Disidentification in the Center of Power: The Porn Performer and Director Belladonna as a

Contrasexual Culture Producer (A Letter to Beatriz Preciado)

Author(s): Tim Stuettgen
Source: Women's Studies Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 1/2, The Sexual Body (Spring - Summer,
2007), pp. 249-270
Published by: The Feminist Press at the City University of New York
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27649664
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 INTHECENTER
DISIDENTIFICATION OFPOWER:
THEPORNPERFORMER
ANDDIRECTOR
BELLADONNA
AS
A CONTRASEXUAL
CULTUREPRODUCER
(A LETTER
TO
BEATRIZ
PRECIADO)

TIM
STUETTGEN

INTRO.
This essay is an attempt
to draw some coordinates for an
assemblage
between feminist and queer and
politics philosophy, poststructuralism
film theory, investigating pornography as a biopolitical field and a
machine of culture production. With the works of the queer philosopher
Beatriz Preciado as a central discourse, this outline is meant to function

as a necessary element in a I call

cartography "postporn politics."1

JERK/OFF.
This text is inspired by a story, that happened to a friend of mine. As he
did everyday, he was surfing around the Net and tried to jerk off to some

porn flicks. But one day, somehow, it didn't work.

CRACK/UP.
The about the new Internet is that
funny thing porn phenomenon you
can it for short durations. if you don't use the
enjoy only Downloading,
structures, costs To tease customers and make them
illegal money.

monthly paying members, theWeb companies usually allow only two

or three clips (lasting between ten seconds and one minute) to be down
loaded. "Small shots for free," as on video,
they say. Fucking-fragments
with the usual stories, acts, bodies, and cumshots.
repetitions genders,
OK?most of the time, not That's the
always. point, maybe.
The accumulation of money, and
ultraspeedy, pluralist images,
bodies the structures of the Internet
through production brings specta
tors into an unusual and situation. On the one
not-at-all-body-centered
have more than ever and can surf for hours, never
hand, they options

WSQ:
[ Women's Studies Quarterly 35: 1& 2 (Spring/Summer 2007)]
? 2007
by Tim Stuettgen. All rights reserved.
250 DISIDENTIFICATION OF POWER
INTHECENTER

a point where they have seen it all. On the other hand, they
reaching
never know what are to get?an uncontrolled area. Here we
they going
enter a new level of capitalist utopia: you?OK, naturally only if you
are male and straight and get a kick out of watching heteroporn?are
in the of a more than a million It
put position god, controlling images.
could on forever . . . for a new a new a
go always waiting page, girl,
new sexist With the downloaded teasers can even
spectacle. you open
an archive. But if you are an
guy, believe in a two-sex system
ordinary
and want to as are, break down and
things stay they you might your

archive one Because there is repetition, there is

might explode day. everywhere
there is power, there is counterpower. And there
difference. Everywhere everywhere
is totality, there is something thatflees.

PERSONAL
STUFF/PERFORMANCE.
The following text is a letter to someone I admire. Her thoughts have
changed my life, my body, my thoughts, and my practices. As in some of
her work, the text of and
integrates practices investigative journalism
into the structures of academic
performativity knowledge production.
And it is, to a certain extent, fiction?as is any text.

BEATRIZ
LETTER/TO PRECIADO.
Dear Beatriz,

How are How is life, sex, love? Where are at the moment?
you? you
The last time I heard about you, you were teaching in Paris. When Imet
Del in Berlin in the middle of February he told me that you guys would
be doing a performative lecture called Post Porn andNew Technologies of
Pleasure." I hope it went fine. I have to admit it is kind of strange to be
a letter to I've never met in person. But for various
writing somebody
reasons I feel a kind of closeness with you. But this is neither the time
nor the place to tell you about all that, is it?
I am after an that sound a little
writing you experience might
I some and
ridiculous. just watched porn of the
performer
director Bel

ladonna. Even if she is a mainstream star and but an icon of

anything

queer counterculture, I should know about her. I'm sure

thought you
I'm exaggerating a little if I say her work is But I find it
revolutionary.
fascinating to recognize that the micropolitics of her body?set
nowhere else than in the center of
representational power?has
in the past few years into new ways of As I
changed becoming.
 STUETTGEN 251

researched Bella's work I about some lines you

contemporary thought
wrote, that whenever is forced to be normalized,
underlining something
there is that will not be, and wherever the powers of normal
something
ization are at work, there is that flees: "You are a
something portable
sex model to become either male or female, to
biopolitical designed
to your mate, to the human
respond counter-gender reproduce species.
But this political prosthetic implant operation is a political failure:
thousands of humans, although still alive, become queer" (Preciado
2006, In some of Belladonna's last films, so thesis, can
152). goes my you
witness her becoming a postporn producer. There is this clip called Bella's
Auditions for Dirty Talking (Belladonna 2005), which might seem banal at
a first even a little silly. But as I have not had the time to
glance?and
tell you about all her works, Iwill stick to a few scenes that come to
mind right now.3 This one I found inspiring and deconstructive, sexy
and all at the same time.
funny,

SOLO.
POST/PORN
Bella's Auditions for Dirty Talking starts with spitting vulgarly onto her

hands, somewhere in a room on a sofa, while her are

living legs spread
wide. But it is not the clich? of the embraced vagina that she is present
us, but a as it becomes the central in the
ing huge strap-on, object
Bella starts it and moans, allocates the saliva, tells the
image. rubbing
face to face that she wants him to come over and sit
spectator virtually
on her dick. I think it is rare for how
quite straight porn, contradictory

performativities of masculinity and femininity are mixed here with

relaxed implicitness. On the one hand, Bella is still easy to identify as
female, with all the lingerie and her embraced breasts. These signifiers
are neither hidden nor outplayed by codes of masculinity, but combined
to form a new the short, black hair and the
assemblage: stylish vulgar,
dominant language, the dildo becoming part o? her gender and sex-technol
ogy. I think Donna Haraway would have liked her
performance.
For me, Bella like a virtuoso, from arousal to
opens shifting laugh
ter and to an interface that makes various ways of read
playing sexing,

ing and performing sex possible. In the roughly edited action, which
consists of cuts and outtakes from a movie not
jump possible yet

released, Bella dreams of "fucking her own butthole," before she bursts
out laughing. This ?berfantasy of double-gendered lust is not only total
but also hints in a self-reflexive way at what could be
ly masturbatory,
252 DISIDENTIFICATION OF POWER
INTHECENTER

called a not the answer to an release from ques

postporn image: idyllic
tions of in sex, but a of its constructed
power recognition performance,
an integration of reflexivity and the processing of the involved affects
into a new and of the for the circulation of
staging folding performance
more and relationalities?here, a
complex desires, bodies, girl being
dominant and being gazed at, being playful and powerful, handling the
a
phallus but still penetrable. And girl who is also the director and pro
ducer of the scene. Seconds later she even starts to the camera
talking
man, him to in, in an unusual manner:
inviting join

Belladonna: Why don't you come over here and stick it in the

dirty mouth of yours?

Cameraman: Huh? Me?

Belladonna: Yeah . . .

Cameraman: Get the fuck out of here . . .

Belladonna: I know you want it.

Cameraman: Yo, I ain't gay.

Belladonna: It doesn't matter. You don't have to be gay to

enjoy this cock.

PORN/DISCOURSE.
Beatriz, was it you who told me that the narrative ofFou
genealogical
cault's History of Sexuality (1978) stopped when photographic apparatuses
were invented? Teresa De Lauretis (1987) calls these "dispositifs" of film
and photography "technologies of gender," underlining their power to
form and structure identities. are tattoos, I as I
gender Images thought
read this, spaces for your machinic mirror stage in the bina
burning self's
as a with affect blocks and
ry-sex system, interpellating you subject
semantic you wrote once, with
signs. Representation, "belongs together
medical and legal discourses, to the biopolitical processes of normalization
and control of bodies and sexuality" (Preciado 2006, 152). Sure, the acade
mic structures needed some time to confront the visual of pornog
politics

raphy. As in many disciplines, feminism needed to break into the

to introduce on a ethics of
university sphere questions representational

gendered Sadly, the discourse didn't develop into a complex read

bodies.

ing of pornographic language and its powerful rules. Instead, the famous
debate an dualism of and against,
censorship produced unlucky for interpel
biomale?viewer as and
lating any?usually potential rapist any, usually
 STUETTGEN 253

biofemale, critic as an enemy of se.4 Not I know, but

pleasure per always,
often.

I remember you once said that "pornography should be looked at

precisely from the point of view of performance theory" (qtd. in

2004a, But OK, one at a time. For me, Linda
Stuettgen 24). step
Williams was one of the first to look at porn without being too
impressed by its sexist phantasmagorias. Her influential book Hard Core

(1999) freed the discussion from Bilderverbot stances and one-dimensional

modes of reflection. Rather, it started to outline some first toward
steps
a
genealogy of sex films. This became the critical basis for a discourse
that still may a in tension between criti
produce political philosophy
cism and arousal, and desire.
analysis
In a way Williams took a surprisingly relaxed view of the issue.
Porn cinema, which for her is, besides horror and melodrama, the real

bodygenre in cinema history, could be studied and analyzed like any other
film genre. But this doesn't imply she took it easy. In the tradition of
feminist film theory she acknowledged the standardized structures of

subjectification in which the female porn performer is inscribed as a

fetish to a male of control and
object, presented gaze pleasure.
How did you experience the first porn film you looked at, Beatriz?
Or to
put it in a more adolescent way, did you think it was, well, real? I

remember in front of a screen in one of my skater friends' bed

sitting
room. He took out a dirty videotape from a box under his bed and told
us that this was the real First, I it on a affective
thing. experienced purely
level. Iwas shocked, aroused, disoriented. I think I needed the collec
tive formation of the male bond, me and three other skater friends

together, to at least have the impression that I kind of enjoyed it. How
easy male-dominated heterosexuality works, huh? The intensity of this
and the of any uncontrollable failure in
experience ignorance porn's
surfaces were the between us, con
ideological produced by dispositif

sisting of a homogenous spectator-community I had to identify with the

on the screen. OK, I at the end. This was real.
images thought for
Years later Williams made clear to me that in mainstream pornogra
we face the of the ultimate construction of
phy representational promise
the truth that this sex just is. The usually female, passive, and submissive
her so-called in the act of confession of her
performer presents pleasure
inner truth of sex, and structured the male-bonded powers
regulated by
of cinematography and economy, communicated and distributed through
254 INTHECENTER
DISIDENTIFICATION OF POWER

the filmic dispositif. I get penetrated like this, thereforeI am like this. For real.

Obviously, these fairy tale-like technologies for binary gender

are translatable to fetishist of
production conceptions consumption
inside the Freudo-Marxian framework. That's how it was
done?espe

cially in feminist film theory. The concretely historical but seemingly

timeless repetitions of the inscriptions called the truth of woman just
entered a new level of Western In a discursive
patriarchy. performativi
aura and VIP
ty between underground yellow-press pathos, spotlight
and wannabe mainstream did very well in
ing, spectacle, pornography
economical distribution.

CUM/SHOT.
Have you seen Scorcese's film Goodfellas (1990)? On the one hand, as in
the of porn, the Italian Mafia is as subversive and
myths represented

glamorous. On the other hand, it still functions as a stable foundation of

Western both inside and outside the eco
capitalist patriarchy, system,
more than In his unfinished "racket
nomically independent. theory,"
are
Max Horkheimer (1985, 270) tried to outline how deviant subjects
criminalized and excluded from society but still supported and repro
duced inWestern formations to stabilize them?a thesis that
capitalist
should be actualized and applied to the porn industry. From this point of

view, it was no that a retro movie like Paul Thomas Anderson's

surprise

Boogie Nights (1997) found its references in the ups and downs of the
Mafia outlined out in the films of Scorcese and De Palma. Whereas the
climax inMafia cinemapeak in the spilling of blood
achieved its highest
that follows the shooting of the finally defeated gang leader, the climax
in mainstream porn is accomplished in the spilling of sperm after the
cumshot. The cumshot functions as the number one referent of the authen

ticity that sex happens and pleasure too, constructing an idyllic happy end
not for the narrative of the male but also for
only successfully performer,
the identifying viewer?and much more absurd in its claim, for the
female too. This ersatz tries to make one
performer strange proof forget
what classic porn cinema suffers from every second: the unrepresentability
of the female This lack in a
orgasm. funny pornotopia of representation,
where female bodies in any and form seem available at any time,
shape
shows the of its and is just an obvious of
inconsistency logics example
the lines of flight in the center of straight sexist ideology.
The of every in its microstructures,
impossibility controlling image
 STUETTGEN 255

imperfections, and fictional claims, made Williams think of an alterna

tive pleasure in the interface of ideological failure of porn-myths too
old and new for a market of female consumers. One
fancy products day
I asked her about what she calls female pleasure and what is referred to
as the "female She smiled and said, "Can't we talk about
gaze."5 just
else? The female is of course an But
something gaze important aspect.
then we would have to discuss the old story of the male gaze for hours,

the female gaze being something like its anti-theses. This was a
big issue
in Hard Core, but today there are so many other possibilities to talk
about these things" (qtd. in Stuettgen 2005, 80).

GONZO/LANGUAGE.
As moves on, cinema moves on?and its
history porn assemblages
The demand to take other into account seems also
change. possibilities
to me because of historical of forms, and
important changes genders,
Bella's star to rise at the end of the 1990s, as
practices. began genre log
ics shifted. The newest easier to as more
thing, produce; presented

authentic, rhetorically and aesthetically; and influenced by emerging

video and the home-movie was
digital techniques genre, "gonzo porn."

Slowly but surely it established itself as an alternative to the genres'

classic codification of women as feminine,
cinematographic essentially

glamorous, and spectacular. Even if the blonde Barbie-like performer

Jenna Jameson may be the most successful porn star of our time, the

1990s semantics of diva starlets and sets in a

excessively photographed
closed construction of worldly totality are In con
slowly diminishing.
temporary porn, is ruined the inten
representational harmony through
sification of affects and bodies. be an obscure term for
"Intensity" may
some academics, but one of this Deleuzian lies in
productivity concept
the possibility of thinking of degrees and foldings of events and bodies in
time and space: illness, hotness, wetness, coldness, ecstasy, or, of
hunger
course, and arousal. These states are for me to break
pain impossible
down to or a Lacanian
language, signs, symbolic.
The materialist Berressem has characterized
poststructuralist Hanjo
the term as a central formula in and
"always already" poststructuralism
cultural studies (2003). This (post-) Freudian concept o? Nachtr?glichkeit
functions as a favorite line in Lacan and Derrida, Bhabha and Bau
punch
drillard. And it clearly poses a problem when materializations of bodies
are discussed, as their is inscribed,
presence always already symbolically
256 DISIDENTIFICATION OF POWER
INTHECENTER

finally read, as they never would have lived and breathed in a material
world of and in actual time and space. As
contingence singularities?and
Butler once it, another believer in the "I confess,
Judith put always already:

however, that I am not a materialist. time I try to write about

good Every
the body, the writing ends up being about language" (2004, 198).
The for more in gonzo comes from the pro
hunger intensity porn
duced of the more more more more
promise rough, everyday, cheap,
more more, oh yes, real, of porn. Not the auratic
dirty, spontaneous, type

diva, but the girl next door is the icon, and Belladonna her arguably most
real who is open to have fun
prominent impersonator. Somebody always
and be used: more Punk Rock than Woman, more Asia
Pretty Argento
than Julia Roberts, pushing the notion that every body and object can
become fetish. But if that is true, what happens if female subjects realize
they don't need to stay in the symbolic space of subject woman?

FETISHES/PRACTICES.
Beatriz, I know you like fetishes. I heard that you own, like many dykes
who seem to care less and less about feminist middle-class
straight

taboos, an impressive collection of dildos. Underlining the fact that gay

and lesbian was reached not the
emancipation exclusively through
rational enlightenment of political theory, but also through subcultural
with no outside to such com
pop practices anticapitalistic imagine,
modities as dildos (in the lesbian scene) and discos (in the gay scene)
made the more and
fights pleasurable productive.
As
the poststructuralist theorist Katja Diefenbach highlighted in her

revisiting of readings of Marx by Derrida and Agamben, it was the gay

filmmaker Bruce La Bruce who most contested the Marxist
directly
feminist film theory framework and affirmed the pleasures of the fetish

(2006). As one of the characters in his film Raspberry Reich (2004) polemi
states: "Put your Marxism where your mouth is!" However short
cally

sighted the affirmation of the commodity world might be, there seems to
be in it materialist and as shown in the conse
something very pragmatic,

quent logics of There is no way over thefetish. But there is also nothing behind
thefetish. There isjust what you make of andproduce with thefetish.
First, let us look at a few dialectical contradictions. An awkward
one I found in porn's assertion of uncovering the hidden truths
implicit
of sex and the Marxist of the contradiction in the value form,
concept
which is built up from a dialectic dualism between the artificial and the
 STUETTGEN 257

natural, the hidden and the real. Marx sees the secrets of social rela
big
tions in the form of the value itself; that's why it dances around like an
acrobat and does tricks like a the blind of
magician. "Biopower," spot
Marxism: The biopolitical regimes and the social practices through and
between bodies and discourses, and
disciplinary performances everyday
relations seem to have to find their ersatz in the fetishes' aura.6
spectral
In the first volume a
o? Capital (Marx 1867), the fetish therefore gains
nearly ungraspable charisma, described by Marx in spooky images. This
we find also in Freudo-Marxian feminism, where remain
metaphors
more powerful than they could (and should) and generate a foggy aura
that disguises the analysis of practices in spatial and temporal power
relations under the ongoing rhythms of difference and repetition when
we call socially gendered reality.
producing the thing
Diefenbach criticizes the dualist binary between the overplayed
of the female as fetish and its romanticized the
metaphor counterpart,

motherly and holy working woman as the symbol for an idyllic anticap
italism in the idealist dream of human nature, where every
lying deep

thing is present and real, natural and identical with itself. Cynically, the
idea of an absolute real and natural is where in an of
present porn, age
video numbers of amateur recruitment, and small
cheap shootings, high

production sets for the audience of the digital age ismost popular. Here
the message is one of naturalism too: no or no
makeup professionals,
fakes or This is real.
stages. really
As Diefenbach put it: "the is less whether?in the repre
question
sentation and of sex, fashion and porn?a power
incorporation beauty,
ful form of sexist alienation and substitution is hidden and expressed,
and more a of how fetishistic are carried out, with
question practices
which other practices they are linked, inwhat ways do they have effects
on forms of life, what is their relation of forces? Not deciphering, but

analysing" (2006, 155).

ANAL/DISIDENTIFICATION.
When it is easy to that
analyzing contemporary straight porn, recognize
one of the prime essentialist referents of the subject woman has lost its
number one status: the vaginal. The center of attention and in
penetration
the new millennium is the anal. Director and
producer John Stagliano,
of and owner of Evil the most success
major propagandist gonzo Angel,
ful was once asked a the anal has
porn company today, by journalist why
258 INTHECENTER
DISIDENTIFICATION OF POWER

become such an "Pussies are bullshit," he answered.

important body part.
"With vaginal sex you have a girl that is chirping around a little. And the
we
specialist viewer asks himself: Is this real? Or is it bullshit? Therefore
need guys that fuck really good and let the girls look more virile. Iwant
the girls to show their testosterone" (Metelman 2006, 41).
isn't it? Testosterone: the number one for masculine
Funny signifier
intensities?in the age of the movement, the
FTM-transgender drag

king community and a long-lasting tradition of gay tributes for analism

from Genet to Bruce La Bruce, which are also actualized and
Jean prac
ticed in the socio-sexual relations of the gay everyday.
her entry into the business in 1999, Bella became popular as
After
one of the most highly acclaimed performers of the anal. in the
Nobody
was when she married the sadistic macho
industry surprised performer
Nacho Vidal. "It is ... a for myself to see what I can do and
challenge
what limit I can take to next. Imean, I enjoy it, but I enjoy the fact that
I can't believe I'm this. . . .That's I off on she once
doing why get it,"

answered when being asked why she uses the biggest objects available
for her Another time she was invited to comment on the
body-holes.7

aggressivity in the business. replied, She "I personally like to be

smacked around and I also like to do a little smacking around, but it's
not all the time."8
necessary
But one day it all changed. After performing inmore than two hun
dred films, she stopped working with male porn directors and split from
her husband. Instead, she her own Belladonna Enter
opened company,

tainment, and started to work with women in

exclusively?except
Bella's (2002), in which
Bitches she and her girlfriends penetrated
men seems as
straight-identified with huge dildos. It though she went
through the dispositif of gonzo porn to construct a counterdispositif. If the
anal in psychoanalysis is understood as level of regression that involves a
loss of (gender-) subjectivity, Belladonna took this deterritorialization
as a for new identities, and that
possibility practices, pleasures usually

might be a starting point for a line of flight into becoming queer.Natural

a sex or lesbianism doesn't solve
ly, performer's bisexuality practiced
the ambivalence of an of scenes for
increasingly emerging variety girl-girl
a
straight male gaze. But still we need to highlight that no practice of sex
can be at it. That's what Pierre
disciplined totally by the gaze pointed
Klossowski us in his most famous work, the trilogy Les lois de
taught
l'hospitalit?, where the woman Roberte is pushed by her husband to have
 STUETTGEN 259

sex with in front of him, out his

strangers living his fantasies, acting
double created the structures of the male
projections?the perfect by
But after numerous variations, on the
patriarchal gaze.9 partly perceived
cool level of logocentric art discourse, the husband finally experiences

something unbelievable: his wife has doubled herself for real. Besides the
woman he trades with other there is another, an
guests, living
autonomous life with a different of fantasies, and
economy pleasures,
decisions. This experience finally leads him to becomemad.
Bella's moves might be described by what the queer theorist Jos?
Esteban Mu?oz has called "active disidentification" (1999, 141): "amode
of dealing with dominant ideology, one that neither opts to assimilate
within such a structure nor it." Munoz tries to make us
simply opposed
think of a political joy from a position of minor subjects, but he doesn't
ignore the precarious conditions from which this identity practice
emerges:

Let me be clear about one disidentification is about cul

thing:

tural, material and survival. It is a response to state and

psychic

global power apparatuses that systems of racial, sexual

employ
and national subjugation. These routinized protocols of subju
are brutal and ... I have wanted to that
gation painful. posit
such processes of self-actualization come into discourse as a

response to that discriminate demean, and

ideologies against,
to of that don't con
attempt destroy components subjectivity
form or to narratives of universalization and normal
respond
ization. (1999, 161)

a female conforms neither to the narratives

Obviously, porn performer
of traditional feminism and nor to the of main
queerism, expectations
stream Even worse, the female star is also to the
society. porn exposed
conditions of the business under dominant male power struc
biopolitical
tures. Most people of my generation have already forgotten that the fight
for the of gays and lesbians, sex and sex workers were
rights performers,
in one collective hand in hand, on the same streets.
fought body,

DRAG/PRODUCTION.
Since the publication of Judith Butler's Gender Trouble (1990), such acts as
and disidentification are discussed on the
drag usually representational
260 DISIDENTIFICATION OF POWER
INTHECENTER

and semantic level of deconstruction and subversion the ele

through
ments of citation, and This well be true also
repetition, pastiche. may
about Bella, as she works with citations that never submit
gender fully
to the male/female.
binary
After stepping out of the shadow of the omnipresent drag queens,
the lesbian butch/femme culture and the contemporary drag king
movements us that also is the
helped recognize masculinity entering age
of About three years you started to
performative (re-)production. ago

give drag king workshops yourself, from the United States to Chile,
from Spain to France. When I asked you about the political outcome,

you answered:

I think of the Drag King workshop as a chance for reinventing

feminism without the The work
subject-woman. Drag King
aims to collective the
shop explore through practice performa
tive construction of masculinity, its social and body benefits,
and its for action. . . . The
possibilities political performative
has three main First, from a critical of
practice goals. point
view, it aims to make manifest the constructed character of

Second, the tries to a form of

masculinity. workshop generate
action and visibility for women alternative to the traditional
essentialist feminism, a form of action that enables the subver

sive recitation of certain cultural codes of

masculinity. Finally,
the Drag is an of collective
King workshop experience empow

erment, of political and sexual joy for bio-women, dykes,

and transexual women. The to use an
transgenders workshop,
of Felix is an exercise of
expression Guattari, micropolitics of the
cells inwhich we learn to collectively rework the performative
of of codes within memo
technologies inscription gender body

ry and action, (qtd. in Stuettgen 2004a, 23)

"Here we are in the of a Felix Guattari

register corporeal materialism,"
wrote in his essay "Microphysics of Power/Micropolitics of Desire"

(1984), where he underlined that even in the pessimistic notion of Fou

cault's of the of there exists
understanding productivity power, always
the possibility for counterpower and resistance. That's where the lines
of flight in the philosophies of Deleuze and Guattari become the source
of the production of countersubjecticity. Thus Guattari quoted Foucault
 STUETTGEN 261

in the text he would read at Foucault's funeral: "We need to promote

new forms of subjectivities the type of individuality that
by renouncing
was us for several centuries." Instead of the various inter
imposed upon

pretations of Foucault's politics of the self, which pointed to a privatized

recuperation of apolitical practice and contemplation, Guattari clearly
the notion that "across these various we see
supported prescriptions,
that the decoding of the political technologies of the body, the micro
of . . . does not consist of a of
physics power simple contemplative point

reference, but rather involves what I have called

micropolitics, that is, a

molecular that allows us to move from forms of to

analysis power
investments of desire" (Guattari 1984, 166-7).

QUEERING BEHIND.
DELEUZE/FROM
While Foucault remained skeptical of ongoing representational gay and
lesbian liberation and concentrated on the micropolitics of a
subject's

body?the self?Guattari still supported the notion that from a Foucault

ian perspective it is possible to produce practices and activities that "put
into question the status of the normalized individual and assert a funda
mental right to difference (which is,moreover, not in the least incompat
ible with community a notion that later would be underlined
choices),"
by the numerous Foucaultian tools that made the queer theories of
today
what are. We also know that the "molecular as
they homosexuals,"
Deleuze and Guattari often called themselves, two white men
European

lives, had an ambivalent with the concrete

living straight relationship

identity politics of the gay and lesbian movement of the 1990s.10 Sadly,
this is even not most
contemporary
recognized by poststrucuturalists.

(Even if it is obvious that D&G's concept o? becomingwoman was inspired

by the feminist fights of their time, aswas the concept of a molecular homo
sexuality by gay and lesbian liberation). I know you remember Deleuze's
famous quote about his philosophical practice: "I saw myself taking an
author from behind and giving him a child that would be his own off
monstrous. It was for it to be his own child.
spring, yet really important
. . .But the child was bound to be monstrous too, because it resulted from

all sorts of shifting, slipping, dislocations" (Deleuze 1995, 6).

In his famous letter to the young gay activist Michel Cressole, Deleuze
moves in a way from the masculinist reference of
contradictory certainly
active mentioned above to the invulsive and
penetration deterritorializing
262 INTHECENTER
DISIDENTIFICATION OF POWER

of his identity philosophy of becoming: "Individuals find a real

description
name for themselves, rather, the harshest exercise in
only through
themselves to the multiplicities every
depersonalisation by opening up

where within them, to the intensities running through them" (Deleuze

1995, 6). With what could we connect this notion sexually, if not with
the invulsive and deterritorializing act of being penetrated? The philosophi
cal of masochism and made Deleuze a fan of Sacher
approval passivity
Masoch instead of de Sade, admiring the bourgeois masculine that gave
to to the of a woman that would intensi
up his sovereignty submit rules

to produce a new
fy his body subjectivity (Deleuze 1989).
That makes it at least understandable where the of
concept
woman" from, a term that made Guattari also
"becoming emerges
adore queens:
drag

resort to mime, dance, etc., not as different

They drag, song,
of a theme, to the ideas of the
ways illustrating change specta

tors, but in order to trouble them. To stir uncertain desire

up
zones that more or less refuse to The
they always explore.

question is no longer to know whether one will play feminine

masculine or the reverse, but to make bodies, all bodies,
against
break away from the and restraints of the social
representations
. . What
. is essential here is not the in
body. object question,
but the transformational movement. . . . this is of course, much

different than an identification to the woman. . . . it is a

Instead,

of a different a state in order to become

question becoming,

something other than that which the repressive social body has
forced us to be. (Guattari 1996, 37)

Isn't that a definition of

quite adequate contemporary queer politics,
amultitude of gendered subjects that are productive and not
implying
only reflexive in relation to the hegemonic? Besides the general impli
cations of what?not the but the woman"
subject, concept?"becoming

might be, the problems of this becoming is that it is only approachable

in one Or to
put it as a more
ques
primary way.11 possibly generalized
tion: if the hegemonic majorities' progression might lie in becomingminor,
be it animal, woman, or what
becoming becoming becoming imperceptible, hap

pens with the minorities, such as imperceptibly underrepresented

women identities? As Brian Massumi noted:
 STUETTGEN 263

Deleuze and Guattari's formulation of the concept of "becom

ing-woman" is indeed sexist. The burden of change is placed on

women, since it is their clich? that is singled out. They do not
dwell on the possibility of a similarly becoming-man that
would push the masculine stereotype beyond its threshold of

recuperation (following, for example, strategies of the kind

employed by some segments of the gay and lesbian S/M com
munities who theatricalize in order to take it to a
"masculinity"
deconstructive extreme. (1992, 89)

This knowledge was elaborated by Judith Halberstam (1998): For hun

dreds of years, in women is the untouched, and
masculinity unthought,

repressed philosophy. That's why your concept of the

other of modern
dildo is so powerful in penetrating not only the hidden standpoint of

Deleuze, but possibly the whole logocentric history of philosophy from

behind. And that's why no one other than the molar lesbian could produce
the monstrous child of Deleuze.

DILDONIC/CONTRASEX.
When Bella's narrative of porn we can see
following practices, precisely
how she exchanged the phallocentric status of the penis into the one of a
dildo. One technology of porn she was famous for was "gagging." Gagging
is a act in porn and an intensification of the
popular contemporary
a of the mouth, an obvious of male
blowjob, deep penetration staging

power in sex There are three levels of

performance. cocksucking today:
the blowjob, a a
First, girl sucking guy's penis, usually with the guy

standing and the girl on her knees. Second, deepthroating, the girl
the as as sometimes near This tech
taking penis deep possible, choking.
is even further identified in a sadistic manner in Here,
nique gagging.
the girl is literally penetrated in the mouth by the penis, sometimes with
her out in tears and her throat with reflexes of
eyes bursting reacting

vomiting. Bella often performed this act, most notably in the big-budget
Fashionistas where she was mouth
hard-core-porn (Stagliano 2002),

penetrated by the aggressive performer Rocco Siffredi in the final scene

of the film. This masochistic made Bella a star in
performance major
the business.

Three years later, in Belladonna's Fucking Girls Again (2005), she

264 INTHECENTER
DISIDENTIFICATION OF POWER

a scene with Melissa Lauren, a known for her

performs performer
submissive "talent." Here Bella the dominant and
extremely plays
active character: a kind of dominatrix,
gothic girl already transgressing
the boundaries of mainstream After more
porn by performing pregnant.
than minutes of soft-core-sadomasochism that includes
thirty playful
Bella trying out baseball bats and hockey balls inMelissa's anus, she
introduces a new object: a blow-up dildo. The blow-up dildo could be
called both a joke about and a threat to phallocratie power: it is not only
a of the a size and volume that
campy exaggeration penis, gaining
almost no biopenis has been given by nature, but also a tool of gay cul
ture to train the anus it. Here the dildo is con
by stretching blow-up
trolled a woman to stretch the anus, and mouth of her
by vagina,
submissive But then dominant Bella com
counterpart. surprisingly
mands her sex slave to put the blow-up dildo in her mouth and make it

grow bigger and bigger.

This abstraction of the gagging technique subverts the heterosex
and works it for an of that can't be
binary through economy power
reduced to dualist of sadism and submission, and
conception activity pas

sivity any more. At the most intimate moment in this machinic transversal

sex,Melissa tells Bella how sexy she is, as her mouth grows bigger under
the pressure of the growing blow-up dildo. Then Melissa starts to lick the
tube as if itwere the body part of Bella, still pushing more air through it
and Bella's skin. A new of
caressing sex-technology empathie relationality
and at the same time a total denaturalization of what was once called a

phallistic signifier. In this scene, there is no phallus, owned by one of two

a
subjects any more, but dildo shared by both of them. Finally, at the end
of the dildo game both Bella andMelissa kiss and lick it together.
Bella's practice seems to fit surprisingly well into the outline of a
contrasexual society described in your book Kontrasexuelles Manifest

(Contrasexual Manifest) (Preciado 2004), which was inspired by the

contracts of the S/M This manifest not sets a
working community. only

polemical end to the invisible sex work in classic family structures and
naturalized of love. Here, where all sex without contract
straight myths
is rape, and every child will be brought up not in a family, but in a com
munity, the barriers between the and the space
public private?a
"where women were never safe," a notion of the feminist theorist Linda

Singer that elicited the agreement of Judith Butler?are broken down.12

In the Kontrasexuelles is a sex worker, cultural
Manifest, everybody
 STUETTGEN 265

and The new

producer, gender politician. revolutionary proletarian
icon is therefore the anal a hole that has.
proletarian, sharing everybody
The penis has lost his privileged status as the phallus, being just one of
many variations of dildos.

"A penis is just one bio-dildo, that was the status of the natur
given
al" you once stated You continued:
laconically.

I learned from Derrida that dominance is simply the power to

name code as the and all others as fake. . . . Please
your original
don't tell me now that think that there is some
you really really

thing like the phallus that means something other [than] the
status of the I also about the
unquestioned penis. prefer talking
because this has its own . . .
penis, organ biopolitical history.
The analysis of classical queer studies seem[s] inadequate for
me, to sex- and Besides a
analyse precise gender-connections.
few anecdotes, the processes of and sexual
marginal bodily
transformations which in transsexual-bodies are as
happen
as the dominant of sex- and
neglected standard-techniques

gender-stabilisation, which organise heterosexual bodies. What

transsexual and communities set on the academic

transgendered
are not on the but
plan only gender-crossed performances stage,

sexual, social and transformations in the

physical, political
In other Clits that
everyday. words?precise technologies:
become penises, under the influence o? hor
body-mutations
mones . . . reconstructed that don't desire
vaginas penises. My
dildonics takes account on these transformations,
theory using
dildo as a term to understand the biopolitical production of the
as 2004, b)
body prosthesis. (Stuettgen,

Funny that mainstream society hasn't that we have

recognized already
arrived there: The age of the body as prosthesis. The age offemininity and mas
not as essence, but as form. The And the age
culinity age of contrasexuality. of

postporn production.

QUEER/RESERVOIR.
InA Grammar of theMultitude (2004), Paolo Virno reintroduces theMarx
ist intellect" as a source of the "multi
"general primary revolutionary
tude." The intellect for such as Virno, Lazzerato,
general post-operaists
266 INTHECENTER
DISIDENTIFICATION OF POWER

and Hardt, is what connects all human the to learn,

Negri, beings: ability
to to survive?from the child a home to the migrant
speak, finding way

finding work and food in a different country and language. Even when
Virno underlines that these social abilities of the biopolitical age of
when labor and life in the structures of communication
post-Fordism,
networks and never-ending flexibilization, unpaid internships and
unclear economical futures melt into one and the whole socius experi
ences a state of he doesn't refer to the drastic differences
precariousness,
between all these states Instead, he makes the intel
of exception. "general
lect" an ontological category that all subjects exhibit. This leads not

only to the generalization of difference (I remember how I asked myself

why the multitude in Empire looked so peaceful and hippieish, totally
from any violent and microfascistic but also to
emancipated potential),
the of concrete of identi
disappearance experiences by specific groups
ties. For instance, in an age when all is the affective labor of
productive,

vanishes, as does a tradition of feminist which asked

reproduction critique,

biopolitical questions of work intertwined in an everyday outside the

many years before. In your text Multitudes note

factory queer, you rightly
that Negri and Hardt to be resexualized,
need as all sexual implications
in the interface of labor and life are excluded from their concept of

biopolitics.13

Instead, I would a reservoir, a reservoir of

propose building queer

political knowledge gained by concrete experiences of being exposed,

or as Judith Butler has described it, being beside oneself.14 It would be a
reservoir of and rituals, different relations to and time,
practices space
sex and darkrooms, and women women's
postporn drag king workshops
and reflective use of the fetish. This reser
groups, gender performances
voir would be an alternative the of
approach concerning exchange
affects and of emotions, of and
sharing production knowledge self-orga
nization. The of different states of or even loss
recognition exposedness
could possibly be the basis for therapeutic practices in the social body
that function as an alternative to the hermetic of the
sphere psychia
trist's couch, for a different relation to the world.
achieving
Diefenbach has described as a
Katja "singularity" poststructuralist
term that understands as an ensemble of and
"experience pieces things,

parts of certain and certain situations"

subjects, practices (2006, 87).
Events in space and time that include us, but are not owned us. A few
by

years ago that queer would open themselves to

nobody expected politics
 STUETTGEN 267

a politics that was not only owned by and didn't refer to gay and lesbian

subjects. But even the lesbian icon Judith Halberstam stated:

Queer is a critique, Imean queer isn't just like you sleep with
of the same sex. So, Imean, there are lots of trans
somebody
men who are with women who seem heterosexual, are
they
heterosexual or. . . .Heterosexual is a clinical term rather then

a you know. So I don't think the question

political description,
is "can heterosexuals be it's, "what's queer about het
queer?"
erosexual or heterosexual modes of identification?" I
practices
am not bothered about having a
particularly membership poli
cy for queer. I am to make queer into a useful term, a
trying

politically useful term rather than simply a category where I

say, "yes I identify or no, I don't." (Halberstam 1998)

I think we should start drawing maps and cartographies again, building

archives and reservoirs for new of collective
ways becomings. They
could help us, finding useful strategies, not only for more specific ways
of critique, but also for the production of a transversal sexual politics
to come.
still Even if itmay be philosophically shortsighted, for this case
Iwill stick with Brian Massumi's description of "becoming," because he
links it so directly with the term "strategy": "'Strategies' is the best
word for ways of are less theories about than
becoming: they becoming
as landmarks to future movement.
pragmatic guidelines serving They
have no Value' unless are immanent to their must be
they 'object': they
verified by the collectivity concerned, in other words submitted to

experimental evaluation and remapped as needed" (Massumi 1992, 193).

Beatriz, I think I should finish now, at what is probably the easiest

point at which to depart, the affirmative and messianic prophecy of

better times still to come. Do remember final words in the
you your
interview we did?: "I think about an alliance of dissident posthetero
and even that to
postgay-postlesbian-posttrans postqueer people try
look together for strategies to build new collective bodies and affects. It
is still to come ... a dream" in
(qtd. Stuettgen 2004a, 46).
I to hear from soon.
hope you

Love, Tim
268 INTHECENTER
DISIDENTIFICATION OF POWER

TIM STUETTGEN
did his BA in film studies atMiddlesex University, Lon
don, and the Freie Universitaet, Berlin. Now he is a
postgraduate
researcher at the Jan Van Acad?mie, Maastricht, the Netherlands,
Eyck
and a student of fine art at the HfbK Hamburg. He has been published in
various and newspapers in and Switzerland. He is
magazines Germany

presently writing his first book, Post Porn Politics. Tim Stuettgen is also a
queen under the name Timi Mei See
drag performer Monigatti.

www.postpornpolitics.com

NOTES
1. Preciado's book Kontrasexuelles
Sadly, Manifest (Contrasexual manifest) (2004),
like many of her texts, has not been translated into English. Therefore, except for a
few marginal essays, I have had to draw on German or French versions. Translations
are my own.

The term was made artist Annie vari

"postporn" popular by Sprinkle through
ous and films since the early 1990s. It was reevalued in
performances productively
contemporary queer theory by Beatriz Preciado and others.
2. This lecture at the twentieth London Lesbian and
performative premiered
Gay Film Festival, on 6, 2006.
April
3. In 2002 Belladonna
opened Belladonna Entertainment, through which she has
directed more than a dozen films. To reflect upon what in
"performed relationality"
sex in straight at Bel
girl-girl performance porn could mean, it is worth
looking
ladonna's films Fucking Girls 1-3 (2005-2006), Fetish Fanatic 1-3 and No
(2005-2006)
Warning 1, 2 (2005-2006).
4. For a summary of this debate, see the chapter Sex," inWilliams
"Speaking
(1999, 1-34).
5. The "female is further discussed in the chapter and Re-visions"
gaze" "Sequels
inWilliams (1999, 229-65).
6. The first time Foucault mentioned the term was in the lecture
"biopower"
"The Birth of Biopolitics" 1997, 73).
(Foucault
7. Sadly, the interview with Belladonna is no exception the poor state
regarding
of interviews with contemporary porn stars that overflow the market. See SteveC.

(2003), In Deep with Belladonna.

8. For a more interview of the same see SteveC.
contemporary poor quality,
(2005), Catching Up With Belladonna.
9. The consists of Roberte ce soir (1954), La r?vocationde l'Edit de Nantes
trilogy
(1959), and Le souffleur (1960). Only the first two novels have been translated into

English: Klossowski, Pierre, 2002. Dalkey Archive Press: 2002.

10. For a queer/contrasexual deconstruction of Deleuze/Guattari's molecular

homosexualities, see "Deleuze oder die Liebe, die ihren Namen nicht auszusprechen
wagt," in Preciado (2004, 131-52).
11. Another form that certainly should be researched and discussed more is the
woman of the lesbian
becoming femme.
 STUETTGEN 269

12. This is just a brief reference to the discourse in feminist studies about
huge
precarious female identities inmarriage (Butler 1996, 112).
13. For feminist criticism on see Schulz Multitudes
Negri/Hardt, (2002, 13-16).
queer is another Preciado text that has not been translated into English.
14. Both queer feminists and feminists of color have that certain experi
argued
ences of fragmentation and exposedness could be the basis for a new concept of pol
itics. See Butler's "Being Beside Oneself: On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy," in

Butler (2004, 17-40), and Sandoval

(2000).

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CITED
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.com/guests/page.php?node=freevideo&videoinfo=Bellas+Auditions+for+Dir

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Berressem, 2003. Matter That Bodies: Gender in theAge a Materialism.
Hanjo. of Complex

http://www.genderforum.uni-koeln.de/mediating/btm/btm.html.
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Lauretis, of Gender. Essays Theory and Fiction.
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Masoch. New York: Zone Books.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1995. Negotiations. New York: Columbia Press.

University
2006. "The Form of Value." In Capital
Diefenbach, Katja. Spectral (It Fails Us Now),
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Foucault, Michel. 1978. The History I: An Introduction. Trans. Alan Sheri

of Sexuality
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Guattari, Felix. 1984. "Microphysics of Power/Micropolitics of Desire." In The

Guattari Reader. Ed. Gary Genesko. U.K.: Blackwell.
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Marx, Karl. 1867. Capital. Vol. 1. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867

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Massumi, Brian. 1992. A User's Guide to and Schizophrenia.

Capitalism Cambridge,
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Metelmann, J?rg. 2006. Porno Pop. W?rzburg, Germany: K?nigshausen and Neu
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Mu?oz, Jos? Esteban. 1999. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Poli
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-. une
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FILMS
Boogie Nights. 1997. Director and writer: Paul Thomas Anderson. Lawrence Gordon
Production and Ghoulardi Film Company.

Fashionistas. 2002. Director: John www.fashionistastheshow.com.

Stagliano.
Fetish Fanatic. 2005. Starring: Belladonna. Evil Angel.
Fetish Fanatic 2. 2006. Belladonna. Evil Angel.
Starring:

Fucking Girls. 2005. Starring: Belladonna. Belladonna Entertainment/Evil Angel.

Fucking Girls Again. 2005. Starring: Belladonna. Belladonna Entertainment.

Fucking Girls 3. 2006. Starring: Belladonna. Evil Angel.

Goodfellas. 1990. Director: Martin Scorcese. Story: Nicholas Warner Bros.

Pileggi.
Pictures.
No Warning. 2004. Belladonna. Evil Angel.
Starring:
No Warning 2. 2006. Belladonna. Evil Angel.
Starring:
Raspberry Reich. 1990. Director and writer: Bruce La Bruce. Film
J?rgen Bruning
produktion (Germany).
Strapon Chicks: Bella's Bitches. 2004. Starring: Belladonna. Ducati Productions.