Ingrid Maria Ryberg: A Critique of the Notion of Authenticity in Lesbian Pornography

19th Oct, 20:00, Kant-Kino 5, Ticket 6 Euro, Language of Lecture: English:

Biography

Ingrid Ryberg is a Ph.D. student and teacher at the Department of Cinema Studies at the University of Stockholm. Her research project is about lesbian pornography. She also works as a freelance writer and tv-feature producer for various Swedish National Television cultural and arts programs. She is the producer and director of the 50 minutes long cultural documentary "Dragkingdom of Sweden" (2002), and of a 30 minutes long educational film about gender power relations and techniques of dominance, "Var fick du luft ifrån?" (2005).

A Critique of the Notion of Authenticity in Lesbian Pornography

The paper is a critical discussion of the notion of authenticity in regard to lesbian pornography. By discussing the Swedish short Selma & Sofie (Mia Engberg) - a film that attracted much attention when released in 2002 - in particular, I point out some paradoxes that this notion entails. How can staged enacted sexual performances in front of a camera claim to be authentic?
Selma & Sofie together with the behind the scenes documentary Bitch & Butch (Engberg, 2002) is just one example of how the term "authentic" is manifest in almost all lesbian porn film production and distribution. The notion is a way of separating and qualifying some representations of lesbian sex from what is seen as fake lesbian sex numbers in straight mainstream pornography. However the premises that the term is constructed on are highly problematic, making assumptions about what true lesbianism is and about the possibility to cinematographically represent reality and visually prove sexual pleasure.
I demonstrate how the notion is serving too many purposes, without proposing fruitful solutions. It gives an unsatisfactory answer to the posed problem of fake lesbian sex as foreplay in mainstream pornography. In the end all it seems to do is to reaffirm normative ideas about what lesbian sex is, and to get stuck with questions of positive or negative stereotypes in identity politics.
The paper is a call for a more complex discussion and new ways of conceptualizing both what is problematic and what potential solutions there are to the question of how to represent lesbian sexual pleasure.

Registration please at org@pornfilmfestivalberlin.de