Delbello - Nash

Jennifer Nash’s book The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography revolves around an interesting analysis and discussion of how black women are represented in pornography and the connection to the different types of feminisms that have been developed around the topic of women of color and pornography. Methodologically, she uses different methods, one of these is the analysis of films as texts, in an effort to translate images in words, in a linguistic fashion, as possible signifiers.

As she notices, “far too often, the word black in front of the word pornography is treated as an intensifier, as something that produces political anxiety rather than as something that engenders theoretical energy and analytical sophistication. (p. 104)” On this note she tries to articulate how black women in pornography can act towards a liberation project rather than an “intensifier” of excesses and of fetishes of body parts.

So this extent, Nash underlines how “this volume uses racial iconography as a hermeneutic that both ruptures this prevailing black feminist narrative and opens up new black feminist attention to ecstasy.” She separates pleasure from ecstasy, to include in her study a vast array of “disposits,” to use the Foucaultian language, that were used to create a “racial iconography,” allowing her to study and analyze the “technologically and historically embedded pleasures that racialized

pornography can produce for black female bodies, including pleasures in performing blackness,

pleasures in race-humor, pleasures in upending the conventions of the racialized pornographic film, pleasures in being watched, and pleasures in watching. (p.105)”

In doing this she uses sociological and philosophical nuances to understand how ontologies of black women came about and how to create possible projects of resistance through pornography.

As a matter of fact, she admits that she is “attracted to the pornographic texts I analyze here because they are sites where one would not expect to locate political possibility;” The reasons why she does it is that these are locations that were specifically created to make profits but happen to conceal sites of “political shifts,” precisely because black pleasures are “articulated, amplified, and practiced.”

In so doing, Nash tries to overcome common narratives of recent black feminism, connected mainly to problems of representation, and to actively and positively propose a liberation project through pleasure.

I think she does overcome classical definitions of intersectionality to embrace methodologies that are clearly unorthodox and radical, to confront what can be the stagnancy of dominant feminist liberal critiques. I was very interested in the way in which she analyzes and turns into texts films, I think it’s a powerful way of employing a discourse analysis via images.

In what is more and more a society of spectacle, I really think this is a refreshing approach to find new avenues of liberation. My question would be: how do we now discuss what it seems to be a new and promising methodology in relation to a larger theoretical framework? I think that Guy Debord's society of spectacle can be a very useful way to talk about it, but how can we think about it in theoretical terms?