Shaping pleasure: Pornographic Switzerland 1988 – 2022

The dissertation project examines the sex positive appropriation of pornography and marginalized sexuality by queer feminist sexual activists and artists in Switzerland as a practice and knowledge production since 1988. With a view to current subcultural pornography festivals and exhibitions, the historical change and continuities are traced as continuous multimedia debate about queer(-ing) sexualities. Pornography transports and transforms transgressively cultural ideas of sexuality. In contrast to mainstream pornography, the queer genre uproots hegemonic concepts of desire, expands the language of lust through its own aesthetics and thereby possibly shifts sexual norms: fantasies are reimagined, and sexual scripts are envisioned as a form of resistance and critique. From a queer theoretical perspective, the subversion of sexual norms in porn films happens as a work on the norms, as a failure of its repetition, and only in relation to normative sexual scripts they can be queered and changed. In my opinion, this processing of normative scripts is in a state of tension: Is there a language for sensual intimate bodies, sexual desires and boundaries, an exploration of erogenous and cyborg body zones, beyond binary forms of desire, without conversely making trans identities, BIPoCs and people with dis/abilities hyper-visible, vulnerable and sexually fetishised on screen? Methodologically the project combines Oral Histories and film analysis and brings exemplarily presented (im)possibilities of a pleasurable and painful (non)binary sexuality on academic stage and asks about the contradictions and ambivalences. In Switzerland, too, pornography has historically been censored, moralised, but also appropriated, discussed and enjoyed (Schmitter, 2010). In the spring of 1988, feminist cinema and filmmakers founded Xenia, the most important women’s film club in Europe, in the city of Zurich, an intimate space of experience exclusively for women* who generated other, pornographic images and thus new sexual and cinematic knowledge in order to explore their sexual desire, boundaries, identities and rights in a self-determined and way. My aim is the interweaving of multigenerational voices that have engaged with pornography as a search for their own and another sexuality and sexual subjectivity. I aim to locate queer feminist pornography in its time and local context, to discover the queer cracks in the seemingly seamless structure as well as the transnational collaborations and circulation, and to document that the (post-)pornographic process and product is equally about rejection and appropriation, repetition and subversion, diversity and similarity, an affective masturbatory template and a self-empowering mission. In this sense, I consider queer pornography as a political practice and art form that, at its core, engages with bodies, privilege, oppression and sexual ethics, but also as a normative, powerful and visual consumer product (Rose, 2016) that is intertwined with neoliberal and postcolonial discourses of domination that reproduce inclusion and exclusion unpredictably. Which bodies and practices remain invisible/unpresentable? These ambivalent forces of sexuality in queer pornography and the potential of staged pleasure as critique will be explored in this project – whether they are narrative, trashy, visual or discursive.

Keywords: pornography, sexuality, queer theory, trans-non-binary, cultural studies, body practice, subcultures