The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (28 page)

Every Time We Fuck, We Win: Recognition, Resistance, and Repetition

What the image of the two intertwining—but also conflicting—trajectories of intimate and counter public spheres allows is an understanding of this film culture as a site for the continuous process of negotiation. This negotiation involves working through intersecting power structures, at the level of individual subjectivity as well as on the social level. Rather than isolated acts of subversion and reader agency in an undifferentiated public sphere, experiences in this film culture, just as mine and my friend’s, remain multiple, complex, and even contradictory. Empowerment is never guaranteed, but contingent. It is continuously fought for. In her email, my friend underscored the importance of reflecting on and talking about her experience in the theater. She found that it could potentially provide her with new tools for handling similar situations of violence, disorientation, and objectification in the future. The complex film experiences taking place in these spaces can be understood as queer moments of disorder, where, in Ahmed’s terms, the world becomes slantwise. Ahmed contends that “such moments may be the source of vitality as well as giddiness” and that “[w]e might even find joy and excitement in the horror.”
³⁷

As such this film culture can also be understood with Ann Cvetkovich’s
consideration of the healing potential of alternative sexual publics, where negative affect and trauma is embraced rather than refused.
³⁸
She argues that “[a]llowing a place for trauma within sexuality is consistent with efforts to keep sexuality queer, to maintain a place for shame and perversion within public discourses of sexuality rather than purging them of their messiness in order to make them acceptable.”
³⁹
She finds that lesbian subcultures and writing on sexuality forge emotional knowledge as well as sexual pleasure out of its very roots in pain and difficulty. In these celebrations of “the hard-won experiences of sexual pleasure,” intimate lives are situated in relation to different forms of oppression, to experiences of homophobia and shame in the public.
⁴⁰

Such a negotiation of social relations is also central in the queer, feminist, and lesbian porn film culture and this is also what the women in “The Queer X Show” do. In the performance, as well as in the two films
Too Much Pussy
and
Much More Pussy,
the performers share their hard-won experiences of sexual pleasure as well as the pain and difficulties in living in a sexist, homophobic, and racist world. Their conversations and their sexual performances work through the norms, conventions, and taboos shaping and pressing on their lives, bodies, and desires. During their tour, they literally face the violence of these norms. In Paris, one of their friends was subject to a hate crime after returning home from their show and, in Malmö, they participated in a ceremony for the murdered victims of a shooting attack against a gay youth center in Tel Aviv.

The force that blew me away when I saw
Much More Pussy
was not the force of an ultimate transformation of gender and sexual hierarchies, or a construction of an alternative world beyond these hierarchies, but the force of a continuous resistance in the face of these hierarchies. This is the agency and empowerment for which this film culture may provide new conditions. In this public sphere, we might, as Ahmed puts it, “come into contact with other bodies to support the action of following paths that have not been cleared.”
⁴¹
Here, safety is not a safe world or a clear path, but the public sphere where the un-safety of being queer, female, or lesbian is forcefully acknowledged, worked through, and challenged. Queer Nation’s lyrics in the soundtracks for
Too Much Pussy
and
Much More Pussy,
“Every time we fuck, we win,” can only be understood in relation to its constant repetition, the claim made again and again. As the manifesto says: “Being queer . . . means everyday fighting oppression; homophobia, racism, misogyny, the bigotry of religious hypocrites, and our own self-hatred.” Through the collective and repeated resistance to oppression, the queer, feminist, and lesbian porn film culture adds courage, agency, and, importantly, pleasure to this everyday fight.

Notes

1
. Emilie Jouvet, “Too Much Pussy! Feminist Sluts in The Queer X Show: un road-movie documentaire entre filles,” trans. Ingrid Ryberg, March 2, 2010,
http://www.facebook.com/?ref=logo#!/note.php?note_id=334096238387&id=119867167658&r ef=mf
.

2
. Carol S. Vance, “More Danger, More Pleasure: A Decade After the Barnard Sexuality Conference,” in
Pleasure and Danger, Exploring Female Sexuality,
ed. Carol S. Vance (London: Pandora Press: 1992 [1984]), xxi.

3
. Jane Gerhard,
Desiring Revolution: Second-wave Feminism and the Rewriting of American Sexual Thought, 1920 to 1982
(New York: Columbia University Press 2001), 158. Hanna Hallgren,
When Lesbians Became Women—When Women Became Lesbian. Lesbian Feminist’s Production of Discourses Regarding Sex, Sexuality, Body and Identity During the 1970s and the 1980s in Sweden
(Göteborg: Kabusa Böcker, 2008).

4
. Gerhard,
Desiring Revolution,
149–82; Richard Dyer, “Lesbian/Woman: Lesbian Cultural Feminist Film,”
Now You See It: Studies on Lesbian and Gay Film
(London: Routledge, 1990), 169–200; Heather Butler, “What Do You Call A Lesbian With Long Fingers? The Development of Lesbian and Dyke Pornography,” in
Porn Studies,
ed. Linda Williams (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 178; Nan D. Hunter, “Contextualizing the Sexuality Debates: A Chronology 1966–2005,”
Sex Wars, Sexual Dissent and Political Culture,
eds. Lisa Duggan and Nan D. Hunter (New York: Routledge, 2006), 15–28; Mary T. Conway, “Spectatorship in Lesbian Porn: The Woman’s Woman’s Film,”
Wide Angel
19, no. 3 (July 1997): 94; Chris Straayer, “Discourse Intercourse,” in
Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies: Sexual Re-orientation in Film and Video
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 184–232; Terralee Bensinger, “Lesbian Pornography: The Re/Making of (a) Community,”
Discourse
15, no. 1 (Fall 1992): 69–93.

5
. Ragan Rhyne, “Hard-core Shopping: Educating Consumption in SIR Video Production’s Lesbian Porn,”
The Velvet Light Trap
59 (Spring 2007): 45; Butler, “What Do You Call,” 167–97; Eithne Johnson, “Excess and Ecstacy: Constructing Female Pleasure in Porn Movies,”
The Velvet Light Trap
32 (Fall 1993): 30–49.

6
. Clare Hemmings, “Telling Feminist Stories,”
Feminist Theory
6, no. 2 (2005): 115–39.

7
. Hemmings, “Telling Feminist Stories,” 131.

8
. Straayer, “Discourse Intercourse,” 204.

9
. Gerhard,
Desiring Revolution,
2, 4, 6.

10
. Ibid., 153.

11
. The Boston Women’s Health Book Collective,
Our Bodies, Ourselves: A Book By and For Women
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973[71]), 3, 23.

12
. Mad Kate, “27 July 2009,”
The Queer X Show
(blog), August 3, 2009,
http://queerxshow.wordpress.com/2009/08/03/27-july-2009/
.

13
. Lynn Comella, “Looking Backward: Barnard and Its Legacies,”
The Communication Review
11 (2008): 207.

14
. Jane Juffer,
At Home with Pornography: Women, Sex, and Everyday Life (New
York: New York University Press, 1998).

15
. “Dyketactics” and “Women I Love,”
The Films of Barbara Hammer
directed by Barbara Hammer (1974, 1976; New York: Women Make Movies, 1981), VHS; Barbara Hammer,
Menses
(1974), 16 mm and Barbara Hammer,
Multiple Orgasm
(1976), 16 mm;
Near the Big Chakra
directed by Anne Severson (1972; San Francisco: Canyon Cinema, 2011), DVD;
Mann & Frau & Animal
directed by Valie Export (1973;
Virtual-Circuit.org
), DVD. See Scott McDonald, Anne Severson, and Yvonne Rainer, “Two Interviews. Demystifying the Female Body: Anne Severson “Near the Big Chakra,” Yvonne Rainer: “Privilege,”
Film Quarterly,
45, no. 1 (Autumn 1991): 18–32; Richard Dyer with Julianne Pidduck, “Lesbian/Woman: Lesbian Cultural Feminist Film,” in
Now You See It: Studies in Lesbian and Gay Film,
Second Edition (London and New York: Routledge, 2003[90]), 169–200.

16
. Email correspondence with author, trans. Ingrid Ryberg, February 17, 2011.

17
. Juffer,
At Home with Pornography,
15.

18
. Ibid., 8.

19
. Sara Ahmed,
Queer Phenomenology, Orientations, Objects, Others
(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), 58.

20
. Ahmed,
Queer Phenomenology,
159–60.

21
. Ibid., 159.

22
. Ibid., 160.

23
. Ibid., 160.

24
. Miriam Hansen,
Babel and Babylon, Spectatorship in American Silent Film
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991).

25
. Hansen,
Babel and Babylon,
118.

26
. Ibid., 118.

27
. Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,”
Social Text
25/26 (1990): 67–68; Iris Marion Young, “Unruly Categories: A Critique of Nancy Fraser’s Dual Systems Theory,”
New Left Review
222 (March–April 1997): 8–9; Michael Warner, “Publics and Counterpublics,”
Public Culture
14, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 86.

28
. Marit Östberg, “Vi behöver fler kåta kvinnor i offentligheten,”
Newsmill,
August 27, 2009,
http://www.newsmill.se/artikel/2009/08/27/vi-behover-fler-kata-kvinnor-i-offentligheten?page=1accessed
June 21, 2010,
http://www.newsmill.se/print/10304
.

29
. An article about the project on the daily newspaper
Dagens Nyheter
’s website was their second most-read article during 2009 (outnumbered only by an article about Michael Jackson’s death) “Mest lästa på DN.se 2009,”
DN.se,
December 31, 2009,
http://www.dn.se/nyheter/mest-lasta-pa-dnse-2009
, accessed October 13, 2011,
http://www.dn.se/nyheter/mest-lasta-pa-dnse-2009
. Sofia Curman and Maria Ringborg, “Porr för feminister?”
DN.se Kultur&Nöje,
August 28, 2009, accessed June 17, 2010,
http://www.dn.se/kultur-noje/film-tv/porr-for-feminister-1.940378
.
Dirty Diaries
was also commented on by Conan O’Brien in NBC’s
The Tonight Show,
September 10, 2009. By October 2011 the film’s distribution rights had been sold to twelve countries.

30
. Lauren Berlant,
The Female Complaint, The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture
(Durham: Duke University Press 2008), 8.

31
. Cherry Smyth, “The Pleasure Threshold: Looking at Lesbian Pornography on Film,”
Feminist Review
34 (1990): 154.

32
. Peggy Phelan,
Unmarked: The Politics of Performance
(London and New York: Routledge, 1993); Beverley Skeggs, “Matter Out of Place: Visibility and Sexualities in Leisure Spaces,”
Leisure Studies
18 (1999): 213–32; Phil Hubbard, “Sex Zones: Intimacy, Citizenship and Public Space,”
Sexualities
4, no. 1 (February 2001): 51–71.

33
. Hubbard, “Sex Zones,” 63–64.

34
. Linda Williams,
Hard Core, Power, Pleasure and the “Frenzy of The Visible
” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 262.