Kumu Documentary: Mutantes: Punk Porn Feminism
Dir Virginie Despentes
France 2011, 92 min
In French, English and Spanish, with English subtitles
Introduction by the exhibition curator Magdaleena Maasik
A punk, feminist, sex-positive and queer exploration of sex work, BDSM and pornography by the French feminist writer and film-maker Virginie Despentes.
With regard to the exhibition Anna-Stina Treumund: How to Recognise a Lesbian?, the Kumu Documentary series is showing the film Mutantes: Punk Porn Feminism (2011) by the enfant terrible of French feminism, Virginie Despentes (1969). Similarly to Treumund’s later oeuvre, the film explores the world of punk and queer porn and BDSM, and contributes to the demystifying and de-stigmatising of these phenomena. Before becoming a contradictory yet increasingly well-known feminist writer and film maker in her homeland and internationally in the 1990s, Despentes was a sex worker, and she wrote reviews of pornographic films. The radical documentary essay Mutantes, created as a sort of visual supplement to King Kong Theory, her best-known feminist essay, mainly consists of interviews with sex-positive feminists, sex workers, queer activists and post-porn movement advocates in the mid-2000s in the USA, Paris and Barcelona. The interviews are complemented by archival frames from pornographic films, performances and punk concerts. As parts of the queer feminist and sex-positive revolution, the film suggests that sex work and pornography should be free from patriarchal control and that, in the hands of women and sexual minorities, they could become tools of liberation. The film features interviews, among others, with B. Ruby Rich, Lydia Lunch, Annie Sprinkle, Paul B. Preciado, Catherine Breillat, Del La Grace Volcano, Maria Beatty, Coralie Trinh Thi, Carol Queen, Lynnee Breedlove and Norma Jean Almodóvar.
