Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Foreword
- Introduction: Sleazy Honesty
- 1 Singularity and Conformity: Feminism and Roberta Findlay’s Strategic Marketing Communications
- 2 “Not Even a Lesbian,” or Roberta Findlay’s Ambivalently Queer/Feminist Hardcore Cinema
- 3 Zero Girls and Lesbian Stylites: From Solar Sexuality to Camp in the Early Films of Roberta Findlay
- 4 From Slaughter to Snuff: The Origins of a Cultural Myth Giuseppe Previtali
- 5 “This is a Farce”: Satire, Pseudonyms, and the Impact of Collaboration in Early Walter Sear/Roberta Findlay Films
- 6 Fragments of a Porn Star: Hybrid Documentary and Avant-garde Impulses in Shauna: Every Man’s Fantasy
- 7 Roberta Findlay’s Bronx Tale: Notes on Game of Survival
- 8 By the Numbers: Roberta Findlay, Home Video, and the Horror Genre
- 9 The Beginning and the End: Transitioning Careers and Roberta Findlay’s Banned (1989)
- 10 Roberta Findlay vs. Porn Studies
- Index
2 - “Not Even a Lesbian,” or Roberta Findlay’s Ambivalently Queer/Feminist Hardcore Cinema
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 October 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Foreword
- Introduction: Sleazy Honesty
- 1 Singularity and Conformity: Feminism and Roberta Findlay’s Strategic Marketing Communications
- 2 “Not Even a Lesbian,” or Roberta Findlay’s Ambivalently Queer/Feminist Hardcore Cinema
- 3 Zero Girls and Lesbian Stylites: From Solar Sexuality to Camp in the Early Films of Roberta Findlay
- 4 From Slaughter to Snuff: The Origins of a Cultural Myth Giuseppe Previtali
- 5 “This is a Farce”: Satire, Pseudonyms, and the Impact of Collaboration in Early Walter Sear/Roberta Findlay Films
- 6 Fragments of a Porn Star: Hybrid Documentary and Avant-garde Impulses in Shauna: Every Man’s Fantasy
- 7 Roberta Findlay’s Bronx Tale: Notes on Game of Survival
- 8 By the Numbers: Roberta Findlay, Home Video, and the Horror Genre
- 9 The Beginning and the End: Transitioning Careers and Roberta Findlay’s Banned (1989)
- 10 Roberta Findlay vs. Porn Studies
- Index
Summary
“I don’t like women.”
Roberta Findlay“I like to see women raped on the screen … I get turned on by the beating of women. Of course, I don’t do it in real life. I’m not even a lesbian.”
Roberta FindlayAs the quotations above suggest, Roberta Findlay is a self-professed hater of women. I will argue nonetheless that, as one of only a handful of women directors working in US adult film in the 1970s, her filmography and public persona mobilize troubling and even misogynistic images and ideas toward potentially—if unintentionally—queer and feminist ends. As such, her work contributes significantly to what I am calling the “minor cinema” of women’s pornography.
The question of how to define a woman’s film has been approached from many angles. Alison Butler argues:
Women’s cinema is a notoriously difficult concept to define. It suggests, without clarity, films that might be made by, addressed to, or concerned with women, or all three. It is neither a genre nor a movement in film history, it has no single lineage of its own, no national boundaries, no filmic or aesthetic specificity, but traverses and negotiates cinematic and cultural traditions and critical and political debates.
As such, Butler proposes that we conceive of women’s cinema as a “minor cinema” rather than a counter-cinema. In so doing, she considers a range of cinematic genres, categories, and production cultures, from Hollywood to indie to experimental, but elides pornography. This is notable because, as I argue elsewhere, pornographic production cultures have consistently been far more accessible to women filmmakers than has Hollywood, and her innovative theoretical framework applies at least as well to their work.
Feminist theorists in the 1970s and 1980s, such as Laura Mulvey, Claire Johnston, and Teresa de Lauretis, argued that women’s cinema is a countercinema, offering different perspectives and foregrounding women’s subjectivity in response to cinematic traditions dominated by the male gaze. Using Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of minor literature and drawing from the feminist film criticism of Meaghan Morris and B. Ruby Rich, Butler argues that women’s cinema does not generate or employ a new cinematic language but rather could be seen as idiomatic or accented iterations of the dominant film language.
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- ReFocus: The Films of Roberta Findlay , pp. 43 - 67Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2023