Queer pornography

Queer pornography depicts performers with various gender identities and sexual orientations interacting and exploring genres of desire and pleasure in unique ways. These conveyed interactions distinctively seek to challenge the conventional modes of portraying and experiencing sexually explicit content.[1] Scholar Ingrid Ryberg additionally includes two main objectives of queer pornography in her definition as "interrogating and troubling gender and sexual categories and aiming at sexual arousal."[2]

Queer porn works to have authentic representations with respect to the sexual orientations, gender identities and desires of the performers in it.[3] It differs from heterosexual, gay, or lesbian pornography, because queer porn will often be a partnering of performers outside traditional pornographic categories.[3] Gay porn falls into a similar situation as heterosexual porn by putting an emphasis on androcentric imagery of pleasure, as scholar Richard Dyer argues, and often glorifies the homonormative, masculine body-type and behavior. To appear as inclusive, gay porn will exotify differences.[4] Performers' bodies in queer pornography are key to providing a difference between it and other categories of pornography.[5] For example, a DVD may have one scene which shows a transgender lesbian with a cisgender femme-identified queer woman, while the next scene may showcase two transgender queer-identified men.[3]

The genre of queer pornography as defined above is relatively recent and has been popularized and distributed by adult film companies such as Pink and White Productions, Trouble Films, Real Queer Productions among others. While porn is not limited to adult cinema and can exist in the context of a variety of media such as queer written pornography, the currently produced queer porn is mostly in the form of video.

Some prominent queer producers include Shine Louise Houston, Chelsea Poe, and April Flores who attempt to challenge the filming methods within the porn industry. Typically within the Porn Industry, the producer and director have the majority of control over how each scene will be performed, who is showcased in each set, and creating a differential of performers’ salaries based on their popularity.[6] Queer pornography counters these practices by actively engaging performers in the creations of scenes allowing them to form more organically as a collaboration with a more horizontal access of control rather than a hierarchically vertical system.[7][8]

Queer porn similarly celebrates ejaculation but with some signification differences to conventional porn. Unlike in the mainstream industry, the performer does not have a financial bonus for providing such a "money shot." Directors only encourage performers to perform an orgasm if/when the actors feel like it.[9] Since the money shot in conventional porn relies of visibility for the camera, it necessarily centers on showing external ejaculation of the penis as the ultimate climax. This reflects attention back to the male centered gaze and a representative instance of phallic power and pleasure.[10] Queer porn attempts to broaden such a delineation of phallic centered climax and the pornographic production.

  1. ^ Koller, Veronika (2015-01-01). "The subversive potential of queer pornography: A systemic-functional analysis of a written online text" (PDF). Journal of Language and Sexuality. 4 (2): 254–271. doi:10.1075/jls.4.2.04kol. ISSN 2211-3770.
  2. ^ Ingrid, Ryberg (2012-01-01). Imagining Safe Space : The Politics of Queer, Feminist and Lesbian Pornography (Thesis).
  3. ^ a b c Seise, Cherie (April 2010). "Fucking Utopia: Queer Porn and Queer Liberation" (PDF). Sprinkle: A Journal of Sexual Diversity Studies. 3: 19–29. Archived from the original (PDF) on August 8, 2017. Retrieved May 8, 2013.
  4. ^ Dyer, Richard (1999). "Coming to Terms: Gay Pornography". In Gross, Larry (ed.). The Columbia Reader: On lesbians and gay men in media, society, and politics. New York: Columbia University Press. pp. 479–485.
  5. ^ Jacobs, Katrien, Marije Janssen, and matteo Pasquinelli. C’lickme : A Netporn Studies Reader. Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2007. Print.
  6. ^ McKee, Alan (2016-04-02). "Pornography as a creative industry: challenging the exceptionalist approach to pornography". Porn Studies. 3 (2): 107–119. doi:10.1080/23268743.2015.1065202. hdl:10453/41441. ISSN 2326-8743.
  7. ^ Wright, Cody (2015-10-20). "The underside of the porn industry". Golden Gate Xpress. Retrieved 2017-04-29.
  8. ^ Dowling, Dar (2015-06-18). "Shine Louise Houston & Jiz Lee: Crowdfunding Queer Porn Their Way.…". Huffington Post. Retrieved 2017-04-29.
  9. ^ Cite error: The named reference :0 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  10. ^ Linda, Williams (1999-04-27). Hard core : power, pleasure, and the "frenzy of the visible". University of California Press. ISBN 978-0520219434. OCLC 838864947.