The Opening of Constance Penley[1]

Lucas Hilderbrand

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“How does such theoretical precociousness emerge in cracker culture?” Constance Penley poses this question early in her influential—and my personal favorite—essay “Crackers and Whackers: The White Trashing of Porn.[2]” Penley answers, “The real advantage lies in the way that upbringing helps a nascent theorist grasp the idea of agency and resistance to an utterly disdained social group whose very definition presumes to have no ‘culture’ at all.”[3] The same answer might explain what she calls “my own budding entrepreneurship”[4] in childhood.

Penley has lived many lives: growing up in Central Florida, later studying in Paris with Christian Metz, then working as a research assistant for Francis Ford Coppola before becoming a professor. Although her life might suggest a Horatio Alger story of self-making, Penley has modeled a feminist practice of collaboration and an ethos of outreach beyond the Ivory Tower. She demonstrates that one can be capaciously interested and can actually be in conversation with the practitioners whose work one studies. Penley’s enterprising scholarship makes things possible, then makes them happen.

One of the things that Penley made happen is Camera Obscura, which she co-founded in 1976 with Janet Bergstrom, Sandy Flitterman, and Elisabeth Lyon while they were still graduate students at UC Berkeley. In its early years, Camera Obscura provided a U.S. publication venue for film theory exploring ideology and psychoanalysis, which were animating developing conversations in France and England.[5] The first issue of the journal included theory by men and attention to new filmmaking practices by women. From the start, it rejected reductive essentialism in its conception of feminist theory—a core value that sustains. The editors introduce the issue, “This kind of analysis recognizes that women are oppressed not only economically and politically, but also in the very forms of reasoning, signifying and symbolical exchange of our culture. The cinema is a privileged place for an examination of this kind in its unique conjuncture of political, economic and cultural codes.”[6]

Camera Obscura has continued to evolve: it has been a cutting-edge venue that expanded into studies of popular culture, science and technology, masculinity and queerness as feminist concerns, and a broader range of media platforms. Although its voracious inquiries have diversified, its principles of collective editorship and support for emerging scholars persist.[7] Camera Obscura followed Penley to UC Santa Barbara as its institutional home, ensuring its survival. For decades, Camera Obscura has led the discipline as the first-rate feminist media theory journal.

That journal’s principles also endure across Penley’s subsequent work. Four of her books include “feminist” or “feminism” in their titles, and three others include adjacent terms “male,” “sex,” and “woman.”[8] Across these books, much of her work entailed editing—solo or in collaboration—to produce volumes that defined or introduced fields. Whereas single-author books often have a more elevated status in assessments of academic careers, the work of editing too often gets devalued. Yet editing makes an essential contribution by conceptually mapping a field and shepherding authors. Furthermore, journal articles and edited books often have far more impact than monographs in articulating a new way of thinking or constituting schools of thought. This takes vision and significant labor.

In introducing her 1988 collection Feminism and Film Theory, Penley offers an insightful intellectual history of the first generation or so of feminist film theory. She also understands, here as always, that this work’s implications are never hermetic but expansive. She writes, “The reader will find throughout the volume a feminist development of film theory that initially takes that body of work on its own terms, but then proceeds to question and often radically renovate not only its ideas about the spectator, the film apparatus, enunciation, point of view, and narrative form, but also filmic pleasure and belief.”[9]

Penley’s approach to rigorous theoretical genealogies and imaginative ways to open them up is further evident in her influential essay “Feminism, Film Theory and the Bachelor Machines.” I quote her concluding paragraph in full:

The formation of fantasy, which provides a complex and exhaustive account of the staging and imagining of the subject and its desire, is a model that very closely approximates the primary aims of the apparatus theory: to describe not only the subject’s desire for the filmic image and its reproduction, but also the structure of the fantastic relation to that image, including the subject’s belief in its reality. Film analysis, moreover, from the perspective of the structure of fantasy, presents a more accurate description to the spectator’s shifting and multiple identifications and a more comprehensive account of these same moments within the film: the perpetually changing configurations of the characters, for examples, are a formal response to the unfolding of a fantasy that is the filmic fiction itself. Finally, the model of fantasy would allow us to retain the apparatus theory’s important stress on the cinema as an institution: in this light, all films, and not just the products of Hollywood, would be seen and studied in their fully historical and social variety as dream-factories. The feminist use of the psychoanalytic notion of fantasy for the study of film and its institutions can now be seen as a way of constructively dismantling the bachelor machines of film theory (no need for Luddism) or at least modifying them in accordance with the practical and theoretical demands of sexual modernity.[10]

Would it be too literal to suggest that this advocacy for fantasy as a key term for psychoanalytic theory laid a foundation for her feminist embrace of science fiction as a genre and site of study—as a genre that offers a generative space for personal, sexual, social, and cultural fantasies? Or for her work on pornography?

Penley’s NASA/TREK: Popular Science and Sex in America provided one of the texts that introduced me to the orientations of cultural studies—not just as a Marxist methodology but as a belief in the fascinating complexity and intelligence of popular culture that helps us understand our world and the meanings audiences make. Penley demonstrates that we can learn from the world-making of popular science, sci-fi, and fan production, even if one isn’t oneself a fan (as I am not). She persuasively writes, “Popular science, fully in the American utopian tradition, proposes that scientific experimentation be accompanied by social and sexual experimentation.”[11] And then she goes further: “Slash writing devotes as much time to inner space as to outer space, emphasizes women’s inclusion and creative control, and offers a much more satisfying utopian solution than NASA has yet been able to conceive. ... It is an experiment in imagining new forms of sexual and racial equality, democracy, and a fully human relation to the world of science and technology.”[12] This is Penley’s vision of feminism’s expansive, world-making potential.

Which brings us to pornography. The explosive production, circulation, and consumption of hard core film pornography in the early 1970s just predates the ideological and psychoanalytic film theory that gave our discipline rigor and that formed Penley’s own formation. Feminist film theory built upon the latter and debated questions of objectification onscreen in Hollywood cinema and of audience agency (or not) in the theater seats. Meanwhile, feminists became politically divided as to whether pornography harmed women or should be protected as free speech. No doubt degrading pornography exists, but Penley—a staunch advocate of free speech—recognized pornography as a significant mode of expression and its potential for classed representations. Whereas Linda William’s Hard Core became film studies’ “seminal” book in legitimating the analysis of pornography as texts with narratives and genre norms, Penley saw something more interesting at work by approaching pornography as illuminating the contradictions of contemporary culture and politics.[13] This is not to say that she neglects what pornography does and gives as texts. But, for me, her way of thinking with pornography as cultural texts has been absolutely essential and influenced my thinking across all of my work, whether about pornography or not.[14] (She also taught me that cheese is not to be refrigerated, but I have not always followed that lesson.)

Penley takes pornography seriously, by which I mean she recognizes its humor and the way that its bawdiness—not just bodiness—exposes important class critiques, including self-critique. If a scholar misses the wit of what they analyze, they are often missing an essential incisive or affective point; I have tried to keep this in mind across my own writing. By attending to a feminist analysis that engages pornography rather than starts from a reductive dismissal of it, she discovers the ideologically complex, even contradictory logics it offers. “What I have observed is that as porn films ‘progressed’ as film, technically and narratively, and began to focus on the woman and her subjectivity, they became more socially conservative as they lost the bawdy populist humor whose subject matter was so often the follies and foibles of masculinity.”[15] Cultural politics are never a linear march toward enlightened progress but are much messier, just like people. She also attends to reception practices and the ways audiences’ jokey talkback mitigated historical homosocial and homosexual tensions. This attention to reception aligns with her contemporaneous work on slash and fan production.

Across her work, Penley has toppled cultural hierarchies while modeling what it means to build academic conversations and institutions. When I periodically visit with colleagues and friends of Penley at UCSB, they often marvel at her ability to engage with film industry professionals—including, importantly, in the porn industry—in ways that contributed to her pedagogy and that forged the interpersonal relationships that built the Carsey-Wolf Center for media research and public programs. Revisiting NASA/TREK, I might have discovered the key to her approach: “What I gave up as a critic by adopting the fan method, the righteous rush of the negative critique, I more than gained in the ability to get people to listen to me…”[16] Perhaps this is the most important lesson that we can take from her example to ensure not only our rigor, but also our relevance.

Notes

[1]The porn film The Opening of Misty Beethoven (dir. Radley Metzger aka Henry Paris, 1976) stars Constance Money and presents a French-set Pygmalion satire of class, sex, and female labor.

[2]Constance Penley, “Crackers and Whackers: The White Trashing of Porn,” White Trash: Race and Gender in America, ed. Matt Wray and Annalee Newitz (New York: Routledge, 1997). Page numbers from reprint in Pornography: Film and Culture, ed. Peter Lehman (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 99.

[3]Penley, “Crackers and Whackers,” 101.

[4]Penley, “Crackers and Whackers,” 100.

[5]Penley has been particularly instrumental in advancing the work of French film scholar Raymond Bellour in Anglophone film studies. Bellour, The Analysis of Film, ed. Penley (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).

[6]“Feminism and Film: Critical Approaches,” Camera Obscura 1 (1976): 3.

[7]Camera Obscura published my first major academic article, and it remains my most-read one: “Grainy Days and Mondays: Superstar and Bootleg Aesthetics,” Camera Obscura, 57 (December 2004): 56-91.

[8] Penley, ed., Feminism and Film Theory (New York: Routledge, 1988); Penley, The Future of an Illusion:  Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989); Penley, Elisabeth Lyon, Lynn Spigel and Janet Bergstrom, eds., Close Encounters: Film, Feminism, and Science Fiction (University of Minnesota Press, 1990); Tristan Taormino, Celine Parreñas Shimizu, Penley, and Mireille Miller-Young, eds., The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (New York: The Feminist Press, 2013); Penley and Sharon Willis, eds., Male Trouble (University of Minnesota Press, 1992); Penley, NASA/TREK: Popular Science and Sex in America (New York: Verso, 1997); and Paula Treichler, Lisa Cartwright and Penley, eds., The Visible Woman: Imaging Technologies, Gender, and Science (New York: NYU Press, 1998).

[9]Penley, “Introduction: The Lady Doesn’t Vanish: Feminism and Film Theory,” Feminism and Film Theory, 2.

[10]Penley, The Future of an Illusion, 80.

[11]Penley, NASA/TREK, 10.

[12]Penley, NASA/TREK, 148.

[13]Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible’ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989 and 1999). Laura Kipnis offers the contemporaneous claim that pornography expresses dissident critique and reveals the culture’s subconscious. Kipnis, Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America (New York: Grove Press, 1996/Durham: Duke University Press, 1999).

[14]She also appears as an expert in the shockingly good documentary series Pornography: The Secret History of Civilisation (World of Wonder/Channel 4, 1999).

[15]Penley, “Crackers and Whackers,” 108.

[16]Penley, NASA/TREK, 3.

Lucas Hilderbrand is Chair and Professor of Film and Media Studies at UC Irvine. He is the author of The Bars Are Ours: Histories and Cultures of Gay Bars in America, 1960 and After and Inherent Vice: Bootleg Histories of Videotape and Copyright, as well as the BFI Film Classics book on The ‘Before’ Trilogy and the Queer Film Classics book on Paris Is Burning.