Engaging in the disclosure of personal experiences as part of a greater discussion
of cultural values and boundaries requires a certain amount of risk taking. “Talking sex,
like having sex, is fraught with potential difficulties in that it entails personal and
interpersonal decisions about self-disclosure, confidentiality, and trust.”1
Experiencing this work challenges the viewer’s participation as an “encounterer,” and further defines the moment.
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1Erica Rand, “The Passionate Camera,” The Passionate Activist and the Political Camera, ed. Deborah Bright (New York: Routledge, 1998), 370. Rand discusses the dynamic of “representational struggles” within lesbian activist groups with which she was involved in the early 1990’s. Of key importance to the group was deciding the visual language by which the group and its goals were to be represented: “While our sex talk was often fun and arousing, it was just as often discomforting, especially because sex among us was not just a matter of theory and pictures but of lived experience.”