UCLA Center for the Study of Women

Citizenship porn lies at the nexus of gender, citizenship, race, and sexuality. It indicates much about power embedded in our body-making practices, as well as the ways in which differential value is produced. As such, in this paper I ask, what makes porn and citizenship compatible? How does citizenship porn produce epistemological value (embedded with hierarchy), and what value is produced through this union? To engage these questions, this analysis is developed in two parts. First, it is argued that as a visualizing technique, citizenship porn provides a frame through which the meaning of “undocumented” as a subject category is produced. The second part of the analysis considers what this epistemological value might look like. The “perverse body” is taken as an example. Finally, I conclude with a discussion of the possibilities for this project in the future.