Jennifer Nash, Race-pleasure and Crip-pleasure

Jennifer Nash's book, "The Black Body in Ecstasy" is a "loving critique" of black feminism's theorizing on pornography. In the introduction and chapter 1, she describes existing black feminist approaches to pornography. These approaches have, on the whole, cast pornography as always harmful to black women. In fact, many black feminists characterize all media representations as harmful to black women (with the exception of self-representations as “recovery work”). The existing black feminist archive, according to Nash, is an “archive of pain”. In the remainder of her book, Nash uses a variety of intersectional methodologies (and the primary method of close reading) to detail ways in which racialized pornography can be positive and pleasurable for black women. This blog post will take up one such concept of pleasure, ‘race-pleasure’.

In Chapter 3, Nash analyzes the Golden Age film, “Sexworld” and the race-pleasure experienced by the film’s black female protagonist, Jill. Nash borrows the term “race-pleasure” from the legal scholar Anthony Paul Farley, but she defines the term in her own way. Whereas the existing black feminist archive describes that the dramatization of difference in media portrayals of black women is always harmful to black women, Nash explains that the dramatization of imagined difference can be a source of pleasure for black women. In the film “Sexworld” Jill takes “pleasure in eroticizing her imagined difference” and her “hyperbolic performance of blackness [is] a source of her own excitement”. This pleasure – in performance of difference and of being seen as different- is what Nash describes as “race-pleasure”. Nash goes on to describe how “blackness can function as a lexicon of desire and a locus of eroticism for black pornographic protagonists”. Black pornographic characters are seen taking pleasure in the performance of their imagined racial differences. Nash relates this to queer theories in which queers may take pleasure in performance of gender or performances of the abject. Nash writes that blackness is a “fraught, complex and potentially exciting performance for black subjects…. A doing which can thrill, excite, and arouse, even as it wounds and terrorizes.”

Nash’s claims in chapter 3 are certainly controversial, and they required her to engage in “aggressive counter-reading” to search for race-pleasure in encounters that look oppressive at first glance. While I don’t feel qualified, as a white scholar, to decide whether the concept of race-pleasure is truly pleasure (and not just the “velvet glove on the iron fist of domination”), I can relate to Nash’s concept as a queer disabled scholar. It is true that queers often find pleasure (and power) in intentionally, strongly portraying the abject. Sometimes portrayals of abject gender and sexualities, for example in drag, are pleasurable because they are counter to dominant culture.

I also see great relevance of the concept of race-pleasure to the field of disability studies. As I was reading Nash’s work, I was thinking about the performances of Mat Fraser. Fraser is a disabled performer with a strong interest in freak shows. While many disability activists condemn freak shows – as othering displays that cast disabled bodies as different and terrifying – Fraser takes pleasure in the experience of a freak show. I saw him perform a burlesque play entitled “Beauty and the Beast” (co-created with his partner, Julie Atlas Muz) this winter, and attended a panel discussion after. It was clear from the burlesque, and from Fraser and Atlas Muz’s responses on the panel, that the couple takes mutual pleasure in eroticizing Fraser’s impairments. Being seen as a “freak” or a “cripple” is part of the sexual play and part of the pleasure in performance during their burlesque. I think this pleasure is very similar to Nash’s conception of race-pleasure. Perhaps we could call it crip-pleasure.

Questions:

1.     In what ways might race-pleasure be both a truly pleasurable experience and an ‘unhealthy’ response to domination (as other feminist scholars claim).

2.     What do we make of Nash’s claim that black people’s erotic investment in the imagined difference of blackness is part of what maintains racial categories? In what ways to queer or disabled people’s erotic investments maintain their categories in the same ways?