Brian Rogers

The Revolution is My Boyfriend:: the Raspberry Reich and the Subversive Power of Political Porn Brian Rogers

Bruce LaBruce is a queercore filmmaker who has combined elements of the pornographic and art worlds in his work. The Raspberry Reich (2004) is a potent example of how LaBruce manages to create insightful cinema that includes hardcore sexual imagery. The film focuses on a group of terrorist rebels who seek to create a revolution inspired by the work of Wilhelm Reich, meaning there cannot be revolution without sexual revolution, and there cannot be sexual revolution without homosexual revolution. The group?s leader, Gudrun, demands that the men of the group throw off the shackles of their repressive heterosexual monogamy and participate in sexual activities with one another. The film is an explosion of political dogma, intellectual theory, and explicit sex. The hardcore sexual nature of the film could lead one to dismiss it as smut, but it is argued that the messages of the film go much deeper than stimulating sexual arousal. In this piece Brian Rogers analyzes The Raspberry Reich in terms of genre, the scopophilic gaze and the sexual philosophies it addresses and represents in order to understand what is being communicated and the subversive potentials of political porn.