The Practices of Amateur Pornography

• Applicant: Dr. Sven Lewandowski
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research
• Term: from 2018 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 397130176

The research project investigates medial as well as sexual practices of persons who create amateur pornographic self-presentations. It is designed to collect new empirical data as well as to sketch out novel explorative research methods in the field of sociological sexual research. On that account, the research project investigates widely distributed amateur pornographic self-presentation as quasi (auto-) ethnographic data documenting practices of self-presentation as well as lay sexual practices and interactions. Precisely, amateur pornographic self-presentations are employed not only as objects of investigation, but also as methodical vehicles for the study of, potentially, transformed cultures of sexuality. Since habitualized and incorporated sexual scripts are enacted and reproduced in each sexual (inter-)action, the analysis of amateur pornography is taken as a singular opportunity for opening up the black box of private sexual practices and interactions, which has remained occluded due to the restrictions of conventional research methods.The analytical investigations center on amateur pornographic self-presentations that are meant to be expressions of individual sexual identities and desires rather than being primarily motivated by economical purposes. The production of amateur pornography is systematically studied for the sake of, firstly, bringing to the fore how sexual actors navigate and negotiate their sexual arrangement, scripts, identities and practices among themselves and, secondly, to disclose their capacities to mediate between their individual desires and widespread stereotyped norms of sexual behavior. By this dint, amateur pornographers are assigned the role as active sense-producing actors that display a genuine awareness of personal as well as public codes which, in turn, may serve as demarcations of positions within the field of amateur pornography.In its methodological profile, the project introduces a methodical device rarely probed within the vast domain of qualitative research on sexuality, i.e. a triangulation of methods of image-, video- and video interaction analysis with qualitative interviews. This triangulation of research methods allows for investigating both sexual and medial practices as well as sense and life worlds [Sinn- und Lebenswelten] of amateur pornographers.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants