Queering Porn Audiences

Abstract

A small but important niche, queer porn has grown out of initiatives like the Porn Film Festival Berlin in Europe, the Canadian Feminist Porn Awards and productions by American-based filmmakers such as Shine Louise Houston, Courtney Trouble and Madison Young, who have all attempted ‘to playfully affirm sexuality and reinvent new representations of desire and pleasure’ (Ryberg 2013: 142). Queer pornography is, for many commentators, not just representation but an expression of politics struggling against stereotyping and conventional, normative sexual identities and practices (Attwood 2010; Jacobs 2007; Moorman 2010). One of the ways in which queer porn might have particular political valence is in its promotion as a form of collaboration and, as Florian Cramer writes, the ‘replace[ment] of the rhetoric of artificiality in mainstream pornography … with a rhetoric of the authentic: instead of mask-like bodies normalized using make-up, wigs, and implants, the authentic person is exposed’ (Cramer 2007: 174). What then do viewers make of these representations?