![](/images/ico/ico_close.png)
![](/images/ico/ico5.png)
Author: Jacobs Katrien
Publisher: Routledge Ltd
ISSN: 1466-4348
Source: Cultural Studies , Vol.18, Iss.1, 2004-01, pp. : 67-83
Disclaimer: Any content in publications that violate the sovereignty, the constitution or regulations of the PRC is not accepted or approved by CNPIEC.
Abstract
This article investigates pornographic web-based media at a time when commercial pornography has flooded the Internet and pockets of sex activism are budding alongside the porn boom. Pornography moving freely across borders is foremost a capitalist vision, but the web's sexual potency is equally defined by web users and artists who visit and maintain peer-to-peer networks for producing and sharing sexually explicit materials. Revisiting Foucault's notion of space as 'heterotopia', networked sexual communication and pornography are shown to permeate physical places and other spaces. Web users cultivate attachments to everyday places and spaces other than the ones they routinely inhabit. Networked sexual agency materializes desire far beyond the confines of community rituals and commodity industries. Besides the fact that porn industries expand their markets and diversify products, sex communities emerge alongside these markets and play a vital role in negotiating sexuality. The article shows how the Internets decentralized mechanisms of power and communication, including debating societies and playgrounds, have entered the realm of online porn and sexuality. Developing a theoretical notion of space as other spaces, the article unfolds the sexual web as exuberant, dispersed in bodies and cultures, yet forcefully regulated by global corporations and nation-state governments.
Related content
![](/images/ico/ico_close.png)
![](/images/ico/ico5.png)
Closed Spaces, Restricted Places: Marginalisation of Roma in Europe
Space and Polity, Vol. 5, Iss. 2, 2001-08 ,pp. :
![](/images/ico/ico_close.png)
![](/images/ico/ico5.png)
![](/images/ico/ico_close.png)
![](/images/ico/ico5.png)
Urban spaces after socialism: ethnographies of public places in Eurasian cities
Central Asian Survey, Vol. 33, Iss. 3, 2014-07 ,pp. :
![](/images/ico/ico_close.png)
![](/images/ico/ico5.png)
Journeys to the other spaces of Fascist Italy
Modern Italy, Vol. 5, Iss. 1, 2000-05 ,pp. :
![](/images/ico/ico_close.png)
![](/images/ico/ico5.png)
Other Spaces : migration, objects and archives
By Duggan Jo-Anne Gandolfo Enza
Modern Italy, Vol. 16, Iss. 3, 2011-08 ,pp. :