Interview with Barbara DeGenevieve

With the pleasure of Barbara DeGenevieve coming to our class, we were able to view the pornography that she produces within the queer community that is different in comparison to the mainstream heterosexual and/or gay and lesbian porn. DeGenevieve is a professor at the School of Art Institute of Chicago and is an multimedia artist, writer and work in video, photography and performance. In the “Interview with Barbara DeGenevieve,” she talked about her website www.ssspread.com, which people pay a fee to subscribe to the site to view her production in the queer porn she produced. The reason that it is not free is because then she would not be able to pay the models for the work. Her work of queer pornography focuses on different types of body images, which she state “Every fetish and every body type imaginable-hairy women, fat people, men with small penises, grandmothers, the list goes on and on,” is represented in her work (DeGenevieve 142). The meaning of queer porn to DeGenevieve is much different than gay and lesbian porn because it is portrayed differently than the mainstream pornography that only portrays a certain kind of image. When Libidot asked DeGenevieve what queer’s sexuality mean to her, she states “Queer’ to me is different from ‘gay’ and ‘lesbian.’ Queers are more outrageous, less interested in fitting in or being culturally ‘normal’, and generally live within a community of social and political activism. Queer is very inclusive of gender deviations and variations that are not part of a more traditional ‘gay/lesbian’ sexuality” (DeGenevieve 144).