26 novembre 2009
femme invisibility
So apparently there's been a lot of writing about femme invisibility on queer blogs in November (here, here, here and here), and since I'm always late, well here's my December blog post about femme invisibility.
Being invisible as queer because I am femme is something that is a
problem when I am in the metro, or in the streets, and I see someone
who is visibly queer, and I want to express attraction and/or
solidarity.
Being invisible because I am femme is a problem in Berlin, where all the butches are attracted to other butches and don't have a clue we exist, or despise us for not looking anti-capitalistic enough.
Being invisible is also a problem in NY, which is such a huge city, and where I can't go to lesbian bars because they card and I am not 21, and where the only way I could hope to meet queers would be if they recognized me in the streets as one of them when I stare and stare and stare desperately.
But altogether really, I am pretty resigned to my invisibility and I guess I don't see it as so much of a problem.
Sometimes funny things happen to me. Sometimes I think I'm invisible and I am not.
Last summer when I was stuck in an airport for hours and
hours waiting for my flight from NYC to San Francisco, I started trying
to find queers in my boarding gate. When I spotted a cute
genderqueer person, I did all I could to make myself visible to them. I
was being less and less subtle : staring, smiling, re-applying lipstick,
showing my garter-belts, putting on my Lexington Club sweater and
trying to make the logo conspicuous (”Lexington Club, San Francisco :
where every night is ladies night”, it says)… To no avail. I felt so
invisible. I gave up, feeling despaired. Then, aboard the plane, cute
genderqueer and I happened to be seated next to each other ! We started
talking, and in the first minute I dropped as many names as I could to
prove I was queer : Michelle Tea, the Homo A GoGo Festival, the Femina Potens gallery… It turned
out that, earlier in the boarding gate, I was the one not seeing that
while I was trying to get their attention, they were busy writing me a
cute letter, which is why their eyes weren’t meeting mine. We ended up
fucking on the plane and having a very romantic summer crush. Fuck
femme invisibility !!!
Just recently, a femme
friend of mine asked me for advice on femme in/visibility. She just got
in a relationship with a transman, and she is struggling with the loss
of visibility that entails for her. Basically, she is used to being
with a butch which makes her visible, but now as a couple they pass as
straight. And as I have been with someone trans for quite a long time
now, she wanted to know how I dealt with that.
Well, I guess I’ve come to see invisibility as something that defines
femmeness. Having a butch with you to make you more visible is not a
solution, it just makes the problem more obvious : you can’t be visible
on your own, your queerness has to come from your partner. People will
still think that you are a straight girl who was corrupted by a butch,
you weren’t really a lesbian before you met this girl who doesn’t
really look like one anyway, so you’re not really a lesbian at all.
In my queer community, people are always much more surprised when they
learn that someone who is butch has had sex with men – they aren’t
really shocked when they learn a femme has had sex with men. A butch is
always seen as more of a lesbian, even in the queer community. In most people's eyes, femmes are not really dykes, either they’re attracted to masculinity
and therefore they’re kind of heterosexual (since they’re attracted to
otherness in terms of gender), or if they’re attracted to other femmes
then they’re just doing lesbian porn for men, kissing to make boys
horny. I guess what I’m trying to say is that invisibility is kind of a
fatality and I’ve come to be resigned to it.
Also, I think that somehow if I’d really wanted to be visible as queer, I would have
made other choices in terms of identity. Not that being femme was a
choice, but it has to reflect my needs and my personality. So one of
the reasons why I’m femme is probably BECAUSE it makes me a spy, an
invisible queer, because I pass, because I can pretend. Of course
sometimes I resent it, but it’s also comfortable. My identity as a
femme probably matches my needs and my personality, and for some reason
or other it suits me better to be invisible than to be visible, as the
lesser of two evils. Accepting that invisibility is a part of
femmeness that is inherent to it makes it easier. It has never been that big of a
problem for me to be rendered invisible by the fact I was in a
relationship with a trans. I’ve accepted it and have never given that
much thought to how I could solve the problem.
Also, I think one of the main reasons my boyfriend transitioned was NOT
that he felt he was a man deep inside, but that he wanted to be able to
choose when to be visible and when not to be. Basically, he doesn’t
identify as a man, he still identifies as butch, but it was too much
for him to be stared at, assaulted, confronted with so much hatred all
the time, and he just needed to be able to negociate when he wants to
be out and when he wants to be closeted. Being femme allows you to do
that, and transitioning to pass as a man also allows you to do that
too, to a certain extent. But being butch doesn’t. When you’re butch,
you are constantly out and visible, even when it’s a danger for you. So
basically, the fact that his transition has so much to do with the
question of his in/visibility, makes it easier for me to empathize and
to accept the compromise I’m making by losing some of my visibility for
him to be able to choose his. I can still come out when I choose to, although it has to be verbal, linguistic, and he can now be closeted when he chooses to, instead of being subjected to the public examination of his gender, as in "are you a guy or a girl ?".
Also I guess the fact that he is out as trans to most people around us makes things easier. If he wanted to pass
as a man to more people than just the strangers in the streets and the
salesman at the grocery store and the people at his job, it would mean I would
have to be closeted as queer to a number of people. But I’m lucky he is
even ok with being out to my Jewish grandmother, which avoids me the
humiliation of saying “I have a boyfriend” after I’ve said “I’m a
lesbian” and my family said “it’s just a phase”.
Now I have a problem with the people who say being femme means "looking straight". I don't think my femininity is a straight femininity. The problem is in the eye of the reader but certainly not in my gender presentation. My femininity is a twisted one, a perverted, subverted one. Of course sometimes you will see me looking like just another girl. But most times even if I'm not necessarily readable as queer, I'm read as different, weird, over-the-top.
Something in the article on Sugarbutch really questioned me : it's the "invisibility to yourself" part.
I’ve always felt that my queerness came from intellectual and
political choices, that I had decided as a feminist not to have sex
with cismen anymore although I couldn’t help but being attracted to
masculinity ; that I had tried really hard to become a lesbian, by cutting my hair short
and having sex with straight girls or lipstick bisexual girls, and I
didn’t feel sexual desire for them ; and that I had therefore decided that butches would be what was most suitable to both my feminism and my attraction to masculinity.
It sounds pretty ridiculous now that I think about it. It sounds like I
am saying that I’m not really queer, that since I’m a feminine person
attracted to masculine persons, I’m basically heterosexual. That my
queerness is a operation of my brains, a strategy, that I could act
upon it, choose to become queer.
Actually something probably changed in my DESIRE, and not just in my
THOUGHTS, when I stopped having sex with men. I have not DECIDED to
stop having sex with men. It’s just what I’d been telling myself.
Probably that explanation I had for my queerness was some sort of
integrated femmephobia.
I remember thinking that since my ring finger was not longer than my
index, then it meant that I wasn’t really a lesbian, not a “primary”
lesbian, not biologically a lesbian, which sounds awful now that I think about it.
Something else that I found interesting on the matter in the past weeks :
The LGBT association I'm a part of, Etudions Gayment, organized an student exchange with the Swedish queer association SFQ. Nine young queers were invited to Paris for a week of workshops, etc. Two of them gave a workshop on heternormativity, and part of it was an exercise : you get two pictures, and you have to guess which pictures represents someone who is heterosexual. The pictures I got showed two feminine girls, one older, one younger. I said "I don't want to take part in this exercice, you can't say whether someone is gay or straight just by looking at them, I am confronted with invisibility way too often to accept to play this game". Of course this was one of the reactions that the organizers of the workshop expected - uncomfortable feelings, anger and confusion. But the main point of the exercise is : we do have assumptions, we are prejudiced, whether we like to admit it or not. Of course, among activists, political correctness will prevail and noone will want to say "I assume this person is straight because they look feminine", or "I assume this person is straight because they are working-class", although this is something we actually do. And indeed even I would probably have thought these two women on the pictures were straight if I had seen them in the street out of a queer context. Even maybe in a queer party I would have thought they were out of place. Another point of the exercise was to show how heterosexuality is that which isn't noticed, commented upon, it is normal, and therefore doesn't stand out in a crowd : it is the norm. This was shown by how the only participants of the workshop who accepted to play did not respect the rule of the exercise : they tried to look for signs of homosexuality, to say which of the two was homosexual, and not the opposite. It is much easier to point signs of homosexuality than signs of heterosexuality because everybody is supposed to be heterosexual unless they're gay. Anyway, I'm beginning to drift from my original subject which was femme invisibility.
Here is a link which shows the beautiful diversity of femmeness. I am addicted to it and refresh the page several times a day to check if something is new.
I hope that is not what you have done with my blog, because I haven't been posting anything new in a long time. I didn't advertise for the queer playparty last night, I didn't tell you to walk for World AIDS Day march last week, or let you know about all my intricate thinking and good BDSM sex, or give you plenty of porn links to jerk off to... I'll try and catch up on all these things in my next post.
In the meantime, please comment.
16 octobre 2009
Tenderness
I have an older sister whose name is Tenderness. She was a stillborn baby, but her ghost is still around.
ce soir vendredi 16 octobre, conférence à la Maison des Métallos, 94 rue Jean-Pierre Timbaud, sur le thème "femmes-artistes et création", 19h30, entrée libre. Wendy Delorme, Emilie Jouvet, Louise deVille, Peggy Sastre. venez !
aujourd'hui et demain à Montpellier, les Assises des Corps Autogérés, contre-colloque organisé par Pink Freak'X en réaction à un énième séminaire de discours sur le transsexualisme - parler de et à la place de, avec interventions de psychiatres experts en transphobie.
je pars demain matin à Berlin, où je vais tourner une scène de cul avec mon transboyfriend pour Courtney Trouble. I'M SO EXCITED I CAN'T SLEEP AT NIGHT.
là-bas aura lieu le 4e Berlin Porn Film Festival, dont le programme est enfin en ligne. Outre les projections de films dans lesquels j'apparais, ici et ici, et l'atelier d'éducation sexuelle que je co-host, en bas de cette page, il y a tout plein de films géniaux qui vont être projetés, des invitéEs super classe, plein d'évènements en marge du festival comme par exemple une compétition de air-sex (!), une expo d'art, le festival de littérature érotique Erophil où je fais une lecture, le Petra Joy Award et le Feministiche PornoFilm Preis Europa, des soirées...
Pour me voir (sur grand écran toute nue et en vrai habillée) :
* au Kino Moviemento (Kottbusser Damm 22, U-bahn Schönleintr. ou Hermannplatz) :
-Vendredi 23 octobre, 17h45, séance Dyke Porn, 7,50€.
-Samedi 24 octobre, 12h, seconde projection de cette même séance (comprenant des courts d'Emilie Jouvet, Todd Verow...), 7,50€.
-Samedi 24 octobre, 20h15, Histoires de Sexe(s), d'Ovidie, 7,50€.
*au Studio 70 (Kottbusser Damm 70, U-bahn Hermannplatz)
-Dimanche 25 octobre, 13h, performance pour Erophil, et je crois que c'est gratuit.
*au studio 38 (Schlesischestr. 38, U-bahn Schlesisches Tor)
-Dimanche de 15 a 18h, atelier d'education sexuelle sur les jeux de roles et les sextoys, 25€ (on va essayer de faire des reductions quand meme, parce que c'est cher) reservations office@pornfilmfestivalberlin.de - l'atelier est ouvert a tou-te-s, en anglais.
toutE lA monde peut pas aller à Berlin, mais ce qui est chouette c'est que je vais refaire l'atelier d'éducation sexuelle sur les sextoys et les jeux de rôle à Paris avec Wendy Delorme, en non-mixité de personnes-se-définissant-comme-femmes, au festival Cineffable, le 2 novembre à 17h. Et en plus cette fois c'est en francais, et gratos. cet atelier aura lieu après la séance "Sexualité et Plaisir" de 15h, où sera projeté le film Passion and Power : The Technology of Orgasm, réalisé par Emiko Omori qui est une documentariste géniale.
toujours pour Cineffable, je participe également au débat sur le SM, le 1er novembre à 22h, aux côtés de Flozif et Jade.
La date de la prochaine playparty queer et lesbienne vient d'etre annoncee ! ça sera le 5 décembre, toujours au Banque Club.
Hier soir j'ai rencontré Eileen Myles après avoir assisté à sa lecture, et j'ai eu le plaisir d'aller dîner avec elle et mes amies fem, c'était une soirée très enrichissante et très inspirante.
J'ai fini de lire Bottle Rocket Hearts, de Zoe Whittal, qui est un roman queer canadien. ça se lit facilement, c'est court et fort.
Je dois retourner en cours, mais je finirai cet article : il parlera de la notion de bio/cisgenre, de mes règles et de la mooncup, et j'y continuerai l'article précédent sur l'expérience de vivre une relation avec quelqu'un qui transitionne. Donc revenez voir !
01 octobre 2009
You are my sweet monster
Je viens de rentrer d'un super spectacle. Le Maxi Monster Music Show joue à L'Européen jusqu'au 9 octobre. Courez-y ! C'est un peu cher mais c'est classe, y a une femme tronc, une femme homme, une femme nordique, une femme à barbe, entre autres. Et toute la monde joue de plein d'instruments et a des super costumes.
Bon alors j'avais pas capté mais apparemment samedi c'est La Nuit Blanche de Paris. C'est pour ça que y avait plein de soirées branchouilles alors ? Le 3 octobre, en plus d'aller voter contre la privatisation de la Poste, et avant la soirée Cunt Punt au Glazart qui commence qu'à 23h, vous pouvez aussi aller à La Nuit Blanche Et Rose, avec concerts, performances (y aura les Kisses Cause Trouble), projections, etc., et ça se passe à Rosa Bonheur, dans le parc des Buttes Chaumont, de 20h à minuit (bon c'est une nuit blanche qui finit tôt alors). Moi perso jvais chez mon cousin, il a un terrarium avec un serpent qui s'appelle Gwendoline !
Le 7 octobre le groupe riotgrrrl français Pussy Patrol, qui vient de se reformer, joue au Chiquito !
Liiiiick my period blood ! (y aura d'autres groupes aussi)
Le 9 octobre vernissage de l'expo photo In Between, par Anakin Wyoming, à la librairie Violette & Co.
LE 10 OCTOBRE C'EST L'EXISTRANS, 14H AU METRO JOURDAIN. J'aimerais bien qu'il y ait plein de monde. Pis ensuite le soir y a une soirée au Yono.
Le 15 octobre, l'auteure américaine Eileen Myles lira à la galerie Castillo/Corrales, 65 rue Rébeval, à 20h.
From October 22nd to 25th, I'm going to be horribly amazingly busy : it's the 4th Berlin Porn Film Festival !
I'm in three of the movies that are screened :
one directed by a straight woman and a straight man (Ovidie & Jack Tyler's Histoires de Sexe(s)), screened Saturday 24th at 8:15pm, one directed by a lesbian (Emilie Jouvet's Judy's Panties), and one directed by a gay man (Todd Verow's Wendy and Judy), both screened in the dyke porn shorts programme, on Friday 23rd at 5:45, and on Saturday 24th at noon. The first one is a full-length feature with a script, the two others are shorts (9 and 30 minutes) without a story, just sex. I will be answering questions of the audience after the screenings.
I will also be performing for Erophil, a festival for erotic literature, on Sunday Oct. 25th at 1pm.
In addition to the screenings and the reading, I'm also doing a workshop on roleplay and sextoys with Wendy Delorme, Sunday Oct. 25th from 3pm to 5pm. Women, men, and everybody in between or beyond are welcome, but the number of participants is limited. 15€. Register here if you want to attend : office@pornfilmfestivalberlin.de
Du 22 au 25 octobre, pour ceux et celles qui seront pas à Berlin, y a le Paris Burlesque Festival à la Bellevilloise. Projections de films, performances et revues de cabaret, djs et musique live. Jvous laisse regarder le programme.
Et à la fin du mois, le festival Cineffable : Le 21e festival international lesbien et féministe de Paris se tiendra du 29 octobre au 2 novembre.
Bon je crois que j'ai tout dit.
Now, confession time : I've heard several times from people who'd been in relationships with people who were transitioning that they'd had to mourn the loss of someone, that differently gendered person that their partner had been, and was not anymore. My current partner is going through his own transition : when we got together he was my girlfriend and had a girl name and was referred to as "she", and then little by little he started binding his chest, he changed pronouns, then names, then started taking testosterone, and is considering surgery. I have never felt it was hard for me, on a deep level. Of course his transition brought about the usual questions of my visibility as a queer femme when I'm walking in the streets with someone who is presenting as male or recognized as male by strangers. Of course it brought about the usual questions of my sexual orientation : how can I be a lesbian if my partner is not a girl anymore ? But none of this is a major problem for me. I've never really cared about sexual orientation, and as a femme I'm already used to ranting about my invisibility - showing off my butch to prove I'm queer was never really a solution. These problems did occurr, but I never really felt his transition was hard for me. People said "it must be hard for you", he said "I understand this must be hard for you", but I didn't feel it was. I felt it was certainly very hard for him and I had to support him through it, and maybe supporting him would mean sometimes having to hear him bitch about his hair not growing fast enough, or having to be amazed at every new hair that grew on his chin. It also meant having to be very tactful and to deal with his body issues, to respect his stoneness and to help him melt it when he felt like it, and generally having to cheer him up when he went through hard times. All of this felt like normal things, things that should be expected from a loving partner. The extent of the support he needed from me sometimes meant I had to forget myself, to be selfless, to nurse and care and sometimes to feel reassigned to a traditionally disempowering female role. Sometimes it meant I went more often to the TDoR meetings and the Trans March meetings than to feminist movement events, or sexworkers movement events, and I was wearing a lot of purple, and I felt I had become a flag for a cause which isn't mine. That felt hard to me. But it was not inherent to his transition. It came from gender constructions I needed to work on, it came from my codependant behavior that I needed to work on, it came from the hardships that any relationship can go through. Nothing was hard for me in his transitioning. But these past months I've been realizing I actually have gone through a phase of mourning. It is probably not over yet. I have been mourning the death of my girlfriend, who's now and forever a boyfriend, the body he had, that is beginning to change irreversibly, the face and the voice and the skin that he had when we met, that I'm beginning to forget. It is a painful process. It is the grief of a loss. The loss of my lesbian love. It's nothing conscious. There's a few dreams I've had that gave me a clue that maybe something was going on there. There's a few times I've felt a pinch in my heart as I was watching not so old pictures of him. And why is it that the last crushes I've had were on persons who were on the verge of transitioning, pe-T, not even binding, but boyish, genderqueer, questioning, or about to take the first steps of their transitions ?
Courtney Trouble is working hard for you ! Her 1st film, Roulette, was released less than six months ago. Her 2nd one, Nostalgia, was released just over a month ago. The 3rd one, Speakeasy, was released less than a week ago. The 4th one, Seven Minutes in Heaven, that was shot at the end of August, is already finished editing and you can see its trailer here. And the 5th one, Roulette Dirty South, is done shooting ! Courtney works with the best everything. Want names ? Morty Diamond, Lorelei Lee, April Flores, Amos Mac, Syd Blakovich, Jiz Lee, Madison Young, Dallas Fivestar are photographers, directors and models she's worked with. Not only is she doing more and more DVDs, but NoFauxxx is being updated more frequently than it ever was, and guess who's in the photos they posted last ? it's me ! I'm in three other photoshoots on the website. AND I have a secret I can't tell you right now, which is making my heart pound like crazy...
Une dernière chose : il y a plein de trucs sexuels à faire avec ses pieds ou ceux de son/sa/ses partenaires ! Par exemple les enduire de lubrifiant et se les frotter là où j'pense.
Mes lubrifiants préférés sont Sliquid H2O Intimate Lubricant, Bodywise Liquid Silk, et Astroglide Glycerin & Paraben Free Liquid, tous les trois à base d'eau. Le mieux c'est de choisir des lubrifiants sans parfum, sans paraben (risques d'allergies ou d'hypersensibilités), et sans sucre (ni glycérine ni glycol, car si t'as les muqueuses sensibles, avec les frictions ça te file des mycoses). Liquid Silk a du paraben et du sucre, mais il est tellement bien... Le flacon de 250ml est pratique, il y a une pompe donc t'en fous pas partout, tu perds pas le bouchon, t'as pas à tatonner pendant longtemps. Il colle pas, il est pas visqueux. C'est celui que j'utilise le plus souvent, parce que je n'ai pas de problèmes de mycoses à répétition ou d'hypersensibilité au paraben.
Bon, d'autres gens aiment d'autres lubrifiants, comme par exemple Probe ; mais je connais aussi beaucoup de gens qui le détestent, car ça fait des fils comme la colle UHU. D'autres gens aiment les gels à base de silicone, comme Concept S. ; water-based vs silicone-based c'est presque une guerre. D'autres gens n'ont pas assez de thunes pour se payer des lubes de luxe ou carrément les commander depuis les Etats-Unis : auquel cas, n'utilisez surtout pas de lubrifiants à base d'huile (vaseline, etc, pas compatibles avec les préservatifs et très très très mauvais pour votre vagin), évitez si possible les petits sachets de lubrifiant qu'on vous refile avec les capotes gratuites, et n'achetez surtout pas les produits Durex Play (le pire apparemment c'est "frissons", au menthol, qui a l'air de grave brûler et irriter). Alors si vous pouvez pas vous permettre les dépenses excessives, les voyages ou les frais de port, mais que vous voulez quand même vous faire du bien sans vous faire du mal, vous pouvez trouver le lubrifiant KY en pharmacie, à mon avis c'est ce qu'il y a de mieux pour pas cher en France. Il est plutôt correct - il a de la glycérine et du paraben, et il colle un peu au bout d'un moment, mais il n'a pas de parfum et il tient longtemps.
Bonne nuit !
22 août 2009
San Francisco
Saturday, August 22nd - ART OF RESTRAINT, erotic rope bondage event, at the Femina Potens Art Gallery. I will be performing there, as well as Madison Young, Midori, Fivestar... and also Margaret Cho !!!
2199 Market Street & Sanchez. Come ! My piece might get messy !
Tuesday, August 25th - RADAR, reading series, at the San Francisco Public Library.
It is hosted by Michelle Tea and I will be reading some of my writing. Rose Tully and Katie Crouch will also be reading. It is free ! Come ! I won't be naked, promise !
I just discovered PornSaints, and it's a very exciting project.
I want to be a pornsaint !
I am reading the book Intersex (for lack of a better word), by Thea Hillman, and you have to read it too.
The HomoAGoGo festival just ended and it was great. A fashion show (I walked the catwalk in a pink crochet jumpsuit), an art exhibit (I particularly loved a painting of two giraffes snuggling that was entitled Longingly), live music (I was amazed by Mirah, Tender Forever and Tim'm West)...
Being in SF has me wondering about something I'm feeling increasingly uncomfortable with.
Buying local, cruelty-free, fair trade, organic, recycled, non GMO, women-owned... Political choices seem to be a lot about consumption choices.
Are politics just marketing niches ? In French supermarkets, there is a tiny fair trade deparment, with very attractive packages that make you feel very cool, where the prices are much higher than the rest, and then there's the usual trash - made-in-China, underpaid cashiers, and battery chicken.
When you buy from a shop that sells many products that were made by 8-year-old kids, or tested on animals, AND a line of ethical products, who are you giving money to and what purposes does it serve ? As it seems to me, it's just a way for the shop to get money from more people : the ones who don't give a fuck about politics, AND the ones who do.
I remember going to this very green, ecological, organic, vegan restaurant in Paris, where they had no switch for the light in the bathroom. It never went off. When I enquired why, the woman said "when there is one, people forget to switch it off anyway", which is obviously a ridiculous justification.
This also makes me think of what this link shows : namely, that a few corporations own all the printed press, TV channels, and publishing companies of my country. The newspaper of the Communist Party is partially owned by a corporation that also owns a part of Cosmopolitan, and hundreds of other magazines, newspapers and tv channels (and also a weapon producing and arms trading company). I am not saying that the journalists who work for this newspaper are subservient to capitalism and not honest in the work they're doing. I'm saying the corporation that holds so many shares of their capital is convinced they're harmless and that reading this communist newspaper will not make any revolution or social change happen that would threaten its interests. It all confuses me a lot. To what extent can we trust a publisher who is selling a feminist book and a book
advocating for rape, a book defending the theory of intelligent design and a book
that is pro-darwinism, a book that says capitalism should end and
a book that says communism is the root of all evil ? Are the freedom of speech that we have and the independance of our journalists so harmless and ineffective to make a real change ?
It makes me think of "La dictature c'est ferme ta gueule, la democratie c'est cause toujours", it makes me think of "if voting could change anything it would be illegal".
What can we do ? If you know how not to get cynical about this, please comment. I'm in need of positive thoughts on the matter.
I got to see Speakeasy, Courtney Trouble's yet unreleased 3rd movie, and it is HOT. The most glamorous queer porn I've ever seen. The bondage scene with Jiz Lee and Dallas Fivestar made me cream in my jeans. Lorelei Lee is one gorgeous foxy lady. Beautiful B&W photography, a simple, classic, efficient storyline, and hot FtM-on-femme & transfag action make for a dirty, smutty, delicious film noir.
I got to attend the shooting of her 4th film, Seven minutes in Heaven, and it's gonna be HOT. Courtney is still in the process of editing it and since I'm staying at her place, I get to hear the soundtrack of moans and whines and groans everyday as I wake up.
Oh, and : my creativity and inspiration are developing ! It is very exciting and sleep-depriving ! I am now a 19 year old porn actress, performance artist, sex educator, translator, activist and writer !
21 août 2009
Stone
Stone is the transmen who won't get naked when they're fucking you, much less let you fuck them. Stone is the sexworkers who won't let their clients kiss them. Stone is how sometimes you get ticklish and it's just the way your body says "don't touch me there". Stone is the butches who don't want my lipstick to get smeared on their lips when we make out, and the reason why I wear kiss-proof rouge a levres. Stone is how so many women won't trust anyone but themselves with their bodies enough to let go and cum. Stone is how I'll get tense if you get too close to my clit, and keep my hand ready to stop yours, clutched firmly around your arm, trying to keep control. Stone is how I'll fidget and wiggle under you, feeling trapped, not telling you I'm scared, just trying to reduce the harm, moving away from you with my hips, escaping as much as I can. "You're not doing anything wrong, just going places where I've been hurt", I whisper when you ask what's going on. Thank you for asking. Maybe stone is also how upset you got, how I felt you cringe, when your friend called you a name he says is your real name, and how relieved you felt that I didn't hear it. Stone is these experiences that queers have in common, these hard boundaries that pain has carved in our bodies, making us harden. In some places, my stone can be melted, if you do it right, if you're patient and listen. In others, it will remain hard as a rock.
15 août 2009
overwhelming whirlwind
so, after reading my last post, someone told me the exhaustion i talk about at the end of the text is very typical of sexworkers, and such women as Annie Sprinkle and Virginie Despentes mention similar feelings.
here's what i wrote back :
my exhaustion has very little to do with sexwork though.
i started feeling this way long before i began sexworking.
it's just the way my life is meant to be.
a constant overwhelming whirlwind. hectic frantic and fantastic.
i can hardly keep up with it, but most of the time the breathlessness just makes me a little dizzy and light-headed with happiness and excitement.
except the times when i get burnt out and have a nervous breakdown.
maybe sometime i'll come to terms with the existential anxiety that leads me to run after time the way i do, keeping myself busy all the time, maybe trying to escape something, who knows. i'm sure i'll work that out.
until then, this neurosis makes my life pretty darn interesting.
voici un lien vers un site qui vient d'etre cree : Les mots de la chair.
ce soir j'ai performe pour SIZZLE, une soiree de lectures et de performances organisee a la galerie Femina Potens. c'etait interessant et agreable. les autres auteures invitees etaient Madison Young, Luna Maia, et Thea Hillman, et ce qu'elles ont fait etait chouette.
je suis pressee de voir ce que San Francisco aura a m'offrir dans les deux semaines a venir.
(j'ai largement augmente l'article precedent depuis que je lai mis en ligne, si vous l'avez lu juste apres sa publication, vous devriez y jeter un nouveau coup d'oeil. je vais probablement le retravailler encore dans les jours qui viennent.)
vous devriez aussi jeter regulierement un oeil sur ce que fait Courtney Trouble :
elle a realise trois longs-metrages dans les derniers mois : Roulette, Nostalgia et Speakeasy, qui m'ont bien l'air d'etre des oeuvres d'art en plus d'etre des pornos queer excitants.
elle vient de faire passer son site internet, NoFauxxx, a la vitesse superieure : il y aura des updates plus regulieres a partir de maintenant (et un troisieme photoshoot de moi vient d'y etre mis en ligne) !
lentement mais surement, son projet d'inventaire exhaustif, que dis-je, de pantheon du porno queer, avance petit a petit : RealQueerPorn. d'ailleurs si vous voulez offrir votre contribution benevole a ce projet, contactez-la, elle a besoin de petites mains !
Sinon, voila une serie de liens vers des trucs sympas :
Bitch Magazine, un magazine lesbien feministe assez cool
$pread Magazine, un magazine qui "illuminate the sex industry"
On Our Backs, un magazine porno lesbien qui n'existe plus...
Fetlife, un reseau social genre myspace ou facebook sauf que c'est pour les deviants sexuels et autres kinksters
The Inverted Eye, une boutique en ligne qui vend des accessoires vintage et des antiquites dont l'usage initial peut etre detourne et perverti au gre de vos kinky games (fragments d'uniformes, materiel de barbier, materiel medical, materiel d'equitation... y a des tresors)
11 août 2009
Tour
The Queer X Show tour just ended.
You can read extracts from our tour diaries and see pictures on this blog.
There are also articles here, here, here, here (en Français), and pictures here and here.
I haven't written on the blog, or anywhere else really, during this tour.
I started trying to write, but I was just reporting facts.
A detailed report of every single event, every single feeling and emotion and sensation...
Long long long texts, that no-one will ever have time to read.
RECORD ME ! Mad Kate screamed in her performance, and it echoed deep inside with this obsession I have.
The obsession to record my life, to make archives of my life, with words and sounds and images and bits of papers put together.
I was trying to write it all down, but I was constantly failing, never enough time, never enough paper, never enough ink, I kept failing and being late, losing my breath. Je faisais la course avec le temps, j'essayais de rattraper la réalité, je voulais écrire ce que je vivais quasi simultanément, mais j'étais toujours en retard sur les évènements, le temps que je finisse de raconter l'histoire de la veille la journée d'aujourd'hui était passée, pleine de nouvelles histoires à raconter...
Alors j'ai arrêté. I stopped trying after a few days, and I started living it to the fullest, taking as much as I could take from this experience.
I was discovering new cities, new people, all these landscapes unfolding outside the windows of the van, all these stories unfolding on the rows of seats inside the van...
Berlin Wendy Brussels Sadie Paris Madison Cologne Katie Copenhagen Emilie Stockholm Ena Malmo Judy.
The seven of us, coated with sweat and filth after hours and hours of road, dirty with our little secrets and fears and ego battles and love letters, dirty with our little voices and laughters and underwear and fantasies. So much time spent together in this van, learning who I was, learning who each of them was, telling them about me and hearing about them, while another one was trying to sleep and couldn't because we were too loud. So much time spent laughing, screaming with laughter, laughing until my muscles hurt with it, laughing until I couldn't breathe, because Sadie was just so funny. So much time spent talking, my little high-pitched voice going further and further as I was telling my story, trying to be as faithful as possible to the truth, over analyzing everything I was saying... Each conversation that started seemed to end up being an exhaustive exploration of everything that could be said on the matter, with all of us participating, and all of us learning so much in the process. It was incredible.
We talked about psychiatrization and how harmful it can be to people
in general and to women and queers in particular, we talked about how
problematic it is to label someone crazy and how helpful it can be to
be diagnosed sometimes, and how complicated all of this is.
We talked about art and money and how we manage to deal with the apparent contradiction and how we work out the issues that come up when your job is your passion, or when your passion doesn't pay the bills.
We talked about sexual orientation and the limits of defining oneself as homo/hetero/bi, or generally making the gender of your partners what determines your own identity.
We talked about sexwork and being out and being closeted and educating people and taking care of yourself and choosing your battles.
We talked about compulsive grooming like popping zits and plucking hair and how weird it is that it feels so good.
We talked about the porn industry and how it is in LA as opposed to in Europe, and how to prepare yourself for an anal scene.
We talked about race and class and gender, beauty standards,
sexual
freedom, objectification, transgression and taboo, shame and guilt.
We talked about our fetishes, our exes, our first times, our partners, our families, our body issues.
We talked about white people with dreadlocks and cultural appropriation.
We talked about alcoholism, codependance and relationships.
We talked about group dynamics.
We talked about linguistics.
We talked about so many other different things and in the end I'm so grateful that we were able to share so much, and I was confronted with so many worldviews that I'd never thought of before, and I was able to give a voice to so many ideas or stories that I'd had to hush or I hadn't been able to express before.
These girls are all such exceptional persons, performers, writers, thinkers, and besides super hot, and I felt so honored to be a part of this.
I grew and improved as a performer, too. When I accepted to take part in the tour, I really didn't think of myself as a good performer, and I certainly didn't think of my performances as art.
Whenever I performed, it was in front of an audience mostly filled with my friends, or if they were not my friends I felt I was lucky to be on this stage, it was almost undeserved, I thought of it as "I'm a beginner, they are offering me this stage for me to try out, experiment, learn, and if there weren't other more professional, more talented performers in this show, the audience wouldn't be as indulgent with me." I felt that I was Wendy's little sister, she had given me the chance to be there and I almost apologized for being there and never felt like what I did was really worth anything. Things changed slowly, I started developing my own solo performances myself, instead of always doing duos with Wendy, working on them alone instead of always asking her for coaching. Of course her help and her teaching was extremely valuable, and she was a great mentor to me, and she gave me so many opportunities. But at some point I had to try and fly with my own wings, and I did it little by little, and this tour definately created a new level of independance and self-confidence for me as a performer. I no longer think I'm bad. I'm definately inexperimented, and a beginner, but what I do is beginning to have its own little personal flavor, it is my work, it is my creation. I'm beginning to see performing as "hello, here I am, I'm Judy Minx, this is my art, I'm putting it out there for people to see and to criticize or praise".
Our show was a whole, it was a complete entity. The structure of it, the line-up (which number goes first, second, ..., last), we thought about all of this together and that way we integreated each little fragment, our solo numbers, into a bigger picture, an artpiece, a show. I was proud of all of us. When I felt I'd been bad, I was still able to see how great a show we'd done. When I felt I'd been great but the audience hadn't been very receptive to the show as a whole or the connection I'd had with the other performers hadn't been that good, I wasn't satisfied. It felt good to be working together like that. We all contributed to making the show good, we weren't just going on stage and doing our own piece and then letting the others do theirs. We gave suggestions, processed and brainstormed about each other's pieces, we asked for advice or opinions on our performance ideas, we made the others contribute to our solo numbers to make them duos, trios, quartets... Backstage we asked each other for bobbypins, hairspray, glitter, fake blood, fake eyelashes, lipstick, help with zipping the costume on or taking the shoes off...
Another very interesting thing was to perform to so many different
audiences, in so many different venues and contexts, and to adapt our
show according to the circumstances. A few hecklers from time to time. Some awkward shyness. Young drunk dykes at 1am the night
of the gay pride in a huge club in Stockholm. A very quiet, seated,
intellectual and artsy audience on a very interesting and newly built
stage in Malmo at 10pm. A very receptive, very interested audience at 8pm in a small gay bar in Paris, who instantly got carried away with us in a very intimate and ritual-like connection, although they were totally unused to seeing anything like us... I could obviously not do a
15 minutes spoken word act, that requires silence and attention from
the audience, at 1am in a club where people were standing and getting
drunk and wanted to party. We couldn't do a fisting performance in
Stockholm where the restrictions on nudity and explicitness and public
sex are tough. I couldn't do twice the same number in the same city.
etc. Working out all of this was a very interesting part of our work.
Sadie Lune wrote this rap for me (she made one for each of us) :
Tits for a minute, legs for days
Spreads em wide and invites your gaze
Drinks from a bottle fresh soy milk
And pisses all over your new silk
Judy Minx ! Judy Minx ! Baby pornstar really makes you think
Judy Minx ! Judy Minx ! You'll miss a mouthful if you stop to blink !
Tranny cock and kinky sex
Born in heels and raisin' heck
She'll never believe you might be right
Unless the rope's tight extra tight
Judy Minx ! Judy Minx ! Baby pornstar really makes you think
Judy Minx ! Judy Minx ! Brains and a pussy and a load of high jinx !
I got to see my cervix, meet incredibly talented people, chew on a red hot chili and find it sexually arousing, question my assumptions about who I'm attracted to or not, whip myself with branches in a sauna on wheels just a few meters from the Baltic sea, laugh at stupid private jokes shared by less than ten girls on this planet, have sex with hot queers after the shows in the backstage/in the ladiesroom/in the van, and get away with it without any polyamorous drama or yeast infection, do ageplay under the full moon, be attacked by an army of ladybugs and stung by a wasp, eat disgusting food in freeway rest-stops and delicious food in great restaurants, meet many people whose names end in -a, like Anna Erica Cecilia Christina and Alva, go to the Pere Lachaise and the Sacre Coeur, two touristy things I'd never taken time to do in my everyday life in Paris, decorate a van with garlands of tampons and hair-rollers and fake flowers and barbies in bondage and dick-shaped mint candy, hit on perfect strangers and not fear rejection, develop my creativity and feel validated as an artist, have crushes on people I probably wouldn't have thought were my type at first, see friends of mine who live far from Paris and that I don't see often enough, meet real straight feminist men, visit Christiania and be disappointed, buy a faux-vintage girdle, feel how much I miss you when I'm away and how thankful I am to have you, eat ice-cream, feel my belly aching with desire, not take enough showers, create more femme solidarity...
There's something else I want to talk about. While we were in Paris, a very close friend of mine who is trans', who had worked at helping us with the props and the stage, got assaulted. He was called a dyke by a men, then he was punched in the face and he fell to the floor and fainted, bleeding a lot. Noone came to help, although it was in the metro in the middle of the afternoon and people were passing by. He got two stitches and a lot of fear and shock.
On August 1st, while we were in Copenhagen, a masked man entered a LGBT Youth Center in Tel Aviv and started shooting, killing two persons and injuring 11 more.
You're always much more free on the stage than on the dancefloor. If
I'm topless on the stage I'm considered to be doing art with my body
and the distance with the audience prevents anyone from
non-consensually touching me. If I'm topless on the dancefloor I'm just
a drunk girl who's asking for it and they can all touch my tits without
asking for permission, and then the bouncers can kick me out because "this
ain't a strip club".
These things remind us that we can't be apolitical artists, we can't just do pretty and sexy things and not care about what is actually going on out there. Being an artist puts you in a very privileged space, and it makes you safer from these attacks. Performing feels very good to us, but we can't just do it because we enjoy it or just because it's empowering for us. We need to make something good for the world, good for our audiences. We can't stay in ivory towers, we can't disconnect our art from what is going on out there. Because when they attack one of us, they are attacking us all. Because it keeps happening, in Tel Aviv, in Paris and everywhere else, and it needs to stop. Because art can be and needs to be a force that impacts change, an element of the social and political context in which the world evolves. Because it all feels so close to us, because it has happened to us, and it could happen again, to be the victims of someone's hatred, to be the victims of the states's institutionalized discriminations, and we don't want to go through this in silence. Our art is political, and I have never been interested in creating anything that wasn't. (although there's an article in Swedish on the internet that misunderstandingly quotes me. it says I said that there's nothing more to our show than entertainment and fun. it is not true and i didn't say that.)
On a little square in Malmo, we went to a ceremony with candles and a march and a kiss-in on Aug 5th in remembrance of the victims of the Tel Aviv tragedy and to express solidarity with its survivors. Vendela, the organizer of this little demonstration, who is also one of the most wonderful persons I've met during this tour, read passages from the Queer Manifesto. Her voice was so strong and so broken and so beautiful I wanted to cry. AN ARMY OF LOVERS CANNOT LOSE, she chanted. I hope she's right. Until we're proven wrong we'll keep fighting.
After the last show in Berlin, everybody was sad that the tour was over. I loved it, it was definately a life-changing experience that helped me understand more about where I want to go with my life, what kind of person I want to be... But I was not sad that it was the end. I really needed it to stop. The sleep-deprivation needed to stop. I needed to be on my own again, release myself from the constant tension and self-consciousness and fears that group dynamics like this one raise in me, spend a few days with my partner, get things done in Paris...
I am now in San Francisco, where I got less than 24 hours ago. I really wish life was slower. It all happens all the time, I never get a rest from all the craziness, and it has just begun ! It drives me insane, and I mean it. I undergo a whole little personal revolution every three months. It's been like that for a while now, things get more and more hectic as it goes, I always think it can't get worse but it does, I have a serious problem with FOMO (fear of missing out) so I keep trying to do it all, I think "I'll sleep when I'm dead" but I actually need some sleep or I'll get burnt out. I keep having to choose between sleeping eating and taking showers and I end up not doing enough of either. One life-changing experience a day is too much. I can't process it all. The next one ends up erasing the previous one, because it was too quick, I couldn't get over the first one and there's already something new sweeping me off my feet. I need some rest, I need a slower pace in my life. It's just so hard to not do everything, to not make the most of every opportunity that I get. When you're 20 and you're offered to participate in projects with people who not so long ago were your idols and heroes, you can't say no. You can't tell yourself "I refuse this one and I'll get another chance later". So I'm living it up. I wanted my stay in San Francisco to be a vacation. Spa, manicure, shopping, sleeping, drinking fruit smoothies and having healthy food, writing and seeing friends... But then Madison offered me to perform for her art gallery, Femina Potens.
So tomorrow night, August 14th, I'll be performing for the first time in the US ! I'm excited, come see me if you get a chance. The event is called SIZZLE. The details are on www.feminapotens.org
09 juillet 2009
Queer X Show
in English below
----
Vendredi soir, je quitte Paris pour Berlin, où commence la tournée du Queer X Show, qui s'achèvera le 8 août.
Le Queer X Show c'est un show qui rassemble des performances de Wendy Delorme, Judy
Minx, Sadie Lune, Mad Kate, Madison Young, une soirée
après le spectacle avec aux platines la berlinoise DJ Metzgerei, et un
road-movie porno documentaire sur la tournée des 7 bad girls, réalisé
par Emilie Jouvet.
On part avec un van pour faire vibrer l'Europe
au rythme de nos orgasmes pendant un mois.
Berlin, Bruxelles, Paris, Cologne, Stockholm, Copenhague, Malmö, et Berlin !
watch out cause we're up to mischief !
Lorsqu'on sera pas sur scène en train de te faire mouiller ta culotte, ton boxer ou ton slip kangourou, on sera peut-être en train de tourner une scène de cul avec toi, alors si t'es queer, que t'as toujours secrètement rêvé de coucher avec moi (ou une autre des filles du gang) et que t'as pas peur des caméras, envoie un mail au Queer X Show sur myspace, facebook et/ou à emiliejouvet@gmail.com et on arrangera ça !
dans tous les cas, viens voir le show !
numéros de cabaret,
exhibition explicite extrême,
strip-tease burlesque et spoken word,
léger mignon sexy et/ou malsain tordu troublant,
de l'urine, du sang, de la glaire cervicale, de la salive,
de la sueur, de la cyprine, de l'éjaculat féminin - et des paillettes
des profs des flics des prêtres des petites filles des grenouilles des cyborgs et des drapeaux américains, des performances différentes à chaque représentation et même des invitées surprises dans chaque ville...
17/07 Berlin : L.U.X (Schlesische Str., Kreuzberg)
18/07 Brussels : Metro Anneessens (bvd Maurice Lemonnier, entrée Place Fontainas)
23/07 Paris : Le Tango (13 rue au Maire)
24/07 Paris : Chez Régine (49-51 rue de Ponthieu)
26/07 Cologne : Tsunami Club (Im Ferkulum 9)
29/07 Stockholm : Kolingsborg (Södermalmstorg 2, Gula Gangen)
29/07 Copenhagen : ArtRebels Gallery (Flæsketorvet 17-19)
31/07 Copenhagen : Salt Club (Vesterbrogade 2A)
04/08 Malmö : D'Nye (Nordenskiöldsgatan 19)
08/08 Berlin : BKA Theater (Mehringdamm 34)
----
Tomorrow night I'm leaving Paris for Berlin, where the QueerXShow tour begins. It will last until August 8th.
The Queer X Show is a show with performances by Wendy Delorme, Judy Minx, Sadie Lune, Mad Kate, Madison Young, a party after the show with wonderful DJ Metzgerei from Berlin, and a porn road-movie documentary about the 7 bad girls on tour, directed by Emilie Jouvet.
We are leaving on a van to make Europe throb
to the rhythm of our orgasms for a month.
Berlin, Brussels, Paris, Cologne, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Malmö, and Berlin !
watch out cause we're up to mischief !
When we're not on stage making you cream in your panties / boxers / briefs / jockstrap, we might be shooting a sex scene with you, who knows ?
so if you're queer, you've always had the secret dream of fucking me (or another girl from the gang) and you're not scared of cameras, email the Queer X Show on myspace, facebook and/or emiliejouvet@gmail.com and we could arrange something !
Anyway, come see the show !
cabaret numbers
extreme explicit exhibition,
burlesque strip-tease and spoken word,
cute sexy carefree and/or creepy twisted disturbing,
saliva, blood, urine, vaginal fluid, cervical mucus, female ejaculate - and glitter,
teachers cops priests lilgirls frogs cyborgs and American flags,
different performances every night, and even surprise guests in every city...
(see the dates of the tour in the French version above)
03 juillet 2009
Butch is a Noun
"I know what butch is. Butches are not beginner FTMs, except that sometimes they are, but it’s not a continuum except when it is. Butch is not a trans identity unless the butch in questions says it is, in which case it is, unless the tranny in question says it isn’t, in which case it’s not. There is no such thing as butch flight, no matter what the femmes or elders say, unless saying that invalidates the opinion of femmes in a sexist fashion or the opinions of elders in an ageist fashion. Or if they’re right. But they are not, because butch and transgender are the same thing with different names, except that butch is not a trans identity, unless it is; see above.
- S. Bear Bergman, from “I Know What Butch Is,” the first chapter from hir book Butch Is A Noun."
Après les débats houleux qui ont eu lieu ici, ici, ici, ici, ici, ici et ici au sujet de la liste Top Hot Butches dont je vous parlais dans un billet précédent, j'ai lu cet extrait de Butch is a Noun et il m'a touché et m'a fait rire.
JE VEUX LIRE CE LIVRE !
22 juin 2009
Europe de l'égalité mon cul !
La Lituanie est un pays membre de l'Union Européenne situé au bord de la mer baltique.
La LGL (Lithuanian Gay League) n'a jamais été autorisée a organiser de
Pride ni aucun évènement à Vilnius, la capitale. Le parlement de Lituanie vient de voter une loi sur la «protection des
mineurs» qui interdit dans le pays toute représentation positive des relations homosexuelles, bisexuelles ou polygames. 67 députés ont voté pour, trois contre, et quatre
se sont abstenus. Plus d'infos ici. Il faut faire quelque chose !
Au même moment aux Pays-Bas, où les gays et les lesbiennes ont pourtant le droit de se marier, semble souffler un vent réactionnaire. Le gouvernement avait consulté le Conseil d'Etat après un licenciement survenu il y a quelques mois dans une école protestante. Celui-ci vient de rendre son avis : les écoles protestantes néerlandaises ont le droit licencier les enseignants et les pasteurs qui ont des relations homosexuelles, même si cela ne sort pas du cadre de leur vie privée. Un article ici. C'est maintenant aux députés qu'il revient d'examiner l'avis du conseil.
En France le don du sang n'est toujours pas ouvert aux pédés, malgré le manque de dons qui pourraient sauver des vies. Signer la pétition. Le sang donné est systématiquement testé, c'est donc par souci de rentabilité et non de sécurité que cette politique discriminatoire est maintenue (malgré les effets d'annonce de Bachelot qui avait promis son arrêt). Les médecins de l'EFS avec qui j'ai eu l'occasion de discuter de la question ont répondu "on ne va pas prendre le sang de gens qui passent leur temps à jouer dans leur caca" et des choses du même genre.
Le premier festival trans et intersex d'Espagne a commencé aujourd'hui. Il dure jusqu'au 26 juin, à Barcelone. Films espagnols, français, argentins, américains, coréens, turcs... Certains acteurs et réalisateurs seront présents. Et c'est GRATUIT !!!
Un classement des 100 butchs (et autres personnes transmasculines) les plus HOT vient d'être mis en ligne ! ça coûte rien et ça fait du bien : allez vous rincer l'oeil !
Et voici un annuaire de blogs de gouines, ça peut être un outil sympa pour perdre une journée sur son ordi à rien faire d'autre que lire des bluettes romantiques, des annonces de soirées électro et des coups de gueule contre l'intolérance. Oh ça va je rigole ! (au fait j'ai mis mon blog dessus, votez pour moi !)
== Publicité ==
