Extreme style and sensation

Pornographic styles have proliferated in recent years, problematizing established views of what porn looks like, and in some quarters at least, offering a challenge to porn’s lack of respectability and acceptability. In this context, ‘extreme porn’ has become a new yardstick to mark the acceptable from the unacceptable. Concerns about extreme porn are part of a broader disquiet about what the BBFC has called ‘an increasingly popular category of “extreme reality” material which has many of the characteristics of extreme pornography but does not appear to have been produced for the purpose of sexual arousal’, also evident in the use of the term, 'pornography' in discussions of some horror films (‘torture porn’), and images of real violence (‘war porn’ or ‘atrocity porn’). This paper asks what is at stake in the notion of ‘extreme’ porn and what concerns about pornographic styles and the sensations they evoke in their viewers suggest about the shifting construction of bodily pleasure, experience and performance.