‘Orgies in the Garden of Heaven’ – the pornographic playground of Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s Lost Girls

ABSTRACT In this article we situate Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie's Lost Girls as a ‘pornographic playground' arguing that it is through ‘play' that the text is able to position itself as serious and not-serious simultaneously, something central to its navigation of the ethics of its pornographic mode. Contextualising our analysis by considering the relative absence of ‘sex' as an example of ‘play' in scholarly texts, as well as the debates around the porn-wars, we argue Lost Girls uses a playful mode as part of its subversive reiteration of pornography, and as an attempt to render pornography ‘feminine’. In doing this, it nevertheless creates a space of tacit exclusion, creating a sexual playground predicated upon class privilege. However, it is as a space of play that the text navigates the ethics of representation – something particularly important to its dealing with serious themes including sexual assault, incest and paedophilia – by insisting upon the simultaneous connection and separation between the actual and imaginary, the real-world and not-real-image/text/imagination. Speaking back to wider debates around pornography, the text positions the navigation of such ambiguity as central not only to the ethics of texts, but also to the creation of spaces of play.