My year as a Dominatrix: non-recuperable pornography, labour, and the work of Shannon Bell

In this article, I analyse my experiences working as a Dominatrix in a small Ontario dungeon through Shannon Bell’s writings on the politics of gender, sexuality, and the body. Bell’s philosophic criteria for non-recuperable pornography, outlined in her chapter ‘Post-Porn/Post-Anti-Porn’, provide the structure for my argument. These philosophical criteria include ‘the saying of the work is not lost in the said; the work is produced from a new post-porn/post-anti-porn positionality; [and] the work is an act of labor as self-activity and not labor alienated as labor-power’. Because non-recuperable pornography works to recodify gendered bodies and bodies engaged in sexual action, assessing where it is, and is not, operative is important. I argue that my work in the dungeon (what I call durational pornographic scenes) adheres to Bell’s first two criteria for non-recuperable pornography but not the third (and that this third failure undermines the first and second criteria as well). I conclude that, ultimately, the project of recodifying bodies and bodies engaged in sexual action needs to be tied to the larger project of transforming economic social relations more generally.