Dirty lesbian pictures: art and pornography in The L Word

Showtime's television drama The L Word (2004-) has an oft-times precarious relationship with obscenity. This is not unlike other lesbian cultural productions, which have had a history of being viewed as obscenity by the mainstream: from the The Well of Loneliness obscenity trial in 1928 to criminal charges being laid on a Toronto bookstore for distributing lesbian pornographic magazine Bad Attitude in 1992. Likewise, within lesbian cultures, debates have raged over what constitutes obscenity and what constitutes acceptable sexuality and sexual representation, most notably during what has come to be known as the sex wars, which took place during the 1980s and 1990 During this period, 'sex-radical' lesbians who not only argued for but also created a wealth of pornographic texts challenged lesbian feminist prohibitions against pornography. This era had a substantial effect on not only lesbian cultures, but also lesbian cultural representation, and the investments in sex and style, together with the reclamation of lesbian femininity, have arguably contributed to the mainstream's contemporary interest in lesbianism and willingness to display lesbian images in mass-cultural forums such as television. As the contemporary lesbian text most visible to the mainstream, how does The L Word position itself in terms of these histories? With some feminists decrying it as soft porn, deliberately titillating a straight male audience,and right-wingers viewing it as perversion,The L Word takes quite a different attitude towards pornography than that which might be expected. Instead of a sex-radical-inspired celebratory attitude that would seem ideologically necessary to underlie the kinds of images the series projects, The L Word instead seeks to posit a very clear demarcation between that which it deems to be pornography and a rather amorphous definition of 'art': a demarcation curiously reminiscent of pre-sex-wars distinctions between pornography and erotica. It also harks back to these earlier modalities in its concrete signification of pornography within a continuum of violence against women. It does this within the contemporary context of a concurrent increase in right-wing backlashes against sex in general, and homosexuality in particular, and a contemporary increase in the amount of homosexual sexuality depicted on television - or at the very least on cable. It is notable that The L Word indeed appears on cable television in its home market of the US, as cable broadcasters are generally able to represent sexualit(ies) deemed unsuitable or indeed 'pornographic' by network standards.