Endless knot/tangled web – my Middle English final paper

The evolution of a paper. I really enjoyed this research, and am considering doing more work in Arthurian stories.

This paper begins four years ago in English 302, in the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s concept of male homosociality, which exists on a “continuum between homosocial and homosexual” (2435). It takes root in various Women’s Studies classes, with the exciting prospect of uncovering queer readings and recovering feminine histories. The first green leaves of this paper, the first iteration of the thesis, is that the female homosociality of Dame Tryamour and Gwenore in Sir Launfal and Morgan le Fay and Guinevere in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is both a queer presence within the texts and an indication of the anxiety and tension between hegemonic Christianity and the paganism represented by the fairy women. This homosociality exists, said the original thesis, and it is as conflict-driven and violent as the homosociality that Sedgwick articulates for men. It was a reach towards collapsing the gender binary, recognizing women’s power and violence, and recognizing the potential for women’s queerness in restrictive Christian social contexts. It was founded on the idea that Christian conceptions of gender must necessarily be heterosexual and heteronormative, and that reading queerness into the text – a queerness that is dependant on the heteronorm – would be a form of resistance to the contemporary norm, and would contribute to a history of feminist scholarship that uncovers queer histories and exposes the ways in which patriarchy is always already undermining itself.

But this paper, an analysis of these texts, cannot flourish in the homo/hetero binary that the original thesis was planted in, because as James Schultz points out, “the heterosexual norm… clamps down on the present and… colonizes the past” (20). Both Schultz and Karma Lochrie argue convincingly that “[t]he heteronormativity of modern scholarship ends up creating its own modern categories where they did not exist before… flattening the gender dynamics of medieval sexualities” (Lochrie xvi). This paper, then, becomes an effort at decolonizing my own scholarship, at freeing my thesis from the contemporary constructions of sexuality that battened it down into intelligible, articulable binaries.[i] It shifts, and in the shifting comes back to Louise O. Fradenburg, and the productive scholarly practice of recognizing and accepting the “undecidability” of a text. My thesis tracks along both an ‘endless knotte’ of contemporary binaries and a tangled web of complexities and undecidabilities.

[i] Although Schultz and Lochrie have convinced me that an uncritical, unintentional projection of contemporary categories of identity into medieval texts is problematic, I am not convinced that an intentionally anachronistic reading doesn’t have a place in contemporary scholarship. For example, although “bisexuality” is not a category that would hold any meaning for a medieval poet, and reading bisexuality into Sir Gawain and the Green Knight would perform exactly the “colonizing” that Schultz warns again, a bisexual reading of Gawain and Bertilak could have multiple positive outcomes for both queer and medieval scholarship. We read these texts within our own time, and the ability to see ourselves represented – even if the original author may never have conceived of our identities – is invaluable. But that’s a different paper!

And here is the paper I actually wrote:

“Don’t Be A Dick”: Applying Wheaton’s Law to Academics and Race

I am working on a major revision of a paper, with an eye to submitting it to the Porn Studies Journal and crossing my fingers that it passes peer review. This is exciting. One of my professors is supervising the revision and helping me figure out how to write a paper for a journal (a different creature than a paper written for a class).

The paper is about the performance of cisgender masculinity in heterosexual scenes in feminist pornography. My hypothesis is that this is a gender/sex performance that is (at least in my existing case study – Ned Mayhem’s performance of masculinity in Fuckstyles of the Queer and Famous) non-normative and one that challenges assumptions of what it means to perform cisgender masculinity. One case study, however, is not enough, and this is where I run into a thorny academic/activist issue.

Ned Mayhem is white. I am also white. Porn studies, along with many academic disciplines, have historically been pretty pale and I am concerned about contributing to an academic exploration of pornography that does not address the many people of colour working within and around pornography. I am also aware that what it means to “perform cisgender masculinity” is different depending on class, race and ability (among other factors). It seems shortsighted and lacking intersectionality to confine my paper to a discussion of only white cisgender masculinity in pornography.

However, what authority do I, as a white academic, have to speak about the performance of masculinity by a racialized porn performer? Not only to speak about, but also to examine through the lenses provided by academics and scholars of colour, and by activist and feminist pornographers of colour.

White academics have committed significant violence against our racialized colleagues, appropriating the intellectual contributions of people of colour without making space for people of colour in the academy. This is evident in the frequency with which Black feminists such as bell hooks and Audre Lorde are cited by white feminists who do not engage with race politics beyond appropriating a brilliant turn of phrase for a facebook status or to hang an academic argument on. (And credit must go to the Black women on Twitter, particularly in the #solidarityisforwhitewomen hashtag, for bringing this issue up – I had never realized how problematic it could be to take Black women’s words and not engage any further.)

I struggled with this idea in my honours thesis, where bell hooks’ concept of the confrontational gaze formed a critical piece of my analysis. In my thesis, the idea of the confrontational gaze was necessary for understanding how Courtney Trouble re-appropriated the money shot from the patriarchal, misogynist pornography that it originated within. hooks’ insight was invaluable for me. And yet, I was not writing about race and race did not feature with any significance in my thesis. Choosing not to use hooks’ insight would have made my thesis weaker, and avoiding the work of academics of colour is clearly not the answer. This is a tangle I have yet to work myself out of, and one that becomes more and more relevant as I work on this revision.

It is clearly not okay to avoid the intellectual contributions of people of colour in my work as a white academic – doing so would perpetuate an oppressive academic system that consistently devalues the work of anyone outside the select, privileged group. However, I am becoming more and more convinced that it is also problematic to simply take up the lens provided by an intellectual from a marginalized community and use it with impunity.

And this is where I run into a wall.

Jane Doe, MD tweeted earlier in the summer:

White activists, what you may see as solidarity or signal boosting is actually appropriation. See: abortion rts freedom ride #FJL

— Jane Doe, MD (@DrJaneChi) July 28, 2013

 
I think this is sometimes the case with white academics as well. What is meant to be inclusive and intersectional may actually be (mis)appropriative. Where I (from my position of privilege) see the potential for solidarity, and want to say “yes, me too!” to the writing of academics of colour, there is the potential for me to be (mis)appropriative, to claim their words for my own when I actually have no right to them, to pull them out of their own context and into mine, leaving their work behind.

Reading Ariane Cruz’s essay “Pornography: A Black Feminist Woman Scholar’s Reconciliation” as research on this topic, I became aware of a visceral response in myself, a “yes, me too!” when Cruz articulates the complexities of the relationship between pornography and feminism. And yet, Cruz is not articulating the complexities of “the relationship between pornography and feminism.”

She is speaking specifically and directly about pornography and Black feminism. My “yes, me too!” echoes the problematic and on-going process of queer activism and queer theory using Black activism and Black theory as a stepping stone, using the backs of our Black colleagues as a bridge for our activism.[1] I am cognizant of the risk in my “me too!” – the potential for this response to step on and muffle the voice and meaning of Cruz’ work.

I want to find solidarity in the essay, because so much of what she writes speaks to me and to my experience as a feminist and as a scholar studying pornography. Cruz articulates the conflict and complexity of studying pornographies in a way that speaks directly to my own experience of pornography. As I become more and more immersed in both the viewing and analysis of pornography and the scholarship surrounding it, I relate more strongly to her statement that “[s]truggles with how to place pornography in the personal space of my home and in the professional space of my office speak to the broader, yet equally nebulous question of pornography’s place in modern society” (217).

She writes, “I have become less assured of the intrinsic virtues of mainstream pornography – its expression of alternative sexualities, its possibilities of and for sexual pleasure outside of a white heteropatriarchal imagination or fantasy, and its capability for an admittedly utopian construction that I might call “sustainable arousal,” arousal that is not an ephemeral feeling but rather one that endures” (222).

Similarly, as I realize that even queer pornography can reinscribe and reinforce dominant ideals of beauty, dominant ideals of gender performance, dominant ideals of acceptable sexual behaviour, I become less and less dogmatic in my belief that pornography (even feminist pornography) is a universal good. We have some views in common, we have some experiences in common. But there are significant differences between my experience of pornography, and Cruz’s. She writes about the specific experience of Black women’s hypersexualization, something that I, socialized as a white woman (though not a woman), have never and will never experience. Is it okay for me to take the parts that fit with my experience out of Cruz’s essay, and leave the rest behind? Is it okay to use her insight, but to only use the bits of it that work for my argument, for my own ends?

In my effort to draw on Black scholarship, to learn from Black scholars and engage with Black thought, there is the potential for me to do harm, to contribute to the ongoing colonization and appropriation of Black culture and thought.

That there is multidirectional flow of knowledge (that Linda Williams is a key reference in Cruz’s essay, for example) does not justify the constant appropriation of Black thought by white academics. Black writers have been actively plagiarized by white writers (most recently Gawker lifted tweets by Black author @wayoftheid word-for-word without attribution). There is a difference between learning from each other and stepping on each other, and because white academics have greater privilege, it is much easier for us to step on rather than learn from.

My “yes, me too!” response is because there is significant value in Cruz’s work. Her essay evoked a wide range of feelings and thoughts – multiple times I had to stop and sit, digest what she had just said. And there are similarities in our struggles. (Not universality, not homogeneity, but similarity.) There are important insights in her work that can illuminate and further both my academic projects and my queer activism.

And yet, this must be done in a respectful and appropriate (rather than appropriative) way.

So here are the two rocks I find myself between, the two rocks I have been wedged between all summer as I struggle with this concept of lateral appropriation, racism, and appropriative intersectionality:

On the one hand, ignoring the presence of race, and the contributions of colored scholars, contributes to the whitewashing of academia that I am so vehemently against. It is not an option.

Yet, on the other hand, appropriating the scholarship and work of scholars of colour has the potential to also be harmful, to speak for or to claim understanding of their experiences and their work, or to simply erase their experiences and claim their voice as my own.

So I can’t write only from and about my own experience because my experience is as a white scholar and that would contribute to the whitewashing of academics.[2] But I also must be careful in how I use the work of scholars of colour in my own academics. This leaves me feeling anxious and uncertain as I move forward with my academic projects, but I think that feeling of anxiety is necessary. It should not be easy to navigate issues of privilege and oppression as the person with privilege. If it is easy, I think perhaps that means you’re missing some critical bits of information. Being in this particular “rock/hard place” is infinitely easier than being in the position of facing systemic racism on a daily basis. I can walk away from this, write whatever I want and continue to appropriate, or just ignore that race is an issue, and at worst I will be a lesser scholar. Academics of colour (people of colour) don’t have the option to walk away from it.

In Jacob Anderson-Minshall’s essay “The Enemy Within: On Becoming a Straight White Guy,” he writes that “The Combahee River Collective’s “A Black Feminist Statement” could have been written about transgender people rather than black women” (29), and goes on to use the language of the text to discuss the oppression of transgender people. It is this type of sentiment and statement that I am wary of expressing, because it decenters Black women as the subject of their own writing. Although I do think that parallels can be drawn, and that these parallels and efforts at coalition are important, claiming Black women’s writing for a different or broader audience risks further marginalizing and erasing the experiences that are unique to Black women, particularly when there is not an acknowledgement of the ongoing, unique issues faced by Black women and other racialized individuals.

Later, Anderson-Minshall writes that “[t]here are a lot of awful problems in the world today, and to solve them we need to make allies and build bridges to other movements seeking change. We need to accept the problems of others as our own” (32). I think there is a danger in claiming the problems of others as our own. Although I agree that we do need to “make allies and build bridges,” I disagree that the way to do this is to claim a universality of experience, a homogeneity of problems. Yes, the kyriarchy impacts all of us, and each point of oppression has ripple effects throughout the rest of society. Misogyny negatively impacts men by cutting masculinity off from any traits that could be considered feminine. Racism negatively impacts white individuals by creating adversarial interactions where collaboration would be not only possible but beneficial. But misogyny does not threaten men – it benefits men. Racism does not threaten white individuals – it benefits white individuals (like myself). These are problems that are unique to the identity category being oppressed, being threatened, and although they do negatively impact all of society, they are not equally available to claim.

Ned Mayhem, later in the same anthology, writes that “[i]t’s easy to talk about how the hierarchy of privilege is bullshit when you’re perched at the top of it, and it’s easy to talk about destigmatizing marginalized groups while belonging to none of them” (81). This insight seems critical, especially when paired with Shiri Eisner’s statement that “[c]onnecting between different struggles is one of the cornerstones to radical political thinking. To acknowledge that all forms of oppression are interrelated is so acknowledge that we all have a stake in each other’s liberation, that none of us is free until everyone is free” (36).

There is a difference, I think, between acknowledging the interrelatedness of problems, and claiming them as our own. It is a small difference, but seems, to me, to be critical.

Ned Mayhem writes about the challenges that he faces in the porn industry, particularly around expectations of masculinity. However, these challenges are not the same challenges that someone with a different body would face. He writes, “[b]eing Caucasian in porn means that I don’t have to look for work exclusively on sites that fetishize my ethnic background. Being cisgendered and having a normative body type means that I am offered more work, and I am not publicly mocked or insulted by the same companies that hire me” (81). It is this acknowledgement of privilege, coupled with an awareness of other groups’ problems and their interrelatedness to his own struggles, that makes his essay feel more inclusive to me.

In the case of my paper, I still think that it’s important to include a case study that looks at a racialized cisgender male performer in a heterosexual scene, in addition to the case study of Ned Mayhem in Fuckstyles of the Queer and Famous. I haven’t picked the scene yet, but I have started reading everything I can get my hands on about racialized masculinities. I’m also reading about race in pornography, and trying to get a handle on not only how race is represented in pornography, but also on how academics and activists of colour are responding to those representations.

This process has been daunting, but incredibly valuable. In reading about Black scholar’s responses to Black bodies in pornography, my own thoughts about genderqueer bodies in pornography have been deepened and become more nuanced. There are interconnected elements in the various relationships between pornography and marginalized and oppressed identities. I think that learning from each other is important – beyond important! I think it is critical.

But our learning cannot come at each other’s expense. And too often, it is too easy for white academics like myself to wiggle off that hook and thoughtlessly trample on the work and writing of our colleagues. We must apply Wheaton’s Law to our academic life as much as to the rest of our lives.

 

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[1] Referencing This Bridge Called My Back

[2] Longest footnote ever: It occurs to me that it is not actually true that writing about white experience necessarily contributes to whitewashing. Writing about white experience as though it were universal is whitewashing. If I wrote about white experience as white experience, that could be valuable and legitimate.

Hmm.

And yet, I don’t want to write about whiteness. Whiteness is not the identity category that I struggle with (a factor of my privilege as a white person). I want to study and write about my genderqueer identity, my bisexual identity, my polyamory, my kink, my neurodivergence, my invisible disability.

I read somewhere that ‘straight white men are the only group that actively seeks marginalization.’ I think perhaps I am experiencing/performing a little bit of this problematic “seeking marginalization” – I don’t want to write about my whiteness because I don’t want to write about my experience as a person with privilege. It is more interesting and more rewarding to write about my experiences of marginalization and oppression. Because my whiteness is invisible to me, because I feel my oppression but I do not feel my privilege, those points of oppression are infinitely more “real” and more “writeable.”

This is a difficult realization.

I wonder if it is possible to critically engage with my whiteness, to write about my privilege from within my privilege, while still maintaining my focus on the areas that interest me more – my orienatation, my neurodivergence, my kink, my poly, my gender identity. To incorporate an engagement with (or at least an active and aware acknowledgement of) my whiteness and how it impacts my scholarship and life into my practice of academic writing. To not let it be invisible.

Works Cited:

Anderson-Minshall, Jacob. “The Enemy Within: On Becoming a Straight White Guy.” Men Speak Out. Ed. Shira Tarrant. New York: Routledge, 2013. 28-33.

Cruz, Ariane. “Pornography: A Black Feminist Woman Scholar’s Reconciliation.” The Feminist Porn Book. Ed. Tristan Taormino et al. New York: The Feminist Press, 2013. 215-227.

Doe, Jane. Tweet from @DrJaneChi. Twitter.com. 28 July 2013.

Eisner, Shiri. Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution. Berkeley: Seal Press, 2013.

Mayhem, Ned. “Male and Queer in the Porn Industry.” Men Speak Out. Ed. Shira Tarrant. New York: Routledge, 2013. 80-86.

DH 2013: Multimedia Design for Research Creation, Community Engagement and Knowledge Mobilization

Earlier this month I attended the Digital Humanities Summer Institute at the University of Victoria for the first time. I am hoping to be back next year, and probably for many years after that. I have a secret dream of eventually teaching a course there on the topic of creating inclusive online spaces, and using anti-oppressive language and community-building skills to create safer and more welcoming spaces for marginalized groups. And I’m thrilled because DHSI seems like the kind of place where the intersection of social justice and academics would be more than welcome.

I wrote a bit about my DHSI experience over at Uni(di)versity (where you can catch me blogging much more regularly, since I have deadlines and an editor!).

DHSI offers a wide variety of courses over the week, and I attended Multimedia Design for Research Creation, Community Engagement and Knowledge Mobilization. You can read about the course in this Storify link.

Over the course of five days, I developed an extensive (and expanding) idea for ‘multimedia design’ in multiple areas of my life. Read about my activism, academics, and some kind of wacky alt-academic career plans after the cut (in that order, because if I’m honest that’s the way I prioritize my life).

April 13 work

I’m disappointed with the work I’m producing. I feel like the information is in my head, but I can’t shake it loose. I made myself a list of goals to accomplish in yesterday’s work but then I totally failed to accomplish a single one of them. I’m also considering whether a chronological approach to the lit review is actually the best way to go. I’m leaning away from that, and am thinking about reorganizing it to be more thematic. (So, rather than anti-porn -> anti-censorship -> pro-porn, which is basically chronological (though there are two waves of anti-porn), I’m leaning towards grouping it thematically and looking at writing about ejaculation and about queer interpretations of pornography. So it would be two sections rather than three/four, and when I’m writing about ejaculation, I’d be talking about the gendered power dynamics of the act, etc. And that leads in to a discussion of the queer issues.

In more positive news, I emailed Courtney Trouble yesterday and got a fantastic reply back from her with some insight into why she chose the scenes she did. So, that’s awesome.

I’m feeling really discouraged about this process, and worried that I’m just kidding myself if I think I’ve got what it takes to be an academic. It’s disappointing and frustrating.

My goal for today is to get 2000 words written, since I was 450 words shy of my goal for yesterday.

Anyway, yesterday’s work:

April 12 Work

It was like pulling teeth to get the last 300 words written, and I’m still 30 short. Hopefully tomorrow will be better!

April 11 work

After the jump.

April 10 work

I did a lot of work! It might even be actually usable work! I am starting to feel less terrified. (I also wrote almost 1400 words today. If I can keep that up, I will be finished my thesis in 10 days and will have 4 days to edit it. Woo!)

Okay, today’s work, for those who are reading it. Oh, and a note – I’m pasting in my Works Cited as it grows, so not all of the works are cited in each day’s work. But I am happy with how it is growing each day. And I came up with a structure for my lit review today.

April 9 pages

Today’s writing session was more productive! And I found some flow – I think a lot of what I came up with as a result of the close-read of Karen Boyle’s article will be usable. To avoid annoying anyone who doesn’t want to read these progress updates, it’s after the jump.

Content!

Writing this honours project is like PULLING TEETH. So I’m going to post my pages as I write them, unedited. I will also post as I edit. This may be horrifically tedious but I want to document the process and I want to have a place to put my writing where people can see that it is (or isn’t) actually happening. Here are the three pages I wrote at my Friday writing session. (I didn’t do any writing over the weekend. It was a tumultuous weekend in non-academic ways. My mental health is… teetering.)

* indicates where I gave up on a thought and moved on. This is an attempt at just getting words onto the page, which is not how I normally work. But words need to happen. So. Read the mess after this – 

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.