Thinking about the guy on the other side of the screen: contemporary rhetorical strategies for creating and maintaining an audience

Adult entertainer Asa Akira uses contemporary rhetorical strategies to create and maintain an audience for her (pornographic) performances. This article presents a narrative rhetorical analysis of Akira’s autobiographies, in which she performs a multifaceted and well-rounded persona. Within her prose, Akira performs forms of sincerity and directness through which the implied reader is constructed as an engaged and intellectually stimulated admirer. Positing these autobiographical performances within the framework of Attwood’s ‘altporn’, it becomes possible to explicate the roles of perceived emotional and intellectual complexity in engaging and maintaining audiences. Particularly, Chatman’s model of narrative analysis is expanded with McGee’s concept of the fragmented construction of discourse in an effort to understand the fragmented, mediated contexts within which Akira writes and her audiences read. By exploring these contexts shaping Akira’s narrative texts, it is possible to outline rhetorical strategies across multiple discourses and illuminate how the multifarious forms of storytelling employed by Akira inform her ‘altporn’ persona. Considering the present prevalence of intertextual performances, narratives are more than likely to exist within fragmented, mediated contexts without whose consideration an analysis would be incomplete. This article’s proposed model allows for the broader modernization of narrative rhetorical analysis.