Lesbian exploitation, also known as ‘dykesploitation’, is a category of exploitation cinema that has been rediscovered and reclaimed by queer video producers, distributors and audiences. Most recently, in July 2007, Wolfe Video (the ‘oldest and largest exclusive distributor of gay and lesbian feature films’) released two classic dykesploitation films from the 1960s and 1970s on DVD as part of its expanding Vintage Collection, That Tender Touch (Russel Vincent, 1969) and Just the Two of Us (aka Sexual Desire (Barbara Peeters and Jaque Beerson, 1975)).1 Before the rise of hard-core pornography in the mid-1970s, low-budget dykesploitation films like That Tender Touch, Just the Two of Us, The Fourth Sex (La Quatrième Sexe, Michele Wichard, 1961), Chained Girls (Joseph P. Mawra, 1965) and Fanny Hill Meets Lady Chatterley (Barry Mahon, 1967) were originally aimed at a heterosexual male audience, who were lured into the cinema by the promise of provocative themes, mild nudity and scenes of soft-core girl-on-girl sex. However, as Wolfe Video’s recent showcasing of That Tender Touch and Just the Two of Us proves, in a cultural climate that is generally more receptive to queer-positive imagery, and with the aid of historical distance, dykesploitation can provide contemporary queer audiences with a glimpse of a less than positive past that still offers plenty of camp entertainment.
Consequently, while dykesploitation was originally marketed to and consumed by men, it has since been re-appropriated, marketed to and consumed by lesbians. It is this contemporary phenomenon – what could be described as the ‘queering’ of dykesploitation – that this chapter sets out to investigate. Using Chained Girls, That Tender Touch and Just the Two of Us, I will first explore classic dykesploitation themes, and then move on to examine the pleasures that these films might hold for a contemporary lesbian audience. Lastly, I shall consider that not only has there been a revival of the soft-core lesbian-themed exploitation films of the 1960s and 1970s but they have also influenced SIR (Sex, Indulgence and Rock n’ Roll) Video Production’s hard-core lesbian porn. Made for and by lesbians, SIR’s Sugar High Glitter City (Jackie Strano and Shar Rednour, 2001) finally puts the dyke into dykesploitation, recoding the films’ original form to include real lesbians having real sex.
UNNATURAL LOVE OF WOMEN FOR WOMEN!
Of the three classic dykesploitation films focused on in this chapter, Chained Girls is undoubtedly the most damning in the treatment of its subject. The film begins with the voice of a male narrator (Joel Holt) asking a series of questions – ‘Who and what is a lesbian? Is lesbianism a disease or a natural occurrence? Is lesbianism reserved for only a few people, or is it a common happening? How do lesbians live? Are they happy with their lives?’ It is noted that although these are not questions that Chained Girls will attempt to answer, the film’s purpose is to discuss them for its audience, purportedly as a form of ‘preventative education’. After all, as an intertitle later informs us, ‘only through understanding the facts can we keep lesbianism from becoming a serious social problem’. The use of an authoritative male voiceover, black and white photography and the spurious treatment of ‘fact’ all afford Chained Girls a documentary-style realism that is typical of educational exploitation films. On the surface, the film takes a pseudoscientific approach to female homosexuality, bombarding the viewer with statistics that reveal the frightening extent to which lesbianism is endemic throughout Western culture – ‘among teenage girls 40 per cent have lesbian desires … and experiences’; ‘25 per cent of college girls have had a lesbian experience’ – and the psychological conditions that are its root cause – an ‘unfounded hatred of all men’ and the ‘neurotic fear of marriage’. As with most dykesploitation films, the tone and message of Chained Girls is above all cautionary, as lesbianism is treated as a social and psychological disease to be observed, documented and, ideally, cured.
At the same time, Chained Girls intends to titillate its audience. Significantly, both the film’s writer/director, Joseph P. Mawra (who had also directed the Olga series (1964–66)), and its producer, George Weiss (who worked with Mawra on the Olga series and with Ed Wood on Glen or Glenda (1953)), were filmmakers already experienced at exploiting taboo subject matter for the screen. As an example of the way that dykesploitation films were marketed to straight male audiences, Chained Girls’s publicity promised ‘Shackled Women in Unashamed Lovemaking!’ in ‘A Film So Daring … So Hush-Hush…’ that such sentences could only end with either an exclamation mark or an ellipsis.2 In reality, though, the film’s soft-core scenes are scarce. Between the many medical studies and statistics quoted, the camera prowls the streets of New York after dark to expose the ‘twilight world’ of urban lesbians, who are glimpsed kissing and fondling one another in public telephone boxes, apartment block doorways and on the backseats of parked cars.
The sex scenes in Chained Girls are shot voyeuristically, and represent varying (low) levels of female nudity and explictness. For example, the audience watches as one lesbian seduces another in a one-night stand. The camera lingers on the couple as they lie on a bed and begin slowly kissing and caressing each other. The relatively butch seductress expertly removes her companion’s bra, swiftly followed by her own. But as their bodies meet in a topless embrace, the point-of-view abruptly shifts to the bedroom floor and the scene ends. Similar staging is employed a number of times in Chained Girls. Later on in the film, during another lesbian sex scene, both women remain fully clothed, yet the camerawork is again suggestive of more explicit events. As one of the women lies back on the bed, the other woman moves down her body and leans forwards, out of the frame. Oral sex is clearly implied. The camera continues to cut between shots which register pleasure on the face of the first woman, and shots of the second woman licking her lips.
FIGURE 16.1 No smoke without sexploitation: the pipe-wielding dykes of Chained Girls
FIGURE 16.2 Female desires and male constructions: lesbian lip-licking in Chained Girls
The camera then coyly shifts its gaze to a discarded pair of ladies shoes by the bed. For the duration of these soft-core scenes the Chained Girls narrator suspends his stern commentary, highlighting the important role that visual pleasure, or at least the anticipation of the potential for visual pleasure, played in the dykesploitation film.
This tension between lesbianism as social problem and lesbianism as visual pleasure is also evident in That Tender Touch and Just the Two of Us. Made by Russel Vincent and starring Playboy centrefold Sue Bernard (also co-star of exploitation director Russ Meyer’s cult classic Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! (1965)) as a young woman who has left her lesbian lover for a man, That Tender Touch uses flashbacks to recall the story of their past love affair. At the beginning of the film, Marsha’s (Bee Tompkins) arrival at the home of newly-wed couple Terry (Sue Bernard) and Ken (Rick Cooper) symbolises both the threat and the thrill that lesbianism represents. If, as Michel Foucault states, marriage is the cornerstone of society, then lesbians threaten to undermine this basic structure, infecting wives with the temptations of unnatural sexual desire.3 In That Tender Touch, it seems that Marsha’s mere presence is enough to ignite the secret sex cravings of almost every female in Terry’s new suburban neighbourhood: one after the other, Dodie the British maid (Margaret Read), lonely housewife Jane (Victoria Hale) and troubled teen Wendy (Phae Dera) all try unsuccessfully to seduce Marsha. Tormented by her love for Terry yet unable to win her back, Marsha vows that ‘it is better to have felt the crudeness of a man, than the tenderness of a woman’. Even more than Chained Girls, That Tender Touch is a moral tale, warning against the evils of homosexuality. As Jenni Olson, one of the few critics to have written on dykesploitation, notes ‘just like most Hollywood films of old, the exploitation genre tended to kill off its queer protagonists’.4 Following this convention, at the end of That Tender Touch, Marsha’s lifeless body is found floating in the pool – finally she has ‘submitted, suffered and died for that tender touch’.5
Chained Girls’s diagnoses that lesbians are women who are either sexually immature, insecure, or have in some way been mistreated by men are then borne out in That Tender Touch and Just the Two of Us. In the latter, Denise (Elizabeth Plumb) and Adria (Alisa Courtney) embark upon their affair when they are left home alone for long periods by their husbands. Because mutual boredom, loneliness and curiosity become catalysts for the exploration of their ‘deep sexual desires’, Just the Two of Us was marketed as ‘An Explicit Picture Every Husband and Wife Should See!’6 Similar to Marsha and Terry in That Tender Touch, it appears that Denise and Adria’s relationship is doomed since whereas Denise (like Marsha) decides that she is a ‘real’ lesbian, Adria (like Terry) seems only to be experimenting and she soon tires of their affair, swapping Denise for a young actor, Jim (John Aprea). Given the tradition of killing off the queer protagonist during a film’s final moments, it is therefore surprising that Just the Two of Us ends with Denise and Adria reunited. Having lost both her husband and her male lover, a dejected Adria returns to Denise. Though the film’s ending could hardly be described as conventionally ‘happy’, the two women are at least alive and together.
AN EXPLICIT PICTURE THAT EVERY HUSBAND AND WIFE LESBIAN SHOULD SEE!
It is significant that this uncharacteristically upbeat ending is found in a dykesploitation film made by a woman. Just the Two of Us was written and co-directed by Barbara Peeters (with Jaque Beerson), a filmmaker who has been labelled a feminist exploitation pioneer.7 Much like Stephanie Rothman, during the 1970s Peeters worked within the exploitation genre and directed a number of films (including Bury Me An Angel (1971), Summer School Teachers (1975) and Humanoids from the Deep (aka Monster, 1980)) for Roger Corman’s independent production/distribution company, New World Pictures. Writing about the films Rothman made for New World, Pam Cook has argued that they can be seen as ‘a prime example of feminist subversion from within, using the generic formulae of exploitation cinema in the interest of her own agenda as a woman director’.8 So, in Student Nurses (1971) and The Velvet Vampire (aka The Waking Hour, 1971) Rothman plays with and encourages an awareness of popular exploitation stereotypes, parodying the genre’s basic principles, codes and conventions. A similar argument can be made for Peeters’ work, and Cook cites Humanoids from the Deep as a film that both conforms to and questions the exploitation genre’s standard form and appeal.9
Released at the end of the cycle of 1960s and 1970s dykesploitation films, Just the Two of Us likewise demonstrates Peeters’ awareness of the requirement to exploit lesbian sexuality, but at the same time it undermines expectations that pathologically queer characters must be killed off, with its final, subversive act of bringing the lesbian couple back together just before the credits roll.
FIGURE 16.3 Dykesploitation as feminist text: Barbara Peeter’s subversive Just the Two of Us
If Just the Two of Us is, then, an example of what Cook refers to as ‘subversion from within’, the recent DVD release of Peeters’ film by Wolfe Video suggests that dykesploitation may also be subverted from without.10 For, whereas straight males were dykesploitation’s original target audience, Wolfe’s identity as an exclusive distributor of lesbian and gay feature films suggests that That Tender Touch and Just the Two of Us have been reappropriated by a queer-owned company. Seeking to reach a lesbian market, Wolfe’s press release describes these films as ‘push[ing] the boundaries depicting lesbians in cinema’.11
To support this claim for dykesploitation’s historical significance, each film comes with a colour mini-reproduction of its original press book. For a contemporary lesbian audience, this glimpse into the films’ previous advertising campaigns serves a dual purpose. Firstly, the press book is an all-important reminder of the cultural and industrial context in which these films were first made and received. The viewer is at once reassured by her historical distance from the images and attitudes represented on screen, and made aware that, however problematic, dykesploitation should form part of a lesbian film canon. In the same way that Cook reassesses low-budget exploitation cinema, and Rothman’s work in particular, to argue for their historical significance to feminist film culture, dykesploitation can thus be thought to make a comparable contribution to lesbian film culture.
Secondly, the sensational claims made in the press books call attention to the ironic gaps that exist between the dykesploitation films, their original promotional material, and a contemporary lesbian audience. For example, the press book for That Tender Touch includes various posters designed for lobby displays to accompany the film’s release. The provocative taglines ask ‘How far will a girl go to satisfy her needs?’ and ‘The Wall Between Two kinds of Love … Which Will She Choose?’, advertising a cast of characters that fits somewhere between melodrama and male fantasy: ‘The Maid: Cute … Ready to Serve!’ and ‘The Teenager: Young … Which Way Will She Go?’ That Tender Touch was publicised using images that captured some of the film’s most titillating moments as ‘A Woman’s Picture every Man must SEE!’12 Typical of the dykesploitation film, it’s promotional material teased its audience with suggestions of much more sexually explicit content than are actually delivered. Although the film does not really deliver the lesbian sex it promises, it does deliver lesbian melodrama, in excess.
The use of flashbacks, the triangular set-up which in this case sees the still bi-curious Terry tempted away from her husband and all that is ‘good’ by ‘evil’ lesbian Marsha, and the recourse to psychological discourses in order to explain transgressive female desire, are all common melodramatic tropes. Melodrama is also known to employ highly stylised mise-en-scene as an outer symbol of inner emotions.13 Because it is a low-budget exploitation film, That Tender Touch does not have the conditions to reproduce mainstream production values, but it does exude a kind of over-exaggerated artificiality that makes it well suited for camp appreciation.
Like queer reading practices in general, Harry Benshoff and Sean Griffin note that, historically, camp created a subject position from which the reader ‘could revise a text’s original meanings, and thus it strongly figured in the creation of a shared community’.14 They go on to say that ‘bad’ acting, cheap sets and histrionic narratives ‘make B and exploitation films especially fertile ground for camp viewing’.15 Camp readings of the 1960s and 1970s dykesploitation films certainly do appear popular with today’s lesbian media and audiences. For example, in a review that celebrates ‘Lesbian Grindhouse’ and the DVD release of Just the Two of Us and That Tender Touch, writing for The Advocate (a magazine aimed at a queer readership), Michelle Kort observes that both films ‘are hilariously bad, but in a good way – perfect for watching with a group of hooting camp-loving friends’.16 Here, Kort confirms that lesbian viewers can deliberately take pleasure in dykesploitation’s sensationalised treatment of lesbian sex and narratives focused on relationships between two women, and that these films are best enjoyed as part of a collective viewing experience.
This form of nostalgic camp appreciation is also expressed by Tracy Gilchrist in her review of the films for the lesbian community website, LesbianNation.com. She states that dykesploitation should be reclaimed as ‘delicious campy fun’, and not as demoralising to a lesbian audience. For her, it is the extensive use of ‘gauzy lighting, over-the-top ballads, flashbacks and superimpositions’ that make episodes like the highly-strung emotional scenes that dwell on the dyke drama of Marsha’s desperate longing for Terry in That Tender Touch, ‘endlessly entertaining’.17 Indeed, it is this mixture of melodrama and sex that has made the contemporary TV series The L Word (2004–2009) so popular with lesbian viewers. Together, the camp pleasures offered by these cult texts mean that watching them is widely understood as an amusing and engaging, rather than alienating, experience.
Considered retrospectively, dykesploitation is becoming increasingly acknowledged, and even enjoyed, as part of lesbian film history. The LGBT historian, critic, collector and curator, Jenni Olson has championed the category, stressing that while ‘We [the queer community] wouldn’t exactly embrace these films as positive portrayals of lesbian or bi life’, at the time of their release dykesploitation films did at least make lesbianism visible, and ‘from our current historical distance [they can] offer loads of campy entertainment value.’18 As already discussed, the contemporary marketing and reception of dykesploitation is aware of and plays on a number of ironic gaps that exist between the films’ original audience, their new audience, their sensational promotional materials, and their camp content. It seems that it is precisely these disparities between intention, expectation and fulfilment that make the classic dykesploitation films so appealing to present-day lesbian audiences. However, the legacy of dykesploitation does not end with a reclamation of the cycle of 1960s and 1970s films, since it can also be argued that many of the category’s traditions are continued and developed by contemporary hard-core lesbian-made pornography.
VERY EXXXPLICIT: 100% DYKE PRODUCED
Sugar High Glitter City is a clear example of how contemporary lesbian porn might be related to dykesploitation. Significantly, it begins with a female voiceover, which introduces the fantasy that the film’s narrative is based around:
It’s the future … sugar is outlawed. The power mongers of the earth control the flow of the beautiful white gold through their sticky fingers. Kickbacks and payoffs are the name of the game. No place knew the score more than Glitter City … caneville … sweet town … an underworld of sugar pimps and candy ‘hos filled with cane-addicted dykes peddling their own flesh to keep the sweet trip going.
Like Chained Girls, Sugar High Glitter City uses its narrator to provide motivation for and contextualise the characters and plot that, in this case, link a series of hard-core sexual scenarios together. But while the role of the narrator remains largely unchanged, the shift from an authoritative male voiceover to an authoritative female voiceover, points to one of the key differences between dykesploitation in its original formula, and the queer version that continues in lesbian porn. Opening Sugar High Glitter City with a female narrator immediately helps signal a change of address from a straight male to a lesbian audience. Moreover, the fact that this voice is later identified in the credits as belonging to San Francisco-based lesbian photographer, artist and activist Honey Lee Cottrell further adds to the film’s aura of active appropriation; her queer authority overrides the patriarchal voice and instead asserts lesbian sexual agency in a very real sense.19
From Cottrell’s voiceover we learn that Glitter City’s futuristic lesbian underworld is a subculture based entirely on and around exploitation. In Glitter City, sugar is a drug that has now been outlawed, but sugar-hungry lesbians will stop at nothing, even selling themselves, to feed their addiction. Sugar is then explicitly connected with other illegal substances and with promiscuous sexual activity in Sugar High Glitter City, causing all manner of sinful behaviour – corruption, cravings, habituation and dependency.
These vices are in turn associated with lesbian culture, as the city’s inhabitants all share an irrepressible desire for that ‘sweet dyke currency’ of sugar/sex. This is clearly reminiscent of the 1960s and 1970s dykesploitation films, which had also exploited lesbian sexuality and sex in order to attract audiences even as they portrayed lesbianism as both a deviant behaviour and a serious social problem. Sugar High Glitter City’s playful conflation of lesbian sex and sugar implies that in the future both are regarded as illicit, guilty pleasures that mainstream society has (once more) declared immoral and legislated against. It is interesting to note therefore that the societal structures, such as the secular state and the Church, who denounce deviant sexuality, are critiqued in the film via the character of the Reverend Dew (Shar Rednour).
The Reverend Dew is first seen dressed in army camouflage and employed in folding pamphlets entitled ‘Say No to the Sugar Life’. She preaches redemption on the streets of Glitter City, urging those she comes across to ‘keep away from the sugar life… The sweet life leads to soul decay.’ Due to the links made between sugar and sex, the Reverend Dew’s virulent condemnation of ‘the sweet life’ is, by association, also a denunciation of lesbian sexuality. But all is not as it seems. For, while we watch the Reverend Dew lecturing on the ‘evil ways of sugar’ to a small group of lesbian hustlers, her sermon is interrupted by the narrator who informs us of the Reverend’s past: ‘she used to be Honey Dew, one of the best candy ‘hos ever to strut the streets… Glitter City’s not been the same since she became sugar free.’ This is followed by a flashback to Honey Dew’s last experience of sugar-fuelled lesbian sex before she converted. In the flashback, Honey Dew uses her fingers to penetrate Cherry Glaze (Josephine X) and bring her to orgasm, as they each suck hungrily on the same lollipop.
FIGURE 16.4 Dykesploitation imagery in contemporary lesbian porn: cover art for Sugar High Glitter City
Having set up the Reverend Dew as a former addict/lesbian and born-again preacher, the film later goes on to show her re-conversion back to sugar and the joys of lesbian sex. The Reverend Dew’s return to her old lifestyle is prompted when she comes across Cherry Glaze and another of her ex-lovers – the corrupt cop Blue (Jackie Strano) – dealing sugar in a doorway. The Reverend’s attempt to reform Cherry Glaze fails, and instead Blue seduces Reverend Dew by reminding her of how much she misses sugar/lesbian sex. The Reverend Dew is finally converted back to Honey Dew as she, Blue and Cherry Glaze enjoy a femme-butch-femme lesbian threesome and some contraband confectionary together. Reverend/Honey Dew can be read as a metaphor for the way that Sugar High Glitter City turns dykesploitation around – in the same way that she has been reabsorbed into the lesbian underworld, the dykesploitation form has been reappropriated by these lesbian filmmakers.
FIGURE 16.5 Lips like sugar: sex and saccharin addiction in Sugar High Glitter City
Made by the independent lesbian production company SIR, Sugar High Glitter City is, as the DVD cover states, ‘100% dyke produced’.20 SIR’s films (other titles include Hard Love (2000) and How to Fuck in High Heels (2000)) are all written, produced and directed by ‘real life’ lesbian couple Shar Rednour and Jackie Strano. Rednour and Strano also star in their porn films, alongside a diverse cast drawn from the local lesbian community. SIR’s claim to authenticity – real lesbians having real sex for a real lesbian audience by the company’s close links to the San Francisco lesbian community where SIR is based, is particularly important to its status as specifically ‘dyke porn’. In her historical account of the development of lesbian pornography since the 1960s, Heather Butler views dyke porn as the most recent stage in the representation of lesbian sexuality and sex. According to Butler, what distinguishes this form of lesbian pornography from what came before it is that
Dyke porn is safe-sex savvy and not afraid to appropriate sex acts once considered definitive of heterosexual and gay male pornography, such as penetration, dirty talk, rough sex, and role-playing, to name a few. Anything once considered off-limits, perverted or inappropriate (for either political or personal reasons) is now up for grabs – literally.21
So, dyke porn is described as inclusive, as it assimilates and makes acceptable a wide range of sexual practices. As a result, films like Sugar High Glitter City can be seen to challenge the notion that certain sex acts do not or cannot belong in the representation of lesbian sex by co-opting dykesploitation’s heterosexual configurations to create an authentic ‘utopian’ lesbian fantasy space.22
Crucially then, Sugar High Glitter City has put the dyke into dykesploitation. Butch characters were originally very few and far between in this exploitation sub-genre. Out of the three classic dykesploitation films discussed above, only Chained Girls actually features any butches. Chained Girls establishes the stereotypical butch/femme relationship – the butch not only assumes the traditionally masculine role, she is also masculine in her appearance.
FIGURE 16.6 The butch is back: contemporary dykesploitation imagery in Sugar High Glitter City
In contrast to the film’s narcissistic and sexually immature femme characters, the butch characters are represented as violent, predatory and controlling. For example, one scene in Chained Girls depicts a young femme’s forced initiation into the ‘love cult of lesbianism’ by a pipe-smoking butch who is encouraged by a flesh-hungry group of her ‘bull dyke’ friends. Again, the fact that these dykesploitation films were mainly produced by and aimed at men in the audience means that, on the few occasions she did appear, the ‘mannish’ butch lesbian was not eroticised in the same way as her glamorous femme counterpart. In fact, it has been noted that erotic representations of the butch body still remain problematic, even in ‘real’ lesbian porn that routinely focuses on butch/femme dynamics.23 Michelle Tea suggests that this is because ‘Butches are supposed to be the silent, non-glamorous types… The reality of womanly curves and soft flesh can feel like betrayals to dykes cultivating a tough machismo.’24
However, Sugar High Glitter City does address this dilemma. Alongside the many episodes of butch/femme and femme/femme sex, the film also features a rare butch/butch sex scene. Both Blow Pop (Chester Drawers) and Gooden Plenty (Rocko Capital) are marked as butch ‘sugar bois’ (for lesbians, a boi is a dyke with a boyish presentation) and both wear strap-on dildos. As the scene between them progresses, their butch bodies are increasingly exposed; as Gooden Plenty penetrates Blow Pop from behind both of them are topless (Blow Pop is bottomless too, apart from her harness) and Gooden Plenty expresses her pleasure by fondling her own breasts. With scenes like this, SIR’s dyke porn has sought to challenge any deep-seated reluctance to bare all, and a desire to sexualise butch women has been central to the filmmakers’ pro-feminist, pro-sex agenda.25
In Sugar High Glitter City we see all kinds of lesbians engaging in all kinds of lesbian sex that includes multiracial butch/femme role-play, sex toys and female ejaculation. So, for example, in another scene from the film, the Asian butch hustler Rock Candy (Charlie Skye) and her rich client, black femme Goldie Icing (Aimee Pearl) enact a lesbian ‘Daddy girl’ fantasy in which the strap-on dildo also figures prominently. The role-play begins with Goldie Icing begging Rock Candy to let her touch and lick that ‘special package … Daddy’s cock’, and climaxes with her orgasm after she is finally penetrated by Rock Candy’s dildo (like Gooden Plenty and Blow Pop, Rock Candy also uncovers her butch body during sex). In the context of dyke porn, the dildo is seen as an important, if contested, accessory of lesbian sex that was previously absent from classic dykesploitation.26
Like the reappropriation of dykesploitation, the reappropriation of the phallus, role-play and use of the word ‘cock’ points to contemporary lesbian politics and the representation of active female sexuality. Sugar High Glitter City uses scenes like this to realise a camp mise-en-scène of lesbian desire; for instance, all of the props, costumes and make-up used, glitter and sparkle under the studio lights. This extends from the silver metallic dress, earrings and eye shadow worn by Goldie Icing in the scene described above, to all the women’s glitter-sprinkled bodies, and even the brightly coloured dildos. In addition to mise-en-scène, the parodic dialogue and style of fantasy role-play in this scene, and indeed the whole of the film, are intentionally camp, suggesting what Judith Butler has termed the performative nature of gender and sexuality.27 Here, as elsewhere in contemporary lesbian porn, the butch/top-femme/bottom couple perform their representation of sexual desire and pleasure calculatedly, deploying the dildo and the conventions of mainstream porn in a way that, Ragan Rhyne says, has enabled SIR to ‘recode them’ in the context of lesbian sexuality.28 Therefore, it seems that whereas the earlier dykesploitation films, whose address is clearly towards heterosexual males, may be thought of as (unintentionally) camp through the lens of historical distance, Sugar High Glitter City is an example of a (deliberate) camp fantasy made unequivocally for an informed lesbian audience.
CONCLUSION
Although Sugar High Glitter City is not the only contemporary lesbian porn film in which a dialogue with dykesploitation can be detected, it is noteworthy that the blurb on the DVD cover explicitly connects the two, stating that this film ‘slams the dykesploitation genre into fast-forward’.29 Beyond SIR’s influential work, other recent examples of lesbian-made porn associated with dykesploitation might include, in the US, those films written and directed by Shine Louise Houston, such as The Crash Pad (2006), Superfreak (2006) and Wild Kingdom (2006), and in the UK, Angie Dowling’s Tick Tock (2001) and Madam and Eve (2003). Not only has dykesploitation inspired a creative re-vision in the form of contemporary lesbian porn, but films like Sugar High Glitter City can prompt a rereading of the original, exploitative approach to lesbian-themed narratives, which is now, in its turn, being exploited.
