The Feminist Spectator as Critic

4. The Dynamics of Desire: Sexuality and Gender in Pornography and Performance

4 The Dynamics of Desire: Sexuality and Gender in Pornography and Performance The role sexuality plays in performance and in the visual representation of women as sexual subjects or objects is an issue intensely debated within the feminist critical community. With its overt imaging of sexuality in an economic context constructcd for and controlled by men. pornography has become the focus of this debate. This focus has prompted the creation of two opposing positions on the function of pornography within the culture. One position is represented by feminists who are prosex and who support the cultural production of sexual fantasies-for some groups. often in the form of lesbian pornography and the creation of performance-like. sadomasochistic rituals. The opposing view is articulated by antipornography feminists who argue for legislation against pornographic images of women, contending that pornography effuses sexual violence against women in the society at large.! Alice Echols. in her critique of their analysis. writes that antiporn feminists have gone as far as legislating against imagination in the form of fantasy which "they claim is dangerous because it entails the substitution of an illusion for the 'social-sexual reality' of another person. In rejecting as so much 'male-identified mind-body dualism' the belief that fantasy is the repository of our ambivalent and conf1ictual feelings, [antipornJ feminists have developed a highly mechanistic , behaviorist analysis that conf1ates fantasy with reality and pornography with violence."2 The insidious alliance between antipornography feminists and conservatives in the New Right-who have launched a moral crusade against both pornography and alternative sexual lifestyles-makes lucid analysis of the representation of sexuality crucial. The feminist antiporn movement has its antecedents in American feminism of the 1970s. which shifted its focus away from sexuality to a notion of sexual difference that reified gender. 3 Unifying women around the commonalities provided hy gender required a concomitant disarnling of the perceived threat lesbian sexuality posed to the cohesiveness of the movement, highlighting, as it 60 The Dynamics ofDesire would, women's differences in their choice of sexual preference. Sue-Ellen Case believes that this shift marginalized lesbians by recasting lesbianism in political terms and desexualizing the lesbian lifestyle with the suffix "-feminist ."4 The lesbian prosex position vis-a.-vis pornography and sexual fantasy is in some respects an effort to recuperate the lesbian position within feminism. Lesbians have a lot at stake in the antipornography debate, because despite feminist efforts to reduce it to female friendship, or to diffuse it across a lesbian continuum, lesbianism is still defined by a choice of sexuality.5 The antisex morality of the antiporn movement threatens to render lesbians not only marginal to feminism, but totally invisible. If sexuality is censored, if fantasies are legislated against, if the feminist movement is allowed to dictate or implicitly condones governmental legislation of the "proper" expression and representation of sexuality, the free expression of self and sexuality will slip into a totalitarian framework. The fact of lesbian sexuality as sexual expression and representation makes the lesbian perspective crucial to an understanding of the politics of pornography. This chapter will briefly review the opposing positions on the pornography debate, applying their principles to various forms of performance and the visual representation of women's sexuality. From performance art and erotica, through lesbian performance and lesbian pornography, a range of materials will illustrate the influence of both traditional and feminist theories of gender and sexuality on the representation of women within the culture. Lack of Illusions: The Antipornography Debate and Cultural Feminist Performance The model antipornography law drafted by Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon defines pornography as "the graphic sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures and/or words."6 The law goes on to enumerate the various conditions under which the representation of women is considered pornographic , focusing on sexual objectification as the primary determining factor. In an accompanying statement, Dworkin clarifies the issue of subordination in terms of an imbalance of power: "Subordination is a social-political dynamic consisting of several parts. The first is that there is a hierarchy. There's somebody on the top and somebody on the bottom.... The second ... is objectification . The third ... is submission.... The fourth is violence."7 For Dworkin, the insertion of power into social, political, and sexual situations automatically establishes a hierarchy that leads to violence against women. Feminists who embrace this position as an argument against pornography are often allied theoretically and politically with cultural feminism.8 Cultural feminists tend to valorize what...