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Abstract
In this article I use policing—literal and symbolic—to illuminate how race operates not only as an apparatus of power, but also one of pleasure. Through the lens of bondage and discipline, domination and submission, and sadism and masochism (BDSM) race play and race play pornography, I explore the complex relationship between discipline, pleasure, power, and violence hinged at the site of black female sexuality. First, I present my theory of the “politics of perversion.” As both a theoretical framework and praxis of black female sexuality, the politics of perversion pushes back against respectability politics to take seriously the perverse, as not merely a mode of producing pleasure but of black queer world-making. Second, I discuss black women’s fraught practice of race play, a controversial BDSM practice that eroticizes racial difference and often employs racism as an erotic tool of power exchange. Contextualizing black women’s modern-day performance of race play within historical feminist debates over BDSM reveals the longstanding reign of the politics of respectability on black women’s sexuality. Finally, I read an example of black/white interracial lesbian race play pornography that enacts the unspeakable and queer pleasures of race play, while illustrating the literal and metaphorical dimensions of the policing of blackness, queerness, and black queer female sexuality.
Notes
James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (New York: Random House, Modern Library Edition, 1995), 5. Italics in original.
Ibid.
Jared Sexton, “Radical Will,” Artforum (December 2013): 246.
BDSM” is a widely used umbrella term that stands in for “bondage and discipline” (B/D, B & D), “domination/submission” (D/S, DS), and “sadism and masochism.” I use the contemporary term “BDSM” because of its resonance in the adult entertainment industry and its highlighting of the power exchange—the play of dominance and submission—essential to the practice. For a wonderful discussion of the terminology of BDSM, see Margot Weiss, Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), vii–xii.
Oxford Dictionaries, s.v. “kink,” http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/american_english/kink (accessed June 4, 2015).
See Ariane Cruz, The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM, and Pornography (New York: University Press, 2016). In my larger project I also discuss the resonance of perversion to BDSM. Though BDSM, in practice and theory, is anchored in the literary foundation of Marquis de Sade and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, in the 19th century, sadism and masochism were coded as psychosexual perversions. See Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, “Venus in Furs” (1870), in Masochism, translated by Jean McNeil (New York: Zone Books, 1991). See also Marquis de Sade, 120 Days of Sodom & Other Writings, translated by Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver (New York: Grove Press, 1966); Marquis de Sade, Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings, translated by Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Grove, 1965); and Marquis de Sade, Juliette, translated by Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Grove Press, 1968). In Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), Richard von Krafft-Ebing not only coins the terms but also inaugurates them within the moralizing pathologizing impulse of psychoanalysis as sexual perversions. For more on the relationship between BDSM and perversion see: Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis (Chicago: Bloat, 1999); Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. 1 (New York: Random House, 1942); Gilles Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty,” in Deleuze, Masochism, translated by Jean McNeil (New York: Zone Books, 1991); Theodore Riek, Masochism in Modern Man, translated by Margaret H. Beigel and Gertrud M. Kurth (New York: Grove, 1962); Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 19, The Ego and the Id and Other Works (1923–1925), translated by J. Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1961) and The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, translated and edited by A. A. Brill (1938; repr., New York: Random House, 1995); Robert J. Stoller, Pain and Passion: A Psychoanalyst Explores the World of S &M (New York: Plenum Press, 1991) and Perversion: The Erotic Form of Hatred (New York: Pantheon, 1975); Kaja Silverman, “Masochism and Male Subjectivity,” Camera Obscura 6, 2, no. 17 (1988): 30–67; Paul G. Gebhard, “Fetishism and Sadomasochism,” in Dynamics of Deviant Sexuality: Scientific Proceedings of The American Academy of Psychoanalysis, edited by Jules Masserman (New York: Grune & Stratton, 1969), 71–80; Darren Langdridge and Meg Barker, eds., Safe, Sane, and Consensual: Contemporary Perspectives on Sadomasochism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); and Andrea Beckmann, The Social Construction of Sexuality and Perversion: Deconstructing Sadomasochism (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009).
I am informed by Freud’s use of the term “polymorphous perversion” as well as his understanding of the normality of perversion—his belief that “the disposition to perversions is itself of no great rarity but must form a part of what passes as the normal constitution.” Freud’s understanding of polymorphous perversity is useful here because it signals BDSM’s degenitalization of erotic pleasure, the perverse inclination as natural rather than aberrant, and the multiple shapes—both symbolic and material—that perversion manifests in performances of black female sexuality. Sigmund Freud, “An Autobiographical Study,” in The Freud Reader, edited by Peter Gay (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1989), 24 (see also 23). “On the contrary, while he identifies a polymorphously perverse degenitalization of pleasure in children and ‘perverse’ adults, he argues that perversion is a part of ‘normal’ human adult sexuality and ‘a general and fundamental human characteristic.’” Sigmund Freud, “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,” in The Freud Reader, edited by Peter Gay (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1989), 268; ibid., 258.
The New Oxford American Dictionary, 3rd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 2010), s.v. “pervert.”
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs (1870), in Masochism, translated by Jean McNeil (New York: Zone Books, 1991). See also Marquis de Sade, 120 Days of Sodom & Other Writings, translated by Austryn Wainhouse and Richard Seaver (New York: Grove Press, 1966); Marquis de Sade, Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom, and Other Writings, translated by Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Grove, 1965); and Marquis de Sade, Juliette, translated by Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Grove Press, 1968).
Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis (Chicago: Bloat, 1999), 55–56.
Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. 1 (New York: Random House, 1942), 159. While Krafft-Ebing considered sadism and masochism to be distinct entities, Freud viewed them as concurrent and linked, a view later challenged by Gilles Deleuze who argued that masochism and sadism are independent of each other and are fundamentally different. See Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis; Freud, “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,” in The Freud Reader, edited by Peter Gay (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1989), 253; Gilles Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty,” in Deleuze, Masochism, translated by Jean McNeil (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 57, 14.
Like Krafft-Ebing, Freud believed that BDSM tendencies were manifest in “the normal individual.” See Sigmund Freud, “Infantile Sexuality,” in The Basic Writings of Sigmund Freud, translated and edited by A. A. Brill (1938; repr., New York: Random House, 1995), 569 and “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,” 252; Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, 80.
See Darren Langdridge and Meg Barker, eds., Safe, Sane, and Consensual: Contemporary Perspectives on Sadomasochism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Andrea Beckmann, The Social Construction of Sexuality and Perversion: Deconstructing Sadomasochism (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009); Thomas S. Weinberg, “Sadism and Masochism: Sociological Perspectives,” Bulletin of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law 6, no. 3 (1978): 284–95; Thomas S. Weinberg, “Research in Sadomasochism: A Review of Sociological and Social Psychological Literature,” Annual Review of Sex Research 5 (1994): 257–79; Thomas S. Weinberg, ed., S&M: Studies in Dominance and Submission (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1995); and Thomas S. Weinberg and G. W. Levi Kamel, S and M: Studies in Sadomasochism (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1983).
For more, see Paraphilic Disorders, “American Psychological Association: DSM-5 Development,” http://www.dsm5.org/Documents/Paraphilic%20Disorders%20Fact%20Sheet.pdf (accessed August 20, 2013).
Within queer theory, perversion often performs as a kind of theoretical metonymic mascot for queerness—gesturing toward a prolific and unstable range of sexualities that the assumed norm or regime of heterosexuality marginalizes. See Michael Warner, Fear of a Queer Planet: Queer Politics and Social Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Michael Warner, The Trouble with Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “Sex in Public,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 2 (1998): 558.
Cathy Cohen, “Deviance as Resistance: A New Research Agenda for the Study of Black Politics,” Du Bois Review 1, no. 1 (2004): 37.
Cathy Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 3, no. 4: (1997): 437–65.
Warner, The Trouble with Normal, 48.
José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 34.
For the politics of respectability, see Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Evelynn Hammonds, “Toward a Genealogy of Black Female Sexuality: The Problematic of Silence,” in Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures, edited by M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty (London: Routledge, 1997), 171–81; Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West,” Signs 14, no. 4 (1989): 912–20; and Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West,” Signs 14, no. 4 (1989): 912–20.
Evelynn Hammonds, “Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Theory 6, nos. 2–3 (1994), 131.
Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West,” 915.
Hammonds, “Black (W)holes,” 135.
Ibid., 134.
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 14, 187. See also Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “African-American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of Race,” Signs 17, no. 2 (Winter, 1992): 251–74.
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, “Pornography: A Black Feminist Woman Scholar’s Reconciliation,” in The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure, edited by Tristan Taormino, Constance Penley, Celine Shimizu, and Mireille Miller-Young (The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2013), 215–27.
See Alice Walker, “Porn,” in You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1971), 77–84; Alice Walker, “Coming Apart: By Way of Introduction to Lorde, Teish and Gardner,” in You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1971), 41–53; Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (London: Routledge, 1990); Jewel D. Amoah, “Back on the Auction Block: A Discussion of Black Women and Pornography,” National Black Law Journal 4, no. 2 (1997): 204–21; Tracey A. Gardner, “Racism and the Women’s Movement,” in Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography, edited by Laura Lederer (New York: William and Morrow, 1980), 105–14; Luisah Teish, “A Quiet Subversion,” in Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography, edited by Laura Lederer (New York: William and Morrow, 1980), 115–18; Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley: The Crossing Press, 1984), 53–59.
Dwight A. McBride, Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 106, see also 103. See also Linda Williams, “Skin Flicks on the Racial Border: Pornography, Exploitation and Interracial Lust,” in Porn Studies, edited by Linda Williams (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 271; Miller-Young, statement in “Black/White: Sex, Race, & Profit”; Gail Dines, “King Kong and the White Woman: Hustler Magazine and the Demonization of Black Masculinity,” Violence Against Women 4, no. 3 (1998): 291–307; Jarret Neal, “Let’s Talk about Interracial Porn,” Gay and Lesbian Review 20, no. 4 (2103), 24.
Natalie Purcell has recently problematized this view, interrogating pornography’s precarious yet common conceptualization as fantasy. See Purcell, Violence and the Pornographic Imaginary: The Politics of Sex, Gender, and Aggression in Hardcore Pornography (London: Routledge, 2012).
Mireille Miller-Young, A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); Mireille Miller-Young, “Hip-Hop Honeys and da Hustlaz: Black Sexualities in the New Hip-Hop Pornography,” Meridians 8, no. 1 (2008): 261–92; Mireille Miller-Young, “Sexy and Smart: Black Women and the Politics of Self-Authorship in Netporn,” in C’lickme: A Netporn Studies Reader, edited by Katrien Jacobs, Marije Janssen, and Matteo Pasquinelli (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2007), 205–216, http://www.networkcultures.org/_uploads/24.pdf.
Ibid., 2.
Abiola Abrams, “Intimacy Intervention: My Husband Uses Racial Slurs During Sex,” Essence Magazine, Monday April 9, 2013, http://www.essence.com/2013/04/08/intimacy-intervention-my-husband-uses-racial-slurs-during-sex/ (accessed September 7, 2013).
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
To read this chorus of comments visit http://www.essence.com/2013/04/08/intimacy-intervention-my-husband-uses-racial-slurs-during-sex/.
For Williams, “[a] white person coming at their Black partner with racial slurs without mutual negotiation, consent and ongoing assessment risks, at the very least alienating their partner in a way that is potentially irreversible.” See Mollena Williams, “Race Play: Hitting the Mainstream Media,” April 11, 2013, http://www.mollena.com/2013/04/12212/ (accessed June 2, 2013).
The list in order is as follows: racial slurs, someone else’s name, below-the belt-insults, baby terms, and gendered obscenities. See “Racial Slurs, and 4 Other Things You Shouldn’t Say During Sex,” Clutch Magazine, April 8, 2013, http://www.clutchmagonline.com/2013/04/racial-slurs-and-4-other-things-you-shouldnt-say-during-sex/comment-page-1/#comments (accessed September 8, 2013).
Feminista Jones, “[TALK LIKE SEX] Race Play Ain’t for Everyone,” Ebony, July 23, 2013, http://www.ebony.com/love-sex/talk-like-sex-race-play-aint-for-everyone-911#axzz2uMawpRG4 (accessed August 4, 2013).
Lori Adelman, “How Race Plays A Dynamic Role In S&M Culture,” The Grio, March 29, 2011, http://blackinamerica.com/cgi-bin/blog.cgi?blog_id=199491 (accessed April 5, 2012).
Readers can pick one of three answers: “Absolutely not. Our ancestors were raped and enslaved. That is sick,” “Possibly. I find the taboo intriguing,” or “Not sure. I’m uncomfortable thinking about it.” The poll results reveal the majority of readers are disgusted by race play; out of a total of 271 votes, 53 percent chose the first, 41.01 the middle, and 5.99 the later. See Kirstin West Savali, “Plantation S&M Fantasies: Would You Engage In Slave Sex Roll Play?” HelloBeautiful, November 6, 2013, http://hellobeautiful.com/2013/11/06/plantation-retreats-race-play/ (accessed December 9, 2013).
Chauncey Devega, “Playing with Sex, Power, and Race: Did You Know that There Are ‘Plantation Retreats’ Where Black People Go to Serve Their White ‘Masters’?” Indomitable: The Online Home of Essayist and Cultural Critic Chauncey Devega, August 12, 2012, http://www.chaunceydevega.com/2012/08/playing-with-sex-power-and-race-did-you.html (accessed August 29, 2012).
Audre Lorde and Susan Leigh Star, “Interview with Audre Lorde,” in Against Sadomasochism: A Radical Feminist Analysis, edited by Robin Ruth Linden, Darlene R. Pagano, Diana E. Russell, and Susan Leigh Star (East Palo Alto, CA: Frog in the Well, 1982), 68. Italics in original.
Paul H. Gebhard, “Fetishism and Sadomasochism,” in Dynamics of Deviant Sexuality: Scientific Proceedings of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, edited by Jules Masserman (New York: Grune and Stratton, 1969), 71. See also Thomas S. Weinberg, “Sadomasochism and the Sciences: A Review of the Sociological Literature,” in Sadomasochism: Powerful Pleasures, edited by Peggy J. Kleinplatz and Charles Moser (New York: Hawthorn Press, 2006), 17–40.
Lorde and Star, “Interview with Audre Lorde,” 70.
Tina Portillo, “I Get Real: Celebrating my Sadomasochistic Soul,” in Leatherfolk: Radical Sex, People, Politics, and Practice, edited by Mark Thompson (Los Angeles: Daedalus, 1991), 49.
Ibid., 50. Italics in original.
Ibid., 51.
This debate is far more complex than a binary of for/against BDSM yet such polarity effectively animates the feminist exchange and demonstrates that BDSM occupied an always-already controversial space in the field of women’s sexual praxis. For arguments on both “sides” see Samois, ed., Coming to Power: Writings and Graphics on Lesbian S/M (Boston, MA: Alyson, 1981) and Against Sadomasochism: A Radical Feminist Analysis, edited by Robin Ruth Linden, Darlene R. Pagano, Diana E. Russell, and Susan Leigh Star (East Palo Alto, CA: Frog in the Well, 1982).
Daisy Hernandez, “Playing with Race,” Colorlines: News For Action, December 21, 2004, http://colorlines.com/archives/2004/12/playing_with_race.html.
Plaid, “Interview.”
Black people within the BDSM community have labeled Williams a “‘self hating Black-woman,’ a ‘traitor to the race,’ ‘deeply disturbed and in need of serious counseling,’ and ‘unfit to be in the community.’” See Williams, “BDSM and Playing with Race,” 71.
The Black Fuhrer, “White on Black Race Play—My Views,” Youtube.com, October 26, 2009, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4W8f-xmCEE. Her name evokes not just the domination that she performs as a black femdom, but an analogous sexual political discourse regarding BDSM’s (and pornography’s) controversial eroticization of Nazism and fascism. Such debates, largely in the arena of feminist sexual ethics, reflect similar questions surrounding the historical legacies of violence (and pleasure) in our intimate lives. The scholarship on BDSM’s appropriation of Nazism and fascism is vast and diverse; for a sampling, see Irene Reti, “Remember the Fire: Lesbian Sadomasochism in a Post Nazi Holocaust World,” in Unleashing Feminism: Critiquing Lesbian Sadomasochism in the Gay Nineties, edited by Irene Reti (Santa Cruz, CA: HerBooks, 1993), 79–99; Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” in her Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980), 73–105; Susan Griffin, Pornography and Silence: Culture’s Revenge Against Nature (New York: Harper and Row, 1981); Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women (New York: Plume, 1981); Linda Wayne, “S/M Symbols, Fascist Icons, and Systems of Empowerment,” in The Second Coming: A Leatherdyke Reader, edited by Pat Califia and Robin Sweeney (Los Angeles: Alyson Publications, 1996); Susan Leigh Star, “Swastikas: The Street and the University,” in Against Sadomasochism, 131–36; Arnie Kantrowitz, “Swastika Toys,” in Leatherfolk: Radical Sex, People, Politics, and Practice, edited by Mark Thompson (Los Angeles: Daedalus, 1991), 193–209; and Lawrence D. Mass, “Nazis and Gay Men II: An Exchange with Arnie Kantrowitz,” in his Homosexuality and Sexuality: Dialogues of the Sexual Revolution, vol. 1 (New York: Harrington Park Press, 1990), 200–12.
The Black Fuhrer, interview with author, June 19, 2012.
Judith Butler, “Lesbian S & M: The Politics of Dis-Illusion,” in Against Sadomasochism: A Radical Feminist Analysis, edited by Robin Ruth Linden, Darlene R. Pagano, Diana E. Russell, and Susan Leigh Star (East Palo Alto, CA: Frog in the Well, 1982), 160–75; Sheila Jeffreys, “Sadomasochism,” Feminism and Sexuality: A Reader, edited by Stevi Jackson and Sue Scott (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 244.
Butler, “Lesbian S & M: The Politics of Dis-illusion,” 172.
Weinberg, “Sadomasochism and the Social Sciences: A Review of the Sociological and Social Psychological Literature,” in Sadomasochism: Powerful Pleasures, edited by Peggy J. Kleinplatz and Charles Moser (New York: Harrington Park Press, 2006), 33.
Margot Weiss, Techniques of Pleasure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 210–11. See also 219.
Danielle Lindemann, “BDSM as Therapy?” Sexualities 14, no. 2 (2011): 159. Lindemann also argues that clients experience race play as either a reproduction or subversion racial hierarchies. See Lindemann, “BDSM as Therapy?” 160–61.
Mollena Williams, “BDSM and Playing with Race,” in Best Sex Writing 2010, edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2010), 71.
Corie Hammers defines rape play as “a BDSM encounter wherein a mock rape is performed according to agreed-upon rules set out and negotiated beforehand.” See Corie Hammers, “Corporeality, Sadomasochism, and Sexual Trauma,” Body & Society 20, no. 2 (2014): 68–90. See Hammers, The Color of Kink.
Ibid., 69.
Ibid., 74.
Ibid., 70.
Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 67.
See ibid. One such example of BDSM’s somatic possibilities is the de-genitalization of pleasure wherein nongenital erotogenic and libidinal zones of the body are realized. BDSM, as Elizabeth Grosz suggests, “intensif[ies] particular bodily regions—the buttocks being whipped, the hand that whips, bound regions of the body in domination practices—not using pain as a displacement of or guise for the pleasure principle, but where pain serves as a mode of corporeal intensification”; Elizabeth Grosz, Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies (New York: Routledge, 1995), 199.
Michel Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, edited by Paul Rabinow (New York: The New Press, 1994), 165.
Plaid, “Interview.”
The racial epithets I recite here are examples derived from interviews with Black women who practice race play, both professionally and nonprofessionally.
V. M. Johnson, To Love, to Obey, to Serve: Diary of an Old Guard Slave (Fairfield, CT: Mystic Rose Books, 1999), 276.
Johnson’s article, “Playing With Racial Stereotypes The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name,” Black Leather in Color (1994), is reproduced on the weblog Leatherweb, http://www.leatherweb.com/raceplayh.htm (accessed April 5, 2012).
Danny Sisko, interview with author, October 2, 2013.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Hammonds, “Black (W)holes,” 135. Tim Dean and Darieck Scott (who analyzes race play in literary pornography) both discuss race-play pornography within the context of black–white gay male sexuality. See Darieck Scott, Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the Literary Imagination (New York: New York University Press, 2010); and Tim Dean, Unlimited Intimacy: Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). Many scholars have discussed the black top as an erotic icon in gay and BDSM pornography; see Dwight A. McBride, Why I Hate Abercrombie & Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality (New York: New York University Press, 2005); David Savran, Taking It Like a Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998); and Jarret Neal, “Let’s Talk about Interracial Porn,” Gay and Lesbian Review 20, no. 4 (2103): 23–26. For more about black women’s performance in race play porn see Jarret Neal, The Color of Kink.
Sisko’s race-play videos range from about 20 to 75 minutes in duration. He also sells his videos as clips on the amateur porn and fetish video site, wwwclips4sale.com. Currently he has 25 videos and 124 clips for sale. He does not have any statistical information on the demographics of his consumers but notes that a “very, very broad cross section of people buy my work.” Outside the United States, he sells most of his race-play porn in the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada. His custom race-play clients are “pretty much all men.” Because he only gets customers’ initials, not their full names, he is reluctant to make any assumptions about the gender of his customer base.
“Pudding Foot Video Introductory Post,” Pudding Foot Video’s Blog, October 29, 2012, http://puddingfootvideo.blogspot.com/2012_10_01_archive.html (accessed June 6, 2013).
Sisko, interview with author.
Tim Dean, Unlimited Intimacy Reflections on the Subculture of Barebacking (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 116.
Ibid., 118.
Sisko, interview with author.
Jay Wiseman, SM 101: A Realistic Introduction, second edition (San Francisco, Greenery Press, 1996); Staci Newmahr, Playing on the Edge: Sadomasochism, Risk, and Intimacy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011); Mark Cowling and Paul Reynolds, eds., Making Sense of Sexual Consent (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2004); Meg Barker and Darren Langdridge, eds., Safe, Sane, and Consensual: Contemporary Perspectives on Sadomasochism (Hampshire, UK: Palgrave, 2007); Margot Weiss, Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality (Duke University Press, 2011); Peggy Kleinplatz and Charles Moser, eds., Sadomasochism: Powerful Pleasures (New York: Routledge, 2006); Andrea Beckmann, “‘Sexual Rights’ and ‘Sexual Responsibilities’ Within Consensual ‘S/M’ Practice,” Making Sense of Sexual Consent (Ashgate: Aldershot, England, 2004), 195–96; and Cheryl Hanna, “Sex is not a Sport: Consent and Violence in Criminal Law,” Boston College Law Review 42, no. 2 (2001): 239–90.
Mollena Williams, “BDSM and Playing with Race,” in Best Sex Writing 2010, edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2010), 71.
Randall Kennedy, Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word (New York: Pantheon Books, 2002), 27, 31–32.
Darieck Scott, Extravagant Abjection, 236.
Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 47.
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1952), 112, 113.
Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 112.
Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle, 176.
Robyn Weigman, American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 9. For more on skin color’s historical function as a classification of race see Weigman, American Anatomies, 24, 31; Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963). For the historical shifts in race thinking, see Robert Bernasconi, “The Policing of Race Mixing: The Place of Biopower within the History of Racisms,” Bioethical Inquiry 7, no. 2 (2010): 205–16.
Weigman, American Anatomies, 33.
Samira Kawash, Dislocating the Color Line: Identity, Hybridity, and Singularity in African-American Narrative (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 130.
Joseph R. Roach, “Deep Skin: Reconstructing Congo Square,” in African American Performance & Theater History: A Critical Reader, edited by Harry Elam Jr. and David Krasner (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 102.
“Hortense Spillers, Interviewed by Tim Haslett.”
Toi Derricotte poetry reading, Pennsylvania State University, December 2, 2010.
Toni Morrison, Love (New York: Knopf, 2003), 77.
Ibid., 78. Morrison also writes about “emotional memory—what the nerves and skin remember as well as how it appeared”; Toni Morrison, What Moves at the Margin, edited by Carolyn C. Denard (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), 77.
Lynda Hart, Between the Body and the Flesh: Performing Sadomasochism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 10.
Ibid.
Amber Jamilla Musser, Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 20. See also Gilles Deleuze, “Coldness and Cruelty,” in Deleuze, Masochism, translated by Jean McNeil (New York: Zone Books, 1991).
Musser, Sensational Flesh, 20.
Andrea J. Ritchie, “Crimes against Nature: Challenging Criminalization of Queerness and Black Women’s Sexuality,” Loyola Journal of Public Interest Law 14, no. 2 (2013), 362.
Ibid., 366.
Joseph Fischel, “Against Nature against Consent: A Sexual Politics of Debility,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 24, no. 1 (2013): 57.
Mass incarceration of black bodies in the United States is a stark example of this systematic and institutionalized discipline. African Americans are incarcerated at nearly six times the rate of whites, more than 60 percent of prisoners in the United States are people of color, and black women are nearly three times more likely than white women to be incarcerated. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, “Criminal Justice Fact Sheet,” http://www.naacp.org/pages/criminal-justice-fact-sheet (accessed April 25, 2015); March Meuer, “The Changing Racial Dynamics of Women’s Incarceration,” February 27, 2013, http://www.sentencingproject.org/publications/the-changing-racial-dynamics-of-womens-incarceration; see also Southern Coalition for Social Justice, “Mass Incarceration of People of Color,” April 9, 2014, http://www.southerncoalition.org/mass-incarceration-people-color/. See also Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete? (New York: Seven Stories, 2003).
The African American Policy Forum, “Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality against Black Women,” July 2015, http://static1.squarespace.com/static/53f20d90e4b0b80451158d8c/t/55a810d7e4b058f342f55873/1437077719984/AAPF_SMN_Brief_full_singles.compressed.pdf (accessed April 25, 2015).
Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Black Girls Matter,” Ms. Magazine, April 2014, 27. See also Columbia Law School Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies and African American Policy Forum, Black Girls Matter: Pushed Out, Overpoliced and Underprotected Executive Summary, February 4, 2015, http://static1.squarespace.com/static/53f20d90e4b0b80451158d8c/t/54d21c9ee4b0535ab80a10ed/1423056030631/BlackGirlsMatter_ExecutiveSummary.pdf.
Joey L. Mogul, Andrea J. Ritchie, and Kay Whitlock, Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2011), xvii, italics added for emphasis.
Opal Tometi, quoted at The Fire This Time: Citizenship, Civil Rights, and the New Racism in the 21st Century, March 25, 2016, Foster Auditorium Paterno Library Penn State, State College, Pennsylvania.
Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction Volume 1 (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 63. Foucault demonstrates the important role that confession plays in the construction of sexuality wherein the “perverse” sexualities, including that of not just criminals, but children, the mentally ill, and homosexuals were obligated to “step forward and speak, to make the difficult confession of what they were;” See Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 39.
Danny Sisko, interview with author, October 2, 2013.
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Ariane Cruz
Ariane Cruz is an Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in African Diaspora Studies with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, & Sexuality. Her book, The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM, and Pornography (2016), is published with New York University Press.