Tantrik Droplets

Sent on assignment to examine the state of South Asian lesbian 'style' Sonali Fernando runs into a 'Hindu goddess' named Annie
By Sonali Fernando

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Project Number 1

"A critical and possibly poetic piece on style among lesbians of the South Asian diaspora." Ian shares his ambitions for the piece: "Queer reappropriations of the feminine, how this might play itself out for South Asian dykes... queer activism as style?...the uses of style as activism?... Oh, and make it witty."

Author

Mid-Nineties hyphenate (film-TV-words) pursuing the convergence of glamour and truth. Queer in a (currently) desi dyke's body.

Place

London, England. I go looking for the subculture I am to study, like any anthropologist of the old school.

And return with an inventory of absence.

Field Work

  1. Lesbian Archives hesitate. Hmm, they don't know, they have an 'ethnic section,' would I like to come in and browse.
  2. Shebang, Britain's arch, resolutely tacky lesbian teen magazine, is manufacturing a new 'babe' subculture with its own essential argot— 'vixatronic,' 'babelicious,' 'foxtastic.' I find what you might call a South Asian virtual presence inside its covers: a personal ad with a voice mail number.
  3. Quim, a 'journal for dykes of all persuasions' has more: 16 pages where 'Black Women Speak Out.' But there is only one South Asian woman— the naked centrefold—who reclines to be loved (presumably saving her comments for later) on a chaise longue, while her girlfriend prepares to fuck her. On another page a reviewer raves over Annie Sprinkle's Sluts and Goddesses video, and the 'myriad of personas available to the modern girl' according to Annie. The personas include: 'slut, [Hindu] goddess, slave and nurse.' And then the demo: Annie discloses her secret 'new age (read 'Tantrik') breathing techniques designed to heighten your sexual response.'
  4. In another magazine a lesbian mail-order video company promotes itself with an image of Annie Sprinkle dressed up as a 'Hindu goddess.' Her seven arms brandish camcorder, handcuffs, heart, dildo, camera, candlestick, and a vibrator en-fisted in front of her yoni. She sits with her impossible stilettos crossed like swords, beaming quite unlike a deity while a snake creeps round her patent boots.
  5. A lesbian splinter group of the South Asian gay nightclub/rights and support network 'Shakti' is looking for a name. No one can think of a suitable one in any South Asian language—because there aren't any. Lesbianism is 'anamika' in South Asian, without/beyond name. The compound 'Shaktishali' has been mooted because someone had a friend from India who spoke Hindi and suggested it, but no one can remember what it means.
  6. A monsoon of US-imported queer zines and sex-positivity. Anita shows me Slippery when Wet. Inside, no South Asians, but two photographs by Sprinkle.

Inconclusions

Regarding the 'culture to be studied' as an entity existing independently of its description, one revisits the failures of anthropology. More of the 'new ethnographic' approach is needed, analysis of the subculture produced (rather than described) in discourse. Especially because this is a subculture produced publicly as ghost, namelessness, passivity and silence.

The problem with all subcultural 'style guides' is the limitation imposed by definition...A few years ago, GQ men's magazine ran a feature entitled 'Pretty Ethnics' in which it decided that South Asian women were now beautiful, sexy and stylish: colourful accessories for the reader to wear on [his] arm; pretty cufflinks/pretty ethnics. The dilemma of enfleshing the power structure's ghosts is always about the terms on which this happens, what is authorised and what is not. I grow reluctant to speak to my brief.

Anyway, in the Venn diagram 'queer,' 'female' and 'South Asian referenced,' I can not ignore thefact that Annie Sprinkle so frequently occupies the overlap.

In the Venn diagram 'queer,' 'female' and 'South Asian referenced,' I can not ignore the fact that Annie Sprinkle so frequently occupies the overlap.

Project Number 2

Tantrik Annie

Annie Sprinkle is a character played by whore-turned-performance artist Ellen Steinberg, as both stage role and life personality: it is a feature of Annie Sprinkle that she not only presents herself as an effect of performance ('perfected over nineteen years'), but also claims reincarnatory intimacy with a real Annie Sprinkle 'who died in Baltimore a hundred years ago.'1'Annie Sprinkle' in Angry Women, published by Re/Search Publications She claims to be self-fashioned but also predetermined, both construction and essence. She builds her performance around a sexually-explicit autobiography whose reliability is constantly called into question by the exaggerations of her persona and her saturation with make-believe.

Annie Sprinkle confounds the 'mutually exclusive' formulation embedded in much contemporary thought, and adopts sometimes both, sometimes neither, of the positions artist/pornographer, good woman/bad woman, pro-woman/anti-woman, porn director/porn star, powerless/powerful, heterosexual/homosexual. Though an artist, Sprinkle fulfils the pornographer's contract to stimulate audience sexual pleasure. But her mode is unorthodox: she appropriates the generic convention of the male 'money-shot'— the corporeal confession of pleasure that pornography craves—and substitutes her prolific female ejaculations. Though a pornographer she engages with the main concern of female performance artists since the Sixties, that of healing the schizoid rift between private and public domains. But her mode is disarmingly literal: she solicits her audiences of hundreds to approach the stage and view her cervix with the aid of a speculum and torch. This Public Cervix Announcement both parodies and flatters the economy of the Visual in which pornography thrives.

"In a way, I wanna say, 'Fuck you, guys—you wanna see pussy. I'll show you pussy.'"2Ibid. She uses the Visual to subvert its own dictatorship.

In a way, I wanna say, 'Fuck you, guys—you wanna see pussy. I'll show you pussy.

By introducing a genital zone not normally associated with sexual pleasure—the cervix—and also literally opening to view a huge area of internal sexually-sensitive tissue, Annie Sprinkle bluntly refutes 19th and 20th century sexological views both that female sexual equipment is a diminutive isomorph of its male counterpart (an idea derived through purely visual evaluation of the external genitals) and that erotic pleasure is limited to two distinct areas, vaginal and clitoral. She is teasingly, and threateningly, competing with men in the patriarchal economy that measures sexual potency in terms of genital size and quantity of ejaculate.

Sprinkle is also an educator, and, in her Sluts and Goddesses workshop, a supportive catalyst of women's sexual self-exploration: the self-styled 'whore with a heart of gold' nurtures her participants' erotic pleasure by warmly exhorting them to explore their bodies and fantasies; they, in the same generous key, stimulate her manually while cheering her on, midwifing her orgasms.3 Her polysexual screen exploits, in which she 'invites' the viewer to participate, engage the spectator as male and female, heterosexual and homosexual. In so doing they transgress the norm of male, heterosexual address, and elicit a queer, sexually multivalent gaze.

She is teasingly, and threateningly, competing with men in the patriarchal economy that measures sexual potency in terms of genital size and quantity of ejaculate.

By introducing a genital zone not normally associated with sexual pleasure—the cervix—and also literally opening to view a huge area of internal sexually-sensitive tissue, Annie Sprinkle bluntly refutes 19th and 20th century sexological views both that female sexual equipment is a diminutive isomorph of its male counterpart (an idea derived through purely visual evaluation of the external genitals) and that erotic pleasure is limited to two distinct areas, vaginal and clitoral. She is teasingly, and threateningly, competing with men in the patriarchal economy that measures sexual potency in terms of genital size and quantity of ejaculate.

Sprinkle is also an educator, and, in her Sluts and Goddesses workshop, a supportive catalyst of women's sexual self-exploration: the self-styled 'whore with a heart of gold' nurtures her participants' erotic pleasure by warmly exhorting them to explore their bodies and fantasies; they, in the same generous key, stimulate her manually while cheering her on, midwifing her orgasms.3The Sluts and Goddesses Video Workshop, directed by Maria Beatty, Annie Sprinkle, 1992 Her polysexual screen exploits, in which she 'invites' the viewer to participate, engage the spectator as male and female, heterosexual and homosexual. In so doing they transgress the norm of male, heterosexual address, and elicit a queer, sexually multivalent gaze.

Annie Sprinkle combines a theatre of confession with a theatre of surface, on a stage that posits gender and sexuality as commutable roles, but in what way does she foreground race as performance? What does she mean when she impersonates other races, as she does in her goddess posturing, swathed in the trappings of calendar image Hinduism, or in her Orientalist photographs of performance artist Linda Montano (her 'spiritual advisor'), where, for instance, in the soft-focus still 'Guru Leendah,' Montano is adorned with satin, lace and jewels and seated next to an Indian religious bronze, wearing a bindi and a blonde wig?4Photographs in Sacred Sex...1 + 1 = 1, book by Annie Sprinkle, cited in Angry Women. The feminist cultural critics who have espoused Sprinkle's work with such unequivocal elation tacitly condone her exotic/Orientalist objectification of non-Western ethnicities.5See Chris Straayer, The Seduction of Boundaries, and Linda Williams, A Provoking Agent, essays in Dirty Looks: Women, Pornography, Power, edited by Pamela Church Gibson and Roma Gibson (British Film Institute, 1993) Sprinkle's 'Tantrik' claims are accepted with what sounds like staggering naiveté: "an eclectic exploration of the outer reaches of sexuality, combining Eastern philosophy, yoga, meditative breathing, spirituality and healing...A performance might include a monologue, a one-woman sex show...and a Tantrik healing ritual"6Andrea Juno's introduction to interview in Angry Women; "breathing orgasms into non-genital sex and spirituality into orgasms, Sprinkle seduces deconstruction."7Chris Straayer, The Seduction of Boundaries Never mind that these 'outer reaches' (a tellingly Occidental phrase) involve years of dedicated training in highly controlled conditions, and that Tantra will not submit to the logic of the 'weekend workshop' or the stage encore. While Sprinkle wittily animates sexual difference, probing its manufacture in visual, verbal and economic terms, she flattens ethnic difference to a glib mimicking of visual appearance and trite 'spiritual sound bites' converting the unknown East by means of the known West, converting difference into ethnic sameness.

In relation to ethnicity, Sprinkle short-changes her own project: that of examining her 'essence' while delighting in her 'construction.' By failing to explore her essence/construction as 'white' alongside her construction /essence as 'woman' or 'whore,' Sprinkle fails to relativise race in a way that would allow for truly intercultural 'play.' Her inability, or refusal, to grasp Tantra or the culture from which it emerges by any other means than shallow visual references (which are also inappropriate, because her calendar-style, glitzy 'goddesses' are part of the commercialised mainstream patriarchal tradition, and many moons away from the primeval goddesses of Tantra) betrays the obduracy of her white Americentrism. The 'slut/Goddess' opposite that she attempts to deconstruct with the women in her workshops is none otherthan the old Christian dichotomy of Madonna and whore, in Indian garb. The deities she represents are sanitisations of the flesh-eating, self-beheading, skeletal, graveyard-haunting, necrophiliac goddesses of Tantrism; in all her depictions of the Goddess, her smile frozen in a permanent 'cheese,' Annie Sprinkle has ex(or)cised the Terrible Goddess, Kali, Creator, Sustainer and Destroyer of Time. Sprinkle remains an Orientalist, a Westerner who has used a Western-constructed notion of the East, on Western terms. The elision 'Tantrik' and 'New Age' is already a form of appropriation. By locating itself as a temporal metaphor, the discoveries of a happening new Western generation, 'New Age' like any imperialism, conceals the geographical and cultural sources of its plunder. It is therefore no surprise that India, Indians and the Indian subcontinet are never mentioned, and 'Tantra' by name, only rarely. Sprinkle then becomes the authoritative modern interpreter of an (unlocated) 'ancient' lore: and a porn star with a Unique Selling Point.

Annie Sprinkle's approach to her 'spiritual practice' is cheerfully orgasm-oriented. "I'm just now getting to where I can have clitoral orgasms on top of other kinds: energy orgasms, breath orgasms, kundalini orgasms, heart orgasms, Third Eye orgasms."8Angry Women Instrumentality is not alien to Tantra: Tantra itself means 'instrument' in Sanskrit. But in Tantra, sex, and the implicit rousing of "all the faculties—sense, emotions and intellect—to their highest pitch."9Philip Rawson, Tantra, published by Thames and Hudson is an instrument used to apprehend the fundamental unity of all things and move beyond linear time. Sex is not itself enlightenment: this is to confuse the pane of glass with the view. Tantra's emphasis on shedding the self and dissolving all separations means moving beyond the realm of the visual and performative, both of which imply the separation of looker and looked that is crucial to pornography: there is a fundamental contradiction here for Sprinkle. You cannot 'do' Tantra as performance.

Tantra's emphasis on shedding the self and dissolving all separations means moving beyond the realm of the visual and performative... You cannot "do" Tantra as performance.

Desi Dyktopia/Queering Tantra

However, there are aspects of Sprinkle's take on Tantra that are latently challenging, if only they had been worked. I dream of a queer, South Asian diasporic female artist who will take up the challenge of a radical engagement with Tantra in work where she contextualises herself, as well as Tantra, in culture and history, stages and subverts Tantra's own tyrannies, and goes beyond 'sex manual' tips on how to have more satisfying orgasms. Can we queer up the racialised gaze in the same way the sexual gaze is queer in Sprinkle's work? Can we queer up Tantra, a spiritual method that already relies heavily on transgression? There is certainly room for an interpretation that would destabilise the primacy of heterosexuality in Tantra (along the lines of Giti Thadani's semiotic project with Sanskrit texts10Giti Thadani, 'Anamika' in What Lesbians do in Books, edited by Elaine Hobby Chris White). This would mean radically shifting the allegorical functions of masculinity and femininity in Tantrik practices— such as the tendency for women to become allegories of creation and conduits for male transformation, rather than flesh and blood creatures undergoing their own eroto-spiritual change.

For Tantrik philosophy and practice are not short of opportunities for feminist, lesbian-positive interpretation. In Shakti's dance, rehearsed by the female Tantrika during intercourse as the couple return from the state of non-difference, it is Shakti who creates the "bewildering array of separate facets which compose the objective Universe"11Philip Rawson, Tantra: and she does so through her own genitals. The universe of differentiation, of language, is generated through the goddess' yoni, so that she enacts production, not reproduction, in a huge ejaculation that is the genesis of the differentiated, meaningful world. Sprinkle touches on this distinction with her emphasis on the yoni as ejaculatory producer rather than progenic reproducer, underlined through her embracing of sodomy and oral sex, her dildo-play, her sex with women—forms of sensuality sundered from the tyranny of procreation. In Tantra, the existence of the world is conventionally thought of as "a continuous giving birth by the yoni resulting from a continuous infusion of the seed of the male in sexual delight."12ibid. Let this be refigured: as continuous ejaculation by the yoni resulting from endless intercourse with the female in sexual ecstasy....

Notes

  1. 'Annie Sprinkle' in Angry Women, published by Re/Search Publications
  2. ibid.
  3. The Sluts and Goddesses Video Workshop, directed by Maria Beatty, Annie Sprinkle, 1992
  4. Photographs in Sacred Sex...1 + 1 = 1, book by Annie Sprinkle, cited in Angry Women.
  5. See Chris Straayer, The Seduction of Boundaries, and Linda Williams, A Provoking Agent, essays in Dirty Looks: Women, Pornography, Power, edited by Pamela Church Gibson and Roma Gibson (British Film Institute, 1993)
  6. Andrea Juno's introduction to interview in Angry Women
  7. Chris Straayer, The Seduction of Boundaries
  8. Angry Women
  9. Philip Rawson, Tantra, published by Thames and Hudson
  10. Giti Thadani, 'Anamika' in What Lesbians do in Books, edited by Elaine Hobby Chris White
  11. Philip Rawson, Tantra
  12. ibid.
Frieze and handprint design by Sherazad Jamal.
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Sonali Fernando
Sonali Fernando is a writer and filmmaker.
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