Collier- Black Body in Ecstasy

Nash’s book offers a compelling reading of race, gender, and sexuality in pornography. Nash describes where her work is situated in relation to different feminist approaches to pornography, offering her own intervention in the treatment of race and representation in racialized pornography.  She notes how nuance, multiple meanings, and agency in spectatorship are often bracketed when it comes to race, and she questions this assumption to enable an analysis of pleasure and ecstasy.  Nash describes her method as racial iconography: “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”(2).  She focuses on the concept of ecstasy to allow for the complicated and fraught nature of pleasure.  This allows her to challenge existing approaches to representation, to examine how representation can be a space for constraint as well as have the potential for liberation.  She describes this shift as, “moving the black feminist theoretical archive beyond a rehearsal of black women’s troubled relationship with representation, toward a consideration of the fraught pleasures that come in and through blackness, and in and through performances of racial fictions”(147).  Through her readings of racialized pornography and the black feminist theoretical archive she analyzes linkages between sexuality and race and demonstrates how race can function an erotic project.

            Nash’s methods focus on close readings of texts- the second chapter examines black feminist theorizing and the remaining chapters are readings of racialized pornographic films.  She focuses on the meaning-making in the film while also addressing the historical and technological contexts that shaped their production and various forms of spectator engagement and identification with the texts.  She uses close readings to critique previous approaches to representation and porn that oversimplify or ignore possibilities for ecstasy in these sites.  Building from feminist gender theory, she explains, “I treat blackness as a fraught, complex, and potentially exciting performance for black subjects, as a doing which can thrill, excite, and arouse, even as it wounds and terrorizes”(87).  Her work speaks directly to women of color feminisms and there is also a bit of queer of color critique with an analysis of the co-constitutive nature of race and sexuality.

I really appreciate how Nash challenges dominant approaches to theorizing spectatorship and complicates the treatment of race in reading and representation.  Her examination of how pleasure links to power, constraint, and agency is also an important intervention.  A lot of queer studies work engages with these questions, but particularly in sociology, an analysis of pleasure as it relates to identity, spectatorship, and power is missing.  In thinking about methods and her approach to studying the topic, I kept wondering if the study could have been accomplished through engaging with audiences, how it might have impacted the results, and what sorts of knowledge could have emerged from different methods.  With a focus on the complex links between pleasure, gender, and race, it could be challenging trying to approach this study in different ways.  This leads me to my questions:

How can we operationalize pleasure and ecstasy?  Are other sites where this turn towards the complexities of pleasure might be important?

Thinking about methods and different disciplinary conventions- could this analysis have been accomplished with human subjects?