"Every time we fuck, we win!": Porn Methods in the Face of Disaster

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

The abrasive and gloriously offensive declaration, “Every time we fuck, we win!” was published in The Queer Nation Manifesto (1990) thirty-five years ago this year. Commemorating the righteous anger and life-affirming principles of ACT UP activism at the onset of the second Trump administration, where queer and trans sexualities and bodies are targeted for legal and social exclusion, while efforts to censor and ban pornography are gaining momentum, our panel thinks through the significance of engaging queer, trans, sexy, sweaty, lustful embodiments. This roundtable examines questions of bodily autonomy, the erotic, and the pornographic as spaces that empower us to challenge the current phase of the AmeriKKKan empire. We bridge Marxist feminist thought with Black and Latinx gender and sexuality studies to ask: In times of censorship and austerity impacting intellectual freedom, what methods do academic pornographers engage in to continue examining porn’s histories? What responsibility do we have as cultural theorists in excavating the so-called unproductive sexual subject and their challenging of economic systems? What are some of the legal and ethical considerations of preserving adult media, given the current political landscape?

Erick John Rodriguez looks to the queer 1950's archive to argue that the counter-public erotica of ballet artist Dom Orejudos offers a counter history to the formation of leather and BDSM communities in the United States. Mark Lockwood’s work provides a historiographical narration of the blatino porn era, which emerged in the late 1990s as a call-and-response to the overwhelmingly white gay porn industry. Drawing from firsthand oral history interviews, film analysis, and archival research, he explores how blatino pornographers not only created a unique genre but also strategically challenged the racial and economic terrains of the mainstream porn market. Yessica Garcia Hernandez centers the porn work of April Flores and Carlos Batts to argue that Flores and Batts’s porn work created a fat feminist porn avant-garde aesthetic, particularly in the 2000s, at a time when exposing the racialized fat body in erotic ways was not yet normalized in mainstream movements. Caleb Luna considers the boundaries between art and pornography through Evu Wu and Shoog McDaniel’s collaboration “Bunny x Gator.” Blending performance art and kink, Wu and McDaniel visualize disabled sexuality that both challenges and implicates normative cultures within sexual practices. Our moderator, Aracely Garcia-Gonzalez contextualizes the history of the criminalization of sexual labor and its relationship to the formation of U.S. empire and asks: who has the right to own their sexual labor and sell it under capitalism?

We refuse the impetus to sanitize queer and instead imagine new modalities of knowledge production that views the performance of the grotesque, the taboo, the hypersexual, and the selling of sex as sites of radical possibility. This roundtable calls all the putas, malcriadas, whores, and lustful bottoms to wear the disapproving whispers on their bodies and actively respond to the dramatic increase in porn censorship to reimagine sexual futures against and outside the nation-state. Together, we investigate the methodological interventions necessary to survive late-stage empire.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chairs

• Aracely Garcia Gonzalez, Merced College

• Erick John Rodríguez, University of California-Santa Barbara

Panelists

• Caleb T Luna, University of California-Santa Barbara

• Mark R Lockwood, Northwestern University

• Yessica Garcia Hernandez, University of California, Los Angeles

Biographical Information

Erick John Rodríguez is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara where he is finishing his dissertation titled, “Carnal Lassitudes: Pleasure, Power, and Subversive Masculinities in Contemporary Literatures of the Global South." His research focuses on affective responses to labor degradation in modern imperial countries, and its role in shaping racialized male sexualities. He specifically looks at aesthetic and narrative deployments of submissive sexual intimacy from queer Latinx, South Asian, Middle East, and Maghreb authors and cinematographers who reside in North America and Europe. Ultimately, his work critiques twentieth and twenty-first century formations of fascist and authoritarian hypermasculinity as it emerged and continues to evolve under the conditions of capital imperialism. Enhancing his research, Erick has been a fellow for the American Cultures and Global Contexts Center and the Hemispheric South/s Research Initiative. Most recently, he co-organized the Global Spains Research Institute on Conviviality and Accompaniment, which seeks to expand notions of Latinidad outside traditional area and hemispheric studies paradigms.

Email: erickrodriguez@ucsb.edu

Title and Institutional Affiliation: Doctoral Candidate, Department of English, UCSB

Caleb Luna is a writer, performer and award-winning educator and scholar. They are the bestselling author of REVENGE BODY (Nomadic Press, 2022), and co-host of the podcast Unsolicited: Fatties Talk Back. Publishing, performing and curating across genre and medium, Caleb's cultural work reads, responds to and challenges tropes and discourses regarding race, size, sexuality and disability in media and culture. Dr. Luna’s manuscript-in-progress analyzes media and cultural objects to surface body size as a shared site of oppression under colonization and the majoritarian culture that sustains it across lines of race, gender and sexuality. They are a former UC President’s and Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow and are currently an Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Email: ctluna@ucsb.du

Title and Institutional Affiliation: Assistant Professor, Feminist Studies, UC Santa Barbara

Yessica Garcia Hernandez is Assistant Professor and Filmmaker in the César E. Chavez Department of Chicana/o and Central American Studies at UCLA. Her research explores Latinx sexualities, performance, popular culture, and auto/ethnographic methods. She is currently writing a book about Chicana singer Jenni Rivera and paisa youth subculture and a second book about the history of Latinas in the pornographic archive and contemporary industry. Her research theorizes working-class vulgarities as feminist rebellion and examines how Latinx and Mexican girls engage in vulgar pleasures as ways to refuse respectability politics. She has also written about fat Latina sexuality and fat erotics.

Email: yessicagarciah@ucla.edu

Title and Institutional Affiliation: Assistant Professor, Department of Chicana/o Studies, UCLA


Aracely García-González received her Ph.D. in Chicana and Chicano Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Effron Center for the Study of America at Princeton University. She is an interdisciplinary feminist scholar; her training is in critical ethnic studies, emphasizing social processes, cultural studies, visual culture, history, and the legacies of U.S. imperialism in the Americas. Her research focuses on the connections between histories of colonialism, global capitalism, gender, and economic vulnerabilities in marginalized communities. Her book-length project, “Flirting with Sexual Economies,” outlines how Latina sexualities and aesthetics reflect U.S. capital accumulation and are integral to how capital moves, particularly in the Americas. She theorizes how Latina sex and cultural workers flirt with imposed ideas about their excessive sexualities as they navigate the dehumanizing economic conditions of the 21st century.

Email: ag4163@princeton.edu

Title and Institutional Affiliation: Postdoctoral Research Associate, Effron Center for the Study of America, Princeton University

ASA Number: 6353983

Mark Lockwood is a porn scholar, resource mobilizer, and pleasure-centered harm reductionist who earned his PhD in American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. Broadly, he writes, teaches, and researches about race & pornography, gay porn history, sexual cultures, harm reduction, and the sex industries. He is currently writing a book project tentatively titled Black Inches: Masculinity, Sexuality, and Erotic Resistance in the ‘Blatino Porn’ Era. This book is the first to provide a rich analysis on the history, biographies, material production, and sexual representations Black and Latino (“blatino”) pornographers in the “blatino porn” era. This project explores how blatino pornographers created pornographic content for themselves, by themselves at a moment in gay porn history when men of color were largely excluded from mainstream pornographic media industries. Using personal interviews, archival research, historiography, and film analyses, he explores how blatino pornographers pursued their own entrepreneurial efforts to gain control over the means of production; worked within an industry that commodified their sexualities; and challenged, and sometimes subverted, stereotypical depictions of their representations in the pornographic.
ASA Number: 3107213
Mark Lockwood

Email: mark.lockwood@northwestern.edu

Title and Institutional Affiliation: SPAN Postdoctoral Fellow, Northwestern University