Race play in BDSM porn: the eroticization of oppression

2018

In this paper, I aim to explore a controversial practice within BDSM known as race play, from an anthropological perspective. Race play is a type of consensual erotic roleplay that focuses on playing with a societal taboo; perpetuating historically situated racial, ethnic, and religious power dynamics for pleasure. I argue that the intersection of race and sexuality in erotic play, especially in overt practices like race play in BDSM, can allow practitioners a space to identify, understand, explore, and discuss current and historical societal inequalities, that otherwise would not be illuminated in BDSM. By framing race play as the ultimate taboo and off-limits act, the BDSM community is feeding into neoliberal whiteness, and by refusing to acknowledge or speak about how deeply entrenched many aspects of erotic practices, in general, are inescapably tied to historically situated racial, ethnic, and religious traumas, there is no way forward, and no space for minorities.

Feminist Encounters, 2023

Pornography, however defined, has become a legitimate, established field of academic study since the seminal (pardon the pun!) collection of essays Porn Studies, from 2004 and edited by Berkeley scholar Linda Williams. A journal with the same title was launched in 2014 by Routledge and its diverse content is continuing testament to how varied the field of study is; including intriguing research byways such as "'The First Rip Off": Anti-Circumcision Activism in Men's Magazines' (Allan, 2018). Further, Williams's volume contained a mere dozen pages of 'Suggested Reading' and many of the essays and books listed were only laterally connected to hardcore pornography. These days it wouldn't be difficult to imagine a bookshop or library with a large, dedicated section and, again, the interests are methodologically and politically diverse.

2015

Pornography has been a widely debated issue within the feminist movement since the sex wars of the 1970’s. The conversation has shifted to a sex radical position within the third movement, seeking to be “sex positive” in representations of pornography as a potential site of empowerment. This work, however, seeks to complicate the idea that all depictions of sex are empowering by examining the popular genre of interracial pornography through the lens of the southern tropes that are often enacted within them: the jezebel, southern belle, and black brute. By using these historical tropes with the work of Judith Butler and Patricia Hill Collins as a lens to examine contemporary mainstream pornography, this thesis addresses the violent humiliation and dehumanization of oppressed bodies that have become standard in porn. My first and second chapters work to analyze the films of DogFart Productions, a company specializing in interracial pornography, often with neoconfederate themes. Each u...

2016

Much has now been written about the divisive nature of the so called porn wars that ripped through the feminist movement in the 1980s and 1990s, What was previously a somewhat agreeable alliance between radical and liberal feminists turned into the full scale battle that continues today, albeit in a somewhat muted form. While there have been some new players added to this debate recently, specifically post-modem feminists, there are still clear divisions between those feminists who argue that pornography is, in its production and consumption, a form of violence against women, and those feminists who see pornography as having subversive and potentially liberatory consequences for women\u27s sexuality. While I set my arguments within a broadly defined radical feminist paradigm, it is my contention that both sides have tended to assume a gender system which is race-neutral, an assumption that cannot be sustained in a country where gender has proven to be a powerful means through which ...

Journal of Homosexuality, 2006

This article explores nonpractitioners’ understandings of and responses to the increasingly mainstream representation of BDSM in U.S. media, focusing on the film Secretary (Shainberg, 2002). I argue that popular images of SM promote the acceptance and understanding of sexual minorities through two mechanisms: acceptance via normalization, and understanding via pathologizing. Rather than challenging the privileged status of normative sexuality, these mechanisms reinforce boundaries between protected/privileged and policed/pathological sexualities. Instead of celebrating increased representation, this article argues that political energy might be directed toward the desire that the popularity of BDSM representations signifies: the desire to encounter authentic, undisciplined, and non- commodified representations that would transgress the sexual norms of American postmodern consumer culture.

Porn Studies, 2021

With media attention highlighting the murders of unarmed Black men at the hands of police, questions have risen regarding pornographic films that eroticize White ‘police’ abuse of Black ‘suspects’. Nonetheless, few performers of colour continue to participate in race play pornographic films and arguably some people of colour watch and enjoy these films. This led us to ask how can such erotic performances of racial abuse by White ‘police officers’ on Black male bodies be read for pleasure? And if the performances can be read in such a way, how should pleasure be read in these performances? Using a pornographic method in our data collection and a transgressive reading of the Black male performances in our visual analysis, as well as grounding our findings in a politics of perversion and an erotic (sexual) autonomy, we find that the performances can be read for pleasure. The pleasure is revealed in three ways: modes of resistance at the onset of the films, temporal agency in the Black male performances throughout the films and shifts in power from the White ‘cops’ to the Black ‘suspects’ by film’s end. This results in the Black ‘suspects’ taking back control by reclaiming their own racial-sexual pleasure.

2014

In The Black Body in Ecstasy , Jennifer C. Nash rewrites black feminism's theory of representation. Her analysis moves beyond black feminism's preoccupation with injury and recovery to consider how racial fictions can create a space of agency and even pleasure for black female subjects. Nash's innovative readings of hardcore pornographic films from the 1970s and 1980s develop a new method of analyzing racialized pornography that focuses on black women's pleasures in blackness: delights in toying with and subverting blackness, moments of racialized excitement, deliberate enactments of hyperbolic blackness, and humorous performances of blackness that poke fun at the fantastical project of race. Drawing on feminist and queer theory, critical race theory, and media studies, Nash creates a new black feminist interpretative practice, one attentive to the messy contradictions—between delight and discomfort, between desire and degradation—at the heart of black pleasures.

American Quarterly , 2019

This essay engages our shared interest in the capriciousness of sexual expression and desire.1 By analyzing the discontinued WGN television series Underground (2016–17) as an ephemeral site for imagining black women's erotic interiority and theorizing black sexual desire as a scattered effect of the archive in Cheryl Dunye's film The Watermelon Woman (1996), we assert that rather than stifle desire, black sexuality enacts an elasticity as it negotiates white male power and respectability politics. Although black gendered and sexual difference appears illegible, it nonetheless reveals the sociosexual power relations of slavery, and even as it surfaces as erased, it articulates history-making as a practice of desire.