The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (56 page)

Author’s Note: Thanks to Juno Parreñas and my co-editors for reading and helping me to improve this essay with their close readings, inquiries, and insights.

Notes

1
. Richard Fung, “Looking for My Penis,” in
How Do I Look?: Queer Film and Video,
eds. Bad Object Choices (Seattle: Bay Press, 1991).

2
. Hoang Tan Nguyen,
Forever Bottom!
(San Francisco: Frameline, 1999), DVD.

3
. Melissa Farley, “Prostitution, Trafficking, and Cultural Amnesia: What We Must
Not Know
in Order To Keep the Business of Sexual Exploitation Running Smoothly,”
Yale Journal of Law and Feminism
18, no. 2 (2006).

4
. J. O’Higgins, “Sexual Choice, Sexual Act: An Interview with Michel Foucault (1982),” in
Foucault Live: Collected Interviews 1961–1984,
2nd edition, ed. Sylvere Loringer (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 1996), 322–34.

5
. Deepti Hajela, “Chen Case: Asian American Troops Endure Bias,”
Military.com
,
February 20, 2012,
http://www.military.com/news/article/chen-case-asian-american-troops-endure-bias.html
.

6
. Celine Parreñas Shimizu,
The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).

7
.
More Dirty Debutantes #101,
dir. Ed Powers (4-Play Video, 1999), DVD.

8
. “Sexual Choice, Sexual Act,” 322–34.

9
. Gail Dines, “The White Man’s Burden: Gonzo Pornography and the Construction of Black Masculinity,”
Yale Journal of Law and Feminism
18, no. 1 (2006): 283–97.

10
. Celine Parreñas Shimizu,
Straitjacket Sexualities: Unbinding Asian American Manhoods in the Movies
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012).

11
. Emmanuel Levinas,
Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Philippe Nemo,
trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 68.

Knowing Dick: Penetration and the Pleasures of Feminist Porn’s Trans Men

BOBBY NOBLE

Bobby Noble
is an associate professor at York University in Toronto, Canada, cross-appointed to the departments of English and sexuality studies. His research focuses on transgender scholarship, masculinity studies, and feminist porn studies from within cultural studies. He is the author of two monographs:
Sons of the Movement: FtMs Risking Incoherence on a Post-Queer Cultural Landscape
and
Masculinities without Men?: Female Masculinity in Twentieth-Century Fictions.

T
he work done in this essay draws on the newly launched Feminist Porn Archive and Research Project. This is a federally funded, three-year Canadian research study of feminist-porn cultures and the creation of an archive that will house feminist porn. While there has been much contention in feminism about porn, feminist porn itself emerges in the latter decades of the twentieth century as both a product of and intervention in many of those debates. Feminist porn production and consumption has not only placed women’s sexual pleasure within its domain but also reconfigured the sexuality of trans masculinity within its counterpublics. This essay takes these complexly gendered pleasures as part of its twofold focus. First it analyzes feminist porn as an archive of knowledge—that is, it argues that feminist porn is itself a methodology of knowledge production and of knowing that troubles the classificatory process that locked up pornography in the secret museum, an imaginary place of danger, as Walter Kendrick suggests, to which some have access and from which others (usually women and children) must be protected.
¹
Kendrick argues that pornography is less a thing and more an idea or “thought structure,” a collection of processes focused on objects that have little in common with each other but that become rendered recognizable by virtue of classificatory, discursive, and definitional practices. This project also asks to what extent feminist pornography significantly contests or troubles an idea of pornography, sexuality, and gender
advocated by feminist fundamentalism. By fundamentalism, I refer to a series of feminist practices which, in their effect, oddly affiliate and align with social, moral, and biologically coercive normalizations.

The way that feminist porn troubles masculinity is the second domain of this essay: If feminist porn cultures can be theorized not just through methodological work but
as
methodological work, how does this change what can be known—and known differently—not just of women in porn, but its more elusive and silent subject supposedly in plain view, that of masculinities in porn? This essay asks: how are trans masculine bodies depicted and made knowable? Trans, butch, and FTM bodies become extremely significant hinge points within the complex nexus of feminist porn and its masculinities. Recent portrayals of FTM trans masculinities deploy a counterpublic and potentially post-porn practice I call
transing.
These representations have
transed,
or deterritorialized both masculinities and porn from the heteronormative male phallic body and the visual spectacle of the money shot. They produce the dispersal of pleasure across denaturalized bodies of desire and sites of gendered pleasure in performance, production, and consumption. To discern these deterritorializations, I first analyze the very ambivalent accounts of masculinity in the work of one antiporn feminist, Robert Jensen.
²
I then compare these accounts with two different depictions of FTM sexual cultures. The first is the documentary film by Debra A. Wilson,
The Butch Mystique
.
³
Two other examples of feminist docu-porn will be analyzed:
Linda/Les and Annie
by Annie Sprinke; and Luke Woodward’s
Enough Man,
to suggest that
trans-formed
masculine pleasures and their dissemination across the incoherence of trans bodies have crystallized a new feminist porn sexual grammar that reconfigures masculine sexuality.
⁴
To render this new grammar epistemologically significant, three related sets of questions need to be addressed: What does feminist masculine sexuality look like? What are its affective economies? How is it that feminist porn—some thirty years after the infamous feminist porn wars—has become not only a means of depicting transmasculine sexuality in productive ways, but a potent interlocutor and champion?

I. Penetrating Feminist Masculinities

Masculinity’s desires
in
porn and
for
porn have posed significant challenges for thinking the proximity of “feminist” to “porn” in any terms other than suspicion. Fundamentalist feminisms unequivocally opposed to pornography, such as Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon,
as well as contemporary antiporn crusaders Gail Dines and Robert Jensen, have cast masculinity and its desires as always dangerously and essentially pornographic—that is, innately exploitative, objectifying, dangerous, and violent.
⁵
Writing some thirty years after Andrea Dworkin, Robert Jensen contemporizes such a structure of feeling. Deploying the same rhetorical strategies that Dworkin sets in motion, what is used most frequently in this economy of critique is an (imagined) unmediated documentary realism that takes up masculinity only to underscore the brutalities of sex for women in porn. One of the primary effects of such a rhetorical style is a deeply ironic standpoint essentialism that both consumes the pornography it decries
and
advances a self-punishing, self-bullying, and moral panic about masculinity itself. In his book on masculinity and porn,
Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity
(2007), Jensen grounds his argument in just such a claim when he asserts “I get erections from pornography. I take that to be epistemologically significant; my body understands the charge of pornography. Because I was raised in a sexist culture with few (if any) influences that mitigated that sexism, I am in a position to explore how that sexual charge is connected to the ideology of male dominance and female submission that structures contemporary commercial pornography.”
⁶

The strategy of imagining pornography through the lens of documentary realism is evident throughout Jensen’s text, one he dedicates to the memory of Dworkin. Arguing the obvious, that there is a growing interdependence between capitalism and pornography, Jensen states in the imperative that one cannot liberate masculinity from itself; one instead must destroy it. In Jensen’s words: “One response to this toxic masculinity has been to attempt to redefine what it means to be a man, to craft a kinder-and-gentler masculinity that might pose less of a threat to women and children and be more livable for men. But such a step is inadequate; our goal should not be to reshape masculinity but to eliminate it.”
⁷
The allusion to “elimination” here is extremely noteworthy.
Eliminate,
comes from the Latin
eliminatus,
meaning “to be turned out of doors” or “through a threshold”—which also connotes to put an end to something; to kill, destroy, or make somebody or something ineffective; to defeat and put a player or team out of a competition; to remove something as irrelevant or unimportant; and interestingly, last but nowhere near least, to expel waste from the body. This is curious. Part of what Jensen suggests with this rhetoric of elimination is that, in addition to surrendering the desire to reconstruct masculinity—something he claims is an inadequate response—masculinity instead needs
to be categorically destroyed, removed, killed off, and, expelled as waste. Of course, the claim here is supported by both of the teleologies and tautologies in Jensen’s logic: “I get erections from pornography. I take that to be epistemologically significant.” Jensen concludes two points about the male body and its sexual responses: first, it is involuntary in its responsiveness; and second, that such responsiveness itself is a priori evidence of abject, irresolveable culpability and guilt. Masculinity writ noncomplicitous remains unthinkable.

Such corporeal self-evidence and abjection are precisely what Judith Butler has cautioned against in her work while, at the same time, acknowledging the vitality of the unthinkable in other ways and on different terms. Although Jensen, Dworkin, and Butler each write the impossible body as the effect of heteronormative hegemonies, Butler’s construction of embodiment differs from Jensen’s. Where he details a body constructed by its overdetermined biological need to occupy and destroy femaleness as a drive toward achieving normalized manhood, for Butler, the body is the effect of normative social processes and can, in turn, “occupy the norm in myriad ways, exceed the norm, rework the norm, and expose realities to which we thought we were confined as open to transformation.”
⁸
In other words, where matter for Jensen must inscribe no possibility of excess, Butler finds rearticulation as a fundamental part of why matter must be inhabited in excess of itself and incoherently for both theory and politics. “Bodies are not,” Butler writes, “inhabited as spatial givens. They are, in their spatiality, also underway in time: aging, altering shape, altering signification—depending upon their interactions—and the web of visual, discursive, and tactile relations that become part of their historicity, their constitutive past, present, and future.”
⁹
What emerges vis-à-vis Jensen’s rearticulation of antipornography feminism and masculinity is precisely the opposite of what Butler seeks to map. Jensen’s is a flow of affect not only grounded in mimesis, or an assumption of realism without mediation. Instead it is affect produced relationally (as a mediation between text and audience), an affect that is also heavily invested in constituting masculinity through problematic and very limited subject positions: the only feminist affect available for masculinity is self-punishment, despair, and debilitating pathos. Jensen punctuates and performs such pathos throughout his text by lamenting, “I am sad. It feels like there are few ways out” for a masculinity trapped in the guilty male body and for whom elimination is the only remedy.
¹⁰
If Sara Ahmed is right when she posits that affect is not what flows naturally or organically from the individual body but is what holds or binds the social body together, then we must ask what is the affect of feminist masculinity in the individual and social body within feminist porn?
¹¹