"You've got to remember the system is rigged. The female gaze in the same sentence as subversive is a bit of a stretch. It's the female gaze activated on a platform owned by men."

Arvida Bystrom in conversation with Grace Banks, "Arvida Byström’s New Book Nuda, AI And Ten Years Of Her Female Gaze" (2024)

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"Forever Mediated: Feminist erotic texts and the seduction economy" is my in-progress dissertation for MA Comparative Literature at University College London. This piece asks how erotic texts made by women mediated by the male patrons, publishers, and toolmakers who fund its creation. Through a comparison of two feminist pornographies made half a century apart, I aim to uncover how women’s erotic art maneuvers this line between theoretical subversion and sexual conformity, as well as how this balance has been automated on digital media by the surveillance of a profit-motivated algorithm. 

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The comparative analysis at hand is between Anais Nin’s Delta of Venus (1977) and Arvida Byström’s AI nude photobook In The Clouds with Arvida Byström (2024). Nin's infamous collection of erotic stories was written as a series of commissions for a private collector. She famously protests about the crudeness that the collector demanded from her, as opposed to her own love of sensuality and detail. Nonetheless, the texts became notorious after her death and remain one of Nin's most successful publications to date. Byström's photobook is a compilation of AI-generated nudes she sold to men for thousands of dollars via the creator app Sunroom, accompanied with critical texts from Slavoj Zizek, Olivia Kan-Sperling, and more. While the circumstances are drastically different, these two seductresses both managed to profit off curations of their own sensuality. Are these works both porn and feminist art?

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In my literature review, I plan to build off of post-Deleuzian theories of sex, embodiment, and “becoming-woman” to outline a brief history of erotica that has been considered both porn and art. I will follow this up with a theory of “seduction economy” – based on the economic idea of “attention economics” – to describe how male attention can act as a sieve for which feminist erotic texts gain larger recognition in art or literature. Through the textual comparison, I will explore how the seduction economy has both broadened and solidified for feminist erotic texts with the appearance of digital platforms and the subsequent rise of algorithmic beauty. 

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Throughout the course of the project (until September), I plan to conduct mini-Interviews through my Substack. If you feel that you can speak about Deleuzian feminism(s), 20th century erotica, contemporary feminist porn/erotica, sexuality as trend/as data, please get in touch. 

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