AN INTERVIEW WITH PAUL PRECIADO

post-porn/dissident arousal

In 2003 you organized the first Post-Porn Marathon at Macba. What does post-porn signify?

In reality, the term post-porn was invented by Dutch artist Wink van Kempen in the 1980s to name a set of photographs of seemingly explicit content (namely, with representation of genitalia in the foreground) but whose objective was not masturbatory, but parodic and critical. But it was the American porn artist and actress Annie Sprinkle who gave the term a broader cultural and political dimension, when she used it to present her show "The Public Announcement of the Cervix", in which she invites viewers to explore the inside of her vagina with the help of a gynecological speculum. Ironizing at the same time the visual codes of medicine and traditional pornography, Sprinkle warns visitors about her uterus: "you want to see more and more, come closer, look, what you see is really sex." All the insatiable visitors will see with the aid of a flashlight will be a pinkish canal and the flashing reflection of light at the bottom of the uterus. In this way, Sprinkle reduces to absurdity the imperative of maximum visibility of the female sex imposed by traditional pornography. Sprinkle teaches us that pornography produces the truth of the sex it purports to represent: it is a fictional film genre made of codes, conventions, normative representations... whose dominant narrative is constructed to satisfy the heterosexual male gaze. Sprinkle asks us: which body is represented by pornography, why and for whom does it appear as arousing, what are the limits of pornographic representation, what is that, which, when represented, prevents arousal?

For me, Sprinkle's notion of post-porn serves to give a name to a set of initiatives of critique of the dominant pornography that, far from renouncing the representation of sexuality, bet on the production of dissident representations. I thought about the Post-Porn Marathon because I was missing critical and political initiatives around the representation of sexuality in Spain, and I had the impression that we were going to need days and nights to start a debate. My surprise was arriving at Barcelona and finding that, despite the apparent critical silence, there was a group of activists who were already doing post-porn, even though they had not yet called it that.

But why is pornography important politically?

What other political machine do you know of that has the same power to produce pleasure? Pornography is a powerful technology of the production of gender and sexuality. To put it quickly: the dominant pornography is to heterosexuality what advertising is to mass consumer culture: a language that creates and normalizes models of masculinity and femininity, generating utopian scenarios written to satisfy the heterosexual male eye. That is ultimately the task of the dominant pornography: to manufacture docile sexual subjects... to make us believe that sexual pleasure "is that".

It is therefore not surprising that the post-porn movement appears precisely at a time of intense politicization of the body and pleasures, in the late 1980s, in the context of the AIDS crisis, which was accompanied by a strong resurgence of homophobia and the strengthening of new state measures of control and regulation of sexuality: criminalization and pauperization of sex work, cleaning of cities, re-privatization of the pornographic image... the post-porn guerrilla emerges as a reaction to these new forms of control.

Until now we thought that feminism was fundamentally anti-pornographic. Can feminism and pornography work together?

Feminism in the 1980s was the first political movement to make a lucid diagnosis of the power of this iconographic pornographic apparatus to produce and control sexual identities, but when the time came to make a decision regarding the management of that power it found itself fractured into two divergent strategies: on the one hand, abolitionist feminism, led by authors such as Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, identified with the chaste, middle-class heterosexual white woman, asks the state (paradoxically the same state it criticizes as patriarchal) to protect women from the violence of pornographic language by using censorship and repression to control representation. We already know the disastrous consequences of this anti-porn abolitionist movement, especially in Canada where it was legally implemented: all sadomasochistic lesbian representations were censored as examples of "extreme violence", while hetero-dominant representations continued to circulate without problem. Faced with this abolitionist feminism, the political strategy of pro-sex and post-porn feminism appeared, initially organized by collectives such as COYOTE and PONY, with the participation of sex workers, lesbians and porn actresses such as Annie Sprinkle, Veronica Vera, Scarlot Harlot or Diane Torr. Here it is no longer a question of asking for help from the state-pope-censor but of re-appropriating the technologies of production of sexual representation and pleasure. Post-porn feminism claims pornographic representation as a space for political action through which women and sexual minorities can redefine their bodies and invent new ways of producing pleasure that resist the normalization of the dominant pornography. An alliance is thus established between anti-AIDS groups such as ACT UP, queer, transsexual and transgender movements of criticism and resistance to the heterosexual norm, and movements of sex workers in the pornographic industry, who fight for the recognition of their wage rights and the improvement of their working conditions.

Is post-porn always a minority?

The post-porn movement is the process of becoming-subject of those bodies that until now have only been abject objects of pornographic representation: women, sexual minorities, non-white bodies, transsexuals, intersexuals and transgender, deformed or disabled bodies. It is a process of empowerment and re-appropriation of sexual representation. It is not that these bodies were not represented: they were in fact the center of the dominant pornographic representation, but from the point of view of the heterosexual male gaze. Until now they had only served to reaffirm the position of cultural and political domination of heterosexual male pleasure. From now on, women and minorities re-appropriate the pornographic device and its technologies of production of representation and pleasure to question the dominant gaze. Thus appear subaltern pornographies that question the traditional models of masculinity, femininity, but also the representations of race, sexuality, the valid and disabled body. This process will give rise to a series of dissident pornographic productions: in the 1980s, for example, the lesbian porn magazine On Our Backs appeared in the United States, the center of critique of heterosexual abolitionist feminism, in which the first photographs of the BDSM culture were published, Butch-Femme and Drag King by Del LaGrace Volcano. The first independent lesbian and feminist porn production companies such as Candida Royalle, Fatale Video or Blue Productions were also set up at that time, to which the SIR label should be added in the first decade of the 21st century. Thus emerges a queer, experimental, self-produced and self-distributed pornography whose authors include Annie Sprinkle, Maria Beatty, Bruce LaBruce, Shu Lea Cheang or more recently the LoveArtLab formed by Sprinkle and Stephens, Emilie Jouvet, Maria Llopis?

To these new productions we should add the work of what we could call post-porn artivists in which the use of the body and sexuality in the public space is a form of political action, as in the case of PostOp, GoFistFoundation, Medeak or Dianapornoterrorist.

Isn't post-porn too chic, too artistic? Why this artistic demand of post-pornographers?

Art is not elitist but fundamentally corporeal and political. It is not that post-porn demands art as opposed to pornography, but rather that both art and post-porn are spaces of experimentation, criticism and research in which one works with the materiality of the sign, with image and sound and with their capacity to create affections, to produce pleasure and identity. In addition, post-porn, like art, distances itself from traditional pornography due to its renunciation of, in many cases, the masturbatory practice implicit in it. The aim is no longer so much to activate the mechanism of pleasure production as to interrogate it, to question it. We can think of an extensive post-porn genealogy that would go from the films of Andy Warhol, for example, when in "Blow Job" he films only an orgasmic face of a boy displacing the camera from the pornographic "objective", or from Jean Genet's "Un Chant d'amour" in which homosexual love is represented in prison, in the films of Jack Smith, the performances of Cossi Fan Tutti to the contemporary works of LoveArtLab by Sprinkle and Stephens, or Bruce La Bruce and Shu Lea Cheang.

Your favorite porn films?

The list would go on and on. Annie Sprinkle's Herstory of Porn is an absolute classic: the ABC's of post-porn. But to speak of a recent production, without a doubt, what I have seen, still in a first edition, of the materials Shu Lea Cheang has recorded with the group of artists and activists from Barcelona in Hangar promises a maximum of dissident arousal.

texto original en castellano