Barbara Hammer’s ‘Double Strength’ (1976) opens with a sequence of sepia photographs featuring Hammer and her then-partner, Terry Sendgraff, a movement and trapeze artist. Their faces fill the screen as they offer a collaborative and wistful voiceover, something which heightens the sense of nostalgia that reverberates throughout the opening scene. Together, they illustrate that their bond is “not intellectual [but] emotional” and offer a vivid description of their physical connection. Referencing the sex they had that morning, Barbara (or possibly Terry) describes the sensation of sucking her partner’s nipples and the feeling of resting her head between her breasts. Erik Satie’s Trois Gymnopédies plays in the background: laden with sentimentality, its melody poses a contrast to their explicit sexual reflections. The conversation between the lovers continues, yet when the slideshow concludes, the focus moves to the floor of an empty gym. The scene retains the sepia tones of the first sequence and depicts the equipment Sendgraff uses to work out. Having already stationed herself at the top of the ladder, Hammer allows her lens to roam around the room. From this vantage point she takes in her surroundings, observing the metal bolts attached to the ceiling and the thickly knotted ropes strewn in coils across the floor. Eventually, the camera falls to rest on Sendgraff’s hands as she grasps the trapeze bar.
Our introduction to the gym is accompanied by Hammer and Sendgraff’s lyrical commentary. Still in the early days of their relationship, they express the pleasures of their intimacy – and of lesbianism more generally. Most importantly, they describe how it feels to touch each other. It is often unclear who is speaking, indicative of how entwined and symbiotic their energies have become.
“It’s impossible to say what it’s like because it just goes all of the way inside of me. It touches everything inside of me, it’s like I can feel it all the way in my blood, my bones and even in my hair and in my eyes. It’s almost like a feeling of purity. With purity meaning openness and the universe. An eternity that goes on and on and on. It just feels right.”
As the voice-over unfolds, Sendgraff reaches for the trapeze and lifts herself up from the ground. Bringing her knees upwards, she hovers above the floor and spins in a graceful circle. Next we see Sendgraff on the ground, holding Hammer’s feet firmly on the bar while she guides the swing in a swooping arc around the gym. Both women are naked, because as the filmmaker explained in her book, HAMMER! Making Movies out of Sex and Life, there were simply “no adequate outfits that would show our muscles”.1 As Hammer captures the scene from the top of the swing, Sendgraff looks up and smiles. The perspective shifts to focus on Sendgraff’s hands. These are not delicate, but exemplify strength, agility and power, and the steady stream of exaltations that fill the otherwise silent sports hall similarly allude to the sensual properties of the athlete’s touch. Soon after, Hammer removes herself from the frame and films from the sidelines, capturing Sendgraff’s extraordinary skill as she performs a series of gymnastics. Sendgraff swings rhythmically between two bars, supporting the weight of her body with the strength of her hands and arms. Veins throb to the surface of her skin and her biceps ripple; her knuckles pale with the effort of remaining in constant motion. Although the camera takes in the whole of Sendgraff’s body, the footage is punctuated by close-ups of the athlete’s hands, as if Hammer is unable to escape the sensual pull of her lover’s hands and fingers.
While the content of the film is not overtly sexual, the interplay between language and imagery forms an implicit connection between hands and sex. This segment of Double Strength expresses the filmmaker’s preoccupation with hands, particularly the hands of her lover. Viewing this scene alongside other instances from Hammer’s early work, including ‘Dyketactics’ (1974), ‘Multiple Orgasm’ (1976) and ‘Women I Love’ (1976), the link between Hammer’s conception of touch and her fondness for the hand as a fundamental tool of connection is obvious. For Hammer, the hand is indisputably sexy. However, the taxonomy of the hand has historically been a slippery subject.2 While seemingly naked, exposed and supposedly exempt from amorous implications, hands harbour a wealth of hidden meaning, within lesbian culture. Images and cinematic depictions of hands engaged in sex affirm the existence of queer desires and practices, participate in a subcultural circulation of knowledge and speak directly to a network of queer women.3 Hands encapsulate sexual expression between queer and lesbian-identified women, while simultaneously undermining the unity between heterosexuality and ‘real’ sex and establishing alternative ways to give and receive pleasure. Within the dominant framework, the sexual activities that can be categorised as intercourse are notably limited, but here the affirmation of sex between female bodies deconstructs heteronormative morphology.4
Hammer’s films reject the symbolic order by positioning the hand as the lesbian phallus, alluding to the boundless sensual configurations that can occur when lesbians “do it by hand”. Conceived by Judith Butler, the lesbian phallus indicates the transferability of the phallus as a signifier of desire. Butler discusses the metonymic quality of Freud’s phallus and suggests instead that the “phallus belongs to no body part.”5 She accedes that while the lesbian phallus is still a “fiction” it is a “theoretically useful one” as it generates possibilities for “imitation, subversion and the recirculation of privilege.”6 Comparably, queer activist and pornographer Courtney Trouble has conceived of the “psychic dick” which correlates to “the feeling that a part of my body (my tit, clit, fingers, strap-on) has become my actual dick”.7 Likewise, this dispersal of phallic power is central to Hammer’s films which recognise the sexual potential of the body as a whole, but invest particular power within the hand, fist and fingers. While conceptually hands can be read as providing a metaphor for Hammer’s broader consideration of touch, on a material level hands are celebrated as the tool that touches and their sexual connotations are rarely sidelined.
It’s impossible to underestimate the significance of touch (and the hand) across Hammer’s films from the ‘70s: her tactile sensibility deconstructs the distance between the camera lens and the body, creating a corporeal visual experience. Hammer has discussed the link between her identity as a lesbian and her sensibility as a filmmaker in various interviews, explaining that as her life became more tactile, so too, did her films. In 2010 she claimed that when she became a lesbian, “My skin, corpuscles, and all the cellular knowledge of touch increased. I was touching a body like my own, reinforcing my own body shape, so of course I had to bring that onto the screen.”8 This contrasts directly with Hammer’s earlier work, particularly films such as Aldebaran Sees (1969) and Contribution to Light (1968), which focused on the pictorial qualities of cells, light reflection and shapes occurring organically in nature. Loosely grouped together as her pre-coming out films, these pieces are indicative of her desire to record either her own interiority or the Californian landscape, rather than use the medium to capture rationality, the body’s materiality, or a sense of touch. Prior to their divorce in 1970, Hammer made a silent film with her husband titled ‘Clay I Love You II’ (1968) which documents a motorcycle trip along the Mendocino coast. Filmed from the backseat of the bike, their bodies are relatively absent. Instead she captures the ocean, forests and the landscape either side of the road – and all this mostly from a distance.
In Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, Laura U. Marks imagines vision as an embodied experience and writes that haptic cinema “appeals to a viewer who perceives with all the senses.”9 Hammer’s emphasis on tactility possesses a dual function: while she is committed to heightening the viewer’s tactile senses, her work also attends to the hand as the instigator of touch. Her synaesthetic approach amplifies the feeling that we are touching the bodies on-screen with our hands, rather than elevating the eye as a tool for touching. This focus is central to work that seeks to locate the lesbian hand. In a 2015 interview with Jane Harris for the Paris Review, Hammer stated that the objective of her early films, particularly Dyketactics, was for “the audience to be embraced, as if they felt their hands or bodies moving across the screen, connecting touch with the images.”10 Her aesthetic works to dramatise the role of touch and her constant emphasis on tactility and texture implicates the hand as an initiator of familiarity, intimacy and pleasure.
‘Dyketactics’ (1974) remains one of Hammer’s best known films. It is regularly cited as the first film to be directed by an openly gay woman and portray lesbian identity and desire. As a consequence, there’s a lot less scissoring. Uncensored by the male gaze, Hammer’s film shocked and inspired its initial viewers. Her decision to deploy images of the vagina, rather than the more socially palatable female torso, caused one man to scream during a screening. At just four minutes long, the film has been fondly described by its creator as a lesbian commercial.11 The first half is filmed in a meadow. Nude women move across the field and dip their toes into the stream; they clasp hands, touch the grass and comb their fingers through one another’s hair. The camera zooms in on a hand deseeding a melon, capturing the fingers as they plunge into its centre. Elsewhere, we see a woman’s fingers tracing the ridge of a fossil before the scene dissolves to depict two fingers gently pinching a nipple. Dreamily, the footage merges together, images are superimposed onto one another and each one exudes the myriad pleasures of touch. Draped in warm sunlight, the film gives us a vision of pastoral queerness. Hammer moves inside to film herself and her then-partner Poe Asher having sex on the living room floor. Avoiding the tropes of pornography and the narratives of heterosexual pleasure, Hammer allows hands and touch to form the crux of an indispensable seminar on ‘dyketactics’. Hammer’s emphasis on the hand is similarly clear throughout the remainder of the film. Frames are cropped in ways that position the hand as the focal point.
In Dyketactics Hammer addresses the perennial question of what it is that lesbians do in bed. Yet no physical act is hierarchised over another and every instance of touch is rendered noteworthy. An image of oral sex is as erotic as a hand touching a thigh or a nose coming into contact with a nipple. She attentively captures these collisions, archiving moments of touch that bypass heteronormative expectations of sex on film. Often the breast is concealed from the camera, and we are offered instead a broad expanse of hand as it cups the flesh and guides the areola towards the lips. Opposed to traditional erotics, the female form becomes a collage of fragments, glimpsed from angles that are neither gratuitous nor graphic. While some of the footage of the couple was shot by their friend, Chris Saxton, Hammer also places the camera in the bed between them. From this angle, the lovers appear even more entangled and their bodies change into in a tactile mass of flesh and fingers. One frame is occupied by a hand as it reached from above. The angle distorts the perspective, causing the hand to appear much larger than it actually is, stressing its primacy. The splayed fingers cast an arresting shadow and the diagonal line it creates signifies its fluidity, flexibility and sexual dynamism. Hammer’s film charts the evolution of the hand as a sexual body part; a development which is demonstrated further by the film, ‘Multiple Orgasm’ (1976), a study of masturbation. Here Hammer debunks the necessity of a penis (or a partner) for sexual stimulation, instead paying homage to the fingers and auto-erotic pleasure. This six-minute film presents female genitalia as a landscape in a surreal layering of vagina and rock face. Using superimposition and double exposure, frames are placed on top of one another to create an added layer of sexual metaphor; the images ride one another, metonymically echoing the friction occurring on the level of the image. Four fingers stimulate the clitoris and enter the vagina but our perception is distorted by the rocky desert landscape.
Interestingly, Hammer’s focus on the female body also provoked accusations of essentialism from feminists. These included the critic Andrea Weiss who wrote, in 1981, that Hammer’s films adopted “traditional, oppressive notions of romantic love” and contributed to a patriarchal understanding of femininity and womanhood.12 For Weiss, the gaze directed towards women in ‘Dyketactics’, combined with the totalising conception of love espoused in ‘Double Strength’ placed Hammer’s within a traditional (and masculine) trajectory of filmmaking which sought to objectify women’s bodies. While Hammer’s early work could be understood as attributing femininity exclusively to female bodies, which Weiss read as an essentialised notion of womanhood, the critiques had a marked effect on Hammer and led to her decision to eliminate the body from her subsequent work.13 Yet for many, ‘Dyketactics’ offered a celebratory vision of queer femininity which rendered lesbian sexuality visible. In interviews Hammer has described her efforts to satiate her female viewers: she explains that “we were all hungry in the ‘70s, and even by the ‘80s our appetites for images we could relate to had not been fully satisfied.”14 Evidently there was a need for images which gave voice to lesbian desire as well as female autonomy. Contemporary queer film critics such as Willow Maclay and Sally Jane Black have described ‘Dyketactics’ as a “complete reclamation of the body” and a “revelation of aspects of life generally closeted by the straight world.”15 Despite the critiques of essentialism levelled against ‘Dyketactics’ and Hammer’s other films from the ‘70s, the ongoing relevance of Hammer’s films for queer audiences highlights the importance of these lesbian-led representations of queer female culture. For Hammer, the hand is always the primary symbol of lesbian eroticism, a means of expressing the possibilities of lesbian sexuality. The ‘multiple orgasms’ its fingers induce are testimony to the fact that queering the terms of sexual intercourse allows for pluralised pleasures. This challenge to the penis affirms lesbian sexual practice as both real and tangible, locating the hand as a locus of erotic power and an indubitable sexual organ.
1. Barbara Hammer, HAMMER! Making Movies out of Sex and Life, New York: CUNY. 2010, p. 71. 2. In her examination of the hand, Mandy Merck writes that as well as being “an instrument of love and labour” hands are “the historic agent of binding agreements.” Merck also acknowledges that hands are an “anatomical epitome of elaborate sensory capacity, complex coordination and rational control” and inhabit an “erotic function” within lesbian sexology and criticism. In praise of fisting, lesbian theorist, Zoe Schramm Evans highlights the anatomical expertise of our hands. Exceptionally “sensitive” and “intimate” organs, “more nerves run from the hand to the brain than from any other part of the body” and contain “a sensory capacity even greater than that of the genitals”. Mandy Merck, In Your Face Sexual Studies, New York: NYU Press. 2000, 127-133. & Zoe Schramm-Evans, Making Out: The Book of Lesbian Sex and Sexuality. London: Pandora. 1995, p. 159. 3. Joanne Winning observes that, “as a symbol of sexual desire [the hand] must surely represent a primary signifier in a yet untheorized system of lesbian erotics”. While Merck concurs that “the lesbian hand has a cultural history in which it figures both as an instrument of sexual pleasure and as a marker of gender transitivity” (127). This assessment is certainly true for two queer novels which emerged at either end of the twentieth century. In Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, Stephen Gordon’s large, masculine hands are deployed as a way of coding the character’s gender nonconformity. Comparably, in Sarah Water’s popular novel, Fingersmith, the disrobing of gloved hands is used to elevate the sexual tension between women. Joanne Winning, The Pilgrimage of Dorothy Richardson, Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press. 2000, p. 97. 4. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues that “notoriously, if sex means penetration and penetration means penis, then there’s no sex in absence of the penis […] and no sex between or among women.” Tendencies, London: Routledge. 1994, p. 98. 5. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, New York: Routledge. 1993, p. 51 6. Bodies, p56 7. Courtney Trouble, Finding gender through porn performance, Porn Studies, 2014, 1:1-2, pp. 197-200. 8. Trish Bendix. An Interview With Barbara Hammer, After Ellen. March 8, 2010. 9. Laura U. Marks, Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media, Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2002, p. 18. 10. Jane Harris, ‘Lesbian Whale: An Interview with Barbara Hammer’, Paris Review of Books, December, 2015. 11. HAMMER! Making Movies out of Sex and Life 12. Andrea Weiss. ‘Women I love. Double Strength: Lesbian cinema and romantic love’, Jump Cut, no. 24-25, March 1981, p. 30. 13. Kate Haug, “An Interview with Barbara Hammer” Wide Angle 20.1 (1998) pp. 64-93. 14. Barbara Hammer and John David Rhodes, “Film Is Thinking: A Conversation Across Distance,” World Picture Journal, Autumn 2012. 15. Dyketactics page, Letterboxd.
