I saw a couple of films at the Lesbian & Gay Film Festival at the BFI last night: Mutantes (Porn Punk Feminism) by Virginie Despentes and Too Much Pussy: Feminist Sluts in The Queer X Show by Emilie Jouvet. Both were documentaries about women who have taken ownership of their sexuality through sex-work and/or the creation of their own pornography and performance art. The former film contextualises the queer punk scene of the 90s and 00s as following on from the 80s pro-sex feminist movement championed by figures like Annie Sprinkle, Scarlot Harlot and Candida Royalle. Tthe latter film follows seven women as they toured Europe in 2008 as the Queer X Show which is mentioned in Mutantes. I was disappointed that these films didn't shed a lot of new light on these subjects for me. It's great to see that films about these women are being made, however I would have prefered if the films had been analytical instead of simply celebratory. With Mutantes for example, so many fascinating performers and academics were interviewed, but only superficially and the overwhelming message conveyed was that the binary of madonna/whore has been overturned and that active female sexuality as exemplified by the prostitute is now the valorised role. For me, what is far more interesting and useful is that the work of sex-positive feminists such as Annie Sprinkle and cohort conveys a much more complicated relationship that can't be reduced to a binary at all. Shannon Bell's book Reading, writing, and rewriting the prostitute body provides a compelling argument around the work of Sprinkle, Royalle and Harlot.
I often feel disappointed if not outright alienated by mainstream representations of women and their sexuality. So many films fail to pass the 'Bechdel Test' which asks:
1. Does the film have at least two women in it?
2. Who [at some point] talk to each other?
3. About something besides a man?
Both of the films I saw last night passed this test with flying colours. So it made me feel rather hypocritical when I found myself thinking 'why can't these women on screen be talking about desires for men?' As a straight woman watching a lesbian film, is it inevitable that I would feel left out? I know the answer to that question is 'no' because Monika Treut's Virgin Machine is one of my favourite films. Maybe a more apt question is, why does it seem I can only find 'better'/ more accurate representations of female desire in queer cinema?
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As an aside, one of the performances in Too Much Pussy the artist was dressed in a cherry red vinyl suit and matching stilettos with a mask over her head lying limp for what I anticipated would be an S&M striptease, but she got up, revealed her face and started shouting "I don't remember what I look like!". She quickly broke out her tripod and camera to snap some self-portraits. Then she got out her computer in a near-hysterical fit trying to update her facebook, twitter and myspace pages. I couldn't help but laugh in recognition of that feeling, the narcissistic compulsion to document oneself at all moments - especially a performance - as if all that matters is that it happened so I can update my blog now.
Another aside, there was one T-shirt in each film which seems worth remembering. Scarlot Harlot had a shirt that said "SLUTS UNITE!" and one of the QueerXShow ladies was sporting a threadbare top that said "More Whores, No Wars".