The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (59 page)

Houston is the master of the profound one-liner in which she maps the paradigm shifts that result in feminist porn and which it, in turn, enables. I will end with both. At the 2010 FPAs in an acceptance speech on stage, Houston very specifically evokes one of the most significant feminist thinkers of the twentieth century—Audre Lorde: “What I’ve learned in this business is that you absolutely can dismantle the master’s house using the master’s tools . . .” Curious though is the unique feminist porn twist on Lorde’s infamous axiom “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”
²⁷
At the 2011 FPAs, Houston puts her own queer inversion of Lorde’s axiom into effect when, at the podium receiving an award for her new website, she thanked the crowd and said “[My website Heavenly Spire] is just pure self-indulgence for a feminist interested in cock.” And based on audience response, it seemed that there was barely a person in attendance who didn’t agree that masculinity never looked better.

Notes

1
. Walter Kendrick,
The Secret Museum: Pornography in Modern Culture
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), xiii.

2
. Robert Jensen,
Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity
(Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2007).

3
.
The Butch Mystique,
directed by Debra A. Wilson (New York: Outcast Films, 2003), DVD.

4
.
Linda/Les and Annie: The First Female-to-Male Transsexual Love Story,
directed by Annie Sprinkle (Oakland, CA: New School of Erotic Touch, [1989]1992), DVD.
Enough Man,
directed by Luke Woodward (San Francisco: Frameline, 2004), DVD.

5
. Andrea Dworkin,
Intercourse
(New York: Free Press Paperbacks, 1987); Catharine MacKinnon,
Pornography and Civil Rights
(Minneapolis, MN: Organizing Against Pornography, 1988); Gail Dines,
Pornland
(Boston: Beacon Press, 2010).

6
. Jensen, 135.

7
. Jensen, 7.

8
. Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” in
Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories,
ed. Diana Fuss (New York: Routledge, 1991), 217.

9
. Butler, 217.

10
. Jensen, 138.

11
. Sara Ahmed,
The Cultural Politics of Emotion
(New York: Routledge, 2004).

12
. Annie Sprinkle,
Hardcore from the Heart: The Pleasures, Profits and Politics of Sex in Performance
(London and New York: Continuum, 2001).

13
. Shannon Bell,
Reading, Writing and Rewriting the Prostitute Body
(Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994).

14
. Bell, 1994; Rebecca Schneider,
The Explicit Body in Performance
(London and New York: Routledge, 1997); Linda Williams,
Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the “Frenzy of the Visible
” (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999).

15
. Bell, 143.

16
. Katrina Fox, “Buck’s No Angel,”
SX News,
February 2006,
http://press.buckangel.com/interviews/sx2.jpg
.

17
. Ann Cvetkovich,
An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality and Lesbian Public Cultures
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 65.

18
. Cvetkovich, 65.

19
. Anne McClintock, “Maid to Order: Commercial S/M and Gender Power,” in
Dirty Looks: Women, Pornography, Power,
eds. Pamela Church Gibson and Roma Gibson (London: BFI Publishing, 1993), 210.

20
. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick,
Epistemology of the Closet
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

21
. Colin Thomas, “Beyond the Binary: Adventures in Gender,”
Straight.com
,
July 28, 2005,
http://www.straight.com/article/beyond-the-binary-adventures-in-gender
.

22
. Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake, eds.,
Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

23
. Sprinkle, 1.

24
.
CrashPadSeries.com
directed by Shine Louise Houston (San Francisco: Pink & White Productions, 2009),
http://crashpadseries.com/
.

25
. “Volume 5, Episode 53,”
CrashPadSeries.com
directed by Shine Louise Houston (San Francisco: Pink & White Productions, 2009),
http://crashpadseries.com/
.

26
. “Mickey Mod,”
Heavenly Spire,
accessed August 3, 2011,
http://www.heavenlyspire.com/wordpress/mickey-mod-preview/
.

27
. Audre Lorde,
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
(Trumansburg, NY: The Crossing Press, 1984).

Out of Line: The Sexy Femmegimp Politics of Flaunting It!

LOREE ERICKSON

Loree Erickson
is a poly, queer, femmegimp porn star academic in a doctoral program at York University in Toronto. She is the creator of
want,
an internationally award-winning porn film, and a community organizer. She loves travelling to lecture, making queercrip porn, and facilitating workshops on a variety of topics including collective care, disability justice/radical disability politics, and all things related to sex and disability. She is also a fan of sun, sparkly things, and social justice. Her website is
femmegimp.org
.

I
’d like to tell you a story, which, as it turns out, is in fact at least three related stories.

1. Everyday Moments Can Say a Lot

One day, which really could be any day, I left my house in a rather good mood. I had found a lovely patch of sunshine to sit in while I waited for the bus. Soon I was joined by another bus rider who stood about four or five feet away from me. In a minute or two, another person passed by with no real difficulty, but found it necessary to grumble at me while passing that I “should have parked [my] car” (more appropriately called a wheelchair) elsewhere as I was blocking the sidewalk. I wasn’t blocking anything. The person who was waiting with me was shocked that this other person had made such a rude, ableist comment. I was not surprised. Nor was I surprised by the message behind his words, which was: You are in the way. You and “your car” are taking up too much space. I just let it go and waited. I was relieved when the bus that arrived moments later was accessible, and was a bit surprised when the other person waiting stepped to the side to allow me on, rather than rushing/pushing past me—as many people tend to do, making the bus more difficult to navigate.

As I waited for the driver to ready the bus, the person who had been waiting with me looked at the step of the bus and then to my power
wheelchair and asked if I needed help. I simply replied that the bus has a ramp. Behind this sort of well-intentioned query is the ever-present assumption that I am in need of help. I also get this when I am sitting somewhere waiting to meet a friend. People just come up to me and ask if I am okay. As the bus pulled away, I was thinking about how back-to-back these moments were when I heard a loud shrill voice from the back of the bus exclaim, “You’re amazing!” I froze. “The way you just whipped that little cart of yours right in that spot.” I ignored it, too tired after three ableist encounters in ten minutes to offer any witty comebacks in response, and too angry to feel like educating anyone.

These three encounters are not isolated or individual experiences. Sadly, they are common and systemic. These three moments only tell us some of what disability means, how it appears, and how it is done. Disabilities, and many associated experiences, are often reduced to essentialized biomedical limitations or malfunctions of certain bodies. Disability can more accurately be described as a process enacted through social relations.

Though the term disability appears to describe bodies and how they act/move/inhabit/sense/think/exist/communicate, the label carries the weight of how these bodies are deemed inferior to other bodies through illusory, arbitrary, and compulsory social and economic standards designed to enable certain ways of being over others. Disability is a complex, intersectional, cultural, and fluid constellation of experiences and constructs.

While this is my story of systemic ableism, it is not—and could not be—every story of systemic ableism. My story is reliant on my particular embodiment and cultural context, which includes, but is not limited to, physical disability, whiteness, with a high level of education. As a thirty-four-year-old queer femmegimp who lives below the poverty line, I am marked by a unique interplay of identities.
¹
Disability never appears in isolation; it is always interrelated with other marginalities and privileges. Systemic ableism manifests based on other marginalities and privileges (race, other experiences of disability, class, gender, and beyond).

The encounters in the story above tell something about how people make sense of my body: both the anxieties they project onto it and the simultaneous erasures they enact. These are moments among many where the relations of power reveal themselves. For example, the idea that people take up “too much space” underscores the notion that some people are worthy of occupying space and others are not—and is reminiscent of other sociohistorical practices of isolation and segregation. In
Reading and Writing Disability Differently,
Tanya Titchkosky writes, “The meaning of disability is composed of conflicts of inclusion and
exclusion as this intersects with our ordinary ways of recognizing people . . . or not.”
²

2. Why I Became a Porn Star

Disabled people are often imagined as being in the way; unimportant; in need of help; or called “inspirational” for doing ordinary things. Disabled people are imagined as less capable than or not as good as “normal” people (a problematic term as well). All of these attitudes simultaneously bolster and create policies and practices that propagate the association of disability with undesirability. We see this in state-sponsored practices of funding and mandating institutionalization through incarceration in prisons, psychiatric wards/hospitals, group homes, and nursing homes over community-based support; in immigration policies using racist, capitalist, and ableist definitions of who counts as a desirable citizen; in historic and contemporary eugenic ideals (affecting marginalized bodies and minds of all varieties); in “lives not worth living” rhetoric and consequent denial of medical treatment to those deemed unworthy; as well as in welfare and disability income programs that keep us impoverished and hungry.

The same structures that affect other areas of our lives, creating an overwhelming climate of devaluation, also regulate our sexual lives.
³
From forced and coerced sterilization to institutional surveillance that limits privacy, there are multiple systems that pathologize, control, and punish the sexual explorations and expressions of disabled people. Common paternalistic assumptions hypersexualize and/or portray disabled people as hypervulnerable. This damaging ideology is used to justify segregation. Disabled people—all people—need affirming resources, sex-positive information, and ways to realize their sexual potential. Antisex laws in many US states criminalize certain sexual activities that may be preferred ways for some disabled people to experience pleasure and express desire.