Nash explores racialized pornography, pornographic representational culture featuring the relationship between spectatorship, gender, and visual pleasure. The black body in ecstasy begins by pointing out that the focus of the project is not about how black women is violated by pornography but about “radicalized excitement” that underpin pornographic representation of black women. She is interested in the ecstasy that racialized pornography generates in terms of both possibilities of black female pleasure within a white-dominated representational economy and the possibilities of female pleasure within a patriarchal economy.
Her work is in part a critique of black feminism’s approach to visual culture and advances a theory of representation. What is interesting to me is that Nash does not deal with pernicious effects of radicalized pornography’s representation, but potentials for liberation that subjects exercise freedom “within the confines of a visual field structured but gender and race.” She aims to remake the black feminist theoretical archive to examine ecstasies that pornography produce for black female spectators and black female pornographic protagonists.
The author employs a method of racial iconography to shift from examining race as historical and social structure of domination, traditional scholarly focus on racial work, to exploring two under-theorized aspects of race, which are pleasure and performance. Particularly, Nash departs from prevailing scholarly focus on spectators’ viewing pleasure, and asks how black pleasures can include sexual and erotic pleasure in racialization and how racial formations are both crafted and disrupted through performance.
Nash uses close reading to examine the relationship between race, gender, and pleasure. Her analysis moves "between texts and context, between representation and multitude of possible spectator responses.” What is close reading? How is it different from discourse analysis?
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