Abstract

The term ‘porn star’ most often refers to the female performer, where her renown is understood to rest on the particularities of her bodily presentation – her stereotypically large breasts, big hair and plastic smile – and who, in much critical discourse, simply demonstrates conformity to patriarchy’s hegemonic ideal of the available (and through her seeming availability, dirty) woman. For male porn stars, the constructions are just as limited: a recognisable and easily caricatured iconography of rampant masculinity reduced to their penis size, the male performer is often placed under erasure as the faceless substitute for the male viewer (Hardy 1998; Shelton 2002), or he is discursively positioned as the ‘man of action’ whose place within the narrative and/or mise-en- scène is as the ‘fucker’, pile-driving orgasms out of the woman (Dines 2010). Made to come, her body is the primary object of the spectacle, displaying her subservience to his big cock. His dialogue is limited to exhortations, his body is large, pumped up and often tattooed. Traditionally paid less than his female co-star, the male performer is rarely the main attraction (at least in pornography aimed at heterosexual audiences).In this chapter we examine the multi-layered stardom of James Deen, the straight American performer variously described as the Tom Cruise (Helmore 2012), Daniel Day-Lewis (Ayala 2013) or Ryan Gosling (ABC Nightline 2012) of porn. Deen has become a very visible persona in and outside of pornography, creating considerable media speculation about the causes and effects of his popularity, particularly for young women. It is in this ‘crossover’ that James Deen becomes particularly interesting, as the coupling of pornographic performer and celebrity persona ruptures usual understandings of relations between male stars and their fans.