The Heterotopian Character of Porn: Sexual Fantasies as Social Alternate Ordering

Abstract

While much have been written about the utopian character of pornography and there is, at least, one fruitful contribution which connects Michel Foucault's concept of heterotopia with pornography, there has been no attempt so far to relate Kevin Hetherington's work to internet porn. Therefore, this article presents some thoughts on how Hetherington's conceptualization of heterotopia, as being ‘spaces of alternate ordering', can be used to link the five distinct ways of understanding the relations between pornography and fantasy, which Martin Barker outlines, with the discussion around the ‘stock characters' and the mainstream pornographic categorization of desires and fetishes. It is argued that the ‘male narrative mainstream hardcore' which is produced nowadays from famous porn brands is an alternate ordering ‘based on a number of utopics that come to being in relation to a tension that exists within modern societies between ideas of freedom and ideas of social control or discipline'.