Gender and sexuality are bound up with each other through the sinews of the sensuous, the enmeshing forces of the erotic, the various scripts and choreographies of performance we encounter and negotiate constantly throughout our day to day, always and especially when we encounter sex on screen, all the more so when a film un/consciously enters into the liminal space where the cinematic and pornographic meet. In other words, as taboo as it often is to discuss sex and sexuality, even in gender transgressing and expansive spaces, audio-visual materials of various forms tend to inform and foreclose how we act out and act upon our sexuality in gendered ways. At the risk of speculation, a sense of the aforementioned interplays and silences may well be why the first SF Trans Film Festival in 1997 featured porn, and why numerous trans filmmakers and judges were a part of the earliest erotic film festivals of the early 1970s.

Gender, sexuality, and cinema, each in their own way, each in tandem, troubles the line between participant and witness, actor and audience. Each in their own way, each in tandem, shapes how we make sense of ourselves, our relations, our desires, and our world. Even, and especially, when we think we are proposing alternative modes of being, operating anew, the complications of our un/conscious desires, scripts, and choreographies may well interrupt. If we are to refuse normative dictates of what it means to “properly” inhabit gender and sexuality, to instantiate a genuine break from them, we ought take seriously cinema’s place in this vexing triangulation. 

Discussion

  • Plainly put, how might gender shape how we think about cinema and sexuality? and how might sexuality shape how we think about cinema and gender? 

  • How does thinking about porn alongside sex on screen more broadly help us to differently, perhaps more rigorously, consider how we come to understand gender, sexuality, and cinema—the negotiation of roles, their structure, their scriptings, their limits, playing up, playing down, playing into, breaking out of, where performance begins and ends?

  • How do erotics—the heightening of our senses, the excesses of pleasure—shape the cinematic experience? How do absent-presence/present-absence of erotics inform what is or is not admissible for us to engage with, or engage in, the variable modes through which we are able to take in films today?