Porn labour and cruel optimism

The labour of porn performance is often framed through a binaried lens of either sexual liberation or exploitation. This article, in contrast, conceptualizes the labour of porn performance through the affective bind that Berlant labels ‘cruel optimism’. For Berlant, cruel optimism refers to a ‘relation that exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing’. In other words, cruel optimism designates a relationship in which one’s attachment to an object, perceived as optimistic, impedes the very flourishing that it otherwise ostensibly promises. In the contexts of porn performance, the dynamic of cruel optimism emerges in complex ways, where the promise of sexual expression, financial independence, and avoidance of straight work becomes entangled with conditions – such as stigma, risk and precarity, and commodification – that undermine those aspirations and attachments. By bringing Berlant’s framework into dialogue with (former) porn performer narratives and industry scholarship, this article seeks to provide a more complex and nuanced account of porn performance that avoids binary thinking and instead foregrounds the ambivalent, contradictory, sustaining, and constraining affective attachments and economies that often lie at the heart of pornographic and sexual labour.