Kathryn Sears – Black
Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography by Jennifer Nash
The
introduction to Jennifer Nash’s Black
Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography immediately engages us
in a critical interrogation of representation and race in pornographic
films. She outlines her project
following an interesting and rather telling anecdote about the recurring
conversations she has when discussing her work with people per their interest
and titillation and sometimes “racialized curiosity” about the distinctiveness
of black women’s bodies in pornography.[1] Nash’s overarching question—which asks what
it would mean to read racialized pornography “for moments of racialized
excitement, for instances of surprising pleasures in racialization, and for
hyperbolic performances of race that poke fun at the very project of race”—sets
a tone for the remainder of the introduction in which Nash meticulously
investigates the existing scholarship on racialized pornography and outlines
what her critique will add to this body of scholarship.[2] Specifically, Nash discusses four feminist
traditions, antipornography feminism, pro-pornography feminism, the sex-radical
rejoinder, and feminist porn studies, each with its own point of departure
where she argues beyond the margins of these traditions in order to examine the
notions of pleasure and race in pornography beyond the somewhat limited
precedents from which she begins.
Two excerpts which I found most
ripe for thinking about my project are: “To think that men and women can walk
away from the images they consume makes no sense in light of what we know about
how images shape our sense of reality.”[3] In studying art history, I find this argument
quite obvious, however, I think it is rather important that Nash articulates
the power that images have in shaping our world view on both a personal and
communal level. This sort of eloquent,
yet obvious statement is something that I find missing in my writing—an element
of writing which I am trying to address—and a quantity of the critical analyses
of artworks and visual culture. This
leads to a departure from the visual material itself and into an analysis that
seems to lack a foundation and a clear, concise methodology.
The second excerpt that I want to
address leads to my discussion question for the day: “Feminism cannot be the
new voice of morality and virtue, leaving behind everyone whose class race, and
desires never fit comfortable into a straight, white, male (or female)
world…Instead of pushing our movement further to the right, we should be
attempting to create a viable sexual future and a movement powerful enough to
defend us simultaneously against sexual abuse.”[4] Using this quote form Amber Hollibaugh in
Nash’s introduction as a beginning, what are some interventions that we can use
in our own work in order to create less rigid and more inclusive social
structures in a broader sense beyond artworks or specific research? In short, how can we broadly apply Nash’s and
Hollinbaugh’s projects to an audience that might see these things as more rigid
and exclusive than are applicable to a real world setting?
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