The passivity of seeing: A Lacanian perspective on pornographic spectatorship in virtual reality.

This article investigates how pornographic spectatorship in virtual reality shapes sexuality and desire from a Lacanian perspective. By considering the specificity of VR pornography as a genre, it explores various implications of the embodied encounter with both pornographic images and VR technologies. I argue that the representation and production of eroticism in virtual reality generate a specific type of the viewing subject, who achieves sexual arousal via an act of seeing characterised by passivity. How this idea of passivity testifies to symbolic alienation as well as offering a possibility of resistance is further discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]