At the Limits of the Consenting Subject: Chronotopic Formulations of Consent and the Figure of the Porn Performer

Abstract

This article traces the 2015 controversy following porn performer Stoya’s accusation of rape by fellow performer James Deen, in which competing ideas about Stoya’s ability to consent circulated through popular and social media discourse. Focusing on the occupational class of porn performers, the article suggests that interpretations of sexual assault and notions of consent rely on particular models of personhood to prescribe and delimit definitions of who and how one can occupy a consenting (and thus, nonconsenting) subjectivity. The article introduces three chronotopic formulations of consent, spatiotemporal parameters for when and where consent is considered applicable, demonstrating how each is applied to a victim of sexual violence according to how the victim is interpellated as a particular kind of subject.

On November 28, 2015, a successful porn performer, Stoya, sent out two tweets stating that her former boyfriend, James Deen, also a well-known porn performer, had raped her (fig. 1). This pronouncement came as a shock to fans as well as to those in the industry, as the two had dated for several years and were often depicted in the media as a power couple with an idyllic relationship. Deen responded to Stoya’s tweets, dismissing the allegations as “false and defamatory” (fig. 2). Though no legal charges were ever made, as Stoya’s story spread, several other women, also mostly porn performers, began to share similar experiences of sexual assault they had had with Deen. However, rather than mobilizing action against Deen or even a unifying rally of support or sympathy for Stoya’s experience, in the months that followed, Stoya’s tweets would catalyze a media controversy centered on definitions of consent, sexual violence, and victimhood.

Figure 1. Tweets posted November 28, 2015, by Stoya

Figure 2. James Deen’s tweets posted November 29, 2015

“If this happened while they were dating, why didn’t she say anything then? Why not call the police instead of going on Twitter?” one Twitter user wrote (fig. 3, first tweet). Another commented, “Why is she promoting him on the front page of her website? That’s not normal behavior” (fig. 4, first tweet). Others responded back: “Rape is rape no matter what a woman does for a living. The idea that porn stars can’t get raped is reprehensible” (fig. 6, first tweet). These utterances, loaded with the indexical baggage of Stoya’s occupation, circled through social media spaces as followers of the controversy responded through “intertextual chains” (Bonilla and Rosa 2015) created by the hashtags: #solidaritywithStoya and #teamStoya showing their support; or #teamDeen rejecting her remarks in defense of Deen. At the same time, Stoya continued to find ways for her voice to be heard through the chatter: through blog posts in the weeks that followed, she provided a metanarrative of the controversy that saw through many of the legal and discursive frameworks that would have kept her silent. This was most evident in a blog post Stoya made a few weeks after the initial tweets:

We who work in adult entertainment navigate a legal landscape that can be uncertain. … We work in a culture that can be outright hostile, as when War Machine’s lawyer questioned whether Christy Mack can be raped because of her former career in pornography or when NYC police used carried condoms as evidence of prostitution, which it did until mid-2014. … Unlike many other industries, we who work in pornography experience the effects of moral hysteria and anti-sex work propagandists. Therefore, we who work in porn must consider these points before publicly airing any of pornography’s dirty laundry, whether its structural flaws, its ethical shortcomings, or its personal violations.¹

In this post, Stoya articulates the discursive choices she made before going public with her story, and pinpoints the key sources of her anxiety in these decisions. She discusses her use of Twitter as a venue for raising the issue, describing how the history of unfair treatment of porn performers by law enforcement and the judicial system led to her decision against seeking criminal charges and makes reference to a similar case in which another performer, Christy Mack, had been brutally attacked. She points to the lineage of “anti-sex work propagandists”—both feminists and right-wing conservatives—and the effects of “moral hysteria” they caused. Explaining the fear of how her utterances would be entextualized by the public as well as legal institutions, she makes clear that it is her visibility as a particular kind of subject, in a range of different social domains, that makes her vulnerable when making claims of sexual violence.

Figure 3. Replies to James Deen’s November 29, 2015, tweets

Figure 4. #teamDeen uses Stoya’s participation in porn as evidence against her

But why, given the clarity of her contestations, as well as the corroboration of several other women, did the claims spark such controversy? It is this question that I explore in this article—focusing not on why her statement was contested but why it was contestable. Following Stoya’s suggestion above, this article is framed around how in the uptake of claims of sexual violence, public discussions focus not only on evaluations of the perpetrator as a subject capable of committing violence, but on the victim as a subject capable of giving or denying sexual consent. While many are well aware that there is often a messiness in public discourses of sexual consent—multiple standpoints from different social domains, each internally fractionated—this article is an initial effort in the process of parsing that mess. The process starts with the questions: for whom is the discourse of sexual consent applicable? And further, what kind of subject stands at the limit of this question, whose personhood is constitutively defined as unable to consent or refuse?

Chronotopic Formulations of Consent

While work on sexual consent in the field of language and sexuality is not new (McConnell-Ginet 1989; Ehrlich 1998, 2001; Kitzinger and Frith 1999; Cameron and Kulick 2003; Kulick 2003), this article argues that answering the above questions requires a semiotic framework that attends to how interpretations of sexual assault and notions of consent rely on particular models of personhood, semiotically loaded with indexical links to prior sociohistorical discourses, by prescribing and delimiting definitions of who and how one can occupy a consenting (and thus, nonconsenting) subjectivity. Though gender, race, class, and sexual orientation—as well as age and psychological status—are all contributing factors in these interpretations, this article focuses on an occupational class: porn performers, as well as the larger occupational class of sex workers, which they are vicariously nested within.² While the article is centered on the 2015 controversy following Stoya’s accusation of rape by James Deen, relevant to this is discussion is an earlier model of porn performer consent, emergent in the 1983 attempt to pass the Dworkin-MacKinnon Ordinance, as the text serves as a prominent example of the “moral hysteria and anti-sex work propagandists” that Stoya mentions as having informed her own handling of the assault and its aftermath. The article explores processes of iconization (Peirce [1932] 1955; Gal and Irvine 1995) through which certain social groups are constructed against sexuality-centered moral discourses, and become what I term icons of antonymy—a class of signs in which the main semiotic force is to invoke iconic opposites rather than likenesses—for these moral projects. Through an unfolding process of antonymic iconization, these socially recognized figures are called on in specific cases of sexual assault to deny agency and diminish legibility for particular subjects.

Analyzing the manifold interpretations of the porn performer exposes a range of heterogeneous proscriptions for the figure’s ability to consent. These proscriptions connect the porn performer figure to particular chronotopic paradigms of consent, delineating the spatiotemporal parameters for when and where consent is applicable for a given subject. These distinct paradigms are significant in parsing the varying ways that consent is both conceived of and applied to subjects of sexual violence—proscriptions that, to be sure, have implications for how consent operates in a wide a range of contexts beyond the class of porn performers. In particular, these distinct formulations illustrate that there is no single unified notion of consent—nor a homogenous public to hold such a notion. Instead, as various models of consent compete for dominance via the social groups invested in such models, the limits and conditions of a subject’s capacity for sexual consent or refusal are shaped. These dialectics are particularly problematic when evaluations of consent rely on the legibility of that very subject, such that being read as a porn performer (or some other subject category) can overdetermine the uptake of accusations of sexual violence.

Though they may not be exhaustive, the three chronotopic formulations of consent introduced in this article are drawn from Stoya’s metacommentary on the controversy: the first, “Anywhere, Anytime,” consists in defining a given subject as consenting to all sexual activity on any occasion and in any setting (this is apparent in slut-shaming rhetoric such as “she was asking for it,” the long-standing denial of marital rape, as well as the example Stoya gives of Christy Mack’s legal case); the second, “Nowhere, Never,” emergent in antipornography and anti–sex work rhetoric, states that consent is not operable for a given subject and thus consensual sexual activity is not possible in any space or at any time (think, for instance, of age of consent laws, as well); and the third, “Here, Now,” which Stoya and her followers push forward, assumes a subject’s ability to consent and limits consent to a specific sexual event, and insists that consent can be given or withdrawn at any stage, or in any occasion of sexual activity (this is most commonly how we are taught about sexual consent through the expression “No means No,” as well as more contemporary notions of affirmative consent). Significantly, while inclusion in each paradigm requires that a particular subject is believed to meet the conditions set by that paradigm (factors such as, e.g., age, marital status, psychological status), in the case of the porn performer figure, we see that all three of these paradigms appear in the manifold interpretations of a single event of sexual violence.

Enregisterment, Multiaccentuality, Chronotope

After decades of the porn industry’s unrelenting expansion and proliferation from the 1970s into the internet porn era of the early 2000s, the porn performer figure has become an “object of commentary” (Reyes 2017a, 213) in a vast range of social domains, from moral panics about porn to discourses of sexual empowerment (Rubin 1984; Hall 1995). These invocations of the porn performer enact an unfolding process of enregisterment (Agha 2005, 2007a), asserting the porn performer as a “figure of personhood,” a widely recognized social type with associated attributes, habitual behaviors, and qualities within specifiable social domains (Goffman 1981; Irvine 1996; Agha 2005; Reyes 2017b). Asif Agha has defined enregisterment as “processes and practices whereby performable signs become recognized (and regrouped) as belonging to distinct, differentially valorized semiotic registers by a population” (2007a, 81). Semiotic registers assign “stereotypic indexical values to performable signs” (81), but in the case of the porn performer figure, these stereotypic links are wide-ranging and often contradictory—from associated qualities of criminality and hypersexuality to victimhood as well as empowerment—depending on the social domain in which the figure appears.

This internal heterogeneity of the porn performer figure is an effect of its multiaccentuality, a condition of the “inner dialectic quality” of all signs (Voloshinov [1973] 1996, 23), a dynamic and productive site where variant models of the sign, with new accents of meaning, can emerge. In Stoya’s blog post, she explains that the many possible renderings of her—all in reference to her occupation but in different ways—were central to her fears about going public with her story, as well as her decision not to seek legal assistance. She notes not just one enregisterment of sex workers that could affect her negatively, but several, each coming from distinct pockets of the population: a lawyer defending a man accused of rape, the NYPD, and anti–sex work feminists. These multiple enregistered notions of the porn performer figure, each with divergent indexically linked qualities and capabilities, have distinct semiotic consequences both for those regarded as inhabiting a porn performer subjectivity (such as Stoya) and for those interpreting the figure as such (i.e., antiporn activists, porn consumers, or other actual porn performers). In what follows, I consider how in the debates following Stoya’s tweets the multiaccentuality of the porn performer figure is harnessed for distinct, even opposed, semiotic work, as Twitter users create referential alignments among themselves by calling on particular enregistered notions of the porn performer. As these Twitter debates make clear, negotiations of consent that claim to center on a speech act (whether consent was given or not) are in fact more often than not dependent on broad notions of personhood and a subject’s preconceived capacity for giving consent.

Significantly, these preconceived capacities—emergent in the simultaneous circulation and enregisterment of the porn performer figure—become the conditions for inclusion in one of the three paradigms of consent described above. I have labeled these divergent paradigms of consent after the specific spatiotemporal, or chronotopic (Bakhtin 1981, 84), envelope indicating the space and time dimensions (i.e., Here, Now/Nowhere, Never/Everywhere, Anytime) of acceptable consensual sexual activity for a given subject. However, these chronotopic formulations not only index a specified spatial and temporal framework, they index types of people that could exist within that frame. As Agha defines it, “a chronotope is a semiotic representation of time and place peopled by certain social types” (2007b, 321). In the chronotopic formulations of consent, parameters of time and space—even in the seemingly absolute, abstract terms of “Nowhere, Never” or “Anywhere, Anytime”—are always connected to notions of who—what type of person—can occupy such dimensions. Since Stoya is regarded via multiple enregistered notions of the porn performer figure, several chronotopic formulations of consent are seen as appropriate to her case, just by different people. As each chronotopic formulation has vastly different repercussions for a victim of sexual violence, this conjunction of paradoxical applications of the paradigms of consent puts Stoya, or anyone evaluated via the figure of the porn performer, in a precarious and dangerously ambiguous position for making claims of sexual violence. I argue that, on the one hand, the porn performer’s presumed sexual deviancy in popular discourses leads to an understanding that they are always already consenting, or as James Deen’s supporters— #teamDeen—suggest, that their occupation serves as consent, while, on the other hand, the porn performer figure is excluded from the norms of consensual sex due to her subordinated position and presumptions of victimhood within a system of exploitation in antipornography rhetoric such as the Dworkin-MacKinnon Ordinance. In yet another instantiation, the movement in support of Stoya, the porn performer is seen as a willful speaking subject, capable of consent, and becomes an emblem for a feminist movement of sexual empowerment and end to rape culture. It is this overlap of the models of consent, in part the result of competing notions of porn performer subjectivity, themselves arising from intertextual chains of discourse from very different groups of people, which I interrogate below.

Readings of Rape in 2015

In the months following her November 28 tweets, Stoya’s voice was cited and circulated—in both opposition and support of her—but always in reference to the subjectivity her discourse was presumed to emanate from: the figure of the porn performer. Below, I outline the uptake of Stoya’s November 28 tweets, as well as the responses to Deen’s denial tweets (figs. 1 and 2), in which users of Twitter took sides on the event through the intertextual discursive tool of the hashtag: using either “#solidaritywithStoya” or “#teamDeen” to express their opinion. Before looking into the responses, however, it is necessary to look at where the controversy begins: with Stoya’s own account of the event.³

In the initial two tweets, shown in figure 1, Stoya creates a coherent narrative of rape that avoids ambiguity as well as navigates several of the common sources of doubt in readings of rape allegations. Through statement of the use of physical force: “James Deen held me down”; the violation of the rules of consent: “while I said no, stop, used my safeword”;⁴ as well as overtly defining the event as “rape”: “the guy who raped you”; Stoya presents a thorough discursive reconstruction of the event as an act of sexual violence, and a violation of her explicit attempt at dissent through an established discourse of refusals. Her account, though brief, leaves very little room for interpretation of the event as anything but an instance of sexual violence and a violation of the rules of consent. Both of these tweets were widely disseminated on Twitter through retweets, but in addition the topic was spread through several intertextual chains created by the hashtags: #solidaritywithStoya; #teamStoya; #teamDeen; #istandwithStoya. As the tweets circulated on social media, Stoya’s narrative of rape became rearticulated as an accusation, allegation, as well as by Deen himself as “an egregious claim” that was both “false and defamatory” (fig. 2). The next section focuses on these anti-Stoya, or #teamDeen, responses, illustrating the first formulation of the porn performer figure—as a hypersexual yet willful and empowered (though morally corrupt) subject.

Once Consenting, Always Consenting: #teamDeen

Many of the anti-Stoya, or #teamDeen tweets sought to cast a shadow of doubt upon her claims by constructing Stoya as an unreliable subject, one whose testimony should not be taken seriously, in order to strengthen Deen’s denial of the sexual assault (fig. 3).

In figure 3, Twitter users respond directly to James Deen’s denial of assault with support, arguing that Stoya should not be believed because (a) she only reported the assault on Twitter (fig. 3, first tweet); (b) she had gained followers on social media, and thus was trying to use the controversy to attract attention for her personal brand and to increase her own fame (fig. 3, second and third tweets); (c) the other accusers—“these girls” (fig. 3, third tweet)—were also porn performers only interested in fame and (d) because she was jealous of James Deen’s new relationship (fig. 3, fourth tweet). These Twitter users construe her character as untrustworthy, desirous of illicit forms of attention, and overcome with jealousy—all reasons, they argued, not to believe her story.

While assumptions of transgressive sexuality and poor character are not uncommon to victims of sexual assault more generally, many #teamDeen tweets explicitly remark on Stoya’s involvement in the sex industry to bolster these claims. The fact that users share a skepticism about Stoya’s allegations through the mention of her profession—“her followers” and “site visitors” reference her fans as well as the porn site she co-owns (fig. 3, second tweet), and the user in figure 3 (third tweet) argues that Deen’s other accusers (“these girls”) and Stoya are jealous of his comparably greater porn stardom—suggests that the figure of the porn performer is a relatively enregistered emblem (Agha 2007a) for this group of Twitter users. This particular enregisterment of the porn performer figure is not new, however; instead, #teamDeen discourse builds on long-standing stereotypic associations between sex workers and cultural notions of transgressive female sexuality, such as the harlot, whore, or jezebel (Pheterson 1987; Miller-Young 2014; Gira Grant 2014). These related figures carry indexical associations of criminality, promiscuity, and licentious behavior, associations that circulate alongside the porn performer figure despite the critical distinction of porn performance as a legal form of sex work. Even in tweets that do not explicitly remark on Stoya’s profession (fig. 3, first and fourth tweets), Twitter users share anti-Stoya sentiments by implying that Stoya is morally corrupt and likely pulling a scam, trying to get attention or financial gain, or even acting out of jealousy toward Deen’s new lover. As part of an intertextual chain in which Stoya’s profession figures heavily, these tweets contribute to the discursive conjuring of the porn performer figure as an abnormal sexualized subject, the antithesis of the sexually chaste and virtuous. In turn, Stoya’s decision not to “call the police instead of going on Twitter” (fig. 3, first tweet) only underscores the assumptions of illicit, criminal behavior presupposed by Twitter users due to her occupation. Rather than ask, “Why would she choose to make these claims without legal intervention?” (this is discussed in further detail later on), these users presume the already criminal in her actions, and disregard her statement as libel.

In order to reinforce #teamDeen’s denial of conventional interpretations of sexual assault (such as the principle that victims should be believed, etc.), the porn performer is drawn on as what I term an icon of antonymy, cited to imply and reify an (oppositional) normative notion of sexual activity outside of sex work. Here, I draw on Peirce’s theory of signs, in particular his definition of an “icon,” as a sign relation of similarity or likeness (a sign that stands for something it is perceived to be similar to), but I attend specifically to an example from Peirce that has been anthropologically underexplored. This is the “drunken man” as an icon that operates through an opposition to likeness. The “drunken man,” Peirce states, “is exhibited in order to show, by contrast, the excellence of temperance, this is certainly an icon, but whether it is a likeness or not may be doubted” ([1932] 1955, 107). Though Peirce leaves the question open, what I refer to here as an “icon of antonymy” builds on this example: a sign relation held together by opposition, nested in a likeness, but representing a dissimilarity. Though work on iconicity has stressed that semiotic relations of similarity and opposition are always simultaneously coproduced (Irvine and Gal 2000; Gal 2012), the sign of the drunken man is particular in that its main semiotic force is in the production of an oppositional semiotic category: temperance. That is, the drunken man is called on in certain instances to invoke temperance and sobriety (its opposite) rather than to signify drunkenness. Though these icons can become quite stable formations for a given group (for instance, the drunken man among followers of the temperance movement), they are best understood as part of an ongoing social process of antonymic iconization. I argue that this process is at work in the sign of the porn performer, as the porn performer, a subset of the sex worker, is incessantly cited and recited to invoke an oppositional category of sexual normativity, though the particular valence of that opposition is always contextually shifting.

Many of the #teamDeen remarks contribute to the process of antonymic iconization of the porn performer subject. In particular, this process becomes apparent through a consideration of another common anti-Stoya argument: the notion that participation in the consensual sex involved in performing in porn is incommensurable with the violation of consent that rape and sexual violence presupposed.

In the examples in figure 5, those participating in #teamDeen discourse suggest that participation in porn is hypocritical for a victim of sexual assault. In figure 4 (first tweet), Twitter user @shingles1975 cites the fact that her website (an alternative porn company that she co-owned) was still online as evidence against Stoya’s claims. The ongoing existence of Stoya’s website (a central source of her income, including profits derived from older video clips that featured Deen) is described as “not normal behavior” for a victim of sexual assault, thus positioning Stoya’s occupation as antithetical to her role as a victim. Other members of #teamDeen went further by making explicit reference to her work as a porn performer while at the same time denying that she was capable of being raped by siding with Deen (fig. 4, second and third tweets). In figure 4 (third tweet), user @firepro2k15 facetiously dismisses the pro-Stoya hashtag #istandwithStoya by describing an imagined sex scene with her (imaginable in detail because of her work as a porn performer) while at the same time showing support for Deen through use of the hashtag #teamDeen. In figure 4 (second tweet), another user’s question begins with “How can you rape them when … ,” positing an if/then logic that implies that she (and the other porn performers accusing Deen) could not be victims of sexual violence given their consensual participation in pornography.

Figure 5. “Once consenting, always consenting” sentiment in reply to James Deen’s November 28, 2015, tweet.

As stated above, the process of antonymic iconization unfolding in #teamDeen intertextual chains places Stoya outside the realm of the sexually normative, yet in a very particular way: the figure is viewed as both hypersexual and capable of willful consent, but only of a certain kind. This logic can be referred to as “once consenting, always consenting,” a reasoning that suggests that Stoya’s consent to perform in porn constitutes consent to all subsequent sexual activity (fig. 5). In fact, this became the leading anti-Stoya argument: the notion that acts of sexual consent and refusals are irrelevant (and ineffective) once a subject has willfully chosen the occupation of the porn performer.

In figure 5, user @veepeevaughn claims that it is “not rape it’s repeat,” underscoring that consent, once given, need not be given again. This example of a common response to James Deen’s tweets demonstrates how claims of violation are dismissed through an extension of the chronotopic envelope of consent, such that a bounded instance of consensual sexual activity (participation in sex work) becomes extended to consent to all sexual activity thereafter, even if it occurs outside of work, as in the case of Stoya. Here, the logic of “once consenting, always consenting” locates the porn performer figure within the chronotopic formulation “Anywhere, Anytime,” as it stretches the spatiotemporal envelope of consent such that the ontological basis of the porn performer figure (as a subject who performs in pornography) becomes synonymous with consent to all sexual activity: the porn performer figure’s very being serves as consent. Thus, in this case, the conditions for inclusion in the category of porn performer (consenting to perform in porn) serve as the necessary conditions for inclusion in the “Anywhere, Anytime” paradigm (consenting to perform in porn). In this view, the existence of the porn performer subject constitutes consent to all subsequent sexual activity, thus diminishing claims of sexual violation by overdetermining readings of all sexual encounters involving porn performers as consensual.

To be sure, this paradigm of consent has often been applied to victims of sexual violence outside of the porn industry. The argument that consenting once to a sexual act means consenting to all instances thereafter is tied to particular social practices and positions, appearing often in cases involving abuse in married couples, instances of sexualized domestic violence, as well as date rape cases. Yet in these other instances the “Anywhere, Anytime” formulation of consent has restrictions on to whom that consent was given (i.e., the husband, partner, or even date for the evening). In other words, it is seen as a contract between two people that once given, makes sexual encounters between those individuals consensual thereafter. Yet in Stoya’s case the significant distinction is that she is seen as sexually available to all—including users in the #teamDeen thread (fig. 4, third tweet)—not just to Deen.⁵ In the examples above, it is her occupation, and the presupposed notions of sexual availability and sexual deviancy that the porn performer figure, as an abnormal sexual subject, indexes (made clear in the imagined sex scenes described in fig. 4, second and third tweets, as well as the “not normal behavior” [fig. 4, first tweet] of running a porn website), that serve to prove Deen’s innocence. It is critical to the social positioning of #teamDeen users that these are put together: “Anywhere, Anytime” cannot be applied to any subject, as that could be seen as condoning rape; instead #teamDeen users preserve a notion of sexual normativity to which Stoya is excluded, by constructing and reifying the porn performer figure as an icon of antonymy, outside the sexually normative. However, #teamDeen users were not alone in commenting on Stoya’s tweets. In the following sections, I turn first to pro-Stoya Twitter users’ responses to #teamDeen, and second, to the broader politics signaled by the debate—as the pro-Stoya stance incorporates not just a reaction to anti-Stoya sentiments, but to a longer history of anti–sex worker politics.

#solidaritywithstoya: Being on “The Right Side of History”

Aware of the issues in #teamDeen’s rhetoric, those in support of Stoya attempted to bring the problematics of the #teamDeen discursive logic to the surface. In particular, many of the Twitter responses in support of Stoya pointed out the flaws in applying an “Anywhere, Anytime” paradigm of consent by citing its correlated conclusion: the notion that “porn stars can’t be raped.” Aghast at this sentiment, responses were posted under the hashtag #solidaritywithStoya (fig. 6).

Figure 6. #solidaritywithStoya response to “Porn stars can’t get raped”

As the responses to Stoya’s tweets spread, more and more Twitter users became involved through attachments to the political aspects of the conversation. In particular, those rallying around Stoya often contextualized #solidaritywithStoya within a political platform of sex positivity, sex workers’ rights, and an end to rape culture and “slut-shaming.”

In figure 7, #solidaritywithStoya comes to index solidarity with all sex workers, as well as an alignment with a contemporary iteration of feminism in which sex workers’ rights are at the forefront. This is accomplished in part through the intertextual linkages between hashtags (Bonilla and Rosa 2015); in figure 7 (second tweet), #solidaritywithStoya is co-present with #IDEVSW (International Day to End Violence against Sex Workers), thus linking Stoya’s case to the broader social movement of sex worker’s rights activism; in figure 7 (fourth tweet), Stoya’s case is connected to the even larger feminist struggle against misogyny and the goal to “#EndRapeCulture.” These tweets serve as a direct response to #teamDeen rhetoric, as well as portray the recognition of a larger politics inhering in the debate around Stoya’s claims.

Figure 7. #solidaritywithStoya underscores Stoya’s profession

However, while these politics include general themes of feminism, they also invoke a more specific debate within feminism regarding pornography—the schism initiated by the so-called “sex wars” of the 1980s (Vance 1993; Duggan 2006; Dodson 2013; Smith and Attwood 2013; Hester 2014). Most famously encapsulated in the Dworkin-MacKinnon Ordinance and its backlash, these long-standing debates within feminism—often divided into “sex-positive” or “sex-negative”/ “antiporn” contingents—hinge on topics of porn, sex work, and the presumed or proscribed agency of the sex worker subject. In figure 7, those in #solidaritywithStoya make clear that they are on the pro–sex worker, sex-positive side of this debate. In fact, many of the #solidaritywithStoya tweets seemed to be more directly addressed to other feminists than to #teamDeen, such as user @rebeccaestherc’s tweet stating: “if your definition of feminism doesn’t include supporting or standing by sex workers, then you’re not a feminist” (fig. 7, first tweet). These tweets draw on Stoya’s case to make a larger political claim about how feminism should be defined. In order to be “on the right side of history” (fig. 7, fifth tweet), any self-identifying feminist needs to support Stoya—not just because all women should be believed, but more specifically because all sex workers should be believed. Thus, in figures 6–7, #solidaritywithStoya is used to index a contrastive “feminist” persona; distinguishing its users from what they view as the misogynistic discourse of #teamDeen, as well as more broadly enunciating a specific iteration of sex-positive, pro–sex worker feminism. In order to understand the context for this contrastive stance, the next section provides a glimpse into an earlier period of antipornography feminism to which #solidaritywithStoya is responding by looking at its key text: the Dworkin-MacKinnon Ordinance.

“Pornography Is a Civil Rights Issue”: The Dworkin-MacKinnon Ordinance

During the 1980s, a wave of antipornography sentiments swept through the United States, notably marked by the collusion of second-wave feminists and right-wing conservatives in several attempts at passing antipornography legislature. The most prominent and successful of these attempts was the “Anti-pornography Civil Rights Ordinance,” also known as the “Dworkin-MacKinnon Ordinance,” named after Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon, the feminist scholars who coauthored the bill. Stoya made the connection between her case and this discourse quite clear in her blog’s metacommentary on the controversy. Expanding on her fear of going public due to “anti-sex work propagandists,” Stoya writes, “Most of all, I was afraid that speaking would only serve to fuel the arguments of outside groups who aim to dictate how we adult performers do our jobs and whether we’re legally allowed to do them at all.” As a prototypical example of one of the “outside groups” to which Stoya refers, the Dworkin-MacKinnon Ordinance is key to understanding a particular enregisterment of the porn performer figure, distinct from that which arises in #teamDeen discourse, including how it envisions the figure as able or unable to give (or withhold) sexual consent.

In this rendering of the figure, there can never be a willful female subject consenting to participate in pornography, as any involvement in the industry presupposes coercion due to the patriarchal asymmetries of power that place the porn performer figure in the slot of the subordinated victim.⁶ This is stated rather explicitly in the first section of the bill, which seeks to redefine pornography as “graphic sexually explicit materials that subordinate women” (Dworkin and MacKinnon 1988, 134) which the authors make clear is not restricted to violent images, but to the implicit violence against women that all pornography entails. The first section from the Cambridge, Massachusetts, draft is depicted in figure 8 (line breaks are from original document). In this preambular description, a process of antonymic iconization is enacted, through which pornography becomes a hyperbolized site resembling the ills of a society under patriarchy, and the porn performer is constructed as an icon of the issues the feminist struggle is up against. This process of iconization relies on the erasure (Gal and Irvine 1995) of different kinds of experience within the porn industry, such that “psychic assault, sexual exploitation, forced sex and prostitution, physical injury and social and sexual terrorism” (lines 7–8) are the only possibilities for the porn performer. Through the definition of pornography as “a practice of sex discrimination” (line 2) and “subordination based on sex” (line 5), two subject positions are inscribed: the subordinated (explicitly named as the female performer) and the subordinating (implicitly the male performer, as well as male producers, directors, and consumers of porn). This dichotomy of figures within the porn industry is symptomatic of the recursivity (Gal and Irvine 1995) of the semiotic process of ideological differentiation, wherein oppositions established at one level (e.g., intergroup) recur at another level (e.g., intragroup). Thus, the antonymic relationship between pornography and “the commonwealth” (line 3) is transposed onto the social positions of subordinator/subordinated and the social types associated with those positions. In this sense, despite the female porn performer being located (both materially and symbolically) in an industry itself outside of the norms of society, within the industry the porn performer figure is positioned as an emblem for Dworkin and MacKinnon’s struggle for “civil rights” due to its oppositional relation to the more generalized figure of the subordinator. Again, the porn performer operates as an icon of antonymy: it is invoked in the Ordinance as a symbol of the struggle against that which it resembles. However, in this case the porn performer figure as an icon of antonymy carries quite different shades of meaning from how it was used by #teamDeen. Whereas in #teamDeen discourse it is the presumed moral corruptness of the porn performer that opposes her to the norms of sexuality, in the Dworkin-MacKinnon Ordinance, the porn performer figure is antonymic to the sexually good and natural (sexual equality free of patriarchy) due to the subjugation and victimhood of the figure.

Figure 8. Excerpt from An Act to Protect the Civil Rights of Women and Children (1992)

The bill’s construction of the porn performer as subjugated victim becomes even more significant in the bill’s treatment of performer consent in the following section of the bill, known as “the coercion provision,” a list of factors that cannot be used to disprove coercion. These factors explicitly delimit performer agency and consent in ways that leave no possibility for uncoerced participation (Padgett 2019). The coercion provision begins the list by stating, “proof of one or more of the following facts or conditions shall not, without more, preclude a finding of coercion” (sec. 3.1, 1988, 138) and includes exclusions such as: proof of payment, proof of prior knowledge of the acts involved, proof of contract, the absence of physical force, the absence of resistance or the appearance of cooperation, as well as whether “the person actually consented to a use of a performance that is then changed into pornography” (sec. 3.1.h.). By stating that proof of contract, prior knowledge of the acts involved, or that a performer “actually consented” does not preclude coercion, the bill effectively negates the possibility of consent for the porn performer subject. In turn, the bill seeks to secure the placement of the porn performer figure within a “Nowhere, Never” paradigm of consent, which sees consent as not possible for a given subject at any time or in any place. Like a child whose signature, however willingly given, cannot bind a contract, Dworkin and MacKinnon state explicitly that a porn performer’s consent (be it through contract, visible cooperation or affirmations of consensual activity before and after) does not qualify as consent.⁷ Dworkin and MacKinnon justify these limitations through the logic already established by the bill, wherein an indexical link has been constructed between the performer subject and the already coerced subject, a victim of patriarchy incapable of giving consent.

Though these bills were never successfully passed, their circulation was key to the process of enregisterment of the porn performer figure as always already the subordinated victim, an articulation of the porn performer that endures today.⁸ Many of the bill’s discursive strategies have survived in current legislature addressing sex work, including the 2018 SESTA/FOSTA bill,⁹ particularly through the bills’ attempts to link pornography to sexualized violence, and porn performers to the victimhood of this violence (Vance 2011; Bernstein 2018). Like Dworkin-MacKinnon’s antonymic iconization of the figure, the construction of indexical links to victimhood and the use of sex workers as icons of a movement to end sex work are central features of what has been termed the “rescue industry” (Agustín 2007), a discursive regime that positions its enunciators as helpers, and constructs particular “others” as subjects in need of help. As the figure gets enunciated by interlocutors of a new sociohistoric context, Dworkin and MacKinnon’s articulations of the porn performer—as subordinated, silenced, and already coerced—serve as rejoinders to newer iterations of the porn performer figure, fuel oppositional responses such as the sex-positive pro-Stoya remarks in figure 7, or are seen as potential limitations by those regarded as embodiments of the figure, such as Stoya.

The diverse responses to Stoya’s claims exploit the multiaccentuality of the porn performer figure as the grounds for the unfolding of a broader political debate. In addition, the processes of antonymic iconization visible in both #teamDeen discourse as well as the antiporn movement produce markedly different results: while in the Dworkin-MacKinnon Ordinance all porn performers were construed as victims of sexual violence due to their location as a figure outside of the norms of sexual equality, #teamDeen and its related discursive chains suggest that willing participants in porn could not be victims of sexual violence precisely because of their involvement in porn. This differentiation is obtained through a shift in the application of the paradigms of consent: while in the first instance the porn performer figure is confined to the “Nowhere, Never” paradigm, due to a presupposition of coercion, in the second, the porn performer is trapped in an “Anywhere, Anytime” paradigm where consent is what is presupposed. The double bind of these two parallel and yet contradictory iterations is clear in attempts to contest these stances, in the pro-Stoya sentiments expressed both on social media and by Stoya herself.

The Willful Speaking Subject

As the controversy unfolded, Stoya provided a metacommentary that exposed many of the contradictory discourses around the porn performer figure as well as the harmful applications of the various chronotopic paradigms of consent. Caught in a bind between accepting that her story would be refuted based on her occupation and aligning with an anti–sex work politics, Stoya rejected both the “Anywhere, Anytime” and “Nowhere, Never” paradigms. Instead, Stoya insisted on another: the “Here, Now,” a chronotopic formulation of consent requiring the renewal of consent for every sexual interaction, sometimes even within a single sexual encounter. This “Here, Now” paradigm was made evident in the language of her initial two tweets through a precise description of how exactly consent was withdrawn and the sexual act shifted to sexual violence. She writes, “while I said no, stop, used my safeword,” (fig. 1) narrowing the moment in which consent was violated to a series of utterances within a single sexual interaction. Though she does not state a time or place when the rape occurred, Stoya makes clear that what she is referring to is a specific event—a moment (or several, as she states at least three attempts at refusing sexual activity) within a sexual interaction, itself within the context of her relationship with Deen, in which her consent was violated and the act became violent. By her account, she is a willful, speaking subject capable of giving consent, whose willful refusal is being ignored within the chronotopic envelope of the here-and-now in which the sexual violation occurred.

The “Here, Now” paradigm was also the chronotopic formulation that many of her supporters insisted on as well, as seen in figure 9: “Here, Now” is precisely the paradigm operative in what is commonly known as a “No means No” approach to consent. In this application, the “Here, Now” chronotopic envelope of consent is narrowed to the context of a single utterance (the word “no”). It is thus in contrast to “Anywhere, Anytime” in which consent given at some point in time—whether it is through participation in the sex industry (as referenced in fig. 9: “no matter what job you do”), or through prior sexual interactions with the same individual (“no matter if he’s your partner”), or even consent within the same sexual interaction (“no matter how many times you’ve said yes”)—entails consent to subsequent sexual activity. At the same time, “Here, Now” refutes the “Nowhere, Never” paradigm of consent by demanding that a willful speaking subject is capable of consent and dissent and that their utterance of the word “no” must be heard as a refusal of sexual activity, no matter who they are or what the context of the utterance is. As discussed above, these other paradigms, which supporters of the “Here, Now” reject, rely on the porn performer figure as an icon of antonymy to establish the preconditions for inclusion in each respective paradigm of consent. Thus, in their dismissal of both the “Anywhere, Anytime” and “Nowhere, Never” paradigms, Stoya and her supporters sought to untether this antonymic relationship and rearticulate the porn performer figure as not outside the realm of the sexually acceptable, such that the norms of consent, which, as indicated by the “Here, Now” paradigm, rely on a willful speaking subject, could be applied.

Figure 9. #solidaritywithStoya supports a “Here, Now” paradigm of consent

Despite this insistence however, demands for a “Here, Now” paradigm of consent did not amount to its application outside of Stoya’s supporters. Stoya’s tweets were still entextualized by others as emanating from particular formulations of the porn performer figure—as either a helpless victim of the porn industry or as an always already consenting whore—to which the other paradigms of consent were then linked. Though we are often taught “no means no” as the golden rule of consent,¹⁰ the “Here, Now” chronotope implied by this phrase presumes an abstracted individual, outside the processes of social enregisterment through which individuals are tied to social groups, and social groups are linked to qualities, activities, and abilities. While the “Here, Now” paradigm of consent is the most familiar—common to sex education curriculums, discourses of sexual autonomy and empowerment, and movements to end sexualized violence and rape culture—in its reliance on a willful, speaking subject, those advocating for the paradigm often ignore the social, cultural, and legal processes through which such a subject is formed. What’s more, looking at Stoya’s experience demonstrates that the “Here, Now” formulation is but one of many models of consent and is not necessarily the leading model, nor is it the dominant model in legal institutions—at least not for all subjects.

Yet Stoya foresaw this dilemma when she expressed her anxieties about going public with her story. Returning to Stoya’s blog post, it is clear that Stoya’s own analysis of the discursive repercussions of her claims fits the schematic of chronotopic formulations I have outlined in this article. In it she draws out the various models of consent to which she may be seen as beholden to, as well as the various publics supporting these models. First, she illustrates applications of the “Anywhere, Anytime” model, particularly as it has appeared in legal cases and among law enforcement involving porn performers and sex workers. This is demonstrated by her example of Christy Mack’s case, in which the defense attorney of Mack’s attacker (the attacker was also a former boyfriend, an MMA fighter named War Machine) argued that charges of sexual assault should be dismissed on the basis of Mack’s profession. Similar to the members of #teamDeen, War Machine’s lawyer suggested that Mack’s consent to participate in the adult industry constitutes consent to all subsequent sexual activity and thus prohibits her from making claims of sexual assault. In addition to this very apt legal precedent,¹¹ Stoya mentions the Condom Laws in New York, which allow the NYPD to use possession of condoms as evidence of prostitution, building on enregistered notions of the sex worker as a sexual deviant, and linking a presumed sexual promiscuity to illicit sexual transaction.¹² With these examples, Stoya evinces the harms of the “Anywhere, Anytime” paradigm in constructing and supporting a legal framework that defines her as not only outside of the law’s protections but a likely target of its punitive force.

In the second half of Stoya’s commentary, she explains how the fear of promoting the “Nowhere, Never” paradigm—in which the agency of the consenting subject is entirely stripped away—outweighed, at least for a time, her desire to come forward with her story. She discusses concerns about how her story may be appropriated in antipornography and anti–sex work cultural and political discourses—the Dworkin-MacKinnon Ordinance being the prototype referent—which have aimed to “protect” the sex worker by legally blurring the terms of consent altogether, inscribing all sex workers as victims of coercion, if not outright abuse. Indexing the harms of which this political position had resulted, Stoya’s statement explained her unwillingness to fuel the “moral hysteria and anti-sex work propagandists” that might use James Deen’s violation of consent as evidence for the structural violence and coercion of the entire porn industry. Stoya’s meaning was further clarified in an article by her close friend and business partner Kayden Kross, in which she wrote, “Stoya knew that if she were to name one man who did, in fact, violate consent, then the entire industry would be assumed to be complicit” (Kross 2015). Thus, her decision to avoid airing the “structural flaws” and “ethical shortcomings” of the porn industry, because it may legitimate a politics that ends up hindering and even harming herself and other porn performers, is in this case also a refusal to align with the “Nowhere, Never” paradigm of consent.

Stoya’s careful analysis of both the “legal landscape” and a “culture that is outright hostile” also makes clear that in the discursive struggle between competing models, not only are formulations of consent differently understood by various factions of the population, but not all formulations have the same kind of dissemination, nor are all supported by formal institutions. These chronotopic formulations are varied in “scales of relevance” (Agha 2007b, 324); while some models have a social authority attached to them, others have no institutional uptake whatsoever. Yet institutional uptake is not the only route to dissemination; as made clear by the Dworkin-MacKinnon Ordinance, a failed attempt to intervene with an authoritative discourse (a legal bill that was never passed) remains consequential in its continued articulation both by antiporn activists of a new era and by those who oppose them. Eerie, but perhaps unsurprising, is the fact that the model of consent often perceived as dominant—the “Here, Now”—is not only not shared by all but is not necessarily the model with the most institutional authority. As discussed above, Stoya’s decision not to involve the legal system comes from the expectation that she will be placed within an “Anywhere, Anytime” chronotopic frame by this system. However, decisions to avoid such authorities do not necessarily result in an avoidance of a particular paradigm of consent, as it crops up in other social domains as well, such as the #teamDeen responses on Twitter. The problem is one of competing models of consent asymmetrically disseminated between many social domains, and thus unequal in their consequentiality, such that Stoya’s demands for the “Here, Now” get caught in the ongoing dialectics produced by the many voices invested in her story and the respective cultural projects they support.

Conclusion

In this article, I have made apparent that consent must be addressed as less about a speaking act (whether it occurred or not) but as being regarded and evaluated as a kind of subject. As demonstrated by the uptake of Stoya’s tweets, the push and pull of multiple enregistered notions of the porn performer establishes a fundamental ambivalence in the figure, particularly when it comes to deciding which paradigm of consent ought to be applied. This multiaccentuality is furthered by the social positions indexed by holding these views—while pushing for performers’ ability to consent indexes a platform of sex-positive feminism and empowerment, pushing against it can mean an alternative view of feminism or a rejection of the terms of feminism altogether. Moreover, tracing the many enregistered forms of the porn performer sheds light on discourses of consent more generally, demonstrating the way in which public discussions, media discourse, and even legal decisions on sexual violence circle around an individual’s presumed ability to occupy a consenting subjectivity in a given place and time, shifting the conversations from whether an event happened or not to whether it could have happened at all—to a particular kind of subject.

The kind of subject this article has addressed is sex workers, and I have argued that the problem with sexual consent as it applies to sex workers is an inconsistent and unstable system in which multiple formulations of consent are applied to the same subject for a single event of sexual violence. In the first formulation, “Anywhere, Anytime,” consent is individuated but tied to a discursive moment that is prior to the act at issue (such as the choice to enter the porn industry) such that consent to sexual activity is overdetermined by an earlier speech act that allows for consent thereafter to appear pre-given. In the second, “Nowhere, Never,” consent is defined by structural conditions, such as the social category of porn performer, and thus becomes inaccessible at the level of the individual. The third, “Here, Now,” relies on a notion of a willful, speaking subject capable of giving consent, but ignores the processes of subject formation through which an individual comes to be included in this category. In addition, usages of the porn performer as an icon of antonymy have further consequences for its treatment within these models of consent, beyond being placed in multiple chronotopic formulations. When we consider other social practices and positions to which these formulations are associated—such as the “Anywhere, Anytime” model of consent as applied to married women,¹³ or the “Nowhere, Never” as applied to persons under the age of 18—it is clear that in these cases, the chronotopic formulations have specified (potential) endpoints: a married woman can become divorced, and a minor can turn 18. This is not the case when these models are applied to the porn performer figure—a result, I argue, of its usage as an icon of antonymy, reifying sexual normativity through its opposition, and thus seen as forever outside the norms of consent. Former adult performers often complain that they are still viewed through this social type long after they have left the business; it is clear from Christy Mack’s case—which happened after she had retired—that the envelope of “Anywhere, Anytime” initiated by her work in the porn industry is still seen to be open, at least by the defense lawyer in her case. According to anti–sex work feminists, the applications of the chronotopic formulation emerge from structural asymmetries of power such that there are no exceptions to the “Nowhere, Never” chronotope for the porn performer: it can’t end, until patriarchy—or pornography—ends. In this case, these two models are buttressed by a semiotics around the porn performer figure as an icon of antonymy, always outside of an ill-defined normativity, but a normativity that assumes that sexual consent is operative somewhere, sometimes, for some people, just not here, not now, and most importantly not for them. That other space and time is precisely the “Here, Now” of the third paradigm, an abstracted notion of consent as spoken by an agentive subject and interpreted free of contextual interference, such that “no” (or whatever safe word you prefer) means no. Thus, these three models work in tandem, with the “Here, Now” as the norm of consent to which both “Anywhere, Anytime” and “Nowhere, Never” are the exceptions.

These competing models of consent have implications for how consent is applied to victims of sexual violence outside the sex industry as well. Similar work that addresses the three chronotopic formulations of consent beyond the porn performer figure would enrich the understanding of this process. Yet even a brief consideration of how these paradigms operate beyond the porn performer figure reminds us that there are instances where exceptions to the norm of the “Here, Now” might be necessary—for instance, cases involving children or individuals unconscious at the moment of sexual interaction might require a “Nowhere, Never” paradigm.¹⁴ At the same time, understanding that the cultural politics of enregisterment will continue to bring new meanings to the social figure of the porn performer implies that the solidification of a monologic subject is not only unproductive, but likely impossible. It is thus neither the many formulations of the porn performer figure nor the multiple paradigms of consent that are amiss, but the point at which the two meet: such that in the uptake of a single instance of sexual violence, all three paradigms are being applied—thus delaying action until one paradigm is chosen—due to the co-presence of conflicting renderings of the figure. It is this process, through which a person is evaluated as a kind of subject and subsequently placed within a given paradigm of consent, that I have made transparent in this article. This essay has shown how one type of subject, the porn performer, stands at the limits of consent, occupying the liminal space between consent and refusal; I presume there are many other kinds of subjects out there too.