The Black Body In Ecstasy - Ezra

In The Black Body In Ecstasy, Jennifer C. Nash critically engages with a vast corpus of black feminist thought through an examination of Golden and Silver era pornography, attempting to reorient its conversations about representation. Nash contends that a logic of racialized and sexualized injury and its Manichean opposite, a counter-representation of recovery, have overdetermined existing black feminist lexicons of freedom and possibility within visual registers. As a response, she proposes unsettling a logic of woundedness with the critical hermeneutic of racial iconography. This project situates pornography historically and within a materialist context of technological development, moving beyond its reified symbolic or rhetorical values and toward an interrogation of “time and place”, analyzing how it is consumed and produced. This methodology focuses on revealing contingency and contradiction rather than in producing a totalizing ethical/moral injunction, thereby allowing the reader to parse through the complexity of how pleasure and ecstasy are, “constrained by and potentially liberated through representation” (6). She disrupts notions that viewing communities engendered by pornography are reducible to dominant fields of representation within which consumption is reliably performed by majoritarian subjects. In doing so she problematizes the argumentative reliance of black feminism on the omnipresence of the white/male gaze without discarding critiques that theorize its controlling effects. Nash describes how black spectator’s desires within this context subvert but also find gratification within the racialized and sexualized pornographic screen, even when it is a fundamentally painful production (150). Finally, Nash identifies a possibility for new vocabularies of naming this co-implication and reminds us of its inherently utopian potential, citing Jose Esteban Munoz’s claim that ecstasy, “offers an opportunity to step out of the here and now of straight time and to embrace the possibility of futurity” (3).

Questions:

What constitutes a “loving critique”? Is it merely an adoption and commitment to a specific set of grammars and conversations, or does such a project inherently share the content of a tradition’s political direction?

How/can an accentuation of what has elsewhere been rendered impossible be used to destroy or make irrelevant a dominant field of representation? Has such a project been irreparably foreclosed by the homogenizing force of modernity?

The Black Body in Ecstasy-Carpio

Through close readings of several pornographic films from the 1970s and 1980s, Jennifer C. Nash in The Black Body in Ecstasy seeks to introduce a way of interpreting and viewing racial iconography. It is of importance how Nash moves away from a black feminist traditional reading of pornography as a damaging form of visual representation for black women, instead she challenges this tendency and considers how racial fictions can generate a space of agency, desire, and pleasure for black female subjects.

Nash names this form of analysis racial iconography in which she seeks to investigate the ecstasy that racialized pornography can unleash. “By reading for ecstasy rather than injury, racial iconography performs what Judith Butler terms an “aggressive counter-reading,” one which suspends normative readings of racialized pornography and instead advances readings which emphasize black performances and pleasures represented on the racialized pornographic screen.” (12)

Before reading Nash’s analysis I understood, as she declares, “speaking sex is always speaking race” (72), however, I did not understand this to be a possibility of female pleasure or agency, must I followed the path of traditional feminism focusing on the pain, trauma, and commercialization of the body. This was a fascinating and well-argued text where she not only examines the intersections of race and sexuality but also of gender, visual culture, agency, and pleasure.

_________

Has the wide variety and availability of porn via Internet changed how racial-sexual ecstasy is performed?

Can black male bodies performing gay porn be read in a similar way?

Black Body in Ecstasy -Provost

The Black Body in Ecstasy explores racialized pornography and pornographic representation, not as a project of violation but Nash approaches pornography with a more nuanced lens. Nash borrows from many feminisms, specifically a feminist anti-pornographic body of work and black feminist theory to further investigate what she is presenting us with. Nash does this to outline the complexities of pleasure in a context of race, gender and sexuality. She contextualizes her work in relation to other feminist projects and approaches to unpacking pornography, specifically it’s relation to interpretations and reading of pleasure.

What is most interesting to me in Nash’s work her close reading of the texts and the role of spectatorship and the assumptions that pleasure does not exist for the black women in the films that she analyzes. Nash attempts to convince the reader through the presentation and re-interpreation of “Silver” and “Golden” age films, that the black women represented in the films themselves derive pleasure(s) or some sense of empowerment.

Nash’s perspective and methodologies were useful for me to reimagine my current understanding of many complex and nuanced research questions. While this specific work does not directly relate to my work I wonder how her close reading techniques can be applied elsewhere.

Hashim Ali-- The Black Body in Ecstasy

Jennifer Nash’s monograph The Black Body in Ecstasy manifests itself as a radical intervention by contesting the assumptions of anti-pornography black feminists camp that deem the desires and pleasures of black bodies as impossible within the framework of visual representation. Nash utilizes the methodology of what she terms as the hermeneutic iconography to contest the anti-pornographic black feminist camp. In her own words: “Racial iconography is a critical hermeneutic, a reading practice that shifts from a preoccupation with the injuries that racialized pornography engenders to an investigation of the ecstasy that racialized pornography can unleash” (Nash, 2). Basically, Nash performs the labor of closely reading black pornographic films produced in the 1970s and 1980s in the United States that she categories as golden and silver age cinemas; her major reason for choosing this unusual source relates to the potentiality as sites where one would not expect to locate political possibility. The good example of this possibility is the “performance of racial fiction” performed by the “black pornographic protagonists—particularly females that deploy race humor strategies to amplify racial fictions” (Nash, 110).

Nash clearly states that she employs “media-studies approach” as opposed to psychoanalytical approach adopted by many scholars and the reason for adopting this approach is the open possibility of transnational analysis. While I really appreciated Nash’s incorporation of “the nineteenth century display of Saarjie Baartman” in the French museum, the transnational contextual analysis and reception of the golden and silver cinemas was missing. How would the analysis of reception of these films in the transnational context enhance her analysis?

Also, Nash alluded to the hetero-normative porn as essentially homophobic without delving deeper into the dynamic of that relationship. By offering such a frame, isn’t she assuming the foreclosure the possibility of a gay male seeking pleasure from focusing his gaze on just the male protagonist in a hetero-normative porn?

Nash - GLASS

In her book, Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography, Jennifer Nash seeks to re-claim desire for black female spectators of racialized pornographic films. Placing herself in conversation with both black feminist scholars and feminist porn scholars, Nash borrows form pornography scholarship, feminist work, and black feminist theory – among others – to encourage a different, more nuanced look at the possible pleasures for black spectators in watching pornography.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of her work in my opinion, Nash critiques existing black feminist scholarship on porn while insisting that pornography and sexuality have multiple meanings – in other words, she claims to be a “sex radical” (Nash 2014: 16). Through her “loving critique,” Nash analyzes four films (Lialeh, Sexworld, Black Taboo and Black Throat) and explains that unlike what the existing black feminist scholarship posits, there is a potential to read pleasure in these films.

I found her term “race-pleasure” most interesting. According to Nash, “race-pleasure” can be seen in Sexworld and denotes the experience of pleasure through blackness. Nash proclaims that Jill’s (the protagonist) use of hyperbolic stereotypes of white men provide her with the vocabulary to voice her pleasures.

I like the way Nash seems to re-coopt pornography in a way that the reader can almost feel the “power” (or pleasure/ecstasy) returning to black women. Her read of the four films “lovingly” disagrees with previous scholarship as she gives ecstasy back to black women.

I am not sure myself how this would apply to my own research – although I like the way she essentially says “no, this is not demeaning or belittling, this is, or can be empowering” in her work. I would like to be able to achieve this in my own work at some point – to challenge previous scholarship around the politics of motherhood, for example, in a way that gives power back.

I can see this being applicable to previous readings in that we, as researchers, have a duty to represent our subjects and their necessities and desires in a way that helps and not hurts. So her push back to read pleasure in the films instead of viewing them as solely damaging seems to urge other scholars to also view black bodies in this way.

My question is: is this enough? Does her reading of black women in pleasure, as empowering as it seems, ignore other institutional forms of power that mock her reading of pleasure? I’m not sure I’m making sense with my question – but it seems to not be enough. Or is it enough, if many other scholars make this move with her?

Black Body in Ecstasy-Nash-Alexia Bacon

In Black Body in Ecstasy Jennifer Nash states an analysis of both porn and pleasure.  She does this through a critical examination of black feminists scholars approach on representation.  From this Nash develops her own method of analyzing black women in pornography, which she calls racial iconography.  Through this perspective Nash shifts the focus from the “hurt” caused to black women and examines the ecstasy and pleasure created from not only black women’s blackness, but also in the “hurt” and “objectification” itself. 

So far while reading Nash’s work I appreciate the straightforward way in which she writes.  In the introduction I found value in the outline of her work to better understand and build upon her own critique of “traditional” black feminism.   At times people can over simplify race, upon further reflection of her work I also found it interesting how she encourages people to think of race in more complex ways. 

Discussion Question

What tools and knowledge are needed in order to navigate lines/boundaries of the positive racial objectification that Nash discusses vs. oppression? Is this something personal or does it work within groups and systems?

Obfuscating the binary and performance boundary - shannon m.

Nash's Black Body in Ecstasy is another great example of a critical discussion obfuscating the very tired binary that was established along white western concepts of propriety.  Traditional black feminism's binary had established that radicalized pornography was either oppressive black representation or recovery with no space between the two extremes for any other experience or truth.  Of course the issue is, that Nash so easily points out, that humans are more dynamic than falling neatly into place on a binary which makes a binary definition space limiting and useless in seeking to understand race, performance and pleasure.  This type of binary - in this case exploitation vs recovery - excludes anyone who does not identify in either column and starts to border on dismissing or villainizing their voice.  If one has not realized they are being exploited they are not "woke" and if one is not recognizing recovery work then they have not yet been enlightened.  Rather Nash works to say that racialized pornography can work completely intertwined with or outside of the binary.  A person can find pleasure even amidst oppressive tropes or accomplish a performance of identity entirely of their own volition that never intended nor really has a place as "exploitation" or "liberation" - that it is something else entirely.

Nash names some of the many different sources for pleasure such as sexual pleasure, race pleasure, comedy, and parody among others which also stretches the space within which to explore black feminism's expression of race, identity, and pleasure, even as it exists within the parameters of a white male dominated field.  Traditionally, objectification has been defined as bad - just bad - without any room for any other interpretation of experience.  Instead of trying to work through the badness of objectification, Nash stakes a claim that some people do find pleasure in being in being the object, the exotic, in performing their blackness because it is unique to them in a way that only black people/women can perform blackness similar to how "doing race" happens in any other facet of life.  

While reading I found my mind jumping back and forth between the performer and audience and the different types of pleasure in experiencing the pornographic product.  Nash touches on the importance and lingering impact of images and stories so my discussion question is:  When the audience has not yet been enlightened to the shift in black feminism's empowerment around radicalized pornography, is the continued production of this work reduced to merely damaging or recovering as the old binary tradition might hold?

I also wonder if much of what Nash is saying about black feminism taking pleasure in radicalized pornography can actually be taken to mean that black feminism can take pleasure from radicalized anything.  Does the pleasure in parody, race pleasure, being objectified etc stop just beyond the boundary of the film set?  When it's not art, does it deflate back to just oppression or does it still hold its multidimensional power of expression and pleasure?