Beyond the Wound: Black Feminist Pleasure in Hard-Core Pornography

Historically, black feminist epistemological frameworks have contended with psychic and corporeal wounds inflicted on black womanhood that permeate visual culture through predatory gazes and lascivious narratives. With The Black Body in Ecstasy, Jennifer C. Nash resists the impulse to heal wounds or protect black women in the sexual imaginary as she fearlessly explores racial-sexual taboos that tread on familiar and hyperbolic racial tropes in hard-core pornography. In its excavation of a theoretical and cinematic archive of black women’s fraught relationship with pleasure, The Black Body in Ecstasy levies a critique of black feminism’s categorical condemnation of the representation of black women in pornography without abandoning black feminist methodologies or the archive of black feminist theory. Nash’s measured analysis of black women in pornography roots itself in a black feminist tradition, as it joins Mireille Miller-Young’s Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography (2014) and Amber Musser’s Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism (2014) in ushering the field into provocative new territory.

The Black Body in Ecstasy forwards a historical yet boundary-pushing examination of racialized pornography, a term that Nash describes as “hard-core moving-image pornography featuring black women” (2). Nash makes an intervention into black feminist analyses of black women in pornography by cultivating a theory of ecstasy that subverts injury. Through the reading practice that Nash calls racial iconography, she moves beyond the framework of exploitation that has dominated discussions of black women in pornography, in order to foreground often-overlooked moments of black women’s sexual pleasure. Nash’s conception of ecstasy does not ignore the racialization of black women’s sexuality but describes ecstasy as an uneasy bliss that arises through the bodies of black women who are positioned as the object of the gaze, who relish in the thrill of performance, and who are viewers of racialized pornography.

The Black Body in Ecstasy opens with a brief yet detailed genealogy of feminist critiques and theorizations of pornography beginning with the antiporn/proporn debates of the 1980s, followed by the sex radical position, and ending with feminist porn studies scholarship. As is characteristic of her generous methodology, Nash incorporates into her complex black feminist framework what is habitable about these feminist engagements with pornography instead of discarding them entirely because they have overlooked race or, in their engagement with race, have problematically reinforced racial difference. Nash makes two significant epistemological contributions to black feminist thought on pornography. First, by refusing to hold fast to the understanding that black women’s sexual bodies are perpetually hypervisible in visual culture, Nash attends to the sustained absences of black women in the vast lexicon of hard-core porn. Second, Nash makes a dynamic revelation with implications for all of visual culture—black women’s performances of racialized narratives in sexually explicit films lay bare the knowledge that “race is a pornographic fantasy” (6).

The first chapter collects an archive of black feminist theories that contend with the politics of representation, sexually explicit imagery, racialized gendered violence, and the project of recovering black women’s sexual bodies from a legacy of injury. Nash’s discussion of black feminist theory centers Saartjie Baartman, the Hottentot Venus, as the quintessential black female exploited body. The archive of black feminist thought that Nash assembles is accompanied by contemporary fine art photography that riffs on and reworks the image of the Hottentot Venus, providing a gentle entry into the close readings of hard-core porn that follow. Nash’s vivid descriptions, replete with evocative film stills, consider the historical context and sociality implied within the narratives, performances, and visual language of the films discussed.

The second chapter looks closely at the pleasure experienced by black women performers in the 1970s golden age genre of “blax-porn-tation” (64) films, whose narrative thrust depends on a hypermasculine worship of the black phallus. Chapter 3 discusses black women’s sensual power in scenes that achieve their sexual charge through...