lesbian erotic and pornographic art

Some research notes – short list of artists who have shaped this field.

New age UK feminist painter Monica Sjoo deals with birth, goddesses and the cosmic.

‘It is as if she is reintroducing us to our lost passions. Passions about the earth, about nature, about true worship, about our own strength and power in the face of the mystery that we, as humans and women, inhabit’ (Alice Walker 2003, Introduction to Online Exhibition: ‘Through Space and Time The Ancient Sisterhoods Spoke To Me’).

The first lesbian photographs to link lesbian to sexual liberation, by American Tee Corinne, (with cornerstone book ‘Yantras of Womanlove’, 1982, which uses negative printing and solarization) who was an activist, writer, educator and artist.  I find her life and work fascinating – she started in 1969, while a postgraduate and married to a man-

‘She experimented with sexual imagery in her own art, beginning with photographs of heterosexual couples kissing and moving on to drawings of her own genitals, a subject for which she could find no other models’. (Bibliographical note in Guide to the Tee A. Corinne Papers 1966-2003 at the University of Oregon Libraries, Special Collections & University Archives)

She did art again after a pause of around 5 years and after coming out, using exclusively sexually explicit material. She is responsible for the ‘Cunt Coloring Book’ (1975), which is still published and was intended to be used as an educational aid for kids (renamed ‘Labiaflowers’ for a short while). International reach came with photographic work published in the lesbian journal Sinister Wisdom in 1977 and, as a writer, with erotic stories collection Dreams of the Woman Who Loved Sex, in 1987 and winning the Lambda Literary Award in 1990 as editor of the erotic anthology, Intricate Passions.

In 1998 ‘…the Traditional Values Coalition circulated a package of what they consider “pornography” to members of the U.S. Senate. They gathered the material, including The Cunt Coloring Book and the book Nothing But the Girl — which features Corinne’s photographs — from The Gay and Lesbian Center of the San Francisco Public Library. It was a further effort to discredit the ambassadorial nomination of James Hormel, for whom the center is named’. (Queer arts 1998)

Sex-radical dykes and S/M – Quim & On Our Backs

Jill Posener’s Untitled (1988), Katie Niles’  Untitled (1978), Jacqui Duckworth, Laurence Jangy-Paget, and Mumtaz Karimjee.

‘Photographer Della Grace, for example, conscious of the exploitation of women in heterosexual pornography, has explored different ways of confronting this problem in her work. One exhibition of her staged sex photographs featured audio tapes of the models talking about their feelings during the shoot, and she went on to photograph herself in explicit sexual scenarios, shutter-release bulb visibly in shot’ (source glbtq.com).

Catherine Opie’s Being and Having (1991)-’lesbians wearing false moustaches and beards, plays aggressively with stereotypes of masculinity and femininity as they relate to sexuality. Giard’s Particular Voices project, a compendium of portraits of writers, helped to commemorate 20th‐century gay and lesbian culture, an important concern considering the devastation caused by AIDS and the critical neglect of much gay and lesbian literary production’ (source: arts.jrank.org).

Morgan Gwenwald’s butch-femme photography (US).

Kiss & Tell Collective – Susan Stewart, Persimmon Blackbridge, and Lizard Jones – challenging censorship (Canada).

Some Biblio

Boffin, T., and Fraser, J., Stolen Glances: Lesbians Take Photographs (1991).
Bright, S., and Posener, J., Nothing But the Girl: The Blatant Lesbian Image (1996).

Corinne, Tee A. The Sex Lives of Daffodils: Growing Up as an Artist Who Also Writes. Wolf Creek, OR : Pearlchild, c1997

Ellenzweig, A., The Homoerotic Photograph (1992).
Hammond, H., Lesbian Art in America: A Contemporary History (2000).

gay and lesbian photography – On our Backs, Yantras of Womanlove, The Perfect Moment, Being and Having, Particular Voices (http://arts.jrank.org/pages/10608/gay-lesbian-photography.html#ixzz0cDBTjZV9 accessed 10 January)

glbtq – an encyclopedia of gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer culture,  Erotic and Pornographic Art: Lesbian, Tamsin Wilton (accessed 10 january 2010)

Queer arts.org. “Obscurely Famous,” an interview with Tee Corinne. September 1998 (Accessed 10 January 2010). Online at http://www.queer arts.org/archive/9809/corinne/corinne.html

Sherman, Phillip and Samuel Bernstein, eds. Uncommon Heroes. Fletcher Press, c1994
Waugh, T., Hard to Imagine (1996).

It is as if she is reintroducing us to our lost passions. Passions about the earth, about nature, about true worship, about our own strength and power in the face of the mystery that we, as humans and women, inhabit.

exploring #4 : tech/ porn

and another one from we-make-money-not-art.com- about Pornography and Technology as presented by Tina Loretz at the 23C3 Berlin conf. in 2007. The post gives some historical info of pornographic media but this is the part I found interesting:

‘Teledildonics and Interactive Porn’

Second Life: avatars programmed to have virtual sex. Sex in Second Life happens through a combination of poses, animations, scripts, and typing. The main ingredient is known as pose balls, objects with scripts in them that trigger a user’s avatar to play certain animations or poses. For sex, poseballs are placed close together, with titles above them that say the position the user will take… Wiibrator, a Python application that interfaces the Wii’s Wiimote and the PS2’s Trancevibrator. Lorenz concluded by saying that we’ll see more and more of these gadgets that mediate virtual and real life sexual activities.

In another post the virtual sex world Red Light Social Centre is presented. This is pretty similar to Second Life, but it is all about meeting people and watching porn. It would be interesting to see how queer, if at all, this world might be.

Meanwhile, I updated the entry on Kira O’Reilly, the body / bio artist, in the Artists page (I can’t see anything particularly feminist about Kira O’Reilly’s work, but it is certainly queer, as it is work about boundaries and the body, posthumanism and respresentations of intimacy, so it is relevant here).

I also made a new entry about Jenny Willet, a bioartist, which even though not working within a UK context, is working with Kira O’Reilly, Marije Janssen of C’Lick Me and Netporn art&politics, WARBEAR of Phag Off and others at the Vivo Arts School for Transgenic Aesthetics Ltd.

exploring#3 : the spanish

via wemakemoneynotart.com, the political porn photography ‘The Penetrated’ (Los Penetrados) of the controversial Santiago Sierra (he built a gas chamber in 2006 to protest about ‘banalisation of the Holocaust’). The Penetrated is a comment on immigration and racial issues.

“The traditional paranoia of white people towards black people or of Europeans towards Africans is linked to a strong phobia. We thinks that sooner or later we will have to pay for our past and present greedy misdeeds. But this white paranoia is also related to the size of the dick or to the fear of a sexuality that demeans us. Our female and males might fall in love with it and that frightens us more than the perspective to lose our jobs, only your boss can take work away from us. The political reflections and the actions that derive from them are more primitive than what is ordinarily thought. Behaviours of racial identity are very animal because we are animals.”  (Regine (Debatty), February 24, 2009)

Here ‘political pornography’ is built on a set of heteronormative and patriarchal assumptions about the centrality of the dick in sexuality and the act of penetration as the act of sex. Pornography here has this single meaning, and fucking is a devaluing act. The penetrated is objectified. I really find the fact of calling this work ‘political’ problematic. This work as a comment on immigration politics would need to consider other issues of inequality and stereotyping rather than reinforcing them.

Other interesting stuff about spanish includes ‘Corpus Deleicti: the Body of Crime and Desire’ is a transdisciplinary research and production platform formed in Barcelona in early 2004:

Corpus Deleicti’s first experiment was Genderlab_Protopoesía_01 (2004), which explored medical imagery and rhetoric and its relationship to pornography. The second, which is in development stage, is Support Local Porn, an analysis of the capitalist logic of sex tourism (through the fictitious low-cost agency “Porno Jet”) and the re-sexualisation of public space, which generates particular sexual practices in urban contexts. The group’s artificial life highlights include their participation in MIDDLESEX, Confrontaciones Sociales Feministas, Diásporas Queer y Narrativas del Género, in Zaragoza, a videoperformance at Fugas Subvsersivas, reflexiones híbridas sobre las identidades, an exhibition at the Universidad de Valencia, and a presentation and performance at the closing of the seminar Desacuerdos: sobre Arte, políticas y esfera pública en el Estado Español, organised by Arteleku. Publications: the catalogue of the exhibition Fugas Subversivas: reflexiones híbridas sobre las identidades, published by Universidad de Valencia (2005) with the text: Corpus Deleicti: GenderLab: protopoesía_01, pp. 176-183. (UNCONTROLLED SEXUALITIES AND UNPALATABLE PRACTICES: BIOPOLITICAL CONDENSERS, 2007)

Corpus Deleicti: the Body of Crime and Desire is a
transdisciplinary research and production platform
formed in Barcelona in early 2004. Corpus Deleicti’s
first experiment was Genderlab_Protopoesía_01 (2004),
which explored medical imagery and rhetoric and its
relationship to pornography. The second, which is in
development stage, is Support Local Porn, an analysis of
the capitalist logic of sex tourism (through the fictitious
low-cost agency “Porno Jet”) and the re-sexualisation
of public space, which generates particular sexual
practices in urban contexts. The group’s artificial life
highlights include their participation in MIDDLESEX,
Confrontaciones Sociales Feministas, Diásporas
Queer y Narrativas del Género, in Zaragoza, a videoperformance
at Fugas Subvsersivas, reflexiones híbridas
sobre las identidades, an exhibition at the Universidad
de Valencia, and a presentation and performance
at the closing of the seminar Desacuerdos: sobre
Arte, políticas y esfera pública en el Estado Español,
organised by Arteleku. Publications: the catalogue of
the exhibition Fugas Subversivas: reflexiones híbridas
sobre las identidades, published by Universidad de
Valencia (2005) with the text: Corpus Deleicti: Gender
Lab: protopoesía_01, pp. 176-183.Corpus Deleicti: the Body of Crime and Desire is a

transdisciplinary research and production platform

formed in Barcelona in early 2004. Corpus Deleicti’s

first experiment was Genderlab_Protopoesía_01 (2004),

which explored medical imagery and rhetoric and its

relationship to pornography. The second, which is in

development stage, is Support Local Porn, an analysis of

the capitalist logic of sex tourism (through the fictitious

low-cost agency “Porno Jet”) and the re-sexualisation

of public space, which generates particular sexual

practices in urban contexts. The group’s artificial life

highlights include their participation in MIDDLESEX,

Confrontaciones Sociales Feministas, Diásporas

Queer y Narrativas del Género, in Zaragoza, a videoperformance

at Fugas Subvsersivas, reflexiones híbridas

sobre las identidades, an exhibition at the Universidad

de Valencia, and a presentation and performance

at the closing of the seminar Desacuerdos: sobre

Arte, políticas y esfera pública en el Estado Español,

organised by Arteleku. Publications: the catalogue of

the exhibition Fugas Subversivas: reflexiones híbridas

sobre las identidades, published by Universidad de

Valencia (2005) with the text: Corpus Deleicti: Gender

Lab: protopoesía_01, pp. 176-183.

Exploring #2 : Saartje Baartman and Mara Verna’s Hottentot Venus project

Looking around for female porn movie directors with feminist or queer politics aspirations, I came across Venus Hottentot, the director named after Saartje Baartman, known as Hottentot Venus while she was exhibited around Europe, during and after her life. I remembered first reading about this African woman’s violated body in Anne Balsamo’s ‘Technologies of the Gendered Body’ in Lucia Sommer’s ‘In/ Visible Body: Notes on Biotechnologies’ Vision’ in SUBROSA’s Domain Errors (2002), where she talks about new visualisation technologies and the fragmentation of the female body [about the Visible Human (TM) in particular]. Mara Verna, a Canadian  performance artist, set up an web exhibition based on her research about Baartman’s body and her remains being exposed in museums – to be finally returned to her home land 200 years after Baartman’s birth.

‘On location in South Africa and France this past year, artist Mara Verna presents the culmination of her work surrounding this historical figure through the site www.hottentotvenus.com This work is in association with a travelling exhibition entitled, Rien n’a ete perdu, which opened in Paris in November 2002 (La Vtirine Gallery) and at La Centrale Gallery in Montreal, in February 2003′ (Festival de Cyberart: Circulation 01,2001-2).

What is here intersting to see is how a female porn director appropriates a name which carries such a tremendous amount of violence, not just at a symbolic level, but on a material level (this is the name of a slave exhibited for her labia and buttocks, and then the name of a someone whose dismembered labia, brain and skeleton were exhibited). Venus, I read, who is an art school graduate, directed Candida Royalle’s first ‘Femme Chocolat’ film, Afrodite Superstar, which I am most curious to see – is this an empowering film? is it perpetuating the objectification of Baartman’s, and black womens’, sexuality (sexuality as linked to corporeality ofcourse and not meaning the act of making sex but the whole lot of eroticism and desire). And how can we think of these different approaches to representing and claiming back?

The director herself says: ‘ My attempt is to reclaim her sexual voice, and the voice of all of us. Even though women of color are over-sexualized in our society, our own voice is absent’.

art school grad

‘The Work of Roger Silverstone’

A symposium to mark the naming of the Silverstone Building at Sussex
and to honour a former colleague, an international scholar, and an
excellent teacher.

Date: January 20th, 2010
Time: 12:30 – 18:00 (Followed by a Reception)
Location: University of Sussex, UK, Silverstone Building (Room 309)

Speakers include:
Professor Nick Couldry (Goldsmiths), Leslie Haddon (LSE), Andy
Medhurst (Sussex), Professor Robin Mansell (LSE), Professor Marie
Gillespie (OU), Professor Lilie Chouliaraki (LSE), Dr. Maren
Hartmann (Berlin University of the Arts), Dr. Matt Hills (Cardiff),
Dr. Myria Georgiou (LSE), Irmi Karl (Brighton), Dr. Kate Lacey (Sussex).

All Welcome. The event is free but please RSVP to Sarah Maddox as
soon as possible to reserve a place. (s.maddox@sussex.ac.uk).

exploring #1

My performance/ queer/feminist/ art/ porn quest has had some interesting finds, such as Munchausen, by Susanne Oberbeck and the documentary maker Jules Rosskam (US).

Susanne Oberbeck has been a short-film maker (and did a short film with Kate Moennig of L-Word) and is now performing/ singing for the band No Bra (or here), with her tits exposed and wearing a moustache- of which she says:

‘I’m not wearing the moustache to shock. It just seems more appropriate and, like I said, I think it looks good. Also, if you get your tits out, you have to maintain a balance or else it would look like I was trying to do a strip show’ (Gilrs Like Us Magazine, 2006).

No Bra’s Munchaousen video (2005) is a pissing contest between ‘compulsive men’ which here stands for compulsive liars.

‘We wanted to “absurdify” the idea of achievement,’ explains Oberbeck. ‘Typical male competitiveness taken to the limit. It’s a parody of a certain kind of British culture’ (DIVA Lesbian Magazine, 2005?).

Her work is about subverting gendered identities using humour.

‘Consumerism capitalises on the obsession with sexual identity. People want to escape from who they are, but when they have to get jobs, they have to be male or female. It has to be clear. A lot of men want to be women, or vice versa’ (DIVA Lesbian Magazine).

Jules Rosskam is a trans filmmaker, artist and activist who is now working on a documentary called Transfeminism. A clip from Against a Trans Narrative.

Munchausen, Susanne OberbeckM

Notes – ANT and topology

Notes from Law, J. (1999) ‘After ANT: Complexity, naming and topology’ in Law, J. amd Hassard, J. (eds) Actor Network Theory and after, Blackwell

Here John Law addresses the problem of ANT becoming a homogeneous ‘theory’ whose ‘productive non-coherence’ and ‘capacity to apprehend complexity’(8) has been eroded by the very incorporation of ANT. What has come to hardly matter is exactly the tension between ‘actor’ and ‘networ’, which in the process of naming was an oxymoron intentionally created. Drawing on the history of actor-network-theory, he points to two different approaches to what ANT has come to be understood as.

1. relational materiality (or semiotics of materiality):  As such, ANT represents an anti-essentialist framework whereby entities have no inherent qualities and are produced in relations. Divisions are understood as effects and outcomes and not given in  the order of things.
2. performativity: entities are performed by and through these relations. The question of how, the how these entities gain their fixity through performativity, is for Law what ANT came to be associated with, a managerial task as he calls it.

What ANT clearly did, and as Annemarie Mol points out, is provide an alternative non-conformable spatiality which wages war to Euclidean topology. And to make this meaningful, stress how Euclidean spatiality carries with it certain understandings and socio-technical discourses and practices.  ANT de-naturalises these notions of the topographically natural and essentialist difference. It is in networks that regions are constituted and networks become this way alternative topological systems (nation-states in Mol are made of telephone systems paperwork etc).

The problem for Law is how the notion of the network has itself become naturalised and by this he refers to the process of ANT studies to refer to the how. For him the network concept leaves the character of relations open, does not aim to fix them, to stabilise them in an interpretation, just to translate them (make equivalents).

It is unclear to me if Law means that the problem with what ANT has come to mean or to be used as is actually its virtue as a form of spatiality. Does he mean that translation is a descriptive and neutral practice? Does he detest the fact that, as an alternative form of spatiality, the network limits the possible links that can be made (and thus the possible entities that can be produced)? Because as I understand this, noting the restrictions and the limits of possible relations is not tantamount to homogenising the links. This is not even my understanding of naturalisation, but on  the contrary, of de-naturalisation.  Seeing the notion of the network as an endless possibility and unproblematically incorporating it as an alternative topology carries itself certain assumptions and has its own underpinnings of socio-technical practices. It is also confusing how object integrity is thought as a matter of retaining the links, and just that. To be frank, I don’t get why there is such an insistence about not looking at the how.

netporn/postporn and queer/ feminist activism

I want to do some work around netporn/postporn and relations to queer/ feminist activism and visual art. Should you have any suggestions about UK performers/ visual artists or netporn producers who consider their work activist (feminist / queer), please contact me (af93[at]sussex).

At the moment I am looking at the work of Katrien Jacobs‘ blog and her book ‘Netporn: DIY Web Culture and Sexual Politics’ (2007).  In her book she argues that there is an extensive porn culture online which is based on amateur practices and p2p exchange which makes non-commercial sexual communication possible, despite the corporate branding of cybersex that is taking place or the moderation of web spaces. In particular, she uses the gift paradigm to argue that the porn exchange, just like the link exchange for bloggers, signifies the existence of an exchange culture (a gift economy) which potentially undermine ‘capitalist porn industries’. Sharing of porn is seen as a socil activity which, just like gift exchange, aims at social cohesion in practices of play which are different to the ‘discipline and punish’ of the nation-state. This applies to amateur porn, realcore and queer amateur porn.

There have been two netporn criticism conferences (2005 & 2007) in Amsterdam, in collaboration with the Institute of Network Cultures, Katrien Jacobs and Matteo Pasquinelli. It was The Art and Politics of Netporn (2005) which aimed

‘to discuss the potential of art and critical research in times of heightened information surveillance, filtering and censorship. The research presentations, art projects and performances viewed netporn as a complex network, with impact and growth, like any industry or media operation. Conference presenters addressed the ‘schizo’ climate of hype and censorship, focusing on the ethics and aesthetics of digital media environments and activities such as blogging, webcamming, chatting, p2p porn, live journals, confession boards, mailing lists and zines’.

This also produced the ‘C’Lick Me: A Netporn Studies Reader’.

The second one was  C’Lick me (2007)-

‘We want to re-think the society of the netporn spectacle: the digital zeitgeist that has given us a hypersexual body. What to do with our bodies and digital machines? Pornography has found its way into every nook and cranny of the Internet, but how can we still be queer radicals or body artists, private hedonists or fervent bloggers in this climate? Do we still need to have a sanctified space like an underground or a dungeon, when we produce de-sire with our floating networked bodies? Porn went porn-chic years ago. Today net-porn goes into Myspace bedrooms and everyday “realcore”.

I want to do some work around netporn/postporn
and relations to feminist activism and visual art.

Would you have any suggestions about UK performers/ visual artists or
UK netporn as feminist activism?

chapter in book

I did a chapter for the ‘Communicative approaches to politics and ethics in Europe’ ECREA book.  It is

called ‘Translocal connectivity and political identity: Brighton queer cultural activism’. Here is the book announcement:

NEW BOOK

It is our pleasure to announce the publication of our fourth ECREA Summer School Book, entitled
“Communicative approaches to politics and ethics in Europe. The intellectual work of the 2009
ECREA European Media and Communication Doctoral Summer School,” edited by Nico Carpentier, Pille
Pruulmann-Vengerfeldt, Richard Kilborn, Tobias Olsson, Hannu Nieminen, Ebba Sundin and Kaarle
Nordenstreng. You can download a PDF-version of this book – free of charge – from the Summer
School website (http://www.comsummerschool.org), or the Researching and Teaching Communication
Series website (http://www.researchingcommunication.eu/).

Thedirect link to the book is: http://www.researchingcommunication.eu/reco_book5.pdf.
A print version can be ordered by sending an email to bookshop@ut.ee.

This book includes a series of papers that were presented by lecturers and PhD-students at the
ECREA European Media and Communication Doctoral Summer School, in August 2009 in Tartu (Estonia)
(supported by a European Commission Socrates Erasmus IP Project (contract number:
69935-IC-1-2007-EE-ERASMUS- EUC-1), the European Communication Research and Education Association (www.ecrea.eu), the University of Tartu – the Department of Journalism and Communication

(www.jrnl.ut.ee), the Danish National Research School for Media, Communication and Journalism,
the Finnish National Research School and a consortium of 22 universities.

Jenny Sunden’s ‘What if Frankenstein(’s Monster) was a Girl? Reproduction and Subjectivity in the Digital Age’

in Smelik A. and Lykke N. (2008) ‘Bits of Life: Feminism at the Intersections of Media, Bioscience and Technology’, University of Washington Press

Jenny Sunden analyses Patchwork Girl (1995) in a structured text which begins with questions about endings, moves to the body of stories and ends with questions about the beginnings of narratives. She looks at the acts of writing and reading in hyperfiction and how these acts link to reproduction of both bodies and stories. Sunden’s account of Shelley Jackson’s work further explores the relationship between women and machines and ask questions about authenticity, fragmentation and reproductive anxiety.

See also

N. Katherine Hayles (2000) ‘Flickering Connectivities in Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis’, [online] http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.100/10.2hayles.txt