The Thinking Queer's Pornographer: BRUCE LABRUCE, ART/PORN AND THE POLITICS OF CO-OPTATION
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Published late last year by Italian distribution group Atlantide Entertainment and their subsidiary, Queer Frame, BRUCE(X)PLOITATION is the first monograph dedicated to the work of Canadian filmmaker and artist Bruce LaBruce. The book is predominately pictorial, and is nothing if not comprehensive; it includes over one hundred high definition color and black and white images gleaned from the abundant image bank of a career spanning almost three decades. Film stills feature throughout, but in no way do they dominate. Images from LaBruce and G.B. Jones' Queercore 'zine, J.D.s, appear alongside selections from LaBruce's photographic archive in both its 'art' and 'fashion' modes (though of course it is questionable whether these modes are ever separate in LaBruce's work), as well as a small selection of stills from his stage plays. Editors Cosimo Santoro and Giuseppe Savoca preface the collection with two essays (published in both Italian and English) and conclude the book with twenty pages of biographical information indexing the vast body of work either produced by, or involving, LaBruce. An inventory of feature films and stage plays providing detailed production information, cast lists and full synopses is followed by multiple indices detailing all LaBruce's creative output, organized by his varied modes of engagement with his practice: as film director, script writer, actor, producer, artist, as theatre director and as himself. The final two listings detail the mass of literature pertaining to LaBruce's work. The first, titled Selected and Reviews, cites twenty-one articles sourced from art journals, fashion magazines, broadsheets and online magazines, and is, as the title suggests, merely a 'selection' from the vast number of reviews and articles about LaBruce that proliferate in both mass and queer subcultural media. The final index, Publications by the Artist, has thirteen citations, some of which detail extended periods during which LaBruce was a regular contributor to publications such as Exclaim! Magazine, Index and Vice (to which he presently contributes). This list includes his two books, The Reluctant Pornographer (1997) and Ride, Queer, Ride (1998), as well as pieces written for Butt magazine and Blackbook. The release of this monograph suggests the arrival of a long overdue moment of critical attention directed at LaBruce's career and its artistic, activist and theoretical contexts. 2011 also saw the appearance of The Advocate for Fagdom (Angelique Bosio) on the film festival circuit, a 'talking heads' documentary with a similar historicizing and synthesizing tone to BRUCE(X)PLOITATION. Despite the lack of any sustained critical attention until this moment, the coincidence of these two texts suggests the existence of an audience who recognize LaBruce as an enduring artist and welcome a critical appraisal and acknowledgement of his body of work. Bruce LaBruce enjoys a strong presence among (radical) queer subcultures across North America, Canada and Europe, and within these contexts, his legacy as a co-founder of queercore and his ongoing influence on a new generation of radical, queer and independent art-makers is acknowledged. BRUCE(X)PLOITATION is significant because it represents the first occasion in which LaBruce's longevity and his significance as a queer cultural figure have been recognized in the form of a comprehensive retrospective of his work. The effect of the monograph, emboldened by the simultaneity of the documentary, represents a sort of writing into the history of radical queer art and activism; in this sense, the publication of BRUCE(X)PLOITATION is an important and culturally significant moment in the trajectory of LaBruce's ongoing critical project. It also begs the question: what is the impact of this form of official canonization on the (radical, fringe, subcultural) artist and his work? Despite the obvious thoroughness of the editors, there are a number of bibliographic omissions pertaining to LaBruce's own written work that I would like to briefly acknowledge, as I believe these speak to a larger thematic absence in both the monograph under review as well as the broader discussion of LaBruce. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.023 | 0.004 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".