—Juana María Rodríguez
In their 2013 video, performance artists Amber Hawk Swanson and Xandra Ibarra (aka La Chica Boom) capture feminism’s ambivalent and decidedly vexed relationship to sexual politics. Their piece, Untitled Fucking consists of the always titillating Xandra, dressed in cucaracha pasties, stilettos, and not much else, fucking a bent over, equally feminine and sultry, Amber, first with a bottle of Tapatío, and then with her hand.
Throughout the 15-minute video, Amber repeats, over and over again, the same singular phrase that has been buzzing in my head: “Feminism? That’s deep. I think I need a minute to think about that, so… I don’t know.” A few times during the scene, when the litany gets interrupted by moans of ecstasy and the delectable bottom forgets to repeat her lines, Xandra yanks her hair to bring her face, and her repeated refrain, back into focus. (See a still from the video here.)
Being compelled to talk about feminism, as she is getting pounded from behind with a bottle of Mexican hot sauce, registers the ongoing difficulty of feminist discourse to reconcile the complexities implicated in political (and sexual) postures organized around pleasure, power and difference. Feminism becomes precisely what we don’t want to talk about when we are in the throes of sex, particularly when that sex is twisted through the erotics of race, signified here by the valley-girl cadence of Amber’s dialogue, and the ‘Mexi-sexy’ iconography of a hot sauce bottle on a strap-on.
The messy combination of pleasure, power, and racialized femininities gets even stickier in the final moments of the video when Xandra ejaculates her red-hot Latina spiciness all over Amber who is rendered speechless as she tumbles into orgasm. A Latina power top with cockroach covered nipples? Feminism taking it from behind, and loving it? Cross-racial feminine erotics as condiments for our consumption? Or a riotous encounter with the dangerous pleasures and difficult politics that feminism still has trouble articulating?
Feminism, of course, is still about water, war, work and a host of other material issues. But feminism also needs to be about imagining a sexual politics that does not require the abandonment of fun and pleasure. It is precisely because our sexual realities are so often steeped in abjection and violence that insisting on depictions of sex that represent the viscous substances of our lives becomes so urgent.
When feminists refuse to take up issues of sex, including its censorship and regulation in the institutional public spaces where sex also lives, we perpetuate a discourse that locates sex within the confines of a private domestic sphere. Instead, questions of sex and sexual expression need to be part of feminist discussions on public education, immigration reform, the prison industrial complex, technology, urban planning, militarization, art and yes, pleasure.
The sexual gestures looming behind Untitled Fucking might be imagined as too perverse, too dangerous, or simply too trivial to be worthy of feminism. But if those of us invested in imagining our own sexual futures allow a politics of respectability to set the terms of what might constitute a feminist agenda, we vacate the space of public discourse on sex to others who will not hesitate to assign meaning to our psychic and corporeal practices. And that is something we all need to think about.
Juana María Rodriguez is Professor at the University of California at Berkeley. She is the author of the forthcoming Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures and Other Latina Longings (NYU Press, 2014), and Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Queer Practices (NYU Press, 2003).
