Arte, pornografia, genere

In recent times, pornography has acquired the status of an independent object of aesthetic inquiry, beyond its longstanding presence in ethical and ideological debates. This is thanks to its definition as the representation of subjects capable of producing sexual arousal—a definition, at least at first glance, neutral with respect to the non-purely aesthetic debates surrounding it. Thus defined, pornography lends itself, if anything, to discussions like those concerning works or activities created with a primarily and clearly non-aesthetic purpose (e.g., architecture, industrial design, the aesthetics of everyday life, etc.), which therefore question the presupposition of the disinterested nature of aesthetic experience. Furthermore, thus defined, as a theme of aesthetics, it is linked to the question of whether the subjects of pornographic representations are fictional or not. Actually, the most recent developments in the civil rights movement and, in the scientific field, gender studies have highlighted the problematic nature of the definition of sexual arousal, as it is not at all neutral and univocal, but rather closely linked to the question of the gender identity of the users of pornographic material and almost usually dependent, within power relations, on the so-called "male gaze".