Titans

In October 2011, Helene Cixous, Judith Butler and Avital Ronell came to New York and gave a panel called Disruptive Kinship. In December 2011, Ron Athey and Julie Tolentino came to New York and gave a talk and a performance. 

Ron Athey 

•    Influenced by Throbbing Gristle making a collage

•    Translating visual images into live performances

•    Five hits of acid and whiskey

•    Facing the grotesque

•    St Sebastian. Mishima brought me to him. Always revived during times of plague.

•    Drawing a graph of AIDS, a long journey from immanent death to Frankenstein drugs.

•    Post AIDS, what does it mean.

•    Images in response to people's death

Helene Cixous

•    We expect that we will listen in an affinitive way, with hospitality. In a kind of in translation that permeates body and soul.

•    Matter does not exist without interaction. Between atoms there are interactions. One would wish this would happen between living beings.

•    Things that interact become one, like with gluons, in between. Not only among humans. Translating into other species. Not having affinities before. My mother became a kind of cat. She expresses herself catly.

Julie Tolentino

•    Finding my way through activism. Training as an activist, I understood this as a dancer, the deep spaces of relationship

•    Clit Club multi race and multi class

•    Friends disappearing. Going to ACT UP but also trying to find artistic outlets

•    Memorial work that was personal and not performed.

This is a test. Can I hang with the graduate school lecture crowd, being a garden variety intellectual with a state college education?

Judith Butler 

•    Forms of kinship that are disruptive, what are they meant to disrupt?

•    Kinship a way of ordering relationships? Reordering one that needs disruption?

•    Or maybe kinship rests upon a certain disruption.

•    Kinship emerged in feminist anthropology to ask about exceeding the family.

•    Modes of intimate alliance that take neither conjugality or reproduction as their means.

•    Not all intimate bonds are kin, so how do we distinguish?

•    Foundering on the categories.

•    Do we only know them through the breach? Nexus of greek tragedy.

•    At what moments does one get recognized as or become kin?

•    Oedipus could not recognize mother or father, or at least not consciously.

•    Drum one's own subconscious if one is to make sense of kinship.

Ron Athey

•    I forget sometimes I worked with a cast of 25 before I ever did solo. Not a minimalist.

•    Understanding the flesh and navigating it differently.

Avital Ronell 

•    The traumatic way in which we bind to each other

•    Pulling together, we show up in what severs and cuts describing us. Cut to each others size.

•    Stuck with old names and old ways of naming. You may want to advance but language lassos us back. Limits us.

•    Without is connected in-stoppably to with. Even if there is a severance, we are still WITHout. A structure that holds us.

•    Why do we say "all alone"? Isn't it shitty enough to be "alone"?

•    Elective affinities. A question of how people might relate in ways that cannot be substantialized.

•    Adoptions, enrollments, offering a dismal set of nonstarters.

Thought about my kinship with my former coworkers, how these relationships were not friendship or family. But the breaking apart that happens in lay-offs, a forceful disruption of affiliation, it has an impact on our society, to have so many people who have experienced being let go, having their attachment to colleagues severed. I mean, I had an especially emotional attachment to my coworkers after processing so much around racism and homophobia and exclusivity and so much more that was in the air in our work, then suddenly I'm ass out and all those problems are none of my concern anymore. I loved these people who were not my friends or family. But even with people you don't like that much, seeing them every day they grow on you and you don’t want to be parted from them. Maybe it is in our nature to grow attached to those around us. At least I know it's in my nature. What are the psychic implications of having the relational disruption of lay-offs happen on a massive scale across the country?

Julie Tolentino 

•    Supposedly you are learning about your body in dance... but if you keep exploring you learn an inside-out understanding of what it can do and how it can change... challenging your body to go to a place where you don't know what you have... making changes in modes, duration, embedded texts

•    Rope containing myself and containing the situation so it does not become spectacle

Wealth and whiteness of the New School crowd and the Kara Walker installation on stairwell, as we waited to see Butler, Cixous, Ronell we stood by silhouettes of slavery’s horrors among students with individualistic eyewear. 

Ron Athey

•    Presented as a living corpse. Dead yet sexualized. Elements of sex show in non-sexy way.

Helene Cixous

•    Myths are with us all the time, we are them.

•    Maybe we do not want to think or believe that murder and family are similar. We prefer to think family is love, but love is also murder.

•    It is terrible to be of the same blood. Even if we do not think in those terms, it is with us.

•    When I kill my kind, I shed my own blood. And blood does not climb back into the veins.

•    When you kin with other work, related to predecessors and those who will follow. Intertextuality. Graft other works inside the work. When you read Proust, the whole of french lit is there. Swallowed and thrown up, preserved and buried. You can adore the other without killing, if you swallow the other, you can't kill somebody who is dead, which is why I prefer to deal with fictitious people, dead people.

•    There is enough distance between us for us to be close without biting one another.

I was dog sick during the talk and bodily fluids were about to escape me. Not to mention I could have simply taken out my tampon to instantly make this a more bloody happening.

Avital Ronell

•    Aversion of the gaze, evasion. At the very moment you want to acknowledge a profound proximity.

•    When does it get too close or too far, when you think you are really close you might have abysses to clear.

•    New York was invaded by the united states of america 10 years ago

•    You're so cute I want to eat you up.

Judith Butler

•    Transference systems link us and tear us apart

•    When we undergo transference, we get signed up.

•    Transfer and transform and transference

•    Finding oneself transformed into something else.

•    Iterability defined by its ruptures and elaborations

Wanting so much more about personal connections and loneliness, the most striking thing was brief mentions of loneliness. No, the most striking thing was Helene Cixous discussion of her relationship with Derrida, where he insisted he was connected to death and she was connected to life, and she always said inside NO but he was so insistent that she started to identify with it despite herself.

Julie Tolentino

•    Take a signature work and archive it into my body.

•    To curate work I want to see, here are the five artists I am interested in.

Ron Athey

•    Post AIDS. How many dead people I know, guilt that I don't keep them simmering somehow.

Judith Butler

•    Kinship beyond the blood but also the metaphor of blood, the most fictive moment in ethnography

•    Differences between adopting, grafting & cannibalizing

•    Interactions that produce metamorphosis of another kind

Julie Tolentino

•    I really do appreciate seeing my body joining Occupy Wall Street. I'm interested in how the local is coming through. More issues around race are coming up because people are trying to find ways to be together. To be a body on the line with my full experience.

•    I even said in the performance- I'm bleeding- carpeted the room and described where the cutting would happen. All the things you cannot do. I did a cutting before the performance while you were giving your pre-performance talk

Ron Athey

•    Economy of self mutilation. Boxing is OK, sport is OK, I'd rather be mutilated than punched

•    Bodily fluids are here right now, just beneath the skin

2010 My Year in Queer & Feminist Culture

• Between Two Worlds play by Emily Nepon
• Shuga Shack performances & party hosted by Khane Kutzwell at Littlefield in Brooklyn
• MIX screening Word is Out at Anthology Film Archives
• MEN concert
• QT: Queer book reading at Dixon Place with Sarah Schulman and Charles Rice-Gonzalez
• Barbara Hammer book launch at the Brooklyn Museum
• Speaking of Femme zine reading with Femme Family NYC at Bluestockings
• Catherine Opie Girlfriends photography show at the Gladstone Gallery
• Three Generations of Feminism panel at the Brooklyn Museum
• MIX screening Home at BAAD! in the Bronx
• MIX screening Creepy Dirty Girlie at The Flickering Light in Mt. Airy
• Barbe Bleu (Blue Beard) dir. Catherine Breillat screening at IFC
• Portrait of Jason dir. Shirley Clarke Queer/Art/Film screening at IFC
• Born in Flames dir. Lizzie Borden Queer/Art/Film screening at IFC
• Maya Deren’s Legacy: Women and Experimental Film screenings at MOMA featuring work by Maya Deren, Barbara Hammer, Su Friedrich, Carolee Schneeman (attended 3 screenings)
• Vaginal Davis is Speaking from the Diaphragm performance/chat variety show (attended 3 performances)
• The Owls screening at New Fest
• Warhol exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum
• Antigone is Trans play by Theater Transgression
• Escape to Uranus by IT/EQ at BAAD! Fashion show and performance
• Roadkill Confidential play by Sheila Callaghan
• ACT UP Oral History Project at White Columns Gallery
• Blowhole by J. Delecave performance/feedback session at Circus Amok studio
• Barbara Hammer Retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (attended 8 screenings)
• BUTCH Voices conference
• A Proposition: Beyond the Moon is Lesbos and other tales of queer time artist talk at the New Museum with Sharon Hayes and Pauline Boudry
• Community Action Center by AK Burns & AL Steiner art gallery show and film screening
• Click and Drag Rob Roth photography gallery show
• Justin Bond Re: Galli Blond, a Sissy Fix musical/play at the Kitchen
• SKIN gallery show, performance and film screening
• MIX 23 Queer Experimental Film Festival at Theater for the New City. (17 film screenings, plus performances, installations and community space)
• Landscape and the Fall of Icarus by Samuel Topiary, multi-media performance at Abrons Art Center
• CHERYL performance, dance and video art group at the Brooklyn Museum
• ART+ meeting to plan protest against censorship of David Wojnarowicz by the Smithsonian and religious and political right.
• Demonstration against censorship, started at the Metropolitan, marched to Cooper Hewitt
• Untitled Feminist Multimedia Technology Show dance/performance/play by Young Jean Lee at the New Museum

Justin Bond and the House of Whimsy: Re:Galli Blonde (A Sissy Fix)

The historical imagination of a myth of how queer people were cast out, became cursed, for helping a goddess of light escape from the subjugation of her grieving sister. Cursed to be strangers in our own families, etc. We were watching the re-enactment of our downfall without even realizing it... until it happened. Totally fucking brilliant.

Loved the ritual of sugar and spice, and snakes and puppy dog tails. And Barbie’s head.
Loved the ritual of the disco, the invocation of the houses of NYC, the re-imagined vogue.
Loved Pearl Lin’s sword dance.
Loved the skeleton castration scene.
Loved the kiddie pool communion ritual preceded by the sexiest dance ever.
Loved the dancing, set, music and costumes.

At the end of the mythological re-enactment was a healing ceremony where our pains were confessed and we were healed... it made me want to run up to the stage and get healed too! The people being healed were the actors in the play but their confessions of pain freed them from character as they described their personal experiences of discrimination, rejection, shunning and violence. I wanted Justin Bond to heal me. I wanted to confess how the spectre of the predatory lesbian has always kept me from touching and complimenting women, from expressing any form of admiration or from speaking any depth of love. It blocks me from acting on my desires. It chokes down the least impulse of tenderness and it keeps my hands strictly to myself. I fight back every chance I get. Sometimes I even win. It gets larger, it gets smaller, but it never goes away.

The confessional ritual contained a repeated litany of femme-phobia, homophobia, trans-phobia. Why not name misogyny? Or sexism? In the simplest of terms, part of the reason it is so bad to be a feminine man or trans woman or anywhere on the feminine spectrum is because it is bad to be a woman, period, and a person called male at birth who behaves in a way that is associated with women, well, that's demeaning. Patriarchy was named by one of the confessors, and patriarchy is a big daddy of the -isms that were named. A body with many heads. But I am still stumped over the absence of the word "sexism." Hatred of femininity is misogyny, so coining a new word here seems too small and a failure to make an easy connection.

Is it too much to expect queers to connect the dots between the hatred of effeminacy and the hatred of women? And if it is, isn’t that a problem for our movement? Feminism shouldn’t be news to queer people, and actually I imagine that everyone in the show would agree. The show was an awesome, gender-bending, beautiful blessing and really tapped the vein of all the is magical in our community, our movement, our history and our identity. The failure to articulate the link between women’s oppression and gay oppression created a conspicuous absence in an otherwise awesome work of art.

Generations

Generations. 2010. Barbara Hammer & Gina Carducci. Inspired by Shirley Clarke’s film Bridges Go Round (1953), Hammer and Carducci use two Bolex cameras to capture the final days of Coney Island’s Astroland amusement park. Generations is playing at MIX 23 NY Queer Experimental Film Festival on November 12, 7 PM

The first time I met Barbara Hammer was at CUNY’s 2009-2010 Kessler Lecture. Sarah Schulman was delivering a talk as the recipient of the Kessler award for making a substantial contribution to the field of queer studies. I was attending by myself, and apparently so was Barbara. When she came in, I recognized her and smiled, so she came over and sat with me despite the fact we had never met. The lecture was fabulous, a mind-blowing break from conventional thinking about homophobia that was disorienting in its radical reframing of the meaning of queer community.

The first time I met Gina Carducci was a few years earlier on March 21, 2007 at the Nobody Passes book launch event at Bluestockings, a feminist lefty book store/info shop in the Lower East Side. I was reading an excerpt from “The End of Genderqueer,” something I wrote about the tension between social and revolutionary purposes in identity poltics and queer community building. The reading was my big atheist religious moment, to stand and read in the same very same place where so many of my personal heroes have stood and read. Though I’ve been told no one could tell, my knees were shaking so hard I feared I might fall over. I met Kate Bornstein after the Q&A, and got to tell her how profoundly her writing had affected me. Later that night I met Gina through the good graces of Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore.

A film maker looks at a film maker looking through a camera at a spectator/subject...

Generations is a film about making a film.  Two queer film makers collaborate to create an experimental film that shows the process of them shooting and working with the film itself.  We see each filmmaker with her Bolex, and we see the equipment used in developing and printing. We see them filming each other on the subway, at Coney Island, and in the film lab; some images are beautifully saturated with color and manipulated into abstraction, some are relatively straightforward and contemplative. But images are only the beginning of the elaborate parallel meanings and connections in Generations.

When Barbara Hammer and Gina Carducci agreed to make a film together, they planned for a highly structured creative process. They decided on Astro Land at Coney Island as their location and shot the footage together, each with her own 16mm camera. Each artist started with the complete footage but edited privately, neither seeing the other’s work until it was complete. The two complete works were joined into a single film, one after the other, and premiered at the MoMA Barbara Hammer retrospective.  Each of these facts about the process has a bearing on the final film and its meaning, as does the fact that Hammer’s retrospective opened with a screening that featured four films made in the spirit of learning and collaborating with other women. Hammer lives her feminism, so clearly that even her retrospective, traditionally a celebration of an individual artist, began by sharing the spotlight with other women.

Coney Island is in a beautiful state of disrepair that recalls its history as one of this country’s original sites of recreation when recreation was a new concept. Coney Island always seems to be in jeopardy of either destruction or renovation, either of which would signify an ending to what the place is and has been. Film itself is a medium that is used less and less. Both the subject matter and the medium speak to mortality, the passage of things we hold dear, their beauty is in jeopardy of being lost.

Barbara Hammer is the creator of over 80 films.  Her work has taught queer audiences about experimental film and experimental film audience about the politics of queer sexuality.  Not only have Hammer’s films captured lesbian feminism and culture from the 1970s to the present, in a very real way her films have contributed to the creation of that culture.  Gina Carducci is a radical queer filmmaker who hadn't made a film for five years when she met Barbara. Carducci works in a film lab but her own camera equipment was idly stored in various places at the time. Clearly this was not to be a collaboration of equals, but a mentor-student relationship. Mentoring is woefully absent in the queer community, perhaps because it is so perilous, perhaps because we have been too busy in the struggle to make its cultivation a priority. Mentoring between queer women needs to be handled carefully, since we sustain some wear and tear from constantly coming up against sexist and homophobic power dynamics. Our experiences with being excluded from power make it difficult for us to make the imbalance of a traditional mentor-student relationship work well. It is hard to receive guidance or worse yet, advice; it is also hard to take up our power and guide others without being stifled by self-doubt and second thoughts.

An innovative idea to undermine this traditional power dynamic was to shoot the film together and edit separately. This idea doesn’t make the teacher and student equal, nor does it seek to.  But it does undermine the possibility of Hammer exercising undue influence while also creating the opportunity for Carducci to get back into film making, get creative, and essentially go to town stylistically while knowing her work would be seen by an experimental film audience at MoMA. The rules of their process freed Carducci from the potential perception that being mentored by Hammer made her work derivative, while simultaneously allowing Hammer to mentor somebody less than half her age without overshadowing and thereby authentically pass along some of her wisdom. This working agreement was still to be a mentor-student relationship, but not fall prey to the inherent inequity in that dynamic. The collaborative process they came up with subverts the traditional mentor-student relationship without denying that it exists, but rather by taking it consciously and deliberately into account.

Carducci edited her film on a flatbed editor, a mechanical process involving literally cutting and splicing film. Hammer opted to scan the film then edit on a computer. Here the elder shows us the potential of the new, and the younger remains loyal to the structures and demands of the old. Each works with the footage alone, on her own terms, in her own style, and with her own priorities present. The individual pieces were joined together to form one continuous whole, with one showing after the other. It is difficult to see where one ends and the other begins. Gina told me up front that her film was first, but I’m pretty sure I would have been able to tell that from the formal structure of Gina’s work and the playful tone of Barbara’s. And with a nod to Bridges Go Round, the soundtrack is very different in each part of the film.

The early portion of the film has a visual pattern of numbers from the carousel and repeated safety instructions in the soundtrack. There is a level of abstraction that seduces the viewer into a fascination with details, with close shots of Barbara’s hands winding the Bolex or repetitive images of the old signs that linger around the changing Coney Island. In her portion of the film, Gina includes Barbara voicing the advice to shoot more from the “emotional body” and less from the “measuring mind,” and she begins and ends with images of Barbara.

The latter portion of the film exhibits some of my favorite elements of lesbian culture with footage of the two filmmakers beneath the boardwalk, each hiding behind columns trying to sneak footage of the other. There is simply no pretense of coolness. There is Barbara Hammer sticking two fingers up behind Gina’s head just to make some careless mischief. I admire her consistent lack of irony and utter refusal to be detached or distant from her subject matter. In fact, I had the pleasure of admiring her joyful presence in her films through out the screenings I attended at the MoMA retrospective. At one of the Q&A sessions Barbara mentioned that the editor pleasures herself in what she chooses to include in her film. In her half of the film, the editor is surely full of pleasure with her love of the beach, the camera, and Gina.

In the pleasure and admiration each film maker shows in her choice of images of the other, Generations touches on the radical potential of queer love.  On screen, the filmmakers present as artists at large in the world, but also in their own smaller world of queer friendship. In my imagination of our community, “queer friends” are the opposite of “just friends.” Queer friends are not necessarily lovers yet they retain all their love and sexuality in relationship to one another. In queer frendship there is a grounding recognition of all that we share. It is moving to see a queer friendship across ages documented here, especially at a time when the only queer relationships that seem to reach the public eye are those that aspire to heteronormativity.  (Generations comes chronologically on the heels of a particularly vile mainstream movie about wealthy white married lesbians and their sperm donor, from a lesbian director who is so deluded about the meaning of representation that she claims this portrayal is apolitical.)

And finally as the title suggests, Generations is about generating culture: how we make a culture for ourselves, how we create a legacy and how we express our values.  How do queer people pass along our culture when it is never along bloodlines? The film literally shows its own creation, the filming, the work in the lab, the friendship. The making of this film is a political action in that it is preserving queer culture, in particular, our fabulously different friendships. I totally enjoyed witnessing this difference, this homo/mentor/student/friend relationship full of creativity and love. It reminded me of how much I appreciate the precious utopian moments of interconnection in my own life, like back at that lecture and at the bookstore. The Hammer retrospective at MoMA was overflowing with such moments, with utopian imaginings and deep connections between art, community and the emotional body. Generations invites us to pause and actually feel the meaning of our relationships and legacies.

“Big Mom sat in her rocking chair, measuring time with her back and forth, back and forth, back and forth there on the Spokane Indian Reservation. She sang a protection song, so none of the Indians, not one, would forget who they are.”
-- Sherman Alexie, Reservation Blues

Pleasure and Danger in Mt. Airy

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.

Vaginal Davis is Speaking from the Diaphragm

 WINNER OF THE 2009 ETHYL EICHELBERGER AWARD

"A performance artist of underground legend." - Guy Trebay, New York Times

A performance piece that re-examines the heyday of 1970s American daytime television chat and variety programs. Taking the format of legendary talk shows like The Mike Douglas Show and Dinah!, which starred lesbian icon Dinah Shore. Ms Davis isn't interested in assimilating into the mainstream entertainment complex, but instead wishes to dissect a kind of TV staple and reconfigure it by presenting an array of live and Skype guests from the various worlds of literature, dance, theatre, film and art she has intersected in her over 30 year career as a performance and live artist, writer and cultural raconteur. With guest hosts, Downtown treasure Carmelita Tropicana, and Jennifer Miller the famed bearded lady of Circus Amok expect ten days of the unexpected, the unusual and the sublime.

PS 122.  A series of epic performances that will go down in queer history....

The show begins with some deep breathing and a poem read by the guest host.  With Carmelita Tropicana, the poem is in Spanish and with Jennifer Miller the poem is in English.  The poem invokes Supreme Court Justice Sonja Santo-Meyer.  Which ever of the two guest hosts is present, she is the lesbian lover of Vaginal Davis. 

Ten days of performances and I attended 3 shows and enjoyed lots of lesbian affirmation.  Opening discussions invoke lesbian relationship processing, the lesbiana Clintons, and all the multitudes of lesbians in high office.  And the audience was certainly full of dykes.

Jennifer Miller and Dr. Davis sang together, “you are my lady, my bearded lady” to the tune of You are My Sunshine.  Between verses there was some comedic dialog, songs interspersed with jokes like the Smothers Brothers or other classic comedy teams.

On each side of the stage were computers, projectors and the chat roulette kids.  All present to be objectified in nothing but slightly ill-fitting white briefs.  I was surprised people in the audience were actually watching the projected chat roulette at all, even when the occasional wanker cropped up.  On closing night the chat roulette kids got a lot more frisky, made out and groped each other a whole lot more.  Perhaps Dr. Davis was too free with the praise, however, since some of them seemed quite self-satisfied.  It all worked out for the best when she skillfully referenced and simultaneously deflated colonialism by describing one of the chat roulette kid’s penis as “the most beautiful and well-formed in all of Christendom.”

Next come Dr. Davis’s musings on the desire to bring a man into her lesbian relationship.  Chat roulette kids set upon the audience to find a man.  Man is put on pedestal and admired... for his Bubble Butt. Bubble Butt. Bubble. Butt.  Man-worship and a little bonus shrimping!

Musical interlude.  Yes!  Reluctant Dr. Davis will sing one or both of her original, brilliant, subversive and highly dance-able songs: My Pussy is a Cactus and Tom Cruise Loves Women.

Tom Cruise Loves Women is an old favorite.  I first heard it during Vaginal Davis’s visit to NYC in 2006 where I stalked her for the whole week from a boutique reception to NYU to her Brick Tops party.  She performed Tom Cruise Loves Women in an NYU lecture hall.  This time, the music video for this song was projected in triplicate on the giant screen that made up the backdrop of the set.  Fantastic images of Tom Cruise comprise frenzy of homoerotic imagery.  Mesmerizing images multiply across the screens, the one where he is in his briefs from Risky Business really stands out.  But like the song says... Tom Cruise Loves Women.

My Pussy is a Cactus is a new favorite.  “My pussy is dry. And fidgety.”

The show includes gossip, guests, performances and Skype projections loom large on the backdrop/screen of the set.

Saturday night guests and performances included Julie Tolentino with Pigpen.  Julie Tolentino’s head and face wrapped in rope, she is lying on the floor motionless until her part of the performance.  Pigpen is off to the side, holding the rope, unwrapping her, maybe providing a lifeline.  Rope marks are visible on her face afterwards.

Announcement: There is a car with license plate “Sloppy Bottom,” please move your car or it will be towed. (But who drives in New York?  Is this leftover Los Angeles wit?  An old school variety show interlude? Is there a doctor in the house?)

Sunday night guests included MEN, dressed in gray, tied together, perform their amazing, perfectly danceable and uplifting song, Who am I to be so free?

Jose Munoz read a poem.

Casey Spooner unwittingly wandered close to a smack down from MEN's own Emily Roysden, with his blundering remarks about global politics tempting her to read him like a comic strip.  Not sure if anyone else noticed this tension but it was quickly dispersed, partly by Mickey Boardman’s tired shtick about being a faggot with a distaste for women’s bodies.  No one is buying that old line in this audience, please!

Marc Siegel interviewed over Skype from Berlin.  I love how he showed some of Vaginal Davis’s old zines, holding them up to the camera for all to see.  Treasures!

Many, many lesbian references through out the run of shows, including but not limited to references to several dykes as being a “proper butch.” Sooo respectful!  Vaginal Davis is a real Barracuda Femme Top, as she duly noted herself.

Lesbianic hystrionics!

Hill and Billary, Elena Kegel, Janet Reno.

(It all proves the currently well-known fact that dykes and dyke culture are hot.)

Dance break.

Beauty treatment: Sit on my facial.  Butt-tox.  One of the chat roulette boys provides the juices of a teenage butt to reduce wrinkles and restore youth to our host.

End with human dessert, consisting of whip cream on saran wrap on a chat roulette kid.

Third round of SftD and there was a torrential downpour of rain an hour before show time.  I was walking around the East Village and decided just to hang out in the theater since I was early.  PS 122, like the name suggests, is a converted school and there was a ratty couch in the hallway perfect for my wait.  Thinking about how the only thing missing from this chat show is the actual broadcast.  The title projections and theme music are perfect.  Vaginal Davis is here as the recipient of an award, yet she is putting on a show of all these other performers, academics and culture makers... featuring countless others... in receiving her Ethyl Eichelberger award she is highlighting the world of queer and outsider multimedia and performance art, a world where she is a major contributor and connected to all her guests, many with a history of years of collaboration.  She is placing herself in the center of a loosely formed culture of subversive queer art, and by doing so, perpetuating and furthering the existence of that very culture of subversive queer art.

Why of course there is a radical queer community!  Can’t you see how we are all connected at the hub of Speaking from the Diaphragm?

I wish she had Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch as guests.  According to an interview in Butt Magazine, Ryan Trecartin loves lesbians, not that you couldn’t figure that out by watching his films.  But I digress, and in fact there aren’t many other guests I could wish for, other than of course Vag’s long-time friend and collaborator Ron Athey.  LA gave birth to some seriously powerful movers of queer culture!  I don’t even remember when I first heard of Vaginal Davis, I think she has always been part of my world...  Now that can’t be completely true, but I am fairly sure I already knew about her when I first saw Hustler White.

The run of this show was a sub-cultural showcase, panorama and extravaganza.  All the fabulous musicians, artists, academics and outsiders were enriched and put into context through the so-called German Kindergarten Occultist set and through Dr. Davis’s personal reminiscence with them.

Suzanne Sachsse announced The Jewish Polish Renaissance over Skype and the conversation was all about loving new movements.  Let me show you my manifesto!  Vaginal Davis decreed: Every 15 minutes you have to create a new movement.

Like any other guest, Joanna Fateman's tiny daughter Goldie was offered some of the official SftD drink, Anal Wartese, which looked a lot like cheap vodka and cranberry.

Fashion designer Marcus Pontello changed outfits three times for us via Skype.

Miho Hatori, the singer from Cibo Mato was amazing, loud, rambunctious, defiant and fun music!  Everyone danced.

And one final, important piece of gossip to take away from closing night:

Brian Austin Green is a premature ejaculator.