Obfuscating the binary and performance boundary - shannon m.

Nash's Black Body in Ecstasy is another great example of a critical discussion obfuscating the very tired binary that was established along white western concepts of propriety.  Traditional black feminism's binary had established that radicalized pornography was either oppressive black representation or recovery with no space between the two extremes for any other experience or truth.  Of course the issue is, that Nash so easily points out, that humans are more dynamic than falling neatly into place on a binary which makes a binary definition space limiting and useless in seeking to understand race, performance and pleasure.  This type of binary - in this case exploitation vs recovery - excludes anyone who does not identify in either column and starts to border on dismissing or villainizing their voice.  If one has not realized they are being exploited they are not "woke" and if one is not recognizing recovery work then they have not yet been enlightened.  Rather Nash works to say that racialized pornography can work completely intertwined with or outside of the binary.  A person can find pleasure even amidst oppressive tropes or accomplish a performance of identity entirely of their own volition that never intended nor really has a place as "exploitation" or "liberation" - that it is something else entirely.

Nash names some of the many different sources for pleasure such as sexual pleasure, race pleasure, comedy, and parody among others which also stretches the space within which to explore black feminism's expression of race, identity, and pleasure, even as it exists within the parameters of a white male dominated field.  Traditionally, objectification has been defined as bad - just bad - without any room for any other interpretation of experience.  Instead of trying to work through the badness of objectification, Nash stakes a claim that some people do find pleasure in being in being the object, the exotic, in performing their blackness because it is unique to them in a way that only black people/women can perform blackness similar to how "doing race" happens in any other facet of life.  

While reading I found my mind jumping back and forth between the performer and audience and the different types of pleasure in experiencing the pornographic product.  Nash touches on the importance and lingering impact of images and stories so my discussion question is:  When the audience has not yet been enlightened to the shift in black feminism's empowerment around radicalized pornography, is the continued production of this work reduced to merely damaging or recovering as the old binary tradition might hold?

I also wonder if much of what Nash is saying about black feminism taking pleasure in radicalized pornography can actually be taken to mean that black feminism can take pleasure from radicalized anything.  Does the pleasure in parody, race pleasure, being objectified etc stop just beyond the boundary of the film set?  When it's not art, does it deflate back to just oppression or does it still hold its multidimensional power of expression and pleasure?