The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (60 page)

Disabled people are also often subjected to medical and psychological gawking that objectifies, stigmatizes, and pathologizes our experiences of our bodies including our minds.
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Many children who are born with or acquire their disabilities early on are told directly and indirectly to not expect to have a family or anyone ever romantically love them.
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Disabled people experience the cumulative effects of this extensive system of desexualization every day.

People have begun organizing around this site of oppression as honestly and effectively as we have for other issues of access and justice. There are many barriers associated with this type of organizing and it is
often deprioritized. In part, this is because there has been a disconnection between sexuality and other needs. It can be argued that one should focus more on needs such as housing, adequate attendant care, employment, transportation, and the like. However, this omission of sexuality ignores how profoundly interconnected all of these aspects of our lives are. Another part of the struggle to include sexuality as an organizing goal requires us to challenge the way sex operates in western society. We learn to associate shame with sex. We are surrounded by images that convey a very narrow definition of sex and of desirable bodies. We learn we are not supposed to talk about sex. This framing of normative desire is larger than life, and does not make room for a whole range of enjoyable experiences and possibilities. When sex is thought of as a bountiful playground for the relatively few who can approximate the illusory ideals of the desirable body (skinny, white, able-bodied, rich, and so on), then sex, desire, and pleasure for the rest of us remains relatively invisible. Sex and sexual expression are also often dismissed as frivolous “wants” rather than fundamental aspects of humanity. This is especially true for people with disabilities.

Although it is felt as a personal and private emotion, shame is spun—constructed by our socio-political-cultural institutions and the medical industrial complex—to internalize, naturalize, and individualize many of the oppressions mentioned above as well as others. As Abby Wilkerson argues, “Shame is not so much a psychological state of individuals as such (even though it may shape individual subjectivity), but rather a socially based harm which oppressed groups are subject to in particular ways . . . Shame is deployed as a ‘political resourc[e] that some people use to silence or isolate others.’”
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I would like to expand this idea to include how shame is used not only as a tool of social control to isolate us from each other, but to keep us from accessing those very parts of ourselves, our bodies, our desires, and our experiences (usually wrapped up in our differences from that illusory ideal mentioned earlier) that hold the most potential for change by offering us a different way of being in the world.

Rather than hide away, deny, and ignore those very sites of the deepest shame, we must not only embrace them and learn from them, we need to flaunt them.

What better way to flaunt conventions of sexuality than by making porn? Pornography is surrounded by shame. We feel shame for watching it, enjoying it, making it, and buying it. The content of porn also often instills shame in us. We can feel badly for not living up to certain standards (both in terms of not fitting the mold of which bodies are seen as beautiful and in terms of not measuring up in sexual prowess and skills). There is porn that demeans our identities and experiences and replicates
oppressive power dynamics. Porn is complex, multifaceted—and yes—powerful. Rather than attempt to regulate and control it, which only drives it more underground and into the hands of those with privilege, we need to follow in the work of sex-positive feminists and explore the many benefits that pornography made from such alternative perspectives has to offer.
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This all may seem an unlikely beginning to porn stardom. By making queercrip porn, I moved out of line and took the “queer” and “wonky” path to place new stories within reach.
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I took this path to open up new possibilities and imaginings.

My journey began in a progressive sex shop in San Francisco in 2000; I was looking at an issue of
On Our Backs,
a lesbian porn magazine, featuring an article on sex and disability. I was so excited . . . until I opened to the article. There was one picture of someone in a wheelchair with someone sitting on their lap kissing them. This one picture—the only image combining sex and disability I had found up to that point in my life—was inverted, so the image was obscured and barely recognizable. I wanted to see bodies that looked and moved and felt like mine represented in the exciting, but clearly still problematic, queer sexual culture. I wanted to see something that reflected my desires! I wanted to know that desiring people like me was possible. I resolved then and there to become a porn star.

In the summer of 2006, I made a short film called
want,
which weaves together sexually explicit images with everyday moments and scenes of the ableist world. It works to get people hot and poses an insightful, complex, honest, and sexy image of disability and gender transgressive bodies.
want
was clearly wanted. It won several awards, and continues to screen internationally at film festivals, conferences, and workshops.

I wouldn’t be making porn right now if I weren’t so pissed off. I would not be making porn if I hadn’t struggled for most of my life to be recognized as a sexy and sexual being, or if the world wasn’t so fucked up. But making porn is one of the best things I’ve ever done. On a political level, it allowed me to make a movie that would not only offer a moment of recognition of how sexy queercrips could be, but also a way to tell others how I wanted to be seen. Making this video allowed me to take up space and reconceptualize what is sexy.

Personally, it was an amazing experience—and not just because of all the really great sex. The three of us (my co-star, the video artist, and I) created a space of comfort, beauty, respect, and desire. To be able to share that with others is truly remarkable. That day was one of the first times in my life that I felt wanted for exactly who I am. The first time I felt that was with my first lover. Unfortunately, experiences like these are
rare for many people. Despite the sheer joy of the day—I must have been smiling for days afterward—it took me a while to work up the nerve to watch the video footage. I was afraid that what I might see would allow all those stories I was trying to erase to reemerge and pollute my experience of that day. While there were some bits that were hard to watch, it turned out to be not so bad—and kind of hot. I could see that I was sexy. I still feel that pull of doubt, but I am building up a whole host of stories, salacious stories, to counter the other ones.

3. Being a Porn Star is Hard Work

Before this turns into a simple story of overcoming adversity, I would like to complicate things a bit. “Flaunting it” is not without its difficulties, but it does help to loosen up the knots a bit and free up more space for imagining. Because our bodies, identities, desires, and experiences have multiple meanings, we need multiple stories. We need stories of love, lust, and other stuff. We need the success stories and the stories of pain and frustration. We also need stories about the work that stories being told about us, without us, do. These stories still inform our stories. We also need to look at the work that our stories do. Here are some stories that attempt to do that work.

Mainstream porn uses a series of conventions to shape the discourse of what is considered sexy. As I mentioned earlier, we can feel shame for not measuring up to these standards. Despite my politics, while editing, I found myself tempted to recreate those standards. I wanted to edit out the messy stuff, the very things that made this porn different. Wouldn’t leaving in these sites of shame make it so that we wouldn’t have to feel bad when we don’t fall seamlessly into bed with our hair splayed out perfectly on the pillow? I’ve seen other porn movies that do this. They show pauses for gloves and lube and the negotiation process: “Try moving my leg here,” or, “I like this,” or “Touch me here.” How powerful would it be to show that when we fell back or slipped, it didn’t ruin anything? We just kept going. Then I realized that, within the constellation of power relations, I had somewhat contradictory aims. How far could I go toward a new vision of sexy and still be recognized as sexy? How far could I go away from that standard referent and not be discounted as too different or have my film written off as a fetish film? If, as Foucault contends, we can never get outside of power, then how do we create something new without reinforcing oppressive ideologies? In the end, I compromised; I showed bits of both.

Alongside the delicious moments of recognition that have come from making queercrip porn, there are also those moments when the normative
paradigms that limit and/or shape our understandings in a given context are revealed. For example, some people assume that my co-star and I are lesbians. Part of this assumption is based on their normative readings of gender; for instance, taking a certain tone of voice as implying a corresponding gender or reading what is sometimes a dildo as only ever a dildo (when sometimes it is someone’s cock). In the moments of reading me/us as either straight or as lesbians, the embodiment of and desire for gender-transgressive bodies (both his and mine) are erased. This assumption presumes that desire occurs along heteronormative binary axes of gender, sex, and sexuality. In addition, the way that disabled people are often denied agency contributes to a lack of recognition of subversively performed gender expression.

Hot genderqueer boy/femmegimp lovin’ action must be made unintelligible, yet again, to keep certain bodies and desires in line. I find these moments of “misrecognition” quite revealing and useful. They highlight how difficult it can be to unlearn our ideas that only certain bodies are desirable, but they also emphasize the endless possibilities of embodiment beyond binaries.

The first time I screened
want
at a festival, during the question and answer section, another film director commented, “Eventually your chair faded away and you were just a hot girl getting fucked.” He meant it as praise: he was giving me the all too familiar “You were so hot I forgot you were in a wheelchair” compliment. I was not fulfilling the asexual poster-child stereotype that he sees as what disability is; disability and hot sexiness could not exist simultaneously. In his viewing, he made what he considered to be the less desirable bit disappear. But my wheelchair will not just fade away. When I am hot, I am still disabled. I feel it is important to mention that to make this exchange between him and me even possible, I had to fight and win an obnoxious argument about why my screening had to be held in an accessible theatre. Sorry, no, you can’t keep your little bubble of queer sex-positive activities or the locations of said activities exactly the same and include me. The alignment of the inaccessible location of the event and his ablest views of “hotness” were not accidental.

Representations of genderqueer boy/femmegimp love are still rare, leaving many viewers unable to imagine these identities, bodies, and experiences outside the difference-effacing liberal frameworks of the dominant culture. This is partly why films like mine are unsettling as well as productive. They create a space for disability and embodied sexuality to co-exist and be seen. They give viewers the opportunity to recognize, re-imagine, and acknowledge that being out of line, being crooked,
being different, and being variant can be smoking hot. This is possible when the performers can feel fully recognized when we do not fall in line or hide our transgressions. As already discussed, shame is a panoptical device used to urge bodies toward assimilation and normalcy. In my life, I have not had the privilege of hiding certain sites of shame in many ways, which has been complicated and in some ways hard, but it has also opened up new possibilities and ways of being in the world. In
want
I show my self as a body that is explicitly sexual and also needs intimate daily personal care. Bodies that cannot or do not hide their interdependence, needs, and leakiness as well as others do, have faced a long history of violence, discrimination, and desexualization. Being regarded as a dependent body is one of the major ways that disabled bodies have been cast as undesirable. I wanted to bring these two supposedly disparate parts of me together because I am certain that disability will never be fully desirable until notions of dependency and care are reworked. I wanted to show how adopting a nontraditional model of meeting my care needs through a collective of people from my community has not only enabled my sexual expression, but opened up a space for so much more. The mutuality of these caring relationships contributes to new ways of being in the world with others.
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In the article “Loving You Loving Me: Tranny/Crip/Queer Love and Overcoming Shame in Relationships,” Samuel Lurie states, “being desired, trusting that, reciprocating that cracks us open”.
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Remaining open and vulnerable is scary because of shame, past hurts (both systemic and interpersonal), and the very real chance of harm, but it is also hard because it means we have to tell new stories. We have to tell stories that contradict the omnipresent chorus that tells us that we are not good enough to be wanted.

These stories can be hard to tell because they can sometimes be hard to believe, but they need to be told because in their telling, they make change possible. As Eli Clare argues:

Never are we seen, heard, believed to be the creators of our own desires, our own passions, our own sexual selves. Inside this maze, the lives of queer crips truly disappear. And I say it’s time for us to reappear. Time for us to talk sex, be sex, wear sex, relish our sex, both the sex we do have and the sex we want to be having. I say it’s time for some queer disability erotica, time for an anthology of crip smut, queer style. Time for us to write, film, perform, read, talk porn. I’m serious. It’s time.
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