Dark dynamics and institutional inequalities: the (re)production of women’s harm and violence in the user-generated pornography market
Creators: name: McVey, Laura
Publisher: name: RMIT University
Year: 2024
Subjects: classificationCode: 350699
subject: Marketing not elsewhere classified
classificationCode: 440599
subject: Gender studies not elsewhere classified
classificationCode: 449999
subject: Other human society not elsewhere classified

description: This thesis identifies the perpetration of market violence against women, specifically as manifest in the online pornography market and the ways it encourages and coerces women to participate in and (re)produce their sexualised (self)subordination through content creation. Through an analysis of the user-generated pornography market and its selling of content creation to women, this interdisciplinary thesis-with-publications makes a novel and
significant contribution to two rich bodies of scholarship. As a prominent element of the contemporary pornography industry, as well as a site of increasing cultural significance, the user-generated pornography market stands out as being largely neglected in feminist scholarship concerned with pornography’s harm as well as in the marketing scholarship concerned with capitalist and gendered inequalities. For feminists attentive to the harms of pornography, the open selling of women’s sexualised and racialised inequality to consumers has been an important way to highlight the industry’s abuse of women (as individuals in production and as a sex-class in society). However, a focus on the role of the market, and its more camouflaged mechanisms, has mostly evaded critique. Additionally, while extant marketing scholarship is beginning to address how markets and marketing are implicated in the (re)production of inequalities and violence, the role of the market in sexualised forms of women’s inequality and violence remains under-examined. Therefore, this thesis addresses the central problem of how this market, known for its profiting from sexual violence, sells itself to women as self-producing ‘content creators’.

The project takes a structural level approach to understanding this problem and brings radical feminist theory to an institutional logics analysis of the textual and visual archival data derived from five user-generated pornography websites. Across four chapters (Chapters 2-5), the thesis contributes to two rich bodies of scholarship concerned with structural approaches to violence and inequality – critical marketers concerned capitalist inequalities and critical
(radical) feminists concerned with pornography’s violence and harm. In putting forth a radical feminist perspective on pornography to make visible women’s sexualised inequality and violation, the thesis project contributes to theorisations of women’s inequality in the marketplace. Through bringing an understanding of the market and its mechanisms to feminist theorists, the thesis also reignites broader critical feminist theorising on pornography.

To synthesise the key contributions of this interdisciplinary project, overall, this thesis-with publications can usefully be understood in two halves. The first half extends extant work from critical marketers (Chapter 2) and feminist marketers (Chapter 3) through bringing radical feminism as a way to understand sexualised inequality and woman abuse, as commercialised, by an underexplored market in the discipline – the pornography market. Initially, through Liz Kelly’s continuum of sexual violence framework (Chapter 2 – a published conceptual journal article), then in a centring of harm (Chapter 3 – a published
theoretical book chapter), a radical feminist approach to pornography brings marketing scholars a way to locate the pornography market as a structure of ‘market violence’ against women, as well as revealing the multilayered nature of women’s inequality, and finally raising this market as a priority for future analyses in the discipline.

The second half of the thesis (Chapter 4 – a published journal article, and Chapter 5 – a journal article currently under review) then applies an institutional logics analysis to advance both critical feminist analyses of pornography as well as marketing scholarship on institutional and market manifestations of inequality. In particular, an institutional logics analysis provides a way to make visible the more paradoxical and hidden mechanisms of the user-generated market and its reproduction of women’s inequality. These chapters find that feminised appeals to ‘care’ and ‘activism’ function to obscure and wash the market violence at the core of this capitalist structure, as well as constructing a social and civic ‘duty’ for women to reproduce their own subordination through content creation. Collectively, these four chapters are designed to build upon one another, bringing a structural lens to the intersection of markets, sexual violence and women’s inequality, and uncovering some of the market mechanisms that camouflage this market, obfuscate its harm and construct a moral obligation for women as content creators. The concluding chapter compiles the theoretical contributions of the thesis and how these collectively advance the problem at the centre of this project. Given the cultural significance of this market, this conclusion also attends to a point the preceding chapters have not had the capacity to do: draw out some of the practical and public policy implications of this work for addressing the persistent and pervasive problem of market violence against women. Therefore, in identifying the perpetration of market violence against women, the thesis is important and timely in revealing some of the market mechanisms that function to structurally coerce women to participate in and (re)produce their own subordination through content creation.