As the quotations above suggest, Roberta Findlay is a self-professed hater of women. I will argue nonetheless that, as one of only a handful of women directors working in US adult film in the 1970s, her filmography and public persona mobilize troubling and even misogynistic images and ideas toward potentially—if unintentionally—queer and feminist ends. As such, her work contributes significantly to what I am calling the “minor cinema” of women’s pornography.

The question of how to define a woman’s film has been approached from many angles. Alison Butler argues:

As such, Butler proposes that we conceive of women’s cinema as a “minor cinema” rather than a counter-cinema. In so doing, she considers a range of cinematic genres, categories, and production cultures, from Hollywood to indie to experimental, but elides pornography. This is notable because, as I argue elsewhere, pornographic production cultures have consistently been far more accessible to women filmmakers than has Hollywood, and her innovative theoretical framework applies at least as well to their work.

Feminist theorists in the 1970s and 1980s, such as Laura Mulvey, Claire Johnston, and Teresa de Lauretis, argued that women’s cinema is a countercinema, offering different perspectives and foregrounding women’s subjectivity in response to cinematic traditions dominated by the male gaze. Using Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of minor literature and drawing from the feminist film criticism of Meaghan Morris and B. Ruby Rich, Butler argues that women’s cinema does not generate or employ a new cinematic language but rather could be seen as idiomatic or accented iterations of the dominant film language.