Filmed on three iPhone 5S cameras, Tangerine is a modern film featuring a racially diverse cast of low-income, disenfranchised peoples, namely black trans sex workers. The film dives into complex relationships between a married Armenian taxi driver who enjoys having sex with trans female sex workers in his taxi, an imprisoned pimp who cheats on his sex worker girlfriend with other sex workers, and several female sex workers who, despite all odds, support one another through their individual hardships. The film oozes feminism, pro-sex and pro-sex work ideologies, and the unapologetic desire to freely exist in an equally unapologetic, harsh world. Tangerine provides a window to a world where pre-conceived notions of fidelity, anti-sex, anti-sex work, and anti-feminism are too expensive to afford, but also are undeniably barriers on expressing one’s self, and therefore are left behind.
Phallocentrism
Leonie Taylor, in her essay Sex, ‘Race,’ and Betrayal: Kalinda Sharma and Bisexual Feminist Politics, gives an answer for why women-loving-women couples are asked “So, who wears the pants?” Taylor’s answer: phallocentrism. The idea of phallocentrism, coined by Ernest Jones in 1927, was created to combat Sigmund Freud’s idea of women being depressed creatures purely driven by penis-envy (Jones instead suggested that Freud’s belief was centered around castration anxiety, which Freud chose not to comment on). Phallocentrism was later further defined and debated by other male psychoanalysts before being picked up by second-wave feminists, who declared that the phallus was becoming “man’s identity with himself” (Ermarth, 172-173). Problematically, phallocentrism has become a barrier for lesbians and lesbian couples, as phallocentrism creates a barrier of misunderstanding between WLW and the rest of the world. Women-loving-women couples are mysteriously viewed as either sex starved or asexual, as many individuals believe that a woman cannot achieve sexual pleasure without a penis. This idea is further perpetuated through lesbian pornography, which is typically not intended for a women-loving-women audience, but instead for a male gaze, allowing men to picture themselves partaking in sex with the lesbian couple in question. Phallocentrism is undoubtedly anti-feminist, anti-lesbian, and anti-female sex as it reduces a woman’s sexual pleasure to a man’s penis, ignoring the diverse range of other sexually pleasuring practices that do not require a penis and are readily accessible to women.
Photo by DAVID ILIFF. License: CC BY-SA 3.0
YOUR WORST FEAR: YOUR BEST FANTASY
Diana Davies’ photo of Donna Gottschalk, taken at the 1971 Christopher Street Liberation Day Parade in New York City, is a captured outcry for women-loving-women’s liberation. Donna Gottschalk demands to be seen and recognized as a women-loving-woman and given visibility outside of pornography. Donna Gottschalk’s sign references the shunned attitude towards women-loving-women in every single aspect of daily life except to perform sex with another woman for a male audience. A women-loving-woman cannot exist, as she is underrepresented, mistreated, and ignored because her sheer existence denies men to use her as a service, and Donna Gottschalk firmly places herself in the spotlight by forcing her way into public domains and existing as an outright lesbian, unregulated by anyone.
Photo credit: Davies, Diana. 1971, New York Public Library.
