The Changing Landscape of Online Pornography: Translocal Networks and Transcultural Practices

Pornography's massive growth online in the last 25 years, and the emergence of technologies such as broadband, webcams and smartphones, has led to fundamental changes in the ways people encounter, consume, and relate to online porn. Pornography has undoubtedly infiltrated the Western mainstream; it is now woven into the fabric of ordinary life and everyday online multitasking. The ways porn is accessed and consumed continue to evolve, keeping pace with broader changes in Web use. While there is much work being done in contemporary porn studies which examines these changes, there is an aspect of porn's evolution online that has for the most part been neglected: the ways it is linked to globalization and the spread of ideas across nations and borders. Processes of globalization, the Internet, and developing media technologies have facilitated global access to pornography. Pornography now moves across geographic space, transcends national borders and links global communities – spreading narratives, norms, and social texts across global contexts. Despite these changes, contemporary porn studies has, for the most part, remained insulated from the theoretical work coking out of transnational studies. Conversely, transnational theory—as well as the theoretical positions developing out of transnational theory, such as translocal and transcultural theory—has all but ignored pornography as one of the flows of information that increasingly moves between and connects global spaces, and that has specific impacts on relations of intimacy, sexuality and desire. This paper explores how, when taken together, each of these approaches has the potential to broaden the scope of the other, and potentially answer some important questions around the ways globalization is impacting sexualities.