The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (58 page)

Gender and sexuality converge, then, on these incoherent bodies in very complex and antiessentialist ways. Gender is produced not only through surgical and chemical interventions on the body but also emerges in excess of those technologies. Both Casey and Wendell identify their forms of masculinity as what I have described earlier as the incoherence evoked by the term “fag” when layered through female masculinity; each identifies their approximations of manhood as “flaming faggots.” For Casey, though, given his partners are primarily femmes, this strikes a bit of an unusual chord. Like Elyse in
Butch Mystique,
“fag” here marks an antinormative space of gender rather than an exclusive object choice, although the space of manhood in each case is shadowed by the specter of queerness even though that queerness does not function the same way in each case. Casey’s appearance in the documentary supports this; he is wearing gold shorts, a cowboy hat, and his body language resonates in ways less conventionally masculine even though his object choice—femmes—marks his sexuality as heterogendered. Wendell, on the other hand, has not had top surgery, yet his entire gender presentation is much more conventionally masculine. With a crew cut, dressed in army colors, and less flamboyant in appearance, Wendell’s “fag” does signal object choice far more than Casey’s. Wendell’s on-camera sex partner is Randall, another young pre-transition FTM who identifies not only as atypically male (his terms) but also as Wendell’s sexual bottom.

However, what continues to be queerly incoherent in
Enough Man
is the way that these sexual identifications fold over and articulate through gender in an antiessentializing way. These are neither understandings of sexuality reducible to gender identities, nor the sexualities of gender identifications without reiterating either gender or sexuality according to heteronormativity. These are instead something else: complex, triangulated
sexual and gendered identifications where each circumvents and interrupts the essentialisms of the other. But these mostly masculinist genders also remain incommensurate with queer sexual performativities and heteronormative genders. For instance, Wendell is a sexual top, so being genderqueer and running the sexual scene allows him to access what he identifies as his actual body underneath his breasts. Randall, on the other hand, as Wendell’s boy, bottoms as a decidedly feminine gender expression. “Bottoming,” Randall says, “is like a gender expression. I like being a boy who gets put in his place.” Both share Wendell’s analysis of entrustment, that is, a negotiation around the incoherence of gender identity, bodies, and sexual practice: “Biology and gender are separate. Even if someone has their fingers up my vagina, as long as they perceive me as male it doesn’t matter.” Raven and Joshua, on the other hand, are both FTMs who exist as part of an intergenerational alternative kinship system/family made up of their relationship plus an MTF transfemme. The three of them have what Raven calls a fluid bond; they have unprotected sex with each other but have protected sex with folks outside of their family. Raven is a top and Joshua is his boy-bottom. They exist in a consensual ownership BDSM relationship where Raven is contractually owner of Joshua’s sexuality; dominance/submission is the scenario they perform in front of the camera. Again, this relationship between two FTM transsexual men who have not had bottom surgery transcends essentialism yes, but also conventional and heternormative kinship systems complete with incest taboo. Raven identifies their kinship, not necessarily their object choices, as trans perverted, suggesting that their relations of kinship are equally as significant in terms of identity as are their gender and sexual identifications. And, it seems, each plays out on the site of the other. Raven is both Daddy-top to Joshua and butch to his wife’s femme. Sexuality is articulated through gendered bodies produced as the effect of sex play, even though neither are an index or cause of the other. At the same time, BDSM, which includes penetration through bottoming/topping, becomes an expression of gender identities.

To put this differently: the gender identifications and sexualities of these visual texts are beyond even a simple queering of heteronormative subjectivities. But equally true is the premise that their relative social positionings condition their sexual and gender configurations. If the body is a ground for negotiating social relations precisely because those relations animate that body through trauma, then sexual embodiment (like penetration) functions in potentially productive ways. Ann Cvetkovich reminds us that these experiences are not necessarily traumatic in the more conventional sense of the term but are traumatic in the specific sense that they constitute a breach of bodily boundaries; as
such, they then also have the potential to keep sexuality queer by locating it within public sex cultures that seek to resist shame and perversion rather than purging them of their messiness in order to make them acceptable.
¹⁸
But these incoherent bodies are also part of what Anne McClintock describes as an economy of conversion, as a kind of sexual theater or stage that borrows its décor, props, and scenes from the everyday cultures of power, inverting that culture’s ability to regulate by making public that which is supposed to be kept as private. Trans bodies as feminist porn do to gender what BDSM does to sexuality: each performs social power as “both contingent and constitutive, as sanctioned neither by God nor by fate, but by social convention and invention, and thus open to historical change.”
¹⁹

But even beyond simply queering them, Casey and Natalie in particular, defy and
penetrate
those grammars. As a sexual top, Natalie’s transitively desires the instabilities of Casey’s body. Sex play between them is intensely edgy including water sports and genital needle play. Such needle play in the film is evidence of the political uses of sexual incoherence—conditioned by gender and social relations—as the needles themselves are recognizable (to those subject to them) as the means of testosterone injections: the twenty-one gauge, 1.5 inch needle. It is beyond a little ironic, then, that this needle becomes the prop that Natalie uses to quite literally penetrate Casey’s man-pussy. Natalie’s use of the medicalized mechanisms of sexual reassignment—testosterone needles—marks these sexual bodies and desires as political ones, where the perverse pleasure of the sexual scene is conditioned by the political struggle to access still heavily regulated sex reassignment technologies in the first place. As a politicized and perverse resignification of the trans man’s supposedly corporeal “failure” as a man (that his body is not “man enough” to produce its own testosterone or penis, a failure ambivalently hinted at in
Linda/Les and Annie
), this scene in particular sutures sex play and penetration to the social world but also calibrates them both through a queering of differently gendered shame. These are the very telling and complex inversions of feminist porn: As a man, Casey becomes Natalie’s object to her subject and her pleasure circumvents, indeed, penetrates, his. But judging by the object of penetration (that is, the needle), neither is his completely irrelevant. As a femme top, Natalie takes her pleasure in finding a trans(itive)-object for her quite active desire; these sexualized objects (trans boys) cannot exist without a subject (femme top) through which their own ability to act as a subject depends. The scene, then, of BDSM between them becomes a feminist sexual grammar necessitated by their gender incoherence but equally fuelled by a political
deployment, imperative even, of perverse pleasure as the raison d’être of feminist post-porn.

Moreover, where many docu-porn films about FTM cultures circumvent the incoherence and incompleteness of the FTM body,
Enough Man,
as public post-porn, puts that body unblushingly on display within what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick named nonce taxonomies, ever proliferating but contingent categories in a taxonomy neither recognizable nor secured by a binary truth regime.
²⁰
Living in a FTM transsexual body is, of course, living in, with, and through corporeal incoherence. Very few FTMs can afford successful lower surgery as most phalloplasties remain simply cost prohibitive.
Enough Man,
and Casey in particular, both take those private masculine anxieties about living with indeterminate bodies (that is, bodies that might pass as male in public but could not pass visual inspection) and refuse the social shaming by allowing the camera to film the physical site that is quietly and euphemistically identified among FTM men as “the tranny bonus hole.” In his interviews with FTMs as well as with intersexed folks, Colin Thomas teases out the way that transitive folks rearticulate gender possibilities based on a decoding of the binary gender system even as that system attempts to limit its subjects. “Hanging out with gender-variant people,” Thomas writes, “can quickly dislodge one’s concepts of what it means to be male or female, gay or straight.”
²¹
In fact, one of his interview subjects notes how these limits of language mirror the limits of bodies when “he” says: “If there was a tranny pronoun, I’d use it . . . I’m male, but I’m not suddenly this biodude either [ . . . ] I do plan on keeping my tranny bonus hole [though]. That’s staying.” This is not the same site of physicality that equally defines heteronormative femininity and some radical-fundamentalist feminisms (the vagina-as-sheath-for-penis) and by implication lesbianism (the for-women-only vagina); this is the paradoxical space that defies existing gender and sexual taxonomies but which uses their imperatives as foreplay. As a way to pay homage to the early feminist porn workers, and to Annie Sprinkle in particular, as a queer trans son of this post-porn movement, Casey does a performance piece in the film that he calls his “Andy Sprinkle.” With partner Natalie holding a flashlight, Casey puts his feet into stirrups and invites the viewer, assisted by Natalie and through the camera’s gaze, to quite literally look at his genitals and into his vagina or what he calls his boy hole. Narrated through a voice-over by Natalie—a voice-over narration directly evocative of Sprinkle’s in
Linda/Les and Annie
—“Andy’s” scene puts that productive space of nothingness and impossibility fully on display, situating his body within a public representation while challenging its essentialisms at the same time.
There’s something vertiginously incoherent about Andy’s body literally in motion between sexes, reducible to neither, bearing traces of both, and owned, and narrated, in queer representational circuits of desire, by his femme top. Gendered discourses of shame might compel the composition of the sexual scene but their work is rendered mute.

When analyzed together and despite their differences in form, both
The Butch Mystique
and
Enough Man
provide the opportunity to reconsider gender work both accomplished and deconstructed through sexual identifications as they are put on display in feminist porn. As much as the grammars of gender essentialism and heteronormativity both regulate identification through a politics of shame, each is interrupted by that which the other cannot fully constrain or contain. Elyse, Wendell, and Casey’s gendered sexual space of “fag” masculinity is available to trans men as a productive trope of gendered sexual receptivity staged and triangulated through those same shaming logics. In this case, however, identification and desire are not conditioned or enabled by the foundational and sexed body; that is, viewing or desiring as a woman or a man as limited by essentialist bodies. Instead, these texts depict self-unmade transed bodies that sexual incoherence animates instead of defeats. In fact, that image of a man with a pussy being penetrated is indicative of what Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake call the lived and defiant messiness of gender as productive contradiction, not as failure.
²²
Within this gendered sexual culture, the vagina becomes bonus hole becoming “pussy,” which becomes gender without genitals, empty signifier without referent. Penetration signifies a compelling incoherence where top-bottom, active-passive, male-female, gay-straight dichotomies become sexually deconstructed imperatives. Annie Sprinkle may have been quite ironic when she suggested that “you can never demystify a cervix.”
²³
But what these trans men suggest is that both
in
and
as
feminist post-porn, it might actually be possible to penetrate its intransigent coherence instead.

IV. Postscript: “I’m just a feminist interested in cock”: Knowing Dick at the Feminist Porn Awards 2011

The contingency of this queerly proliferating post-porn taxonomy resignifying masculinity is best evident through the Feminist Porn Awards (FPAs) event held annually in Toronto. Growing in size exponentially, the Feminist Porn Awards recognize and celebrate “feminist smut” through a three-day long event culminating in the awards ceremony where awards are given out to porn stars, producers, distributors, directors, and cast in a variety of categories (“Hottie of the Year”; “Most Diverse Cast”; “Best Bi Film”; “Most Tantalizing Trans Film”; “Sexiest Straight Movie”; “Hottest
Kink Movie”; and “Movie of the Year” to mention only a few categories). The FPAs have grown over the last six years to become far more than just a celebratory event. Porn workers, producers, and distributors recognize that the demographic, scope, and increasingly very diverse local and international audience of the FPAs present a unique opportunity not previously available to hail, champion, and market the work done by feminist porn.

Although not necessarily a consistent feature of all feminist porn, penetrating intransigence is most certainly a reoccurring structure of perverse feeling that marks the sexual affective grammars of feminist porn as something different from nonfeminist porn. And again, while trans bodies are not a stock feature of every instance of feminist porn, this culture is marked by its insistence that one neither can nor should make assumptions that the bodies both in front of and behind the cameras are
not
trans bodies either. Finally, and most tellingly, where feminist fundamentalisms remain profoundly ambivalent about and suspicious of masculinity, feminist porn operates differently in two ways. It features different kinds of masculine subjects as objects of desire in its productions—FTM, trans, genderqueer, butch, and cisgender—but it also rethinks the consumption practices of masculinity, refusing to accept a feminist politic that assumes that heterosexual cissexual male performers or spectators or desires are dangerous. In fact, what trended at the 2011 Feminist Porn Awards, both in terms of content but also in terms of culture, was an entirely reconfigured epistemological proximity to, and desire for, masculinity. One could not help but discern different economies of masculinity, feminist sexuality, and queer affect within the post-porn—post-queer even—cultures of feminist porn, cultures and practices ultimately repudiated and disavowed by antipornography feminist fundamentalism. Two very interesting workers inside feminist porn—one behind the camera, one in front of the camera—illustrate the post-queer knowledges repeated as motifs throughout the 2011 FPAs: rising heteromasculine superstar Mickey Mod and filmmaker-extraordinaire Shine Louise Houston, often dubbed in the feminist porn literature as “the ethical pornographer.” Identified originally as a “lesbian of color” (most recently updated to “queer person of color”), Houston is the filmmaker/producer who directed and produced the film
The Crash Pad (TCP)
in 2005 and created the online series based on it (CrashPadSeries. com).
²⁴
The
TCP
is fascinating in its design and actualization: the concept is an apartment where anonymous folks have sex in the space rigged with cameras. In its beginnings,
TCP
first depicted lesbian hookups but it evolves, and in so doing, begins to map the trajectory tracked here across feminist porn (in no particular order): from lesbian couples the bodies
transform into butch-femme, genderqueer, punk queer, tattooed queer, to girl/femme on girl/femme to transfag sex to threesomes to FTM bear sex to Mickey Mod in a threesome with another porn superstar Syd Blakovich; and then beyond to reality porn online live where recognizable superstars in the feminist porn world like Nina Hartley hook up with newcomer superstars like genderqueer performer Jiz Lee.
²⁵
Mickey’s appearance in the
TCP
series is extremely noteworthy. He is one of the first cisgendered men to appear in the series. But most significantly, he becomes a kind of bridge to a differently gendered and queered economy of looking and the desire to know masculinity differently—an epistemology performed through a queer feminist gaze, as Houston launches a new gay/male porn website practice
HeavenlySpire.com
with Mickey as its posterboy.
²⁶
Heavenly Spire is a project of fascinating incoherence centering a very willful feminist gaze and camera directly on the bodies of queer masculinity. To borrow from its own description, it is “a Shine Louise Houston creation for the purpose of masculine appreciation. Heavenly Spire focuses on masculine beauty and sexuality and how it manifests on different bodies. Following the same vision as Houston’s previous projects, Heavenly Spire focuses on capturing genuine pleasure with a unique cinematic style.”