Abstract
Catherine Breillat and Lena Dunham share a devotion to questioning sexual norms and norms of representation through 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, in and out of pornography, that conceal and deny women’s humanity. In so doing, these ‘provocauteurs’ stretch definitional and representational boundaries of ‘feminist’ and ‘porn’. Through examination of Breillat’s films A Real Young Girl (1976), Romance (2000), Fat Girl (2001), Sex is Comedy (2002), and Anatomy of Hell (2004), and of Dunham’s HBO series Girls (2012–), this chapter considers how these screen provocauteurs’ mutual re-envisioning of sex/uality generates a hybridised, politicised mode of feminist ‘art porn’.
Exploring the nature of sex [allows] me to transcend the usual, horrible images that form the basis of porno films.
Catherine Breillat (Macnab, 2004, p. 22)
Guys my age watch so much pornography. There’s no way that you, young Jewish man from Chappaqua, taught this to yourself.
Lena Dunham (Bruni, 2012, p. 3)
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
‘Postfeminism’ has been defined in multiple, often competing ways as following from, reacting to, and revising elements of second-wave feminism that are themselves not easily encapsulated. For a thorough parsing of postfeminism’s accumulated meanings, see Gill, (2007, pp. 147–66).
- 2.
Linda Williams adopts Jean-Louis Comolli’s concept of the ‘frenzy of the visible’ to characterise pornography’s fixation with showing what it claims is the truth of sexual pleasure, yet as Williams demonstrates, in much of heteronormative pornography that which disproportionately serves to signify truth is the visual fetishisation of male ejaculation.
- 3.
Also listed: ‘Because Girls is, at its core, a feminist action while Hustler is a company that markets and monetizes a male’s idea of female sexuality’ and ‘Because it grosses me out’. @lenadunham, Twitter, May 24 2013.
- 4.
References
Angelo, A. (2010). Sexual cartographies: Mapping subjectivity in the cinema of Catherine Breillat. Journal for Cultural Research, 14(1), 43–55.
Breillat, C. (1968). L’homme facile (A Man for the Asking). C. Bourgois.
Breillat, C. (1974). Le soupirail (The Opening). Guy Authier.
Breillat, C. (1976/2000). Une vraie jeune fille (A Real Young Girl). France.
Breillat, C. (2001). À Ma Soeur (Fat Girl). France.
Breillat, C. (2000). Romance. France.
Breillat, C. (2001). Pornocratie. Denoël.
Breillat, C. (2002). Sex is Comedy. France.
Breillat, C. (2004). L’anatomie de l’enfer (Anatomy of Hell). France.
Bruni, F. (2012, April 1). The bleaker sex. The New York Times, p. 3.
Canterbury, S. (2013). This Ain’t Girls XXX. US.
Constable, L. (2004). Unbecoming sexual desires for women becoming sexual subjects: Simone de Beauvoir (1949) and Catherine Breillat (1999). MLN, 119(4), 672–695.
Daalmans, S. (2013). I’m busy trying to become who I am: Self-entitlement and the city in HBO’s Girls. Feminist Media Studies, 13(2), 359–362.
Dunham, L. (c. 2007). The Fountain. US.
Dunham, L. (2010). Tiny Furniture. US.
Dunham, L. (2014a, September 29). Fresh Air. Retrieved from http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=352276798.
Dunham, L. (2014b). Not That Kind of Girl: A young woman tells you what she’s ‘learned’. New York: Random House.
Gill, R. (2007). Postfeminist media culture: Elements of a sensibility. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 10(2), 147–166.
Hagland, D., & Engber, D. (2013, February 10). ‘Guys on Girls, Season 2. Slate. Retrieved from http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/tv_club/features/2013/girls_season_2/week_5/girls_on_hbo_one_man_s_trash_episode_5_of_season_2_reviewed_by_guys.html
Hazlett, C. (2012, October 9). Lena Dunham explains her thighs – and the no-pants look. Today. Retrieved from http://www.today.com/entertainment/lena-dunham-explains-her-thighs-no-pants-look1C6358990?franchiseSlug=todayentertainmentmain.
HBO (1999–2007). The Sopranos. US.
HBO (2011–). Game of Thrones. US.
HBO (2012–2017). Girls. US.
Hiatt, B. (2013, February 28). Girl on top. Rolling Stone. Retrieved from http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/news/lena-dunham-girl-on-top-20130228.
Jaeckin, J. (1974). Emmanuelle. France.
James, E.L. (2012). Fifty Shades of Grey. UK: Vintage Books.
Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers of horror: An essay on abjection, trans. L. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.
Lunceford, B. (2012). Naked politics: Nudity, political action, and the rhetoric of the body. Lanham: Lexington.
Macnab, G. (2004). Sadean woman. Sight & Sound, 14(12), 20–22.
McNutt, M. (2012, April 8). Game of Thrones: The night lands and sexposition. Cultural Learnings. Retrieved from http://cultural-learnings.com/2012/04/08/game-of-thrones-the-night-lands-and-sexposition/.
Price, B. (2002). Catherine Breillat. Senses of Cinema. Retrieved from http://sensesofcinema.com/2002/great-directors/breillat/.
Rosenberg, A. (2014, January 10). 5 productive ways to ask Lena Dunham about the nudity on Girls. Think Progress. Retrieved from http://thinkprogress.org/alyssa/2014/01/10/3148721/lena-dunham-girls-nudity/.
Rowe, K. (1996). The unruly woman: Gender and the genres of laughter. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Secher, B. (2005, April 8). Catherine Breillat: All true artists are hated. Telegraph. Retrieved from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/starsandstories/3672302/Catherine-BreillatAll-true-artists-are-hated.html.
Stasi, L. (2013, January 4). New girl on top. New York Post. Retrieved from http://nypost.com/2013/01/04/new-girl-on-top/.
Wells, G. (2002). Accoutrements of passion: Fashion, irony, and feminine p.o.v in Catherine Breillat’s Romance. Sites, 6(1), 51–66.
Williams, L. (1999). Hard core: Power, pleasure, and the frenzy of the visible. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Williams, L. (2014). Cinema’s sex acts. Film Quarterly 67(4), 9–25.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
San Filippo, M. (2017). ‘Art Porn Provocauteurs’: Feminist Performances of Embodiment in the Work of Catherine Breillat and Lena Dunham. In: Nash, M., Whelehan, I. (eds) Reading Lena Dunham’s Girls. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52971-4_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52971-4_12
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-52970-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-52971-4
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)