Girl meets boy: Cross-gender queer sex and the promise of pornography

This article takes a look at an intriguing topos in women’s erotic fiction: cross-gender queer sex, that is, sex between women attracted to women and men attracted to men. I offer a reading of three stories that revolve around this theme, and analyze it both as a manifestation of ‘queer’ as a non-gendered identity formation, and as a product of the adoption of the gay male model of sexual subjectivity in lesbian pornography and lesbian sex culture in general. Finally, I evaluate this topos from the viewpoint of women’s rewriting of fantasy in the field of pornography, and explore its political implications. I argue that while the phantasmatic investment in gay masculinity has played a facilitating role in the articulation of female sexual subjectivity, its drawbacks include leaving the equation of subjectivity and masculinity intact. I conclude that the topos of cross-gender queer sex in pornography by women demonstrates both the promise and the limitations of pornographic resignifications.