POV to the People. Online Discourses about Gonzo Pornography

The term ‘gonzo’ is often misunderstood or misused even in the digital public writing or commenting on the genre, becoming a sort of metonymy or lightning rod for more general controversies around pornography. More interesting perhaps, the term has been progressively discarded by the same porn 2.0 industry. How might we understand gonzo then? This article investigates the discursive construction of gonzo pornography through a digital ethnography of online spaces where gonzo porn is watched or debated, proceeding through two stages. First, the close reading of three important user-generated content sites hosting the ‘definitional’ or ‘ontological’ efforts of users (Yahoo! Answers, Wikipedia, Urban Dictionary); and second, the sampling and consequent analysis of 378 comments on gonzo videos deposited on the streaming site PornHub.