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Punk, Porn and Resistance: Carnivalization and The Body in Popular Culture
Lauren Langman
Current Sociology 2008 56: 657
DOI: 10.1177/0011392108090947

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 Punk, Porn and Resistance
Carnivalization and The Body in Popular Culture

Lauren Langman
CS Loyola University of Chicago, USA

abstract: Following work by Michel Foucault and Bryan Turner, the body has
become an important topic for social inquiry. One major debate concerns the
nature of social control vs agency. For Foucault, the gaze, surveillance, imposes
disciplinary practices that inscribe identities upon docile bodies. Yet he also notes
that domination fosters resistance. For others such as Turner or Shilling, the body
can be seen as a site of agency and locus of empowerment. Late capitalism, in its
globalized moment, has produced enormous wealth, but at the same time this
wealth sustains hierarchies in which only a few benefit. Vast numbers of people
remain alienated in their work and politically powerless to foster change. People
find themselves entrapped in a disenchanted, rationalized world of rules and reg-
ulations. Finally, for many, the mass-mediated commodified culture is superficial
and inauthentic. Given such conditions, we have seen the re-emergence of the car-
nival, which Bakhtin saw as legitimating a variety of forms of transgressions as
critique and resistance. This can be seen in many ways: in the popularity of tattoos
and piercings, in punk/metal music and lifestyles, and in ‘porn chic’ as a fashion
statement. Each form of adornment, fashion and lifestyle can be understood as a
way of claiming agency to resist domination, invert disciplinary codes and expe-
rience ‘utopian moments’. Body adornments would valorize the ‘primitive’ as a
protest against economic inequality and repression of the body. Punk/metal
music and fashions empower audiences and allow expressions of rage and
protest. Finally, ‘porn chic’ can be seen as a critique of patriarchal codes of moral-
ity and adornment in which the body becomes a basis of empowerment and
authenticity. Notwithstanding, most such ‘transgressions’ serve as ‘repressive
desublimations’ that shunt discontent from the political economy to the culture
and incorporate potential dissidence.

keywords: agency ✦ body ✦ carnival ✦ piercings ✦ porn chic ✦ pornography ✦

resistance ✦ sexuality ✦ tattoos

Current Sociology ✦ July 2008 ✦ Vol. 56(4): 657–677

© International Sociological Association
SAGE (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore)
DOI: 10.1177/0011392108090947

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 Current Sociology Vol. 56 No. 4 Monograph 2

Introduction
The body as defined and constructed by society, while experienced and
enacted by the person, is a ‘contested terrain’ for artists and academics,
fashion designers and marketers as well as moralists who would police
and defend boundaries of the permissible – also known as what shall be
repressed. The professoriate may question the history of bodily desire or
the nature of the structure of discipline vs embodied agency and resist-
ance. And designers and marketers envision sales. Moralists may debate
what may be hidden or revealed, what (if any) sexuality is acceptable or
perhaps desirable. The body may thus be understood as the site of domi-
nation or agency concerning its appearance, displays and actions as well
as a locus of moral judgments.
Structural power is often mediated through ethical notions and articu-
lated by moral ‘experts’, who would discipline the docile body to secure
its ‘appropriate’ or ‘desirable’ appearance. But the moralists may well dif-
fer over what parts of the body can and cannot be revealed and how that
body may be adorned. Thus, for example, in current western culture, tall,
thin women are deemed ‘attractive’ and desirable, and all the more so if
they have large breasts. The typical fashion model today is about 25 per-
cent lighter than the average woman of the same height. Further, how
much of her body may be publicly revealed? In some societies, women are
expected to cover all their flesh and remain veiled; other societies accept
topless beachwear as ‘normal’. Finally, how might people adorn their
bodies? People have worn jewelry and decorated their bodies for many
thousands of years. Today, for many people, jewelry might well consist of
various rings, studs and posts as well as tattoos and indeed extreme body
modifications.
In advanced societies such as the US, much of Europe and even certain
parts of developing nations, transgressive aspects of embodied beings
have taken center stage in mass culture and couture. This may be seen in
a number of ways: perhaps beginning with the valorization of the erotic
body as seen in Playboy magazine’s semi-nude centerfolds in the 1960s, or
the embrace of piercing and tattooing in the punk subcultures of the
1970s, or perhaps with extreme body modifications such as implanted
horns. There has been a growing popularity of breast implants and labia-
plasties. The transgressive, erotic body became more ‘mainstream’ in the
music video formats of MTV, which typically featured scantily clad
dancers choreographed in frantically gyrating, sexually suggestive ways,
maximizing the erotic and challenging policed boundaries. When MTV
produced the half-time entertainment for the 2004 Superbowl, there was
a serious ‘wardrobe malfunction’: Justin Timberlake tore away part of
Janet Jackson’s costume and revealed a nipple-ringed breast. This became

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 Langman Punk, Porn and Resistance

a much talked-about event in US politics and popular culture. The self-

appointed moral guardians considered this display one of the most out-
rageous moments in history – and perhaps the sign of the end of
civilization. Others, typically younger folks, thought it was ‘cool’. Indeed
in the days following the event, sales of nipple rings to young women
skyrocketed.
Youth have often embraced fashions and styles that push the envelopes
past the ‘acceptable’ standards of the parental generation and frequently
adopt what might be quite transgressive. Some styles are considered
grotesque, others are especially revealing of flesh to challenge traditional
notions of modesty. Perhaps the most obvious has been ‘low-rider’ jeans,
which typically display navels in front and the upper part of a thong from
behind (what has been called the ‘whale tail’ and termed ‘butt cleavage’).
These are typically worn with ‘spaghetti’ strap halter tops. Other expres-
sions of transgressive fashions among youth may be the styles of punk,
grunge, Goth or hip-hop.
Finally, it should be noted that pornography – the portrayal of explicit
sexual activity in word, picture, film or video – has migrated from the
liminal spaces at the margins of society (such as seedy stores and dingy thea-
ters) to influence the mainstreams of society and become a central motif
in its lifestyle and couture. ‘Porn chic’, as fashion and lifestyle that cele-
brates transgressive sexuality, has become one of the more telling
moments of contemporary fashion and lifestyle. Movie celebrities such
as Rob Lowe, Pamela Anderson or Paris Hilton, whose sexcapades have
been taped and widely circulated, have not suffered; indeed, it may well
have helped their careers. As is argued in this article, pornography has
entered the mainstream; porn stars are lauded and ‘porn chic’ is au
courant. Porn stars such as Jenna Jameson appear on late night television,
while Mary Carey not only ran for governor of California, but was also a
major contributor to the Republican Party and was invited to a White
House dinner (and many conservative politicians were quite happy to be
photographed with her).
How might we understand the growing toleration, indeed desire, for
transgressive expressions of embodiment, couture and sexuality? Let me
suggest that there is a long history of transgression centered on bodily dis-
play and action. While this history can be traced to some of the earliest civi-
lizations, for our purposes we begin with the carnival, which was a central
moment of medieval culture (Bakhtin, 1968). For Bakhtin, the carnival,
which preceded Easter, emerged as a popular festival that sprang from
commoners, peasants, townsfolk, artisans and the lower classes, not the aris-
tocracy; and indeed, carnival stood in opposition to the feasts and jousts of
the elites. It was a festival of pageants and feasts, of transgressive actions and
appearances, and ribald, if not profane, language. It was a time and place

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 Current Sociology Vol. 56 No. 4 Monograph 2

where everyone engaged in play, revelry, merriment, gaiety and, above all,
laughter as a form of resistance. There was often a great deal of song, dance
and verse. But much of its fun, joy and humor came about because so many
of the activities were transgressions of moral norms and various social prac-
tices. Sexual norms and standards of modesty were often discarded as the
body, primarily the lower body, became a central focus. Carnival celebrated
the birth, decay and death of the body, as well as its organic functions such
as eating, drinking, farting, defecating and copulating.
As a transgressive festival, carnival can be understood as an expression
of cultural ‘resistance’ to the lifestyles and values of the aristocracy – it
provided a ‘second life’, a moment of utopian equality that opposed the
‘official life’ demanded by a hierarchical society. That ‘resistance’ served
as a safety valve, dissipating many of the frustrations of medieval life and
ultimately serving to reproduce social arrangements. In much the same
way, I would like to suggest that carnivalization today, as seen in various
forms of embodied transgression, also serves to contain some of the
angers and frustration of contemporary life (Langman, 2005). But the fun-
damental difference is that in late capitalist society, critique and resistance
become incorporated within the society. Carnivalization qua resistance,
contextualized by global capital, has itself become a commodity that
serves to alleviate the strains and tensions of the contemporary world and
at the same time profits from providing amelioration.

From Modernity to Carnivalization

Paradoxically, the emancipatory promises of the Enlightenment – freedom,
democracy and equality – along with new kinds of egalitarian community
have themselves fostered societies based on domination, social fragmenta-
tion and repression of the affective life (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1972).
While capitalism has seen vast transformations since the ‘Satanic mills’ of
the early 18th century, vast numbers of workers today, more typically in
service jobs than in production jobs, remain alienated by the demands of
work. Not only is labor commodified, but quite often that labor involves
the commodification of one’s self and one’s emotions (Hochschild, 1986).
In turn, workers still find themselves powerless, their selfhood thwarted
and estranged from others. Further, for many workers, the rules and regu-
lation of bureaucratic work, though they are often mystified by managerial
notions of freedom and participation, foster dehumanization, depersonal-
ization, inauthenticity and even a ‘corrosion’ of character that leaves many
feeling trapped (see Sennett, 2000).
Though hardly nascent a century ago, there exists today a huge culture
industry that promotes an alternative image of the good life as the ‘goods
life’. Yet the incessant pursuit of consumer goods and mass-mediated

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 Langman Punk, Porn and Resistance

images as commodities has done little more than create new forms of dom-
ination, conformity and repression by image-based realities, ‘inauthentici-
ties’ that do not provide people with genuine gratification. The
consumerism of our age secures legitimacy for the system while providing
that system with vast profits. The ‘culture industries’ and empires of fash-
ion collude and coopt sexuality for the sake of sustaining consumerism and
the privatized hedonism that in turn reproduces capitalism and dulls criti-
cal thought. Marcuse (1964) called this pattern of erotic liberation in the
service of domination ‘repressive desublimation’. In short, while the classi-
cal forms of domination through overt coercion or violence are less typical
today, domination – whether economic, political or cultural – not only
endures, but operates in ways that are quite subtle if not invisible: mediated
through consumerism and mass culture and disguised as erotic freedom.
The social conditions of our globalized and globalizing age (limited job
prospects, insecurity and pressures for productivity; see Langman and
Kalekin-Fishman, forthcoming) have fostered social pressures that might
challenge political arrangements. But much like the bread and circuses of
Rome, consumerism and its allied culture industries serve to provide a
variety of gratifications and amusements that would compensate for the
frustrations of social life – and indeed offer identities and gratifications
not found in work, or available via politics. But further, the various prod-
ucts, services and experiences that constitute consumerism serve ideolog-
ical functions beginning with securing the hegemony of global capital.
Given the greater alienation of work, the rationalization of everyday life
and the ‘inauthenticity’ of a commodified world, we have seen the emer-
gence, or should we say, the re-emergence, of a culture of transgression,
inversion and excess. This is the essence of carnival culture.

Carnival as Critique
For Bakhtin (1968), the carnival was more than simply a time of release,
fun and games through transgression, it was a critique of social hierar-
chies, domination and a time and place of resistance. Through mockery
and satire, it challenged the elite authority of church and state by ignor-
ing typical patterns of deference and demeanor to elites (Bakhtin, 1968).
Standing as criticism of and opposition to norms, practices and appear-
ances of the dominant society, the carnival was another world, indeed a
second world and a ‘second life’ outside officialdom, a world in which all
medieval people participated more or less during a given time of the year:
If we fail to take into consideration this two-world condition, neither medieval
cultural consciousness nor the culture of the Renaissance can be understood. To
ignore or underestimate the laughing people of the Middle Ages also distorts
the picture of European culture’s historic development. (Bakhtin, 1968: 6)

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 Current Sociology Vol. 56 No. 4 Monograph 2

This second life was inherently utopian. There is a motivation during car-
nival time to create a form of human social configuration that ‘lies beyond
existing social forms’ (Bakhtin, 1968: 280). Rich or poor, all had the same body
functions and desires and the carnival, in celebrating the body and the bod-
ily, fostered a temporary equality that would sustain the entrenched system
of domination. The carnival and its revelry was an alternative realm of being
and doing that stood as (1) a critique of the dominant elites, (2) an expression
of resistance to elite privilege and (3) a utopian space in which differences of
rank were abolished and a common humanity could come together. ‘People
who in life are separated by impenetrable hierarchical barriers enter into free
and familiar contact on the carnival square’ (Bakhtin, 1968: 123), with a moti-
vation during carnival time to create a form of human social configuration
that ‘lies beyond existing social forms’ (Bakhtin, 1968: 280).
Carnival can be thought of as a festival opposed to the normal and
typical nature of everyday life; here the transgressive is valorized and
a grotesque esthetic becomes normative – as critique. The transgressive
that is typically relegated to the margins to keep society from being pol-
luted becomes acceptable; indeed the inversion of norms is encouraged
and celebrated (see Douglas, 2002). All that might be prohibited is now
acceptable. The lifestyles and values of the elites may be mocked, par-
odied or reversed. The transgressive often involved the body, especially
the lower body, its orifices, bodily hair, excreta and secreta. Carnival
was ludic; it consisted of fun, games, merriment and, above all, laugh-
ter. It was participatory, not observed from afar but engaging of all. In
sum, the transgressions of carnival assumed three, often overlapping,
forms:

1. Grotesque: A reversal of usual esthetic standards, it celebrates what

might be considered ugly, if not repulsive.
2. Ludic: Whatever else it might be, carnival is a time for play and not work.
3. Desublimated: Most societies place certain constraints upon human
desires. Carnival is a time where the ordinary controls and repressions
are released with abandon in frenzied celebrations. This can be seen in
various ways: the release of controls on the erotic (especially among
women who are ordinarily more repressed than men), the aggressive,
and the scatological (especially among men who are ordinarily more
gross than women).
To recapitulate, what is crucial for our understanding is that transgressions rep-
resent a critique of the values and morals of the elites that ‘set them apart’. The rever-
sals, inversions and esthetic–moral transgressions create a utopian-like realm:
a second world and a second life. But finally, however critical carnival might
be, however pleasurable its experiences, it ultimately served hegemonic

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 Langman Punk, Porn and Resistance

functions: to contain discontent and malaise, to channel it away from the

political and into the cultural where it could be neutralized.
But whereas the medieval carnival was a popular festival that came
from the people, the carnivals of today are more likely prompted either by
the culture industries or a resistance to the one-dimensional lifestyles pro-
moted by those cultures. Thus I would suggest that carnivalization is the
process by which various expressions of transgression and an esthetic of
the grotesque are provided as commodities that keep in check the anger
and discontent of a commodified, capitalist political economy in its global
moment.

The Body Carnivalized

As a modern sociological category for a stage in the lifecycle, youth is con-
cerned with autonomy from parents and establishing a separate identity.
Typically, youths become members of youth cultures or subcultures that
can be seen as identity-granting communities of meaning. These commu-
nities give the person a sense of belonging, provide him or her with recog-
nition of his/herself, provide a sense of empowerment and in general
assuage the anxieties of life, what Giddens (1991) calls ontological anxiety.
For a number of such young people, especially those marginalized (or
proactively anticipating marginalization) by the structural changes of
globalization and facing adverse economic consequences, there develop a
variety of countercultures, often subcultures of the grotesque that reject
the values of the dominant society. Thus, participation in the subcultures
of youth above all grants dignified identities and positive emotional expe-
riences to those within the boundaries of the group. While this is impor-
tant in all youth groups, gaining a positive sense of valued selfhood
becomes especially important to groups of youth in class positions with-
out status-based deference. That more and more youth in advanced soci-
eties face this problem has been noted by many. For example, in their
extensive review of the academic literature on self-esteem, the National
Association for Self-Esteem notes the problematic nature of self-esteem in
contemporary youth as can be seen in violence, drug/alcohol addiction,
suicide, pregnancy, eating disorders, etc.1
Following Nietzsche, marginal groups, the powerless and denigrated
that are likely to feel ressentiment toward their superiors, develop inver-
sions and repudiations of the dominant values. These transvaluations of the
ethical valorize what is proscribed and celebrate what is disdained. Ludic
identities of resistance at the margins of ‘polite society’ interrogate and resist
efforts of the dominant culture to valorize more conventional lifestyles. As
we have noted, with the fashion of resistance, body art and modification use
the body as a canvas of the grotesque to secure membership in the liminal

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 Current Sociology Vol. 56 No. 4 Monograph 2

anti-structures of inversion that give meaningful identities and voices to

those who might be invisible. They recapture the ‘aura’ of the ‘original’ by
making themselves both the artist and the ‘uniquely’ adorned canvas.

Body as Adornment
In a world of elegant jewelry, expensive watches and upscale ‘acces-
sories’ of the mainstream, we see the proliferation of body modifica-
tions such as tattoos and piercings that critique the esthetic blandness
of modern affluence in which consumer-based identities are rendered
‘conspicuous’ by valorizing the primitive and often the grotesque.
Indeed, the more extreme versions of such adornments suggest a carni-
valesque transgression in which a primitivism of style was expressed as
an embodied esthetic that stands as a general critique of rationalized,
capitalist modernity (Langman and Cangemi, 2004). In some contem-
porary forms of fashion and adornment, the decoration of the body
itself has become a template upon which esthetic sensibilities are
inscribed and through which selfhood is articulated. There are a num-
ber of subcultures for whom tattoos are fundamental markers of self.
Tattoos may take patriotic, romantic, motorcycle, prison, Yakuza or
religious forms. But for our purposes, the most relevant forms are prim-
itivism and/or the transgressive.
More specifically, a number of people have fostered and embraced a
subculture, if not a counterculture, that designates itself as ‘modern prim-
itive’. These are people who would retreat from modernity and its various
forms of alienation, entrapment and inauthenticity, ranging from con-
formity to occupation-based ranking of status to commodified forms of
individuality. The modern primitives would invert those hierarchies in
which the rich and powerful are valued merely for their wealth and
power. Indeed, as a moment of the carnivalesque, they would abolish
hierarchies within the imaginary community of the primitives.
Body modifications, tattoos, piercings, surgical modifications (split
tongues, implanted horns, modified and decorated genitalia) have
become fashion statements indicating a moment of resistance, a rebellion
against capitalist modernity, the regulation by rational rules and mass-
produced selfhood. The body modifications stand as distinctive markers
of inclusion into alternative identity-granting communities of meaning.
Many adherents of such body modification regard their embrace of the
grotesque as a rejection of the alienation, sterility, emptiness and inau-
thenticity of modernity. We might call this a ‘decivilizing process’ in
which large numbers of people who decorate their bodies with a variety
of accoutrements reject the cultural standards and norms of propriety of
modernity with its cold rationality, its achievement-based status and its
repressive morality (Vale and Juno, 1989).

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 Langman Punk, Porn and Resistance

I would like to suggest that these various expressions of body modifica-

tion must be understood as moments of the resurgence of the medieval car-
nival, with its essential features that celebrate transgression. The vulgar and
grotesque provide people with a bodily-based identity that repudiates the
modern and recaptures an imagined ‘premodern’ primitive, in which
Dionysian moments of bodily frenzy celebrate a sexuality free of Apollonian
repression – and, as mentioned earlier, free of the repression and alienation
of capitalist modernity. Hearkening back to something more ‘basic’ and fun-
damental in human nature: pain, ritual, a concern with the processes of the
body and the exploration of different levels of consciousness and physical
experience; and based upon a common interest in adding reimagined
romance back into modernity, small affiliated communities (or tribes) of
‘modern primitives’ have developed in the wealthy, industrialized western
nations (Holtham, 1992: 12).
A great many young people with tattoos embrace or at least flirt with
the transgressive and find selfhood and meaning through flaunting dom-
inant parental norms. Further, for many young for whom society does not
seem to have a place, tattoos can be an expression of anger at the main-
stream as well as a marker of an identity that has rejected the mainstream.
This was especially clear in the early years of punk music when groups
like the Sex Pistols, Sousxie and the Banshees and the Clash articulated
the anger and alienation many young people felt. For such youth, tattoos
and piercings (often with safety pins) signaled this discontent. As tattoos
became a more typical feature of youth cultures, a number of women had
small, discreet tattoos that were not likely to be seen in public. They might
be inscribed on a breast, below the navel or on the butt. The important
message was that they were meant to be seen, but only by a lover.

Fashion
In much the same way that urban primitives resist the ‘alienation, banal
sterility and inauthenticity’ of modernity through the adornment of their
body, others express their resistance in the clothes and styles that cover the
body. The mass-marketed styles, fashions and ‘haute couture’ that provide
‘branded’ expressions of identity and lifestyle have been repudiated by the
bizarre, grotesque, transgressive, subcultural anti-fashions of punk, grunge
and Goth. They articulate a carnivalesque resistance against the commodi-
fication of style and the massification of taste. Thus we see a number of car-
nivalesque subcultures whose inversions and repudiations valorize
resistance expressed through transgressive, vulgar, grotesque appearance
and style. For Goths, for example, every day is Halloween. Their costumes,
an amalgam of medieval, S&M, B&D and Hollywood kitsch horror films,
represent both a critique of the mainstream and a compensatory quest for
‘authenticity’ of self and experience through that separation.

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 Current Sociology Vol. 56 No. 4 Monograph 2

Among the most important signifiers of late modern youth are the var-
ious bikers, heavy metal, hip-hop, grunge, punks, Goths, ravers and so
on. While these groups differ from each other, they share certain crucial
features: they embody and celebrate the carnivalization of everyday life;
their liminal anti-structures privilege privatized hedonistic indulgence;
sex and drugs are quite common and their use provides their members
with a shared, albeit oppositional, identity.

Punks In the late 1970s, as globalization qua deindustrialization began

to impact the job prospects of youth, tastes in popular music, lifestyles
and identities began to differentiate along class lines. Whether distinctive
genres of music produce subcultures or subcultures create or embrace
their own musical tastes reflecting their identity is an interesting debate
(see Hebdige, 1979). In any case, by the late 1970s, the rise of ‘punk music’
groups such as the Sex Pistols, Dead Kennedys, Iggy Pop and the Stooges
extolled grotesque imagery while transgressive violence, sexuality and
obscenity became a staple of a nihilistic turn in popular culture that yet
endures.2 As the Sex Pistols put it, ‘we’re not into music . . . we’re into
chaos’, which we now understand as a ludic and transgressive critique of
a global economy that provides little economic hope for blue-collar
youth.3 Nor does the escapism of mainstream popular culture provide
such youth with meaning systems. Instead, they have articulated the
alienation, nihilism and rage of the young victims of global capital and its
neoliberal ideology. More than any other group, the Sex Pistols created
the ‘look of punk, the way of dressing, behaving, and maybe even think-
ing’. But with the demise of the Sex Pistols, the Clash became the standard
bearer of punk and more clearly directed anger and angst toward global
inequality and injustice (for example, as seen in their triple album,
Sandinista!).
Today, as more and more blue-collar youth have been marginalized by
globalization, punk subcultures are not only found almost everywhere in
the ‘advanced’ countries, but punk music/shock rock (see later) is a
multi-billion dollar industry. Moreover, the various fashions, ornamenta-
tions and accoutrements are another significant source of profit, as indeed
various aspects of punk fashion come to the edges of mainstream. While
punk fashion emphasizes black, like most forms of ‘oppositional dress’
such as that of fascists, anarchists, bohemians or Goths, one of the dis-
tinctive features of punk is its embrace of an esthetic of the grotesque. It
attempts to shock in various ways: from multi-colored, extreme hairstyles
and body modifications, to wearing various forms of black leather often
studded or spiked that suggests the wearer is fierce and powerful, even
though he or she may be socially marginalized. Like the primitive empow-
ered by wearing a lion mask, wearing a spiked collar not only differentiates

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 Langman Punk, Porn and Resistance

the punk from the larger society, but the grotesque appearance stands as
a critique of its esthetic standards.

Goths – Every Day is Halloween If punk can be understood as an expres-

sion of working-class anger, Goth can be understood as an expression of the
ennui of the more educated – especially various artistic or creative types.
While emergent out of punk music, with groups like Sisters of Mercy,
Bauhaus and Sousxie and the Banshees, Goth emerged as a dark opposite
to ephemeral disco. Death symbolism is often found in pale faces and black
make up. As Ice Princess puts it, ‘The common thread in Goth culture is an
appreciation for the dichotomy of life, the contrast between light and dark,
good and evil, with an awareness that the two can’t exist without each
other, and that the traditional value judgments assigned to those opposites
are not necessarily true.’4 For our purposes, most Goth culture is an attempt
to ‘re-enchant the world’, to confront the ‘specialists without feelings’
(Ritzer, 1999). Goths have created a ‘tribal identity’ based on a cultural pas-
tiche of Gothic tribes, medieval fantasy, magic, Victorianism and vam-
pirism. (There are also subgroups of medieval, Victorian, fairy and
techno-modern Goths, among others.) Many are new age spiritualists,
Wiccans or occultists, who are into runes, healing stones and magical prac-
tices. Some wear crosses while others wear ankhs. Being more educated,
they are likely to read Dante, Byron, Tolstoy, Ann Rice, Bram Stoker and
Storm Considine (a Goth writer) and flock to German expressionist films.
Perhaps the most important aspect of Goth is its flamboyant garb rang-
ing from the neo-medieval to transgressive latex to fetish (see the discus-
sion of porn chic later). While black is the dominant color, white shirts,
gowns and peasant blouses are also popular, as are often red and blue.
Hair colors also vary. Fishnet stockings, ornamental brassieres, bloomers
and bustiers that publicly flaunt oppositional erotic styles, are common
markers of membership designed to shock outsiders. While exposed flesh
is hardly novel today, Goth style emphasizes a transgressive, erotic signi-
fier of being sinful, wicked and fun. In that most are employed in the
dominant economy replete with bureaucratic codes, Goth subcultures
allow the person both to participate in that economy and yet after work,
to critique its conformity and dehumanization. When they return home,
many create castles, dungeons or occult havens.

Porn Chic – The Erotic Body as Contested Terrain

Pornography, while difficult to define, refers more or less to a genre of
film, photos, videotape and DVDs that depicts bodies engaged in explicit
sexual content. Pornography has become a $20 billion+ a year business in
the US (Lane, 2000: 269–82). There are approximately 800 million porn
tapes/DVDs sold or rented each year. Critics and defenders agree that

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one of the essential qualities of pornography is that it challenges norms

over the body and its sexuality and inverts standards of morality. Further,
it has changed from solo men watching pornography while masturbating,
to erotic entertainment for couples and/or groups. Indeed, one of the
growing segments of the industry is amateur porn in which couples or
small groups record themselves in action and trade their tapes or DVDs
with other couples or groups.
Pornography has often been seen as a violent means of dehumaniza-
tion, exploitation, domination and/or humiliation of women for the sake
of voyeuristic male pleasure. Whereas one tradition of feminist critique
seen in the writings of authors such as Susan Brownmiller (1975),
Catherine McKinnon (1995) or Andrea Dworkin (1981) claims that
pornography serves to render women as nothing more than degraded ori-
fices to serve men, at worst it fosters misogyny, rape and violence toward
women.5 Dworkin (1981) suggests that the very act of penetration is a
form of violence. ‘Compliant’ women readily turn themselves into sex
objects, if not slaves, ‘that will display anything, do anything’ to gratify
the ‘male gaze’ and satisfy male lust for domination as well as eroticism.
The displays of unclothed female bodies engaged in actual sexuality
paired with simulations of intense erotic enjoyment via multiple and pas-
sionate orgasms, serve as testimony to male power and erotic prowess –
at the cost of female agency and dignity.
Yet a number of feminists argue otherwise; indeed there are a number
of ‘pro-sex’ feminists, who argue that pornography has a number of pos-
itive personal and political benefits for women. McElroy (1995) has chal-
lenged ‘anti-sex’ feminists and has suggested that pornography allows
women to pursue their own sexuality without shame, guilt or censure.
Camille Paglia (1995) has offered a contrary reading, emphasizing the
legacy of repression and paucity of genuine sex. Paglia notes:
The problem with America is that there’s too little sex, not too much. The
more our instincts are repressed, the more we need sex, pornography and all
that. The problem is that feminists have taken over with their attempts to
inhibit sex. We have a serious testosterone problem in this country. (Paglia,
1995: 52)6

Thus, she argues, strippers, hookers and porn stars, guardians of the mys-
terium of sexuality, are actually empowered in their realms. She goes on to say:
Stripping is ‘a sacred dance of pagan origins’ and the money men stuff into G-
strings is a ‘ritual offering’. ‘The more a woman takes off her clothes, the more
power she has’ and feminists hate strippers because ‘modern professional
women cannot stand the thought that their hard-won achievements can be out-
weighed in an instant by a young hussy flashing a little tits and ass’. (Paglia,
1995: 53)

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 Langman Punk, Porn and Resistance

For critics such as Laura Kipnis (1996), porn is a genre of popular

esthetic expression, albeit hardly in the same league as Tolstoy or
Chaucer. Yet in democratic society, we should pay attention to all varieties
of expression – even those that offend some segments. She argues that
porn must not be interpreted as social realism but as fantasy, and as such
it serves a number of other functions, not least of which is the resistance
to male definitions of sex, gender and eroticism. Porn affirms the legiti-
macy of female pleasure in a society that has taught many women that sex
is bad – especially when enjoyed by women.
She argues that pornography is best understood as a form of cultural
expression, a fictional, fantastical, even allegorical realm; it neither
reflects the real world, nor is it some hypnotizing call to action. The
world of pornography is mythological and hyperbolic, peopled by fic-
tional characters. It doesn’t and never will exist. But what it does do is
to insist on a sanctioned space for fantasy. And this is the basis of so
much of the controversy it engenders, because pornography has a tal-
ent for making its particular fantasies look like dangerous, socially
destabilizing things.
Like any other popular culture genre (like romance, mystery, true
crime), pornography obeys certain rules, and its primary rule is trans-
gression. Like your boorish cousin, its greatest pleasure is to locate each
and every one of a society’s taboos, prohibitions and proprieties, and sys-
tematically transgress them, one by one. Like sci-fi, porn replaces existing
realities with wild alternative universes (against which to measure the
lackluster, repressive world we’ve inherited). At its most inventive,
pornography too has an allegorical distance from the real, as with the
deeply absurdist Deep Throat – an utterly invented erotic world in which
male and female bodies and desires correspond with one another far
better than they do back here on terra firma.7
Pornography’s capacity to reimagine the world and the quotient of sex-
ual gratification it contains is obviously what most irks its critics, and
what its fans can’t get enough of. The usual impediments to acquiring sex
don’t exist in ‘pornutopia’. The slogan is: ‘forget social convention, sexual
repression, your partner’s personality foibles’. Porn is a world where per-
sonality simply doesn’t matter: what a refreshing vacation from the daily
reality of coupledom. In this way, porn must also be seen as form of sex
education – mostly as toleration and examples of the diverse ways people
can find erotic pleasure, and indeed, especially so for women, who not
only live in a patriarchal culture that subordinates women, but who – the
strains of feminists noted earlier suggest – if they have erotic relationships
with men, are traitors to their gender. Some porn qua resistance can give
women agency to explore their own sexuality and redefine their own sex-
ual norms. Consider the most typical way people do it is the missionary

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position, in which by definition the man is on top. Pornography often

presents a number of alternatives, many of which give the woman the
advantage. For Linda Williams (1989), porn should, and often does, portray
women as active sexual agents with desires of their own that can and do
resist patriarchal codes and representations.
Thus we see that pornography is far more complex than explicit depic-
tions of sexuality that objectify or exploit women.8 It stands as a contested
terrain between moral conservatives and libertines, between older, ‘sec-
ond wave’ feminists of the 1960s and what have been termed ‘third wave’
feminists who reject patriarchy as much as the anti-sensual Puritanism of
earlier-generation feminists. Thus feministas are often proudly assertive
in seeking erotic pleasures, and will go out ‘slutting’, or using boys sim-
ply for pleasure, much as men have used women.

Porn Chic and the Esthetics of the Body

Notwithstanding the voices of moral outrage from the guardians of
virtue, the ‘normalization’ of pornography with its now-secure niche in
popular culture can be seen as part and parcel of the same process of car-
nivalization that was seen in bodily adornments or fashion. As I have sug-
gested, one of the most important moments of the rejection of modern
asceticism and the denial of embodied, erotic desire is the valorization of
the genital and the inversion of the shame of exposing one’s genitals that
are typically private into the pride-based public. We might call this ‘pubic
art’, decorations/piercings of one’s genitalia and proximate parts for the
purposes of display to others. Such displays are discreet: as part of a sub-
culture, they are typically only displayed within that subculture. It is
interesting that one of the more prevalent forms of display has become the
internet and a number of sites (e.g. www.bme.freeq.com) require a photo
of one’s piercings to be posted as the entry requirement to the members-
only sections.
There are a large number of decorations that people apply to their gen-
itals, with rings the most common. Perhaps the one that is known most
widely is the Prince Albert, a single ring in the glans and through the ure-
thra, purportedly used to tie the penis to the leg. But men often have sev-
eral rings, locks and other things implanted into their penis, scrotum and
perineum. Some prefer posts to rings and a series of parallel posts in the
penis is called a ‘ladder’. Similarly, women are likely to put rings in their
nipples, labia, clitoris, hood, etc. Quite often women report that such
piercings enhance their sexual relations and often provide sexual stimu-
lation in everyday life.9 Moreover, unlike more repressed generations of
the past, in any body modification chat groups (as well as within S&M),
women will freely and openly discuss their sexuality in ways that would,
and do, shock the dominant culture.

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 Langman Punk, Porn and Resistance

Sexercise Young women and not-so-young women are flocking to

gyms, dance studios and athletic clubs that are teaching strip-teasing,
erotic dancing and pole dancing as forms of sexy weight loss: ‘get in touch
with your inner stripper’. While this has been an emergent trend, with the
publication of The S Factor: Strip Workouts for Every Woman by Sheila
Kelley (2003), also a featured book on Oprah’s show and web page,
women everywhere are trying to lose weight, tone up and become allur-
ing by learning the boot shake, lap dance and hair toss. Learn to get the
pasties to twirl in opposite directions? The book is perhaps best described
by its publisher’s blurb:
Hipper than Taebo, sexier than Pilates, the S Factor – stripping – is the hottest
new fitness trend. . . . S Factor classes are wildly popular and generating an
avalanche of attention from Extra, Entertainment Tonight, The Los Angeles Times,
Allure, Us magazine, Fox News, and CBS’s 48 Hours, which proclaimed:
‘[Women] don’t even know they’re working out until two months later when
they say, “I’ve never had a better body in my life. I’m strong, I’m limber, I feel
great.’’’ Sheila even convinced Barbara Walters to try a pole dance on The View.
. . . No wonder. Combining yoga, dance, and erotic movements, the S Factor is
a program that tones muscles, firms the body, increases flexibility, promotes
weight loss, and gives you a few new tricks for the bedroom. Illustrated in hun-
dreds of photographs that show step by step how each move is done, the exer-
cises are sensual yet demanding, requiring a balance of strength and finesse.
There are slow, rounded warm-ups, the Spine Circles and Hip Circles.
Strenuous motions, like the Rocking Cat-Cow. Peels and rolls, grinds, pounces,
arches. And pole work, from the Firefly to Descending Angel. . . . Something
else happens, too: These exercises and routines boost self-esteem and give
women a new way to think about their bodies. Stripping is a liberating act, out
of which comes a new look, new body, new confidence, new you.

As the carnivalization of society, qua commodification of the transgres-

sive, has made ‘porn chic’ and porn-influenced fashions au courant, and
with the popularity of strippercize and pole dancing, many women have
become consumers of hooker/stripper outfits. The extent to which young
women freely wear clothes to reveal pierced navels in front and ‘butt
cleavage’ behind has been noted earlier. But this is just the tip of a much
larger iceberg. There has literally been an explosion in the fashion indus-
try in which transgressive attire has become a multi-billion dollar indus-
try. Victoria’s Secret, a division of Limited, has over 1000 stores in the US
and does about US$4 billion of business a year. In the industry, their
goods are termed ‘slutwear’ or ‘hookerwear’, styled to be transgressive
more than simply erotic. This of course includes far more than what is
simply skimpy or almost transparent, but may simulate what hookers or
strippers are likely to consider de rigueur. Some of this fashion attempts to
simulate the B&D or S&M look, and may even be used for such purposes.

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 Current Sociology Vol. 56 No. 4 Monograph 2

Further, there are a number of small manufactures and retailers who make
and market clothes designed to connote ‘porn star’, ‘porn star in training’
or ‘porn star instructor’, etc. French Connection United Kingdom has
made the display of their initials a major selling point. Abercrombie and
Fitch (US), well known for selling clothes by advertising nudity, was
recently embroiled in a controversy for selling a shirt for women embla-
zoned, ‘with boobs like these, I don’t need an education’. While I would
suggest that it was meant as parody, many feminists did take it seriously
– eventually it was removed from the shelves.

Plastic Surgery of Private Parts The final moment of porn chic has
been termed ‘vaginal rejuvenation’, which takes two forms, the shaved
pubis and medical reconstruction, e.g. labiaplasty as a cosmetic plastic
surgery. In the first case, the shaved pubis (and Britney Spears recently
displayed hers to the world) has become more and more popular in
pornography – in part, as suggested, to emphasize the power differential
between the male and the more seemingly young woman. While this may
have been compensatory for males facing challenges to their masculinity
in the face of globalization, this practice seems to have migrated from
porn flicks to a much wider segment of the population.10
With the growing audience for pornography, and the ‘money shot’
often includes close-up pictures, a growing number of women have
become dissatisfied with the way they look compared to the porn stars. In
her study of labiaplasty, Makowsky (2006: 7) comments:
As Braun and Kitzinger (2001) go on to note, vagina size is cultural currency; a
premium is placed on women’s bodies that look pre-pubescent and the vagina
seems to be no exception. Not only does a smaller, tighter vagina invoke an
image of a pre-pubescent girl, but also a ‘slack vagina’ is associated with ‘(neg-
ative) judgments about sexual promiscuity’. In this way, a vagina’s appearance
has implications not only for how one self identifies and how others identify
the self, but also how closely (or far) one stands from the normative feminine
ideal. . . . One woman quoted in The New York Times stated that she wanted her
vagina to look like those of women in pornographic movies; ‘they were tiny
and dainty and symmetrical’ (Navarro 2004). Similarly, surgeons who perform
labiaplasties and other such surgeries acknowledge that the ‘standards women
hope to achieve are set mostly by adult film actresses, strippers and nude
denizens of the Internet’ (Healy 2006). Thus, it seems that the pornography
industry directly affects the aesthetic standards that present some women with
much psychological distress. . . . That pornographic standards may compel
some women to choose to undergo vaginal cosmetic surgery exemplifies how
difference is turned into sameness. Vaginal cosmetic surgery enables women’s
vaginas to be molded and crafted to fit a norm espoused by the pornography
industry, thereby paradoxically upholding a feminine ideal that women in
pornography industry stereotypically do not exemplify – that tightness is

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 Langman Punk, Porn and Resistance

equated with dainty, docile, innocent women while sagginess implies promis-
cuity. The porn-star standards that women hope to achieve by undergoing
labiaplasty parallel findings by Braun and Kitzinger (2001) that it was men
who were described as wanting their female partners to have tight vaginas.

Finally, while on the topic of porn-influenced body esthetics, plastic

surgeons have recently added ‘anal bleaching’ to their repertoire.

Conclusion
As sociology has become more concerned with the body, the body as a site
of transgression has assumed a more central place in popular culture – or
perhaps it was the other way around. But while the body as constructed,
adorned and fashioned has typically been the subject of various social
controls, discourses and disciplinary regimes, in the past few decades the
body has become a basis for agency and the site of resistance to the dom-
inant culture and means of overcoming alienation, entrapment and the
inauthenticity of commodification. The initial expression of that resist-
ance could be noted in the forms of bodily adornment and fashion that
were evident in the youth cultures of the 1960s and 1970s. The hippies
rejected the middle-class lifestyles. A few years later, the punks were
angry they could never have them. It was not clear at that time, but the
various expressions of working-class anger and alienation expressed in
punk music were among the earliest indications of the major transforma-
tions that were to come about due to globalization.
As capitalism globalized, it became more and more competitive – to
save costs, workforces were reduced or trained to be more productive. It
was at this point that more and more of the popular culture assumed a
transgressive stance, and a great deal of this transgression centered on the
body. While the middle-class youth of the 1960s might dance semi-naked
while fully stoned and listening to the Beatles, a bit later, angrier working-
class youth were more likely to wear black clothes, pierce or adorn their
bodies, and lambaste society while listening to the Sex Pistols or the
Clash.
Just as it was not clear that an emergent globalization was transforming
the world, it was even less clear that a new trope in popular culture was
emerging. It is now evident that in the face of the anger and alienation fos-
tered by the economic changes, with ever more rationally regulated jobs
and ever more forms of commodified inauthenticity, a popular culture of
transgression-as-resistance was growing. It is now evident that this cul-
ture of transgression focused on the body could be seen as a resurgence of
the carnival. To be sure, many moralists repudiated the lifestyles, values
and identities of countercultural youth. But in a most prescient warning,
Marcuse (1964) suggested that oppositional subcultures and seeming

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 Current Sociology Vol. 56 No. 4 Monograph 2

erotic freedom may do little more than serve as ‘repressive desublima-

tions’ that contain and neutralize discontent. Late capitalism could not
only incorporate its own critique, but profit from that critique.
Today, from the vantage point of the early 21st century, we can clearly
see how a carnival culture has emerged with embodiment as its central
element. Like the medieval carnival, the contemporary carnival is trans-
gressive, ludic and valorizes the grotesque. Its transgression can be seen
in reversals, inversion and parodies. The most salient examples of con-
temporary carnivalization include bodily adornments such as tattoos and
piercings, various expressions of oppositional fashion, and the growth of
what has been called porn chic. While carnivalization would seem to be a
moment of resistance, bodily liberation as an alternative to the realities of
the contemporary political economy, much like the medieval carnival,
serves to displace frustrations. Carnivalization displaces resistance from
the political realm of action to the cultural realms of festivity and ulti-
mately secures social reproduction. As such, carnivalization today is itself
highly commodified in order to produce profits as well as to sustain hege-
mony and reproduce social arrangements. Understanding how a theme in
popular culture appears as resistance yet sustains political economy
requires a sociological understanding of the body in its transgressive
moments. This article is an effort to understand this problem.

Acknowledgements
The author wishes to express utmost thanks and gratitude to his assistant,
Maureen Ryan, for the research and editing help in this paper, and as co-
author of forthcoming book on carnivalization.

Notes
1. See Robert Reasoner (n.d.).
2. At the end of the 1960s, as the first effects of industrialization were evident,
many working-class youth, facing bleak job prospects, expressed their anger
and hopelessness in their music, their lifestyles and appearances, in which
their body and its adornments became signifiers of their pain and rejection of
the mainstreams of society. Punk music is typically loud, angry and nihilistic
and often embraces self-destruction. See Marcus (1990), Weinstein (2000) and
Christie (2004) for histories and analyses of the origins of heavy metal and
punk music.
3. Marcus (1990) suggested that the Sex Pistols were the then current cultural
expression of anger at social conditions, expressed in cultural forms, that fol-
lowed a long tradition of the medieval Brethren of the Free Spirit, the English
Ranters, Dadaists, Situationists, etc.
4. At: www.ice-princess.net/academia.html

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 Langman Punk, Porn and Resistance

5. In terms of empirical research, the increase in porn in the last few years has
been associated with lower rates of rape and violence to women.
6. At: privat.ub.uib.no/BUBSY/playboy.htm
7. In 1972, the sexually explicit film Deep Throat was released in movie theaters
across the US. It was directed by Gerald Daminao and starred Linda Lovelace.
There were a number of attempts to close the theaters that showed the film,
but after a number of lawsuits defending ‘free speech’, the efforts to stop sex-
ually explicit films ended. The film, made for US$25,000, became the most
profitable film in history and ‘porn chic’ became an element of popular cul-
ture. The plot, if it can be called that, was summarized by Michael Brook:
‘Linda, frustrated that her hugely energetic sex life leaves her unsatisfied,
seeks medical help. The doctor informs her that the reason for her problem is
that her clitoris is mistakenly located at the back of her throat – but there is a
very simple remedy, which the doctor, and various other men, proceed to
demonstrate.’ At: www.imdb.com/title/tt0068468/plotsummary (accessed
March 2007).
8. Gay (male) porn can hardly be said to exploit women.
9. We are reminded how in the days of foot-operated sewing machines, occasion-
ally some of the seamstresses would begin to sew at much higher rates – at least
for a short time – and utter a loud sigh of relief as they finished the cuff.
10. A similar phenomenon has been reported in Japan where more and more
grown men are seeking circumcision – not a traditional part of their culture.
Why? The influx of western porn has led to many women demanding their
lovers appear like western males.

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Biographical Note: Lauren Langman is professor of sociology at the Loyola

University of Chicago. He works in the tradition of the Frankfurt School of
Critical Theory, especially relationships between culture, politics/political
movements and the psychosocial. He is past chair of the Marxist Section of the
ASA and current president of RC 36, Alienation Research and Theory, of the
ISA. He has served on the editorial boards of Sociological Theory, Current
Perspectives in Social Theory and Critical Sociology. He writes on alienation, the
body, social movements, Islamic fundamentalism, nationalism and national
character. His most recent research is on the carnivalization of culture.

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 Langman Punk, Porn and Resistance

Address: Department of Sociology, Loyola University of Chicago, 6525 Sheridan

Road, Chicago, IL 60614, USA. [email: Llang944@aol.com]

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