Tester

mechanism” for the management
of pleasure and affect. Crucially,
excitation-frustration cycles perform
actual work, integrating
bodily events into a global media
circuit. In such terms, porn generates
an embodied social relation:
the viewers, the actors, the producers,
the cops, the migrants all
become entwined in the spectacle.
Porn films are “embodied images,”
to use porn scholar Linda Williams’
term, incorporating themselves
into the body and staging
an “encounter with an eroticized
technological apparatus” 4 beyond
the body, effectively mediating social
relations among people.
Preciado identifies porn as a
paradigmatic media form, the limit
case of the body affected by the
techniques that collectively constitute
the Border Spectacle, which,
we cannot forget, is fundamentally
a refocusing maneuver, a matter of
making-(in)visible. Porn is instructive
because, in Williams’ terms, it
somewhat inverts the normative
optics of obscenity (that which is
off-scene) by bringing into “the
public arena the very organs, acts,
bodies and pleasures” that are usually
obscured, thereby operating
as an optics of “on/scenity.” This
characterization assumes a prior
reality, stable but hidden, which is
revealed through pornography in
a manner that Williams typically
understands as liberating. Against
this reading, de Genova offers that
while obscenity is constituted by
acts of concealment, it is through
image. Border porn exists, however,
on a spectrum of genres and
“gestures of selective exposure”
that an event’s obscene nature is
33