…“in fantasy we may construct multiple subject positions, even contradictory ones, and this multiplicity is not only permitted but integral to the structure of fantasy itself” (Rodowick 1989, 270). This understanding unsettles notions of the spectator as a coherent subject and instead imagines them as fragmented, mutable, and capable of embodying a kaleidoscope of positions in relation to the image.
From this, the article constructs a compelling theoretical argument: that pornographic spectatorship operates as a privileged space of unfixity—of sexual and gendered play—wherein fantasies can function as exploratory, liminal zones in which desires and identifications are temporarily adopted, transgressed, or transformed. Within this framework, bisexuality and transness are not treated merely as identities, but as modalities of relationality and identification that resist rigid alignment with normative sexual and gender schemas. These modalities offer models for understanding pornographic spectatorship as inherently multiple and protean.
Indeed, the notion of “spectatorial unfixity” becomes central—not merely as a descriptive tool, but as a political and epistemological intervention. The refusal of fixedness aligns pornographic fantasy with broader queer, bisexual, and trans epistemologies that question the stability of the self and the legibility of desire. In other words, pornographic spectatorship can operate as a site of queer and trans potential, one where identities are not simply represented but imagined otherwise, tested, and temporarily inhabited.
This position gains further urgency when we consider the reactionary anxieties surrounding pornographic media’s transformative potential—its alleged ability to “turn” someone trans or bisexual. These anxieties betray a deep discomfort with unfixity, with the idea that sexual or gendered identities might be subject to play, exploration, or even change. But rather than deny or refute such concerns, the article embraces them in rearticulated form, recasting this potential as expansive and affirmative. If pornographic spectatorship can destabilize the categories of cisness and monosexuality, then it also becomes a site where new, more capacious subjectivities might emerge.
The article’s intervention is twofold:
- Theoretical: It synthesizes feminist film theory, psychoanalytic accounts of fantasy, and bisexual and trans theory to produce a framework for understanding pornographic spectatorship as mutable and multivalent.
- Political: It insists on the value of this unfixity, positioning it against discourses that would pathologize or police desire, gender, and fantasy. Rather than see contradictory identifications as failed or deviant, it views them as inherent to the process of engaging with pornographic media—and crucially, as generative of new forms of selfhood.
By framing identification as “just-as-if” rather than as fixed alignment, and desire as a structured but open-ended process, the article shifts the focus of pornographic analysis away from stable categories of orientation or identity, and toward the fluid, unpredictable work of fantasy. This conceptualization invites us to approach pornography not as a mirror of identity, but as a laboratory for becoming—a place where queer, trans, and bisexual possibilities are not merely represented, but actively forged.
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