Shine Louise Houston

Last updated
Shine Louise Houston
Alma mater San Francisco Art Institute
OccupationFilm director, producer, cinematographer, performer
Website Official website OOjs UI icon edit-ltr-progressive.svg

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]

Contents

Significance

Shine 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

Houston received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Film from the San Francisco Art Institute. [2]

Career

After 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]

Awards and honors

Influences

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References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Seise, Cherie (April 2010). "Fucking Utopia: Queer Porn and Queer Liberation". Sprinkle: A Journal of Sexual Diversity Studies. 3: 154.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Cruz, Ariane (2016). The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM, and Pornography. NYU Press.
  3. 1 2 3 4 "Shine Louise Houston". Crash Pad Series.
  4. 1 2 3 Miller-Young, Mireille (2014). A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography. Duke University Press.
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 Taormino, Tristan; Penley, Constance; Shimizu, Celine; Miller-Young, Mireille, eds. (2013). The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure. The Feminist Press.
  6. 1 2 3 Wysinger, Caroline (June 26, 2015). "Support SNAPSHOT: Queer Women Of Color Making Sexy Porn". Autostraddle .
  7. "Winners Of CineKink's 14th Annual Kinky Film Festival Announced". AVN.
  8. [ dead link ]
  9. "Buy cinema tickets for Sexit Screenings: Enactone + Snapshot | BFI Flare: London LGBT Film Festival". whatson.bfi.org.uk.
  10. 1 2 Hall, Chris. "Shine Louise Houston: What if Hitchcock, Jarmusch, and Metzger Made Porn Films?". SF Weekly.