt encounter between two heterogeneous worlds during an era of mercantile capitalism and slavery. At this point it clearly embodies the problem of contradictory social value -- whether it is gold as valuable, or gold as warding off bad luck. Though initially just about heathen customs and rituals, it later also becomes a marking of certain groups of people for conquest. It is from this context that Freud transports the word, laden with meanings of conquest and violence, to the realm of sexuality. Obviously these meanings stain future connotations of fetish, the word fetish itself becoming prey to contradictory meanings of race and sex and difference.</p>
<p>For Freud, the fetish is the embodiment in one object of two positions -- castration and its denial. Though this does capture some sense of the ambiguity that McClintock also refers to, here the meanings oscillate between two, and only two, fixed options (a recurring male economy). The fetish becomes both a permanent memorial to the horror of castration, embodied not in the male but in the female -- as well as a token of triumph, and safeguard against the threat of castration. This has, of course, been critiqued by feminists quite severely. McClintock’s basic argument is that it is indeed hard, considering the varied nature of fetish objects, to find a single originary explanation in the psychic development of the individual -- in a single originary trauma. What is important here, however is to take on this notion of the fetish as an historical enactment of ambiguity itself, and see if as a theoretical concept it has any value to the study of the loose category of Indian porn, especially MMS porn. <br /><br /><strong>Soap in these strange days: fetish objects</strong><br /><br /><em>“Such spectacle creates the promise of a rich sight: not the sight of particular fetishized objects, but sight itself as richness, as the grounds for extensive experience.”<br />Dana Polan (iv)</em><br /><br />Anne McClintock’s work on fetish also looks at the seemingly ubiquitous object of soap as the carrier of many ambiguous meanings around gender, class, imperialism -- both the cult of domesticity (the running of the empire of home with servants, sweepers, cleaners, women, maids etc.) and the cult of new imperialism found in soap in its exemplary mediating form. The story of soap, for McClintock, reveals that fetishism rather than a quintessentially African propensity (belonging in the realm of lands and peoples that were being discovered through imperialism) was in fact central to industrial modernity; fetishism was not original either to industrial capitalism or precolonial economies, but was from the outset the embodiment and record of an incongruous and violent encounter (between two or more heterogenous cultures) and about rapid changes of modernity, rather than about the ‘primitive’. <br /><br />Marx says that the mystique of the commodity fetish lies not in its use value, but in its exchange value and its potency as a sign: “So far as (a commodity) is a value in use, there is nothing mysterious about it”. This could be linked to the idea of a mobile phone that is supposed to achieve so much beyond mere communication, at least according to the advertising -- they should mend ruptured relations and homes, get all the hot chicks, grow beautiful gardens, change the boring routine of life. For some time, the Samsung mobile phone ad with Estella Warren played in India, which probably moves the mobile phone with camera out of merely its symbolic use as enhancing attractiveness, to actually ‘getting’ or rather capturing girls by clicking. Magically in the ad, the act of clicking photographs make the girl not just willing, but she also takes the phone and photographs herself. Barring one scary moment when it looks like she might turn into an avenging warrior like Xena or The Bride, but instead she simpers into a loving sexy pose, she is willing. The ad can’t be easily dismissed as misogynistic, but it does give an intriguing glimpse of the intimate pictures and moments that can be captured with a mobile phone. <br /><br />That a mobile phone is fetishized as a commodity is probably evident, from the rush to get the more enhanced phone with the better camera and features, though mobile phones are also a ubiquitous element of one’s life, in some ways exactly like soap. Probably in a country like India, having a mobile phone can be read as opening up sexual possibilities in a way that wouldn’t be obvious in a more developed country. If the fetish is a social contradiction that is experienced at an intensely personal level, then the mobile phone, especially after the DPS MMS clip, is precariously located between the zones of the private and personal, and that which is entirely in the public domain beyond any control of the person(s). This ability of the mobile phone to occupy simultaneous universes because of its interconnectedness in a network, and that it is (for most people now) an entirely personal object with messages, numbers, conversations, images, videos, is what makes it unpredictable. <br /><br /><strong>Looking at MMS porn</strong><br /><em>“Memories were meant to fade. They were built that way for a reason”<br />Mace, Strange Days</em><br /><br />When looking at MMS porn, I’m irresistibly reminded of the movie <em>Strange Days</em>, in which Angela Basset’s character Mace expresses her frustration with Lenny (played by Ralph Fiennes). Lenny is obsessed with preserving memory and accessing other people’s experiences, through what in the movie are called playbacks. Playbacks are recordings of events in the brain that were fed back into brain waves to reproduce the earlier event -- the feelings, the sensations of touch, the smells and not just the visual. Playbacks haven’t been invented yet, but the obsessiveness with which Lenny wheels and deals (he’s also a dealer and collector of playbacks) gives a peculiar insight into how mobile phones are becoming fetish objects of sorts -- particularly MMSs recorded on mobile phones where other people are able to occupy the space of an unknown character that conveniently rarely ever appears on the screen. The famous pornographic ones are the DPS MMS clip and other MMS scandals, including the hidden voyeuristic ones taken without permission, and a precursor of this is Mysore Mallige where the man appears rarely on the screen and only at the end, almost like a signature. In a peculiar way MMS porn becomes like playback from Strange Days, a movie that is attempting to unravel the unknown future mired in technological changes that are messily intertwined with human desire and frailty. A future (set on the date of turning the millennium) that we’ve hopelessly gone past without even asking many of the questions that the characters in the movie pose.<br /><br />Indian websites advertise MMS scandals as a specific category of pornography. This category also includes genuine MMS clips of celebrities kissing (Kareena Kapoor), wardrobe malfunctions from Fashion Week, and also fake ones with celebrity look-alikes bathing, changing, having sex (Preity Zinta, Mallika Sherawat). Mostly what is being talked about are videos made on mobile phones by men, who record themselves having sex with ‘gullible’ women. The alleged gullibility of these women is probably essential to the erotic charge of such videos. They are shaky videos, especially when sex is underway, and have a grainy quality that makes them eerily real. Their perspective is usually that of the man who is holding the phone camera and rarely enters the frame himself, whereas the woman is definitely the desirable object that is being captured. Maybe this phenomenon can be understood better if one looks at McClintock’s idea of fetish and whether MMS/images on mobile phones can be located within that category -- whether the ambiguous nature of the video or image recorded on the mobile phone and its ability to be an intensely personal and private object and also to be so easily transmitted into networks signifies a crisis in social meanings around private and public. The mobile phone then merely becomes an object onto which this anxiety is displaced, and the recording of images repeatedly (and anxieties and fears triggered when they accidentally slip into the public domain) are ways of trying to control terrifying ambiguities over the private and the public (where aspects of sexuality, family and selfhood could be calamitously disrupted by a slip between the two categories). (v)<br /><br />In a strange way this is a parable for a larger phenomenon of pornographic circulation and the law, as well. The mass circulation of pornography is perceived as a private secret that is kept by all, and whenever there is slip between the two categories, the law and public discourse are barely able to deal with the furore of anxieties. And if not, then the law and public discourse proceed to deal with the banal unbuttoning of Akshay Kumar’s jeans by his wife as obscenity in courtrooms, as if we hadn’t all imagined an MMS that allowed us to be doing the same. <br /><br /> i. Anne Mcclintok’s work on sadomasochism illuminates some of the arguments that I make in relation to sexual subjectivity and the state’s interests and desires in policing it. (unpublished article for book on queer issues and the law). Her work borrows from notions developed by Foucault. “Sadomasochism plays social power backwards, visibly and outrageously staging hierarchy, difference and power, the irrational, ecstasy or alienation of the body, placing these ideas at the centre of western reason.” The analysis of sexual subjectivity and State’s interest in it also looks at the judgment on sadomasochism by the House of Lords, England that declares such activities that cause severe injuries and maim the body, as illegal, regardless of consent of parties. <br />ii. Anne Mcclintok, Imperial Leather: Race, gender and sexuality in the colonial contest, Routledge, 1995.<br />iii. Ibid<br />iv. Cited from Laura Mulvey, Some Thoughts on Theories of Fetishism in the Context of Contemporary Culture, October, Vol. 65 (Summer, 1993), pp. 3-20. </p>
<p>v. As in the story of Chanda in Dev.d loosely inspired from the DPS MMS clip incident<br /><img src="https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/uploads/kalkichanda.jpg/image_preview" alt="Chanda from Dev.d" class="image-inline image-inline" title="Chanda from Dev.d" /><br /><br /><br /></p>
<p>
For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/impassioned-objects-unraveling-the-history-of-fetish'>https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/impassioned-objects-unraveling-the-history-of-fetish</a>
</p>
No publishernamitahistories of internet in IndiaCyberspaceinternet and societyObscenitywomen and internetYouTubeCyborgsCyberculturesDigital subjectivities2011-08-02T08:35:20ZBlog EntryPleasure and Pornography: Pornography and the Blindfolded Gaze of the Law
https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/the-blindfolded-gaze-of-the-law-and-pornography
<b>In the legal discourse, pornography as a category is absent, except as an aggravated form of obscenity. Does this missing descriptive category assist in the rampant circulation of pornography, either online or offline? Rather than ask that question, Namita Malhotra, in this second post documenting her CIS-RAW project, explores certain judgments that indeed deal with pornographic texts and uncovers the squeamishness that ensures that pornography as an object keeps disappearing before the law.
</b>
<p><strong><br /></strong></p>
<p><strong>When Justicia, blindfolded, cannot see the profane …</strong><br /><br />In the legal discourse, pornography as a category is absent, except as an aggravated form of obscenity (1). Does this missing descriptive category assist in the rampant circulation of pornography, either online or offline? Rather than ask that question, I would like to explore certain judgments that indeed deal with pornographic texts and uncover the squeamishness that ensures that pornography as an object keeps disappearing before the law.</p>
<p>For instance, in the case of Fatima Riswana V. Chennai & Ors. (2) both the public prosecutor and counsel for the petitioners applied to the court for transfer to another (male) judge, to save the District Lady Judge from embarrassment. The order for transfer was passed, so that the District Lady Judge does not have to view certain CDs that are part of the evidence. The justification for this is that the 'said trial would be about the exploitation of women and their use in sexual escapades by the accused, and the evidence in the case is in the form of CDs, viewing of which would be necessary in the course of the trial; therefore, for a woman Presiding Officer it would cause embarrassment'.</p>
<p>This is a rather obvious case, where explicit and pornographic material is made to disappear before the eyes of the law, gesturing towards the larger complicity that allows society and law to create a ruckus about Richard Gere and Shilpa Shetty’s kiss, HBO's English movie channel, dance bars and other such aspects of the sleazy modernity that we inhabit (3), but simultaneously is oblivious to circulation of pornography, both online and offline.</p>
<p>In a rather confrontational visual juxtaposition, I place Savita Bhabhi alongside Husain’s Mother India, to be able to ask several questions, including the question of which one’s existence has been more threatened by the law. There is almost no doubt about it; Savita Bhabhi’s chequered career as a slutty housewife has been marred only by two scandals (and several almost patriotic accounts of India having finally arrived (4)) – once when a child sent an MMS about his teacher and it made references to Savita Bhabi, which led to some mention of action that might be taken against the website (5), and another time when Karan Johar (Mid Day, Delhi – 31 March 2009) remarked that one of the characters, Jeet, has a look similar to that given to Amitabh Bachchan in 'Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna', and this might be a case of copyright infringement. Neither of these have resulted in any serious charge against the alleged anonymous producers, Indian Porn Empire, or what is more probable, the blocking of the website regardless of whether the producers/creators can be found and prosecuted. However Husain’s untitled painting, which surfaced on a website for an auction for victims of a Kashmir earthquake in 2006 (two years after it was first sold by the painter), was dragged to court on serious charges of obscenity, which fortunately led to a rather progressive judgment on obscenity by the Delhi High Court.</p>
<p>Returning to the two images of nude women, obscenity law in India has laid down that “nudity in art and literature is not per se evidence of obscenity”. As stated in the judgment that dealt with the circulation of Hussain’s untitled painting (later titled 'Bharat Mata') 'the work as a whole must be considered, the obscene matter must be considered by itself and separately to find out whether it is so gross and its obscenity so decided that it is likely to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to influences of this sort'. What renders an object obscene is the transaction rather than the text -- a transaction involving the depiction-consumption of the female body , and the sexualisation of the viewer who in turn sexualises the object. It is not just that the painting/image may already be sexualized but also that the public is in turn sexualised by looking at it (and sexualises it with its
gaze), thus making them vulnerable to the perversion that is modernity
itself and the pornographic gaze (Nitya Vasudevan and Namita A. Malhotra, State of Desire - Unpublished article). To put it simply, the anxiety of the state is not just about the object, but also about its circulation in the public, and the meanings it acquires through these series of transactions.</p>
<p>Legal and public discourse is often obsessed with the various meanings that become possible because of the placing of this naked body - or the transactions of this naked body with the context, background, narrative that it is placed in. Though seemingly sexualised already as a naked body (this can be refuted not only by the Indian court but various examples in art, religious architecture, etc.) the meanings it may carry are further complicated when it is placed in a pornographic comic online, bearing a crown and saying 'I will be Miss India', or as a faceless hazy outline in the foreground of the map of India. Hussain’s depiction of the naked woman on the map of India, embodying India (in pain or anger) carries many jostling, conflicting meanings. Inspite of the furore over the painting, the High Court finally held that the painting was not obscene, stating that the intention of the painter was to evoke sympathy for a woman – indeed a nation – in distress (6) . However what is intriguing, is that Savita Bhabi’s body, her markings of Indian-ness, her poses and postures are not examined to that extent either by the court or the public.</p>
<p>Pornography, as obscenity in its aggravated form or explicit depiction of sexual acts without a relevant or coherent narrative, has been dropped from both legal discourse and academic and cultural analysis--is it possible to surmise that this has happened because it can be read as a blank slate, a place where meanings cannot be read, felt or inferred? Pornographic movies are spliced into mainstream films, circulate
surreptitiously through video stores, piracy markets or though online
spaces that cannot be easily accessed because of regulations and
filters in most places –- colleges, homes, schools, offices, cybercafes
(7) etc. Can we surmise that the transaction of the sexualized gaze with the obscene object has been, in this way, so removed from public gaze that it does not merit discomfort and anxiety for the state or public, unless it nefariously slips into public discourse (DPS MMS, Noida MMS, Mysore Mallige)? As long as it is a secretive (even if mass) consumption, it does not disturb the heternormative familiar and familial in the manner that an object whose obscenity is not quite obvious or clear does – for example, HBO's English movie channel (8).</p>
<p>In this context, let us look at an excerpt from the progressive judgment on Hussain’s painting, which demonstrates the extent to which the court has to read the meanings of an image to determine whether it is obscene or not, but simultaneously, by not ever having to interact with a pornographic text, the court (or the public) does not have to see that there are many meanings embedded in such an image as well.</p>
<p><em>'One of the tests in relation to judging nude/semi nude pictures of women as obscene is also <strong>a particular posture or pose or the surrounding circumstances</strong> which may render it to be obscene, but in the present painting, apart from what is already stated above, the <strong>contours of the woman’s body represent nothing more than the boundaries/map of India.</strong><br /></em></p>
<p><em>Even if a different view had to be taken that if the painter wanted to depict India in human form, it may have been<strong> more appropriate to cloth the woman in some manner may be by draping a sari </strong>or by a flowing cloth etc., but that alone cannot be made a ground to prosecute the painter.</em> <em>There can be a numbers of postures or poses that one can think of which can really stimulate a man’s deepest hidden passions and desires. To my mind, art should not be seen in isolation without going into its onomatopoetic meaning and it is here I quote Mr. Justice Stewart of the US Supreme Court in Jacobellis v. Ohio 378 U.S. 184 (1964) who defined ‘obscenity’ as, “I will know it when I see it”. The nude woman in the impugned painting is not shown in any peculiar kind of a pose or posture nor are her surroundings so painted which may arouse sexual feelings or that of lust in the minds of the deviants in order to call it obscene. The </em><em><strong>placement of the Ashoka Chakra</strong> or the States in the painting
is also not on any particular body part of the woman which may be
deemed to show disrespect to the Ashoka Chakra/States and the same was
conceded by the learned counsel for the respondent during the course of
the arguments advanced. </em></p>
<p><em>It is possible that some persons may hold a more orthodox or conservative view on the depiction of Bharat Mata as nude in the painting but that itself would not suffice to give rise to a criminal prosecution of a person like the petitioner who may have more liberal thoughts in respect of mode and manner of depiction of Bharat Mata.' </em>(9)</p>
<p>A body that doesn’t carry inscriptions of cities on different body parts, but is definitely inscribed as Indian is that of Savita Bhabi – from the mangalsutra that never comes off even during doggy-style sex, the sari that slips off rather easily, the bindi, the gestures and mannerisms, to the stories that place her in sexual encounters with familiar people – the bra salesman, the old boyfriend, the cousin, the doctor, the woman colleague, the boss, the aging star and many others.</p>
<p>Savita Bhabhi thus carries as many confusing, jostling meanings as a pornographic text. For instance, she refers to recession and aspirations to become Miss India. She ventures into the fantasy world of her fans, since many of her stories are drawn from their stories on the Savita Bhabi website and fansite –- whether these stories are make-believe or true is irrelevant. These resonances of the text beyond mere sexual arousal are obvious. Even if one were to ignore Linda Williams (10) and inferences from Foucault that pornography becomes one of the many forms in which knowledge of pleasure is organised, it is obvious that from varied perspectives within film studies and legal studies, pornography merits examination. Williams' point also seems to provide some insight into why pornographic circulation doesn't merit much anxiety from the state or in the law; if pornography is organised in consonance with the heteronormative familiar and familial and accessible primarily by men, then maybe it is not such a big surprise that the state or the law is not really invested in controlling pornography, since pornography itself is controlling modes of sexuality and/or sexual expression.</p>
<p>Returning to the comparison, Hussain's untitled nude body on the map of India is literally marked. She carries these inscriptions -- Gujarat on one breast, Bangalore between her thighs, Chennai on her calves, Goa on her hip. Savita Bhabi is marked by her sari, her bindi, her blouse, her aesthetic sense, her fantasies of film stars, her stories of encounters in dressing rooms and myriad other recognizable details -- that mark her as Indian, or at least as living in India, in an Indian (albeit a privileged fair North Indian) body. However, it is Husain's untitled painting -- not called Bharat Mata (and the painting doesn't seem to signify a maternal relation but that of a wounded woman or pained woman) -- that goes to court on charges of obscenity.</p>
<p>Before looking at the few judgments that deal with the actual pornographic text, I take a detour to look at another iconic female figure -- that of Justice. Though clothed, she is blindfolded, so as to be able to discern even a fraction of a slip in the scales of justice; visual cognition would not be sufficient for her to recognise such a slip. As explained by Costas Douzinas, ('The Legality of the Image, lecture – December, 1999), ‘Justice must be blindfolded to avoid the temptation of facing the concrete person and putting individual characteristics before the abstract logic of the institution'. Martin Jay traces the trajectory of how justice became blindfolded through the ages, in the article 'Must Justice Be Blind' (11). Justice was initially wide-eyed and alert; she was blindfolded by the Fool in a period when corruption of the rulers was rampant; she was immortalised by Vermeer as staring at empty scales; and in a transitory state before being completely blinded she had two heads, with a pair of eyes that could see, and a pair that was blindfolded -- shielded, maybe, from the profane and from embarrassment.</p>
<p>I look at this blindness of the judicial system that allows pornography to circulate, while pinning down the obscene and examining minutely its various meanings. The obscene ('Satyam Shivam Sundarmam', 'Prajapati' – a Bengali magazine which carries short stories, 'Lady Chatterley’s Lover', 'Bandit Queen') is examined firstly, for whether it is so gross, though grossness or vulgarity as such is not enough to establish obscenity. And secondly, for whether it has the tendency to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such influences and into whose hands -- or rather, vision -- such an object might fall (this is what allows for the circulation in limited publics -- adult audiences, time slots on television). <br /><br /><strong>Hard and Near Hard Pornography: Close Encounters of the Law with the Profane</strong></p>
<p>In the case of Anonymous vs. the Commissioner Of Police (12), yet another encounter takes place between the embarrassed law and the pornographic text. The excerpt below describes the encounter of two women advocates asked by the court to examine what movies are being exhibited at a specific theatre. In the peculiar clash of social mores, that ensure who has access to pornography, and the law, that ensures equal access to all legally sanctioned media to everyone, the movie theatre was held responsible for violating the fundamental right of women to have access to their premises -- and thus access to pornography. <br /><br /><em>'We approached the booking counter of Rs. 20/- and asked for tickets. The booking clerk first informed us that it is an English movie and it is not meant for ladies to view. When we insisted for tickets, he asked us to come inside the booking room from the main entrance of the theatre. When we were entering the theatre, the gate-man informed us that ladies are not permitted as it is a "SEX MOVIE".</em></p>
<p><em>However, we walked into the booking room. Booking clerk issued us Box-A tickets and further asked us to see the Manager before taking seats. We did not see the Manager but directly went to Box-A and took seats. Even the Box-A doorman asked us to leave the theatre advising us that we being ladies cannot see it as the movie is a "SEX MOVIE". When the movie began at 12.00 P.M. simultaneously the Manager along with two men switched on the lights in Box-A and asked us to leave the hall immediately. Since he repeatedly insisted us to leave, we both came out of Box-A. On coming out we enquired as to why we should not see the movie, to which the Manager replied that it is a "BF". On asking for further clarification of "BF", the Manager stated that it means "BLUE FILM". When we asked him to identify himself, he informed us that he is Mr. Prasad, Manager of the Theatre, as such he has every right to ask us to leave. When we asked as to how it was not advertised that the movie is meant for men only, he retorted that "It is understood that whenever English movies are played in this theatre, ladies are strictly not permitted." As such we were forced to leave the theatre immediately.'</em><br /><br />The question before the court was whether the films exhibited in this theatre were being exhibited in accordance with the censor certificate or whether there was any tampering; whether there was any other device or contrivance to interpolate or intermingle blue films with any otherwise innocent-looking film. Here, though the court had taken it upon itself to address the pornographic text, it ran into a series of complications when merely trying to access the text or the evidence itself, as two women advocates were sent to determine if there was an illegal film exhibition taking place. Pornography seems to be continuously disappearing even on the rare occasion when it is addressed directly by the court, especially in the court's attempt to precisely locate the moment of transaction of the gaze with the pornographic object.</p>
<p>The court, when allowed to examine the film exhibited, found that it was 'a hotch potch of short films, advertisement films, party propaganda films, Hindi and Telugu feature film bits'. (13) The court finally located the pornographic segments (squeezing breasts in a tub, cunnilingus, brutal murder scene) and the court’s comment was that 'normal scenes were replaced by sexy scenes'. The recommendation of those who examined the films that were ostensibly being spliced into <em>Secret Games 3</em> and <em>Dark Dancers</em> is that, 'The only course proper is not to permit entry into the country for such films which prima facie may be <strong>classified hard or near-hard</strong>'. Though the term near-hard is amusing and unique classification of pornography, maybe it's a Freudian slip by a judicial system caught between disgusted arousal and embarrassment.</p>
<p>Finally, in this judgment, the court had to acknowledge its own blindness -- that there is ‘some hole somewhere in the system so that even excised portions by the Censor Board of the films have found their way to the theatres’, including portions that were never passed through the censor certification process at all. <br /><strong><br />Whose Hard-On (or Near Hard-On) Are We Looking for: The Law in Its Search for the Profane</strong><br /><br />In 2005, two teenagers frolicking were captured on a mobile phone camera, and the clip circulated first through mobile phones and then subsequently on the internet. The clip sparked off a phenomenon of hidden camera and mobile phone clips -- a booming pornographic enterprise now on the internet. For a split second, it seemed as though any kind of desire could become pornographic, captured in an ubiquitous medium and transmitted throughout the country. That thrill and anxiety was possibly grasped at slightly in Anurag Kashyap’s <em>Dev.D</em>, where Chanda -- the prostitute, or the other of the good girl -- is the one depicted as the unknown girl who was part of the MMS clip. Very few films have been able to grasp the visceral embarrassment and immediacy of desire as <em>Dev.D</em> does, and it is possibly not the story of Chanda, but that of Paro that achieves this. Paro, who sends nude pictures of herself across continents; Paro, the cyber-sexer; Paro, the entirely relatable slut who cycles with a mattress across fields of mustard in small town Punjab because she desires sex.</p>
<p>After three and a half years (countless MMSs, one movie reference, and a few academic articles later) the court passes judgment in this case – of who possibly can be held liable for the circulation of the MMS clip online, and specifically its sale on Bazee.com (an eBay subsidiary) by an IIT student (Avnish Bajaj vs State on 29/5/2008 by Muralidhar J.). In this case, it is not the pornographic text that keeps slipping and eluding the grasp of the court; the problem is in the inability, especially in the age of the internet, to fix the transactions around such an object that is rapidly changing hands and circulating at an exponential speed through the internet.</p>
<p>The court is in a bind -- the wrong person is accused. Not the corporate body of Bazee but the CEO of Bazee himself (the boy is a juvenile so is facing lesser charges in the juvenile court). The court has the responsibility to fix the blame of the circulation of the obscene object on Avinash Bajaj, without being able to establish that there is any knowledge on his part about the existence of the clip. Though the court was able to establish that there was negligence on the part of Bazee in running the website (in spite of notification, the clip remained on sale for a whole working day after the complaint), and that the filters used by Bazee were obviously inadequate to control what is sold through the website, it was still not possible to find the CEO liable for obscenity charges. If the company had been charged, this would have been possible. Eventually, even though obscenity as a charge couldn’t stick, similar provisions in the IT Act (Section 67 read with Section 85) were used to charge Avinash Bajaj himself, as opposed to Bazee (the corporate body or the company itself). </p>
<p>Here again the court is forced to confront a pornographic text only in instances where there has been a public furore around it, and the eventual judgment is not likely to be able to even remotely address the phenomenon of MMS clips and hidden camera footage from cybercafes and hostels that has been spawned as a result of this incident. The slippery transaction of the gaze with the pornographic object is difficult to fix though in a different way from the earlier judgment – here the pornographic nature of the text is understood rather than examined, more for its violation of privacy than actual elements of obscenity. But it is still hard to determine for the law, especially with the internet, how and by whom has circulation of the pornographic object has taken place and to fix these transactions to ensure legal culpability.</p>
<p>*****<br />Curiously this tale of women advocates and judges as representatives of law and justice, who are averting their gaze from the pornographic text or find that the text is constantly eluding their legal stare, must deal in its closure with the figure of the male judge. Anne McClintock’s male judge in her article ‘Screwing the System’ (14) is a judge who gets a hard-on each time he sentences a prostitute -- a judge who otherwise pays to be beaten by the very same prostitutes. The Hidayatullah paradox of obscenity law is that the judge who decides on obscenity has to decide on the basis of whether he is affected, or rather aroused -- and if he is turned on, then how is he any longer the reasonable judge, or even the 'reasonable man' who can be expected to pass judgment with the dispassionate authority of law? The work of both Shrimoyee N. Ghosh (on the dance bar judgment) and Lawrence Liang (on cinema and the law) on the relation between law and affect, gestures towards an interesting puzzle for us to consider here: if we could look into the eyes of justice, if she were not blindfolded, what would we see? And is the purpose of the blindfold indeed to prevent us from observing the affective life of law itself – its arousal, disgust and embarrassment?</p>
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<p><strong>Endnotes:</strong></p>
<p>1. Ranjit Udeshi v. State of Maharashtra. Only in the recent fairly progressive judgment on Hussain’s painting, that held eventually after examining it, that it was not obscene, was there an attempt at giving some distinction to the category of pornography apart from it being an aggravated form of obscenity and to say that it, as a class of objects, images, paintings, videos, is designed for sexual arousal, while other material which may or may not be obscene is meant to have other meanings. Such reading of the author’s intentions is a convoluted way of restating Justice Potter’s statement – 'I know it (hard core), when I see it'. <br />2. Fatima Riswana v. State Rep. By A.C.P., Chennai & Ors.Case No.: Appeal (crl.) 61-62 of 2005<br />3. -'…in a clear shift of subject matter, what we are now seeing is an explicitly politicized moral censor looking at all this—looking not so much at the sex industry as at society-in-general, at society itself now theatricalised into a morbid stage of sleaze'. Ashish Rajadhyaksha, in his essay ‘Is Realism Pornographic?,’ which deals with the writings of Pramod Navalkar, former Minister for Culture in Maharashtra, points to how explicit or hard-core pornography does not seem to be the concern as much as a whole range of practices attached to the phenomenon of modernity<br />4. Anastasia Guha, The Beatitudes Of A Bountiful Bhabhi, Tehelka, Vol 5, Issue 19, Dated May 17, 2008. Available online at http://www.tehelka.com/story_main39.asp?filename=hub170508the_beatitudes.asp <br />5. Savitha Bhabi threatened, http://infotech.indiatimes.com/quickiearticleshow/3476748.cms <br />6. For instance, the court held that in Bandit Queen, the nudity during the sequence of rape and torture of Phoolan Devi is necessary in the narrative and essential for the impact and the moral that the story is trying to convey – her anger with the upper caste feudal landlords and her quest for justice become identifiable for the viewer, and hence the nudity is in fact necessary in the story, and has no ‘tendency to deprave or corrupt’.<br />7. The regulation of cybercafes takes place in a manner reminiscent of how cinema spaces such as movie theatres were sought to be regulated by the colonial law. Current laws demand placing of computers so monitors face outward, use of identity cards for every visit, data retention for at least a month for most users, etc. <br />8. Though the latter might be a valid assumption (and certainly beneficial for us) it is an assumption whose presumptuous certainties are shaken in the age of the internet, especially that primarily men access pornography and cyber sex through these newly opening up online spaces.<br />9. Maqbool Fida Husain v. Raj Kumar Pandey CRL. REVISION PETITION No. 114/2007. Decided on 08-05-2008</p>
<p>10. Williams, Linda. Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989<br />11. Costas Douzinas, Lynda Nead (Eds), Law and the Image: the Authority of Art and the Aesthetics of Law. University of Chicago Press, 1999<br />12. Anonymous Letter-Un-Signed vs The Commissioner Of Police And Others on 26 December, 1996<br />13. For a judicial system that is invested in narrative film or narrative structure for reasons of copyright law (see generally Anne Baron, The Legal Property of Film) or for aesthetic reasons, as is evident from the judgment in Bandit Queen (that held nudity when she was paraded naked in front of the villagers to not be obscene because those scenes are needed for a narrative impact – for people to feel moved and disgusted by Phoolan Devi’s plight) it must also be a different kind of horror to find films chopped up into twenty sundry pieces, the last piece thrown somewhere else.<br />14. Anne McClintock, Screwing the System: Sexwork, Race and the Law, Boundary 2, Vol. 19, No. 2, Feminism and Postmodernism (Summer, 1992), 70-95. <br /><br /></p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/the-blindfolded-gaze-of-the-law-and-pornography'>https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/the-blindfolded-gaze-of-the-law-and-pornography</a>
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No publishernamitahistories of internet in IndiaObscenityinternet and societyArtcybercultureswomen and internetYouTubeCyberculturescyberspacesDigital subjectivitiesHistory2011-08-02T08:37:23ZBlog EntryPleasure and Pornography: Initial Encounters with the Unknown
https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/xxx-files-initial-encounters-with-the-unknown
<b>This blog entry is the first in a series by Namita Malhotra on her CIS-RAW project that is about pornography, Internet, sexuality, law, new media and technology. She aims for this to be a multi media and research project/journey which is able to cite and draw on various sources including legal studies, film studies and philosophy, academic and historical work on sexuality, art, film and pornography itself. </b>
<p>There are few dilemmas that one is faced with when working on the vague and over extended category of pornography. The first is the very familiar feminist dilemma over pornography, and the position of radical feminists such as Andrea Dworkin and Catherine McKinnon--pornography is violence or sexually explicit subordination of women. This is more popularly encapsulated in Robin Morgan’s words--pornography is the theory and rape is the practice. Even if this can be collapsed into the positions of pro-sex and anti-sex feminists, it does initially haunt any research agenda on pornography, especially for a guilty quasi-feminist like myself.</p>
<p>However, some of my previous writings have attempted to deal with the position of the women’s movement, specifically in India, on pornography (the details are given below) and here I hope to move beyond either the moral or feminist positions on pornography, to examine what the pervasive phenomenon does. One of the strands that I hope to continue to explore is the relation of body to film. Though film studies is mostly focused on the visual sense, few scholars have looked on film as a bodily experience and attempted to understand the mimetic relation between the body of the 'viewer' and the body of the film. A more tactile understanding of the experience of film and media would be a useful place to start exploring pornography.<br /><br />The second has arisen from many conversations that I have had – when I say I’m working on pornography, the response is either a withdrawal or over-enthusiasm bordering on insistence to share personal collections of erotica and pornography. Though these conversations are often insightful, I have now realized that it is hard for me to actually examine pornography in all its totality – from spliced moments in mainstream films in shady theatres to specificities of hentaii and tentacle porn. Personal tastes, preferences, and access make it hard to be able to be interested in everything. Which is precisely my fascination with pornography – that it is in fact an intensely personal relation or rather a space in which different people have kept very varied and specific material, words, and media--that it also is not entirely about the media/words themselves, but also about how and in what setting they are consumed, how they are bought, downloaded or searched for. <br /><br />The third is the legal conundrum posed by pornography – that it is not recognized in Indian law as a specific category but that there exist, nonetheless, stringent conditions for obscenity. Obscenity is determined on the basis of the Hicklin test, which originated in England in 1868 and has continued as an integral part of Indian law though it has been discredited in English common law and American law. Here, the legal scholarship of Nussbaum is an interesting starting point as it sets up a useful framework that refuses to look at the law as a rational system of rules that is devoid of emotions. Nussbaum analyses the cognitive content of emotions that work within law – in the case of determining obscenity, she points to how emotions of disgust and revulsion play a significant role (the other emotions that she examines in detail are shame, fear and anger in the law). In Nussbaum’s analysis of the cognitive content of disgust, she remarks that in most cultures, disgust is about discomfort humans have with 'our own bodies and decaying selves', and concludes that disgust is an unreliable indicator for obscenity. She refers to McKinnon’s and Dworkin’s work to state that the indicator should be harm done by the material, rather than disgust. I would disagree with Nussbaum on whether harm can be a useful indicator to determine whether something is obscene, but before that it is necessary to examine whether Indian case law actually relies on the notion of disgust. Within Indian law, there seem to be other factors at work including notions of cultural purity vis-à-vis contamination from Western culture. An interesting and rather progressive judgment to look at is the recent High Court judgment on Hussain’s painting of nude Mother India that held that the painting is not obscene. <br /><br />These are a few of the scattered aspects of this project and some of the strands that it will explore. I would also like to share two comics on internet pornography. The first is from the famou <a class="external-link" href="http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/rule_34.png">xkcd comic</a> series and the second from the relatively new comic series <a class="external-link" href="http://deviswithbabies.blogspot.com/2008/10/brown-girls-equal-opportunity-porn.html">Brown Girls</a>. Both capture how lusty desires will find their objects anywhere – in the explosion of the polymorphous perverse on the internet or presidential debates on television. <br /><br /><br /></p>
<p><strong>Previous material </strong><br /><a class="external-link" href="http://www.apc.org/en/pubs/issue/gender/all/world-wide-web-desire-content-regulation-internet"><strong>The World Wide Web of Desire: Content Regulation on the Internet</strong></a><br />This article attempts to understand the dynamics of pushing the child pornography question to the forefront of any debate around censorship and pornography, especially in contexts of internet regulation, both nationally and in international forums such as the Internet Governance Forum. This is often done at the expense of a more nuanced understanding that would be possible if the focus were on issues related to gender, the prevalence of draconian censorship regimes in most countries in Asia and concerns related to free speech.</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.genderit.org/en/index.shtml?apc=r90501-e95021-1"><strong>Do Not Look at Porn</strong></a><br />This is a short video titled "Do not look at porn" which is a remix video or a collage of different materials taken from television and other videos, famous art works, photographs and books. The video is almost boringly pedagogic in its attempt to illustrate the slippery-slope argument which is that obscenity laws generally lead to the ban of progressive material rather than only offensive material. The video features Sarah Jones' song 'Your revolution will not happen between these thighs', and the popular Warcraft character based machinema video 'The internet is for porn'.</p>
<p><a class="external-link" href="http://www.genderit.org/en/index.shtml?apc=r90480-e95146-1"><strong>Search History: Examining Pornography on the Internet</strong></a><br />This article explores some of the dilemmas of the women's movement in India when faced with the question of pornography. It also is a very basic historical look at the category of pornography itself, as it emerged to describe the array of objects and artefacts discovered in the ancient city of Pompeii. These finds were kept at the Secret Museum; only men of a certain upper class were allowed and ‘trusted’ to have access to these objects, and not the ‘easily corruptible rabble or women’. Such distinctions would often arise in the case of pornography and be the reasoning behind censorship and regulation of many media in the next few centuries. Whether it was the birth of photography, cinema, video, and in recent times the internet and new media (CD,VCD, DVD), each technology has been greeted with suspicion of its possible harm to society. <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /></p>
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For more details visit <a href='https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/xxx-files-initial-encounters-with-the-unknown'>https://cis-india.org/raw/histories-of-the-internet/blogs/law-video-technology/xxx-files-initial-encounters-with-the-unknown</a>
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No publishernamitahistories of internet in IndiaObscenityinternet and societywomen and internetresearchCyborgsdigital subjectivitiesHistory2011-08-02T08:37:27ZBlog Entry