2023
2 channel digital video
3 min 50 sec
Film stills
The Pleasure of the Text is a 2 channel video work that confronts the anger and deep unease surrounding the exploitation and erasure of Linda Lovelace. Once celebrated as the face of sexual liberation through pornography, Lovelace’s later testimony—detailing abuse, coercion, and violence—was met with public skepticism and silence. This piece reckons with the societal complicity in her suffering: a system that glamorized her trauma, devoured her body as symbol, then discarded her humanity when her story no longer served its fantasy.
The work draws on the aesthetics of rupture: harsh edits, jarring sound, a fragmented female figure—never fully visible, always performing, resisting, breaking apart. It is not a portrait of Lovelace, but of the cultural role imposed upon her and so many others: the woman as icon, vessel, scapegoat, and ultimately, warning. In its caustic language and transgression, The Pleasure of the Text reclaims rage as an essential response—not only to Lovelace’s treatment, but to the broader machinery that renders women both spectacle and silenced subject.