Eroticized evaluation: casting and labour incorporation in early postsocialist gay pornography

This article examines Young Russian Innocents and Young Soldiers Disclosed, two 1994 transnational gay pornographic films featuring Russian performers. The article argues that their casting scenes constitute a distinct pornographic form in which recruitment, inspection, and conditional approval become the primary site of erotic investment. Performers are interviewed, translated, examined, undressed, and sexually tested on camera, transforming audition into a sustained structure of labour evaluation. The camera assumes an employer’s perspective, while the translator mediates linguistic and bodily legibility. Produced amid postsocialist economic instability, the films render market incorporation visible within the sexual encounter itself. Rather than treating pornography as merely representing precarious labour, the article shows how these films eroticize the evaluative procedures through which bodies become employable and incorporable within transnational markets.