ABOUT ITZIAR BILBAO URRUTIA

I am a video and live art creator, fetish producer and activist. As a working class immigrant woman, I have funded my practice working as a professional Dominatrix and Femdom has become my subject of research. In 2023, I was awarded a PhD by portfolio by Kingston University with my thesis, The Strapon Is Mightier Than The Gun. It interrogates the censorship of my femdom porn studio The Urban Chick Supremacy Cell - UC-SC, by the British online content regulator, ATVOD¹, on the grounds of ‘extreme porn’.

An essential strategy in my practice is the deliberate blurring of art work and adult fetish content. The work reported for obscenity were part of my creative research, that seeks to widen the representation of the dominatrix beyond the male gaze.

The UC-SC project reimagines Femdom in the aesthetic of historical radical action like the Baader-Meinhof Group and the rhetoric of 2nd wave feminism, such as Valerie Solanas. Femdom’s paradoxes- its apparent subversion of gender roles, while reinforcing misogynist tropes, are read through the lens of my lived experience in the intersection between performance art, a genre essential to my art practice, and porn production- as well as the crossover and differences between both types of “performances”.