A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography by Mireille Miller-Young (review)

Not since Thomas Waugh’s Hard to Imagine in 1996 has a historical study of US pornography combined such depth of research with such analytical dexterity. In A Taste for Brown Sugar, Mireille Miller-Young offers a summation of porn studies scholarship to date and a generative vision of work to come. She does so by digging into archives ranging from scholarly institutions to private stag-film collections, rerouting porn debates away from the often tacitly white conflicts between antiporn and sex-positive feminism and instead through black feminist thought and queer of color critique, and, most emphatically, taking black women sex workers’ voices seriously.

Black women in pornography are sparsely documented in conventional archives, but they are not subaltern; scholars simply haven’t bothered to consult them for the most part. Miller-Young does, and a rich body of testimony emerges, informing her textual analysis but also allowing for an unprecedented history of racialized workplace dynamics. Brown Sugar is most likely to be read by porn studies scholars, but it should be read also by labor historians, since it depicts with both empathy and exactitude the harsh realities of women of color sex workers navigating neoliberalism as independent contractors, their exploitation secured in part by the very textual tropes of the ghettoized films to which they are often confined.

Before arriving in the early twenty-first century, however, Miller-Young begins at the dawn of cinema, tracking the emergence of pornographic representations of black women through early photography and into the stag-film era. Not far removed from the time of legal slavery, this period’s representational strategies trace back to the spectacle of the black female body presented as a commodity on the auction block. Even as such stag films as Darkie Rhythm (1932–35) and KKK Night Riders (1939) traffic in both banal stereotypes and violently racist rape fantasies, Miller-Young argues that black women onscreen “negotiated their sexual labor within even the most abusive fantasies” (59). In a beautifully textured analysis, she highlights the “gestural interventions” with which these women disrupted the demeaning, caricatured staging of their bodies and sexualities; in knowing glances, reverse gazes, and, in the case of KKK Night Riders, even an apparent onscreen labor negotiation in which the featured actress refuses to lick ejaculate brought up to her face, Miller-Young identifies “an erotic subjectivity that marks a turning point in the evolution of pornographic images of black women” (41).

Miller-Young acknowledges the limitations of the existing archive for this research: some of these films are disintegrating, others wholly lost. Many of the performers, like a woman who appears in two 16 mm stag reels in whom Miller-Young locates these early glimmers of resistance, cannot even be identified by name, leaving a fuller narrative of their lives impossible unless unexpected sources someday emerge. Yet Miller-Young insists on their agency and dignity. Her careful, precise, close readings of bodies and expressions, informed by José Esteban Muñoz’s theoretical highlighting of the ephemeral, is a model of historicized analysis.

Chapters 2 and 3, covering the “soul porn” of the so-called Golden Age of the 1970s and then the video porn of the 1980s, overlap some with Jennifer Nash’s The Black Body in Ecstasy, published concurrently by Duke University Press. While the analysis of Lialeh (1974), Sex World (1978), and Black Taboo (1984) runs parallel to Nash’s coverage, the two scholars differ in vantage point. Nash uses pornography to mount a broader, ambitious theory of racial representation. Her book (also excellent) has the more expansive theoretical breadth, while Miller-Young offers the greater historical depth. One important detail that Miller-Young recovers in her examination of video-era star Angel Kelly, for instance, is that she was the first known black woman to direct porn films, as codirector on Little Miss Dangerous (1988) and a 1992 sequel. Coming...