The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (57 page)

II. Female-to-Male Trans Men: Mirroring Masculinity’s Pleasures of Penetration

With notable exceptions, explicit sexual representations of FTM trans bodies have been few and far between until very recently. Even more obscure, at least in a public, representational sense, are those same bodies as sexual bodies. If, as I have argued recently, FTM trans men are one site of political and corporeal incoherence where embodied sex, gender presentation, erotic object choice, and desire organized around sexual acts do not align normatively or within grids of intelligibility, then might these same bodies be similarly productive as sites of masculine
and
feminist sexualities?

Feminist porn scholars should take note of the increasing presence of FTM trans men in the feminist porn circuit. In some ways, trans male bodies have always been a part of feminist post-porn cultures. The term “post-porn” has already been put into circulation through two different circuits of production with different histories: one through sex worker Annie Sprinkle who pre-dates the self-described contemporary feminist porn culture; and the second through trans-porn artists like those documented in this project. That these circuits overlap on trans bodies in contemporary porn is no accident. Annie Sprinkle begins to shape these
post
temporalities of feminist porn when she identifies herself as a mainstream porn worker, as a feminist, and as a “post-porn modernist” long before the self-hailed practices of feminist porn artists come into existence.
¹²
As noted by Shannon Bell, Sprinkle’s show
Post Porn Modernist
is an amalgamation of shorter performance pieces that Sprinkle has performed since approximately 1984.
¹³
Sprinkle’s work documents her transition both in terms of identity (from birth name “Ellen Steinberg” to self-made “Annie Sprinkle”) and worker in the mainstream pornography industry, which includes over two hundred “porno movies,” numerous magazines, and her work in the sex trade. However, the importance of her performance work to feminist porn cannot be overstated. As noted by Bell (1994), Schneider (1997), Williams (1999), and others, Sprinkle was one of the first to fuse “feminism” and “porn” at a time in history when such an articulation seemed oxymoronic.
¹⁴
In the early 1980s, Sprinkle, Candida Royalle, Veronica Vera, and others began to challenge the perceived impossibility of feminists inside the industry as feminist sex workers. Bell notes the stakes and impact: “It was a turning point in three ways [. . .] the documentation by prostitute/porn stars that they are capable of thinking, talking, and communicating their feelings, that they are neither stupid nor victims, and that they made a choice to work in pornography. It was a turning point in the porn debate because a new
feminist viewpoint was introduced, that of the female porn actor. And it was a turning point in terms of introducing a new genre of feminist performance art.”
¹⁵

The trans guys putting their bodies on display mark yet another turning point. Their representation in feminist porn began with Annie Sprinkle’s post-porn work.
Linda/Les and Annie,
a film produced by and starring Sprinkle, emerges as not just one of the first docu-porn films—a genre using a mix of both documentary film techniques (especially the interview) and porn conventions—but also as the first sexually explicit film to feature a sexual FTM body post-transition.
Linda/Les and Annie
centers around FTM Les Nichols, after his surgical sex-reassignment that, for him, included a phalloplasty, the surgical production of a penis. There’s much to be analyzed in this film—not the least of which is its overemphasis on the American ideology of freedom, tattooed on Les’s chest—but for my purposes here it remains very interesting for its depictions of both FTM genitals and sexual practice. In the film, Annie is his sexual partner and together, in front of the camera, they explore this transition and Les’s body in a sexual context, attempting to use Les’s penis for penetration. They also both reflect upon the surgery, their sex play, and their respective processes after Les’s transition. Phalloplasty procedures are not a perfected medical procedure and, one of the things Annie and Les discover and depict is the degree to which penises produced through this procedure cannot become erect enough for penetration. Despite what might be construed as a moment awash in pathos and failure, Les and Annie “make a few adjustments”—as the voice-over tells—and continue to fuck each other for the camera using Les’s pussy and new penis simultaneously. Even as Sprinkle performs for the camera, her voice-over narrates the complexity of what I will identify as the work of feminist/femme entrustment, as a femme to whom butch, genderqueer, and FTM sexual intimacy is extended in a complexly gendered and queer grammar. Although it would not be wrong to argue that the camera and the voice-over equally fetishize as much as feature Les’s new genitals, the film remains important as part of a visual archive of FTM sex-reassignment histories as well as queer trans sex practices between a feminist pornographer and FTM trans man.

Of course, there are vast and important histories marking the temporalities between
Linda/Les and Annie
and more recent depictions of FTM bodies and trans sex in recent porn. What trans bodies in contemporary feminist porn share with Sprinkle’s post-porn is a corporeal, representational, and lived problematic that, in the twenty-first century, does what
Linda/Les and Annie
could not yet do in 1989: disrupt expectations
of
but also the variously complex pleasures
in
gendered and sexual incoherence.
What emerges in today’s FTM/transgender porn cultures, is no longer pathos but a productive space of ambivalence and incommensurateness about sexual trans bodies and, more precisely, about sexual penetration. Trans masculinities in feminist post-porn raise complex questions about bodies: How are trans men reorganizing normative constructions of what’s being called the bonus hole, the former “vagina,” after surgeries? And within genres of sexual representation that rely upon the supposedly unmediated body on display for the audience, what kinds of psychic, social, and visual negotiations are required to mitigate against the essentializing and representational stubbornness of that ‘hole’ once penetrated both sexually and visually? Feminist porn is, in part, shaped through an epistemological and political imperative of incoherence, and this incoherence informs its visual language. This imperative to rupture sense is itself complicated. When it is both the ground of public cultures and the imperative of feminist porn, how then might it be used as a trope to represent that which is already constituted as incoherent: trans bodies? In 1989, Les and Annie use the language of “bisexuality” and “pussy” when contextualizing the economies of bodies, sex, and desire. In more recent work, these languages change dramatically, begging that we question how the subjects of these ironic overdeterminations (that is, between sex, sexuality, and gender)—stone butches, genderqueers, and FTMs—negotiate their sexual complexities in front of a camera held, as it were, by queer and feminist pornographers? In two other films—one documentary, Debra A. Wilson’s
The Butch Mystique
(2003), and one docu-porn, Luke Woodward’s
Enough Man
(2004), penetration is characterized by FTMs as a very gendered sexual practice and decidedly invasive. Not only is the
event
of penetration persistently gendered by the subjects in these films, it often marks spaces of trauma, shame, and ambivalence for FTM trans men. But when is a vagina no longer a vagina? These films provoke questions about the names, meanings, and uses of body parts as they do the work of gender and power at the same time. The transed body, overdetermined either as “female” for butches or “incomplete with a penis” for FTM trans men, is supposed to be a site of shame and impossibility. Instead, two strategies begin to emerge in feminist porn: first, as a form with the intention to disrupt both convention and content, feminist porn converts the traumas of being differently gendered into a sexual grammar that desires to see differently. And second, its resistances to essentializing gender are aggressively coded as both counterpublic and sexually queer. How those codings function as visual grammars is where their respective contributions to public sexual cultures become very fascinating. My question, then, is this: Within such economies where embodiment is a site of profound ambivalence and
political shaming for butches and/or FTMs, how then might social and discursive power be negotiated through complex sexualities and incoherent and yet decidedly masculine identifications? What kind of work is being accomplished through these complex desires to put another incoherence—the “man pussy”—on display as self-constructed visual spectacle vis-à-vis feminist porn? Is that work, for FTMs, similar to the gender work accomplished through the repeated, and hence, ambivalent public and performative refusals of penetration for some butches? Can both moments—the moments of self-constitution through representation as well as through performativities like a repeated refusal—be read as a redeployment of cultural and political shame animating these bodies and grammars of incoherence?

III.
“Seeing the Hole”:
On the Incoherent Grammars of Post-Porn’s Looking Relations

The subjects interviewed in the award-winning documentary,
The Butch Mystique,
bear witness to the productive potentialities of these correlations. Produced and directed by Debra A. Wilson, and decidedly not porn in its form,
The Butch Mystique
tracks the “mystique” surrounding female and trans masculinities in the lives of a group of African American butch-studs and, in a couple of cases, (FTM) trans identified, folks, many of whom take up the term “fag” to self-constitute a representation of, and a lived relation to queer masculinity.

At first glance, subjects of female and transgender masculinity identified with the masculinities evoked by the term “fag” might seem strangely incoherent. The term signals gay identity and evokes a set of epistemologies that govern the relationship between masculinity, bodies, and sexuality. Elsye, a FTM from
Butch Mystique
and others in these recent films, self-identify with this term and its overdetermination of the masculine less to
reduce
gender nonconformity to a sexual object choice, but more to reference continuities laterally between particular kinds of masculinities on the receiving end of things, as it were. But on the other hand, the very paradoxical post-queer sexual genders signaled by this term are not at all unlike those articulated by FTM porn star Buck Angel. When asked to what demographic his sex work appeals, he answers, “Gay men enjoy [my] masculinity, they aren’t attracted to women but some of them are definitely into pussy.”
¹⁶
The contradiction—that a “pussy” does not always equal a “woman” or “woman with a vagina”—suggests that sexual “genders” articulate bodies despite sex not because of it. So, what the
work
of these post-queer, incoherent sexual
scenes seems to accomplish is a rupture of the way that bodies, genders, and sexual identifications are arranged.

What we see in
Butch Mystique
and
Enough Man
is the shared labor of rearranging the meanings of sexual activities outside of limited heteronormative and misogynist gender overdeterminations. In
Butch Mystique,
for example, Skyler, who has one of the most physically sculpted bodies, performs the difference: “for the butch who [is vaginally penetrated], she’s giving up a lot of trust to that woman.” The concept of entrustment is an active, always negotiated relation. It is likened to something being given up and given over, something exchanged in the sexual scene. It functions like a shared set of agreements and arrangements about how those bodies and desires are materializing in excess or beyond the limits of the conventionally sexed or sexualized body. Such entrustments are visualized and rendered performative in the most recent docu-porn film to which I will turn my attention,
Enough Man.

Enough Man
details the lives and sex lives of mostly white trans men from the United States. Produced and directed by Luke Woodward,
Enough Man
remains one of the most layered archival texts of transsexual practices and bodies. The docu-porn is also remarkable for the way that the trans and queer folks interviewed move through boastfulness and gregariousness at the start of the interviews to very thoughtful, intimate, and piercingly honest accounts of the pleasures and paradoxes of their transformed bodies. Moreover, many of the couples also perform sex scenes in front of the camera. Seeming to pose its own title as a question—that is, when is enough physical or corporeal matter present to qualify a body as male, or when is a man a man?—
Enough Man
answers: when the body in question says so. The body itself, as many trans, feminist, and queer theorists have argued, is a metaphor or/and site of both psychic and social processes.
¹⁷
As such, it can be rewritten to mark resistance to those processes at the same time. At least three of the “couples” represented in
Enough Man
code themselves and their sexual genders, at the level of filming, so aggressively for incoherence that the narrative at the heart of the film bends under the weight of visual contradiction. At the same time, a new kind of sense making emerges, once that does not require a reckoning of gender contradiction.

As a lived and embodied lesson in the politics of incoherence, almost all of the trans men in the documentary identify with the “enough” qualifier in their presentations so as to approximate, trouble even, but not necessarily unproblematically reproduce, hegemonic masculinity. Moreover, these same three couples illustrate the degree to which FTM penetration aggressively defies shaming but also reading practices—
popular and academic alike—that need to conflate pussy and penetration with femaleness. Casey and Natalie, Wendell and Randall, as well as Raven and Joshua, all talk in very complex ways about bodies, desires, and genders, before having sex in front of the camera. All self-identify as FTM, except for Natalie, who identifies as femme, cisgendered, and a sex worker (as she puts it, a self-identified “whore”). With the exception of Randall and Wendell, all of the trans men have had some surgical interventions (mostly top surgeries); neither Randall nor Wendell have had top surgery and neither appears to be taking testosterone at the time of filming. All of the couples practice safe sex and consensual BDSM sex to varying degrees. What’s even more interesting is that none of those who appear without clothes on screen have had obvious bottom surgeries; nor do they allow the reductive politics of gender essentialism to fold pussy into female.