Cybersexual moral panics: governing desire in the age of digital censorship

Abstract

Drawing on the intellectual legacy of Shannon Bell, I argue that pornography has been politically retooled as a capacious moral category through which non-normative gender and sexuality are rendered threats to social order. Focusing on ‘Project 2025’ as a central case study, I demonstrate how anti-porn discourse functions as an infrastructural mechanism for governing trans life in the digital age. Situating recent policies within a longer genealogy of obscenity regulation, the article traces how appeals to child protection mobilize affective economies of fear to justify expanded censorship, surveillance, and platform liability. I show how these dynamics operate across legal frameworks, platform moderation, and public discourse, producing a regulatory formation in which anti-trans, anti-porn, and anti-sex work logics converge. In doing so, this article contributes to porn studies and trans studies by offering a framework for understanding how sexual stigma structures the conditions of digital visibility, precarity, and survival.