Jozi Chaet - The Black Body in Ecstasy

Relevance to the Text Generally

Jennifer Nash’s investigation concerning the understanding of representation, feminism, and historic perceptions of race over the course of The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography, is one that examines the political and social implications of the hardcore pornography films produced over the course of the second half of the twentieth century, and particularly throughout the 1970s and 1980s. In particular, Nash explores the way in which/the extent to which racialized representations or fictions have the potential to create a space of agency and pleasure for the female subjects ostensibly represented in those specific portrayals (Nash 2014). While the following post cannot successfully engage with the specificities that contribute to the strength of Nash’ argument, this post attempts to think through the primary intentions guiding Nash’s work over the course of The Black Body in Ecstasy, and the impact of that work in the context of this class. In turn, the following post focuses on Nash’s general argument concerning the representation of black women in pornographic films and the methodologies Nash employs in an attempt to construct that analysis, and endeavors to address the ways in which Nash’s application of particular methodologies relates to my own emerging research.

Over the course of her discussion concerning the representation of black women in pornographic films produced in the United States, Nash attempts to explore the dominant visual culture associated with the pornography industry that perpetuate images of black women that entrench “ideas of the black feminine hyperlibido, reenacts the violence of the past...reduces black women to fetishized body parts…[,] and incessantly structures black femininity to ideas of excess, deviance, and alterity” (Nash 2014, n.p.). In doing so, Nash attempts to extend the extant body of literature concerning the intersections between feminism and pornography in several ways, which are detailed in the conclusion to the book and are useful to reproduce here in their entirety –

“First, [Nash] analytically separate[s] ecstasy from pleasure, and endeavor to produce a black feminist theoretical archive that is oriented toward ecstasy…[s]econdly, in arguing for a black feminist theoretical archive oriented toward ecstasy, [she] center[s] fantasy in the political life of black feminism…[f]inally, [her] investment in ecstasy calls for a black feminist reconsideration of the very meaning of blackness” (Nash 2014, n.p.)

In order to accomplish that goal, Nash approaches “racialized pornography as a visual form that tell us something about ‘who we are as a culture,’ as a rich repository of information about collective fantasies and racial fictions” (Nash 2014, n.p.). Consequently, Nash employs several different methodologies in an effort to successfully engage in that comprehensive analysis, which, like her scholastic contributions detailed above, are useful to include in their entirety. Specifically, Nash’s methods for analyzing the pornographic films as texts include –

“close reading. Because [she is] invested in closely reading texts, [she has] largely bracketed engagement with the biographies of pornographic filmmakers or pornographic actors, and instead focused on the racialized meaning-making performed by various pornographic texts” (Nash 2014, n.p)

As a result, Nash explores the social functions of hardcore pornographic films, as well as the relationship history, technology, and representation embedded within the films themselves. In turn, Nash’s use of close readings is supplemented with analyses of images taken from the films; the conjunction of those two methods allows Nash to analyze the “black feminist theoretical archive, a collection of texts and images which…actively produces and enforces the idea of wounded black female flesh” (Nash 2014, n.p.). Thus, Nash makes use of the methodologies presented by Cotera and Smith (women of color methodologies, material texts as representations of culture), perhaps the methodologies presented by Puar, Eng, and Ferguson (queer of color methodologies, assemblages), and certainly interscetionality.

Applications to Real or Imagined Projects

While my nascent work (I will avoid repeating the details several weeks in a row) deals with questions that are slightly different than the ones addressed by Nash, insofar as I am interested in asking questions about the state, activism broadly, and women’s movements in the Middle East more specifically, the work presented by Nash is a clear representation of the way to apply the methodologies that we have discussed over the course the semester. Nash weaves together a narrative of the films, their story lines, and social impact in a way that flawlessly acknowledges questions of black feminism, interscetionality, representation, and perception. Thus, while the methodologies employed by Nash are not necessarily the ones that I have been considering as the ones that I feel are applicable to my own project (save for intersectionality), as I have been leaning more towards the methodologies associated with imperialism, transnationalism, and diaspora studies that we have  discussed in class in recent weeks, the way in which Nash integrates her methodologies into her text provides a useful example with which to conceptualize the use of particular methodologies in a long-term, sustained project.

Discussion Question(s)

Nash, unlike many of the scholars that we have read, does not spend much time discussing positionality or accountability in relation to her work – When undertaking textual projects/materially-based projects of this sort, is the same level of self-reflexivity/self-awareness not needed? In what ways does this impact her work? Additionally, Nash addressed Butler’s work at the beginning of the text, but spends much of the book discussing concepts within a heteronormative framework – is Nash’s discussion of pornography limited by the heterosexual lens through which she discusses the films? Is there a way for her to incorporate another level of analysis, that of LGBTQ representations, in a way that goes deeper than what is provided in the text? Would her analysis benefit from such an incorporation, or is it completely successful as it stands?