The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (26 page)

2
. Adam Polaski, “Feminist Porn For a Male Audience,”
The Good Men Project,
April 28, 2011,
http://goodmenproject.com/good-feed-blog/feminist-porn/
.

3
. See Michael Kimmel,
Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men
(New York: HarperCollins, 2008).

“Every time we fuck, we win”: The Public Sphere of Queer, Feminist, and Lesbian Porn as a (Safe) Space for Sexual Empowerment

INGRID RYBERG

Ingrid Ryberg
is the director of the drag king documentary
Drag-kingdom of Sweden
(2002), the lesbian short
Phone Fuck
(2009), one of the shorts in the Swedish feminist porn film collection
Dirty Diaries,
with Mia Engberg (2009). She has published articles in academic journals, such as
Film International, Montage AV,
and
Frauen und Film,
and regularly writes for the Swedish movie magazine
FLM.
In 2012 she defended her doctoral thesis, “Imagining Safe Space: The Politics and Ethics of Queer, Feminist, and Lesbian Pornography,” in the Department of Media Studies, Stockholm University, Sweden.

L
aunched in 2006, the Pornfilmfestival Berlin has become a central arena for the current queer, feminist, and lesbian porn film culture. Though the festival has hosted guests such as Candida Royalle and Shine Louise Houston and workshops on feminist porn and safer sex since its inception, the audience for the festival is quite mixed. When I attended the festival in October 2010, I had a deeply ambivalent experience. I went to see the film
Much More Pussy
by the French director Emilie Jouvet, one of the prominent figures in the current wave of queer, feminist, and lesbian porn in Europe and North America.
Much More Pussy
is the second film Jouvet made that documents the burlesque performance “The Queer X Show,” where a group of seven sex-radical women toured Europe in a minibus during the summer of 2009. While the first film
Too Much Pussy: Feminist Sluts in The Queer X Show
focuses on the performances and discussions among the seven women, the second film,
Much More Pussy,
focuses more on the sexual encounters that occurred during their tour. I had attended “The Queer X Show” when they performed in Stockholm in August 2009 and was excited to see what Jouvet had made of the footage documenting the tour.

During the screening something occurred that forced me to grapple with the simultaneous experience of pleasure and danger involved in
porn spectatorship for women. As I will discuss later, this incident made me powerfully aware of how there can be no simple equation between queer, feminist, and lesbian pornography and empowerment. In this article, I intend to unravel some of the issues at stake in queer, feminist, and lesbian porn film culture and struggles for sexual empowerment. I draw on ethnographic fieldwork in European porn production and exhibition contexts, specifically the Pornfilmfestival Berlin screening of
Much More Pussy.
I argue that this film culture may act as both a
counter public
and an
intimate public
space for queer, feminist, and lesbian subjects, and that it is in the tensions and dynamic transactions between these notions of publicness that the potential for a safe space can be both located and undermined. Importantly, empowerment is not an issue of individual agency. Rather, it is an ongoing and collective process of negotiating the norms that both surround and incorporate us. I claim that this continuous, collective negotiation can potentially make queer, feminist, and lesbian pornography a safe space for sexual empowerment for women and queer people.

Claiming Public Space for Queer, Feminist, and Lesbian Sexual Discourse

“The Queer X Show” and the Pornfilmfestival Berlin are two examples of the contemporary queer, feminist, and lesbian porn film culture as it has emerged in Europe over the last decade. Other examples are the Post Porn Politics Symposium held in Berlin in October 2006 (hosting guests such as Annie Sprinkle), Paris Porn Film Fest launched in 2009, the performance collective Girls Who Like Porno in Barcelona (2003–2007), and the Swedish feminist porn collection
Dirty Diaries: Twelve Shorts of Feminist Porn
(Engberg, 2009), for which I directed the lesbian short
Phone Fuck
(Ryberg, 2009). The emergence of this film culture in Europe is closely related to and overlapping with North American examples such as the Feminist Porn Awards in Toronto (2006–) and the Good Vibrations Independent Erotic Film Festival in San Francisco (2005–). San Francisco-based filmmakers such as Shine Louise Houston, Courtney Trouble, and Madison Young are frequent guests at the Pornfilmfestival Berlin and “The Queer X Show,” which gathers sex-radical women from France, Germany, and from the United States.

In the
Too Much Pussy
press release on Facebook, explicit reference was made to American “pro-sex” feminists such as Annie Sprinkle, Candida Royalle, and Carol Queen; it positioned the performers in “The
Queer X Show” as new actors in the same revolution to playfully affirm sexuality and reinvent new representations of desire and pleasure.
¹
In the early 1980s, Sprinkle made
Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle,
and Royalle formed the production company Femme Productions, ushering in a new era of porn from the point of view of women. Lesbian sex videos also started to be produced by companies such as Fatale Media. Both Femme Productions and Fatale Media were examples of sex-radical activism in the then-ongoing, heated feminist debates known as the sex wars. In these debates, issues such as pornography, sadomasochism, and lesbian butch/femme roles became a dividing line between sex radicals and cultural feminists.
²
In cultural feminism, women’s sexuality was seen as radically different from male models of genital and penetrative sex.
³
Lesbian porn challenged this framing of female sexuality as intimate, nurturing, and reciprocal, and celebrated sex roles and acts considered antifeminist and patriarchal (in the antiporn discourse) such as butch/femme, rough sex, and penetration with dildos.
⁴
Lesbian porn also appropriated mainstream hardcore conventions like the money shot, the meat shot, and the principle of maximum visibility.
⁵

The sex wars changed the feminist landscape for good, and it is a crucial context for understanding the contemporary feminist, queer, and lesbian porn film culture. But the story of the sex wars is also a story often told and, as argued by Clare Hemmings, forms part of a developmental narrative structuring the feminist past as decade specific, as a progression from the essentialist 1970s to a more refined understanding of differences in the 1990s and 2000s.
⁶
In accordance with Hemmings’s call for a conceptualization of the feminist past “as a series of ongoing contests and relationships rather than a process of imagined linear displacement,” I propose a more nuanced understanding of queer, feminist, and lesbian porn.
⁷
Focusing too much on the dividing line between cultural feminism and sex radicalism, one misses important overlaps, inter-texts, notions, and features within this film culture. As Chris Straayer argues in her chronicling of lesbian sexual representations in film and video, the ideologies of both cultural feminism and “pro-sex” lesbians “frequently intersect in independent video,” where women’s struggle for sexual agency, self-definition, and empowerment prevails as a central concern.
⁸

This film culture also builds on the second-wave feminist tradition of consciousness-raising groups as safe spaces for empowerment. These spaces were shaped by the idea that, through sharing and learning from one another’s experiences of oppression and explorations of one’s body
and sexuality, women become more self-confident and autonomous. Jane Gerhard contends that before second-wave radical feminism had fractured into different interests, groups, and sexual agendas during the 1970s, sexual pleasure was framed as the key to liberation and became synonymous with empowerment and self-determination.
⁹
The impulses of both antiporn critique and sex radicalism coexisted in radical feminism in the late 1960s and early 1970s and “resulted in a productive moment of activism” where sexual pleasure was claimed as every woman’s right.
¹⁰
One example of this activism is the Boston Women’s Health Collective classic
Our Bodies, Ourselves.
Describing their experiences of empowerment in coming together and sharing and learning about their bodies, they write:

For us, body education is core education. Our bodies are the physical bases from which we move out into the world; ignorance, uncertainty—even, at worst, shame—about our physical selves create in us an alienation from ourselves that keeps us from being the whole people that we could be.

As we managed to be more trusting with each other we found that talking about ourselves and our sexuality can be very liberating. . . . [W]ith each other’s support, we have become more accepting of our sexuality, and we have begun to explore aspects of ourselves that we hadn’t thought much about before. . . . We are learning to define our sexuality in our own terms. . . . Our sexuality is complex because it involves physical, psychological, emotional, and political factors.
¹¹

Looking again at “The Queer X Show,” it is possible to see how it inscribes itself into this second-wave feminist tradition of women’s groups, consciousness-raising, and the politics of sexual pleasure. Moreover, in the two films about “The Queer X Show,” the intimate dialogue and knowledge production within this group of women is central, evident also in their blog, where the performer Mad Kate wrote:

What I appreciate most about this tour so far is the privilege and comfort of being surrounded by incredibly wonderful queer women; our ability to have these amazing conversations and not to feel like any of my opinions or feelings are wrong or illegitimate.

I am familiar with a school of thought that believes sexual desire is superfluous, that these are the things that can and should be repressed and reconsidered, or that sexual freedom is luxury or even childish. But I can’t agree; freedom to express one’s self sexually is tied into every freedom of expression of the body, from speech to basic needs like eating and sleeping. When we don’t have the rope around us we suddenly realize just how much easier we can breathe.
¹²

Like second-wave feminist activism around issues of sexual pleasure, the contemporary queer, feminist, and lesbian porn film culture constructs public arenas for feminist discourses on sexuality. Lynn Comella highlights how the NOW Conference on Female Sexuality in New York in 1973 anticipated the Barnard Conference in 1982 in “[creating] a public space for women to come together and talk openly about their sexuality at a time when women had few opportunities to do so.”
¹³
As Jane Juffer points out, women’s access to public discourses on sexuality, such as the masturbation discourse in feminist literature of the 1970s, altered the conditions for, not just material, but also mental access to their own bodies and sexual pleasure.
¹⁴
Women’s sexual organs, including the clitoris and cervix, menstruation, and masturbation, were celebrated in consciousness-raising groups and literature, as well as in the artwork of Judy Chicago and Carolee Schneemann and in the films by Barbara Hammer and Anne Severson.
¹⁵
In her blog entry Mad Kate describes how the participants in the show, at an early stage of the tour, examine their cervixes together. In “The Queer X Show” the practice of cervix examination was also performed on stage by the sex educator and performer Sadie Lune, echoing both Annie Sprinkle’s public cervix announcements in the 1990s, and the opening up of public discourse and space for feminist consciousness-raising around sexuality in the 1970s.

Such reclaiming of public space is also invoked in a number of the shorts in the Swedish feminist porn collection
Dirty Diaries.
For instance, in her short
Flasher Girl on Tour,
conceptual artist Joanna Rytel plays the role of a female exhibitionist who exposes herself in various public places in Paris, such as in the Metro. Wearing a strap-on vibrator that she controls with a remote, she also visits the red-light district Pigalle where she stalks and objectifies various men. In its attack on and appropriation of male dominated public sexualized spaces, Rytel’s film ties in with a long-running tradition of feminist performance art and intervention in public spaces.
Flasher Girl on Tour
echoes, for instance, Valie Export’s performance Genital Panik (1968), where Export exposed her genitals in a movie theater as a comment on women’s role in cinema. In Åsa Sandzén’s film
Dildoman,
an animation set in a stripclub, the female strippers subvert the action by using one of the male visitors—a
figure based on the former leader of the Swedish Christian Democratic Party, Alf Svensson—as a dildo. Similarly, Pella Kågerman’s film
Body Contact,
a mockumentary about an amateur porn film shoot staged by two women and a man that they find on an Internet dating site, reclaims the sexualized public domain of the Internet. The man they pick up and invite is at first reluctant but eventually allows them to film the sex, performing what he believes are good porn positions (like “doggy style”). In all three films, male-dominated, sexualized public space is appropriated for women’s sexual pleasure and gendered power relations are put into question.