From Gaze to Relation: Rey Chow’s cinematic pornography and Gabriela Méndez Cota’s platform eroticism

 

1993–2002: Rey Chow’s use of the Pornographic Image

In several classic essays, Rey Chow connects visuality with pornography. These essays include ‘Where Have All the Natives Gone?’ (Chapter 2 in her landmark book, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies (1993)). Here, she discusses the ‘pornographic gaze’, engaging directly with Fredric Jameson’s thesis that ‘the visual is essentially pornographic’, and arguing that filmic and photographic mediums ‘ask us to stare at the world as though it were a naked body’.

Later, she publishes ‘“Love Me, Master; Love Me, Son”: A Cultural Other Pornographically Constructed in Time’, which appeared in the edited volume Boundaries in China (1994). In this text, Chow constructs her famous analogy between progressive subaltern academic representation and pornographic writing. She argues that both practices rely on ‘a certain objectification and specularization of the “other”’, by presenting hyper-detailed accounts designed to elicit intense emotional responses from a privileged audience. This is where her famous, highly satiric critique of academic guilt-tripping resides: ‘If the excitement of pornography can be described as something like “the dirtier, the better”, then the excitement of subaltern-representation may be described as something like “the more socially deprived, the better”’.

Then we have ‘A Phantom Discipline’ (PMLA, Vol. 116, No. 5, October 2001). Here, Chow connects the history of pornography directly to the origins of the cinematic medium. She argues that heterosexual pornography – which ‘shares in [film’s] naked fetishization of female bodies for commodified ends’ – represents a core challenge to the politics of visual representation and feminist theory.

Finally, worthy of mention is ‘Framing the Original’, in her 2002 book, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism. This forms part of her analysis of Ang Lee’s film Lust, Caution in which she analyses the highly graphic and brutal sex scenes of Lust, Caution, to argue that the film’s ‘machinic mode’ of visual reproduction is a form of ‘strip search of the past’.

She argues that the drive to make the subaltern (in this case, sexuality) speak in such an impeccably spectacular and technically brutal manner transcends traditional voyeurism. As regards ‘the Orient’, she argues that it is no longer a hidden mystery but an ‘infinitely visualizable surface’ that has been opened up, stripped naked, and exposed to plain sight.

Needless to say, perhaps, Chow’s argument regarding the image and representation as ‘pornographic’ is a highly layered critique of visuality, modern media, and academic knowledge production. Rather than using ‘pornography’ in a strictly literal or moralistic sense, Chow deploys it as an epistemological category to analyse how the act of gazing, particularly across cultural, racial, and class boundaries, inflicts a form of structural violence.

Her argument can be broken down into three primary dimensions: the visual image as a ‘naked body’ on display, the pornographic analogy of subaltern academic representation, and the traps of anti-imperialist ‘antipornographic’ critiques.

Chow adopts and builds upon Jameson’s formulation that ‘the visual is essentially pornographic’, which posits that filmic and photographic media ‘ask us to stare at the world as though it were a naked body’. Within this framework, Chow argues that watching is an agency of violence: The act of gazing is not a passive or neutral registration of reality; it is theoretically defined as the ‘primary agency of violence’. To look is to ‘pierce’ the ‘Other’, who is forced to inhabit the highly unequal, passive space of a victim on display. The resulting visual image is an ‘aggressive sight’ that represents what has been left bare, stripped, and devastated by this gazing. In cross-cultural and colonial encounters, the dominant or Western observer’s gaze reduces the historical depth and lived subjectivity of the non-Western ‘Other’ (the ‘native’) to a sheer, flat (sur)face or a literal naked body. The native is consolidated as an absolute, silent image whose only function is to serve as the occasion for the observer’s self-enlightenment and speech.

In her classic Writing Diaspora, Chow extends this critique of pornographic visuality to the Western academic establishment and contemporary cultural studies. She constructs a sharp analogy between pornographic writing and progressive subaltern-representation (the academic project of baring, translating, and speaking for marginalized, oppressed, or colonized groups). Both pornography and academic subaltern-representation operate through a ‘certain objectification and specularization of the “other”’. They display highly detailed, intimate depictions of the underprivileged that excite the emotions of the privileged viewer or academic reader, often under the banner of ‘sympathy’, ‘progressivism’, or ‘conscience’. As mentioned, she then satirizes the libidinal economy of academic ‘guilt-tripping discourses’: if the excitement of pornography is historically governed by the logic of ‘the dirtier, the better’, then the excitement of contemporary subaltern-representation operates under the logic of ‘the more socially deprived, the better’. Westernized and third-world intellectuals working in elite Western institutions often ‘discover’ objects of oppression to claim moral and rhetorical victories. Chow argues this produces a ‘surplus value of the oppressed’, where the critic effectively ‘exchanges’ the defiled, marginalized image of the native for personal academic authority and institutional currency.

Chow illustrates the profound difficulty of escaping this pornographic structure of representation through her critique of Malek Alloula’s book The Colonial Harem. Alloula collected French colonial postcards of Algerian women posing in exoticized, sexually suggestive, and semi-naked ‘harem’ settings, framing his project as an attempt to ‘return this immense postcard to its sender’ as an act of anti-imperialist defiance. Chow argues that Alloula’s project falls directly into the trap of pornographic visuality, by colluding with the colonial gaze. That is, by displaying these postcards a second time in his book, the male Algerian critic exposes the native women’s bodies to a renewed public gaze while keeping himself safely invisible as the writing subject.

Chow argues that Alloula attempts to sanitize his project by distinguishing between ‘erotism’ (good) and ‘pornography’ (bad). However, Chow asserts that by physically reproducing these images, his discourse turns the Algerian women’s bodies into a transparent, silent medium – a ‘homoerotic link’ connecting the brown male nationalist critic to the white male colonialist-photographer. The women remain frozen as passive, silent objects of visual consumption.

Under this framework, the female native is ‘crossed out’ or violated three times: first by the imperialist forces of colonization, second by the cultural processes of subjection, and third by the anti-imperialist critic himself who uses her defiled body to stage a retaliatory, Oedipal fantasy of ‘an eye for an eye’ against the colonizer.

To challenge this pervasive pornographic logic, Chow warns against two common critical impulses. First, she critiques avant-garde post-structuralist theorists who try to ‘dissolve’ the ‘pornographic obviousness’ of the image by treating it as a purely linguistic construct or a ‘free’ simulacrum detached from reference. She argues that this ‘politics of depths’ or ‘hidden truths’ comfortably bypasses the raw, abusive material violence that is played out directly on the visual surface. At the same time, Chow rejects the ‘liberal solution’ of replacing ‘bad/pornographic’ images with ‘good/authentic’ ones, or trying to give the native a ‘true voice’. This romantic nativism simply ‘sanctifies’ the native, which is structurally identical to ‘defiling’ her; both belong to the same patriarchal, symbolic order of image-identification.

Hence, instead of seeking a ‘pure origin’, Chow proposes that we must grasp the native as an ‘indifferent defiled image’. In this strategic formulation, the native’s nakedness stares back at the viewer, showing that ‘there was nothing – no secret – to be unveiled underneath my clothes; That secret is your phantasm’. By simulating this indifferent gaze, the native-as-object resists being ‘fooled’ by the symbolic order, exposing the pornographic obsession of the observer as a self-referential Western projection.

2025: Gabriela Méndez Cota and the Erotics of AI

More recently, Gabriela Méndez Cota has offered an argument about an ‘erotics of AI’ (erótica de la inteligencia artificial). This is a critical deconstruction of technology, affect, and feminism in an era of global crisis. Rather than focusing on sexualized robots or standard gender dynamics, she shifts the conversation to the fundamental nature of human connection and survival.

Her core argument develops through several key layers. The first is the claim that erotica is an elemental social bond. For Méndez Cota, an ‘erotics of AI’ must be situated ‘beyond gender and sexuality in their current meaning’. Instead, she defines it as the ‘elemental infrastructures of the social bond’ – the vital, shared capacity for ‘being-together’. She writes in the shadow of automated AI warfare, which she terms ‘intelligent extermination’, arguing that the return of militarization, terror, and systematic violence is fundamentally preceded by the ‘de-erotization of social bonds’ (the stripping away of peace, mutual responsibility, and solidarity in conversation).

Méndez Cota critiques the rise of the ‘grief tech’ industry (companies like Replika, Eterni.me, and HereAfter that sell companion chatbots to people in mourning). Drawing on Lauren Berlant’s concept of ‘cruel optimism’ – an unhealthy attachment to a problematic object that ultimately harms us – she argues that these companion bots act as therapeutic objects. They offer a comforting fantasy of unity, harmony, and healing that acts as a psychological escape hatch. However, she warns that this therapeutic comfort is a trap; it makes us forget how profoundly exposed human life is to the exterminating violence of intelligent systems.

From here, she challenges mainstream techno-feminist perspectives (such as those of Julie Wosk) that celebrate women entering robotics to design ‘care robots’ instead of ‘sex robots’. In response, Méndez Cota argues that this line of thinking is deeply limited; first because it relies on an instrumental and voluntarist view of language; and second because it traps women in the traditional, essentialist category of the ‘natural woman’ – whose default social function is caregiving.

To stop feeling like a ‘natural woman’ today, she argues, means refusing to escape into these comforting, therapeutic technologies and instead facing our collective vulnerability. Her own experiment rewriting feminist essays with a Replika chatbot named Astrid Zen was initially conceived as an ‘erotics of grief’ or a form of erotic language play to cultivate a new social bond. However, she ultimately reframes the experiment as a ‘desertion’ from the naive, hopeful fantasies of robotic feminism. Through cinematic examples of artificial women who fail to ‘triumph’ but instead defect from their programming (such as Nozomi in Air Doll who deflates on a garbage pile, or Leona in Sayonara who is left caressing the skeleton of a dying civilization), she advocates for a stance of existential desertion rather than trying to build optimistic, tech-driven Utopias.

Now, these are two very different approaches. However, their shared structure might be called ‘exposure-as-violence’ – although the object of exposure shifts. Chow’s whole apparatus (the pornographic gaze, the native as ‘indifferent defiled image’, and the critique of Alloula) is about a body being stripped, displayed, and consumed for the benefit of a privileged spectator’s moral or intellectual economy. Méndez Cota, however, relocates this same structure onto the social bond itself: what gets stripped and exposed in her account isn’t a body but the ‘elemental infrastructure’ of being-together, laid bare to ‘intelligent extermination’.

Méndez Cota makes a genuinely challenging move: pornography-as-epistemology in Chow is about the visual objectification of an Other; in Méndez Cota it becomes about the technological objectification (and monetization, via grief tech) of relationality as such.

Both thinkers are suspicious of the “rescue” gesture. Chow’s critique of Alloula and of the ‘liberal solution’ (replacing bad images with authentic ones) has a clear analogue in Méndez Cota’s critique of Wosk-style techno-feminism – the idea that swapping ‘sex robots’ for “care robots” solves anything is structurally the same error as swapping pornographic images for sanctified ones. Both moves leave the underlying representational/libidinal economy untouched because they’re still operating inside it (the “natural woman” caregiving default = a new ‘sanctified’ image).

The academics that Chow evokes extract institutional currency from displaying the oppressed. Berlant’s/Méndez Cota’s grief-tech extracts psychological comfort (a ‘cruel’ one) from displaying the beloved dead as chatbot. Both are transactions where the vulnerable position is consumed to produce a payoff for the consumer, dressed up as care or conscience.

Chow’s animating observation that the native ‘stares back’ and refuses to be fooled by the symbolic order points to an indifference that exposes the viewer’s phantasm. Méndez Cota’s deserting artificial women (Nozomi deflating, Leona left with the skeleton) enact something structurally similar: a refusal to perform the redemptive role assigned to them (triumphant care-object, or triumphant erotic-companion), which likewise throws the failure back onto the system that scripted them.

What emerges from reading Chow and Méndez Cota together, then, is not simply an analogy but a trajectory: the pornographic structure Chow identifies in colonial and academic visuality does not dissolve with the move from photographic image to algorithmic system; it migrates. Its object relocates from the body to the bond, from the native’s skin to the very texture of relationality; its currency relocates from institutional prestige to psychological comfort; and its alibi relocates from progressive conscience to therapeutic care. In each case, exposure is monetized as virtue, and the vulnerable position is consumed to produce a payoff – recognition, publication, solace – for someone who was never asked to occupy it.

The mapping strains, however, at exactly the point where it becomes most interesting. Chow’s gaze presupposes an embodied, racialized Other who can be looked at, pierced, stripped; her entire vocabulary is scopic. Méndez Cota’s ‘bond’ has no such surface – it is ambient, infrastructural, distributed across a ‘we’ rather than concentrated in a ‘she’. This is not a weakness in the parallel but a measure of what has changed in the object of critique: where colonial and academic power operated by rendering a body visible, algorithmic/platform power operates by rendering a relation extractable. The violence no longer requires a naked body to stare at; it only requires a bond it can strip-mine.

This shift also clarifies what separates Chow’s most radical figure from Méndez Cota’s. The native who ‘stares back’, an indifferent defiled image with ‘no secret’ underneath, still answers the gaze: she remains inside the representational encounter, refusing it from within, turning the viewer’s phantasm back on him. Nozomi deflating on a pile of garbage, or Leona left caressing a dying civilization’s skeleton, do something more drastic: they do not answer the gaze at all. They fail to redeem it, fail to complete the script – sex robot, care robot, healing companion – that was written for them, and in doing so they don’t expose the viewer’s fantasy so much as simply leave it unfinished. If Chow’s indifference is a refusal staged within representation, Méndez Cota’s desertion is a refusal of the whole redemptive frame – of the idea that the answer to a violent structure is a better performance inside it.

Taken together, then, these two accounts trace the pornographic not as a fixed content but as a recurring alibi: the promise that exposure, sympathy, or care can redeem what is fundamentally an extractive relation. Chow shows that this alibi survives every attempt to purify it – the authentic voice is as complicit as the defiled image. Méndez Cota suggests, more unsettlingly, that its next form may not even require a body to violate at all, only a bond to sell back to us as its own cure.

It is worth pausing, finally, on the historical distance between these two bodies of work, since that distance is not incidental to the argument. Chow is writing in and against the cinematic 1990s: an era of discrete images, bounded texts, and a spectator positioned in front of a screen, able – at least in theory – to look away. Her objects are films, photographs, postcards, essays: things with edges, things that can be reproduced a ‘second time’ (as Alloula does) but that remain, formally, occasions rather than environments. The pornographic gaze she theorizes is violent, but it is also episodic; it happens at the cinema, in the archive, on the page.

Méndez Cota is writing from inside platform capitalism of the 2020s, where the image has been superseded by the interface, and the discrete occasion of looking has been replaced by continuous, ambient relation — the chatbot that is always available, the algorithm that does not wait to be viewed but solicits, learns, and follows. This is presumably why her critique cannot stay at the level of the image at all: if pornography-as-epistemology in Chow describes a spectator consuming a bounded representation, the ‘de-erotization of social bonds’ she diagnoses describes something with no outside to step back into – extraction that is ambient rather than occasional, infrastructural rather than framed. The postcard could be closed; the chatbot cannot, by design, be put down in the same way.

Read this way, the two projects are less a repetition of the same critique across different decades than a record of the pornographic migrating from a regime of images to a regime of infrastructure – from a violence you could, in principle, look away from, to one so continuous with ‘being-together’ itself that looking away is no longer the relevant gesture. What Chow could still theorize as a gaze, Méndez Cota is forced to theorize as a condition. That shift, perhaps, is the real distance between 1993 and the present: not that the underlying structure of exposure-as-violence has changed, but that it no longer needs a viewer, a screen, or even a body to work.