In March of this year, the authors of Manifesta spoke at a Brooklyn Museum panel about feminism across generations. The panel discussion was framed as a dialogue across feminist generations in celebration of the Sackler Center, the one-of-a-kind feminist art center at the museum which houses the Dinner Party. I was pretty excited to go see them and pretty disappointed in how the panel actually turned out. Lots of discussion of second wave this and third wave that. They talked about their second wave feminist mothers and repeatedly brought up the participation of their husbands in childcare. The discussion failed to examine the family as the foundational site of patriarchy. The panel placed sexism and misogyny in accurate yet contextually remote places like sex trafficking, but not in contextually present places like their own marriages... marriage being the living and breathing building material of patriarchy. They talked a little bit about pornography but not at all about compulsory heterosexuality.
Fast forward a few weeks to April, when I had the honor of bringing a program from MIX NYC to Philadelphia for our second round as guest curators for The Flickering Light. After the bus and train, Mt. Airy positively glowed green, lush and luxurious with coffee shops and beautiful old houses and gardens. Even before the film screening at the Art Garage in Mt Airy, I could sense a bad vibe from the audience, maybe a skepticism or lack of interest... something. Feeling some coldness during the introduction, I probably should have intervened in the moment. Made a joke or asked a question. How many of you are familiar with experimental film? What brought you here tonight? Curious about what you are about to see? Instead I did my usual introduction about what MIX does, our festival and various projects. I saw no one outwardly presenting as femme, at least not displaying any of the traditional markers... And I got very little eye contact. The few people with long hair seemed more on the all-natural side of things. My rational voice scolded me not to assume anything. After all, they must have come to the screening for a reason. After all, the title of the screening instantly conveyed a lot of information about the content: Creepy Dirty Girlie. After all, The Flickering Light is a warm, welcoming, independent, free-spirited, open minded art space. And I made a point of making sure everyone got the program notes to contextualize what they were about to see: queer femininity. And although I don't remember exactly what I said in the intro, I know the words "queer," "femme" and "sexuality" were high on the word count.
We had an audience of about 35, but by the second film people started walking out. Six people walked about within the first 20 minutes of a screening that totaled less than 60 minutes worth of short films. There were some x-mas lights that remained lit during the screening, by necessity since in an emergency you need people to be able to find the exit. The lights enabled me to see everyone's faces and literally averted eyes at the somewhat obscured penis in Project B*mbi, an experimental film that shows various strains of male domination over women, animals, and other men. A woman in front of me put her hand over her eyes at a brief moment of cock from Debbie Does Dallas, which Project B*mbi overlays with Bambi and The Deer Hunter. The film brilliantly invokes pornographic sexuality in order to reveal a discourse of domination. I love Project B*mbi, like I love all the films in this program...
More walk-outs followed the S/M images in 120 Secondi, and I am not sure if people even made it to the pussy close-ups in Pop or Hidden. The walk-outs probably either missed or didn't enjoy the subversive humor in One Useless Prick, or in Sometimes You Fight for the World, Sometimes You Fight for Yourself, or in Golden Diamonds. And they definitely missed the straight-up feminism in Hey F*ck Face and My Dead Brain. While I do not take audience discomfort personally, I do wonder what the person sitting one row in front of me thought- I just introduced the films, mentioned I came all the way from NY to bring you this screening- and I am sitting right behind you. She couldn't stick out a single short film she didn't like in order to see the program as a whole? I suspect this was not a matter of like or dislike, but a matter of offense. In a queer film screening, femininity and even het porn images seemed like obvious feminist content to me. But this audience showed me how easy it was to miss! And reminded me about the lack of consensus among queer women about feminism. The content offended them and I was offended they walked out. Offense all around.
Creepy Dirty Girlie is a program of short films dealing in some way or other with queer feminine sexual expression. Some more subtle than others, some serious, some comical. The program went over well during its original screening at MIX22-The NY Queer Experimental Film Festival last fall, with an audience of approximately 85. Audience members even dressed up for the occasion. At MIX, Creepy Dirty Girlie was thrilling. Many of the film makers were in attendance. The audience was energetic and sexy, with everyone celebrating visible queer femininity on the screen, in the audience, all around.
But the Mt. Airy screening showed me a whole different angle, put me into another state of consciousness, shifted my vision and allowed me to see the films through different eyes. See there were no traditional plots in any of the films... and there weren't even any characters speaking dialogue! I hadn't even noticed the absence of these traditional movie elements before this particular screening. I sat in the audience in Mt. Airy and realized we were showing queer women's sexuality with no narrative. The work challenges the audience to make meaning. I mean, it was clear to me when I was viewing these films and assembling the show for MIX that every last minute was critical of heteronormativity and showed the complicated, perilous relationship between women, femininity, sexism and sexual expression. Hence the title... but it was not clear at the time that the films pushed other boundaries too.
As Abigail Ottoman recently noted, "Being femme is a constant, simultaneous evocation and rejection of heterosexuality." Maybe our audience in Mt Airy only saw the evocation and missed the rejection part. I thought these films in total were about being women, about our bodies, about what is expected of us. But the audience members who left only saw the fucking. At the end of the screening, a few audience members hung out for discussion but most hustled right out. One woman stayed to discuss Lilith references with the excellent film makers behind My Dead Brain. But we mostly missed out on any kind of dialogue, and that was probably the biggest loss of all. In Barbara Hammer's memoir, Hammer! Making Movies out of Sex and Life, she discusses touring with her films and the heated discussions afterward about the explicit sexual content, and I was really inspired by this vision of an engaged feminist dyke community. So I guess the lack of argument is what bothers me most, not the fact that people were offended. I just wish they had stuck around to talk about it or something. Didn't anyone want to give me a piece of their mind?
There is no excuse for walking out on sexuality explicit content when it was noted on the website and emails. During an impromptu processing session after the screening, the excellent and insightful founder of The Flicking Light discussed the fact that the event had been listed on two lesbian meet-up sites without any description. And there is history in lesbian culture of sex-negative attitudes and beliefs, rooted in early second wave feminist critiques of the very real sexist foundations of conventional pornography. A lot of queers I know pretty much shit on this part of our history, but we need to remember that this very criticism of pornography at least in part motivated a lot of the home made porn, radical porn and sex positive porn we enjoy today. And some of the earliest sex-positive, non-oppressive images of women's sexuality were positive responses to criticism of conventional pornography, when we took on the criticisms not by discounting pornography but by making better porn. But on the flip side, it is also where feminism got branded as puritanical, and where right-wing patriarchal opportunists jumped into the fray and represented themselves as being on the same side as feminism. It is where feminism became an easy target for caricature as merely the old fashioned belief that women are somehow morally superior or just more high-minded and pure. The pro-sex/anti-porn conversation was still contemporary, relevant and real when I was coming out in the 1990s. And it's a fact that all the historic feminist disagreements are present in our queer subculture's drinking water regardless of our acknowledgment or lack thereof.
Debate is vital to community building. Open disagreement creates bonds while unspoken disagreement creates distance. Respectfully communicating our disagreements and differences creates stronger connections, while minimizing or silencing them creates exclusion, isolation and alienation. One of the things I really appreciated about the obits for Andrea Dworkin was the suggestion that we need a feminism big enough to include her, regardless of what we think of her perspective, because it is a vital part of this vast, vast, vast thing called feminism. And of course I believe feminism must always contain disparate and even contradictory points of view, because the deliberate absence of a monolithic, singular perspective is "essential" to feminism. Feminism must always contain the essential idea of refusing essential ideas. Yet I thought the sex wars were settled and that pro-sex feminism had won. Pornography didn't go away and neither did sexism, but public discourse opened slightly to include women's desires and pleasures. Well, at least some women's desires and pleasures. Well, at least some of those desires and pleasures...
So here is where the third wave feminism panel comes in. This version of feminism was still on my mind at the screening, when I was trying to figure out why people left. So here we sit with the so-called third wave which claims to be more inclusive. I have been working on MIX festivals and community screenings since 2007 and this was my only walk-out experience, so I really needed to root around for all the tools in the toolbox to try and understand.
The Brooklyn Museum panel was full of references to husbands, children and writing "slut" across your belly in red lipstick. This particular version of straight feminism seems to have become all about a woman’s right to chose to stay home and to raise her baby exactly how she wants to; as if poor women and women of color ever had any choice about working outside the home and as if we had regressed to a point where it is assumed that all women want children. Their feminism seems unambitious, kind of like the assimilationist gay movement. And yet I sincerely give them credit for their tireless work on the most egregious forms of the oppression of women. They are feminists, just as gay marriage advocates are activists. The trouble is how they skim the surface of our lives and spend their energy primarily on causes that will not change the fundamental injustices the vast majority of us live with every day. It's another case of the most privileged among us doing work that makes them feel better about the lives they are already leading.
What the panel espoused seems like such a personal and specific form of feminism, as though the third wave is the feminism belongs to the set of women who are daughters of second wave feminists. But if your parents were older, like mine, or not feminists- feminism was certainly not in your drinking water the way these panelists claimed it was in theirs. What I remember about feminism from the 80s and 90s was the backlash as described by Susan Faludi. The message was that women were foolish for wanting to “have it all” and children had suffered from their mothers' ambition. I'm not opposed to the third wave, and certainly I take issue with different elements of every variety of feminism to date... each issue and every argument serves to make me more committed to feminism, not less so. But enough waves already anyway, that's a metaphor that has seriously fucking outlived its usefulness!
Yet this sort of watered-down, consumer individualist relatively sex-positive third wave feminist mentality was not what we encountered at the screening. On the panel, the third wave feminists cited Tina Fey having her own show as a feminist accomplishment. That means pretty much any woman doing anything could be considered a feminist accomplishment, since the content of 30 Rock is a far cry from liberatory and while at times funny, the show generally reinforces gender stereotypes and all the gay-related jokes have simply being gay as the punchline. But even Tina Fey would understand, and any feminist should certainly understand in the presentation of sexually explicit images an opportunity to re-interpret what would appear to be traditionally het porn images in the context of feminist discourses of sexuality and pleasure. Our audience wasn't tuned in to this and I am wondering whether they were turned off to the porn because they believe it exploits women or they were turned off because it was not sufficiently entertaining or accessible. Or because the femme women in it didn't seem like "real dykes," which is a tired old misogynist trope in the lesbian community. I would gladly argue against any of these perspectives. All I can be sure of is that they did not want to see it, and they did not want to talk about it either.
Which begs the question of whether queer films are something we merely pay to see/consume, or part of queer people's unique culture that we painstakingly build through our full participation and love. In which case, maybe walking out is a form of participation, but to me, it looks too much like doing nothing. These questions were at the forefront of feminist dialogue years ago, and this experience made them feel as of yet unresolved.
If pleasure is no longer part of the feminist conversation, even contemporary pop feminism, then maybe the anti-porn feminists really did with the sex wars... I studied the sex wars and all I got was this lousy third wave feminism where wealthy white women train their husbands to change diapers! And queer alternatives that support patriarchy and consumers who walk away from sexuality.
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