Nash - GLASS

In her book, Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography, Jennifer Nash seeks to re-claim desire for black female spectators of racialized pornographic films. Placing herself in conversation with both black feminist scholars and feminist porn scholars, Nash borrows form pornography scholarship, feminist work, and black feminist theory – among others – to encourage a different, more nuanced look at the possible pleasures for black spectators in watching pornography.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of her work in my opinion, Nash critiques existing black feminist scholarship on porn while insisting that pornography and sexuality have multiple meanings – in other words, she claims to be a “sex radical” (Nash 2014: 16). Through her “loving critique,” Nash analyzes four films (Lialeh, Sexworld, Black Taboo and Black Throat) and explains that unlike what the existing black feminist scholarship posits, there is a potential to read pleasure in these films.

I found her term “race-pleasure” most interesting. According to Nash, “race-pleasure” can be seen in Sexworld and denotes the experience of pleasure through blackness. Nash proclaims that Jill’s (the protagonist) use of hyperbolic stereotypes of white men provide her with the vocabulary to voice her pleasures.

I like the way Nash seems to re-coopt pornography in a way that the reader can almost feel the “power” (or pleasure/ecstasy) returning to black women. Her read of the four films “lovingly” disagrees with previous scholarship as she gives ecstasy back to black women.

I am not sure myself how this would apply to my own research – although I like the way she essentially says “no, this is not demeaning or belittling, this is, or can be empowering” in her work. I would like to be able to achieve this in my own work at some point – to challenge previous scholarship around the politics of motherhood, for example, in a way that gives power back.

I can see this being applicable to previous readings in that we, as researchers, have a duty to represent our subjects and their necessities and desires in a way that helps and not hurts. So her push back to read pleasure in the films instead of viewing them as solely damaging seems to urge other scholars to also view black bodies in this way.

My question is: is this enough? Does her reading of black women in pleasure, as empowering as it seems, ignore other institutional forms of power that mock her reading of pleasure? I’m not sure I’m making sense with my question – but it seems to not be enough. Or is it enough, if many other scholars make this move with her?