Shine Louise Houston is a filmmaker and the founding director and producer of Pink and White Productions, an independent production company creating queer pornography in San Francisco.[1][2] Houston makes feature-length pornographic films in addition to producing, directing, and shooting hundreds of installments for her queer porn membership site CrashPadSeries.com.[2] Houston distributes her own work and that of other indie adult filmmakers through PinkLabel.tv, catering to different sexual communities.[2]
Shine Louise Houston | |
|---|---|
| Alma mater | San Francisco Art Institute |
| Occupation(s) | Film director, producer, cinematographer, performer |
| Website | Official website  |
Significance
editShine Louise Houston's films have screened at film festivals around the world. Houston speaks widely on issues of representation and sexual freedom of expression.[3] She is heavily involved with the feminist and queer art community as well as doing sexual health work and sex worker activism.[1][3] In her work, Houston features a diverse range of ethnicities, body types, non-conforming genders, and sexual identities[4][1] Houston has been written about widely in numerous publications on the intersections of race, pornography, and desire. Ariane Cruz, a professor of women's studies at Penn State, writes in her book, The Color of Kink,
[Houston's] films showcase stunning cinematography, inventive narratives, and incredibly diverse performers with respect to race, gender, and body. Houston's work critically queers representations of black [women's] sexual desire, offering modes of pleasure outside hegemonic, heteronormative representations of black female sexuality in pornography.[2]
Critics have stated that Houston's work counters inauthentic representations of women, trans, gender nonconforming, and queer folks of color's sexuality and desire in mainstream porn.[5] They also feel that Houston incorporates her own pleasure and desire as a black women into her pornography acting as a self-aware voyeur and camera operator.[1][5]
Education
editHouston received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Film from the San Francisco Art Institute.[2]
Career
editAfter graduating, Houston worked at a Good Vibrations sex shop in the San Francisco Bay area for five years.[3] While at Good Vibrations, Houston found an underserved need for queer-made pornography when customers asked for recommendations on the search for representation of their own sexual communities.[1] Community demand inspired Houston to band together with friends to make their own queer pornography.[5] Houston founded Pink and White Productions and in 2008 launched the queer pornography distribution site CrashPadSeries.com.[1] The company's first queer porn feature, Crash Pad, starring Jiz Lee, establishes the location of all the subsequent CrashPadSeries episodes.[1] The Crash Pad is an apartment located in San Francisco dedicated to mutual pleasure based queer sex and Houston acts as Key Keeper to the Crash Pad.[5] Houston incorporates into the scene her presence behind the camera via her own kink, and participation, as a voyeur.[1] In the feature SuperFreak she stars as the ghost of Rick James.[4] The ghost possesses people on a mission to turn the whole world into SuperFreaks having great sex.[2] All models in Pink and White Productions videos seek them out, and Houston organizes scenes around the model's personal fantasies.[2] CrashPadSeries.com debuts episodic, reality-based queer pornography videos.[5] The site is set up like a blog, featuring photos and identity profiles of the stars to make visible the alternate gender identities and sexualities represented in their videos.[1] As of 2017, Houston is in post-production for their next feature, Snapshot, a horror film dedicated to complicating the limited "coming out" narrative predominantly featured in mainstream media.[6]
Featured publications
edit- A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography by Mireille Miller-Young
- Black Female Sexualities edited by Trimiko Melancon
- Freeing Ourselves: A guide to Health and Self Love for Brown Bois by The Brown Boi Project
- Porn After Porn, "Mighty Real," Shine Louise Houston, Sept 2014 (Reprinted with Permission in XBIZ Fall 2014 Issue)
- Porn for Pussies: Representations of Queer Female Sexuality in Shine Louise Houston's Pornography by Engel Nicole, Presented at the National Women's Studies Association
Influences
editReferences
edit- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k Seise, Cherie (April 2010). "Fucking Utopia: Queer Porn and Queer Liberation". Sprinkle: A Journal of Sexual Diversity Studies. 3: 154.
- ^ a b c d e f g Cruz, Ariane (2016). The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM, and Pornography. NYU Press.
- ^ a b c "Shine Louise Houston". Crash Pad Series.
- ^ a b c Miller-Young, Mireille (2014). A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography. Duke University Press.
- ^ a b c d e Taormino, Tristan; Penley, Constance; Shimizu, Celine; Miller-Young, Mireille, eds. (2013). The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure. The Feminist Press.
- ^ a b c Wysinger, Caroline (June 26, 2015). "Support SNAPSHOT: Queer Women Of Color Making Sexy Porn". Autostraddle.
- ^ a b Hall, Chris. "Shine Louise Houston: What if Hitchcock, Jarmusch, and Metzger Made Porn Films?". SF Weekly.