By Hazel Meyer and Cait McKinney
Design and Research Assistance by Erin F. Chan
Conceived in dialog with Karen Knights and the Archive / Counter-Archive Gendered Violence: Responses and Remediations case study.
In the 1980s, many feminists opposed to porn drew on the language of gender violence to make their case, arguing that all sexually explicit images of women were harmful. Working against this position and the creep of censorship into smaller moving image formats in the province, queer and feminist artists defended sexual expression and created alternative visual languages for sex. Each side organized conferences and screenings, wrote position papers, protested, and kept making their work through it all.
You will be mailed one of two dossiers. Playing with questions of polarization and memory, one dossier represents the working files of an anti-porn feminist; the other of an artist/organizer involved in anti-censorship work. Some of the records are real, others we imagined based on scraps, remnants, and gossip.
Register to receive a mailing using this form. The first 100 registrants will be mailed a dossier in July 2022, and subsequent registrants will receive a digital edition by email.
Content warning: The mailings include archival records related to porn, kink, and gender violence and you are agreeing to receive this material in the mail.
*quote from Himani Bannerji’s address at The Heat is On! Women on ART on SEX conference held at Women in Focus, Vancouver, 1985.
Image: Brochure from Visual Evidence screening and workshop series (1987) and photograph of Elaine Miller, Vanessa Kwan, and Prune (2022).
Co-sponsors:
Hazel and Cait’s collaborations explore their shared attachments to queer histories through research, writing, and archival interventions. Their work has been presented by No More Potlucks (CA), Little Joe: Queers and Cinema Magazine (UK), PHILE (DE), INCITE Journal of Experimental Media (US), Eastern Edge (CA), EMILIA-AMALIA (CA), and Deep Down Body Thirst, curated by the collective Radclyffe Hall for the Glasgow International, SCT (2018). Their film Slumberparty, 2018 has been screened at various festivals including London International Film Festival (2018), Artists’ Moving Image Festival, Tramway & LUX Scotland, SCT (2019) and the Porn Film Festival Berlin, DE (2019.) They are currently working on They, Olympia a video about the 1990 Vancouver Gay Games.