Alter Egos / Alternative Rhetorics: Belle Knox's Rhetorical Construction of Pornography and Feminism

Abstract

In early 2014, Miriam Weeks, more famously known as “the Duke Porn Star” was exposed for acting in pornography to pay her exorbitant Duke tuition bills. Throughout the media saga that followed her outing, Weeks defended her decision to act in pornography, arguing that it was a feminist affirmation of her sexual agency. However, Weeks’s defense of her pornography career is not monolithic, but rather, takes two distinct forms. The first form is characterized by structural or intersectional rhetoric, focused on the contextual factors that implicate the meaning of both pornography and feminism. Contrasting this rhetorical pattern is another that emerged in Weeks’s defense of pornography, characterized by neoliberalism. This rhetoric focused on the affirmation of individualism. Weeks’s neoliberal rhetoric constructed pornography as an openly-accessible option to solve economic shortcomings, regardless of the individual’s social location. Not only is pornography constructed neoliberally, feminism is also constructed neoliberally. Weeks’s neoliberal construction of feminism reduced feminism to an ideology premised solely on the affirmation of individual choices made by women, regardless of what those choices are. Thus, it ignored the role class plays in gender-based oppression. Although these two rhetorical patterns appear mutually exclusive, they co-exist within Weeks’s defense of her pornography career, articulating two distinct versions of both pornography and feminism.