As pornography forms our desire, it also reveals the racial and gendered limits of who gets to be perceived as desirable at all. While Adrienne Rich identifies compulsory heterosexuality as a structure that redirects women’s erotic energies towards men, and Amia Srinivasan demonstrates how pornography trains desire under contemporary conditions, Leslie Feinberg exposes how these regimes of desirability rely on rigid, exclusionary forms of gender identity.

In ‘We Are All Works in Progress’, Feinberg rejects the “prevalent Western concepts of what a woman or a man “should” look like,” framing gendered ideals as violent caricatures. The term “should” presents gender normativity as a demand rather than a reflection of natural human behaviour, regulating how bodies are expected to appear and perform. Under contemporary conditions, this regulation intensifies within trans experiences: trans men and trans women are often required to conform to cisgender ideals to be recognised as “passable”, while non-binary people are paradoxically expected to embody androgyny as a legible marker of their gender non-conformity. These expectations produce the illusion that gender authenticity is visually readable simply from how society perceives an individual. Judith Butler argues in Gender Trouble, “given the range of capacities, desires, and gender identities, it makes no sense to identify a specific biological capacity as defining gender,” this claim directly challenges the assumption that gender can be grounded in anatomy or appearance. Yet the persistence of visual and behavioural norms as criteria for our gender identity suggests that gender non-conformity is only tolerated as it continues to be comprehensible within society's cultural ideologies, reinforcing the very binaries it attempts to unsettle. Furthermore, Feinberg’s account of medical authority, “A surgeon decides whether a clitoris is “too large” or a penis is “too small” ... And what is the criteria for a penis being “too small”? Too small for heterosexual intercourse,” exposes how desirability is not only based on how we perform our gender identities but also how it is biologically enforced based on heteronormative standards of sexuality. Alongside Rich’s insistence that heterosexuality is not a preference but an institution, Feinberg’s analysis reveals how bodies that do not conform to genital and gender norms are disciplined, erased and fetishised rather than recognised as subjects of desirability in their own right. 

What's more, Srinivasan’s critique of pornography sharpens this idea of exclusion by demonstrating how pornographic representation produces hierarchies of race and gender under the guise of sexual visibility. Her question, “Why does the fem gay man or black woman need to watch someone who looks like them be bent over and fucked to know that they, in their femness or blackness, are desirable?” Exposes representation as a deeply ambivalent form of recognition. For queer, trans people as well as people of colour, desirability is often conditional, visibility alone does not dismantle harmful stereotypes as they are often reinforced because marginalised bodies are shown as spectacles through fetishisation or degradation, as pornographic portrayals frequently enhance and encourage pervasive depictions of minorities. This raises a fundamental intersectional problem: how can desire be authentically represented when the subjects of that desire are systematically misrepresented, marginalised or erased? Audre Lorde’s theory of the erotic clarifies how this exclusion is maintained. In Sister Outsider, Lorde argues that “when we live away from those erotic guides from within ourselves, then our lives are limited by external and alien forms.” This resonates with pornographic depictions which impose prejudice fantasises onto marginalised bodies rather than allowing desire to emerge from lived, self-defined experience. For marginalised individuals, sexual representation is shaped by structures that prioritise patriarchal, racialised and cis-normative desires. Under these conditions, desire becomes a mode of conformity rather than connection, demonstrating how pornographic representation pushes a harmful and exclusionary rhetoric that determines who gets to be desired.