Obscene Theming as Strategic Commodification of Public Spaces

Analyzing the Material Outcomes of Staging Sexualized Feminine Bodies in Venice Beach

The provocative display of feminine sexuality is a defining feature of many mainstream tourist destinations. In Venice Beach, such displays adopt a countercultural aesthetic while serving the interests of its private tourist economy. Alexandre Pires, Ph.D. Student (Université Paris Cité / Géographie-cités) argue that the sexualized staging of feminine bodies contributes to the obscene theming of public spaces— a mode of spatial production in which capitalist logics aestheticize, commodify, and ultimately privatize public spaces.

Obscene theming operates through the aesthetic production of feminine bodies, which are incorporated into tourist imaginaries and fantasies of democratic freedom associated with Venice Beach.
Drawing on Lukács’s theory of commodification, he contends that this staged obscenity functions to reinforce spatial injustices. It masks the labor involved in producing these embodied aesthetics by framing them as expressions of individual agency, while enabling a normative tourist economy that categorizes, hierarchizes, and regulates embodied performances of aesthetic transgression.
Alexandre Pires uses obscenity as an analytical lens to examine how ludic culture operates within public spaces shaped by the visible stigmas of a maximally unjust urban context.

Excerpt

Other iconic feminine bodies derive from local and regional fictional imaginaries. Displays showcase mermaids, beach beauties wearing bikinis, blond hippies in charge of weed delivery, and various pornographic categories (pin-ups, playmates, MILFs, and domina) (Figure 5). These representations appear repeatedly in local advertising media or on the merchandise comprising the shop displays. Merchants strategically deploy sexualized representations—especially those perceived as morally provocative—as commercial bait to attract attention and customers.

Fictional feminine stereotypes are also characteristic of Venice Beach’s landscape. These representations draw from local beach, cool and new-age culture, as well as from pornographic categories shaped by national and local industries—such as Playboy (Photos by author, 2022)

Pires, A. (2026). Obscene Theming as Strategic Commodification of Public Spaces: Analyzing the Material Outcomes of Staging Sexualized Feminine Bodies in Venice Beach. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, (00). https://doi.org/10.14288/acme.jh8o2x-2463

Alexandre Pires questions how constructing the visibility of feminine bodies within public spaces entangles in producing the economic value of Los Angeles’s metropolitan spaces.
In his PhD in Geography under the supervision of Renaud LE GOIX and Pauline GUINARD, entitled “Billboards, representations of feminine bodies, and the production of space in Los Angeles. Analyzing the dialectical interrelation between the construction of stereotypes associated with female bodies and the production of socio-spatial injustices in Los Angeles”, he conducts a cultural geography of visible feminine bodies within the metropolitan landscape of Los Angeles. By constructing photographic archives, analyzing their pictures, and conducting ethnographic fieldworks, he is exploring the geographic implications of the changing visibility of feminine bodies across the socioeconomic spaces in Los Angeles.