Post-Exotic Pornography or What´s Color Got To Do With It? On the Problematics of Representation in Ethnic Pornography and a few Interventions by Queer_Feminists of Color.
Whatever ones positon on porn is: One has to realize, that since the developments of the last years, queers and feminists can look at pornography at least a little bit different. Even though the power of mainstream pornography has been continuing and the multiple alternatives posed by genres like queer porn, feminist porn, alt porn and postporn obviously don´t have the influence to pose a real threat to the majoritarian structures of the industry, people with queer desires, bodies and fetishes have entered the frame now since quite some time.
In the year 1990, Annie Sprinkle, under guidance of her lover Wink von Kempen, did stage the piece „Post Porn Modernist“. Instead of arousing the audience with a repetition of intensified affects, overstyled bodies and objectified women, „Post Porn Modernist“ was able to deconstruct the clichés of mainstream pornography including its various stereotypes and overcome the normative dimension of sexuality for a vision that included critique and irony, distanciation and transformation. Like other performance artists before her, Sprinkle used the personal narrative and forms of storytelling as a central ingredient for her piece. But what she provided was not only a herstory of her own life, which can be described as a rollercoaster-ride through all possible variations of sexwork, but also a genealogy of the porn genre itself. When Sprinkle became older she didn´t just end her career, like many colleagues before her. Instead, she used the genre as a place for an onging process finalizing itself in becoming a queer_feminist artist. In this journey, she not only represented a woman that was big bodied, but also a woman of a different age – an age that goes beyond the limit of the most porn careers. Furthermore she diversified her desire towards women and transgender men and constructed positive images of prostitutes beyond the marginalized narrative of the victim.
While Sprinkle came into the porn-scene with a lot of naivité and the subjectivity of a young hippie that was basically interested in new experiences, she did proceed in gaining consciousness about the surpression of sexworkers and therewith became a spokesperson for sexual health and queer pornography. Instead of hating porn, one should do their own porn, was her message, even though one could add, that hating the mainstream porn might also precisely be the reason to produce other porn1. In her own words, she defined postporn as „a new genre of sexually explicit material that is perhaps more visually experimental, political, humorous, „arty“, and eclectic than the rest. Postmodern sex art could contain elements that were not necessarily focused on the erotic – humor, intellectual ideas, politics, feminism.“2 Without wanting to make Annie Sprinkle the one and only pioneer of alternative pornographies, I want to take up this useful definition which represents a subtile but concrete rupture within mainstream pornography. The point is not to make things look as queer, feminist or
1 Here we can see that critiques from the anti-porn-camp might not be so different than some mentioned in the pro-porn-communities. Just the consequences are different. While the first want to abolish porn, the second want to change porn from the inside. 2 Sprinkle (1998), p. 160. other political movies about sexuality never existed. They clearly did3. But the „post“ in the title produced a concrete gesture of distanciation towards a genre that hardly can be called emancipatory in itself. Even if looking at porn might be exciting to study for academics or inspiring for all kind of peoples when it comes to getting new sexual moves, the genre still breathes patriarchy and heteronormative power. Not only on the screen – a space that might be regarded as, like many pro-sex-feminist scholars argued, fantasy or fiction – but also in the structures of the industry, which still is predominately ruled by straight men and also sold to straight men. So instead of looking at porn from one fundamental perspective, the politics of pornography exist on various levels. Next to the structural working conditions and the politics of representation, another problem is that nobody really knows when or what kind of coercion is happening on the set itself.
On the margin of the industry as well as in various queer_feminist undergrounds and the art world, there is a huge quantity of performers, labels and groups that, who sometimes use explicitly the term of postporn, and sometimes do not, could be, from my point of view, all more or less all categorised under this term4. Different than labels as queer porn or art porn, postporn is able to move beyond the description of being a part of just one field (like the one of high culture) or just one group or identity. Just to mention a few actors in this multi-faceted and exciting field are Catherine Opie, Del La Grace Volcano, Diana Pornoterrorista, Maria Beatty, GirlsWhoLikePorno, Go Fist!, Bruce La Bruce, Monika Treut, Hans Scheirl, Virginie Despentes and many others stemming mostly from queer_feminist undergrounds. Others, like Valie Export, Hanna Wilke, Martha Rosler, Judy Chicago or Elizabeth Stephens worked on similar ideas from the point of view of video and performance art. Furthermore a new generation of filmmakers like Courtney Trouble from the USA or Gala Vanting from Australia have even introduced independant, queer porn companys into the porn world. Looking also at the theoretical dimension of porn studies, including scholars like Linda Williams and Beatriz Preciado, festivals like „C´lick Me – The Art and Politics of Netporn“ or the „Porn Film Festival Berlin“, there are now vibrant structures of political, yet playful debates and non-normative, but exciting image-production and enjoyment changing not only the common experience of pornography that usually is trapped in the dualism between unreflected arousal and pessimist anger5, but also producing an own, reflexive and affirmative
3 There are obviously too many examples to mention. A good example combining various elements of what could be considered a leftist, postpornographic work combining documentary and fiction, reflections of the sexual revolution, critique on the commodification of sexuality and the biography of utopian Wilhelm Reich is „WR: Mysteries of the Organism“ by Dusan Makavejev (1971). 4 It has to be mentioned that some performers and groups even consciously distance themselves from the term, as it would be a kind of snobbish concept, disidentifying from the mainstream and therewith from the community of sexworkers working in more precarious conditions altogether. However, I find Sprinkle´s position important, as she embodies precisely a subject that went through all the mainstream dispositives of sexwork and then invented herself not in a total opposition, but in a nevertheless parodistic and critical way towards her background. 5 As major feminist intervention into the debate see: Williams, as major queer intervention Preciado. Useful collections of writings on porn are: Taormino, Penley, Shimizu, Miller-Young (2013), or Stüttgen (2010). audience and with it places for debate and reflection. Through anti-hegemonic readings and strategical counter-desires, the use of prosthetics and dildos and also the recognition of the beauty of bodies beyond the norm, the deconstruction of one of the most ideological genres that was also inspired by the performative turn and queer theory has been partly successful in challenging the genre and therewith heteronormativity, patriarchy and the two-gender-system. Different from sexuality and gender, the notion of race, ethnicity and bodies marked as colored have been much harder to thematizise, deconstruct and subvert. Especcially Mireille-Miller Young has criticised euphoric porn theorists which only concentrate on gender sexuality and gestured towards a whole herstory of porn critique from a women of color-perspective6. Also queer theorist Maxime Cervulle has thematized this situation:
It is striking to see today how much issues of race and class have been absent in debates around post-porn, the future of pornography, ethical porn and DIY representation. It is, however, a crucial issue that could reveal how white and middle- class the porn gaze often is.7
Also it was to be taken into account that there are only a small number of queer_feminist directors that are colored themselves. One could say that there are as many colored filmmakers in the queer or the postporn world as there are female directors in the mainstream porn world. Both are a minority that is limited to less than ten percent. When we try to understand the problem of representing colored bodies, we have to go back to a time before the beginning of a real porn industry. We have to recognize how racism, since the age of colonialism and slavery, are relational products of a world where whites rule over the image of blacks.
„Oh my body, make me always a man who questions!“ writes the anticolonialist theorist Frantz Fanon8 in regards to the experience of racism. In his influential study „Black Skins White Masks“9, Fanon has dedicated a whole chapter on what we could call an ontology of racism from a black mans perspective living in a white world. „The Lived Experience of the Black Man“10 looks at how racism is directly experienced at the psychological level. Drawing infuence from thinkers as Sartre and Hegel, Fanon didn´t oversee that Hegel´s ontology opened up the potential to think universal freedom, while ignoring the realities of slavery and therewith, the black experience. Therefore, Fanon made this unmentioned relationality between white master and black slave the centre for his ontology of „the black man“:
Ontolgy does not allow us to understand the being of the black man, since it ignores the lived experience. For not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man.11
6 Miller-Young (2010), p. 219-235. 7 Cervulle, Maxime (2010), p. 188. 8 Fanon (2008), p. 206. 9 Fanon (2008), pp. 89-120. 10 Fanon (2008). 11 Fanon (2008), p. 90. One has to mention though, that Fanon´s ontological setup is based on masculine subjectivity. There are many problems in his theory concerning Therefore, for Fanon, there is no natural or pregiven substance and meaning to blackness itself. The black self in the Modern world simply doesn´t exist beyond the interpellations by the white master. Thus, the white gaze and colonial ideology constitute the black subject´s being. In a way, the black is an object of a meaning that is inscribed on his body and projected on his representation: „I am overdetermined from the outside... I am a slave not to the „idea“ others have of me, but to my appearance.”12
A classic example in Fanon´s writing is the moment when a white child shouts: „Look! A Negro!“13 Here the black body-experience itself is already alienated and experienced as a burden and how Judith Butler elaborates, through the interpellative act connecting naming and seeing, „the look of the child is both a pointing and a seeing, a pointing out what there is to see, a pointing which circumscribes a dangerous body, a racist indicative which relays its own danger to the body to which it points.“14 Fanon describes the confrontation with the white gaze through the physical metaphor of an „unusual weight“:
...then we were given the occasion to confront the white gaze. An unusual weight descened on us. The real world robbed us our share. In the white world, the man of color encounters difficulties in elaboratin his body schema. he ima e of one s body is solely ne atin . It s an ima e in the third person. ll around the body rei ns an atmosphere of certain uncertainty.15
The alienation of the blacks´ body that is overwritten by racialized meaning goes so far that the black corporeal experience is even felt in the smallest movements: the motoric experience of the body is disowned. Even grabbing a cigarette can result in an estrangement and a loss of control regarding ones own body-schemata:
A slow composition of my self as a body in the middle of a spatial and temporal world – which seems to be the schema… Beneath a body-schema I had created a historical- racial schema. The data I used were provided not by remnants of feelings and notions of the tactile, vestibular, kinesthetic, or visual nature but by the Other, the white man, who had woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, and stories.16
These narratives are not only superficial discourses and banal prejudices. On the contrary, these stories continue to be one of the most traumatic backsides of modernity that was established in slavery and which is living on in racist stereotyping. Fanon comments:
gender and sexuality. For instance, his reflections on black and white gender-relations in the realm of desire present black woman as traitors when they have sex with white men, while black men having sex with white women seems to be less of a problem. However, when it comes to the analysis of black appearance under the white gaze, I think Fanon´s analysis is still very helpful and considered groundbreaking for a reason. 12 Fanon (2008), p. 95. 13 Fanon (2008), p. 90. 14 Butler (2004), p. 207. 15 Fanon (2008), p. 90 16 Fanon (2008), p. 92 I was responsible not only for my body but also for my race and my ancestors. I cast an objective gaze over myself, discovered my blackness, my ethnic features; deafened by cannibalism, backwardness, fetishism, racial stigmas, slave traders...17
In a moving description Fanon underlines how discourses not only form the exterior exclusion but interiour physical distortions as well. In another example, the man of color is looking for a place in a train. He experiences how the whites leave several rows free between them and any move towards them provokes further reactions of distanciation: „I approached the other, ...and the other, evasive, hostile, but not opaque, vanished. Nausea.“18
Again we can see how racism is experienced directly in the corporeal dimension. It affects the deepest impulses of the body – a dimension of affect that has been mostly ignored when dealing with body politics. Fanon himself worked as a psychiatrist in France and Algeria and was one of the first theorists to analyse the interface of the effects of racism and psychological suffering, a suffering that seemed to have no end and consists of a vicious circuit:
The circuit thereby created seems to be closed – there is no possibility of a conception of a future that could be different from the colonial past. ...for the living being who is recognized a priori as black according to a collective conception of blackness, the present is simply affect, a sensory perception that is the arrested action of the past on the present.19
When slavery was abolished in the US, which started at the beginning of the 19th century, obviously racism didn´t end. A lot of racial discrimination survived not only in the material class positions of black labour, but also was redistributed through culture. Freakshows and circusses, postcards and paintings, games and consumer products made the old traumatic images of the savage, the monster and the obedient but supposed to be happy servant continue to live on.
2.2 Fanon in Cinema, Waiting
The black man is a toy in the hands of the white man. So in order to break the vicious circuit, he explodes. I can´t go to the movies without encountering myself. I wait for myself. Just before the film starts I wait for myself. (...). My aching heart makes my head spin.20 Frantz Fanon
In the upper quote Fanon powerfully relates the racism of representation in post- slavery times to the cinema and the passivity of the viewer who is exposed helplessly to the discourse of the Whites. During the interval, after the commercials and before the main feature, Fanon´s heart already makes his head spin as though the always same images of „the negro“ might appear. The trauma of colonialism plays out in the fear and experience of endless repetition.
17 Fanon (2008), p. 92. 18 Fanon (2008), p. 92. 19 Keeling (2007), p. 33. 20 Fanon (2008), p. 119.
2.3 The Black Danger and the White Nation
Now we will look into a primar example of racist, yet canonical cinema from film history, to analyse the trauma of visuality that Fanon described. A black man running through the streets – this moment of free movement and agency after the abolition of slavery has never stopped to trouble the white man. To show the intensity of this paradigmatic „white paranioa“, D.W. Griffith´s classic work „Birth of a Nation“ (USA, 1915) provides humilating examples. Worth noting, „Birth of a Nation“ was the most succesfull film of the silent era, admired for its „dynamics“ and „stylistic originality“, even though its content was obviously far from being modern21 and full of racist revisionism22.
In the narrative, the notoriuos Ku Klux Klan becomes an American rescue army against the „backwards blacks“ who seem to threaten the communal foundation of the United States. Thus, the film is one of the major revisionist works that provides reasons that the US needs a white army to put the black danger „back in its place“. „No single film in the silent era is more important to the critical history of stereotype than is D.W. Griffith´s „Birth of a Nation“, writes film theorist Robyn Wiegman23. One scene specifically relates the black man moving through open space with the notion of a black danger and the stigma of the monster. The soldier and „freedman“ Gus (Walter Long) is represented as a suspicious stranger that is hanging around in front of a white families´ house. Happy that he became a captain in the American army, he seems to somewhat feel included in the national community and even tries to flirt with a white woman. As he meets the female character Flora Cameron (Mae Marsh) in the woods, where she, innocently and depicted as being close to nature happily follows the movements of a squirrel24. Gus moves towards her and announces in an exciting manner: „You see, I´m a Captain now – and I want to marry.“ Then he tries to touch Floras hand. Flora immediatly feels harrassed and gives him a slap in the face - then she runs away. After announcing his peaceful ambitions – „Wait missie, I wont hurt yeh.“ - Gus runs after her and is direclty put into a classic scenery of white paranoia, where the black, again, only functions as a danger to the white and in this case, to „feminine naturelike innocence“. Back in the scene, Gus further
21 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birth_of_a_Nation 22 Obviously „Birth of a Nation“ is only one of the most extreme examples. Racist revisionism has many ways. Another example that should at least be mentioned is „Gone with the Wind“ by Victor Fleming (USA, 1939) which could be seen as a „softcore“ version of the same problematic discourses. It would take until the Seventies (of course there are exceptions) that slavery was represented in all its problematics. Especcially television was a succesful format in doing this, maybe because there is another temporal dimension of storytelling at work which is not restricted, quantitavely nor qualitavely, tot he limits of the feature film. See, for instance, „Roots“ (USA, 1979) and „Queen“ (USA, 1993), both based on scripts by Afro-American writer Alex Haley. 23 „Birth of a Nation“, See: Wiegmann, Robin: „Race, Ethnicity and Film“, in: Hill /John und Church Gibson / Pamela (1998), pp. 158-168. 24 Obviously, but worth noting, in the scene Flora is depicted as somewhat close to nature – a classic sexist stereotype that divides women and men like nature and culture. follows her through the woods, already symbolising the monster or even the potential rapist that is following his victim. Their „hunt“ ends in front of a cliff. Finally, Flora jumps (or falls) down the cliff and dies. The following intertitle comments: „For her who had learned the stern lesson of honor, we should not grieve that she found the sweeter opal gates of death.“ Even without the notion of any violent action, Gus seems to be made responsible for her dying, while the intertitle even supports her possible jump from the cliff, as not having a sexual contact with a black man would have saved her pride. Her brother finds her and wipes her bloody brow with the Confederate flag. Just a few scenes later, Gus caught, tried and finally killed by the KKK.
In this framework, the black and white aesthetics of silent cinema strengthen the contrast of visual meanings that are already placed on the black and white characters. Afro-British theorist Kobena Mercer underlines the intensification of meaning of black skin, which can be loaded both with negrophobic or with negrophile meanings:
arsh contrasts of shadow and li ht draw the eye to focus and fi attention on the te ture of the blac man s s in. ccordin to Bhaba, ... , s in color functions as „the most visible of fetishes.25
As Gus is depicted as a monster which cannot control his desire and that threatens the innocent balance of nature represented through the white woman, the killing of Gus by the Ku Klux Klan symbolizes a righteous intervention to reinstall law and order. Robyn Wiegman elaborates:
Here, the late nineteenth century image of the African American male as rapist turns to pure spectacle in the ideologically weighted aesthetics of black-and-white film.26
As Judith Butler made clear in a text about the brutal attack on the Rodney King, the ideology of the black danger has stayed with us until even today. She underlines that the very act of looking itself is never innocent and that it is always already racialized – the white gaze and its projections on blackness are already establishing what can be seen and meaning is applied to the imagery: “The visual field is not neutral to the question of race; it is itself a racial formation, an episteme, hegemonic and forceful.” Looking therefore becomes “the racial production of the visible, the workings of racial constraints of what it means to see.”27
25 Mercer (1994), p. 183. 26 Wiegman, Robyn 27 Butler (2004), p. 206
2.4 The Sexualization of Racism
“Cock and Gun” (1982). Photowork by the white, gay artist Robert Mapplethorpe28
Kobena Mercer analyzes this sexualized economy of the visual and the fixation of the black supposed to be a danger, rapist or monster as a form of white fetishism, which marks the black, supposed to be owning a “too big” penis as a bad object. He also underlines that the white paranoia about the black male was already adressed in Fanons writings:
s a phobic object, the bi blac pric is a „bad object“, a fi ed point in the paranoid fantasies of the negrophobe which Fanon found in the pathologies of his white psychiatric patients as much as in the normalized cultural artifacts of this time. Then, as now, ... , …one is no lon er aware of the Ne ro, but only of a penis; the Ne ro is eclipsed. He is turned into a penis. He is a penis.29
But not only black masculinity has been sexualized. Similarily, black femininity has been racified and sexualized by the white gaze. A classic example is the story of the “Hottentot Venus” Saartje Bartman. The Khoisan woman was born in Kaffraria, an Eastern Cape Colony of South Africa in the 1780s. As her homeland came under Dutch colonial rule, she worked as a slave at the Cape of Good Hope. After some time, she entered into an agreement with the colonialists Peter Cezar and Alexander Dunlop to travel with them to Britain. There she worked not only as a domestic helper but also would be exhibited in England and Ireland because of her supposed to be larger than normal buttocks.30 While the myth of the big genitals of black men still circulates in, for instance, contemporary pornography, as obvious titles such as “Blackzilla”31 suggest, the freak show would also produce its own racial
28 Found at: http://www.nyphotoreview.com/NYPR_REVS/NYPR_REV1217.html 29 Mercer (1994), S. 185. 30 Nnaemeka (2005), pp. 98-99. 31 See, for instance, „My Mom is fucking Blackzilla“: http://tour.mymomsfuckingblackzilla.com/ As „Blackzilla“ and other „ethnic porn“ lines remind us, that in a time of queer pornography and a fair amount of feminist pornography back in the days. Again, as in Baartman´s case, the seize of her genitals and buttocks would be the reason to “exhibit” her, and like in the male´s case, produce also assumptions about her “animal-like” sexuality. In colonial ideology, her exposedness and nudity were linked with the projection of gaining knowledge about her being. An example worth mentioning is the case of the French naturalist and anatomist Georges Cuvier, whose “examination” of Baartman brought him to the “great discovery” of the “Hottentot Apron” (the hypertrophy of the labia minora) and the “abnormality” of Baartmans “smaller pelvis”. As Obioma Nnamemeka underlines:
Cuvier saw this abnormality as another sign of the Black Woman´s primitivism. He also found Baartman´s pelvis to be smaller and less flared than the white woman´s and resembles more the pelvis of a female monkey. Bartman´s racial difference denoted her below human level and linked her to other social outcasts such as lesbians and prostitutes.32
As Roderick Ferguson points out, in post-slavery times, the ideology surrounding racist projections on black women´s sexuality would continue to culminate in the image of the black prostitute33:
In fact, nineteenth century icono raphy used the ima e of … Bartman, … , to lin the figure of the prostitute to the alleged sexual savagery of black women to install non-white sexuality as the axis upon which various notions of womanhood turned. As industrial capital developed and provided working-class white women with limited income and mobility, the prostitute became the racialized figure that could enunciate anxieties about such changes.34
representations in the genre, the matter of race is less often touched and adressed to be critizised and deconstructed. To follow Maxime Cervulle, a post-exotic pornography is still a marginal concept queer and anti-racist porn-producers and - activists have to find better strategies for. See: Cervulle (2010). 32 Nnaemeka (2005), p. 99. 33 The relationship of Bartman and the stereotype of the black prostitute is further investigated by Gilman (1985). See: „The Hottentot and the Prostitute: Toward an Iconography of Female Sexuality“, pp. 76-108. 34 Ferguson (2004), p. 9.
Saartje Bartman, the “Hottentot Venus”35
In her noteworthy study, Siobhan B. Somerville has argued that since a long time in white racist discourses race and sexuality have been intrinsincally linked. It is therefore not possible to understand the intersectional power mechanisms coming into play here through “just” looking at one category of power. In her book “Queering the Color Line – Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture”36 she makes clear that the legal categories of race and sexuality in the United States were basically established at the same time - at the end of the 19th century37:
...although some scholarship has drawn parallels between discourses of racial difference and sexuality, their particular relationship and potentially mutual effects remain largely unexplored. (...) I show that it was not merely a historical incidence that the classification of bodies as either „homose ual“ or „heterose ual“ emer ed at the same time that the United States was aggressively constructing and policing the boundary between black and white bodies. (...) I argue that the simultaneous efforts to shore up and bifurcate categories of race and sexuality in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were deeply intertwined.38
Literature of medical, physical, psychological and academic “experts” would function as leading guides for American citizens. Books like Havelocks “Studies in Psychology of Sex” were supposed to help and lead the white middle-class citizen into a “non-pathological” everyday life. As Havelock wrote:
I re ard se as the central problem of life. … …the question of se – with the racial questions that rest on it – stands before the coming generations as the chief problem for solution.39
35 Found at: http://wahidahfowler.net/wp- content/uploads/2010/11/sarak_batman_venus_hottentot.jpg 36 Somerville (2000). 37 To add another noteworthy historical intersection, this was also the time when the photographic apparatus was invented and cinema became established as a form of mass entertainment. 38 Somerville (2000), pp. 3-4. 39 Quoted in Somerville (2000), p. 15. So while blackness was pathologized in relation to white normativity, homosexuality was pathologized in relation to heterosexual normativity. Therefore, if heterosexual or homosexual, one might think about the possibility that black sexuality has already been labeled somewhat queer and was considered dangerous and destabilizing to normative white sexualities. Furthermore, both gender and race discourses would culminate in interlocked definitions of queer bodies.
While, for instance, Saartje Baartman would shock because of the seize of her genitals, even many years later white parents would argue for a color-separation in school because they were scared of the too masculine, supposed to be lesbian black girls that would homosexualize their children40. In this sense there are multiple intersections between scientific racism and homophobia.
Obviously, the stereotypes of wild blacks live on in pornography. While the freak shows of the past and the depictions of black male sexuality then could already be considered pornographic, today they inhabit a whole own genre. A whole book could be filled with representations of continuing stereotypes of „phallic blacks“ in contemporary porn. However, I decided to spare you the details as you already got the idea. It has be noted that imageries of phallic black men and overtly sexual women also have been appropropriated by Blaxploitation Cinema, the first independant African American film genre. In this genre black males and females with phallic guns and an obvious sexual hunger restage the projections of the white gaze, but become the heroes themselves. In this way they finally produce counter-representations for a black audience whose experiences of black cinema are clearly limited to encountering suffering slaves or supposed to be happy servants. Hence, the heroes of Blaxploitation – within their limitations – have been clearly a step forward in terms of black cinema. When we remember Fanon telling us that a vicious cycle must be broken and that the black explodes in the white mans hand, the explosive blacks with guns, from the hustler in „Superfly“ (USA, 1972) to the policeman in „Shaft“ (1971), from the Pam Grier-outlets „Coffy“ (1973) to „Foxy Brown“ (1974), are not far from emboyding such an image. In this way one even could think about how black performers in contemporary porn, within their limited framework of agency, also might use the stereotypes they have to perform for their own sake. For instance the idea of the blacks big penis might be used as a way to make fun of smaller white man´s penisses. But this also means that racism in a way is exchanged to sexism.
That the relationship between colored men from the working class and the white gaze can be subverted in the frame of pornography is also the thesis of French Queer Theorist Maxime Cervulle. In his text „Erotic / Exotic – Race and Class in French Gay „Ethnic“ Pornography“ Maxime Cervulle looks at the gay movies of the Studio Beurs which gained popularity through the fetish of thuglike, poor and colored men engaging in casual sex with white men. It is obvious that one part of this encounter has to do with the implied cliché that all beurs are considered homophobic. The seperation of supposed to be white gayness and supposed to be colored heterosexuality is made into a fetish precisely through imagining that the fear of homophobia can be turned around and the projection of the heterosexual beur can be controlled. Cervulle links this projective dimension to the notion of class tourism
40 Somerville (2000), p. 34. where the commodification of ethnicity becomes a market product that can be consumed and be accessed by a kind of invisible white gaze and subject position. But for Cervulle those films also include several dimensions that subvert this constellation. As he puts it, it introduces a kind of reflexivity about the supposed to be stable relationship oft he two parties involved. In parts of these films the objective power of the white French gaze is disrupted by dialogues in Arabic that cannot be understood by the native French viewer. In a noteworthy dimension of ethnic camp, the beur performers play with the stereotypes they are supposed to inhabit and talk about discrimination and precarious labour. Instead of fitting into the picture of a homogenic French society and the whitewashed ideology of integration, the beurs hold onto being different like a pinch of salt of the nation state. Finally, in engaging in gay sexual encounters, they also widen the picture of homosexual identification and make us able to imagine ethnic bodies as queer that usually are mostly considered to be homophobic. These small but noteworthy interruptions upon the ease of pornographic consumption are what Cervulle considers as „post-exotic pornography“. He defines the term as following:
By post-exoticism I mean an acute reflexivity toward the seperation of subject and object, gazing and being gazed at... Built into the pornographic apparatus, these binaries are obviously related to those concerning masculinity / femininity, sexy / unsexy, (...), clothed / naked or average / exotic.41
What I want to continue with now are a few examples of works that could be seen a part of this potential concept. Without being able to propose a linear history or a perfect overview, my aim is to present a few films and performances that challenge common notions of porn and might play a useful part in building up a genealogical frame for further investigating post-exotic movies. While not always directly having an anti-racist agenda, these films are political on different levels and not only represent queer_feminist of color counter-imagery that subverts the relationality of black and white, but also adress dualisms like nature and culture or new forms of exploitation in digital capitalism.
Shu Lea Cheang
While not direclty adressing the issue of black and white bodies and their troubled relationship, Shu Lea Cheang has produced an noteworthy body of work challenging normative representations and uses of pornography in terms of narrative and in troubling the interface between consumerism and capitalism and also gender and sexuality in Non-Western contexts. Furthermore the Taiwanese-born director challenges the notion that pornography and other sexually explicit art films are a exclusively a Western and white genre. When looking at art cinema from Asia, it is worth noting that many filmmakers, especcially from Japan for instance, work with sexually explicit material42. Possibly not without reason her avantgarde sex film „UKI“ has been shot also in Tokyo. But before going deeper into looking at the film, I
41 Cervulle (2010), p. 188. 42 Two noteworthy examples are the bodies of work by Nagisa Oshima or Koji Wakamatsu. The so-called Pink Eiga genre in Japan has partly been an outlet for political directors who had much more artistic freedom than in mainstream cinema as long as there were erotic scenes integrated into the narrative. want to draw the attention onto a webbased work that even though looking simple, is able to pose complex questions about pornography, illness, online capitalism and economical differences between first and third worlds.
Leangs work „Milk“ (2004) mimics an online porn webpage. When we open it, pornographic images from various internet-sites are emerging to gain our attention. Different than usually though, the images turn up in an exhausting slow motion. Instead of directly giving the viewers „what they want“, the page produces an experience of longtime waiting, and therewith, frustration instead of satisfaction. The temporal disruption of pornography as a surface easy to consume forces the viewers to moments of reflection and distanciation. „Milk“ also reminds us of the relationship between money and time a in global capitalism and especcially how the money-driven use of pornography is measured through time in the internet. What we also encounter on the internetpage is a stopwatch ticking and remindung us on the real time we are spending there. Next to the running stopwatch, there is another time count. After, as an example, „52 seconds“, the other time count actually puts on the number „4“. When we read the title a drastic relationship is established. When we put the titles of the page and the numbers together, it says: „0:52 seconds - 4 Africans have died of aids once you loaded this webpage“. While usually online porn precisely functions through making the consumer getting lost in the act of masturbation and forgetting not only time but also space and with it its real conextual surroundings, Cheang turns the consciousness of the viewer back to the worldly totality of global capitalism. While online sex can be considered as the perfect example of immaterial labour that works without any concrete experience of a physical encounter and its consequences, Cheang reminds us how consequential these real encounters actually can be.
As Eric Oishi puts it:
The repetive similarity and stasis of the pornographic images are placed in contrast to the rapid and inexorable movement of time represented by the African Aids pandemic, which mimics a counter that marks the charges being accrued by visitors to Internet porn sites. The experience of seeking erotic pleasure through online porn (an experience that involves both excitement and frustration) is transformed into a global health issue...43
Therewith Cheang reminds us that the pleasure some (western and first world) people experience (in pornography) is always happening on the back of others. The escapist time porn-consumers inhabit online is posed as analogous with the temporality of real dying bodies in Africa. In regards to this it also can be noted that pornography in general can be seen as one of many reactions of both the state and capitalism in the aids-crisis, providing a safe alternative to real physical encounters, but also a domestication of non-normative forms of sexuality44. However, the case becomes even more difficult when we relate these dynamics to societies in the third world which does not have any direct access to contraceptives and modern aids-medication. In relating these problems towards each other, Cheang demonstrates how strategies of pornography can be used as a tool of intervention from a leftist perspective that
43 Oishi (2007), p. 21. 44 This thesis has been reflected by Singer in a complexity that cannot be fully debated here (1993). criticises a global capitalism that is extremely detached from any real experience and presence of bodies and their physical circumstances.
How much sexuality is part of a global capitalist and consumerist society is also further investigated by Cheangs feature film „I.K.U.“ (J, 2000). „I.K.U“ can be translated into „I am coming“ in English from Japanese. Being the first porn which has been included in the honorable Independant Film Event „Sundance“ in 2000, it is not only a spectacular film in terms of imaginative stagings of sexual encounters and a complex storyline, while the structure of the film also resembles more of a computer game itself. We are thrown through a whirlwind of affects, mediated by menues and corporate product imagery that we know from the world of digital commerce and advertisement. Glowing and pulsating like a commodity itself, the film also reminds us that sexuality on screen is always already fabricated. However, in the neonlike world of Tokyo´s Shinjuku, the part of the city where the most sex shops and love hotels are based, we encounter heterosexual, homosexual, transgender sex and sex between humans and robots. In the film which is obviously part of the science-fiction- genre, the main character of the film could be directly drawn from Donna Haraway´s „Cyborg Manifesto“45. Set in a modern Tokyo in a near distant future, a female cyborg, that is part of a group of robots called I.K.U. coders which were produced by the powerful Genom Corporation have to collect the orgasmic data of people they have sexual encounters with. Clearly subverting the notion of both a female nature and the heteronormative idea of a woman being passively penetrated, their prosthetic and stinglike arms transform into dildos to penetrate their opposite and take their orgasmic data with them. Once created to colonise other planets because the earth is already overcrowded and polluted, the cyborg, tragic hero of the narrative, mirroring the unhappy lovestory of „Blade Runner“ (Ridley Scott, USA, 1982), confronts us with hybrid forms of sexuality, interacting with a number of genders but at the same time never symbolising their sexuality as something free or autonomously chosen. While one could say that this film is not directly presenting an anti-racist agenda, it also can be said that it shows an impressive autonomy from conventional porn, representing non-Western bodies in various constellations and reflecting sexuality as part of the commodity fetishist world. Therewith, Shu Lea Cheang directly subverts not only mainstream representations in porn46, but also leads us critically through a world where sex is already part of a chain of capitalist products and just one commodity amongst many others. The queer and transgendered representations of sex are on the one hand, relatively autonomous from the dualist and heteronormative representations of a two-gender-model, while on the other hand they are still part of a global economy. In this way Shu Lea Cheang might want to argue that subversions of representation in the categories of gender, sex or even race and ethnicity alone are not enough as they are all part of codes and value in global capitalism that already inhales diversity for a bigger marketplace. Therefore what we might encounter here though is not just a liberated or more natural sexuality of queer subjects, but a diversification of desires on the consumerist table.
45 Haraway (1991). 46 Even though filmed in an intriguing and fascinating way, like a hyper-active music video, some people argued that the sex scenes are powerful, but still not very queer in their choreography and the fixation on genital penetration. In this way, the world of „IKU“ can be named, to reference Michel Foucault, heterotopian47. Different than utopias, heterotopias are contexts where time and action function in a different logic than in normalized spaces and times, if on cemetaries or brothels, on ships or on markets. Obviously, for Shu Lea Cheang these places are not outside of power but just the newest, most technologically enhanced part of it. Still she is able to create worlds which subvert stereotypical roles and narratives of gender, sexuality and race without making these imaginiaries just escapist fantasies but critical outlets which through projecting a world into the future, are also able to thematicise the tendential realities of the present.
Tejal Shah
Another combination of heterotopic imaginaries are presented in the inventive p5- channel-video installation „Between the Waves“ by the Indian queer artist Tejal Shah. Her work introduces a group of short films that form a self-referential cycle reflecting old Indian mythical creatures in relationship to queer bodies. In one scene a group of queer of color subjects enters a wood, wearing prosthetics on their heads that resemble dildos and furthermore homage a headpiece by the surrealist painter Unica Zürn. Resembling the image of the unicorn, the headpieces mimic both their relationship to old Indian traditions but also to the Western avantgarde. How the artist informs us on her webpage, unicorns, which usually are thought of to be a part of Western civilazation, can be traced back to archealogical sites of Indus Valley from 5000 to 2000 BC. For Shah the unicorns therewith represent tracing her familiy lineage and takes these images back to their natural home. Furthermore in this double- move of both reconnecting to the Indian past and to traditions of modern avantgardes Shah is looking for an interface that troubles dualist notions of the often implied backwardness of non-western countries and the Modern. But back to the wood: Repainting branches of the trees into white, they begin to resemble the dildonic headpieces and soon will get harvested. This is one of many examples in the Indian artists´ work where notions of the old and rural get mixed with ideas of artificial constructions and practices of appropriation art. In another scene the headpieces are actually used as dildos and become prosthetics of queer penetration resembling practices of lesbian culture. In another projection of queer of color bodies that resemble non-normative feminities and transgender persons walk around at the beach and seem to first give the impression of being flooded onto the beach from the wide and impenetrable ocean. But this picture of natural purity is again mashed up with huge piles of trash which also arrive at the beach. Again, the exoticist stereotype of India as a pure and natural world is troubled by the reality of both the artifice of what looks like computer waste and the actual problem of pollution. Therefore Shah challenges any normalised view on India and its residents. While on the one hand she reconnects Indian bodies to a rural and mythical world and therewith to an alternative trajectory than the one she inhabits as an artist primarely showing her work in the West, on the other hand she troubles that distinction in regards to contemporary practices of performance art and imaginaries of queer sexuality outside of the Western and moreover first world experience. Finally Tejal Shah also makes us realize that queer sexualities are usually not only represented as white, but are usually only imagined as a part of metropolitan cities. Therefore the heterotopia Tejal Shah represents, even though looking far away from everyday reality, articulates queer of
47 Foucault, Michel (1990). color sexualities and bodies that go beyond the framework of what is considered queer in the Western World.
Bibliography: Butler, Judith (2004): „Endangered Endangering – Schematic Racism and White Paranoia“. In: The Judith Butler Reader, Butler / Salih Hg., Blackwell Publishing, pp. 204-212. Cervulle, Maxime (2010); „Erotic / Exotic. Race and Class in French Gay ´Ethnic´ Pornography“. In: Stüttgen, Tim (Ed.): Post / Porn / Politics. Queer_Feminist Perspectives on the Politics of Porn Performance and Sex_Work as Cultural Production. Berlin: Bbooks. Eggers, Maureen Maisha / Kilomba, Grada / Piesche, Peggy / Arndt, Susan: Mythen, Masken und Subjekte (2005). Kritische Weißseinsforschung in Deutschland. Münster: Unrast Verlag. Fanon, Frantz (2008): Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press. Foucault, Michel (1990): Andere Räume. In: Barck, Karlheinz (Hg.). Aisthesis. Wahrnehmung heute oder Perspektiven einer anderen Ästhetik. Leipzig: 1990. Gilman, Sander L. (1985): Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race and Madness. New York: Cornell University Press. Haraway, Donna (1991): Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. Mercer, Kobena (1994): Welcome to the Jungle. New Positions in Black Cultural Studies. New York / London: Routledge. Miller-Young, Mireille (2010): Putting Hypersexuality to Work: Black Women and Illicit Eroticism in Pornography. In: Sexualities, 13, pp. 219-235. Singer, Linda. (1993). Sex and the Logic of Late Capitalism. In: J. Butler & M. MacGrogan (Ed.), Erotic Welfare: Sexual Theory and Politics in the Age of Epidemic, New York: Routledge. Preciado, Beatriz (2003): Kontrasexuelles Manifest. Berlin: bbooks, 2003. Sharon Patricia Holland (2012): The Erotic Life of Racism. Durham & London: Duke University Press. Somerville, Siobhan B. (2000): Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture. Durham / London: Duke University Press. Sprinkle, Annie M. (1998): „Post-Porn Modernist. My 25 years as a Multimedia Whore.“ San Francisco: Cleis Press. Stüttgen, Tim (Ed. / 2010): Post / Porn / Politics. Queer_feminist Perspectives on the Politics of Porn Performance and Sex_Work as Cultural Production. Berlin: b_books. Taormino / Penley / Shimizu / Miller-Young (2013): The Feminist Porn Book. New York: Feminist Press at City University of New York. Wiegmann, Robyn (1998): Race, Ethnicity and Film. In: Hill & Gibson: Oxford Guide to Film Studies, pp. 158-169. Williams, Linda (1989): Hard Core. Power, Pleasure and the Frenzy of the Visible. Berkeley / Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Art Pieces and Films: Between The Waves, Tejal Shah, India, Five Channel Video Installation, 2012. Citedebeur Productions: http://www.citebeur.com/ Shu Lea Cheang: „Milk“: http://www.xcult.org/milk/ Produced by 56k, 2004 I.K.U. Shu Lea Cheang, Japan, 2000.