Anthony Spinelli’s 1978 pornographic film SexWorld features a scene of sexual encounter between Jill, a black woman, and Roger, a white man. Even as Roger expresses racist attitudes and a reluctance to have sex with her, Jill undresses erotically and lovingly describes her body parts to him in explicitly racialized terms, referring to her “honey pot,” “dark meat” and “sweet juice.” In her recently released monograph, The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography, Jennifer C. Nash asks in response to this scene, “How do we analyze the ways that Jill’s use of racial rhetoric seems to excite her, to provide a way for her to locate pleasure in the encounter? How do we interpret the fact that Jill takes pleasure in representing her body as a black female body and in being seen as a black female body?”
In The Black Body in Ecstasy, Nash offers a number of compelling answers to those and similar questions, teaching readers how to circumvent narrow understandings of racialized pornography — “hard-core moving-image pornography featuring black women” — as always necessarily harmful to black women performers and to all viewers. Framing her project as a “loving critique” of the disciplinary field she considers her “home place,” black feminist theory, Nash ably balances careful analysis of extant scholarship with articulation of her own compelling, fresh intervention in the field. Building on the work of black feminists such as Patricia Hill Collins, Hortense Spillers and others, she nevertheless departs from their emphasis on the pain and injury of racialized pornography to an emphasis on the complexities of sexual desire and pleasure as performed in racialized pornography. She names her proposed reading practice “racial iconography,” which enables the “[shift] from a preoccupation with the injuries that racialized pornography engenders to an investigation of the ecstasy that racialized pornography can unleash.”
Nash’s readings of her archive of racialized pornographies from the 1970s and ’80s bear out her arguments about the complex pleasures in racialization as they demonstrate the analytical potential of racial iconography as a reading practice. For example, in one chapter, Nash theorizes “race-humor” by showing how a group of black porn protagonists knowingly and purposefully render the fiction of race visible for the viewer, often to humorous ends (Black Taboo, 1984). Elsewhere, she discovers a narrative (Black Throat, 1985) in which the film’s stated promise that racial difference can be revealed and explicated by fellatio is never fulfilled. Across all her analyses, Nash invests agency in the performances of black porn actresses, credits them with sophisticated understanding of the racial tropes in which the films traffic, and validates their experiences of both pleasure and pain in the processes of racialization. In other words, a deep and serious commitment to intellectual ethics is apparent throughout Nash’s project. So, while Nash is in direct conversation with black feminist studies, general and varied academic audiences will find much of interest in The Black Body in Ecstasy, a rigorous, sensitive and nuanced piece of scholarship that will undoubtedly re-map the terrain of the fields into which it intervenes.
