Abstract

Within the current period of shifting international trade, sexuality has been “globalized” in new ways. Rather than working with the generalization that characterizes globalization in line with the somewhat predictable binaries of the WTO/US market opening hegemonic model versus the anti-hegemonic opponents of this same capitalist enterprise, sex as presented in pornography on the World Wide Web offers a counterintuitive way of thinking about globalization. Internet pornography presents a system of unintended consequences. That is, it offers a site where the full investigations of human ambition, desire and degradation are represented and played out, offering the voiceless and the powerless a vehicle for creating and extending the public sphere. The absence of constraints – moral, ethical and structured media ones – makes it possible for desktop consumers to see and hear images that were previously private as well as geographically and technically constrained. The absence of constraints marks proletarianization and with it the emergence of a new social movement.