The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (41 page)

More recently however, there are spaces where productive work, both creative and scholarly, is occurring, recognizing, and exploring pornography’s black feminist potential. Black woman independent filmmaker, writer, and artist Abiola Abrams has collaborated with porn pioneer Candida Royalle to create
Femme Chocolat,
an erotic video that combats hegemonic narratives of black women’s sexual assault, exploitation, and exoticization. Featuring a diverse cast of black female performers, this line seeks to destabilize hierarchies of beauty and body and to empower women of color, a largely un-mined market in the industry.
¹⁷
Also in the arena of pornography production, author, sex-educator, and feminist pornographer Tristan Taormino recognizes not only the empowering feminist potential of pornography, but also reveals the diverse and often problematic sources of women’s sexual pleasure. For example, in a highly acclaimed video series called Rough Sex, Taormino dynamically explores edge play, bringing to life performers’ actual fantasies of sexual aggression in ways that illuminate the charged complexities of violence, pain, complicity, and sexual pleasure for black women.

Similarly, black lesbian filmmaker Shine Louise Houston has transformed the field of queer pornography production. Challenging mainstream tropes of “normative” black female sexuality in porn, she states, “[t]here is power in creating images, and for a woman of color and a queer to take that power . . . I don’t find it exploitative; I think it’s necessary.”
¹⁸
Houston produces “hardcore indie feminist dyke porn” which challenges perceptions “that porn is exploitation of women and that sex in porn is violence against women.”
¹⁹
Exhibiting beautiful cinematography, fresh narratives, and incredibly diverse performers, Houston’s work critically queers representations of black female sexual desire, offering modes of pleasure outside of hegemonic, heteronormative representations of black womanhood in porn. While there is evidence of a black feminist pornographic gaze in porn production, locating this lens in academic scholarship proves more difficult. Mireille Miller-Young, however, considers how black women performers and producers autonomously negotiate the landscape of pornography, analyzing porn as a critical arena for black women’s labor, pleasure, and self-representation. Illuminating the intricacies of black female sexual politics, Miller-Young’s invaluable historical and ethnographic research reveals how black women, as sexual subjects, engage in “illicit erotic economies” in ways that demonstrate their professional autonomy, financial independence, and self-determination.
²⁰
This body of work, both creative and scholarly, has been paramount in expanding the black feminist pornographic gaze from its androcentric, antiporn, and herteronormative roots. Asking difficult questions about the entanglement between sexual pleasure and violence, labor and agency, self-authorship and self-representation, desire and ethicality, these women are undertaking important work in correcting the myopia of the black feminist pornographic gaze to strengthen our understanding of the imbrication of power and pleasure for black women.

Yet just as Alice Walker struggled with her attempt to use porn as a vehicle of sexual pleasure and expression, so too have I grappled with my premise of the virtues of pornography and the regenerative possibilities it may offer for black women in particular. My perspective toward pornography has shifted. The daily deluge of highly repetitive images of often anonymous black women
(phat booty hoes, brown bottom girls, horny ebony sluts,
and
chocolate cream pies)
fragmented, dismembered, and objectified, pouring out of the drawers of my file cabinets, bookmarked at the top of my home and office computer screens, and now flashing spectacles on the backs of my closed eyelids, has altered my initial optimism toward pornography. So years later I am indubitably convinced of my first hypothesis—the fact that pornography is an invaluable medium in analyzing black female sexuality. However, the latter has become less certain. That is, I have become less assured of the intrinsic virtues of mainstream pornography—its expression of alternative sexualities, its possibilities of and for sexual pleasure outside of a white heteropatriarchal
imagination or fantasy, and its capability for an admittedly utopian construction that I might call “sustainable arousal,” arousal that is not an ephemeral feeling but rather one that endures. The sexual pleasure engendered by much mainstream pornography has increasingly been this nonsustainable kind—very much a body reflexive response that is quickly quelled by the mind’s rejection of the image as Poor: Ignorant: Sleazy: Depressing.

As such, pornography’s function as a “body genre” has a new, more profound meaning to me. Linda Williams identifies pornography as one of three types of body genres: genres of film that produce a physical response in viewers that tends to mimic that which the characters on screen are experiencing.
²¹
Pornography’s conceptualization as a body genre is due to its ability to elicit a visceral response from its viewers. It has the power to physically manipulate the bodies of its viewers—whether through an increase in body temperature, a quickening of the heartbeat, or most commonly a rush of blood to the genital region and a feeling of sexual arousal. Indeed what I have found to be so compelling throughout my research is how this power of porn as body genre feels so at odds with the power of pornography to arouse the mind. That is, frequently racist, sexist, and purely offensive material can and will arouse the body while simultaneously seeming to quash the mind. I’ve consumed countless what I would consider alarming hardcore pornographic images of the black female body. Yet despite my objection to the ways she may be treated by her partner, positioned, framed, spoken to, clothed, and/or to her expression (or lack thereof) of her own sexual pleasure, there is the potential, albeit short lived, for physical arousal. So there is a way that pornography, I believe, often does not allow for a separation of the mind from the body, but rather engenders a relationship that makes my critical mind, as an academic, a stranger to my body, and vice versa. My scholarly trained black feminist mind often futilely scolds my body for responding in such a manner.

Indeed, this ability of pornography—its power to manipulate the mind and body of its viewers in different and conflicting ways—is just another facet of pornography’s profound ambivalence. This equivocality is vividly revealed in its unstable and oscillating representation of the black female body—between fantasy and reality, lust and disgust. So it is more than that “this manipulation of feeling [that] lies at the heart of porn film’s volatility as a genre,” but that this vicissitude of apprehension and emotion is the foundation of porn’s power as a visual medium—not just its ability to make the mind and body move in different and conflicting ways, but its intense ambivalence, multivalence, and its power to
mean so many different things to so many different people in so many different contexts, in so little time.
²²
So while my contextual affinity for pornography may have decreased significantly, my faith that it is a powerful and important medium has not.

To reconcile this quandary, to “help [my]self from thinking: Poor: Ignorant: Sleazy: Depressing,” I have continuously relied upon black feminist scholar Michele Wallace’s conceptualization of negative/positive images as a mantra that underlines my research. Wallace problematizes the negative/positive binary as a prevailing mode of American visual criticism. Much of the literature and dialogue on visual representations of blackness are centered on the positive/negative schema. That is, certain images that depict black people in a presumably honorific way are “good” while others that portray them in a less than favorable nature are deemed “bad.” Wallace rightly criticizes this binary approach, saying that it sets the mission of cultural production as a corrective one as well as places the salience of representation too much on the side of reception instead of production.
²³
Yet relying on the negative/positive schema also stifles how we look at and critique images of blackness and asphyxiates our critical visual lexicon. Employing a negative/positive framework as a type of representational methodology stifles the language of cultural representational criticism.

Wallace’s vital theory serves as a constant and much-needed reminder to not tumble into the Manichean divide that still marks much of the scholarship on pornography. As such it continues to help me to reconcile my feelings and thoughts, as a black feminist woman and scholar (two entangled identities whose distinction, perhaps never really existent, seems to become less extant the further I progress on this academic trajectory) studying pornography. Pornography makes me feel different ways different days. Similarly, my feelings for it oscillate in different contexts. I acquiesce that it is acceptable for me to enjoy pornography (not one monolithic thing) and to question it simultaneously. It is this motion, propelled by my intimacy with pornography, that I find so exciting, promising, and challenging about the medium. Ultimately it is my hope that maintaining such a relationship with pornography allows me to produce better scholarship.

Instead of being netted by a kind of politics of respectability in regard to pornography, I argue that we take up a politics of perversion, a disruptive shift in black feminist studies, to critically analyze the entanglements of pleasure and power through pornography consumption, performance, and production. My conjuring of a politics of perversion relies on the plural and polymorphous resonance of the term perversion.
²⁴
A
corruption itself, the politics of perversion recognizes the subvertive, transformative power of perversion as the alteration of something from its original course, and the kink—the sexual deviance—that perversion evokes.
²⁵
Such a politics of perversion might be understood as a kind of queering that enables us to see “sexual pleasure as a feminist choice” and the complex and contradictory ways that pornography continues to inform the pivotal nexus of black women’s power and pleasure.
²⁶

The separation of pornography and black feminism is an ideological wedge that distances elements that profoundly inform one another, ultimately preventing a kind of radical analysis of black female sexuality. Pornography and black feminism maintain a critical, if volatile, relationship with one another. Rather than viewing this relationship as inherently incompatible, we need to understand porn and black feminism as pushing, not policing, each other in productive directions that elucidate black female sexuality as “simultaneously a domain of restriction, repression, and danger as well as a domain of exploration, pleasure and agency.”
²⁷
Among many things, pornography forces black feminism to reckon with artifacts like the politics of respectability, the legacies of black female sexual violence, and our personal and institutional investments in heterosexualization. Black feminism similarly propels pornography, making it more accountable to black women’s diverse sociohistorical cultural and political experiences, informative standpoints, activism, agency, labor, and representation. The alliance of porn and black feminism encourages us to be more aware of both our sexual desires and our boundaries. Lastly, this relationship causes us to confront the vast heterogeneities of both pornography and black American feminism(s), because just as there is not one black feminism, there is certainly not one pornography. As such, the chasmic tension between pornography and black feminism becomes itself a productive space to consider the complexity and diverseness of black women’s sexual practice and the mutability of black female sexuality.

Notes

1
. Alice Walker, “Porn,” in
You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1971), 83.

2
. Ibid, 80; 84. In “Coming Apart,” another trenchant piece on pornography, Walker further limns the deleterious power of the deeply racialized pornographic fantasy and porn’s menacing penetration of black women’s intimate lives. See Alice Walker, “Coming Apart,” in
You Can’t Keep A Good Woman Down
(New York: Harcourt, 1979), 41–53.

3
. DP is a commonly used abbreviation within the adult entertainment industry for double penetration, a sexual act describing one woman being penetrated in the anus by one penis and in the vagina by another simultaneously. An extremely risky and often painful act, DP typically garners more money for female performers.

4
. Linda Williams develops the term
on/scenity
to describe “the gesture by which a culture brings on to its public arena the very organs, acts, bodies, pleasures, that have been designated ob/scene and kept literally off-scene.” The term “on/scenity” echoes the writings of Laura Kipnis who states that pornography “is simultaneously entirely central and entirely marginal.” See Linda Williams, ed.,
Porn Studies
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 3, and Laura Kipnis,
Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 181.

5
. Lehman’s introduction offers a wonderful exegesis to the question of why one would teach and study pornography. Offering a number of reasons to support academic pornography scholarship (both research and pedagogy), Lehman cites pornography’s insight on human sexuality, economic impact, massive and global consumer base, and important relationship to new technologies. For more see Peter Lehman, “‘A Dirty Little Secret’ Why Teach and Study Pornography?” in
Pornography: Film and Culture,
ed. Peter Lehman (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006). Linda Williams also offers an account of her pedagogical experiences with teaching pornography to undergraduates within the academy. Explaining her motivations for teaching pornography, Williams cites a defense of pornography not to combat the voices of virulent antiporn feminists like Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, but rather “to promote a more substantive, critical, and textually aware critique of the most popular moving-image genre on earth.” See Linda Williams, “Porn Studies: Proliferating Pornographies On/Scene: An Introduction,” in
Porn Studies,
ed. Linda Williams (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 12.