Performance and Performativity first paper

My first paper for Performance and Performativity was due Friday, and I submitted it! I meant to post my drafts here, but just kept working over them. So, you just get the final draft.

Word count: 1549

The Performativity and Precarity of Porn Stardom:

Danny Wylde’s ‘Summoning of the Porn Star’ Ritual in Madison Young’s Thin Line Between Art and Sex

            “I was invited to participate in a porn film and much to my surprise I arrived on set and found that everyone involved was an actual person, not a porn star,” says Danny Wylde (Thin Line). This sums up the binary that Wylde explores in his art piece/ritual, the tension and incompatibility of porn stardom and personhood. This ritual, which is the first scene in Madison Young’s Thin Line Between Art and Sex, is a satirical “art piece” in the form of a pagan/Satanic ritual to “conjure forth the porn stars from the past” (Thin Line). This ‘summoning’ inverts and then reinforces Peggy Phelan’s “axis of purity/perversity” (44) by positioning the “real people pretending to be porn stars” (Thin Line) as “disgusting” or perverse, and the porn star, who is an inhuman ideal, as pure but also not virtuous, and therefore perverse. This art piece highlights the performativity of porn stardom, and the precarity that the “real people” (Thin Line) performing porn stardom operate under.

Peggy Phelan claims that the “categories of ‘pornography’ and ‘perversity’ depend on the curious fascination of the spectator’s voyeuristic pleasure, a pleasure that pivots on the axis of purity/perversity” (44). Wylde invokes the “voyeuristic pleasure” (Phelan 44) of the spectator when he discusses his early interactions with idealized porn stars who, Wylde says “have sex all day, they do nothing else, that’s why they call them stars – because you look up to them” (Thin Line). Wylde’s spectatorial pleasure is predicated on the idea that porn stars are porn stars. They are not ‘real’ people. Wylde’s response to the idealized porn star reinforces Phelan’s assertion that the viewer can “’possess’ the image which remains immobile within the frame… of the spectator’s gaze” (46), and his response to realizing that the porn set is full of actual people rather than porn stars shatters this immobility. The porn star cannot be a real person, because their personhood directly conflicts with Wylde’s ability as a spectator to possess them.

Wylde’s performance, however, inverts Phelan’s axis of purity and perversity (Phelan 44). The porn star’s very porn stardom means that they are pure in Wylde’s mind, and it is the physical bodies of the “real people pretending to be porn stars” (Thin Line) that are “disgusting.” The impossibility of the porn star body, which never requires a douche, an enema, or even food beyond coffee, is what makes her a porn star. She is an idealized and inhuman body, existing in a state of perpetual sexual readiness and physical purity. The sex that she has “all day” (Thin Line) does not pervert or damage her purity, and it is this fantasy of the dehumanized sexual vessel that Wylde’s fantasies are based on. It is therefore Wylde as the masturbating teenager generating this fantasy of the idealized porn star that is perverse. The spectator becomes the site of perversity, and the porn star is held up as pure in comparison.

If, however, we read Phelan’s definition of purity as virtuousness, rather than physical purity, then Wylde’s idealized porn star is perverse. Writing on the topic of whore stigma, Jill Nagle notes that “[t]his division [between whore and not-whore] translates into a mandate to not only be virtuous, but also to appear virtuous” (5, emphasis hers). Wylde’s porn star is not virtuous, because she is “having sex all day” (Thin Line) and she does not even appear to be virtuous, because she is perpetually sexually ready and if it were not for the “outfit… that is imposed on her… she would be naked all the time, ready to fuck at a moment’s notice” (Thin Line).

The outfit is imposed on the porn star because it is unacceptable that she be visibly “ready to fuck at a moment’s notice” (Thin Line); her readiness would render her unintelligible within a culture that does not accept freely available sex. Nagle says that “good girls, then, stay out of the fray by eschewing any display of sexual intent or autonomy, lest it be used to relabel them bad” (5). Wylde seems to be demanding that a real porn star voluntarily and publicly place herself in a position of heightened precarity. The naked and ready porn star is unacceptable, unintelligible, in public space, and as Butler notes, “those who do not live their genders in intelligible ways are at heightened risk for harassment and violence” (ii). Wylde is therefore asking that the porn star place herself at this “heightened risk” (Butler ii). The porn star’s sexual readiness is a performance of gender, and Jill Dolan notes that “while it is crucial not to conflate sexuality with gender, expressions of sexuality further illustrate the operation of gender codes and constructs in the representation of the female body” (63), and Butler herself links sexual labour to gender-based precarity (ii).

The sexual availability of Wylde’s idealized porn star is just one aspect of this art piece that brings Judith Butler’s concept of precarity to the fore. Butler situates sex workers, a category that includes porn performers, as an identity category facing exceptional precarity (ii). Porn stars blur the distinction between public and private by performing the private act of sex in the public space of a studio, and challenging the gender norms that Butler says determine “how and in what way the public and private are distinguished, and how that distinction is instrumentalized in the service of sexual politics” (ii). It is the element of sexual politics that Wylde’s satire highlights most clearly. The porn star cannot inhabit the same space as the porn performer, because the porn performer is a person. A person defecates, eats, and has talents, desires and aspirations beyond their sexual labour. By asserting that these real people are “disgusting” (Thin Line) and that they are only “pretending to be porn stars” (Thin Line), Wylde points a finger at the social construction of the “good girl/bad girl binary” (Nagle 5) and even at Phelan’s construction of “the axis of purity/perversity” (44). By emphasizing with such extreme intensity the binary between porn star and actual person, Wylde’s performance undermines the binary that it claims to enforce. This art piece can be seen as a “subversive resignification [that] serves the purpose of exposing the illusion that gendered acts… are stable components in a coherent and necessary order of identity” (Loxley 122).

Wylde claims that a ‘real’ porn star is sexually ready at all times, that her vagina “smells great all the time, she doesn’t menstruate, it’s impossible for her to get bacterial vaginosis” (Thin Line), and that she doesn’t need food or ever require an enema. That Wylde can articulate this inhuman ideal of porn stardom highlights the ways in which the performance of porn stardom is taken up as “a sign of its internal or inherent truth” (Butler i). The porn performer performs porn stardom, and this is a performative act in that it calls into being the idealized porn star body that the performer temporarily inhabits. The construction of the porn star, who cannot have bodily processes or functions, means that the porn star is one-dimensional construction incapable of an artistic (or even human) life beyond their porn stardom. The porn star is non-compliant in the sense that they cannot be recognized as a person, because they do not have any of the indicators of human bodily existence. As Butler notes, “non-compliance calls into question the viability of one’s life, the ontological conditions of one’s persistence” (iv). By performing a non-compliant identity, the porn performer puts their own viability into question. They are eclipsed by their performance of porn stardom, a performance that pushes them into precarity.

By explicitly linking performativity with precarity, Wylde’s piece articulates clearly and with humour the point that Butler makes when she says “[t]he performativity of gender has everything to do with who counts as a life, who can be read or understood as a living being, and who lives, or tries to live, on the far side of established modes of intelligibility” (iv). The porn star cannot be counted as a life, cannot be “read or understood as a living being” (Butler iv). But the porn performer, the person who uses the “hundreds” (Thin Line) of enemas in the bathroom, who menstruates and is capable of bacterial vaginosis, this person lives “on the far side of established modes of intelligibility” (Butler iv). This person exists under conditions of precarity, imposed in part by what Carol Queen describes as a prevalent conception that women in the sex industry “have no boundaries and sometimes no choices” (128). Wylde’s assertion that the porn star is always “ready to fuck” (Thin Line) highlights the lack of boundaries that are assumed for porn stars. Since the only options presented by Wylde within his piece are to be a “disgusting” real person or a porn star with no boundaries, porn performers are in an impossible position, caught between being sexually idealized or stigmatized by our sex-negative culture.

Wylde highlights both the performativity and the precarity of the porn star and of the porn performer who exists behind and within this impossible, illegible identity. His satirical art piece subverts the binaries that it proposes to reinforce, and sets up the rest of the film as an exploration of the space between porn performance and porn stardom.

 

 

Works Cited

Butler, Judith. “Performativity, Precarity and Sexual Politics.” AIBR. Revista de Antropología Iberoamericana 4.3 (2009): i-xiii. AIBR. 13 Feb 2013. Web.

Dolan, Jill. The Feminist Spectator as Critic. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991. Print.

Loxley, James. Performativity. London: Routledge, 2007. Google Play Book.

Nagle, Jill. Introduction. Whores and Other Feminists. Ed. Jill Nagle. New York: Routledge, 2010. 1-15. Print.

Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge, 1996. Google Play Book.

Queen, Carol. “Sex Radical Politics, Sex-Positive Feminist Thought, and Whore Stigma.” Whores and Other Feminists. Ed. Jill Nagle. New York: Routledge, 2010. 125-135. Print.

Thin Line Between Art and Sex. Dir. Madison Young. Perf. Danny Wylde, Madison Young, Justin. HeartCore Films/Good Releasing, 2010. Film.

You’ve Got Something On Your Face – final draft. Eep!

I presented this at the 2013 English Honours Symposium. It went well!

It seems somehow appropriate to end this symposium with a discussion of the money shot.

This iconic pornographic trope, the cum shot onto a face or body that often signals the end of the sexual act or scene, has been subverted and reimagined, and finally excluded, in Courtney Trouble’s queer feminist pornographic film, “Nostalgia.”

It is relevant to this discussion that Trouble’s feminist pornography is queer. There are no biologically male performers in “Nostalgia” and this necessarily shifts the focus away from male ejaculatory orgasm, onto alternative ejaculatory imagery, active participation of all the sexual players, and ultimately the decentering of orgasm as the end-goal of pornographic sexual scenes. It is critical to recognize that Trouble’s queer feminist pornography is not the only iteration of feminist pornography, and that not all feminist pornography is queer and not all queer pornography is feminist. Alison Butler has said that “women produce feminist work in a wide variety of forms and styles,” and this applies to feminist pornography as much as to any other feminist cultural practice. It is important that we not look for all the answers in Trouble’s film – she cannot represent the heterosexual feminist in this film, or answer the question of where the biologically male penis fits within feminist pornography. These are important questions regarding the role of ejaculation and ejaculatory imagery in feminist pornography, but they won’t be addressed here. In fact, I believe that the issues of the heterosexual feminist and the biologically male performer within feminist porn are areas that are chronically under-theorized. Within an academic discipline that is itself full of gaps and areas that demand further thought and critique, feminist academic writing needs to someday wrestle with the acceptance of heterosexuality into a pro-porn canon that often conflates queerness with feminism and problematically excludes heterosexuality.

But for now, an examination of Trouble’s queer feminist pornography.

Nostalgia reimages four scenes from iconic, “Golden Age” pornography. Her film is framed by transitional shots of Trouble and her girlfriend watching porn together. This is an important insertion of Trouble and her girlfriend as viewers into the pornographic scenes, and implicates us, as viewers, as active participants in the same pornographic scenes. Active participation is a theme throughout Nostalgia, and is important because of how it subverts the ejaculation trope of the active male penis ejaculating onto the passive female body. A trope that is pervasive in the scenes that Trouble reimagines.

When I watched the original porn films that Nostalgia is based on, Behind the Green Door, Deep Throat, Babylon Pink and The Devil in Miss Jones, I thought two things. First, I was incredibly grateful to be studying feminist pornography instead of this type of mainstream porn. It was necessary to watch these films in order to understand Trouble’s reimagining of them, but if my only material was this racist, misogynist and heteronormative… I would be studying something else. Second, I thought wow. That is a lot of semen flying through the air! Behind the Green Door features a 7-minute, slow motion, psychedelic money shot montage that I found both surreal and disturbing to watch.

It was the narrow fixation of the original porn films on the money shot – to the extent that the scene in Babylon Pink actually does not include any female orgasm or even attempt to reach orgasm, and centres solely around two men ejaculating onto a passive woman’s face – and the complete lack of this fixation in “Nostalgia” that lead me to the topic for this presentation.

I wanted to know what Trouble was attempting to say about ejaculation, and about its place within queer feminist pornography. She chose four films that explicitly centre around male ejaculation, and she called her film “Nostalgia”! In fact, Deep Throat is cited by Linda Williams as the first significant instance of the money shot, the first time that ejaculation onto a woman’s face or body was given pride of place in the scene, and it along with Behind the Green Door and The Devil in Miss Jones make up the 70s porno-chic triumvirate. What is Trouble nostalgic for? The original scenes are horrifying in their representation of passive feminine sexuality as little more than a receptacle for male sexual pleasure. But, Deep Throat redefined the focus of pornographic depictions of sexuality. And that ability to redefine is what Trouble is nostalgic for and what she attempts to accomplish in Nostalgia.

The first scene that Trouble reimagines is from Behind the Green Door. In the original, the main character is abducted and “ravished” for the enjoyment of an audience that is commanded to be silent and still while they watch. She is restrained through much of the scene, passively but without any indication of active consent, and in the context of having been abducted, and the scene climaxes with 7 minutes of cum.

Nostalgia’s reimagining of this scene, more than any of the other three, closely mirrors the format and structure of the original. However, in Trouble’s remake, there are significant differences. The audience claps and participates – the viewer again brought into the scene. There is no abduction, and the main character is submissive, but she is not passive. She is actively engaged with the sex acts throughout the scene, actively participates in her own pleasure and orgasm, and when two female characters ejaculate onto her torso she makes eye contact with them, she is not restrained, and non-consensual passivity is replaced with consensual submissiveness.

This scene centres around ejaculation, echoing the original. Female ejaculation, yes, but still fully embodied – still a body ejaculating bodily fluid onto another body. And still the climax of the sexual scene.

The second scene in Nostalgia is the reimagining of Deep Throat. Deep Throat is the infamous “clitoris in the back of her throat” film. It was, and is, a controversial film and one that exemplifies the abuses we often associate with the porn industry. Linda Lovelace, who stars in the original, suffered incredible abuse on the set. Trouble’s choice to include Deep Throat in her nostalgia gave me pause. It is a ridiculous and cheesy film, and I found it disturbing to watch. Linda Lovelace is “fixed” when the doctor discovers her clitoris deep in her throat, and she experiences an orgasm that is marked by bells ringing and rockets literally taking off when she deep throats him and he ejaculates on her face. This language of being “fixed” implies that the inorgasmic woman is broken and requires a penis to fix her. She goes on to fall in love with a man whose fantasy is to be a rapist, and who complains that she’s not afraid enough. Her response is that he’s just so manly, and she’s so turned on by him that she can’t fake the fear.

In Trouble’s reimagining of the scene, the casting is important. Madison Young, who not only performs but also directs her own feminist pornography, plays the role of Linda Lovelace. Young is vocal about her enjoyment of fellatio – not just in this scene where she plays the part convincingly, but also in her life, where she gives workshops and presents talks on the topic. Jiz Lee and Syd Blakovich, the two other performers in this scene, are also known for their work as performance artists and activists, as well as porn performers. This casting of three highly recognizable performers who do work on and off-screen mitigates the potential for the implication that Trouble is mirroring not only the film but also the production practices. These three, perhaps more than any other three performers could, make it clear through their acting and their identities, that this is a fully consensual performance.

The doctor finds Young’s clitoris in her throat, just like in the original. And just like in the original, this causes her to orgasm. Rather than rockets launching, however, this orgasm involves glitter. A lot of glitter. Earlier in the scene Young says that she wants to squirt glitter, and the orgasm features glitter fireworks on the screen, and ends with glitter all over the doctor’s condom-covered, silicon cock and Young’s face. It is unclear where the glitter ejaculate comes from. Clearly, throats do not ejaculate. Neither do silicon cocks. Certainly not when they’re wrapped in a condom. This ejaculatory scene, then, shifts the focus away from the fully embodied, supposedly “natural”, ejaculatory orgasm, to an ambiguous, winking, sort-of embodied ejaculation.

Trouble then takes the scene in a direction that does not in any way mirror the original. Both the doctor and the nurse are wearing strap-ons and, critically, Madison Young is active in asking for what she wants and directing the action to achieve her own orgasm. This orgasm, entirely glitter-free, is the result of penetration and clitoral stimulation – inserting the biological female body into a scene that fantasizes about the misplaced clitoris. This is important, because the misplaced clitoris fantasy allowed the original Deep Throat to completely elide actual female pleasure and to place male ejaculation as the primary focus of the scene.

By placing the two orgasms in the Nostalgia reimagining side by side, the one clearly fake, with ambiguously originating glitter ejaculate and dramatically acted porn-orgasm screams, and the other involving no ejaculate and a much more seemingly authentic orgasm, Deep Throat’s original act of placing ejaculation as the focus and the point of the pornographic scene is undone. Trouble pulls the rug out from under this trope by contrasting the two orgasms, highlighting the ridiculousness of the money shot, particularly when it does not include any efforts at mutual pleasure and active participation by all sexual players. This scene also moves away from closely following the original, as the first scene did, and towards more radical revisioning of the original texts.

The final two scenes barely even resemble the original texts.

Babylon Pink, the third scene in Nostalgia, originally featured a short scene of a woman fantasizing about being placed on a table at a dinner party and having two men ejaculate onto her face, with two women also present. In the re-imagining of this scene, the woman having the fantasy is an active participant in the sex acts with her two female companions. The sex acts are widely varied, with elements of dominance and submission and each character playing both dominant and submissive roles. The scene ends with the woman whose fantasy we are watching smearing cake onto the faces of her companions. This is fully disembodied ejaculatory imagery – moving further and further from the phallocentric focus of the porn films being reimagined. Most interestingly in this scene, none of the performers in this scene appear to orgasm, or at least their orgasms are not the focus of the scene. Rather, the focus is on power exchange and the interactions between the three women.

This shift in focus from orgasm as an end-goal to sexual pleasure as an on-going process allows Trouble to interrogate the purpose of pornographic sex. The ejaculatory moment in this scene, with cake being smeared across two women’s faces but nobody experiencing or performing orgasm, challenges the idea of ejaculation as proof of pleasure. The cake-ejaculate is constructed, manufactured, and fully disembodied. In fact, it is vegan cake, which takes it entirely out of the realm of bodies and their products. It is the moments of sexual interaction – the active participation of all performers in the sexual act – that are given the weight of authenticity.

Finally, Nostalgia ends with The Devil in Miss Jones. Both the original and the reimagining begin with Miss Jones’ suicide and her arrival in limbo. These are the only things that they have in common, and it is relevant because unlike the abduction that is removed from the reimagining of Behind the Green Door, Miss Jones’ suicide is an act of personal agency. It is a choice that she makes. In the original, she is given the opportunity to experience lust before going to Hell for her sin of suicide. In Nostalgia, she is also given the opportunity to experience lust. She and the angel that meets her in limbo are transported into the room with Trouble and her girlfriend. This is important because it highlights the point made by Trouble in her framing of the film as interactive, that the viewer is part of the pornographic process. That we shape the porn that we watch through our choices in what we watch, and how we respond to it.

There are no similarities between the pornographic scene in Trouble’s bedroom and any scene in the original film. There is no sadistic teacher, there is no ejaculation of any kind, and there is no punishment. The four women engage in a variety of sex acts, experience or perform orgasms that do not appear to be the focus of the camera or the scene, and end the scene and the film tangled together asleep on the bed.

There have been moments in porn that shape cultural ideas about what sex is and how we do what we do when we get in bed together. Deep Throat, Behind the Green Door and The Devil in Miss Jones are considered the three most influential films of 70s porno chic, they changed how we film sex. They situated male ejaculation onto female bodies as the critical, defining moment in the pornographic scene. And we still see the money shot as the most common ending to scenes in heterosexual mainstream pornography. This focus on the money shot, and on the active male sexuality that it evokes, is about power.

A fundamental argument underpinning the anti-porn feminist critiques that were sparked by films such as the Behind the Green Door, Deep Throat, Babylon Pink and The Devil in Miss Jones is that pornography is about power, and that it is about male power over women. The image of the passive female recipient of the explosive male ejaculate isexactly what feminists like Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon were enraged by. And yet, thankfully, not all pornography is about the passive female and the active male.

Not all pornography is straight, for one thing. And some feminists responded to the appalling state of mainstream heterosexual pornography by creating their own pornography. Annie Sprinkle said that the answer to bad porn is not no porn, it is more porn. I would add, better porn. Feminist porn.

If it was true in the pornography of the time, as Catherine MacKinnon said, that “women/men is a distinction not just of difference, but of power and powerlessness . . . power/powerlessness is the sex difference,” then feminist pornographers such as Courtney Trouble and others like her – Nina Hartley, Jiz Lee, Madison Young, Erika Lust, Tony Comstock, Buck Angel, Tobi Hill-Meyer, Shine Louise Houston, Ned and Maggie Mayhem… These pornographers are smashing that binary. Imperfectly, incompletely, but resolutely.

There is power in pornography; this power is obvious when we look at the long legacy left by Deep Throat and the introduction of the money shot.

Courtney Trouble was nostalgic for that power, for the ability to redefine how we think about and perform sex in pornographic scenes. She took four films that shaped pornography and reimagined them through her own queer feminist lens. This is what feminist porn does, and why I am happy to study it and support it. To be the active participant that Trouble imagines.

You’ve Got Something On Your Face – second draft

It seems somewhat appropriate to end this symposium with a discussion of the money shot.

This iconic pornographic trope, the cum shot that often signals the end of the sexual act or scene, has been subverted and reimagined, and finally excluded, in Courtney Trouble’s queer feminist pornographic film, “Nostalgia.”

It is relevant to this discussion that Trouble’s feminist pornography is queer. There are no biologically male performers in “Nostalgia” and this necessarily changes the focus from male ejaculatory orgasm onto something else. And it is critical to recognize that Trouble’s queer feminist pornography is not the only iteration of feminist pornography, and that not all feminist pornography is queer and not all queer pornography is feminist. Alison Butler has said that “women produce feminist work in a wide variety of forms and styles,” and this applies to feminist pornography as much as to any other feminist cultural practice. It is important that we not look for all the answers in Trouble’s film – she cannot represent the heterosexual feminist in this film, or answer the question of where the biologically male penis fits within feminist pornography. These are important questions regarding the role of ejaculation and ejaculatory imagery in feminist pornography, but they won’t be answered here.

But she asks and perhaps answers other interesting and important questions.

Nostalgia reimages four scenes from iconic, “Golden Age” pornography. Her film is framed by transitional shots of Trouble and her girlfriend watching porn together. This is an important insertion of Trouble and her girlfriend as viewers into the pornographic scenes, and implicates us, as viewers, as active participants in the same pornographic scenes. Active participation is a theme throughout Nostalgia, and is important because of how it subverts the ejaculation trope of the active male penis ejaculating onto the passive female body. A trope that is pervasive in the scenes that Trouble reimagines.

When I watched the original porn films that Nostalgia is based on, Behind the Green Door, Deep Throat, Babylon Pink and The Devil in Miss Jones, I thought two things. First, I was incredibly grateful to be studying feminist pornography instead of this type of mainstream porn. If my only material was this racist, misogynist and heteronormative… I would be studying something else. Second, I thought wow. That is a lot of semen flying through the air! Behind the Green Door features a 7-minute, slow motion, psychedelic money shot montage that is both surreal and disturbing to watch.

It was the narrow fixation of the original porn films on the money shot – to the extent that the scene in Babylon Pink actually does not include any female orgasm or even attempt to reach orgasm, and centres solely around two men ejaculating onto a passive woman’s face – and the complete lack of this fixation in “Nostalgia” that lead me to the topic for this presentation.

I wanted to know what Trouble was attempting to say about ejaculation, and about its place within queer feminist pornography. She chose four films that explicitly centre around male ejaculation, and she called her film “Nostalgia”! Deep Throat is cited by Linda Williams as the first significant instance of the money shot, the first time that ejaculation onto a woman’s face was given pride of place in the scene. What is Trouble nostalgic for? The original scenes are horrifying in their representation of passive feminine sexuality as little more than a receptacle for male sexual pleasure. But, Deep Throat redefined the focus of pornographic depictions of sexuality. And that redefinition is what Trouble is nostalgic for. That redefinition is what she accomplishes in Nostalgia.

The first scene that Trouble reimagines is from Behind the Green Door. In the original, the main character is abducted and “ravaged” for the enjoyment of an audience that is commanded to be silent and still. She is restrained through much of the scene, passively but clearly without her consent, and the scene climaxes with 7 minutes of cum.

Nostalgia’s reimagining of this scene, more than any of the other three, closely mirrors the format and structure of the original. However, in Trouble’s remake, there are significant differences. The audience claps and participates – the viewer again brought into the scene. There is no abduction, and the main character is submissive, but she is not passive. She is actively engaged with the sex acts throughout the scene, actively participates in her own pleasure and orgasm, and when two female characters ejaculate onto her torso she makes eye contact with them, she is not restrained, and non-consensual passivity is replaced with consensual submissiveness.

This scene centres around ejaculation, echoing the original. Female ejaculation, yes, but still fully embodied – still a body ejaculating bodily fluid onto another body. And still the climax of the sexual scene.

The second scene in Nostalgia is the reimagining of Deep Throat. Deep Throat is the infamous “clitoris in the back of her throat” film. It was, and is, a controversial film and one that exemplifies the abuses we often associate with the porn industry. Linda Lovelace, who stars in the original, suffered incredible abuse on the set. Trouble’s choice to include Deep Throat in her nostalgia gave me pause. This is not a film I ever wanted to watch, and it was as disturbing to actually view as I had feared it would be. It is a ridiculous, cheesy, distressing film. Linda Lovelace is “fixed” when the doctor discovers her clitoris deep in her throat, and she experiences an orgasm that is marked by bells ringing and rockets literally taking off when she deep throats him and he ejaculates on her face. This language of being “fixed” implies that the inorgasmic woman is broken and requires a penis to fix her. She goes on to fall in love with a man whose fantasy is to be a rapist, and who complains that she’s not afraid enough. Her response is that he’s just so manly, and she’s so turned on by him that she can’t fake the fear. Like I said earlier, if this was the only material I had to work with, I would be doing a very different project.

In Trouble’s reimagining of the scene, the casting is important. Madison Young, who not only performs but also directs her own feminist pornography, plays the role of Linda Lovelace. Young is vocal about her enjoyment of fellatio – not just in this scene where she plays the part convincingly, but also in her life, where she gives workshops and presents talks on the topic. Jiz Lee and Syd Blakovich, the two other performers in this scene, are also known for their work as performance artists and activists, as well as porn performers. This casting of three highly recognizable performers who do work on and off-screen mitigates the potential for the implication that Trouble is mirroring not only the film but also the production practices. These three, perhaps more than any other three performers could, make it clear through their acting and their identities, that this is a fully consensual performance.

The doctor finds Young’s clitoris in her throat, just like in the original. And just like in the original, this causes her to orgasm. Rather than rockets launching, however, this orgasm involves glitter. A lot of glitter. Earlier in the scene Young says that she wants to squirt glitter, and the orgasm features glitter fireworks on the screen, and ends with glitter all over the doctor’s condom-covered, silicon cock and Young’s face. It is unclear where the glitter ejaculate comes from. Clearly, throats do not ejaculate. Neither do silicon cocks. Certainly not when they’re wrapped in a condom. This ejaculatory scene, then, shifts the focus away from the fully embodied, supposedly “natural”, ejaculatory orgasm, to an ambiguous, winking, sort-of embodied ejaculation.

Trouble then takes the scene in a direction that does not in any way mirror the original. Both the doctor and the nurse are wearing strap-ons and, critically, Madison Young is active in asking for what she wants and directing the action to achieve her own orgasm. This orgasm, entirely glitter-free, is the result of penetration and clitoral stimulation – inserting the biological female body into a scene that fantasizes about the misplaced clitoris. This is important, because the misplaced clitoris fantasy allowed the original Deep Throat to completely elide actual female pleasure and to place male ejaculation as the primary focus of the scene.

By placing the two orgasms in the Nostalgia reimagining side by side, the one clearly fake, with ambiguously originating glitter ejaculate and dramatically acted porn-orgasm screams, and the other involving no ejaculate and a much more seemingly authentic orgasm, Deep Throat’s original act of placing ejaculation as the focus and the point of the pornographic scene is undone. Trouble pulls the rug out from under this trope by contrasting the two orgasms, highlighting the ridiculousness of the money shot, particularly when it does not include any efforts at mutual pleasure and active participation by all sexual players. This scene also moves away from closely following the original, as the first scene did, and towards more radical revisioning of the original texts.

The final two scenes barely even resemble the original texts.

Babylon Pink, the third scene in Nostalgia, originally featured a short scene of a woman fantasizing about being placed on a table at a dinner party and having two men ejaculate onto her face, with two women also present. In the re-imagining of this scene, the woman having the fantasy is an active participant in the sex acts with her two female companions. The sex acts are widely varied, with elements of dominance and submission and each character playing both dominant and submissive roles. The scene ends with the woman whose fantasy we are watching smearing cake onto the faces of her companions. This is fully disembodied ejaculatory imagery – moving further and further from the phallocentric focus of the porn films being reimagined. Most interestingly in this scene, none of the performers in this scene appear to orgasm, or at least their orgasms are not the focus of the scene. Rather, the focus is on power exchange and the interactions between the three women.

This shift in focus from orgasm as an end-goal to sexual pleasure as an on-going process allows Trouble to interrogate the purpose of pornographic sex. The ejaculatory moment in this scene, with cake being smeared across two women’s faces but nobody experiencing or performing orgasm, challenges the idea of ejaculation as proof of pleasure. The cake-ejaculate is constructed, manufactured, and fully disembodied. In fact, it is vegan cake, which takes it entirely out of the realm of bodies and their products. It is the moments of sexual interaction – the active participation of all performers in the sexual act – that are given the weight of authenticity.

Finally, Nostalgia ends with The Devil in Miss Jones. Both the original and the reimagining begin with Miss Jones’ suicide. This is the only thing that they have in common, and it is relevant because unlike the abduction that is removed from the reimagining of Behind the Green Door, Miss Jones’ suicide is an act of personal agency. It is a choice that she makes. In the original, she is given the opportunity to experience lust before going to Hell for her sin of suicide. In Trouble’s reimagining, she is also given the opportunity to experience lust. She and the angel that meets her in limbo are transported into the room with Trouble and her girlfriend. This is important because it highlights the point made by Trouble in her framing of the film as interactive, that the viewer is part of the pornographic process. That we shape the porn that we watch through our choices in what we watch, and how we respond to it.

There are no similarities between the pornographic scene in Trouble’s bedroom and any scene in the original film. There is no sadistic teacher, there is no ejaculation of any kind, and there is no punishment. The four women engage in a variety of sex acts, experience or perform orgasms that do not appear to be the focus of the camera or the scene, and end the scene and the film tangled together asleep on the bed.

There have been moments in porn that shape cultural ideas about what sex is and how we do what we do when we get in bed together. Deep Throat, Behind the Green Door and The Devil in Miss Jones are considered the three most influential films of 70s porno chic, they changed how we film sex. They situated male ejaculation onto female bodies as the critical, defining moment in the pornographic scene. And we still see the money shot as the most common ending to scenes in heterosexual mainstream pornography. This focus on the money shot, and on the active male sexuality that it evokes, is about power.

A fundamental argument underpinning the anti-porn feminist critiques that were sparked by films such as the Behind the Green Door, Deep Throat, Babylon Pink and The Devil in Miss Jones is that pornography is about power, and that it is about male power over women. The image of the passive female recipient of the explosive male ejaculate is exactly what feminists like Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon were enraged by. And yet, not all pornography is about the passive female and the active male.

Not all pornography is straight, for one thing. And thankfully some feminists responded to the appalling state of mainstream heterosexual pornography by creating their own pornography. Annie Sprinkle said that the answer to bad porn is not no porn, it is more porn. I would add, better porn. Feminist porn.

If it was true in the pornography of the time, as Catherine MacKinnon said, that “women/men is a distinction not just of difference, but of power and powerlessness . . . power/powerlessness is the sex difference,” then feminist pornographers such as Courtney Trouble and others like her – Nina Hartley, Jiz Lee, Madison Young, Erika Lust, Tony Comstock, Buck Angel, Tobi Hill-Meyer, Shine Louise Houston, Ned and Maggie Mayhem… These pornographers are smashing that binary. Imperfectly, incompletely, but resolutely.

There is power in pornography; this power is obvious when we look at the long legacy left by Deep Throat and the introduction of the money shot.

Courtney Trouble was nostalgic for that power, for the ability to redefine how we think about and perform sex in pornographic scenes. She took four films that shaped pornography and reimagined them through her own queer feminist lens. This is what feminist porn does, and why I am happy to study it and support it. To be the active participant that Trouble imagines.

You’ve Got Something On Your Face – First draft

It seems somewhat appropriate to end this symposium with a discussion of the money shot.

This iconic pornographic trope, the cum shot that often signals the end of the sexual act or scene, has been subverted and reimagined, and finally excluded, in Courtney Trouble’s queer feminist pornographic film, “Nostalgia.”

It is relevant to this discussion that Trouble’s feminist pornography is queer. There are no biologically male performers in “Nostalgia” and this necessarily changes the focus from male ejaculatory orgasm onto something else. And it is critical to recognize that Trouble’s queer feminist pornography is not the only iteration of feminist pornography, and that not all feminist pornography is queer and not all queer pornography is feminist. Alison Butler has said that “women produce feminist work in a wide variety of forms and styles,” and this applies to feminist pornography as much as to any other feminist cultural practice. It is important that we not look for all the answers in Trouble’s film – she cannot represent the heterosexual feminist in this film, or answer the question of where the biologically male penis fits within feminist pornography. These are important questions regarding the role of ejaculation and ejaculatory imagery in feminist pornography, but they won’t be answered here.

But she asks and perhaps answers other interesting and important questions.

Nostalgia reimages four scenes from iconic, “Golden Age” pornography. Her film is framed by transitional shots of Trouble and her girlfriend watching porn together. This is an important insertion of Trouble and her girlfriend as viewers into the pornographic scenes, and implicates us, as viewers, as active participants in the same pornographic scenes. Active participation is a theme throughout Nostalgia, and is important because of how it subverts the ejaculation trope of the active male penis ejaculating onto the passive female body. A trope that is pervasive in the scenes that Trouble reimagines.

When I watched the original porn films that Nostalgia is based on, Behind the Green Door, Deep Throat, Babylon Pink and The Devil in Miss Jones, I thought two things. First, I was incredibly grateful to be studying feminist pornography. If my only material was this racist, misogynist and heteronormative… I would be studying something else. Second, I thought wow. That is a lot of semen flying through the air! Behind the Green Door features a 7-minute, slow motion, psychedelic money shot montage that is both surreal and disturbing to watch.

It was the narrow fixation of the original porn films on the money shot – to the extent that the scene in Babylon Pink actually does not include any female orgasm or even attempt to reach orgasm, and centres solely around two men ejaculating onto a passive woman’s face – and the complete lack of this fixation in “Nostalgia” that lead me to the topic for this presentation.

I wanted to know what Trouble was attempting to say about ejaculation, and about its place within queer feminist pornography. She chose four films that explicitly centre around male ejaculation, and she called her film “Nostalgia”! Deep Throat is cited by Linda Williams as the first significant instance of the money shot, the first time that ejaculation onto a woman’s face was given pride of place in the scene. What is Trouble nostalgic for? The original scenes are horrifying in their representation of passive feminine sexuality as little more than a receptacle for male sexual pleasure. But, Deep Throat redefined the focus of pornographic depictions of sexuality. And that redefinition is what Trouble is nostalgic for. That redefinition is what she accomplishes in Nostalgia.

The first scene that Trouble reimagines is from Behind the Green Door. In the original, the main character is abducted and “ravaged” for the enjoyment of an audience that is commanded to be silent and still. She is restrained through much of the scene, passively but clearly without her consent, and the scene climaxes with 7 minutes of cum.

Nostalgia’s reimagining of this scene, more than any of the other three, closely mirrors the format and structure of the original. However, in Trouble’s remake, there are significant differences. The audience claps and participates – the viewer again brought into the scene. There is no abduction, and the main character is submissive, but she is not passive. She is actively engaged with the sex acts throughout the scene, actively participates in her own pleasure and orgasm, and when two female characters ejaculate onto her torso she makes eye contact with them, she is not restrained, and non-consensual passivity is replaced with consensual submissiveness.

This scene centres around ejaculation, echoing the original. Female ejaculation, yes, but still fully embodied – still a body ejaculating bodily fluid onto another body. And still the climax of the sexual scene.

The second scene in Nostalgia is the reimagining of Deep Throat. Deep Throat is the infamous “clitoris in the back of her throat” film. It was, and is, a controversial film and one that exemplifies the abuses we often associate with the porn industry. Linda Lovelace, who stars in the original, suffered incredible abuse on the set. Trouble’s choice to include Deep Throat in her nostalgia gave me pause. This is not a film I ever wanted to watch, and it was as disturbing to actually view as I had feared it would be. It is a ridiculous, cheesy, distressing film. Linda Lovelace is “fixed” when the doctor discovers her clitoris deep in her throat, and she experiences an orgasm that is marked by bells ringing and rockets literally taking off when she deep throats him and he ejaculates on her face. This language of being “fixed” implies that the inorgasmic woman is broken and requires a penis to fix her. She goes on to fall in love with a man whose fantasy is to be a rapist, and who complains that she’s not afraid enough. Her response is that he’s just so manly, and she’s so turned on by him that she can’t fake the fear. Like I said earlier, if this was the only material I had to work with, I would be doing a very different project.

In Trouble’s reimagining of the scene, the casting is important. Madison Young, who not only performs but also directs her own feminist pornography, plays the role of Linda Lovelace. Young is vocal about her enjoyment of fellatio – not just in this scene where she plays the part convincingly, but also in her life, where she gives workshops and presents talks on the topic. Jiz Lee and Syd Blakovich, the two other performers in this scene, are also known for their work as performance artists and activists, as well as porn performers. This casting of three highly recognizable performers who do work on and off-screen mitigates the potential for the implication that Trouble is mirroring not only the film but also the production practices. These three, perhaps more than any other three performers could, make it clear through their acting and their identities, that this is a fully consensual performance.

The doctor finds Young’s clitoris in her throat, just like in the original. And just like in the original, this causes her to orgasm. Rather than rockets launching, however, this orgasm involves glitter. A lot of glitter. Earlier in the scene Young says that she wants to squirt glitter, and the orgasm features glitter fireworks on the screen, and ends with glitter all over the doctor’s condom-covered, silicon cock and Young’s face. It is unclear where the glitter ejaculate comes from. Clearly, throats do not ejaculate. Neither do silicon cocks. Certainly not when they’re wrapped in a condom. This ejaculatory scene, then, shifts the focus away from the fully embodied, supposedly “natural”, ejaculatory orgasm, to an ambiguous, winking, sort-of embodied ejaculation.

Trouble then takes the scene in a direction that does not in any way mirror the original. Both the doctor and the nurse are wearing strap-ons and, critically, Madison Young is active in asking for what she wants and directing the action to achieve her own orgasm. This orgasm, entirely glitter-free, is the result of penetration and clitoral stimulation – inserting the biological female body into a scene that fantasizes about the misplaced clitoris. This is important, because the misplaced clitoris fantasy allowed the original Deep Throat to completely elide actual female pleasure and to place male ejaculation as the primary focus of the scene.

By placing the two orgasms in the Nostalgia reimagining side by side, the one clearly fake, with ambiguously originating glitter ejaculate and dramatically acted porn-orgasm screams, and the other involving no ejaculate and a much more seemingly authentic orgasm, Deep Throat’s original act of placing ejaculation as the focus and the point of the pornographic scene is undone. Trouble pulls the rug out from under this trope by contrasting the two orgasms, highlighting the ridiculousness of the money shot, particularly when it does not include any efforts at mutual pleasure and active participation by all sexual players. This scene also moves away from closely following the original, as the first scene did, and towards more radical revisioning of the original texts.

The final two scenes barely even resemble the original texts.

Babylon Pink, the third scene in Nostalgia, originally featured a short scene of a woman fantasizing about being placed on a table at a dinner party and having two men ejaculate onto her face, with two women also present. In the re-imagining of this scene, the woman having the fantasy is an active participant in the sex acts with her two female companions. The sex acts are widely varied, with elements of dominance and submission and each character playing both dominant and submissive roles. The scene ends with the woman whose fantasy we are watching smearing cake onto the faces of her companions. This is fully disembodied ejaculatory imagery – moving further and further from the phallocentric focus of the porn films being reimagined. Most interestingly in this scene, none of the performers in this scene appear to orgasm, or at least their orgasms are not the focus of the scene. Rather, the focus is on power exchange and the interactions between the three women.

This shift in focus from orgasm as an end-goal to sexual pleasure as an on-going process allows Trouble to interrogate the purpose of pornographic sex. The ejaculatory moment in this scene, with cake being smeared across two women’s faces but nobody experiencing or performing orgasm, challenges the idea of ejaculation as proof of pleasure. The cake-ejaculate is constructed, manufactured, and fully disembodied. In fact, it is vegan cake, which takes it entirely out of the realm of bodies and their products. It is the moments of sexual interaction – the active participation of all performers in the sexual act – that is given the weight of authenticity.

Finally, Nostalgia ends with The Devil in Miss Jones. Both the original and the reimagining begin with Miss Jones’ suicide. This is the only thing that they have in common, and it is relevant because unlike the abduction that is removed from the reimagining of Behind the Green Door, Miss Jones’ suicide is an act of personal agency. It is a choice that she makes. In the original, she is given the opportunity to experience lust before going to Hell for her sin of suicide. In Trouble’s reimagining, she is also given the opportunity to experience lust. She and the angel that meets her in limbo are transported into the room with Trouble and her girlfriend. There are no similarities between this pornographic scene and any scene in the original film. There is no sadistic teacher, there is no ejaculation of any kind, and there is no punishment.

The four women engage in a variety of sex acts, experience or perform orgasms that do not appear to be the focus of the camera or the scene, and end the scene and the film tangled together asleep on the bed.

There have been moments in porn that shape cultural ideas about what sex is and how we do what we do when we get in bed together. Deep Throat, Behind the Green Door and The Devil in Miss Jones are considered the three most influential films of 70s porno chic, they changed how we film sex. They situated male ejaculation onto female bodies as the critical, defining moment in the pornographic scene. And we still see the money shot as the most common ending to scenes in heterosexual mainstream pornography.

Courtney Trouble was nostalgic for that power, for the ability to redefine how we think about and perform sex in pornographic scenes. She took four films that shaped pornography and reimagined them through her own queer feminist lens. This is what feminist porn does, and why I am happy to study it and support it. To be the active participant that Trouble imagines.

You’ve Got Something On Your Face: Ejaculatory Imagery in Courtney Trouble’s “Nostalgia”

I’m presenting at the English Undergraduate Symposium on Saturday! I am equal parts terrified and excited.

Here’s my outline. It’s super messy. But it’s something! I’ll post as it gets fleshed out. And I’d love feedback.

– Introduce the idea of feminist pornography, Trouble as a queer feminist pornographer (specifically state that not all feminist pornography is queer, but this film is) and introduce Nostalgia and the films it remakes (I estimate 3-5 minutes for this bit)

– Talk about ejaculation and how it has been theorized by feminist critics (starting with the critique of it as misogynistic and aggressive, moving into contemporary critiques that are more nuanced) (1-2 minutes)

– Run through the ejaculation scenes in the original porn – every. single. scene. includes male ejaculation onto the female performer’s face, and in Behind The Green Door this scene is a psychedelic, 7 minute slo-mo loop of semen flying through the air and landing on Marilyn Chambers’ waiting, passive face (2-3 minutes)

– Analyze the ejaculatory imagery in Nostalgia.

 – In the remake of Behind The Green Door, two female-bodied performers ejaculate onto the torso of the “Gloria” character. I believe that using this as the first scene centers ejaculation as the culmination of the sex act/scene, and it is relevant that this scene is the one that most closely mirrors the original film. Unlike in the original, the moments of ejaculation are not ejaculator-onto-passive body – she is making eye contact, she’s not restrained, and she engages with the two performers who are ejaculating onto her. This sets up the rest of the film, which is marked by active participation on the part of the character who was primarily passive in the original films. This also recovers the D/s elements of the Behind The Green Door scene by showing voluntary rather than forced submission on the part of the Gloria character. This ejaculatory scene is fully embodied – we see the female-bodied performers squirting onto Gloria’s chest and belly. This is also the final scene in this sequence. Another possibility is that this scene irrevocably (within the film’s universe) queers the act of ejaculation. There are no biologically male performers in the film, but this scene makes it clear that sex acts are not aligned to sex parts in the way that much mainstream heterosexual porn portrays them to be. (ie – not just cocks are capable of ejaculating, and not just passive heterosexual or fetishistically bisexual women are the recipients of ejaculate.)

 – In the remake of Deep Throat, glitter! Still simulated as coming from a body – either the strap-on or Madison Young’s throat. This is a further queering of ejaculation. In this scene it is entirely ambiguous whether the glitter ejaculate comes from Young’s throat (earlier in the scene she says she wants to “squirt glitter”) or from the condom-covered silicon cocks. Either way, it is not a ‘natural’ way for ejaculate to get out of a body and onto another body.

 – In the remake of Bablyon Pink, cake! Moving further and further from the true-to-original style of the first scene, and also moving further and further from the embodiment of ejaculation and into a fully constructed/disembodied model of ejaculation.

 – In the remake of The Devil in Miss Jones – no ejaculation AND no punishment for female sexuality. This completely decenters ejaculation as the culmination of the sex act/scene. (10 minutes)

 – Brief discussion of what this might mean for heterosexual pornography, where ejaculation from male bodies still needs to be recovered and re-imagined, so that we are not left with the idea that male ejaculation onto bodies is always misogynist or aggressive. Cite that facials article. (1 minute)