Abstract
ABSTRACTIn this article I try out a number of methodological tacks to understand what happens when porn stops working. I take the advent of gay male VHS porn in the late 1970s/early 1980s for my trials: a history of material technology approach that imagines ‘wear’ as analytic category; an apparatus theory analysis that takes frustration as a central (and not peripheral or accidental) experience of porn-viewing; and an interview approach that must reckon with the skeins of memory and error tolerance. These tacks overlap and combine, but ultimately fail if what we seek is a seemingly stable place from which to observe wily dynamics of porn's media ruptures. I propose that to troubleshoot porn studies’ focus on narratives of innovation and success, we must appreciate broken porn for its unpredictable avenue to novel media forms. This, in the end, offers a roomier gambit to understand a doubly elusive topic (a bad object with glitches).
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