Interrogating lesbian pornography: gender, sexual iconography and spectatorship

During the 1980s and 1990s, debate raged over whether it was politically and culturally acceptable for lesbians to produce pornography. This period of intense debate, known as the sex wars, prompted an outpouring of lesbian-produced screen pornography for lesbian audiences. Most of the critical discussion of such material has rested upon the political potentials and repercussions of such texts. In contrast, textual approaches to these unique pornographic films have been relatively neglected, with the exception of work by Mary Conway (1997) on some early 1990s Blush/Fatale films, and a thorough history and analysis of 'cinematic lesbian sex acts and actual pornographic films from 1968 to 2000' by Heather Butler (2004: 167). This chapter in essence takes up where Butler left off, in its focus on lesbian pornographic cultural production. The contemporary lesbian hard-core pornographic films I will focus on here are Sugar High Glitter City (2001), produced by San Francisco-based S.I.R. Video, Tick Tock (2001) and Madam and Eve (2003), both produced by the UK-based Rusty Films and directed by Angie Dowling, and The Crash Pad (2005), the first pornographic film from Pink and White Productions. Each of these films resonates with the history of lesbian pornographic production, such as Blush/Fatale lesbian pornographic videos made in the 1980s and 1990s, including continuing the focus on 'the education of the lesbian porn spectator', questions of authenticity and the display of 'a diversity of body types' and the re-evaluation of the gaze (Conway 1997: 103)