The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography
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The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822377030 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/31/2014 |
| Series: | Next wave |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 232 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
Jennifer C. Nash is Assistant Professor of American Studies and Women's Studies at George Washington University.
Read an Excerpt
The Black Body In Ecstasy
Reading Race, Reading Pornography
By Jennifer C. Nash
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2014 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7703-0
CHAPTER 1
ARCHIVES OF PAIN
Reading the Black Feminist Theoretical Archive
In Renee Cox's self-portrait Hot-En-Tot, Cox re-enacts the nineteenth-century public display of the so-called Hottentot Venus, Saartjie Baartman (figure 1.1). At the dawning of the nineteenth century, European audiences were fascinated by Baartman, a Khoikhoi woman who was an object of caged display at exhibitions in London and Paris. In an era where locating the other's imagined racial, sexual, physiological, and moral differences justified colonialism and slavery, Baartman's body functioned as a "master text" that allowed audiences to access and assess the "primitive" other. Of particular interest were her breasts, her buttocks (her imagined steatopygia), and her labia (her imagined "Hottentot apron"), all of which were thought to indicate an abundant sexual appetite.
In Hot-En-Tot, Cox wears an "armature" of buttocks and breasts to call attention to the most mythologized portions of Baartman's body and to underscore what Baartman's viewers (and perhaps contemporary viewers of Cox's portrait) thought they would see: black female sexual excess. The strings that attach the exaggerated breasts and buttocks to Cox's body call attention to the artifice of racial mythologies—which are always, it seems, spectacular and larger than life—while also reflecting how these mythologies are worn and even imposed on black female bodies. If black female flesh has acted as the canvas onto which ideas of difference have been projected, Cox's self-portrait pokes fun at the search for the "truth" of racial difference that animated nineteenth-century racial pseudoscience, and underscores the violence this search has repeatedly inflicted on black women. In so doing, she reveals that the logics underpinning Baartman's display also undergird contemporary racialized representation, which continues the search for the "truth" of black female difference. Cox's embodiment of Baartman's exhibition acts as a vehicle for a larger critique of visual culture; it demonstrates both that representation is a practice which consistently makes demands on black women to expose their imagined differences and that representation is a racialized practice because visual technologies—most notably the photograph—emerged, at least in part, to make imagined racial and sexual difference visible. The Hottentot Venus story becomes Hot-En-Tot's "touchstone" for a robust theory of sexuality, race, history, and representation.
Of course, Cox is not simply reenacting the objectifying conditions that marked Baartman's brutal display; instead, she emphatically and defiantly matches the spectator's difference-seeking gaze, undermining a visual tradition of black female accessibility. Describing her artistic process, Cox notes, "I was able to return the gaze to the Hottentot Venus. I felt that was the triumphant moment...." In "returning the gaze," Cox's portrait allows the Hottentot Venus to boldly look back at those who relentlessly observed her, and reveals the genre conventions of a black feminist counter-aesthetic which uses the visual field as the site for contesting black women's hypervisibility. By striking what Janell Hobson calls a "Venus pose," Cox uses the body—the site of Baartman's degradation—as a way of recovering Baartman's history and as a strategy for connecting Baartman's history to contemporary black women's embodied experiences. As Hobson notes, Cox's portrait 'suggest[s] ways in which historical imagery of the body lingers in the present and in which an alternative aesthetic might disrupt such imagery."
I treat Cox's Hot-En-Tot as my point of departure because it epitomizes one interpretative strategy black feminists deploy to theorize visual culture: they use the Hottentot Venus story as a method both for making visible the connection between the past and an unfolding present, and for staging a larger critique of dominant visual culture that emphasizes representation as a practice that references and reenacts historical traumas. Black feminist retellings of the Hottentot Venus story, like Cox's portrait, treat Baartman as the paradigmatic case of racialized sexuality and as a "crucial element in black female contestations of the common perceptions and misconceptions of black female sexuality." While Cox's portrait epitomizes one black feminist mode of interpretation, it mobilizes other dominant black feminist interpretative practices as well, including the presumption that black female flesh can be recovered through the visual field and the assumption that representation degrades black women by treating part of their bodies—here, the mythologized breasts and buttocks—as evidence of black women's deviance generally, and by treating one black woman—here, Baartman—as representative of all black women's alterity.
This chapter uses close readings of seminal black feminist texts as a strategy for uncovering the dominant interpretative modes that black feminist theory has deployed to critically examine the politics and pitfalls of representation. While various black feminist texts read visual culture differently, and maintain distinctive political commitments, the black feminist theoretical archive—a collection of scholarly texts and visual images created by cultural producers invested in recovering black female bodies—collectively presumes the meaning of the black female body in the visual field and assumes that representation injures black women. Of course, black feminist scholars grapple with the nature and origin of dominant representation's violence differently, crafting distinctive approaches to visual culture's harm; yet, what these texts share is the fundamental belief that representation inflicts violence on black female bodies.
This archive also dedicates itself to what might be understood as the flip side of a preoccupation with injury: a practice of visual defense and recovery. Indeed, the architecture of the black feminist theoretical archive is undergirded by twin logics of injury and "protectionism," marked by what Carol Henderson calls 'signs of wounding and signs of healing." These 'signs of healing" presume that the labor of black feminism is to adopt recovery strategies which shield black women from further visual exploitation. Black female cultural producers like Cox use the imagined terrain of violent objectification—visual culture—as the space of recovery, so that their own self-representation is imagined to resolve (or, at the very least, expose and circumvent) the trouble of representation. Black feminist cultural producers" belief that the visual field is both a problem and a site of remedy constitutes its own theory of representation.
The black feminist theoretical archive is not simply a repository of theoretical innovation; it also enacts and enforces a view of visual culture that makes it impossible to theorize black female pleasure from within the confines of the archive. My understanding of impossibility is informed by Gayatri Gopinath's work which uses the term to describe the "unthinkability of a queer female subject position within various mappings of nation and diaspora" and 'scrutinize[s] the deep investment of dominant diasporic and nationalist ideologies in producing the particular subject position as impossible and unimaginable." Gopinath uncovers how "dominant" discursive projects render particular subjects not simply invisible but also "unthinkable." The dominant black feminist theoretical project similarly renders ecstasy—the messy and sometimes uncomfortable nexus of racial and sexual pleasures—"unthinkable," and the black feminist theoretical archive's "deep investment" in foregrounding the black female body's woundedness comes at the expense of capturing the possibilities of black women's pleasure.
My conception of the black feminist theoretical archive is decidedly broad. I draw on scholarly work that falls within conventional understandings of theory—including work by Patricia Hill Collins, Hortense Spillers, Nicole Fleetwood, and Janell Hobson—and a set of work by artists including Cox, Lyle Ashton Harris, and Carla Williams, all of whom use cultural production as a site for grappling with the problem of representation. My investment in an expansive conception of the black feminist theoretical archive is informed by black feminism's long-standing critique of conventional and narrow conceptions of theory. Barbara Christian's work epitomizes this scholarly tradition, asserting that the intellectual privileging of particular forms of theory has overlooked the ways that "people of color have always theorized—but in forms quite different from the Western form of abstract logic." She continues, "And I am inclined to say that our theorizing (and I intentionally use the verb rather than the noun) is often in narrative forms, in the stories we create, in riddles and proverbs, in the play with language, since dynamic rather than fixed ideas seemed more to our liking." Christian interrogates which knowledge gets to lay a claim to theory, exposing that claims to theory are always claims to power. As a way of disrupting this logic, Christian embraces an expansive conception of theory, one which treats a variety of kinds of intellectual and creative labor—the "riddle and proverb," the "narrative form"—as theoretical innovations. My capacious conception of theory, which analyzes black feminist cultural production as a kind of theory-making, shares Christian's investment in destabilizing an imagined "Western form of abstract logic" and in championing forms of intellectual production that are regularly deemed untheoretical—like images—but that actively shape black feminist epistemology.
This chapter traces four interpretative strands that permeate the black feminist archive's conception of visual culture: representation as pedagogy, as a temporal practice, as a metonymy, and as a site of recovery. Though I trace these interpretative strands separately, they intersect in significant ways and bolster each other, collectively crafting a black feminist theoretical archive organized around the violence of representation. My investment in untangling these strands is part of a commitment to closely examining the contours of the black feminist theoretical archive and to showing how each strand places emphasis on distinct problems of representation. By reading this archive as one preoccupied by logics of injury and recovery, I hope to create analytical breathing room for scholarship that moves beyond either exposing the wound or recovering from the wound. Indeed, my profound faith in the promise and possibility of black feminist theory leads me to advocate not an abandonment of it, but instead a concerted effort to craft an alternative black feminist theoretical archive, one that can imagine black female ecstasy in all of its complexity, paradoxes, and—at least at times—uncomfortable contradictions.
Representation as Pedagogy: Reading Patricia Hill Collins
Patricia Hill Collins's Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (1990) is a field-defining book, one which established black feminism as a theoretical perspective that emerges from black women's distinctive standpoint, from "the knowledge gained at intersecting oppressions of race, class and gender," and as a recovery project that recognizes the importance of "discovering, reinterpreting, and analyzing the ideas of subgroups within the larger collectivity of U.S. Black women who have been silenced." Collins's work amplified a set of "core themes" that have come to constitute the foundation of contemporary black feminist thought, including the idea that representation is one of the preeminent sites in the production of racial and sexual inequality. In the years following the publication of Black Feminist Thought, the notion that representation is central to black women's subordination has become so prevalent as to be unremarkable, despite the fact that earlier black feminist texts invested in analyzing black women's particular experiences of subordination (or what Deborah King termed "multiple jeopardy") had relatively little interest in representation. Instead, they located myriad other sites—capitalism (Frances Beale), sexual violence (Darlene Clark Hine), sexual hierarchy (Audre Lorde), simultaneous oppressions (Combahee River Collective, Deborah King, Barbara Smith), and law's inattention to black women's experiences of discrimination (Kimberlé Crenshaw), to name a few—as the loci of black women's marginalization. When Collins emphasized representation, then, she ushered in a new moment in black feminist thought, one which treated visual culture as a particularly pernicious technology where black female bodies are "viewed as object[s] to be manipulated and controlled." This conception of representation's singularity—its unrelenting and single-minded pursuit of objectification—allows Collins to treat visual culture as an instructive site, one which both creates patterns of wounding and teaches viewers how to repeatedly injure black female flesh.
Collins develops the term "controlling images" to describe an ideologically consistent set of visual practices which insist on black women's sexual deviance and train viewers to interpret black women's alterity. For Collins, images of deviant black maternity (the mammy, the matriarch, the welfare queen) and of an excessive black female libido (the jezebel, the hoochie, the video ho) present black female sexuality as uncontrollable, even as they point to different sites of sexual excess. For example, if the mammy is masculine, effectively feminizing (and possibly queering) her male children, the jezebel is excessively desirous and hyper-reproductive. Even though these images are, in some ways, at odds, the underlying ideological consistency is that both contain an excessive performance of gender and sexuality, which endangers the viability of the state, the heteronormative family, and conventional gender roles. In their uniformity, these images render "racism, sexism, poverty, and other forms of social injustice ... natural, normal, and inevitable." Collins imagines that consistency underpins all "controlling" images, a belief that assumes both that images work on all viewers in similar ways and that ostensibly heterogeneous dominant representations are all embedded with a singular meaning. Controlling images are thus pedagogical insofar as they work to make "natural, normal, and inevitable" a dominant racial order, offering instruction on the hierarchy that marks daily life and providing viewers an analytic framework for interpreting black female flesh.
If dominant images injure black female subjects, then black women have developed a set of strategies to resist being wounded. While white women are often seduced into complicity by representation, black women, Collins argues, have never been offered opportunity to find pleasure in their oppression. Indeed, the very idea that black women might locate pleasure of any sort—aesthetic, sexual, political, or racial—in controlling images is an impossibility for Collins, showing her investment in the idea that black subjects never take pleasure in what confers pain or perpetuates subordination (and her investment in the idea that pleasure and injury are mutually exclusive). Like bell hooks's now canonical work on the "oppositional gaze," which asserts that black female spectators actively reinterpret dominant cinema, Collins underscores that black women are critical readers who "construct social realities" that counter "controlling images."
When Collins analyzes black women's resistance to controlling images, she moves from the visual register toward literature, insisting that literary texts authored by black women offer "one comprehensive view of Black women's struggles to form positive self-definitions in the face of derogated images of Black womanhood." It is only outside of the visual register that black women find cultural space to craft and circulate "positive self-definitions" of black womanhood. Indeed, Collins concludes her analysis of visual culture by arguing that "one way of surviving the everyday disrespect and outright assaults that accompany controlling images is to "turn it out." This is the moment when silence becomes speech, when stillness becomes action. As Karla Holloway says, "no one wins in that situation, but usually we feel better." Collins advocates an abandonment of visual culture, and her celebration of "turn[ing] it out," reveals precisely how powerfully and dangerously determining she imagines controlling images to be: black women's resistance to visual culture has to be staged outside of the visual field.
What is most significant about Collins's reading of representation is that at a critical moment in the history of black feminism's institutionalization, her text installed a conception of dominant representation as a singular instrument of violence that produces and reproduces notions of black female sexual alterity. By creating a set of frameworks through which viewers can interpret black female flesh, controlling images instruct viewers on how to injure black female flesh and naturalize notions of black female sexual alterity. However, Collins's seamless ideological universe exposes that virtually all images are "controlling" unless they are produced by black women and outside the trappings of a regime invested in rendering black female bodies spectacular. In so doing, Collins demonstrates that the word controlling which modifies images is a redundancy since the labor of dominant representation is to control, to objectify, and to injure black female flesh.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Black Body In Ecstasy by Jennifer C. Nash. Copyright © 2014 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments viiIntroduction. Reading Race, Reading Pornography 1
1. Archives of Pain: Reading the Black Feminist Theoretical Archive 27
2. Speaking Sex / Speaking Race: Lialeh and the Blax-porn-tation Aesthetic 59
3. Race-Pleasures: Sexworld and the Ecstatic Black Female Body 83
4. Laughing Matters: Race-Humor on the Pornographic Screen 107
5. On Refusal: Racial Promises and the Silver Age Screen 128
Conclusion. Reading Ecstasy 146
Notes 153
Bibliography 181
Index 213
What People are Saying About This
"This is an important book and its readers will know it. The first chapter on black feminist theories of representation brilliantly contextualizes the political stakes of the book's commitment to black women's pleasure. I predict that The Black Body in Ecstasy will be considered the most definitive statement to date on black feminist theory's engagement with visual representation."
"In The Black Body in Ecstasy, Jennifer C. Nash abandons a long-standing framework in black feminist criticism: that pornography is bad to and for black women. She boldly reads pornography for black women's ecstasy. Through careful analysis of key films from porn's golden era, Nash develops an argument that is innovative, fearless, and, ultimately, affirming of possibilities for black women's bodies, fantasies, and sexual lives."