Audre Lorde’s concept of ‘the erotic as power’ evaluated in relation to contemporary queer-feminist pornography.

“The Sex Wars is generally understood as a conflict between feminists who were against pornography and certain sexual practices, e.g. s/m, and ‘sex radical’ feminists. Anti-pornography feminists argued that pornography was inherently sexist and promoted violence against women”¹ states Sara Ellen Strongman. She refers to the era of the 1980’s, a time when women’s sexuality was strongly contested in activism and scholarship. Pornography, ‘prostitution’ and practices like BDSM were topics that feminists quarrelled about. Some saw those practices as objectifying women, whereas others argued that they proved a source of female empowerment. The porn industry at that time was booming, between 1950 and 1970 hundreds of pornographic films were produced, and since the publication of Deep Throat in 1972, thousands, if not millions of pornographic materials have started to circulate globally. This has resulted in the fact that pornography is omnipresent and still highly contested, re-negotiated and re-invented. Beatriz Preciado, therefore, calls the new world regime ‘the pharmaco-pornographic regime of sexuality’², given that we are constantly exposing ourselves to the public. 

From time to time in history, there are different stages where sexuality gets discussed and politicized more intensely than in other times. Gayle S. Rubin argues that “in such periods, the domain of erotic life is, in effect, renegotiated”³. A very influential author who was actively involved in the re-negotiation of the erotic in the time during the Sex Wars, is Audre Lorde (1934-1992). Lorde, an Afro-American, lesbian feminist, poet and English professor from NYC, was an advocate of the anti-porn movement as she saw ‘the pornographic’ as the opposite of ‘the erotic’, whereby she sees the latter as the source of empowerment in every woman. Her famous theory of the ‘power of the erotic’ is deeply embedded in the context of the debates about sexuality, sex, race, pleasure and power at the time.  

Candida Royalle is often identified as the first representative of feminist pornography. She has been active in the industry since 1975 and her main idea was to take the emphasis away from genitalia. Royalle writes that “we wanted to portray a sense of connectedness, tenderness, communication, passion, excitement, and longing. We wanted to portray women with real bodies, of all ages and types, whom our female viewers could relate to and identify with, and men who seemed to care about their partners, who wanted to please and satisfy them”¹². Ms. Naughty adds that her films are about the depiction of the female pleasure and the female orgasm, and therefore one of the important things for her is to abolish the ‘cum shot’ or ‘money shot’¹³. In ‘the Feminist Porn Book’ the authors aim to challenge the normative representations of gender, body shape, class, race, ability/disability and age which exist in mainstream pornography. Feminist pornography instead focuses on agency and pleasure and sees those concepts in their ambiguity and contradiction¹⁴.  

Queer-feminist pornography thus often distinguishes itself from mainstream pornography in stating that they don’t produce for mass-consumption, but rather with an artistical and political aim in mind, where sustainability is more important than profit. Alessandra Mondin calls feminist porn ‘fair trade, organic porn’ as it centers on the humanity and value of the performers, is produced in a cinematographically high quality and is therefore considered to be more ethical than mainstream porn. Queer-feminist porn producers try to ‘change the game of the market’, but the ways in which they do this drastically depends on the producer¹⁵. The film culture of queer, feminist and lesbian pornography is, thus, very heterogenous due to the fact that the three categories hold different activist backgrounds. Feminist and queer pornography are movements actively engaging with other social movements (sex worker’s rights, LGBTQ rights, sex-positive movement etc.).  

Actors who are actively involved in queer-feminist pornography belief that pornography is not violent, no more violent than mainstream media. The strict pro-censorship position that Lorde embodied is mostly criticised by queer-feminist pornographers/theorists: they agree upon the fact that through pornography, the erotic can be negotiated and embraced, while emphasising that erotic pleasure always exists “within and across inequality, in the face of injustice”¹⁶. As queer-feminist pornography shows different gender identities and various sexualities, traditional, normative conceptualizations of sexuality can be challenged, which is something Lorde didn’t consider in her concept of the erotic. She exclusively addressed women when she talked about the erotic as power, excluding important discussions about different gender identities. Since particularly queer sex or queer intimacies are banned from public spaces, it is even more important to publicly show them¹⁷. Making those identities visible in public spaces is something which pornography makes possible. Censuring (certain) sex, which in her most famous work Lorde advocated for, is a mechanism used by states to ostracize it to the private sphere and is undoubtedly problematic.  

The four Black feminists Ariane Cruz, Amber Musser, Jennifer Nash and LaMonda Stallings engage with queer-feminist pornography and theorize Blackness, sexuality and pornography. They address the contradictory relation of Black feminism and pornography, although they take up a different position than Lorde, as they recognise pornography as a site of empowerment. They also show to what extent Lorde’s conceptualization of the erotic as female empowerment and the pornographic as female oppression and the resulting anti-pornographic attitude prevents us from understanding the nuanced relationship of Black sexuality, race and pornography.

Cruz’s main goal is to reconcile Black feminism and pornography. She acknowledges the existing tensions between the two, but nevertheless tries – in opposition to Lorde – to focus on the (unspeakable) pleasure within pornography. Cruz developed ‘the politics of perversion’, a concept which she uses as a tool to show that pornography is not wholly oppressive, but that sexuality can be a ‘technique of power’. Cruz investigates Black women’s engagement in BDSM or race plays, where racism is employed as an “erotic tool of power exchange”¹⁸. Another Black scholar, Mireille Miller-Young, shows that Black women engage in erotic economies in order to be professionally autonomous and economically independent. She calls this process of negotiating their own agency and erotic pleasure while living in an exploitable body ‘the erotic sovereignty’ and explains how this process takes place in an environment of policing and structural inequality¹⁹. Jennifer Nash, in responding to the question about the usefulness of the erotic in relation to race, speaks about ‘race’s eroticism’, which describes the phenomenon that “racial excess and hypersexuality can be limiting and also deeply enabling in permitting sexual imaginations to flourish”²⁰. 

For Amber Musser the erotic does something similar as it does for Lorde, in that it gives people the opportunity to get together. But it should here be noted that she uses the term ‘people’, whereby she includes people who identify with other identities, not only ‘women’. Musser says that “sexuality, pornography and the erotic are sites that bring into relief the construction of race and the simultaneous pleasures and violence in/and of race”²¹.    

What differentiates her account of the erotic from that of Lorde, is that she sheds a light on the fact that through the erotic people can deploy a restricted form of agency, not this ‘absolute’ empowerment Lorde mentioned. By embracing the erotic, Musser thinks that people can engage with themselves and their desires. Jennifer Nash hereby agrees with Musser, adding that especially the naming of those desires which are seen as infelicitous, is an important act that many of those who work in the field of pornography embrace. Pornography for her does this naming (making public) work and is “one of the few places where we see our bodies – and other people’s bodies – and thus it becomes kind of instruction manual on how bodies in pleasure can look”²². Pornographies are a way to imagine and desire even more, and they are educational. Cruz states in relation to the erotic, that she wants to learn about how BDSM in pornography can produce “erotic pleasure in Blackness, on Blackness and with Blackness”²³.  

What the above scholars all have in common is their emphasis on a middle ground between Lorde’s binary of the erotic as empowerment and the pornographic as oppression. Shoniqua Roach adds that there are “multitudinous possibilities for Black eroticism”²⁴ depending on the site and on the social and political context the woman is located, as pornography does affect people in different ways.  

Lorde additionally argued that differences between feminists are important and can be softened through the recognition of the erotic, whereupon Sharon Patricia Holland counters that the erotic is ambivalent and can either dissolve those differences or strengthen them. Community and the sharing with others were deeply important for Lorde and can be understood to still be significant for feminists engaging with pornography today. Ingrid Ryberg therefore developed the concept of the ‘ethics of shared embodiment’: “Thought of as an activism oriented towards means rather than ends, queer, feminist and lesbian pornography invites an embodied understanding of positions and experiences that differ from one’s own and calls forth an ethics of shared embodiment, susceptible to otherness and respecting of difference. […] it demands awareness that there might always be another point of view”²⁵. Within this film culture, the ethics have to be negotiated due to the existing heterogeneity and the disagreement, but especially these discussions and conflicts make this kind of pornography so valuable.  

Lorde’s and other feminist’s strict anti-pornography position therefore gets a lot of criticism, as it doesn’t allow for a holistic understanding of pornography. MacKinnon e.g. is one of the loudest voices in the anti-porn movement and doesn’t publicly debate pornography with porn advocators. The problem of the abolitionist attitude towards all pornography is that it goes hand in hand with the phenomenon of sex-negativity, which in turn entails that women who consume and enjoy pornography feel guilty about their sexual and erotic pleasure.