*The follow is an excerpt from my larger article "Toward a Pussy Oriented Pedagogy: Choreography a Feminist Pornographic Imaginary"
The
“Feminist” in Feminist Porn
Gayle Rubin deploys her concept of the “charmed circle of sexuality” as a means to visualize the stratification of sexualities. The charmed circle occupies a privileged space and those acts within the circle are regarded as "natural" and evade certain forms of social and political policing. In our cultural imagination pornography
is used as a container for many forms of “uncharmed sexualities." For it is a fact that pornography is one of few resources one can turn to for information or representations of these "uncharmed sexualities." As Linda William's remarks in Screening Sex, it “most the most of us ever get” particularly when it comes to peripheral sexualities. One is much
more like to find information about and representations of anal sex,
nonmonogamous sex, group sex, sex with toys, fetishes, BDSM or rough sex,
homosexual and queer sex in pornography or porn related sex-ed materials than
anywhere else. The relationship of the charmed circle to porn also works to
further perpetuate stereotypes about women and their desires. Because these
sexualities are found most frequently in pornography, which is still considered
to be a monolith of films by and for men, than in mainstream culture, women who
want or have uncharmed sex are seen as falsely conscious or as being coerced
into doing them by a porn viewing man in their life.
Pornography is also a likely place to find
representations of women’s sexual pleasure and agency, as indicated and expanded by the
feminist porn movement. Feminist porn as a phenomenon, a form of
cultural production, and a movement “seeks to unsettle conventional
definitions of sex, and expand the language of sex as erotic activity, an
expression of identity, a power exchange, a cultural commodity, and even a new
politics” (Taormino et. al 19). Traditional approaches to representation in media
analysis precede from a feminist position frequently involves sorting out the
ontological status of the film’s representation as “good” or “bad” for women or
as a positive or negative representation of women. The focus on representation
in feminist film theory has been critiqued not only by feminist pornographers,
but in much of the feminist phenomenological theory from the past 10 years. Shifting
from the rigid ontological binary of good/bad, these critiques of the
representational model from theorists like Elena del Rio, Jennifer Barker, and Laura
Marks have engaged the possibilities of bodies and film viewership to challenge feminist paradigms like the male gaze. In particular, Elena del Rio’s critique of the
representational emphasis of feminist film theory provides a basis for thinking
through feminist porn as both a revision of dominant sexual scripts and a
reconfiguration of the role of representation.
In
Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance,
Elena del Rio argues that “the body’s movements and gestures are capable of
transforming static forms and concepts typical of a representational paradigm
into forces and concepts that exhibit a transformative/expansive potential”
(del Rio 6). What feminist pornography offers is a relation of this potential of the body to a type of feminist
choreography. Choreography indicates that there is a model, but because this
model is performative/affective it cannot be thought of as a rigid,
unchangeable, set of observable points. Rather choreography and play are
contingent, they touch upon, but in each movement contain the potential for
rupture, flourish, and transformation. While the relation of feminist
choreography to pornography’s play does not render considerations of
representation worthless, it does offer another mode for navigating
representation and affection.
To
designate a film as “feminist” or “unfeminist” is to understand the film as containing an ontological
essence. However, it also reflects a reduction of women as either proper or
unproper feminist sexual subjects. Antiporn feminism and other sects emerging in the
late 70s and 80s sought to understand some sexual acts, orientations, and
desires as “feminist” and anything else as “unfeminist.” A line in the sand,
feminists attempted to recreate and reconstruct the same mechanics of sexual
stratification used to oppress women and contain them within phallocentric
parameters: the charmed circle of sexuality.
I
find that Luce Irigaray’s deconstruction of Plato’s allegorical cave a useful
way of thinking about how the concepts discussed earlier in this chapter and feminist porn resist an understanding of feminism as producing ontologies. In
terms of pedagogical models few have been historically adopted and appropriated
like that of the matrix model of the allegorical cave. In the 7th
book of The Republic, Plato recalls Socrates’ allegory of the cave. The basic
outline of the model goes like this: prisoners (men) exist in a cave in which
they are chained. There necks are chained so that they cannot move their heads
but instead see only what is in front of them. They cannot turn around. There
exists, however, within the cave a fire, which illuminates the figures of the
men and creates shadows upon the cave wall---the originary screen of projection.
But there also exists from above an opening through which a sliver of sunlight
peeks through. One at a time, the prisoners are released and pushed out of the
cave by a warden/mentor/philosopher. When the prisoner sees the Sun, he is
blinded, disoriented, and must adjust to this new “reality.” This adjustment
relies on a complete disavowal of the shadows, which once functioned as the
prisoner’s truths. While the initial dazzling of the Sun blinds the prisoner, he
later adjusts, first by seeing his reflection in water, then Real objects, and
then looking at the sun.
In
her section “Plato’s Hystera” from The Speculum of the Other Woman, Luce
Irigaray unravels the allegorical cave pedagogical model. She does so primarily
by asking critical questions and through a power of suggestion, a power I find
to be utilized and expanded in feminist porn as navigational mode. Though they
may not move, she asks, why is the singular voice of the philosopher the only
voice in the cave? Why would the prisoners not speak, and all at once in a
glorious, tumultuous cacophony? From her questioning and suggesting, Irigaray
points to the “holes” in the cave/womb pedagogical model in that it: 1) relies
on silence and on a singular echo of the voice of the “philosopher” 2) enacts a
ban on any dissident resonances and reverberations within the cave 3) situates
shame as a necessary part of subject production, in that it implies a paradoxical relationship to the cave in which the
subject only comes into being through the cave but must actively disavow ever
believing that the shadows within the cave as “truths” and 4) forgets the
“vagina,” the transitory space between the cave and the Sun. Further, the
ultimate goal of cave emergence is an essential stable subject around which
everything circulates and the “problem of ambiguity” is solved.
In
that cultural feminism/anti-pornography feminism works towards perpetuating a
proper, and thus stable and singular, feminist sexual subject that has rid
herself of the shadows of her male identification, the anti-sex models of
imagining and theorizing “female sexuality” can be thought of as appropriations
of such a model and exhibit many of its problematics. Alice Echols outlines
such models, as they circulated in feminist sexual politics from 1968 to 1983.
She states
And
while radical feminists were generally careful to distinguish between
individual and political solutions, cultural feminists typically believe that
individual solutions are political solutions. Cultural feminism’s validation of
individual solutions not only encouraged the scrutiny of personal behavior
rather than ideas, but moreover contributed to the development of standards of
‘liberated behavior’ (Echols 53).
In their attempts to theorize a stable
feminist sexual subject, the pedagogical impetus of anti-sex/porn feminism
approaches the sexualities of its “students” as if they are prisoners trapped
in a cave of social construction in which they are blind to the singular Truth
of liberated feminist sexuality. Pornography in this configuration is a threat
to the formation of this feminist subject, with the power to “teach” men and
women that male sexual supremacy is healthy and acceptable.
Feminist porn, like
that of Hartley and Taormino, offers not a feminist ontology but a feminist
relation. Take for example the question “What does feminist porn look like?” Another way of phrasing this
question is: how do you as a scholar identify feminist porn’s ontological
essence of what feminist porn is by looking at it? Because of its investment in
shifting the representation paradigm of feminist film critique it cannot be
described by what it looks like but rather how it is made, produced, whose
voices are included in the text but in the production, and how the viewer
arrives at the text.
Taormino discusses this shift in understanding representation in her
essay “Calling the Shots: Feminist Porn in Theory and Practice.” For Taormino,
the feminist in feminist porn is one of a relation to cultural production; it
is a question of ethics and modes of engagement. She configures representation
as something open to formation instead of a fixed essence. She writes:
Ultimately,
I want the performers to participate in creating their own representations.
Women and men are given choices: they choose who they will have sex with, they
choose the positions they want to be in, they choose the toys they will play
with, all based on what feels good to them, all based on their actual
sexuality, not a fabricated script (260-61).
For Taormino, working conditions,
ethical wages and representations that are understood as something created make
up the “feminist” in her feminist porn.
By
organizing pornography around a material ethical compass, Taormino’s use of
“feminist” to describe her work, and the work of the other feminist
pornographers, refers not to a stable subjective category but to a mode of
existing, coming into contact with object, consuming, and discovering one’s own
pleasure driven impulses. It is about how one arrives at conclusions rather
than the conclusions themselves. It renegotiates the classic feminist pedagogy
of singular conclusion on “female sexuality” but asserting the possibility of sexualities.
It is not one because it is a type of journey, not a singular destination. It
is sea on which to be sailed, a plural choreography, that never relies on a
stable endpoint.
While the alleogrical cave requires a muting of certain resonances,
feminist porn as described and created by Taormino involves cacophony. Multiple
voices emerge and contribute and often contradict each other. There is no
feminist subject that emerges, only a feminist relation. It is a politics of
reverberation and resonance that both “responds to dominant images with
alternative ones and creates its own iconography” (Taormino 261). This
response, however, concerns the paradigms of feminism as much as it concerns
the paradigms of mainstream pornography.
Nina
Hartley lays out the contradictions that have pervaded feminist response to
sexuality by placing certain acts in a feminist taxonomy of creating a proper
feminist subject.
We
were encouraged to take responsibility for our own orgasms while being told
that penetration was the patriarchal practice of colonizing women’s bodies, and
any woman who wanted that was not liberated. These opposing messages left all
women doubting their sanity (230).
The reconstruction of the charmed
circle model of sexuality required women to cast off their former shadowy
illusions in order to echo the singular voice of the philosopher (the proper
feminist subject). Consequentially women involved in the movement found
themselves questioning what was male identified shadow and what was “normal,”
by feminist standards.One way feminist sex radicals
responded, and through feminist porn continue to respond, was to disseminate
information about sexuality, preventing physical harm, and leaving room for
resonance in place of prescription.
If
something resonates carnally with a person it does not necessarily mean that
she will immediately carry out or attempt to mimic whatever it is that
resonates. As I have argued throughout resonance is one of the primary ways
viewers learn from pornography. Williams articulates this concept. She remarks
that
Even
if we live our lives never ‘having’ sex we learn to appreciate and enjoy
certain sexual ways of being, certain forms of (mild or powerful) arousal by
watching the mediate sexual contacts of others, whether smoldering glances,
kisses, more overt forms of friction or complex scenarios of power, abjection,
and need (Williams 95).
The work of Nina Hartley and Tristan
Taormino offers guided opportunities for resonance and identification to help
women learn about different types of “paths to pleasure.” Even those, which are not so "charming."
