INTRODUCTION
“The Sex Wars is generally understood as a conflict between feminists who were against pornography and certain sexual practices, e.g. s/m, and ‘sex radical’ feminists. Anti-pornography feminists argued that pornography was inherently sexist and promoted violence against women” (Strongman, 2018, p. 45).
Strongman, an Afro-American feminist scholar, in this statement refers to the ‘sex war’ of the 1980’s, a time when women’s sexuality was strongly contested in activism and in scholarship. Pornography, ‘prostitution’ and practices like BDSM were topics that feminists quarrelled about. Some saw those practices as objectifying women, whereas others argued that they proved a source of female empowerment (Fritz & Paul, 2017; Chadwick et al., 2018). The porn industry at that time was booming, between 1950 and 1970 hundreds of pornographic films were produced, and since the publication of Deep Throat in 1972 (Preciado, 2008), thousands, if not millions of pornographic materials have started to circulate globally. This has resulted in the fact that pornography is omnipresent and still highly contested, re-negotiated and re-invented. Preciado therefore calls the new world regime “the pharmaco-pornographic regime of sexuality” (2008, p.107), as we are constantly exposing ourselves to the public.
Thus, from time to time in history, there are different stages where sexuality, which is political, gets discussed and politicized more intensely than in other times, as stated by Rubin (1984). She goes on to argue that “in such periods, the domain of erotic life is, in effect, renegotiated” (1984, p.143). Moreover, a very influential author, who was actively involved in the re-negotiation of the erotic in the time during the ‘sex war’, is Audre Lorde. In the following essay I engage with her understanding of the erotic as power within the framework of the essay question stated above (footnote 1). I discuss Lorde’s concept of the erotic as power in relation to pornography, as in brief, Lorde (1978) sees the pornographic as the opposite of the erotic, whereby the latter is the source of empowerment in every woman. As Lorde, a black, lesbian feminist, was an advocate of the anti-porn movement during the ‘sex war’ area, her theory of the erotic is deeply embedded in the context of the debates about sexuality, sex, race, pleasure and power at the time (Strongman, 2018).
In this essay I ask how people engaging in, or with, ‘queer-feminist pornography’ respond to Lorde’s argument that pornography signifies female oppression and that women engaging in it are being used merely as objects. In addition, I am interested in the question of how the erotic is conceptualized in their pornography. I begin this essay by outlining Lorde’s personal background, her concept of the erotic as power and her definition of pornography. I will then discuss how definitions of pornography are always embedded in their historical, political and social context. I also briefly touch upon the limitations of studying pornography. Finally, I present how queer-feminist porn theorists and/or practitioners deal with the question of female empowerment in and through pornography, and how the erotic is conceptualized from their viewpoints.
This essay doesn’t contribute to the discussion about whether pornography is inherently ‘good’ or ‘bad’, or whether it empowers or oppresses women. The focus of many porn studies in the tradition of pro vs. anti-porn is “limited and limiting” (Attwood, 2002, p.92) and leaves out possibilities for examining pornography in a holistic way. Therefore, I want to emphasize the ambiguities within (queer-feminist) pornography, because by focusing on contradictions rather than consent, a more nuanced understanding of the phenomenon is possible.
THE EROTIC AS POWER
Audre Lorde (1934-1992), an Afro-American poet, was born in New York, where she worked as an English professor (Hacker & Dallman, 1981). She described herself as being black, a woman, a lover, a feminist, a lesbian and a warrior. Lorde amazed other feminists like Aptheker (2012) because of her fearlessness to speak about topics which weren’t part of the dominant feminist discourse. Lorde’s essay on which this analysis is based upon is called The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power and was published in 1978. When Lorde (1978) speaks of the erotic, she often uses the term ‘we’ to address other women. The erotic is inside of each woman, and at the same time it’s feared by men, therefore they are not interested in examining it. The following definition encompasses central aspects of her understanding of the erotic: “When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives” (1978, p.9).
The erotic, once a woman recognizes and embraces it, refers to women’s “deepest and non-rational knowledge” (1978, p.6), and to women’s satisfaction. It is therefore a spiritual, sensual, physical, emotional force, which women feel in everything they do: When they dance, when they work – in every activity of their live they should feel joy. The erotic pushes women to see their own excellence, which has been neglected for so long. The erotic is seen, especially in Western culture, as something superficially erotic, something only related to sex, something women should embrace only in men’s service. The erotic beyond its superficiality is feared because it is truly transformative, however only when shared: When two women’s self-connection is shared, differences between them can possibly be transcended. Only when both women are in touch with their erotic, a relation is truly equal; if they are not, they use each other and “use without the consent of the used is abuse” (1978, p.13). What Lorde is arguing here, is that when we engage with others without recognizing the erotic within us, we reduce ourselves to the pornographic, which she sees as the opposite of the erotic. Pornography for Lorde is “a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling” (1978, p.7). If the erotic and the pornographic are contrary, pornography signifies powerlessness, vulnerability, “despair, depression and self-denial” (1978, p.13), and not being in touch with your truest self. Lorde further explains that pornography emerged because the human need to “share deep feeling” (1978, p.13) has been misnamed in Western societies. There are only certain erotic encounters promoted, which she sees as an “abuse of feeling” (1978, p.14). Lorde therefore pledges for the recognition of the erotic, what in turn entails the elimination of the pornographic.
STUDYING PORNOGRAPHY
To study or write about pornography raises some important concerns. To define a concept like pornography may be a political act or an argument and therefore it is indispensable to contextualize the representations (Attwood, 2002; Boyle, 2006). Scholars who do research on pornography study its “production, distribution and consumption” because without that, it “can only ever provide a partial account” (Boyle, 2006, p.13). Following the conversations within porn studies, it is important to keep in mind that Lorde wrote her essay in a particular historical moment of feminisms, and that concepts are defined depending on the geographical, socio-political and personal context. Gill and Orgad argue that the contestation of sexuality (sex work, FGM and pornography) has always divided feminism: “Too often they [the contestations] have taken place along deep lines of stratification between feminists of North and South, secular or religious, heterosexual or queer” (2018, p.1316). As pointed out by Lorde in another crucial essay, The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House (1979), it is essential to include the differences between feminists in every discussion of feminist theory. Therefore, she refers to the arrogance of many white feminists at the time who promoted a single and unified sisterhood without including contributions from poor, black and lesbian women (Lorde, 1979). Lorde, wise beyond her years, pledged for the conduct of what we today call an ‘intersectional analysis’ (Crenshaw, 1989) when writing about a particular phenomenon. Our feminist analysis should irrefutably always take differences in race, class, age, sexuality and ability/disability into account; in order to deconstruct the hegemony of white, middleclass, Western-centric feminist understandings.
When writing about pornography, we should necessarily also write about race, because as stated by Cruz, “internet pornography so vividly reaffirms how race operates in cyberspace” (2015, p.422) and Mulholland confirms that “representations of porn are never neutral to discourses of race and colonialism (2016, p.45). Lorde’s background undoubtedly influenced how she thought about pornography – especially about black female pornography and black women in BDSM. For Lorde it is not erotic to play with power. The erotic is not exclusively related to the bedroom and therefore dominance and subordination are also neither only bedroom-topics. Those practices are embedded in the wider social power structures, which is the reason why Lorde sees pornography as ethically problematic (as cited in Cruz, 2015). The discussion about the relationship between black feminism and non-traditional black women’s sexualities was, and is, highly contested (Cruz, 2015) – a feminist discussion on which I can’t further elaborate in detail due to this paper’s length restrictions.
QUEER-FEMINIST PORNOGRAPHY
As indicated above, scholars encounter difficulties when defining what pornography is constituted of. The same thing happens when trying to categorize queer or feminist (or queer-feminist) pornography. Queer theory in particular reminds us of the fact that categorizers always have a subjective view and that categories are constantly evolving (Drabinski, 2013). To use the term ‘queer-feminist pornography’ gives the impression that there is a relation between queer and feminist pornography, or that they may be the ‘same’. One has to note that some scholars use them together while other’s (especially those who self-identify as queer) emphasize that they are feminists, but their work doesn’t contribute to a feminist goal (Moll, 2017). In spite of the naming problematics I will shortly delineate how practitioners and scholars in the field of queer-feminist pornography distinguish their representations from ‘mainstream pornography’.
Candida Royalle is often identified as the first representative of feminist pornography. She has been active in the industry since 1975 (Stewart, 2018) and her main idea was to take the emphasis away from genitalia. Royalle writes:
We wanted to portray a sense of connectedness, tenderness, communication, passion, excitement, and longing. We wanted to portray women with real bodies, of all ages and types, whom our female viewers could relate to and identify with, and men who seemed to care about their partners, who wanted to please and satisfy them (2013, p.65).
Furthermore, Royalle wanted to let the performers chose with whom they engage – where possible – which is also an important factor for Taormino (as cited in Whisnant, 2016). Ms. Naughty (2013), another feminist pornographer, adds that her films are about the depiction of the female pleasure and the female orgasm, and therefore one of the important things for her is to abolish the ‘cum shot’ or ‘money shot’. The claim of many feminist pornographers to show “authentic” (Taormino et al., 2013, p.12) or ‘realistic’ female pleasure is a common narrative in queer-feminist porn production; a discussion which triggers a lot of discussions, on which I am unable to go into detail due to length limitations.
In The Feminist Porn Book (2013) Taormino et al. argue that it is important to challenge the normative representations of gender, body shape, class, race, ability/disability and age which exist in mainstream pornography. Feminist pornography instead focuses on agency and pleasure and sees those concepts in their ambiguity and contradiction. Queer-feminist pornography thus often distinguishes itself from mainstream pornography in stating that they don’t produce for mass-consumption, but rather with an artistical and political aim in mind (Fritz & Paul, 2018), where sustainability is more important than profit (Mondin, 2014). Mondin calls feminist porn “fair trade, organic porn” (2014, p.190), because it centers on the humanity and value of the performers, is produced in a cinematographically high quality and is therefore considered to be more ethical than mainstream porn. Queer-feminist porn producers try to “change the game of the market” (Mondin, 2014, p.189), but the ways in which they do this drastically depends on the producer. The film culture of queer, feminist and lesbian pornography, writes Ryberg (2015), is very heterogenous due to the fact that the three categories hold different activist backgrounds. Taormino et al. (2013) add that feminist and queer pornography can be seen as movements actively engaging with other social movements (sex worker’s rights, LGBTQ rights, sex-positive movement etc.).
THE EROTIC IN THE FIELD OF QUEER-FEMINIST PORNOGRAPHY
Actors who are actively involved in queer-feminist pornography belief that pornography is not violent, no more violent than mainstream media (Rubin, 1995). The strict pro-censorship position that Lorde embodied is criticised by all the authors that I refer to in the following sections. They agree upon the fact that through pornography, the erotic can be negotiated and embraced, while emphasising that erotic pleasure always exists “within and across inequality, in the face of injustice” (Taormino et al., 2013, p.10). As queer-feminist pornography shows different gender identities and various sexualities, traditional, normative conceptualizations of sexuality can be challenged, which is something Lorde didn’t consider in her concept of the erotic. She exclusively addressed women when she talked about the erotic as power, excluding important discussion’s about different gender identities. Ryberg (2015) emphasises that making those identities visible in public spaces is something which pornography makes possible. Censuring (certain) sex, which in her most famous work Lorde advocated for, is a mechanism used by states to ostracize it to the private sphere and is undoubtedly problematic. Berlant and Warner (1998) explain that especially queer sex or queer intimacies are banned from public spaces, hence why it is even more important to publicly show it.
Four black feminists who engage with queer-feminist pornography, directly respond to Lorde’s concept of the erotic. Ariane Cruz, Amber Musser, Jennifer Nash and LaMonda Stallings who all theorize blackness, sexuality and pornography discussed the topics race, pornography and desire at the TBS Roundtable (2016). They addressed the contradictory relation of black feminism and pornography, although they take up a different position than Lorde, as they recognise pornography as a site of empowerment (Chude-Sokei et al., 2016). They also show to what extent Lorde’s conceptualization of the erotic as female empowerment and the pornographic as female oppression and the resulting anti-pornographic attitude prevents us from understanding the nuanced relationship of black sexuality, race and pornography.
Cruz’s main goal is to reconcile black feminism and pornography. She acknowledges the existing tensions between the two, but nevertheless tries – in opposition to Lorde – to focus on the (unspeakable) pleasure within pornography. Cruz developed ‘the politics of perversion’, a concept which she uses as a tool to show that pornography is not wholly oppressive, but that sexuality can be a ‘technique of power’ (Chude-Sokei et al., 2016). Cruz investigates black women’s engagement in BDSM or race plays, where racism is employed as an “erotic tool of power exchange” (2016, p.381). Another black scholar, Miller-Young, shows that black women engage in erotic economies in order to be professionally autonomous and economically independent (as cited in Cruz, 2016). She calls this process of negotiating their own agency and erotic pleasure while living in an exploitable body ‘the erotic sovereignty’ and explains how this process takes place in an environment of policing and structural inequality (Miller-Young, 2014). Jennifer Nash, in responding to the question about the usefulness of the erotic in relation to race, speaks about ‘race’s eroticism’, which describes the phenomenon that “racial excess and hypersexuality can be limiting and also deeply enabling in permitting sexual imaginations to flourish” (Chude-Sokei et al., 2016, p.55).
For Musser, the erotic does something similar as it does for Lorde, in that it gives people the opportunity to get together. But it should here be noted that she uses the term ‘people’, whereby she includes people who identify with other identities, not only ‘women’. Musser says that “sexuality, pornography and the erotic are sites that bring into relief the construction of race and the simultaneous pleasures and violence in/and of race” (Chude-Sokei et al., 2016, p.56). What differentiates her account of the erotic from that of Lorde, is that she sheds a light on the fact that through the erotic people can deploy a restricted form of agency, not this ‘absolute’ empowerment Lorde mentioned. By embracing the erotic, thinks Musser, people can engage with themselves and their desires (Chude-Sokei et al., 2016). Nash hereby agrees with Musser, adding that especially the naming of those desires which are seen as infelicitous, is an important act that many of those who work in the field of pornography embrace. Pornography for her does this naming (making public) work and is “one of the few places where we see our bodies – and other people’s bodies – and thus it becomes kind of instruction manual on how bodies in pleasure can look” (Chude-Sokei et al., 2016, p.61). Pornographies (intentionally here used in plural) are a way to imagine and desire even more, and they are educational. Cruz states in relation to the erotic, that she wants to learn about how BDSM in pornography can produce “erotic pleasure in blackness, on blackness and with blackness” (Chude-Sokei et al., 2016, p.62).
What the above scholars all have in common is their emphasis on a middle ground (Ciclitra, 2004) between Lorde’s binary of the erotic as empowerment and the pornographic as oppression. Shoniqua Roach, another black feminist scholar, adds that there are “multitudinous possibilities for black eroticism” (2019, p.139) depending on the site and on the social and political context the woman is located, as pornography does affect people in different ways.
Lorde (1978) additionally argued that differences between feminists are important and can be softened through the recognition of the erotic, whereupon Sharon Patricia Holland (2012) counters that the erotic is ambivalent and can either dissolve those differences or strengthen them.
Community and the sharing with others were deeply important for Lorde and can be understood to still be significant for feminists engaging with pornography today (Ryberg, 2015; Taormino et al., 2013). Ryberg therefore developed the concept of the ‘ethics of shared embodiment’:
Thought of as an activism oriented towards means rather than ends, queer, feminist and lesbian pornography invites an embodied understanding of positions and experiences that differ from one’s own and calls forth an ethics of shared embodiment, susceptible to otherness and respecting of difference. […] it demands awareness that there might always be another point of view (2015, p.271).
Within this film culture, the ethics have to be negotiated due to the existing heterogeneity and the disagreement, but especially these discussions and conflicts make this kind of pornography so valuable (Ryberg, 2015).
Lorde’s and other feminist’s strict anti-pornography position therefore gets a lot of criticism, as it doesn’t allow for a holistic understanding of pornography. MacKinnon e.g. is one of the loudest voices in the anti-porn movement and doesn’t publicly debate pornography with porn advocators (Ciclitra, 2004). Ciclitra (2004), to conclude, writes that women simultaneously agree and disagree with pornography, but that those dilemmas will always exist and therefore have to be investigated. The abolition of pornography as a whole goes hand in hand with the phenomenon of sex-negativity, which in turn entails that women who consume and enjoy pornography feel guilty about their sexual and erotic pleasure.
CONCLUSION
To close up this essay, I argue that Lorde’s anti-pornographic position – as much as I personally adore her poems and her contributions – can be criticized from an academic point of view and from the perspective of individuals who engage in or with queer-feminist pornography. As I showed, a strict abolitionist attitude limits our capacity to fully grasp the meaning and implications of the phenomenon.
I further emphasized that focusing on tensions and contradictions within pornography contributes to a nuanced understanding of the relation between feminism, (black) female or queer sexuality and pornography. Pornography is ambiguous, highly contested and embedded in wider political movements and an analysis of pornography can tell us a lot about our reality. Pornographic representations are racialized, sexualized and gendered, and as the black feminists considered in my analysis reaffirmed, they can be a source of empowerment for (black) women, as well as for people who identify as queer.
Lorde’s concept of the erotic as power is not rejected by queer-feminist porn theorists and producers, rather they re-interpret it: to recognize and embrace the erotic does not require an abolition of pornography. On the contrary, it is through pornography that the erotic can be negotiated and embraced, within structural inequalities. Especially contemporary black feminists still refer to Lorde’s concept and thus try to reconcile the difficult relation of black feminism and pornography. They all agree upon the fact that pornography is a space where non-normative desires and sexuality can be expressed, which can be extremely powerful especially for (queer and black) intimacies, which have been politicized and policed for so long. Concepts like ‘the erotic sovereignty’ (Miller-Young), ‘race’s eroticism’ (Nash) or the ‘politics of perversion’ (Cruz) are attempts to make meaning of the negotiation of agency, erotic pleasure and race within pornography.
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Written for the Course "Sexuality, Gender and Culture" at London School of Economics.
This article has been published in a modified form by the Solidarity Collective:
https://solidaritycollective.com/2021/01/08/audre-lordes-concept-of-the-erotic-as-power-evaluated-in-relation-to-contemporary-queer-feminist-pornography/
