“Art Porn Provocauteurs”: Queer Feminist Performances of Embodiment in the Work of Catherine Breillat and Lena Dunham

Abstract

French writer-filmmaker Catherine Breillat and American writer–filmmaker–television series creator Lena Dunham share a devotion to questioning sexual norms and norms of representation, which converge at the point of embodied female performance of sex/uality. Exploring and affirming that which is typically deemed abject or shameful, especially for women, Breillat and Dunham reveal and revise heteropatriarchal uses of female nudity and sexuality, both in and out of pornography, to conceal and deny women’s humanity. In so doing, these “provocauteurs” stretch the definitional and representational boundaries of what we consider “feminist,” “queer,” and “porn.” Through examination of Breillat’s films Une vraie jeune fille / A Real Young Girl (1976, released 2000), Romance (2000), À ma soeur / Fat Girl (2001), Sex Is Comedy (2002), and Anatomie de l’enfer / Anatomy of Hell (2004) and Dunham’s early short films, breakout feature Tiny Furniture (2010), and the first four seasons of her HBO series Girls (2012–), I aim to reveal how their mutual reenvisioning of sex/uality on-screen is generative of a politicized, hybridized representational and performative mode I term “queer feminist art porn.”