Through close readings of several pornographic films from the 1970s and 1980s, Jennifer C. Nash in The Black Body in Ecstasy seeks to introduce a way of interpreting and viewing racial iconography. It is of importance how Nash moves away from a black feminist traditional reading of pornography as a damaging form of visual representation for black women, instead she challenges this tendency and considers how racial fictions can generate a space of agency, desire, and pleasure for black female subjects.
Nash names this form of analysis racial iconography in which she seeks to investigate the ecstasy that racialized pornography can unleash. “By reading for ecstasy rather than injury, racial iconography performs what Judith Butler terms an “aggressive counter-reading,” one which suspends normative readings of racialized pornography and instead advances readings which emphasize black performances and pleasures represented on the racialized pornographic screen.” (12)
Before reading Nash’s analysis I understood, as she declares, “speaking sex is always speaking race” (72), however, I did not understand this to be a possibility of female pleasure or agency, must I followed the path of traditional feminism focusing on the pain, trauma, and commercialization of the body. This was a fascinating and well-argued text where she not only examines the intersections of race and sexuality but also of gender, visual culture, agency, and pleasure.
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Has the wide variety and availability of porn via Internet changed how racial-sexual ecstasy is performed?
Can black male bodies performing gay porn be read in a similar way?
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