The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (22 page)

What does it mean to be a superfreak? For black women the politics of respectability has overwhelmed our ability to think of sex apart from the threat of harm to our womanhood and to our communities.
²⁰
Through the prioritization of normative gender and sexual codes, behaviors, and relations we have sought to recuperate our
selves
from myths associated
with black sexual deviance, and the systemic violence attached to those myths. Pornography offers a site to see how those myths attach to fantasies and to labor arrangements, but also, to make visible the pleasures taken in the queerness of deviance.
²¹
These pleasures are articulated by those who do sexual labor, those who depict sexual acts, those who offer intellectual critiques of them, and by those who do all of the above. In fact, these directors show the important overlaps between sex work and cultural production and cultural critique. Their body of work exposes the defiant sensibilities and subversive politics of black feminist pornographies as they enact a charged eroticism that is full of voluptuous potential.
²²

This nascent cinema powerfully indicts the antiporn feminist viewpoint—if one is preoccupied by pornography’s objectification of women one needs only to look to black women’s pornographic filmmaking to see how women might make use of objectification as a technology of feminism. Claiming subjectivity, critiquing representation, constructing new sexual languages, and aiming for new forms of economic survival and mobility, the many agents of feminist pornography are at the vanguard of the feminist movement. A movement stultified in its reformist program of (neo)liberal rights struggles, it routinely leaves out the critical sexual/cultural workers who are trying to offer a revolutionary paradigm of gender and sexual rights and relations while at the same time entering into the means of production. Black feminist pornographers are on the front lines of what I see as one of the most exciting directions in modern feminism—one that can make plain (and explicit) the inextricability of racialized genders and sexualities to any new modes of capital and methodologies of creative self-fashioning we feminists undertake. Just as black feminists have challenged the mainstream feminist movement to be accountable to race, class, and nation as they act intersectionally and contingently with gender,
²³
black women bring a special insight to feminist pornography: one person’s fantasy is another person’s work, and the workers have fantasies of their own.

Notes

1
. Vanessa Blue, personal interview with the author, August 13, 2008. All quotes from Vanessa are drawn from the same interview.

2
. I refer to my research interlocutors by their first name rather than their last name only to create consistency between those who employ last names in their professional personas and those who do not.

3
. This aspect of my argument is informed by Jane Juffer’s work on the domestication of and women’s access to and uses of multiple forms of pornography and erotica. However, she advocates for prioritizing “material transgression” and “material factors that restrict movement” across boundaries for they allow “the ability of women to literally enter into the means of production, to step across the threshold of an adult video store, to access an online sex toy shop, to buy a volume of literary erotica” over the feminist sex positive “valorization of individuals’ subversive abilities to appropriate texts,” whereas I see a dual focus on material and textual appropriation and constraint as productive for my purposes here. “There is No Place Like Home: Further Developments on the Domestic Front,”
More Dirty Pictures: Gender, Pornography and Power,
2nd edition, edited by Pamela Church Gibson (London: British Film Institute, 2004), 56.

4
. On erotic capital see: Adam Green, “The Social Organization of Desire: The Sexual Fields Approach,”
Sociological Theory
26, no. 1 (2008): 25–50. Employing erotic capital to read hierarchies in the sex industry specifically see Siobhan Brooks,
Unequal Desires: Race and Erotic Capital in the Stripping Industry
(Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2010).

5
. See my article: “Putting Hypersexuality to Work: Black Women and Illicit Eroticism in Pornography,”
Sexualities
13, no. 2 (2010): 219–35.

6
. “Desire industries” is drawn from Siobhan Brooks,
Unequal Desires.

7
. On black women’s representations in mainstream pornography see my forthcoming book
A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women, Sex Work and Pornography
(forthcoming, Duke University Press, 2013). See also the cutting edge work of Jennifer Christine Nash, “The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography” (PhD diss., Harvard University, Cambridge, 2009) and Ariane Cruz, “Berries Bittersweet: Visual Representations of Black Female Sexuality in Contemporary American Pornography” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2010).

8
. Damali XXXPlosive Dares, personal interview with author, March 24, 2010.

9
. See Mireille Miller-Young, “The Hip Hop Honeys + Da Hustlaz: Black Sexualities in the New Hip Hop Pornography,”
Meridians: Feminism, Race and Transnationalism
8, no. 1 (2008): 261–92.

10
. I use the term sexual economy drawn from the work Adrienne Davis, “Don’t Let Nobody Bother Yo’ Principle: The Sexual Economy of American Slavery,” in
Sister Circle: Black Women and Work,
eds. Sharon Harley and the Black Women and Work Collective (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 103–27.

11
. Robin D.G. Kelley,
Yo Mama’s Dysfunktional: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), 45–46.

12
. Melissa W. Wright,
Disposable Women and Other Myths of Global Capitalism
(New York: Routledge, 1997), 2.

13
. On the confessional as site for the production of sexual truth see Michel Foucault,
History of Sexuality, Volume 1,
trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books 1990 [1978]).

14
. Anne McClintock, “Maid to Order: Commercial Fetishism and Gender Power,”
Social Text
37 (Winter 1993): 87–116. There is a paucity of research on black women or men and “kink” or BDSM, but a few popular articles and blog essays or interviews exist. See: Daisy Hernandez, “Playing with Race,”
Colorlines
magazine, December 21, 2004,
http://colorlines.com/archives/2004/12/playing_with_race.html
; Anna North, “When Prejudice is Sexy: Inside the Kinky World of Race-Play,”
Jezebel.com
, March 14, 2012,
http://jezebel.com/5868600/when-prejudice-is-sexy-inside-the-kinky-world-of-race+play
; Andrea Plaid, “Interview with the Perverted Negress,”
Racialicious.com
, July 10, 2009,
http://www.racialicious.com/2009/07/10/interview-with-the-perverted-negress/
.

15
. This is part of my argument in my larger work. See
A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women, Sex Work and Pornography
(forthcoming, Duke University Press, 2013).

16
. Abiola Abrams, personal interview with author, April 10, 2009.

17
. Abiola Abrams, personal interview with author, April 10, 2009.

18
. Angela Carter,
The Sadeian Woman
(London, Virago Press, 1979), 12.

19
. L.H. Stallings, “Superfreak: Black Female Masculinity Spectacle/Spectator in Lesbian Pornography,” Paper presented at Race, Sex, Power: New Movements in Black and Latina/o Sexualities, University of Illinois, Chicago, April 2008.

20
. On the “politics of respectability” see the classic work by Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham,
Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). Related to respectability politics is black women’s “culture of dissemblance”—their strategies of masking, avoiding, and resistance against racialized sexual stereotyping. See Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West: Preliminary Thoughts on the Culture of Dissemblance,” in
Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought,
ed. Beverly Guy-Sheftall (New York: New Press, 1995).

21
. On deviance as a site of potential for black (sexual) politics see Cathy Cohen, “Deviance as Resistance: A New Research Agenda for the Study of Black Politics,”
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race
1, no. 1 (2004): 27–45.

22
. Here I am thinking of L.H. Stallings,
‘Mutha’ is Half A Word: Intersections of Folklore, Vernacular, Myth, and Queerness in Black Female Culture
(Columbus: Ohio University Press, 2007).

23
. On intersectionality see Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,”
Stanford Law Review
43, no. 6 (1991): 1241.

Fucking Feminism

DYLAN RYAN

Dylan Ryan
is a porn star, writer, social worker, performance artist, and self-professed gender and sexuality geek living in San Francisco, California. Dylan holds a double bachelors degree and recently completed a masters in social work from a Canadian university where she studied the rise of feminist pornography and the intersections between sex work and social work. A yoga instructor and amateur filmmaker in her spare time, Dylan hopes to continue her academic career and to become Dylan Ryan, PhD.

I
n 2004, I was working at a popular sex toy retailer in San Francisco. Twenty-three years old, I was a recent graduate from a state university where I had studied English Literature and flung myself headfirst into the eclectic and radically open-minded culture of my adopted city. Working at Good Vibrations, I was surrounded by sexuality, from sex toys to fellow employees who were educated and articulate about sex. The shop had shelves of various kinds of porn films, available for rental and purchase. After six months, I had consumed a fair amount of porn and was used to talking about it with my colleagues and customers. Looking back on that time, I recall watching porn and thinking that I had something to offer to it. With very few exceptions, the porn I had seen felt empty, inauthentic, and not representative of my sexuality and the kind of sex I was having. I honestly thought that I could change the movies for the better.

Many women give up on porn after one or more times out of a sense of alienation, revulsion, lack of arousal, shame, or any mix of these emotions. In the large majority of porn films, “particular female aesthetics are promoted: female actors often have long hair, are thin, often Caucasian, between their teens and thirties, have breast implants and wear high heels and plenty of make-up.”
¹
This “ideal” of femaleness and femininity doesn’t fit the broad spectrum of bodies and identities of “real”
women, a disjuncture that reinforces women’s alienation from pornographic images. It is not hard, given this, to see why many women, like myself, would not only not identify with women in porn but feel that they fall short by comparison. Adding body dysmorphia to all the other complicated intersections between women and pornography—including preexisting ideas about performer agency, choice, and social shame—the resulting experience could complicate a woman’s interaction with porn so as to adversely affect her self-image.
²

My engagement with porn was not one challenged by shame. I respected the women who I saw in the films and had little to no preconceived judgments about them, but I would find myself critiquing them as performers and considering what I would do differently and better. I had experienced sex in my personal life as a mostly positive, enjoyable, and liberating experience. I wanted to see that experience in the porn I was consuming. Like many female viewers, I had difficulty relating to the women in these films and their sexual presentations. Their bodies looked different from mine, and they seemed to embody a sexuality that was foreign to me, one of extreme femininity: vulnerable but hypersexual, passive but sexually desiring, ready for any sex act but without the impetus to make it happen. It seemed as if sex was happening “to” these women rather than with them or because of their choices or motivations. I didn’t imagine that the actresses hated having sex, but rather that they were performing in a venue that discouraged their personal expression. I wanted to know what they looked like when they had sex in their real lives, and I wanted to see
that
onscreen.