Alison Kopit
March 27, 2017
Jennifer Nash—The Black Body in Ecstasy (2014)
In The Black Body in Ecstasy, Jennifer Nash (2014) dissects the various strands of what she calls the “black feminist theoretical archive,” (32) a bundle of texts that, when put together, create a landscape in which black female representation in pornography is solely seen as a site of violence and harm, and where representations of the black body are considered to be forever in the throes of either injury or healing. She provides close readings of racialized pornography and complicates this narrative of pain and violence through a method of “racial iconography” (2). For this blog post, I will focus on racial iconography and the ways that it allows for complex readings, paradox, and departures from the hegemonic discourse. Nash describes racial iconography as “a critical hermeneutic, a reading practice that shifts from a preoccupation with the injuries that radicalized pornography engenders to an investigation of the ecstasy that radicalized pornography can unleash” (2). Thus, using racial iconography leads Nash to an alternate reading of pornography that acknowledges the elements of ecstasy that have been overlooked in the dominant discourse. This alternate reading also allows Nash to center black women in the work, and show moments of agency, pleasure, and resistance, all of which is almost completely absent in feminist porn studies conversation.
Throughout the book, Nash develops and engages the term ecstasy as a way of complicating and differentiating from pleasure. Ecstasy can exist despite moral tension, and among layers of violence and pain. It is not the key to black female liberation or ultimate agency, but it also is not necessarily a weapon against black women. She writes, “I use racialized pornography as a tool for shifting the black feminist theoretical archive away from the production and enforcement of a ‘protectionist’ reading of representation, and toward an interpretative framework centered on complex and sometimes unnerving pleasures” (3). Nash describes and analyzes these sites of “unnerving pleasure” throughout the book. In her work, she sees sites of political agency where they have been overlooked, and complexity when simplistic analyses have been assumed. Also, this re-centering is in itself a critique of the way that theory about violence often repeats patterns of objectification, seeing the marginalized person/group as an object upon which violence is enacted.
What might it mean to resist the compulsion to read only tragic representations, and to insist on something other than violence--not to deny it or to re-write it, but to complicate it? This is something that I am interested in my own work about representation. So many representations of both queerness and disability revolve around tragedy, violence, and/or death. Although these are the lived realities of many queer and disabled people, they are not the entire story. The more popular culture insists on producing only tragic readings of the queer and disabled narrative, or only reading tragedy into every story, the more our complexity is overwritten. What happens when we resist this? Nash herself asks, “What might it mean to “organiz[e] around the paradoxes of pleasure rather than roundedness or the elisions of shared injury, around possibilities rather than pain?” (3).
I am drawn to Nash’s model of the “loving critique” (8), and the way that racial iconography seems to create the space for this. She critiques black feminism and the hegemonic ways scholars have categorized racialized pornography, while still recognizing the ways that she has been influenced by this discourse. She does not seek to abandon these conversations, but to “bring renewed theoretical energy to its debates” (8). In my own work, I am highly critical of disability arts, but have often tried to strike this balance of the “loving critique” in my own work. How do you know when the balance is right? How do you push the field just enough to spark new conversations, but not so far that you lose credibility?
Works Cited
Nash, Jennifer. The Black Body in Ecstasy. Duke University Press, 2014.
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