| Description |
Filmmaker Leah Rachel explores the personal and cultural intersections of identity, affectual exchange, and sex economies in her Web video project Curious Female Casting Couch (2017). Produced in a Los Angeles County adult entertainment studio, CFCC features four videos of young women interviewing with two pixelated male "producers" before disrupting viewer expectations as emotive acts are pursued over sexual ones. Pressed to offer up increasingly intimate details and feelings on-camera, the women construct personas of "amateur" pornography-hopefuls in ways that suggest common "professional" behavioral expectations of service industry workers under global capitalism and its increasingly virtual marketplaces. Created for upload on the popular site PornHub, CFCC was taken down by the company's content-monitors. This project examines the series from dual historical and social perspectives: first, I consider CFCC's approaches to video and performance through art historical lineages of new media art and artists engaging archetypes of the female sex worker, and second, I contextualize CFCC through its intended framework on PornHub.com and the narrative and thematic conventions of the popular casting-couch genre of the mid-2010s. By comparing the media frameworks utilized by late 20th and early 21st century artists and cultural producers, this project aims at illuminating overlaps and critically re-examining concepts of affectual labor between CFCC and those explored in works such as Marina Abramović's Role Exchange (1975) and Andrea Fraser's Untitled (2003). My analyses of each of the Curious women's performances focus on their engagement with and fictional commodification of authenticity, beauty, professional aspiration and critique in contemporary labor marketplaces. CFCC's experiments with identity construction question how the increasingly virtual marketplaces of today are both impacting and shaped by histories of the intellectual authority and social freedoms of female artists and those participating in sex work's variety of virtual, affectual and physical forms. |
