The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (27 page)

Conditions of Access and Agency in the Sexualized Public Sphere

At the Pornfilmfestival Berlin 2010, I attended the screening of
Much More Pussy
with a female friend. Together, we settled down toward the front of the theater at the cinema Moviemento in the Kreuzberg district, the main location of the festival. The theater soon became crowded. Jouvet, as well as some of the women from the show, were also present. This was the first public screening of the film. A man sat down next to my friend and from the very start I noticed that the way he looked and smiled at her was too pushy and far from invited. My friend started to fidget, holding her arms tight around herself. I asked her if she wanted me to tell him to back off. She said, “No, it’s okay.”

Then the film started and I was absorbed by the force of the intimate interactions among the women in the film; by the affective intensity of their different experiences and thoughts on gender and sexuality that they share with each other and bring into sexual role-play and fantasy; and by the careful responsiveness and participative presence of Jouvet’s camera. After the screening, as I left the theater, I realized that I had not noticed any more fidgeting by my friend. I did not get the chance to ask her about it then, but I hoped that it was not just that I had been completely overwhelmed by the film and unaware of what happened next to me. Perhaps the man stopped once the film started. Perhaps he lost his rude courage once confronted with the fierce women in the film, with the control they possessed over their own sexualities and bodies. This was the fantasy I wanted to believe and chose to take with me when I returned to Sweden. Because if, as the film’s punk soundtrack repeatedly declares, quoting the queer activist group Queer Nations’ 1990 manifesto: “every time we fuck, we win”—this man should not. Or, was
this man in fact the symbolic “winner” of the sexualized public sphere enabling this film culture?

A few months later I emailed my friend in Berlin asking her what had really happened during the screening. She answered that the man had put his arm on the armrest, then slowly moved it closer to her body and touched her. She writes:

The hand was there throughout the film, on the armrest. At some point I put his hand back at the armrest since it had landed on my side of it. The person did not seem to realize that he did something that made me feel unease. When I looked at him, he seemed to have the coziest time ever, seemed mostly happy that I looked at him.
¹⁶

As this example demonstrates, any understanding of queer, feminist, and lesbian porn as potentially sexually empowering needs to take into account where, when, and how the experience of it takes place. As Jane Juffer argues, the meanings of pornography need to be located in relation to specific contexts of production, distribution, and consumption. In her work on the home as a site for women’s porn consumption, Juffer problematizes ideas about the transformative power of interpretation as an isolated practice, as placeless individual reader agency, and subversion in an undifferentiated public sphere.
¹⁷
The conditions of access and agency, the relation between the individual subject, and the forces that enable and constrict her movement between sites where porn is available, need to be analyzed.
¹⁸

As my example from the Pornfilmfestival Berlin demonstrates, these enabling and constricting forces are not just economic or material but also cultural and lived as embodied experience. Differently gendered, classed, and raced bodies are differently conditioned and located. In Sara Ahmed’s phenomenological terms they extend differently in space—precisely as in this situation where the man next to my friend reached past his side of the armrest to touch her while she squeezed her arms around herself. In Ahmed’s argument, bodies take the shape of norms that are repeated over time and with force, and “gender becomes naturalized as a property of bodies [. . .] partly through the loop of this repetition.”
¹⁹
In her email my friend writes:

Despite my thirty years I still have not learned to say no, that I’m in charge of my body and very easily could tell a man to stop if he crosses a boundary. Words to mark boundaries are something I’ve often needed but not had access to. I have to struggle to dare saying no; it does not come naturally.

My friend describes how she had arrived at this screening with the feeling that here she could feel bodily loose and free, that she would not have to be self-conscious about her body in this context. Her experience of discomfort in the theater is akin to the feeling of disorientation, of becoming an object, of “losing one’s place.”
²⁰
Referencing Frantz Fanon’s insights about racial abjection, Ahmed contends that “disorientation is unevenly distributed: some bodies more than others have their involvement in the world called into crisis.”
²¹
The bodily feeling of disorientation can be “a violent feeling, and a feeling that is affected by violence, or shaped by violence directed toward the body.”
²²
This situation in the theater in Berlin involved white bodies, but can still be understood through Ahmed’s discussion about how violation and disorientation may block action and accumulate stress.
²³

Queer, Feminist, and Lesbian Porn as an Alternative Public Sphere

The transnational queer, feminist, and lesbian porn film culture can be seen as an alternative public sphere where such forces, naturalized directions, and stress are negotiated and reformulated, and where new worlds may come into reach. Borrowing from film historian Miriam Hansen, this film culture potentially enables an alternative experiential horizon.
²⁴
Just as early cinema in Hansen’s argument opened up an arena for a new discourse on femininity and a redefinition of norms and codes of sexual conduct, so too can this contemporary film culture be said to function as an arena where new sexual discourses and conduct can be articulated and expressed.
²⁵
This arena involves both the physical space of the theater and “the phantasmagoric space on the screen, and the multiple and dynamic transactions between these spaces.”
²⁶
At play in my experience of
Much More Pussy
were such dynamic transactions: between the space on the screen and the space of the theater; between the empowering interactions among the women in the film; between this man harassing my friend and my own expectations that here gendered norms would be redefined, not reinforced; between the queer, feminist, and lesbian film culture and the wider sexualized public sphere.

I suggest one way of understanding the ambivalence of this experience and the complexity of this alternative public sphere’s overlapping with the wider sexualized public is to conceptualize it also as a multiple and dynamic transaction between the spaces of
counter public
activism and
intimate public
affirmation. As theorized by Nancy Fraser, Iris Marion
Young, and Michael Warner, the notion of counter public describes an alternative space where marginalized groups formulate and circulate counter discourses, where new understandings and ideas of their experiences, identities, and interests are encouraged and mobilized to challenge the wider public.
²⁷
I contend that queer, feminist, and lesbian porn film culture can be understood as a counter public sphere where dominant notions of sexuality and gender are challenged.

In an article published on the Swedish political debate website
Newsmill
the week of the premiere of
Dirty Diaries
in August 2009, the director Marit Östberg argues in favor of taking control of sexual objectification and “screaming out our horniness”:

Feminist porn wants people to be horny, wants to encourage people to feel sexy and to be sexual objects, but decide for themselves how, why and for whom. Once you have that power it is much easier to decide when you DO NOT want to be sexual. [—]
Dirty Diaries
is an important project because we need to create more images of desire, ways of having sex and different ways of screaming out our horniness. We need more portraits of sexy fantasies. With the film
Authority
in
Dirty Diaries
I want to celebrate all the proud, shameless, horny and queer bodies that paint their dreams over the public sphere.
²⁸

Through Marit Östberg’s and other
Dirty Diaries
filmmakers’ participation in media, as well as through the film’s wide circulation in Sweden and abroad,
Dirty Diaries
gained far more publicity than the male-dominated space of Swedish filmmaking normally allows.
²⁹
By using mobile phone cameras, these queer feminist porn filmmakers entered into the means of production by sharing and circulating their self-represented sexuality in public.

However, according to Lauren Berlant, the concept of counter public overemphasizes a political register.
³⁰
In her work on intimate publics, Berlant focuses more on how publics are affectively structured as scenes for identification, reflection, and recognition and less by political aspirations. What is highlighted in Berlant’s work is less a trajectory from the margins to mobilized resistance in the wider public, but a trajectory at the level of subjectivity, where the members of an intimate public, sharing a sense of social belonging, are empowered and acknowledged affectively.

Queer, feminist, and lesbian pornography also functions as such an affirming intimate public. Across this film culture, notions of identification, reflection, and recognition are central. They reoccur in my fieldwork interviews, in productions, and in research, for instance in Cherry
Smyth’s discussion about the newly emerged category of lesbian porn in 1990:

Lesbian sexuality has been repressed, rendered invisible and impotent by society. By watching porn, we can on some level recognize ourselves, defend our right to express our sexuality and assert our desire. It includes us in a subcultural system of coded sexual styles, gestures and icons which affirms our sense of belonging.
³¹

Hence, I claim that the two trajectories of counter and intimate publics run parallel and intertwine in this film culture where participation is as much a matter of personal development and sexual self-exploration as of activism, of making a new discourse on sexuality and gender visible and accessible in the wider public. In my experience in Berlin, these two trajectories clashed. The public sharing of an intimate project of sexual recognition, self-discovery, and affective identification seemed to only play into the hands of dominant gender and sexual structures. It seemed to result more in exposure than in safety, affirmation, or conquering.

A number of theorists also problematize the politics of public visibility for marginalized groups.
³²
Phil Hubbard, for instance, rejects the “conceptualization of public space as representing a democratic space where marginalized groups can seek to oppose oppressive aspects of heteronormality,” and the idea that “having free access to public space represents the achievement of full citizenship.”
³³
Importantly, while queer, feminist, and lesbian porn films, as pointed out before, often thematize a reclaiming of public space, this does not happen without negotiation. In her reading of the films of Candida Royalle, Linda Williams demonstrates how they create public settings for women’s sexual explorations that are both safe and exciting.
³⁴
In Joanna Rytel’s
Dirty Diaries
contribution
Flasher Girl on Tour,
risks involved in reclaiming the sexualized public are also explicitly addressed. As she describes it, Rytel strategically only exposes herself in safe places:

What if somebody gets a hard-on and wants to rape you while you’re sitting there on a park bench jacking off! . . . I’ve decided to simply expose myself where it’s safe and where nobody can interrupt me. Obviously I wouldn’t just jack off in the park like some male moron. Nope, I choose smart places. I have two favourite spots: balconies facing courtyards with hundreds of windows and on shore in front of passing ferries and boats. I mean, who’s gonna jump in and stop me?!
³⁵

Rytel exposes the stakes involved in reclaiming public space for queer
and feminist sexual culture. In her work on lesbian cinema, Lee Wallace demonstrates how the apartment acts as both a public and private space in lesbian feature films; the apartment “[refits] the contradictions between [lesbian cultural] aspiration and [sexual] dissidence and thus can provide the fictional setting for lesbian narratives that are simultaneously socially smooth and sexually rough.”
³⁶
In Shine Louise Houston’s film
The Crash Pad
(2005) and The Crash Pad Series (2008–), the apartment is staged as precisely such a flexible space of publicity and privacy. The “crash pad” is an apartment for casual sex where those who have the key can go for play dates or chance encounters. The early Fatale Media production
Suburban Dykes
(1990) also reclaims domestic space as a sexually empowering space when the film’s bored lesbian couple calls an escort service and gets a visit from a leather dyke to spice up their sex life. My own
Dirty Diaries
film
Phone Fuck
is about two women’s sexual encounter over the phone while both are masturbating in their separate apartments. The private space of the two women’s apartments and their respective autoeroticism is shared between them in a mutual fantasy—but also publicly—through mobile phone technology.