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The feminist porn book is a collection of writings by feminist porn producers and scholars that seeks to engage, challenge, and reframe discussions around pornography. It highlights the emergence of a feminist porn movement that contests dominant representations of gender and sexuality, emphasizing ethical production practices and diverse female experiences. This volume also provides historical context for the feminist porn movement, illustrating its evolution and impact within larger feminist discourse.

The Feminist Porn Book is the first collection to bring together
writ-ings by feminist porn producers and feminist porn scholars
to engage, challenge, and re-imagine pornography. As
collaborating
editors of this volume, we are three porn professors and one
porn direc-
tor who have had an energetic dialogue about feminist politics
and por-
nography for years. In their criticism, feminist opponents of
porn cast
pornography as a monolithic medium and industry and make
sweep-
ing generalizations about its production, its workers, its
consumers, and
its effects on society. These antiporn feminists respond to
feminist por-
nographers and feminist porn professors in several ways. They
accuse
us of deceiving ourselves and others about the nature of
pornography;
they claim we fail to look critically at any porn and hold up all
porn as
empowering. More typically, they simply dismiss out of hand
our abil-
ity or authority to make it or study it. But The Feminist Porn
Book offers
arguments, facts, and histories that cannot be summarily
rejected, by
providing on-the-ground and well-researched accounts of the
politics
of producing pleasure. Our agenda is twofold: to explore the
emergence

and significance of a thriving feminist porn movement, and to
gather
some of the best new feminist scholarship on pornography. By
putting
our voices into conversation, this book sparks new thinking
about the
richness and complexity of porn as a genre and an industry in a
way that
helps us to appreciate the work that feminists in the porn
industry are
doing, both in the mainstream and on its countercultural edges.
So to begin, we offer a broad definition of feminist porn, which
will
be fleshed out, debated, and examined in the pieces that follow.
As both
an established and emerging genre of pornography, feminist
porn uses
sexually explicit imagery to contest and complicate dominant
represen-
tations of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, ability, age,
body type,
and other identity markers. It explores concepts of desire,
agency, power,
beauty, and pleasure at their most confounding and difficult,
including
pleasure within and across inequality, in the face of injustice,
and against
the limits of gender hierarchy and both heteronormativity and
homo-
Introduction: The Politics of Producing Pleasure
CONSTANCE PENLEY, CELINE PARREÑAS SHIMIZU,
MIREILLE MILLER-YOUNG, and TRISTAN TAORMINO

Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 9 11/14/12 2:24 PM
normativity. It seeks to unsettle conventional definitions of sex,
and
expand the language of sex as an erotic activity, an expression
of identity,
a power exchange, a cultural commodity, and even a new
politics.
Feminist porn creates alternative images and develops its own
aes-
thetics and iconography to expand established sexual norms and
dis-
courses. It evolved out of and incorporates elements from the
genres of
“porn for women,” “couples porn,” and lesbian porn as well as
feminist
photography, performance art, and experimental filmmaking. It
does
not assume a singular female viewer, but acknowledges multiple
female
(and other) viewers with many different preferences. Feminist
porn
makers emphasize the importance of their labor practices in
production
and their treatment of performers/sex workers; in contrast to
norms in
the mainstream sectors of the adult entertainment industry, they
strive
to create a fair, safe, ethical, consensual work environment and
often cre-
ate imagery through collaboration with their subjects.
Ultimately, femi-
nist porn considers sexual representation—and its production—a

site
for resistance, intervention, and change.
The concept of feminist porn is rooted in the 1980s—the height
of the
feminist porn wars in the United States. The porn wars (also
known as
the sex wars) emerged out of a debate between feminists about
the role of
sexualized representation in society and grew into a full-scale
divide that
has lasted over three decades. In the heyday of the women’s
movement
in the United States, a broad-based, grassroots activist struggle
over the
proliferation of misogynistic and violent representations in
corporate
media was superceded by an effort focused specifically on
legally ban-
ning the most explicit, and seemingly most sexist, media:
pornography.
Employing Robin Morgan’s slogan, “Porn is the theory, rape is
the prac-
tice,” antipornography feminists argued that pornography
amounted to
the commodification of rape. As a group called Women Against
Pornog-
raphy (WAP) began to organize in earnest to ban obscenity
across the
nation, other feminists, such as Lisa Duggan, Nan D. Hunter,
Kate Ellis,
and Carol Vance became vocal critics of what they viewed as
WAP’s ill-
conceived collusion with a sexually conservative Reagan
administration
and Christian Right, and their warping of feminist activism into

a moral
hygiene or public decency movement. Regarding antiporn
feminism as
a huge setback for the feminist struggle to empower women and
sexual
minorities, an energetic community of sex worker and sex-
radical activ-
ists joined anticensorship and sex-positive feminists to build the
founda-
tion for the feminist porn movement.1
The years that led up to the feminist porn wars are often
referred to as
the “golden age of porn,” a period from the early 1970s to the
early 1980s,
INTRODUCTION10
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 10 11/14/12 2:24 PM
marked by large budget, high-production-value feature films
that were
theatrically released. A group of female porn performers who
worked
during the golden age—including Annie Sprinkle, Veronica
Vera, Can-
dida Royalle, Gloria Leonard, and Veronica Hart—formed a
support
group (the first of its kind) called Club 90 in New York City. In
1984, the
feminist arts collective Carnival Knowledge asked Club 90 to
participate
in a festival called The Second Coming, and explore the
question, “Is

there a feminist pornography?”2 It is one of the first
documented times
when feminists publicly posed and examined this critical query.
That same year, Club 90 member Candida Royalle founded
Femme
Productions to create a new genre: porn from a woman’s point
of view.3
Her films focused on storylines, high production values, female
plea-
sure, and romance. In San Francisco, publishers Myrna Elana
and Debo-
rah Sundahl, along with Nan Kinney and Susie Bright, co-
founded On
Our Backs, the first porn magazine by and for lesbians. A year
later, Kin-
ney and Sundahl started Fatale Video to produce and distribute
lesbian
porn movies that expanded the mission that On Our Backs
began.4 In the
mainstream adult industry, performer and registered nurse Nina
Hartley
began producing and starring in a line of sex education videos
for Adam
and Eve, with her first two titles released in 1984. A parallel
movement
began to emerge throughout Europe in the 1980s and 90s.5
By the 1990s, Royalle and Hartley’s success had made an
impact on
the mainstream adult industry. Major studios, including Vivid,
VCA, and
Wicked, began producing their own lines of couples porn that
reflected
Royalle’s vision and generally followed a formula of softer,
gentler, more

romantic porn with storylines and high production values. The
growth
of the “couples porn” genre signified a shift in the industry:
female desire
and viewership were finally acknowledged, if narrowly defined.
This
provided more selection for female viewers and more
opportunities
for women to direct mainstream heterosexual films, including
Veron-
ica Hart and Kelly Holland (aka Toni English). Independent,
lesbian-
produced lesbian porn grew at a slower pace, but Fatale Video
(which
continued to produce new films until the mid-1990s) finally had
some
company in its micro-genre with work by Annie Sprinkle, Maria
Beatty,
and Shar Rednour and Jackie Strano. Sprinkle also made the
first porn
film to feature a trans man, and Christopher Lee followed with a
film
starring an entire cast of trans men.6
In the early 2000s, feminist porn began to take hold in the
United
States with the emergence of filmmakers who specifically
identified
themselves and/or their work as feminist including Buck Angel,
Dana
Dane, Shine Louise Houston, Courtney Trouble, Madison
Young, and
11INTRODUCTION
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 11 11/14/12 2:24 PM

Tristan Taormino. Simultaneously, feminist filmmakers in
Europe began
to gain notoriety for their porn and sexually explicit
independent films,
including Erika Lust in Spain; Anna Span and Petra Joy in the
UK; Emi-
lie Jouvet, Virginie Despentes, and Taiwan-born Shu Lea
Cheang in
France; and Mia Engberg, who created a compilation of feminist
porn
shorts that was famously funded by the Swedish government.
The modern feminist porn movement gained tremendous ground
in
2006 with the creation of The Feminist Porn Awards (FPAs).
Chanelle
Gallant and other staffers at sex-positive sex toy shop Good for
Her in
Toronto created the awards, which were open to films that met
one or
more of the following criteria:
(1) A woman had a hand in the production, writing, direction,
etc.
of the work; (2) It depicts genuine female pleasure; and/or (3) It
expands the boundaries of sexual representation on film and
chal-
lenges stereotypes that are often found in mainstream porn. And
of
course, it has to be hot! Overall, Feminist Porn Award winners
tend
to show movies that consider a female viewer from start to
finish.

This means that you are more likely to see active desire and
consent,
real orgasms, and women taking control of their own fantasies
(even
when that fantasy is to hand over that control).7
These criteria simultaneously assumed and announced a
viewership, an
authorship, an industry, and a collective consciousness.
Embedded in the
description is a female viewer and what she likely wants to
see—active
desire, consent, real orgasms, power, and agency—and doesn’t
want to
see: passivity, stereotypes, coercion, or fake orgasms. The
language is
broad enough so as not to be prescriptive, yet it places value on
agency
and authenticity, with a parenthetical nod to the possibility that
not
every woman’s fantasy is to be “in control.” While the
guidelines nota-
bly focus on a woman’s involvement in production, honored
filmmakers
run the gamut from self-identified feminist pornographers to
indepen-
dent female directors to mainstream porn producers; the broad
criteria
achieve a certain level of inclusiveness and acknowledge that a
range of
work can be read by audiences, critics, and academics as
feminist. The
FPA ceremony attracts and honors filmmakers from around the
world,
and each year since its inception, every aspect of the event has
grown,

from the number of films submitted to the number of attendees.
The
FPAs have raised awareness about feminist porn among a wider
audi-
ence and helped coalesce a community of filmmakers,
performers, and
fans; they highlight an industry within an industry, and, in the
process,
nurture this growing movement. In 2009, Dr. Laura Méritt
(Berlin) cre-
INTRODUCTION12
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 12 11/14/12 2:24 PM
ated the PorYes campaign and the European Feminist Porn
Award mod-
eled on the FPAs. Because the movement has had the most
momentum
in Europe and North America, this volume concentrates on the
scholar-
ship and films of Western nations. We acknowledge this
limitation: for
feminist porn to be a global project, more would need to be
done to
include non-Western scholars and pornographers in the
conversation.
The work we do now, as scholars and producers, could not exist
without early examinations of the history and context of
pornogra-
phy, including Caught Looking: Feminism, Pornography and
Censorship
by FACT, the Feminist Anti-Censorship Task Force. Linda

Williams’s
groundbreaking 1989 Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the
“Frenzy of the
Visible” opened the door for feminist scholars to productively
examine
pornography as film and popular culture, as a genre and
industry, tex-
tually, historically, and sociologically. Laura Kipnis’s 1996
Bound and
Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America
made the
strongest possible case that “the differences between
pornography and
other forms of culture are less meaningful than their
similarities.”8 Jane
Juffer’s 1996 At Home with Pornography: Women, Sex, and
Everyday
Life urged us to pay close attention not just to the hardcore porn
typi-
cally consumed by men but to the uses of pornography in the
daily lives
of ordinary women. Since 1974 the film magazine Jump Cut has
pub-
lished more original scholarship on porn from a pro-sex,
anticensorship
perspective than any other media journal and by leading figures
in the
field, including Chuck Kleinhans, Linda Williams, Laura
Kipnis, Rich-
ard Dyer, Thomas Waugh, Eithne Johnson, Eric Schaefer, Peter
Lehman,
Robert Eberwein, and Joanna Russ. More recently, Drucilla
Cornell’s
Feminism and Pornography, Linda Williams’s Porn Studies, and
Pamela
Church Gibson’s More Dirty Looks: Gender, Pornography and

Power
cemented the value of porn scholarship.9 The Feminist Porn
Book seeks
to further that scholarship by adding a significant, valuable
component:
feminists creating pornography.
In this book, we identify a forty-year-long movement of
thinkers,
viewers, and makers, grounded in their desire to use
pornography to
explore new sexualities in representation. The work we have
collected
here defies other feminist conceptions of sexuality on screen as
forever
marked by a threat. That threat is the specter of violence against
women,
which is the primary way that pornography has come to be seen.
Claim-
ing that explicit sexual representations are nothing but gender
oppres-
sion means that pornography’s portrayal of explicit sex acts is a
form
of absolute discipline and subjugation for women. Within this
frame,
women who watch, study, or work in pornography bear the mark
of
13INTRODUCTION
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 13 11/14/12 2:24 PM
false consciousness—as if they dabble in fire while ignoring the
risk of

burning.
The overwhelming popularity of women’s erotic literature,
illustrated
by the recent worldwide best seller, Fifty Shades of Grey by EL
James, and
the flourishing women’s fan fiction community from which it
emerged,
proves that there is great demand among women for explicit
sexual rep-
resentations. Millions of female readers embraced the Fifty
Shades of
Grey trilogy—which follows a young woman who becomes the
submis-
sive sexual partner to a dominant man—not for its depiction of
oppres-
sion, but for its exploration of erotic freedom. Women-authored
erotica
and pornography speaks to fantasies women actually have,
fantasies that
are located in a world where women must negotiate power
constantly,
including in their imaginations and desires. As with the criteria
for win-
ning a Feminist Porn Award, these books and the feminist porn
move-
ment show that “women are taking control of their own
fantasies (even
when that fantasy is to hand over control).”
With the emergence of new technologies that allow more people
than
ever to both create and consume pornography, the moral panic-
driven
fears of porn are ratcheted up once again. Society’s dread of
women who

own their desire, and use it in ways that confound expectations
of proper
female sexuality, persists. As Gayle Rubin shows, “Modern
Western
societies appraise sex acts according to a hierarchical system of
sexual
value.”10 Rubin maps this system as one where “the charmed
circle” is
perpetually threatened by the “outer limits” or those who fall
out of the
bounds of the acceptable. On the bottom of this hierarchy are
sexual acts
and identities outside heterosexuality, marriage, monogamy, and
repro-
duction. She argues that this hierarchy exists so as to justify the
privi-
leging of normative and constricted sexualities and the
denigration and
punishment of the “sexual rabble.”11 The Feminist Porn Book
showcases
precisely these punishable sex acts and identities that are
outside of the
charmed circle and proudly sides with the sexual rabble.
Spotlighting the
numerous ways people confront the power of sexuality, this
book paves
the way for exploring the varieties of what were previously
dismissed as
perversities. At the same time, feminist porn can also expose
what passes
for “normal” sexuality at the center of that charmed circle.
One of the unfortunate results of the porn wars was the fixing of
an antiporn camp versus a sex-positive/pro-porn camp. On one
side, a
capital P “Pornography” was a visual embodiment of the

patriarchy and
violence against women. On the other, Porn was defended as
“speech,”
or as a form that should not be foreclosed because it might some
day be
transformed into a vehicle for women’s erotic expression. The
nuances
INTRODUCTION14
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 14 11/14/12 2:24 PM
and complexities of actual lowercase “pornographies” were lost
in the
middle. For example, sex-positive thinking does not always
accom-
modate the ways in which women are constrained by sexuality.
But
the problem with antipornography’s assumption that sex is
inherently
oppressive to women—that women are debased when they have
sex on
camera—ignores and represses the sexuality of women. Hence,
for us,
sex-positive feminist porn does not mean that sex is always a
ribbon-tied
box of happiness and joy. Instead, feminist porn captures the
struggle to
define, understand, and locate one’s sexuality. It recognizes the
impor-
tance of deferring judgment about the significance of sex in
intimate and
social relations, and of not presuming what sex means for
specific peo-

ple. Feminist porn explores sexual ideas and acts that may be
fraught,
confounding, and deeply disturbing to some, and liberating and
empow-
ering to others. What we see at work here are competing
definitions of
sexuality that expose the power of sexuality in all of its
unruliness.
Because feminist porn acknowledges that identities are socially
situ-
ated and that sexuality has the power to discipline, punish, and
subju-
gate, that unruliness may involve producing images that seem
oppressive,
degrading, or violent. Feminist porn does not shy away from the
darker
shades of women’s fantasies. It creates a space for realizing the
contradic-
tory ways in which our fantasies do not always line up with our
politics
or ideas of who we think we are. As Tom Waugh argues,
participation in
pornography, in his case as spectator, can be a “process of
social identity
formation.”12 Indeed, social identities and ideas are formed in
the act of
viewing porn, but also in making and writing about it.
Strongly influenced by other social movements in the realm of
sexu-
ality, like the sex-positive, LGBT rights, and sex workers’
rights move-
ments, feminist porn aims to build community, to expand liberal
views
on gender and sexuality, and to educate and empower

performers and
audiences. It favors fair, ethical working conditions for sex
workers and
the inclusion of underrepresented identities and practices.
Feminist porn
vigorously challenges the hegemonic depictions of gender, sex
roles, and
the pleasure and power of mainstream porn. It also challenges
the anti-
porn feminist interpretive framework for pornography as
bankrupt of
progressive sexual politics. As a budding movement, it
promotes aes-
thetic and ethical practices that intervene in dominant sexual
represen-
tation and mobilize a collective vision for change. This erotic
activism,
while in no way homogeneous or consistent, works within and
against
the marketplace to imagine new ways to envision gender and
sexuality
in our culture.
But feminist porn is not only an emergent social movement and
an
15INTRODUCTION
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 15 11/14/12 2:24 PM
alternative cultural production: it is a genre of media made for
profit. Part
of a multibillion dollar business in adult entertainment media,
feminist

porn is an industry within an industry. Some feminist porn is
produced
independently, often created and marketed by and for
underrepresented
minorities like lesbians, transgender folks, and people of color.
But femi-
nist porn is also produced within the mainstream adult industry
by fem-
inists whose work is funded and distributed by large companies
such
as Vivid Entertainment, Adam and Eve, and Evil Angel
Productions.
As outliers or insiders (or both) to the mainstream industry,
feminists
have adapted different strategies for subverting dominant
pornographic
norms and tropes. Some reject nearly all elements of a typical
adult film,
from structure to aesthetics, while others tweak the standard
formula
(from “foreplay” to “come shot”) to reposition and prioritize
female sex-
ual agency. Although feminist porn makers define their work as
distinct
from mainstream porn, it is nonetheless viewed by a range of
people,
including people who identify as feminist and specifically seek
it out, as
well as other viewers who don’t. Feminist porn is gaining
momentum
and visibility as a market and a movement. This movement is
made up of
performers turned directors, independent queer producers,
politicized
sex workers, porn geeks and bloggers, and radical sex
educators. These

are the voices found here. This is the perfect time for The
Feminist Porn
Book.
In this book, we place academics alongside and in conversation
with
sex industry workers to bridge the divide between rigorous
research and
critique, and real world challenges and interventions. In Jill
Nagle’s semi-
nal work Whores and Other Feminists, she announced, “This
time . . .
sex worker feminists speak not as guests, nor as disgruntled
exiles, but
as insiders to feminism.”13 As in Nagle’s collection, here those
working in
the porn industry speak for themselves, and their narratives
illuminate
their complicated experiences, contradict one another, and
expose the
damaging one-dimensional rhetoric of the antiporn feminist
resurgence.
Like feminist porn itself, the diverse voices in this collection
challenge
entrenched, divisive dichotomies of academic and popular,
scholar and
sex worker, pornographer and feminist.
In the first section of the book, Making Porn, Debating Porn,
feminist
porn pioneers Betty Dodson, Candida Royalle, and Susie Bright
give a
grounded history of feminist porn as it emerged in the 1980s in
response
to the limiting sexual imagination of both mainstream porn and
anti-

porn feminism. Providing a window into the generative and
deeply con-
tested period of the sex wars, these feminist pornographers
highlight the
stakes and energies surrounding the birth of feminist porn
activism in
INTRODUCTION16
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 16 11/14/12 2:24 PM
the face of an antiporn feminism that ignored, misunderstood, or
vilified
them and their efforts. Bright’s account of watching her first
porn film,
sitting among suspicious men in a dark adult theater, sets the
stage for
how the invention of the VHS player shifted women’s
consumption of
porn and dramatically changed the marketplace.
In the last decade, a new war on porn has been resurrected and
rede-
fined by Gail Dines, Sheila Jeffries, Karen Boyle, Pamela Paul,
Robert
Jensen, and others. Feona Attwood and Clarissa Smith show
how this
resurgent antiporn movement resists theory and evidence, and
tenden-
tiously reframes the production and consumption of porn as a
mode of
sex trafficking, a form of addiction, or a public health problem
of epi-
demic proportions. Attwood and Smith’s work powerfully

exposes how
feminist porn remains challenged and often censored in
contemporary
popular discourse. Lynn Comella focuses on the consequences
of por-
nography going public. She examines one of the most
significant ele-
ments of the emergence of feminist porn: the growth of sex-
positive,
women-owned-and-run sex shops and a grassroots sex education
move-
ment that create space for women to produce, find, and consume
new
kinds of pornography.
Watching and Being Watched examines how desire and agency
inform pornographic performance, representation, and
spectatorship.
Sinnamon Love and Mireille Miller-Young explore the complex
position
of African American women as they watch, critique, and create
repre-
sentations of black women’s sexuality. Dylan Ryan and Jane
Ward take up
the concept of authenticity in porn: what it means, how it’s
read, and why
it is (or is not) crucial to feminist porn performance and
spectatorship.
Ingrid Ryberg looks at how public screenings of queer, feminist,
and les-
bian porn can create spaces for sexual empowerment. Tobi Hill-
Meyer
complicates Ryberg’s analysis by documenting who, until very
recently,
was left out of these spaces: trans women. Keiko Lane echoes
Ryberg’s

argument of the radical potential of queer and feminist porn and
offers
it as a tool for understanding and expressing desire among
marginalized
communities.
The intersection of feminist porn as pedagogy and feminist
pedago-
gies of porn is highlighted in Doing It In School. As porn
scholars, Con-
stance Penley and Ariane Cruz grapple with teaching and
studying porn
from two very different perspectives. Kevin Heffernan offers a
history of
sex instruction in film and contrasts it with work from Nina
Hartley and
Tristan Taormino in educational porn movies. Hartley discusses
how
she has used porn to teach throughout her twenty-five-plus
years in the
industry, and Taormino outlines her practice as a feminist
pornographer
17INTRODUCTION
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 17 11/14/12 2:24 PM
offering organic, fair-trade porn that takes into account the
labor of its
workers. Performer Danny Wylde documents his personal
experiences
with power, consent, and exploitation against a backdrop of
antiporn
rhetoric. Lorelei Lee offers a powerful manifesto that demands

we all
become better students in order to achieve a more nuanced,
discerning,
and thoughtful discourse about porn and sex.
Now Playing: Feminist Porn takes up questions of hyper-
corporeality, genderqueerness, transfemininity, feminized
masculinity,
transgressive racial performance, and disability. Jiz Lee
discusses how
they14 use their transgressive female body and genderqueer
identity to
defy categories. April Flores describes herself as “a fat Latina
with pale
skin, tattoos, and fire engine red hair,” and gives her unique
take on
being (and not being) a Big Beautiful Woman (BBW) performer.
Bobby
Noble explores the role of trans men and the interrogation of
mascu-
linities in feminist porn, while renowned trans male performer
Buck
Angel explodes sex/gender dichotomies by embodying his
identity of
a man with a vagina. Also concerned with the complex
representation
and performance of manhood in feminist pornography, Celine
Parreñas
Shimizu asks how race shapes the work of straight Asian male
performer
Keni Styles. Loree Erickson, a feminist pornographer and PhD
candi-
date, represents not only a convergence of scholarship and sex
work, but
one of the most overlooked subjects in pornography and one de-
erot-

icized in society: “queer femmegimp.” Emerging to speak from
group
identities previously missing or misnamed, the pieces in this
section are
by people who show the beauty of their desires, give shape to
their reali-
ties, reject and reclaim attributions made by others, and
describe how
they create sexual worlds that denounce inequality.
Throughout the book, we explore the multiple definitions of
feminist
porn, but we refuse to fix its boundaries. Feminist porn is a
genre and a
political vision. And like other genres of film and media,
feminist porn
shares common themes, aesthetics, and goals even though its
parameters
are not clearly demarcated. Because it is born out of a feminism
that is
not one thing but a living, breathing, moving creation, it is
necessar-
ily contested—an argument, a polemic, and a debate. Because it
is both
genre and practice, we must engage it as both: by reading and
analyzing
its cultural texts and examining the ideals, intentions, and
experiences
of its producers. In doing so, we offer an alternative to
unsubstantiated
oversimplifications and patronizing rhetoric. We acknowledge
the com-
plexities of watching, creating, and analyzing pornographies.
And we
believe in the radical potential of feminist porn to transform
sexual rep-

resentation and the way we live our sexualities.
INTRODUCTION18
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 18 11/14/12 2:24 PM
Notes
1. Robin Morgan, “Theory and Practice: Pornography and
Rape,” in Take Back the
Night, ed. Laura Lederer (New York: William Morrow, 1980),
139. On the porn wars
or sex wars, see Carolyn Bronstein, Battling Pornography: The
American Feminist
Antipornography Movement, 1976–1986 (Cambridge, MA:
Cambridge University
Press, 2011); Lisa Duggan and Nan D. Hunter, Sex Wars:
Sexual Dissent and Politi-
cal Culture (New York: Routledge, 1995); Carole Vance, ed.
Pleasure and Danger:
Exploring Female Sexuality (Boston and London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1984);
Pamela Church Gibson and Roma Gibson, eds., Dirty Looks:
Women, Pornography
and Power (London: British Film Institute, 1993); and the
documentary film by Har-
riet Koskoff, Patently Offensive: Porn Under Siege (1991).
2. Annie Sprinkle, Post-Porn Modernist: My 25 Years as a
Multimedia Whore (San
Francisco: Cleis Press, 1998), 149–51.
3. Annette Fuentes and Margaret Schrage, “Deep Inside Porn
Stars,” Jump Cut: A

Review of Contemporary Media 32 (1987): 41–43,
http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/
onlinessays/JC32folder/PornWomenInt.html.
4. Susie Bright, Big Sex, Little Death: A Memoir (Berkeley:
Seal Press, 2011) and
Susie Bright, “A History Of On Our Backs: Entertainment for
the Adventurous Les-
bian, The Original: 1984–1990,”
http://susiebright.blogs.com/History_of_OOB.pdf.
See also, “About Fatale Media,” accessed September 5, 2011,
http://www.fatalemedia.
com/about.html.
5. Feminists in Europe who used sexually explicit photography
and film to
explore themes like female pleasure, S/M, bondage, gender
roles, and queer desire
include Monika Treut (Germany), Cleo Uebelmann
(Switzerland), Krista Beinstein
(Germany and Austria), and Della Grace (England). In 1998,
Danish film produc-
tion company Zentropa wrote the Puzzy Power Manifesto that
outlined its guide-
lines for a new line of porn for women, which echoed Royalle’s
vision: their films
included plot-driven narratives that depicted foreplay and
emotional connection,
women’s pleasure and desire, and male and female bodies
beyond just their genitals.
See Laura Merrit, “PorYes! The European Feminist Porn
Movement,” [unpublished
manuscript] and Zentropa, “The Manifesto,” accessed January
29, 2012, http://www.
puzzypower.dk/UK/index.php/om-os/manifest.

6. In addition, we must acknowledge the early work of Sachi
Hamano, the first
woman to direct “pink films” (Japanese softcore porn). Hamano
directed more than
three hundred in the 1980s and 90s in order to portray women’s
sexual power and
agency, and challenge the representation of women as sex
objects only present to
fulfill men’s fantasies. See Virginie Sélavy, “Interview with
Sachi Hamano,” December
1, 2009,
http://www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk/features/2009/12/01/int
erview-
with-sachi-hamano/.
7. Feminist Porn Awards, accessed September 5, 2011,
http://goodforher.com/
feminist_porn_awards.
8. Laura Kipnis, Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the
Politics of Fantasy in
America (New York: Grove Press, 1996), viii.
9. See Feminist Anti-Censorship Task Force, Caught Looking:
Feminism, Pornog-
raphy and Censorship, 3rd ed. (New Haven, CT: LongRiver
Books, [1986] 1992);
Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of
the Visible” (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1989); Jane Juffer, At Home
with Pornography:
Women, Sex, and Everyday Life (New York: NYU Press, 1998);
Jump Cut: A Review
19INTRODUCTION

Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 19 11/14/12 2:24 PM
of Contemporary Media, eds. Julia Lesage, Chuck Kleinhans,
John Hess (http://www.
ejumpcut.org); Drucilla Cornell, ed., Feminism and
Pornography (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2000); Linda Williams, ed., Porn Studies
(Durham, NC: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 2004); and Pamela Church Gibson, ed., More
Dirty Looks: Gender, Por-
nography and Power (London: British Film Institute, 2004).
10. Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of
the Politics of Sexu-
ality,” in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed.
Carole S. Vance (Bos-
ton and London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 279.
11. Rubin, “Thinking Sex,” 280.
12. Tom Waugh, “ Homoerotic Representation in the Stag Film
1920–1940: Imag-
ining An Audience,” Wide Angle 14, no. 2 (1992): 4.
13. Jill Nagle, ed., Whores and Other Feminists (New York and
London: Routledge,
1997), 3. Emphasis in original text.
14. Lee’s favored gender-neutral pronoun.
INTRODUCTION20
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 20 11/14/12 2:24 PM

I
MAKING PORN, DEBATING PORN
I
MAKING PORN, DEBATING PORN
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 21 11/14/12 2:24 PM
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 22 11/14/12 2:24 PM
Artist, author, and sexologist Betty Dodson has been one of the
prin-
cipal advocates for women’s sexual pleasure and health for over
three
decades. After her first one-woman show of erotic art in 1968,
Dod-
son produced and presented the first feminist slide show of
vulvas
at the 1973 NOW Sexuality Conference in New York City where
she
introduced the electric vibrator as a pleasure device. For
twenty-five
years, she ran Bodysex Workshops, teaching women about their
bod-
ies and orgasms. Her first book, Liberating Masturbation: A
Meditation
on Selflove, became a feminist classic. Sex for One sold over a
million
copies. Betty and her young partner Carlin Ross continue to

provide
sex education at dodsonandross.com. This piece is excerpted
from
Dodson’s memoir, My Romantic Love Wars: A Sexual Memoir.
When it comes to creating or watching sexual material, women
are still debating what is acceptable to make, view, or enjoy.
The porn wars rage on while most guys secretly beat off to
whatever
turns them on. Meanwhile, far too many feminists want to
control or
censor porn. Most people will agree that sex is a very personal
matter,
but now that sexual imagery has become prevalent with Internet
porn
available on our computers 24/7, I’d say—like it or not—porn is
here to
stay.
The fact that pornography is a multibillion-dollar industry and
the
engine that first drove the Internet proves that most people want
to see
images of sex whether they admit it openly or not. After
women’s sex-
ual liberation got underway in the sixties and seventies, women
turned
against each other to debate whether an image was erotic or
porno-
graphic. Unfortunately this endless and senseless debate
continues today.
My first attempt at drawing sex was a real eye opener. In 1968,
I had
my first one-woman show of erotic art titled The Love Picture
Exhibition.

The experience raised my awareness of the many people who
enjoyed
seeing beautiful drawings of couples having intercourse and
oral sex.
Porn Wars
BETTY DODSON
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 23 11/14/12 2:24 PM
With my second show—of masturbating nudes—all hell broke
loose.
The show not only ended my gallery affiliation, but it was then
that I
became aware of how ignorant most Americans were about
human sex-
uality. My six-foot drawing of a masturbating woman holding
an electric
vibrator next to her clitoris—an erect one at that—might have
been the
first public appearance of the clitoris in recent history. It was
1970—the
year I became a feminist activist determined to liberate
masturbation.
In 1971, I had my first encounter with censorship when
Evergreen
magazine published images of my erotic art. A Connecticut
district
attorney threatened to issue an injunction if the magazine was
not
removed from the local public library. My friend and former
lover Grant

Taylor drove us to Connecticut to meet with the DA. His main
objection
was my painting of an all-women orgy. He pounded his fist on
the page
spewing out the words, “Lesbianism is a clear sign of
perversion!”
When the meeting ended, the press descended on me. I don’t
recall
what I said except that sex was nice and censorship was dirty
and that
kids were never upset by my art, but their parents often were. A
few peo-
ple complimented me on my words and art. One woman said she
found
my art “disgusting and pornographic,” but that I had a right to
show it.
Her comment was the most upsetting. Driving home, I remember
ask-
ing Grant how anyone could call my beautifully drawn nudes
disgust-
ing: “Why can’t people distinguish between art that’s erotic and
art that’s
pornographic?”
“Betty, it’s all art,” he said. “Beauty or pornography will
always be in
the eyes of the beholder.” He went on to warn me against
making the
mistake of trying to define either one. It was an intellectual trap
that led
to endless debates with no agreements in sight. After thinking
about it,
I knew he was right! That night I decided to forget about
defining erotic
art as being superior to pornographic images. Instead, I

embraced the
label “pornographer.” All at once, I felt exhilarated by the
thought that I
could become America’s first feminist pornographer.
The next day, I got out my dictionary and found the word
pornography
originated from the Greek pornographos: the writings of
prostitutes. If
society treated sex with any dignity or respect, both
pornographers and
prostitutes would have status, which they obviously had at one
time. The
sexual women of antiquity were the artists and writers of sexual
love.
Since organized religions have made all forms of sexual
pleasure evil, no
modern equivalent exists today. As a result, knowledge of the
esteemed
courtesans was lost, buried in our collective unconscious,
suppressed by
the authoritarian organized religions that consistently excluded
women.
The idea of reclaiming women’s sexual power by creating
pornogra-
BETTY DODSON24
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 24 11/14/12 2:24 PM
phy was a heady concept. Feminists could restore historical
perspectives
of the ancient temple priestesses of Egypt, the sacred

prostitutes, the
Amazons of Lesbos, and the royal courtesans of the Sumerian
palaces.
Sexual love was probably what people longed for, so I gave
myself per-
mission to break the next thousand rules of social intimidation
aimed
at controlling women’s sexual behavior. I did just that and
continue to
do so to this day. In order for women to progress, we must
question
all authority, be willing to challenge any rule aimed at
controlling our
sexual behavior, and avoid doing business as usual, thereby
maintaining
the status quo.
After I fully enjoyed the United States’ brief outbreak of sexual
free-
doms that began at the end of the 1960s, my glorious group sex
par-
ties allowed me to realize how many women were faking
orgasms. So
in 1971, I designed the Bodysex Workshops to teach women
about sex
through the practice of masturbation. It was sexual
consciousness-rais-
ing at its best as we went around the circle with each woman
answering
my question: “How do you feel about your body and your
orgasm?” We
also eliminated genital shame by looking at our own vulvas and
each
other’s. Finally, we learned to harness the power of the electric
vibra-
tor with the latest techniques for self-stimulation during our all-

women
masturbation circles.
The Bodysex Workshops continued over the next twenty-five
years.
They took a lot out of me; I ended up sacrificing my hip joints
to women’s
sexual liberation! These groups also offered unique fieldwork in
female
masturbation, a subject rarely researched in academia, and I
ended up
with a PhD in sexology.
In 1982 at the age of fifty-three, I joined a support group of
lesbian
and bisexual women who were into consensual S/M. Perhaps I
had
avoided this small subculture because I suspected there was
something
unhealthy about mixing pain with pleasure. Instead of finding
sick, con-
fused women, I discovered a group of feminists who were
enjoying the
most politically incorrect sex imaginable. One of our first big
mistakes
as feminists was to establish politically correct sex, defined as
the ideal of
love between equals with both partners remaining monogamous.
For heterosexual women, politically correct sex put us in the
age old
bind of trying to change men by getting them to shape up and
settle
down. That meant men had to also practice monogamy—a
project that
has consistently failed for centuries. Most men are hardwired to

have
multiple sex partners while women who want children need a
more last-
ing and secure relationship in order to raise a family. Those of
us who
remained single also wanted multiple sex partners. Our efforts
to expand
25PORN WARS
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 25 11/14/12 2:24 PM
the idea of feminist sex were censored by mainstream feminists
and the
media at every turn.
The night of my first S/M meeting, I entered the small
apartment and
as I looked around the room, I didn’t see one familiar face
among these
younger women. My internal dialogue was like a broken record:
“They’re
probably all lesbian separatists and the minute they find out I’m
bisexual,
they won’t let me join.” I’d been discriminated against so many
times in
the past that the chip on my shoulder weighed heavily. As I sat
there
wallowing in my anticipated rejection, I visually fell into lust
with every
woman there. What a marvelous variety from stone butch to
lipstick les-
bians. When the meeting began, each woman introduced herself,
then

stated whether she was dominant or submissive, and said a few
words
about how she liked to play. The closer they got to me, the
faster the
butterflies in my belly fluttered. When all eyes were on me, I
defensively
said, “I’m a bisexual lesbian who’s into self-inflicted pleasure!”
Several women smiled. One asked how I inflicted my pleasure,
and
when I said it was with an electric vibrator, the room broke up
laughing.
A group of lesbian and bisexual feminists who were willing to
explore
kinky sex was my fondest dream come true and within no time,
I was
right at home.
Gradually I began to understand that all forms of sex were an
exchange of power, whether it was conscious or unconscious.
My focus
had been on the pleasure in sex, not the power. The basic
principle of
S/M was that all sexual activity between one or more adults had
to be
consensual and required a verbal negotiation, followed by an
agreement
between the players. All my years of romantic sex, when we
tried to read
each other’s minds, were basically nonconsensual sex. Romantic
love
is one of the most damaging concepts on the planet for
women—little
girls raised on Disney’s Sleeping Beauty are taught to wait for a
prince to
awaken them.

By the time I was in my midthirties and sport fucking, I learned
to
take control and be a top as a means of getting what I wanted.
But none
of these sexual activities were ever discussed or agreed upon
openly. As I
looked at sexuality in terms of this power dynamic, it felt like I
was wak-
ing from a deep sleep.
That spring, Dorothy, the founding mother of our group, invited
me
to join her at a conference organized by Women Against
Pornography
(WAP). Her commitment to feminism was contagious and she
was aware
of all the current happenings in the movement. By then I had
dropped
out of feminism so I was learning a lot from Dorothy, a thirty-
year-old
radical lesbian who had been trashed by other feminists because
of her
BETTY DODSON26
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 26 11/14/12 2:24 PM
S/M sexual preferences. As a post-menopausal hedonist in my
fifties, I
looked forward to my first public feminist forum dressed as a
leather
dyke.

The two of us trooped into the WAP conference arm in arm,
wearing
boots and jeans with large silver studded belts under our black
leather
jackets—high-visibility leather dykes sitting in the front row
just to the
left of the podium. The women glared at us, signaling that we
were out
of place, while we wore our political incorrectness like a badge
of honor.
At the time, I had difficulty taking this group seriously. After
femi-
nists had fought against censoring information about birth
control,
abortion, sexuality, and lesbianism, the idea that there was now
a group
that wanted to censor pornography seemed absurd. Surely WAP
was
only a small percentage of feminists, but Dorothy said they
were gain-
ing strength and growing in numbers. Ms. magazine had
contributed
money to WAP, and under pressure from members, NOW
(National
Organization for Women) had approved a resolution that
condemned
pornography without defining it. Several local NOW chapters
actively
supported WAP. Censorship was coiled like a rattlesnake ready
to strike
at our freedom and poison people’s enjoyment of masturbating
while
looking at pictures of sex. Unbelievable!
The large meeting room at NYU was packed with women only—

nearly a thousand had assembled. A red cloth banner with big
black
letters stretched across the back of the stage: WOMEN
AGAINST PORNOG-
RAPHY. That had to cost a pretty penny. There was also a first-
rate sound
system, along with expensive printed flyers—all done very
profession-
ally. This was no makeshift feminist conference where we had
mimeo-
graphed handouts. Dorothy leaned in close and asked, “When
have you
ever seen a conference dealing with women’s issues that had
this kind
of money behind it?” We both agreed that WAP most likely had
been
secretly funded by the CIA, the Christian Right, or both. The
Good Old
Boys were setting us up again—divide and conquer!
Drifting into a reverie, I thought about the 1973 NOW Sexuality
Conference. I remembered how brave we’d been, questioning
sex roles
and sexual taboos, exploring female sexual pleasure, and daring
to create
better sex lives for women with information and education.
We’d been so
sex positive and filled with excitement that we would change
the world.
How, in just ten short years, could we have ended up against
pornog-
raphy, which put feminists in the same bed as Christians
preaching the
gospel?
The WAP conference featured many speakers. Each gave a

brief, per-featured many speakers. Each gave a brief, per-
sonal history, and nearly every one had a horror story of sexual
abuse at
27PORN WARS
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 27 11/14/12 2:24 PM
the hands of a father, brother, husband, lover, or boss. There
were stories
of rape, battered wives, child abuse, harassment, and forced
prostitution.
Dorothy was busy taking notes while I sat there stunned by the
realiza-
tion that I was in the midst of an orgy of suffering, angry
women. Each
speaker’s words and tears were firing up the group into a
unified rage.
Emotionalism without intellect from victims without power was
how
lynch mobs and nationwide hate groups were formed—the basic
strat-
egy of fascism, I concluded with a shiver.
It saddened me to hear how these women had suffered, and I
would
never deny that their pain was real. For most of them, sex had
truly been
a misery or a violent trauma. No sane person was for rape or
incest, but
this one-dimensional attack on images of sex was totally
unacceptable.
Blaming pornography as the sole cause of women’s sexual
problems was

ludicrous. Why weren’t they going after big problems like war,
poverty,
organized religion, and sexual ignorance due to the total
absence of
decent sex education in our school system?
An attractive blonde in her midthirties stood at the mic. With
her
rage barely controlled, she described her childhood sexual
abuse. Every
Saturday when her mother pulled out of the driveway to do the
grocery
shopping, her father got out his “disgusting, filthy pictures” and
forced
her to perform an “unnatural act.” She didn’t say what it was,
but the
audience was surely fantasizing an adult penis penetrating an
eleven-
year-old girl. The whole room was emotionally whipped up into
a rage
with their own private images of child rape, while at the same
time, rev-
eling in the awfulness of it.
The speaker went on to blame the entire incident on
pornography!
There was no mention of society’s denial of sexual expression,
especially
masturbation. Maybe the father was a devout Catholic who
knew he’d
go to hell if he took hold of his own penis. How about the
nuclear fam-
ily taking some of the blame with its restrictive sexual mores?
But none
of these other possibilities occurred to her. She was adamant
that “dirty

pictures” had been the sole cause of her incest.
The WAP meeting ended with an open mic session, and within
moments, emotional chaos broke loose. Women were crying and
screaming hysterically, so we got out fast. Once outside, we
took a deep
breath to release our own tension. We both felt drained.
Although we
disagreed with WAP, they had a right to their opinions even
though they
didn’t respect our rights. We remained sexual outlaws.
The 1980s also ushered in AIDS, and the Reagan government
was
slow to respond to this looming crisis. How perfect: AIDS
ended casual
sex and sent the population back into committed relationships
and
BETTY DODSON28
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 28 11/14/12 2:24 PM
monogamy—the glue that binds. Child sexual abuse was
rampant and
getting national attention, while no one paid any attention to
how pov-
erty was really hurting our kids. Finally women were being
heard, but it
was only half the conversation. We were not getting ahead by
avoiding
central issues—and we certainly were not liberating our
sexualities.

During this time, women showed up at my workshops and broke
down in tears as they began to talk about being sexually abused.
Each
time, I would ask them to leave, with the explanation that my
groups
were about exploring pleasure, not sexual abuse. They needed to
see a
therapist and then come back for a Bodysex Workshop later on.
Some
women accused me of having a hard heart, but I simply stayed
on mis-
sion of liberating women’s independent orgasms so we could
come back
to life—actually and fully.
My Bodysex Workshops were well received, so I decided to
film one.
You just can’t beat the moving image; it’s an opportunity to
give people
images of what sex might be. The best way for us to learn is to
find out
what’s going on with everyone else. My girlfriend and I used a
home
video camera, and it took me two years to edit it on two clunky
tape
decks. My films were automatically labeled porn, because if you
see a
pussy or a penis, it’s porn. But you can’t teach sex without
getting explicit,
so, again, I found myself embracing the role of pornographer.
Before the Internet, every time I said “masturbation,” it either
sent
folks into gales of laughter or provoked embarrassed looks as
they
quickly changed the subject. My articles for magazines were

canceled
and interviews for television ended up on the cutting room
floor. The
bottom line of sexual repression is the prohibition of childhood
mastur-
bation. This humble activity is the basis for all of human
sexuality. The
Internet was the first place in my long career that I was not
censored.
My old lover Grant ran my first website. At the end, he was
classified
as legally blind, and held a magnifying glass, with his nose an
inch from
the screen. When I joined forces with law school grad and cyber
geek
Carlin Ross, we created a new website. I believe that once Grant
met
Carlin, he was able to leave his disintegrating body. He made it
to his
eighty-sixth birthday and died proud with his boots on, with the
next
upload for my website sitting on his hard drive. I miss him
terribly to this
day. We had the most passionate love/hate affair of the century.
Carlin and I offer free, accessible sex information, both visual
and
written, to women and men. We call the clips where we show
sexual
skills, “The New Porn.” Sex education must be entertaining, not
aca-
demic, dry, boring, or stilted. I’m not afraid of the word porn. If
people
29PORN WARS

Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 29 11/14/12 2:24 PM
are going to call my explicit sex education porn, then I say
embrace the
word. Be the new porn, be the porn you want to see. While it’s
true that
a lot of pornography out there is shitty for the most part, it still
works:
it gets people hot. The biggest turn on for me is to have a fully
orgasmic
partner, not someone pretending or playing. We all know the
real deal
when it’s happening—authentic orgasms are unmistakable. I’m
a sex-
positive feminist, liberating women one orgasm at a time.
Our site represents a new feminist sexual politics that’s well
beyond
any victimhood of rape and sexual abuse. We represent
orgasmic
feminism—a new movement of women who have taken control
of our
sex lives, and who dare to design them in any way we choose
whether
we’re straight, bi, lesbian, or a combination, and we can enjoy
our bodies
in any way we desire.
Recently, I love answering sex questions for free from all kinds
of
young, middle-aged, and older women, as well as boys and men.
I’m
learning about the concerns and sexual problems of Americans

and
people from around the world. Let me tell you: sexuality is in a
lot of
trouble. Young women today do not know what, when, where,
or how to
have an orgasm. Many of them have grown up without
childhood mas-
turbation, thanks to the growing influence of religion and the
censor-
ship of sexual information. Without access to proper sexual
information,
porn has been their primary form of sex education. The issue
here is that
the most readily available porn is basically entertainment for
men. One
young woman said she was sure she’d never had an orgasm
because she’d
never ejaculated. Unfortunately, the G-spot has become the new
name
for vaginal orgasms. It’s unfortunate because a very small
percentage of
women squirt when they experience an orgasm. I wrote my first
book
to help those few women know that this response was natural.
Now we
have a nation of young women trying to learn how to ejaculate.
Well-meaning friends suggest that I should drop the word
“feminist,”
and perhaps the entire concept, because feminism is so “old
hat.” Young
women today have lost interest in feminism because they
believe it’s
antisex and that all feminists are man haters. Let me tell you
something,
girlfriends. That’s exactly what the powers-that-be want us to

think and
do. Feminism has become a dirty word, and I want to save it, to
revive it.
I want feminism to signify a woman who knows what she wants
in bed
and gets it. Guys will be saying, “I’ve got to find me a feminist
to fuck!”
At eighty-two, I’ve decided to make a documentary based on the
Bodysex Workshops. In a sense, I’m going back to the
beginning, to
document the heart of my work. The all-women’s masturbation
circle is
BETTY DODSON30
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 30 11/14/12 2:24 PM
my sewing circle. “How do you feel about your body and your
orgasm?”
is a question still worth asking and the resulting conversation is
one still
worth having. We are there to listen to and honor each woman’s
personal
story. We celebrate our independent orgasms without a partner
or with
one.
This time around, it will be captured professionally with a film
crew
and better quality lighting and sound. I want to document this
with the
esteem it deserves, so I can leave the planet happy in the
knowledge

that this incredible workshop, designed by the early women who
first
attended, will be captured for all to see. It will be my most
brilliant work
of art, my Sistine Chapel. Now I have to have the courage to be
an old
Crone on film. I’m willing to set an example for seniors who are
giving
up on sex way too soon. After all, my ageing body can still see,
hear, eat,
drink, laugh, talk, walk, sing, dance, shit, masturbate, fuck,
create, draw,
write, and have orgasms!
In my heart, I believe that women and girls will not be self-
motivated
and self-possessed if they cannot give themselves orgasms. If
they rely on
someone else for sexual pleasure, they are potential victims of
whatever
society is pushing as “normal.” Masturbation is a meditation on
self-love.
It is essential. Sex-positive feminism is alive and well and we
will change
the world. It’s just going to take a bit longer than expected.
Viva la Vulva!
31PORN WARS
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Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory
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Pornographic encounters and interpretative
interventions: Vanessa del Rio: Fifty Years of
Slightly Slutty Behavior
Juana María Rodríguez
To cite this article: Juana María Rodríguez (2015) Pornographic
encounters and interpretative
interventions: Vanessa del Rio: Fifty Years of Slightly Slutty
Behavior, Women & Performance: a
journal of feminist theory, 25:3, 315-335, DOI:
10.1080/0740770X.2015.1124669
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Pornographic encounters and interpretative interventions:
Vanessa del
Rio: Fifty Years of Slightly Slutty Behavior
Juana María Rodríguez*
Gender and Women’s Studies & Performance Studies,
University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley,
CA, United States of America
Using the auto/biography, Vanessa del Rio: Fifty Years of
Slightly Slutty Behavior
as the primary text, this paper investigates how an embodied
understanding of
race and class alters our understanding of gendered experiences
of violence

and pleasure. It asks: what happens when the life experiences of
an aging
Afro-Latina porn star are positioned at the very heart of
feminist investigations
into the relationship between sexual experience and knowledge
production? In
the process, this paper reflects on how images and text function
as complicated
triggers for the attachments, identifications, desires, and
traumas of our own
corporeal embodiments and sexual histories.
Keywords: pornography; Latina; sexuality; sexual violence;
auto/biography;
sexual pleasure; masochism
The book Vanessa del Rio: Fifty Years of Slightly Slutty
Behavior (2010), defies understand-
ings of literary genres and racialized sexualities, demanding the
kind of lingering in uncer-
tainty that latinidad itself registers.1 This chronicle of the life
of an Afro-Latina adult-film
icon simultaneously intimates and distorts the conventions of
autobiography, documentary,
testimonio, and pornography to unsettle assumptions about
Latina sexuality and feminist
interpretive practices. It is a mammoth tome, weighing in at
over six pounds and containing
326 glossy pages.2 It includes images from adult magazines,
movie posters, films, and
photographs from her private collection; text transcribed from
interviews conducted both
on and off camera; memorabilia spanning her childhood to the
present day; and a 140-
minute DVD that includes an on-camera interview, a few “day-
in-the-life” scenes that

follow the contemporary Vanessa del Rio through the streets of
her New York, and numer-
ous clips from her many pornographic films.
Whether or not the name Vanessa del Rio is familiar to you, it
already registers a certain
proximity to the worlds in which race and pornography
intersect.3 The only child of a Puerto
Rican mother and a philandering Afro-Cuban father, Vanessa
was born Ana María Sanchez
on 31 March 1952. She grew up on 111th Street in Harlem and
attended Catholic school
before leaving home in her teens to venture out into the New
York City of the 1970s, a
© 2016 Women & Performance Project Inc.
*Email: [email protected]
Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 2015
Vol. 25, No. 3, 315–335,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0740770X.2015.1124669
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paid to play: lips and nails done in crimson red, makeup always
flawless, cleavage and
shoes always poised to attract attention, attesting to Marcia
Ochoa’s assertion that
“glamour allows its practitioners to conjure a contingent space
of being and belonging”
(2014, 89). In every role she was given, del Rio performed star,
even before she was one,
conjuring an alternate universe in which a young Afro-Latina
from Harlem could become
an international porn sensation. Before retiring from adult films
in 1985 in response to her
own fears of AIDS, her fame was undisputed and she did a
series of pornographic films in
which she simply played herself.5 After her retirement, many of
her previous performances
began to be edited together and reissued as compilations, and
previous films were retitled
to profit from her popularity.6 Today she hosts her own X-rated
porn site and e-Bay site spe-
cializing in signed collectibles. As a public figure, she
frequently appears at adult conventions
to sign photos and books and has also appeared in minor
television roles and in a few hip-hop
music videos. And 30 years after she last appeared in an adult
feature, she remains an icon. 7
This paper, however is not about the history of racialized
pornography or an analysis of
how race, gender, and sexuality come together in these films: I
will leave those invaluable aca-
demic efforts in the capable hands of scholars like Mireille
Miller-Young (2014), author of A
Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography, or
Jennifer Nash’s (2014) imprint The
Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography.8

Instead, I am interested in
older, less precise questions that have preoccupied feminist
academics for generations:
How do we understand experience? How does an embodied
understanding of race, sexuality,
and gender as performative practices alter what we might know
about experience, and how
does an engagement with aesthetics complicate how we might
feel about it? More to the
point, what happens when the life experiences of an aging
bisexual Afro-Latina porn star
are positioned at the very heart of feminist investigations into
the relationship between experi-
ence and knowledge production? Unlike other textual accounts
of life stories, or cinematic
biographical recreations, here the graphic presence of the
contemporary speaking subject
imposes its own interpretive power through the visualization of
documentary. But in combin-
ing biographical documentary with pornography, something else
is also ignited.
Testimonio, documentary, porn
It is well understood that visual images have the uncanny ability
to transfer affect, from the
moment of their production to the moment of their reception. In
the pornographic image,
316 J.M. Rodríguez
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when what is depicted is sex, that affective charge is activated
through its encounter with
our own sexual archives of feeling. In this essay, I want to
allow a space to register what
that affective difference might open up or foreclose, not about
the text per se but about
the very act of interpretation. Thinking experience through
queer latinidad, through the
life story of a porn star, through the shifting textual,
photographic, and cinematic traces
of racialized sexuality, accentuates the buried tensions between
lived experiences and the
theories we might use to account for them. Equally as
intimidating, it requires that we
acknowledge how our own racialized archives of feeling, of
gendered embodiment, and
sexualized attachments animate and unsettle our scholarly
practices.

It was these questions that led me to a consideration of
testimonio as an analytical lens,
that hybridized genre that captures elements of the legal
discourse of testimony, the African
American tradition of testifying, and the particularly Latin
American genre of life story as
evidence in the public claim for human rights.9 Reading Fifty
Years as testimonio makes
salient the racialized sexual politics that undergird del Rio’s
story, as it illuminates
aspects of the text that complicate an already complicated
genre. Following John Beverly’s
foundational work on testimonio, we might argue that as a
woman of color in the sex indus-
try – in addition to appearing in pornographic films, del Rio
also worked as a stripper,
escort, and streetwalker – her life story exists at the margins of
literature, excluded from
authorized representations of Latina sexuality. Her sex-laden
text certainly functions as
an “extraliterary or even antiliterary form of discourse”
(Beverly 1993, 84). Furthermore,
like other notable testimonios, del Rio could be said to use her
life story to promote a
fuller understanding of a community and a history that has been
erased from public dis-
course, to make a claim for the human rights of sex workers.
And her text is replete with
instances of sexual violence, police harassment, and abuse that
evidence this as an
urgent political project. Like many working in the various
sectors of the sex industry, in
this text del Rio recounts the numerous times she was arrested
and jailed, and speaks of
the hypocrisy, futility, and harm of laws that criminalize

consensual adult sex work.10
Similar to other testimonios, del Rio’s life story is narrated in
the familiar “as told to”
format. However, rather than an anthropologist or an
enlightened intellectual, the inter-
viewer, editor, and transcriber in this case, Dian Hanson, is
herself a longtime regular in
the adult-publishing world, having worked not only as an
actress in adult films, but also
as the editor of such titles as Juggs and Big Butt magazines and
now as the editor for
Taschen’s Sexy Books series. Taschen, a German publisher that
specializes in art, architec-
ture, and pop culture is best known for producing over-sized
collector-edition volumes by
such notable photographers as Annie Leibovitz and Helmut
Newton, and coffee-table stan-
dards of French Impressionists, and mid-century design. Their
Sexy Books catalogue speaks
to the mainstreaming of pornography and includes books on
Tom of Finland (Hanson 2009),
Japanese bondage, and the Big Book of Breasts (Hanson 2011),
which comes complete with
3-D glasses. This framing within the world of publishing
situates del Rio’s text, not as tes-
timonio or even autobiography, but as art, as visual object, as
living-room adornment. Here,
rather than 3-D glasses, the 140-minute DVD included with 50
Years (Figure 1) functions as
its special marketing feature that augments the static
photographic images of the text.
Like some other Taschen art books, Vanessa del Rio: Fifty
Years of Slightly Slutty Be-
havior is available in multiple formats: a trade version that sells

for US$59.99, and two
limited-edition formats, one that retails for US$700, and
another that goes for an astounding
Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 317
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US$1800 and includes a signed print and a chance to spend an
evening with the star herself.
All include over 300 glossy, image-rich pages documenting
Vanessa’s life on and off
screen. The book and the DVD cover much of the same material,
and many of the taped
interviews are unfaithfully transcribed in the book, revealing

the seams of post-production
editing.11 In both, del Rio narrates her childhood as a young
Latina growing up in Harlem,
her life in the white-dominated adult-film industry, and her
current career as a pop-culture
icon. And both contain sizable chunks of what can only be
described as hardcore pornogra-
phy. Unapologetically sexual, over the course of the project del
Rio describes the countless
adventures and misadventures of her life in the sex industry.
She also opines on how to
deliver a great blowjob, the current state of the porn industry,
and the hypocrisy of the
Catholic Church. What remains constant throughout the text is
del Rio’s unfaltering
investment in shaping the interpretation of her life story,
particularly with regards to her
sexual agency.
Figure 1. Book Cover with sticker announcing “140-min DVD.”
318 J.M. Rodríguez
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Authorizing subjects
In 50 Years of Slightly Slutty Behavior, del Rio is presented as
both a visual object, whose
body and sexuality is available for our ocular consumption, and
as an authorizing subject,
who is enlisted to interpret the narratives she herself provides.
These shifts between one
kind of visual encounter – porn, and another – the speaking
subject of documentary,
require that viewers who might wish to revel unproblematically
in the pornographic gaze
bear witness to the stories of racism, violence, criminalization,
and racialized feminine
desire that also form part of the narrative.12 Equally as
important from a feminist-studies
perspective, it requires those interested in accessing the
biographical details of this Afro-
Latina icon to confront the explicit rawness of the pornographic
image, and del Rio’s
own accounts of herself. In many ways, the DVD and the
pervasive technology of
digital capture wholly undercuts the genre of testimonio; no
longer is the imagined “voice-
less” subject of testimonio dependent on a literate intermediary
to convey their message to

the larger public. Like Subcomandante Marcos, like protesters
in Greece, Ferguson, or
Iguala, Mexico those wishing to broadcast their stories to a
global audience just need to
upload their “truth” onto YouTube, and the more sophisticated
cinematic genre of docu-
mentary, made possible in part by technological access, is
increasingly becoming a
central feature of how we learn about the world. Nevertheless,
today as publics are inun-
dated with the visual packaging of life stories in reality
television, tell-all biographies,
and cinematic political propaganda, the imagined veracity of
biographical documentary,
like that of its textual counterpart, is rarely accepted as a given,
understood instead as a cul-
tural product mediated and designed to construct a narrative out
of the “real,” to frame
experience in the shape of meaning.
In many ways, Vanessa del Rio personifies the aggressive
racialized woman who sees
something or someone and goes for it, an image she is invested
in controlling and promot-
ing – even now. Several times throughout the book, she credits
Isabel Sarli (Figure 2), the
Argentinean actress of the 1950s and 1960s, as being an early
influence on her, and
describes seeing Sarli’s Spanish-language movies on 42nd
Street with her mother.13 She
writes:
Sarli’s films sometimes ended tragically, but I think I
consciously didn’t pay too much atten-
tion to the ends of the film, I was admiring the sin … I was
liking her power and daring, the life

that that represented, her confidence in her sexuality, and to be
able to use it, to be that type of
woman, to be all woman. (28)
In Vanessa’s retelling, rather than Latina sexuality being
shrouded in Catholic propriety and
sexual repression, she narrates growing up surrounded by
culturally authorized perform-
ances of a Latina hyper-sexuality, gender performances that
were foundational to her
self-fashioning. Moreover, this passage makes clear her early
innate understanding of
gender as performance, and sexuality as a self-styled instrument
of power. She goes on
to say:
[W]atching Fuego, a movie I originally saw when I was 16, I
thought how most people don’t
want to accept all aspects of woman, they just want to praise the
Madonna, the mother, and not
explore the slut. … I like the word slut. It is a strong word for
women who embrace their sexu-
ality and refuse to be sexually controlled. (28)
Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 319
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For del Rio, embracing sexuality and refusing to be sexually
controlled becomes a way to
counter the standard formula of victimhood and recovery that is
so prevalent in tell-all bio-
graphies of retired Anglo porn stars like Linda Lovelace, Jenna
Jameson, Traci Lorde, and
Jennie Ketcham.14 Keenly aware of how others have been able
to profit by fulfilling narra-
tive desires for confession and redemption, del Rio seems to
hold those who claim they
“only did it for the money” in particular disdain.
As a genre, the biographies of porn stars tend to traffic in sad
stories of teenage sexual
abuse and addiction and when, and if, they survive to tell the
tale themselves, generally end
with the triumph of true love. For example, the Publisher’s
Weekly review of Jenna Jame-
son’s New York Times best-seller How to Make Love Like a
Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale,
claims: “Beneath Jameson’s monstrous diva exterior, however,
was a girl who just wanted
to become a loving mother and wife. After many failures, she

finally succeeded, and her X-
rated book ends on an uplifting family-values note” (Strauss
2014). Without a hint of irony,
in Jameson’s text, rather than chapter titles, each section is
divided into books with Roman
numerals, preceded by an epigraph from a Shakespearean
sonnet. Here we see how white-
ness, particularly when paired with motherhood, works to
authenticate narratives of
redemption and romance even as it facilitates the mainstreaming
of pornography. In con-
trast, del Rio refuses to cast herself as a victim of the porn
industry or of life, and reiterates
her sense of control and sexual agency throughout the book. But
she is invested in asserting
more than her agency; what del Rio seems most intent in
describing is her pleasure, the
Figure 2. Isabel Sarli.
320 J.M. Rodríguez
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sheer joy and satisfaction of her many sexual escapades. She
clearly avows, “I like sex, I
have always liked sex; and I will never deny liking sex” (28),
and throughout the text,
she narrates an almost insatiable appetite for sexual adventure.
A story that seems emblematic of this attitude takes place when
responding to a question
about her first performance in an adult film wherein she
describes her nervousness, not
about having sex on camera, but about saying her lines
correctly. Part way through the
on-camera interview, she interrupts herself, turns to us, her
viewers, and blurts out: “And
I blew the cameraman! During a break!” At this point in the
interview, she begins to
laugh uncontrollably, finally adding, “In those days everybody
just had a good ol’time”
(DVD min. 31). Blowing the cameraman, in this story as in
others, becomes a way for
her to assert that sex was not just something she did for money:
it was something she
did for fun.15
Refusing victim
The structure of the book, chapters that are not quite

text, she continually
insists that she never really had any “bad” experiences sexually,
stating: “I really
enjoyed my life, I never did anything that I didn’t want to do
where I wasn’t in on
it, even if I felt it was something that I had to do, I would
always find someway to
be in on it. I would never let myself become the victim or feel
victimized” (DVD
min. 13). The book does not shy away from describing the many
forms of violation
and victimization that impact the lives of women, people of
color, and sex workers,
and del Rio acknowledges she is grateful she never got “sucked
in” and “spit out,”
but she also distinguishes that from feeling like a victim (DVD
min. 23). Del Rio’s
refusal of the term victim marks an important interpretive
intervention into dominant
narratives that cast the subjects of gendered violence as
perpetual, de facto, ahistorical
victims.
Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 321
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In juridical discourse, the term victim operates within the
binary poles of guilt and inno-
cence, victim and victimizer, setting the foundation for
reparations and punishment. But the
term also contains other meanings that surface in its
deployment, a religious reference to
sacrifice that is linked to salvation, and another that defines it
as “one who is reduced or
destined to suffer some oppressive or destructive agency”
(O.E.D.). The Anishinaabe
scholar Gerald Vizenor’s term “survivance” provides an apt
meditation to help elucidate
del Rio’s discomfort with the term victim. He writes:
“Survivance is an active sense of pres-
ence, the continuance of native stories, not a mere reaction, or a
survivable name. Native
survivance stories are renunciations of dominance, tragedy and
victimry” (1994, iii).
Like the indigenous populations of North America and
elsewhere, sex workers are most
often narratively depicted as the perpetual victims of patriarchal
power, damaged beyond
repair, even as liberal politics plot their salvation. In contrast,
Vizenor’s term survivance

brings together the resilience of survival as resistance, as it
insists on acknowledging pres-
ence in the face of societal demands for disappearance.
Del Rio’s repeated insistence on not wanting to be cast as a
victim functions to repudiate
some feminist critiques of those that work in the porn industry
while refusing salvation or
erasure. But survival and resistance have also come to function
as familiar and expected
narrative tropes in feminist scholarship on sexuality, eliding the
more complicated and
vexed question of how pleasure might endure. Nicole Fleetwood
makes this point most
powerfully in her essay “The Case of Rihanna: Erotic Violence
and Black Female
Desire,” when she asserts that “black women are brought into
dominant narrative folds
as victims of unbearable suffering” (2012, 422) and she urges
cultural critics to probe pos-
sibilities for black sexual practices that are not framed through
dominant frameworks of suf-
fering, resistance, or exploitation” (2012, 422). Jennifer Nash in
her work on race and
pornography similarly argues against what she terms the “twin
logics of injury and recovery
which make theorizing black female pleasure from within the
parameters of the [porno-
graphic] archive a kind of impossibility” (2014, 25–26). These
African American feminist
scholars echo del Rio in their refusal to elide questions of black
female pleasure, and it is
this resolute determination to assert possibilities for pleasure
that functions as del Rio’s
ongoing retort to her imagined feminist critics. She declares:
“Some feminists have said,

‘Wasn’t that exploitation?’ And I’d say, ‘No, that was my
pleasure’” (84). But del Rio’s
insistence on not being perceived as a victim can also be read as
her demand that she be
recognized as an authorial agent, capable of not only narrating
her life but determining
its significance.
Many of the stories in the book are those you might expect from
a porn star, her on-
screen accomplishments (she claims the distinction of having
filmed the first double pen-
etration in porn); her frustration at being continually typecast as
the ethnic Other to the
blondes who received top billing and top salaries; and her early
days in an industry that
was just starting to explode with cross-over films like Deep
Throat (1972) and The Devil
in Miss Jones (1973). But del Rio’s book also recounts stories
that are considerably
more disturbing, if also equally commonplace, stories that too
often constitute the sad
stuff of the everyday for many women of color. In del Rio’s
narrative the lecherous
uncle, the manipulative boyfriend, the abusive police officer –
all make routine appear-
ances. The familiarity of these tales is itself unsettling.
However, rather than recount
these stories through the language of victimhood and trauma,
del Rio narrates them with
322 J.M. Rodríguez
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almost comic nonchalance, as another obstacle to overcome,
another futile attempt to make
her feel less than whole, as another testament of survivance.
This repeated insistence on narrating everyday forms of trauma
without recourse to
“fixing” in the Fanonian sense, subjects as traumatized victims,
reorients feminist sexual poli-
tics away from gendered norms of protected white womanhood,
positioning those of us that
have been violated, colonized, abused, harmed, and exploited at
the very heart of feminist
politics, as the norm of what constitutes a gendered
experience.16 For Latinas, these everyday
violations include the nefarious modes through which our
sexuality is used to define and dis-

cipline the possibilities of our social worlds; the ways our
bodies and tongues – tinged by
colonial anxieties that mark us as both colonizer and colonized
– render our sexual counte-
nance as wholly excessive, yet always lacking; and the ways our
sex has been used to
shame us. Frances Negrón Muntaner situates the trope of shame
as foundational to the
ethnic, racial, and gendered identities of Puerto Ricans,
declaring:
[B]oricua bodies are persistently negotiating their shameful
constitution, refashioning the
looks that aim to humiliate or take joy away from them. At the
same time, it is impossible
to deny that our most vital cultural production as boricuas has
sprung not from the denial
of shame, but from its acknowledgement into wounds that we
can be touched by. (xviii)
Frequently in her narrative, del Rio asks readers to dwell in the
complicated, shameful erotic
registers that violence can sometimes instantiate, even as she
actively describes how the
lines between fantasy, reality, the narrative scripts of porn, and
her own intimate sexual
play melt into one another. Early on in the book, she recalls
being around 12 and
hearing her mother warn her of the dangers of the streets by
reading her newspaper articles
about young girls getting raped. Rather than instilling terror or
inspiring caution, although
perhaps this was also their impact, the young girl that grew up
to be Vanessa del Rio used
those stories as the narrative building blocks for her sexual
fantasies. She states:

There was a popular Spanish wrestler. … El Santo, [he] was the
masked good guy, but he
became tangled up in my fantasies. I developed scenarios about
being overpowered by
masked rapists based on his image, which I later played out
with my lover, Reb. (32)
Already in this moment of recounting her childhood, we witness
how the link between sex
and violence gets mined for its erotic potential, as she manages
to hold in tension the threat
of violence and possibility of pleasure.
Returning to Nicole Fleetwood’s pointed insights proves
invaluable here. Fleetwood
challenges what she terms “a coercive agenda” of “black
recuperative heterosexuality”
(2012, 422) to offer alternative forms of understanding erotic
attachments to violence
“that do not conform to dominant frameworks of exploitation, of
racial uplift and respect-
ability” and that are not predicated on narratives of
victimization or pathology. She writes:
How do cultural critics account for highly eroticized
attachments in black heterosexual intima-
cies that are hinged on the force of masculinized violence? In
moving the analysis of sexual
subjugation beyond the framework of fantasy, we need to
fashion analytic tools to examine
black women’s sexual practices where pleasure and attachment
are interwoven with the
threat or reality of physical harm. (421)
Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 323

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As Fleetwood suggests, moving the analysis beyond the
framework of fantasy complicates
our ability to come to terms with all the ways that as women of
color, violence gets multiply
coded into our sexual lives, and the ways domination and
abjection haunt the sexual ima-
ginary of racialized subjects. In Vanessa del Rio’s retelling of
her life, we see not just the
eroticization of violence and even terror, but we also witness
the possibility that some forms
of corporeal and psychic violence might come to function as
self-defined forms of sexual

pleasure.
Let me present another biographical scene that pushes the
boundaries of intelligibility
even further, well beyond fantasy. In another episode, del Rio
describes having to have sex
with a state trooper in order to get her boyfriend out of jail –
she begins telling the story by
explaining:
It was like the movies, where you have to put out to get your
boyfriend out of jail. And to the
extent that it was like the movies, there was something exciting
about it – plus he was hand-
some, blond, and ruggedly studly. (107)17
Once again del Rio returns to the images of sexuality that have
been projected on the silver
screen as a narrative filter through which to make sense of what
is happening in her real life.
And while the trope of “a good girl forced to do something
immoral to save the man she
loves” might be a familiar one in Hollywood, the story takes a
decidedly twisted turn
when she reveals that over the course of the exchange with the
officer she had an
orgasm. She goes on to exclaim:
It was so theatrical, such a humiliating adventure, that I have an
orgasm but I don’t let him
know because I don’t want to give him the satisfaction. I don’t
think he would have believed
it if he’d known, since this was supposed to be his power game
… . Ooh, I felt like such a dirty
girl for enjoying it! (107)18

In the filmed interview, she ends her account laughing, as if she
is keenly aware of the ironic
perversity of the juxtaposition of state coercion and her own
sexual gratification. At this
point the DVD cuts to a clip of one of her porn performances in
which she is playing an
inmate being forced to sexually accommodate her prison guard,
and we witness another,
much campier, representation of state sexual violence.
On one level this story seems ripped from the headlines about
the Oklahoma police
officer Daniel Holtzclaw who was convicted of raping and
sexually assaulting more than
a dozen Black women, some of whom were street-level
prostitutes, because he felt they
were unlikely to report his rape and abuse (Philipps 2015). And
both stories affirm
studies that document the relationship between the
criminalization of sex work, police
enforcement practices, and violence against those suspected of
being prostitutes. One
study goes as far as suggesting that “prior assault by police had
the strongest correlation
with both sexual and client perpetrated violence against female
sex workers” (Shannon
et al. 2009, 5). In fact, in her written account of this incident,
del Rio mentions that she
“thought he must have done this before because he just nodded
at the motel clerk and
drove straight to the room” (107). Sadly, sexual harassment and
assault of women imagined
to be prostitutes by police is a common-day occurrence, a direct
result of laws that crimi-
nalize sex work. Dark, Latina, and daring to occupy the public
sphere as a sexual being,

324 J.M. Rodríguez
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and telling story after story, her image on-screen assures the
viewer that she is just fine,
that she not only endured the violence of her youth but managed
to thrive (Figure 3).19
In recounting the story through the lens of mainstream cinema,
del Rio uses the narra-
tive familiarity as a way to normalize the violence, “where you
have to put out to get your
boyfriend out of jail.” But as the scene continues, she uses this
event to offer her rendering
of how she was able to assimilate this violation within the
interpretative framework of her
own world-view. “This is the kind of thing I mean, where I take
away but they don’t take
anything from me, I take from it” (DVD min. 1:14). Del Rio
regards this experience, not as
evidence of trauma, but as an act of revenge that is made
available to her through her ability
to access pleasure, a pleasure that includes both her orgasm and
her delight in hiding that
fact from her assailant. In making sense of her experience, as
one that is defined by coercion
but which also includes her ability to experience orgasm, she
attempts to rewrite the terms
under which sexual violence, resistance, and retribution are
understood.
As a critic, I return again and again to the axiom from Joan
Scott’s essay “The Evidence
of Experience”: “Experience is at once always already an
interpretation and something that
needs to be interpreted” (1993, 412). In that piece, Scott asks us
to do more than just include
other voices in our feminist formulations of experience; she
compels us to think about the

available frameworks of intelligibility that experience enters as
it comes into language.
Read through Scott, we can understand that del Rio’s account of
her experience already
implies a level of interpretation; it has already been framed by
the interpretive possibilities
available to her, including those offered by both mainstream
cinema and mainstream fem-
inism. Following Fleetwood and Nash, we also see how race
functions to censor the sexual
narratives of certain subjects, making some accounts
unspeakable. Yet for both the young
Afro-Latina who was stopped and assaulted by the police for no
apparent reason, and
present-day del Rio, the seasoned sex worker and porn star who
has lived in intimate proxi-
mity to sexual violence and is now looking back on that
moment, the interpretive possibi-
lities include her ability to access her own sexual pleasure and
script it as an act of sexual
subversion, even in the midst of a coercive encounter.
Furthermore, del Rio’s account of
herself exposes the ways the experiences of racialized subject
positions that are not
white, middle-class, or “respectable” are made illegible within
feminist frameworks that
fail to account for the possibility of pleasure in the sexual lives
of those who are constituted
by violence.
As a critic, I might be able to argue with her analysis of these
events, but in order to do
justice to del Rio’s version of this story, I also have to find a
way to make sense of the trace of
the real, of her laughter, of the materiality of her orgasm, and of
her desire to control the terms

under which intelligibility functions. In her essay, “Ruminations
on Lo Sucio as a Latino
Queer Analytic,” Deborah Vargas (2014) proposes lo sucio, as a
way to account for the
dirty sensory pleasures of non-normative sexualities of those
“deemed collateral genders
within a social world invested in the fiscal benefits of
normative sexual intimacies.” For
Vargas, lo sucio offers “a way to theorize the performative
tactics that genderqueer feminine
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sexualities enact to remain the magnificent refuse of surplus
while in refusal of vanishing.”
Even in the face of police violence that aims to subjugate and
dehumanize her, Vanessa
del Rio rebuffs efforts to reduce her experience to the narrative
tropes of normative hetero-
femininity or redemptive victimhood. She refuses to vanish, and
instead shamelessly relishes
the dirty, sensory, and performative excesses associated with la
puta, the slut, the whore.
Because Latinas come to sexuality through the multifarious
forms of violence brought
about through colonization, enslavement, migration, and the
wounds of public and private
patriarchy, scenes of violence, violation, and shame are core to
our understandings of sexual
subjectivity, kindling an explosion of diverse and divergent
affective responses. Each
response fashions its own meaning from the paradox of logic
and chaos that defines
cruelty, each functions as its own form of acknowledgement that
some glimmer of
self-love might outlive the harms. However, even as these
rejoinders to the extravagant
and quotidian harms that surround us can never fully redress the
injuries we have
endured, they serve to rupture any semblance of an appropriate,
rational response to the
logic of sexual and racial subjection that is intent on defining
our position in the world.
The Reb Stout affair
In a book that repeatedly asserts del Rio’s sense of control and
sexual agency, the inclusion

of one particular chapter stands out for the ways it complicates
narratives of how sexual
empowerment might be understood. Entitled the “Reb Stout
Affair,” it is devoted to a
Figure 3. Still from untitled Taschen DVD.
326 J.M. Rodríguez
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seven-month affair with Reb Stout, a Los Angeles native and
S/M aficionado. Stout claimed
to have seven distinct personalities with male, female, and
genderqueer manifestations,

each with a distinct name, wardrobe, and sexual proclivities,
some quite dominant and
indeed sadistic, some wholly submissive. Curiously, no mention
of this period and no refer-
ence to these images occur in the DVD. And while the rest of
the book is full of glossy
movie posters and professional stills from her films and colorful
magazine spreads, the
photographs in this chapter are taken from the extensive
amateur photographic archive
Stout and del Rio produced during their time as lovers, images
that often include costumes,
wigs, ropes, whips, and assorted sexual paraphernalia. In the
introduction to this chapter
Hanson states, “every sexual encounter was captured on film,
including all the ecstasy,
terror and tears. It was love 1970s style and not for the faint of
heart” (163).
Figure 4. Source: Image courtesy of Reb Stout
Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 327
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Vanessa del Rio describes her initial coming together with Stout
stating: “It was, ‘Oh,
you like to wear makeup and women’s clothing and stick dildos
up your ass? And jerk off
and take pictures? Ok!’”(167). Some of these images are quite
playful and queer and depict
the spirit of endless sexual experimentation that their brief
affair was founded upon. In
Figure 4 we see Stout in a platinum-blonde wig, spike heels,
and pearls bound and bent
over while del Rio stares in the camera coquettishly with her
mouth agape as she yanks
his penis back between his legs.
Other images reveal a more conscious self-posing against the
makeshift background of
a rather ordinary domestic space, a space that includes a fish
tank, assorted six-inch high
heels, potted plants, erotic art, a fishing net with starfish,
scattered sex toys, and lots and
lots of mirrors. “Whenever we got together we had a scene,
every day. Sometimes other
people would be there … and we’d always take photos” (167).
Twenty-one photographs
are included in this chapter, nine black-and-white images, and
12 color images, but we

can imagine that many more were produced during their brief
period together. In several
of the photographs, Vanessa is seen wearing her lover’s
exaggerated blond wig, the only
images of her as a blond that we see in a book that is replete
with images of physical trans-
formation.20 If in her professional career her dark tresses were
central to her Latina vixen
persona, here she is free to play with racial self-fashioning.
While she is frequently photo-
graphed staring into the camera, Stout’s face never appears in
the images included in this
chapter, his face either covered with flowing long hair, or
concealed behind the black
mask of his “Ripper” persona, which del Rio describes as “an
extreme male fantasy of
rape and force” (167).
While del Rio has appeared in several S/M themed films, or
“roughies,” as they were
called, and describes enjoying the emotional potency, stamina,
and physicality that they
require, the images in this chapter have another feel altogether,
their amateur quality
exudes a different kind of intensity and intimacy. It is not that
the other scenes of her
having sex are not real – or do not depict real pleasure, they do,
but because they were
also work, because she was also acting and aware of performing
for an audience, she
seems to maintain a certain composure, even perhaps glamour in
the midst of scenes of
sexual submission that suggest her control of the scene. In
contrast, in several of the photo-
graphs in this chapter, we are allowed to glimpse something else
– a sexual vulnerability

that exposes her willingness to experience something beyond
the carnal pleasures of sex,
outside of the structures of rationality. By fully inhabiting her
body, del Rio manages to
hold in tension violence and pleasure, submission and agency.
Thinking back to that
time, she reflects:
As I got deeper into the relationship with Reb I pushed all the
limits of his personalities and
found I liked being really frightened. I wanted to push them
until I believed their threats, not
just submit because someone said to submit … . “make me,” I
always said. Reb told me I was a
SAM, a Smart-Ass-Masochist, always egging on the dominant.
(171)
Del Rio is not just asking to be dominating, she is demanding it,
goading her top into seizing
greater control. Here, the romanticized kernel of a childhood
sexual fantasy about El Santo
is transformed into an affective encounter with terror in adult
sexual play, an opportunity to
use sex to explore the psychic residue that her experiences have
imparted, and make of them
something else. She continues:
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Every scene was about trying to break me, but I didn’t know
how to be broken. Breaking
would have meant tears, I think, tears of total submission. There
was sobbing, from pain
and discomfort and sexual pleasure, but the pleasure always
won out, which I guess meant
that I stayed strong. (171–2)
Curiously, none of this dialogue is captured in the DVD, and
appears only in the book, even
as the tone suggests the kind of conversation that might occur
between friends.
It bears emphasizing that this was consensual sex, it was desired
abjection, and in del
Rio’s mind, this scene, and these images capture an emotional
intensity her many years in
front of a camera were never able to see – a corporeal desire to
be free from the rational
demands of self-control and composure. For a porn star like

Vanessa del Rio, whose
sexualized body has been captured, reproduced, and circulated a
million different ways,
the photographic memorialization of an intimate affair offers
something beyond autobiogra-
phical documentation, it captures an affective moment in time, a
psychic space that func-
tions to disrupt subjectivity. Del Rio describes this desire for a
release of subjectivity,
and an inability to allow herself to exceed the limits of reason
when she states: “I didn’t
know how to be broken.”
Let me conclude by offering an image from the series of
photographs that depict one of
her sexual encounters with “Ripper,” the very photographs that
she describes in a pro-
motional video for Taschen, as being her favorite images in the
entire book (Vanessa).
Of this series of images she writes:
I think the only time I truly submitted is in these pictures where
Reb’s in his Ripper personality
and his balls are in my mouth and you see the sweat and
mascara running because I was
choking on them. It wasn’t horrible in any way, but it was total
submission, and that was a
strange feeling for me. It felt freeing; I didn’t feel any
responsibility in any way. It was also
very rough. (172)
We can imagine that “very rough” might refer to being bound
and nearly gagged by her
lover’s testicles, but I have seen enough of her on-screen
performances to know that the phys-
ical demands of this scene were not unfamiliar to Vanessa del

Rio the actress. Instead, perhaps
what was “very rough” was the freedom, the freedom to submit
completely, to give herself
over to another and to herself and dwell in the space beyond
rationality and reason.
The image is striking (Figure 5). Stout’s shaved pubis appears
almost feminine, queerly
juxtaposed against the hairiness of his arms. Here, del Rio’s
always flawless makeup is
smeared from sweat and tears; her eyes, thick with smudged
mascara, are closed; her
mouth ajar; her teeth showing slightly as the head of his penis
rests between her lips.
This is not about glamour. Even as we read this as an image of
physical and emotional inten-
sity, there is also tenderness in the position of his fingers on her
face. The photograph
exudes a calmness that defines her submission. While Stout’s
face never appears in this
chapter, his words do. And in reference to these images he
states: “She had tears in her
eyes while she was cumming – a series of concentrated orgasms
like I’d never seen
before … and it was marvelous to see!” (176). Even as it is her
pain, her submission that
is evident in these photographs, the absence of his face in these
images, like his testicles
in her mouth, serves to evidence his vulnerability – to exposure,
to memory, to encountering
the affective power of his own carnal and psychic desires.
Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 329
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Entrega total
In her eloquent treatise, Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and
Masochism, Amber Musser
(2014) declares: “Reading [masochism] as exceptional reifies
norms of whiteness and mas-
culinity and suppresses other modes of reading power, agency,
and experience” (6). Maso-
chism implies the renunciation of power and control, therefore
for racialized feminine
subjects it functions as a way to both claim an intrinsic power
that can then be surrendered,
and to actively inhabit the social and sexual roles to which we
have been assigned on our
own terms.21 In the book, the caption for this photograph reads

as follows: “I will refer you
to the Spanish saying, ‘Sin palabras’, without words” (176). In
this moment, without words,
del Rio resorts to the Spanish to mark something beyond the
logocentrism demanded of
rational subjects.
Vanessa del Rio’s auto/biographical narrative, and the images
used to document them,
represent complicated psychic realities that require us to
question how we engage with
those stories that are too painful, too raw to process fully in
language. Confronted with her
testimonio, del Rio’s account of herself, we attempt to make
meaning from the traces of
the real that her text provides. But testimonio can also slide into
the spectacle of the ethno-
graphic, seeming to provide entry into the psychic realities of
the Other whose experiences
Figure 5. Source: Image courtesy of Reb Stout
330 J.M. Rodríguez
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might seem so divorced from our own frames of intelligibility.
Therefore, it is del Rio’s insis-
tence on authorizing her own interpretive frame, rather than the
experiences themselves, that
pose the greatest challenge to existing feminist formulations of
sexual politics.
Vanessa del Rio’s narrative performance of sexual adventure,
power, violence, and plea-
sure demands an audience, but we cannot embrace the sexual
agency of this icon of Latina
sexuality without grappling with the more difficult registers of
racialized sexuality that her
text also reveals; similarly we cannot simply dismiss her
account of her life because it does
not conform to the feminist interpretations we might wish to
impose. So how can we talk
about pleasure, narrate its peculiarities in ways that account for
the complicated emotions
that are so often wrapped around its articulation? And speaking
directly to the contours of
this project, how can we represent someone else’s pleasure or
indeed their experience of
violence or trauma without privileging our own interpretive
frameworks?

Violence permeates this text, yet del Rio’s reaction to it,
whether it is news reports of
neighborhood rapes, her own violation at the hands of a state
trooper, or her desire for
sexual submission with her lover Reb – at times seems to call
her account of herself into
question, making her sexuality seemingly unintelligible. Yet,
that unintelligibility is pre-
cisely what offers a critical perspective on the very structures of
meaning that would
suggest that an adequate, rational, and recognizable response to
sexual violence is possible.
Furthermore, it exposes how feminist frameworks that have
been sculpted through the life
experiences of those for whom the privileges of race, class, or
social position have provided
shelter, have failed to account for the profound power of the
sexual experiences of so many
racialized feminine subjects. For women of color, for whom
extravagant and quotidian
cruelties are the norm, there can never be one “right” affective
response to violence, one
interpretive trope for engaging the harms that surround us. That
an aging Afro-Latina
porn star might offer us alternative understandings of the
workings of female sexual survi-
vance and pleasure, makes it all the more urgent that we wrestle
with the ability of speaking
subjects to narrate their own complex realities, even and
especially when their interpret-
ations unsettle the preexisting logics we might wish to impose.
But while we need to
listen to these alternate forms of meaning making, we also need
to leave room for those
moments that resist meaning, those moments that allow us to

refuse the imperative to “be
strong” if only for a minute. In a world where so many of us are
defined as always
already irrational and outside structures of sexual and social
legibility, those deeply
painful and powerful moments of carnal pleasure, liberated from
the constraints of language,
image, and reason, might burst open to create possibilities for
something akin to freedom.
Notes
1. I wish to thank the co-editors of this volume for their
generous engagement with my work. I am
further indebted to my anonymous peer reviewers who shared
their knowledge and expertise on
the pornographic archive, and my colleagues Shari Huhndorf
and Leigh Raiford, each of whom
provided key insights at critical points in the writing process.
This paper was presented at
numerous academic venues before publication; each audience
contributed to my own thinking
and theorization of this work, and deserves my heartfelt thanks
for allowing me to work through
these ideas aloud. Finally, I am indebted to Ana María Sanchez
(AKAVanessa del Rio), for her
permission to reproduce these images, for following me on
Twitter, and for her many films. As a
young Latina who came of age watching pornography, her films
offered me a vital vision of
Latina sexuality, an image that continues to inspire me many
years later.
Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 331
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2. All references to the book refer to the trade version. Two
other versions of the book are available
on Taschen’s website, the weight and page count for those
versions are slightly different. The
book is published by Taschen, based in Cologne, Germany and
printed in Italy. The book
includes translations of the text into German and French at the
end, an indication of how
Vanessa del Rio has traveled transnationally.
3. The bibliography for porn studies has been growing
exponentially since Williams’s (1999)
groundbreaking text Hardcore: Power, Pleasure and the “Frenzy
of the Visible,” originally pub-

lished in 1989. For intersections of race and pornography see
Nash (2014) and Miller-Young
(2014), discussed in greater detail below; see also Shimizu
(2007) and Nguyen (2014).
Useful edited volumes include Porn Archives (Dean et al.
2014); The Feminist Porn Book:
The Politics of Producing Pleasure (Taormino et al. 2013); Porn
Studies (Williams 2004);
New Views on Pornography: Sexuality, Politics, and the Law
(Comella and Tarrant 2015);
and Coming Out Like a Porn Star: Essays on Pornography,
Protection, and Privacy (Lee
2015). A new academic journal Porn Studies devoted to this
burgeoning field of academic
inquiry was launched in 2014.
4. As one reviewer smartly indicated, the issue of having del
Rio play a maid is considerably more
complicated than this sentence might suggest. For example, in
the 1984 film Maid in Manhat-
tan, sometimes referenced as Vanessa: Maid in Manhattan, del
Rio received star billing and the
film, including its title, is centered on her character. However,
in her book, del Rio frequently
describes what it was like being one of very few women of
color, stating: “No matter how gla-
morous I looked I’d still be the maid or some smart ass hoochie
mama” (194). In 2002, Jennifer
Lopez, another famous Puerto Rican, also starred in a film of
the same name.
5. Examples include Play Me Again Vanessa and Viva Vanessa,
both of which appeared in 1984.
6. There are numerous compilation videos; those released before
her retirement include Vanessa’s

Bed of Pleasures and Vanessa’s Hot Nights, released in 1980;
and The Erotic World of Vanessa
#1, The Erotic World of Vanessa #2, and Vanessa del Rio’s
Fantasies, all released in 1981. Those
released after her retirement include, Hot Shorts: Vanessa del
Rio, Vanessa Obsession
(1987), Best of Vanessa del Rio (1988), and Taste of Vanessa
del Rio (1990). A decade later,
in 2001, three new compilations were released: Vanessa del
Rio—Dirty Deeds, Vanessa del
Rio—Some Like it Hot, Vanessa del Rio Stars in Celebrity
Sinners, and Vanessa X-Posed.
And 2004 saw the release of Vanessa’s Anal Fiesta, Vanessa
and Friends, as well as her
inclusion in the compilations Mucho Mucho Latinas, Ah
Carumba, and Strokin’ to the
Oldies. Examples of films that were reissued to profit from her
popularity include the 1976
film Come to Me retitled as Hot Wired Vanessa and the 1977
film Reunion retitled as both
Vanessa Gets It! and as Vanessa’s Wild Reunion.
7. While del Rio’s iconicity exceeds the scope of this paper, it
bears mentioning and speaks to the
multiple audiences for whom she is legendary. Included among
those that contributed blurbs for
this book are the rappers Snoop Dogg and Foxy Brown; the
feminist pornographer and creator
of Femme Productions, Candida Royale; and the cartoonist
Robert Crumb. She is also refer-
enced through different forms of popular culture. Del Rio makes
cameo appearances in a
1996 episode of NYPD Blue entitled “Head Case” and the music
video “Get Money,” by
Junior M.A.F.I.A. featuring The Notorious B.I.G. (Rivera
1996); and her name is referenced

in the Digital Underground (1990) song “Freaks of the
Industry,” and Chubb Rock’s (1990)
“Just the Two of Us” to name just a few. On Twitter del Rio has
over 53,000 followers. She
hosts a X-rated porn site, vanessadelrio.com where she performs
weekly live web-cam shows
for members and she has a designated page on ebay to sell
memorabilia, http://stores.ebay.
com/vanessadelriomemorabilia/. With her cooperation, the
director Thomas Mignone is cur-
rently filming a bio-pic film project based on her life in Times
Square during the 1970s and
early 1980s. It is being described as Boogie Nights meets Taxi
Driver (Obenson 2015). For
more on the black body as icon see Nicole Fleetwood’s On
Racial Icons: Blackness and the
Public Imagination (2015).
8. While these books both tackle the subject of black women
and pornography, they are also quite
different in their approaches and are both highly recommended.
Miller-Young’s more
332 J.M. Rodríguez
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http://stores.ebay.com/vanessadelriomemorabilia/
http://stores.ebay.com/vanessadelriomemorabilia/
historically inflected text includes numerous interviews with
key figures and extensive archival
material, including references from early stag films, the golden
age of porn, the home-video era,
and the current digital circulation of pornography. Focused
more on close textual analysis of
specific films and the (im)possibility of “the black body in
ecstasy” in pornographic films pro-
duced in the 1970s and 1980s, Jennifer Nash’s book offers
theoretically generative and artfully
crafted close readings of a smaller archive of films. Both
authors provide significantly more con-
textual information on the era I reference here as the “golden
age of porn” than this article
allows. That period, roughly from 1970–85, marked a period in
which some adult feature
films were screened in movie theaters and reviewed in
mainstream press including the
New York Times and Variety. That heightened publicity
allowed a star-system to develop and
also generated more elaborate marketing campaigns oriented
around specific actors. The rise

of the home video marked the end of this period.
9. For more on the politics and performance of testimonial
literature in Latin America, see Bev-
erley (1993) and the anthology The Real Thing, edited by
George M. Gugelberger (1996).
10. In 2015, Amnesty International began to advocate for the
decriminalization of sex work as part
of an effort to address human-rights violations against sex
workers (Carvajal 2015). Human
Rights Watch (2014) issued a similar statement in their World
Report 2014. Linking the decri-
minalization of sex work to a parallel effort to decriminalize
simple drug use and possession,
their report states: “Criminalization in both cases can cause or
exacerbate a host of ancillary
human rights violations, including exposure to violence from
private actors, police abuse, dis-
criminatory law enforcement, and vulnerability to blackmail,
control, and abuse by criminals.
These severe and common consequences, and the strong
personal interest that people have in
making decisions about their own bodies, mean it is
unreasonable and disproportionate for
the state to use criminal punishment to discourage either
practice” (47). See also the Human
Rights Watch (2015) report, Condoms as Evidence, for their
study on how condom possession
is being used to prosecute sex workers and target those
imagined to be sex workers, pointing to
the ways these policing practices disproportionately impact
transwomen and women of color.
11. There are entire sections that are recorded on camera, such
as her describing the Santeria practices

ofherCubanfather,
thatarenotreferencedinthebook.Therearealsosectionsinthebookth
athave
no corresponding mention in the DVD, most notably the Reb
Stout chapter discussed later. To
complicate matters further, there are passages in the book that
do correspond to on-camera
interviews but which appear to have been edited somewhat in
post-production for clarity. In
this
essay,Icitethespecificsource,eitherthebookortheDVD,andmentio
nnotablediscrepancies.
12. This is not to suggest that her audience consists of solely
white men who have no connection to
stories of racial and gendered violence, her fan base is quite
diverse. Yet, being reminded of
these more realistic aspects of del Rio’s story may complicate a
more sexually inflected
viewing of the film.
13. For more on Sarli see Ruétela (2004) and Foster (2008).
14. More recently the genre of porn-star memoir has exploded,
including more texts by women of
color; see recent titles by Asia Akira (2015), India Morel
(2013), and Roxy Reynolds (2014).
15. Nash’s (2014) chapter, “Laughing Matters,” in The Black
Body in Ecstasy might be particularly
useful in reading how humor functions in del Rio’s films, and in
her own narrative as a way to
make visible the absurdity of racist and gendered fictions
surrounding sexual pleasure.
16. In his essay “The Fact of Blackness,” in Black Skins White

Masks, Frantz Fanon (1967) writes of
the colonial gaze, “the glances of the other fixed me there, in
the sense in which a chemical sol-
ution is fixed by a dye” (109).
17. This is an instance where the recorded audio and the
“transcribed” interview are not quite iden-
tical. In the recorded interview there is no mention of him being
“handsome, blond, and rug-
gedly studly.” In both the written version and the on-screen
interview, the story itself is quite
long and detailed. The written account is over three paragraphs
long and appears in a section
about run-ins with the police. I have elected to cite the textual
version for clarity.
18. Once again the language in the film clip is slightly different
than what is printed in the book. In
the DVD there is no mention of it being “so theatrical, such a
humiliating adventure” and also no
Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 333
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mention of “Ooh, I felt like such a dirty girl for enjoying it!”
These additions appear to have
been added later.
19. In a list included in the book entitled “The Basic Vanessa,”
in addition to listing leopard as a
favorite color, she lists her favorite book/author as Macho Sluts
by Pat Califia, and her hero
as Muhammad Ali (258).
20. The physical changes to her face, hair, skin color, genitals,
and body, brought about through
self-styling, photographic manipulation, age, and technologies
of the body are quite evident
throughout the book. In the chapter “Gym Rat,” she describes a
brief period where she
began to take steroids, developing both her muscles and the size
of her clitoris, which is reported
to be over five centimeters long (224). Later in her life, she also
underwent breast augmentation,
and the newer images include tattoos.
21. In addition to Musser’s superb text, for additional readings
at the nexus of race and sexualized
forms of power relations, see also Hoang Tan Nguyen’s (2014)
A View of the Bottom: Asian

American Masculinity and Sexual Representation; Darieck
Scott’s (2010) Extravagant Abjec-
tion: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American
Literary Imagination, and my
own Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings
(Rodríguez, 2014).
Note on contributor
Juana María Rodríguez is Professor of Gender and Women’s
Studies and Performance Studies at UC-
Berkeley.
ORCID
Juana María Rodríguez http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2867-4520
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5R434&feature=youtube_gdata_playerAbstractTestimonio,
documentary, pornAuthorizing subjectsRefusing victimThe Reb

Stout affairEntrega totalNotesNote on
contributorORCIDReferences
Introduction Brown Sugar
Theorizing Black Women’s Sexual Labor in Pornography
You are not supposed to talk about liking sex because you are
already
assumed to be a whore.—J E A N N I E PE PPE R
In a private gathering following the East Coast Video Show in
Atlantic City
in 2002, legendary performer Jeannie Pepper received a special
achievement
award for twenty years in the porn industry, the longest career
for any black
adult actress. “It’s been a long, hard road,” she said to the
audience of adult
entertainment performers, insiders, and fans as she accepted the
award from
popular adult film actor Ron Jeremy. “There weren’t many
black women in
the business when I started.”1 In 1982, when Jeannie Pepper
began her career
as an actress in X- rated films, there were few black women in
the adult film
industry. Performing in more than two hundred films over three
decades,
Jeannie broke barriers to achieve porn star status and opened
doors for other
women of color to follow.2 She played iconic roles as the
naughty maid, the
erotically possessed “voodoo girl,” and the incestuous sister in
films like Guess

Who Came at Dinner?, Let Me Tell Ya ’Bout Black Chicks, and
Black Taboo. She
traveled abroad as a celebrity, working and living in Germany
for seven years.
In a career that spanned the rise of video, DVD, and the
Internet, Jeannie
watched the pornography business transform from a quasi- licit
cottage in-
dustry into a sophisticated, transnational, and corporate-
dominated industry.
In 1997 Jeannie was the first African American porn actress to
be inducted
into the honored Adult Video News (AVN) Hall of Fame. By all
accounts,
Jeannie had an exceptionally long and successful career for an
adult actress:
she was well liked by her colleagues, and was a mentor to
young women new
to the porn business. Yet, as her acceptance speech reveals, her
experience of
being a black woman in the porn industry was shaped by
formidable chal-
lenges. As in other occupations in the United States, black
women in the adult
FIGURE I. 1. Jeannie Pepper during her tour of Europe, Cannes,
France, 1986.
Courtesy of JohnDragon.com.
B ROW N SU G A R 3

film industry are devalued workers who confront systemic
marginalization
and discrimination.
Jeannie became a nude model and adult film actress in her
twenties be-
cause she enjoyed watching pornography and having sex, and
she was keen
to become a path- maker in an industry with few black female
stars: “I just
wanted to show the world. Look, I’m black and I’m beautiful.
How come
there are not more black women doing this?”3 She felt
especially beautiful
when in 1986 she did a photo shoot with her photographer
husband, a Ger-
man expatriate known as John Dragon, on the streets of Paris.
Dressed only
in a white fur coat and heels, Jeannie walked around, posing in
front of the
Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe, cafés, luxury cars, and shops.
Coyly allowing
her coat to drape open (or off altogether) at opportune moments,
she drew
the attention of tourists and residents alike. She imagined
herself as Josephine
Baker, admired in a strange new city for her beauty, class, and
grace. Finding
esteem and fearlessness in showing the world her blackness and
beauty, even
in the cityscapes of Paris, Hamburg, or Rome, Jeannie felt she
embodied an
emancipated black female sexuality.
Still, she remained conscious of the dual pressures of needing to
fight for

recognition and opportunity in the adult business, especially in
the United
States, and having to defend her choice to pursue sex work as a
black woman.4
FIGURE I.2. Jeannie Pepper poses in the nude before onlookers
outside of the Carlton
Hotel, Cannes, France, 1986. Courtesy of JohnDragon.com.
4 I N T RO D U C T I O N
As Jeannie asserts in the epigraph, she perceived that part of the
difficulty of
being a professional “whore”—in photographs and films—was
the expec-
tation that she was not supposed to talk about or inhabit her
sexuality in
ways that would seem to exacerbate harmful stereotypes about
black women,
namely their alleged hypersexuality. Black women sexual
performers and
workers have had to confront a prevailing stigma: if all black
women are con-
sidered to be sexually deviant, then those who use sex to make a
living are the
greatest threat to any form of respectable black womanhood.
“Brown sugar,” this popular imaginary of African American
women, satu-
rates popular culture. In songs, films, music videos, and
everyday life, the dis-
course of brown sugar references the supposed essence of black
female sexu-
ality. It exposes historical mythologies about the desirable yet

deviant sexual
nature of black women. Publicly scorned and privately enjoyed,
the alluring,
transformative, and supposedly perverse sexuality of black
women is thor-
oughly cemented in the popular imaginary. Seen as particularly
sexual, black
women continue to be fetishized as the very embodiment of
excessive or non-
normative sexuality. What is most problematic about this sticky
fetishism—in
addition to the fact that it spreads hurtful and potentially
dangerous stereo-
types with very real material effects—is that the desire for
black women’s
sexuality, while so prevalent, is unacknowledged and seen as
illegitimate in
most popular discourse.
As a metaphor, brown sugar exposes how black women’s
sexuality, or more
precisely their sexual labor, has been historically embedded in
culture and
the global economy. Now a key component of the profitable
industries of
entertainment and sex in the United States, brown sugar played
a central
role in the emergence of Western nation- states and the
capitalist economies.
Across the American South and the Caribbean, black slaves
cultivated and
manufactured sugar that sweetened food, changed tastes, and
energized fac-
tory workers in the Industrial Revolution.5 In addition to
physical labor, their
sexual labor was used to “give birth to white wealth,”6 and was

thus the key
mechanism for reproducing the entire plantation complex.
“Sugar was a mur-
derous commodity,” explains Vincent Brown, “a catastrophe for
workers that
grew it.”7 The grinding violence and danger that attended
sugar’s cultivation
in colonial plantations literally consumed black women’s labor
and bodies.8
Brown sugar, as a trope, illuminates circuits of domination over
black
women’s bodies and exposes black women’s often ignored
contributions to
the economy, politics, and social life. Like sugar that has
dissolved without a
trace, but has nonetheless sweetened a cup of tea, black
women’s labor and the
mechanisms that manage and produce it are invisible but
nonetheless there.
B ROW N SU G A R 5
To take the metaphor a bit further, the process of refining cane
sugar from its
natural brown state into the more popular white, everyday
sweetener reflects
how black women, like brown sugar, represent a raw body in
need of refine-
ment and prone to manipulation. The lewdness and raw quality
associated
with brown sugar in popular discourse today thus shows how
ideas about
black women as naturally savage, supersexual beings have

flavored popular
tastes even as they have driven a global appetite for (their)
sweetness. While
processed white sugar is held up as the ideal, there remains a
powerful desire,
indeed a taste, for the real thing.
The metaphor of brown sugar exposes how representations
shape the world
in which black women come to know themselves. But
stereotypes usually
have dual valences: they may also be taken up by the oppressed
and refash-
ioned to mean something quite different. Although brown sugar
has been
used as a phrase to talk about black women as lecherous,
prurient sex ob-
jects, unlike other tropes such as the Mammy, Jezebel, or
Sapphire, it conveys
sweetness, affection, and respect. In African American
vernacular speech and
song, brown sugar often expresses adoration, loveliness, and
intimacy even
as it articulates lust, sensuality, and sex (along with other
illicit, pleasure-
giving materials like heroin or marijuana).9 As in the saying,
“the blacker the
berry, the sweeter the juice,” brown sugar is sometimes used by
black people
to speak to the complex pleasures they derive from their own
eroticism. In
this book brown sugar references a trope that black women must
always bro-
ker. Sometimes they refashion this trope to fit their needs. As
Jeannie Pepper
shows, some black women choose to perform brown sugar—the

perverse,
pleasurable imago projected onto black women’s bodies—in an
effort to ex-
press themselves as desired and desiring subjects. Given the
brutal history
of sexual expropriation and objectification of black bodies,
these attempts
by black women to reappropriate a sexualized image can be seen
as a bid to
reshape the terms assigned to black womanhood. In this case,
brown sugar
might be a realm for intervention in their sexualization.
Some black women might view Jeannie Pepper, the porn star, as
a menace
to the hard- fought image of respectable womanhood they have
sought to cre-
ate for more than one hundred years.10 Nevertheless, even
though black sex
workers know that their labor is seen to constitute a betrayal of
respectable
black womanhood, some pursue it. Their reasons may be purely
economic:
it’s a job, and they must survive and take care of their families,
after all. Or, in
Jeannie Pepper’s case, their motivations could be to take
pleasure in “show-
[ing] the world” a beautiful and sexually self- possessed black
woman. While
such a move to represent oneself may be viewed, especially by
many in the
6 I N T RO D U C T I O N

African American community, as perpetuating historical and
ongoing stereo-
types born out of horrible abuse, it is a powerful statement
about how some
black women redefine what respectable womanhood means for
them. For
Jeannie, more important than respectability, is respect.11
Respect means being
acknowledged and valued for her performative sexual labor and
treated as a
star. Jeannie Pepper’s story illustrates how the perception of
black women as
hypersexual, which has persisted since the slave trade, has made
it extremely
difficult to acknowledge that some black women have an
interest in leverag-
ing hypersexuality. But it is possible to leverage this
treacherous discourse and
the black women who speak to us in A Taste for Brown Sugar
explain how.
They use the seductive power of brown sugar to intervene in
representation,
to assert their varied sexual subjectivities, and to make a living.
In the process
of making tough choices about how and when to commodify
their sexualities,
these women offer more complex readings of black gender and
sexual identity
than now prevail in the academy and popular culture. Porn is an
important
terrain in which this alternative sexual politics can emerge.
Pornography as Culture and Industry
Pornography is a highly controversial category, not just for its
content but

because it sparks heated debates about its role in society. Most
often por-
nography is defined as a genre of mass- produced written or
visual materials
designed to arouse or titillate the reader or viewer. A facet of
entertainment
culture and a domain of the commercial sex industry since its
modern cir-
culation in literature, photography, and film in the nineteenth
century, por-
nography has been powerfully regulated as the explicit, obscene
edge of ac-
ceptable forms of sexuality. It is also more than a kind of object
or media;
pornography is an idiom that communicates potent, blunt, and
transgres-
sive sexuality operating at the boundaries of licit and illicit,
sacred and pro-
fane, private and public, and underground and mainstream
culture. Hence, as
Walter Kendrick argues, “ ‘pornography’ names an argument,
not a thing.”12
Pornography becomes a map of a culture’s borders, a “detailed
blueprint of
the culture’s anxieties, investments, contradictions,”13 and a
site of cultural
contest about social access and social prohibition.14 Focusing
on pornogra-
phy since the rise of the modern adult film industry in the
1970s, A Taste for
Brown Sugar analyzes the operation of black women’s
sexuality—its condi-
tions of production, modes of representation, and strategic
performances—
in both the industry and idiom of pornography. This book traces
the work of

B ROW N SU G A R 7
the black female body in pornography as a material object, but
it also delves
into pornography’s function as a cultural discourse about
racialized sexuality.
Does pornography really make much of an impact on how we
view sex,
race, and gender? One argument about porn’s relevance is that it
is big busi-
ness with big cultural effects. Many critics have cited the broad
impact of por-
nography on American life since its legalization during the
sexual revolution
of the 1960s and ’70s.15 With revenues of nearly $8–$10 billion
a year, the adult
entertainment industry is one of the largest entertainment
industries in the
United States.16 Pornographic films, videos, and websites are
one part of this
larger industry that includes exotic dance clubs, phone sex,
magazines, peep
booths, and sex toys. While Hollywood makes nearly four
hundred films each
year, the adult industry makes more than ten thousand.17
This book focuses on photographic film and digital media from
the turn of
the twentieth century to the early twenty- first, a period during
which pornog-
raphy became a “phenomenon of media culture and a question
of mass pro-

duction.”18 Indeed, mechanisms of mass production and
consumption have
become central to the growing convergence of sexual aesthetics
and media
industries, and their prominent role in defining private fantasies
and pub-
lic spaces. In recent years we have seen this convergence
happening within
popular culture, from “porno chic” fashion, to reality TV shows
such as The
Girls Next Door, to mainstream films like Zack and Miri Make a
Porno and
Boogie Nights, to adult actress and entrepreneur Jenna Jameson
being inter-
viewed on Oprah. Porn as an entrance into everyday consumer
life can be seen
as producing what many critics have termed the “pornification”
or “porne-
tration” of culture.19 Previously illicit subcultures,
communities, and sexual
practices have been brought into the public eye through
pornography, and in
the process they have made their way into other modes of
culture, including
fashion, art, mainstream film, music, and television. Celebrity
sex tapes, po-
litical sex scandals, and popular sex panics around issues like
youth “sexting”
have popularized the idea of public sex as a symptom of a
pornographic main-
stream media; they ignite worry that what is being projected and
amplified is
the worst of American sexual experience in terms of taste,
values, and poli-
tics. Indeed, based on documentaries such as Chyng Sun’s The
Price of Plea-

sure, one would imagine that the biggest threat to society is not
war, torture,
poverty, or environmental degradation, but the proliferation of
pornography
and its representation of “bad sex.”20 Rather than an act of
romance, intimacy,
or love, bad sex is seen as the product of the narcissistic, self-
interested char-
acter of our culture. This unfeeling, vulgar kind of sex rubs up
against expec-
8 I N T RO D U C T I O N
tations of personal morality and rational social values rooted in
traditional,
bourgeois views of sex for the reproduction of proper families
and citizens.
Thus, fears of bad sex expose powerful anxieties about how
changing mean-
ings and practices around sex might lead to a downward spiral,
a debasing of
social life and the nation.21 More than a debate about how sex
is represented
in our culture, porn is a site of moral panic about sex itself.
As an act of speech that speaks the unspeakable, pornography
has been
defined by what the state has tried to suppress.22 In the process
of pushing
against censorship and obscenity regulation, porn presses and
redefines the
limits of the culture of sex. Media technologies have played a
leading role
in making porn increasingly accessible and part of the public

domain. With
so many genres and subgenres of erotic fascination making up
pornogra-
phy’s “kaleidoscopic variorum” we might even think of it in a
plural sense:
as pornographies.23 Yet despite its vast proliferation, increased
pluralism, and
rich potential for the reimagining of allowable forms of desire,
pornography’s
commodification of sex has produced what Richard Fung notes
as a “limited
vision of what constitutes the erotic.”24 That porn reproduces
predictable,
indeed stereotypical, representations of sexuality for an
increasingly niche-
oriented marketplace is not surprising given its profit motive.
This limited
erotic vision may also be the result of sexually conservative
regulatory sys-
tems, such as obscenity laws, which have defined what may or
may not be
broadcast via media technologies like television or the Internet
or sold in
stores, whether locally or across state lines.25 In addition to
affecting media
policy, the regulation of sexual culture has reinforced severely
narrow repre-
sentations of gender, desire, and sexuality that make it difficult
to construct
alternative imaginaries, even in supposedly transgressive spaces
like pornog-
raphy.26 Nevertheless, pornography reliably takes up the
challenge of subvert-
ing norms, even as it catalyzes and perpetuates them. The
fantasies it produces
offer fertile spaces to read how eroticism, proliferation,

commodification, and
regulation get played out at the very heart of our public
consciousness.
In many ways porn is a political theater where—in addition to
gender, sex,
and class—racial distinctions and barriers are reiterated even as
they may
also be manipulated or transformed.27 Race, or more properly
racialization,
the process by which meanings are made and power is
structured around
racial differences, informs the production side of commercial
pornography
in at least two important ways: in the titillating images
themselves and in the
behind- the- scenes dynamics where sex workers are hired to
perform in the
production of those images.28 Black women, and other people
of color, have
historically been included in pornography to the extent that its
producers
B ROW N SU G A R 9
seek to commoditize, circulate, and enable the consumption of
their images.
Their bodies represent stereotypes of racial, gender, and sexual
difference and
the fantasies or deeper meanings behind them.29 Until recently,
when black
women and men started to produce and circulate their own
pornographies,
those fantasies were seldom authored by black people.

Black women’s images in hardcore porn show that the titillation
of por-
nography is inseparable from the racial stories it tells. A central
narrative is
that black women are both desirable and undesirable objects:
desirable for
their supposed difference, exoticism, and sexual potency, and
undesirable be-
cause these very same factors threaten or compromise governing
notions of
feminine sexuality, heterosexual relations, and racial hierarchy.
Pornography
did not create these racial stories, these fraught imaginings of
black being and
taboo interactions across racial difference, but it uses them.
What interests
me is the work of racial fantasy, particularly fantasy involving
black women.
Given our racial past and present, what is the labor of the black
female body
in pornography? As my informants show, the players of
pornography’s racial
imaginarium are the ones who can best discern the crucial
implications of
these fantasies for black women’s sexual identities and
experiences. They
reveal how some black porn actresses tactically employ the
performative
labor of hypersexuality to intervene in their representation,
“contest it from
within,”30 and provide a deeper, more complex reading of their
erotic lives.
Working On, Within, and Against

Historically, enslaved black women were marked as undesirable
objects for
white men due to their primitive sexuality. These women, as the
myth went,
were so supersexual that they virtually forced white men into
sex they os-
tensibly did not want to have.31 Enslaved black women needed
their sexual
powers because otherwise these unwitting white men would
never desire
them. This myth concealed, denied, and suppressed the plain
sexual exploi-
tation of enslaved and emancipated African American women by
casting the
demand for their sexuality, both in images and as labor, as
impossible. Chief
to the racial fetishism of black women in pornography, then, is
a double focus:
a voyeurism that looks but also does not look, that obsessively
enjoys, lingers
over, and takes pleasure in the black female body even while it
declares that
body as strange, Other, and abject.32
Black women are of course aware of this regime of racial
fetishism in rep-
resentation (and the social and legal apparatus that sustains it),
which li-
censes the voyeuristic consumption of their bodies as forbidden
sex objects.
10 I N T RO D U C T I O N
As Jeannie Pepper noted, black women are always “already

assumed to be”
whores. She, then, uses this insistent myth in her own work.
That is, Jeannie
Pepper employs her own illicit desirability in a kind of sexual
repertoire. By
precisely staging her sexuality so as to acknowledge and evoke
the taboo
desire for it, she shows that racial fetishism can actually be
taken up by its ob-
jects and used differently. Standing nude on the beach in the
South of France
as throngs of tourists look on, Jeannie takes pleasure in
presenting herself as
irresistibly captivating and attractive in the face of the denial of
those very
capacities. In this way, Jeannie Pepper exposes the disgust for
black female
sexuality as a facade for what is really forbidden desire. It is a
myth that can
be reworked and redeployed for one’s own purposes.
Jeannie Pepper shows us how black women—particularly sex
workers—
mobilize what I term “illicit eroticism” to advance themselves
in adult enter-
tainment’s sexual economy.33 Actively confronting the taboo
nature and
fraught history of black female sexuality, black sex workers
choose to pur-
sue a prohibited terrain of labor and performance. Illicit
eroticism provides
a framework to understand the ways in which black women put
hypersexu-
ality to use. They do so in an industry that is highly stratified
with numerous
structures of desire and “tiers of desirability.”34 Black women’s

illicit erotic
work manipulates and represents racialized sexuality—
including hyper-
sexuality—in order to assert the value of their erotic capital.35
In an industry where they are marginal to the most lucrative
produc-
tions, and where the quality of productions are largely based on
demand,
black women, along with Latinas and Asian women, face a lack
of opportu-
nities, pay disparities, and racially biased treatment in
comparison to white
women.36 Black women are devalued in terms of their erotic
worth, and they
are critical of how they are made lesser players in
pornography’s theater of
fantasy. These women seek to mobilize their bodies to position
themselves to
the greatest advantage. This mobilization requires a complex
knowledge of
what it means to “play the game” and to “play up” race by
moving and per-
forming strategically. However, because not everyone is able to
increase their
status in the established hierarchies of desire, black women
employing illicit
erotic labor face a complicated dilemma: lacking erotic capital,
how can they
produce more, and in the process enhance their erotic power,
social signifi-
cance, and economic position?
One strategy for black women in pornography is to work
extremely hard to
carve out space and fabricate themselves as marketable and

desirable actors.
Their appearance is important to them; they invest a great deal
of time and
money on self- fashioning and taking care of their bodies in
order to achieve
FIGURE I. 3. Jeannie Pepper standing before the Eiffel Tower
in Paris, France, during
her European tour in 1986. Courtesy of JohnDragon.com.
12 I N T RO D U C T I O N
competitiveness. Performance is critical; most performers
attempt to portray
seductive eroticism and sexual skill, which may give them an
edge with con-
sumers and added appreciation by other actors and producers. In
addition to
appearing in adult videos, they actively cultivate themselves as
“porn stars,”
which includes creating a captivating persona and becoming a
savvy finan-
cial manager and entrepreneur. Selling themselves as brands or
commodities
means spending a great deal of time on promotion, including at
photo shoots,
appearances at trade conventions and entertainment- industry
events, and on
their websites, social networks, and chat rooms, to foster a fan
base. All these
spaces are spaces of work and contestation where black women
must fight

for their worth. Even more important, these primarily young,
working- class
black women do all this while also acting as mothers, aunts,
daughters, sisters,
and partners called upon to play important caretaking roles in
their families.
They are women who use their bodies as resources and their
determined intel-
lect as tools to make a living, and sometimes make a name too.
Marginalized and exploited in the labor market, many young,
working-
class black women today identify the sex industries as preferred
spaces to
make a living for themselves and their families.37 This is not
new. As the his-
tory of black sexual labor attests, this choice has been recorded
as part of
their negotiations of the labor market since slavery and through
the Great
Depression.38 Black sex workers make a living when they take
sex, which is
associated with leisure and play, and turn it into what Robin D.
G. Kelley calls
“play- labor.”39 In commodifying sexuality, play- labor does
not necessarily re-
sist or overturn hegemonic institutions of power like patriarchy
and racial
capitalism. That is not its purpose. Play- labor is one strategy
by which black
women (and others) try to negotiate the existing political
economy by using
their corporeal resources, which are some of the only resources
many black
working- class women may in fact possess. Given that the other
options open

to working- class black women appear in service, care work, or
other contin-
gent labor industries, the “choice” to pursue sex work is of
course constrained
within a modern capitalist system where all work is exploited
work, and black
women’s work is super exploited.40
Part of a continuum of sex work—including streetwalking,
private es-
corting, erotic dancing, modeling, phone sex, and S/M role
play—and part
of a history of black women working in underground or gray
economies as
“mojo women . . . bootleggers, numbers backers and bawdy
house operators,”
black women’s work in pornography maneuvers within illicit
and licit sexual
economies to pursue what Sharon Harley describes as “personal
and commu-
B ROW N SU G A R 13
nity survival.”41 Their maneuvers are generally prompted by
market concerns,
like porn’s relatively flexible and high- income work, but also
by nonmarket
motives, such as sexual pleasure and the enjoyment of erotic
performance.
Garnering fame in the adult entertainment industry is often
regarded by per-
formers as a viable aspiration and a stepping- stone to more
opportunities
in entertainment. For young black women, attaining fame could

also reflect
a desire to harness the erotic capital possessed by recognized
black enter-
tainers and actresses such as Beyoncé, Nicki Minaj, Halle
Berry, Pam Grier,
and Josephine Baker.
Jeannie Pepper’s identification with Josephine Baker indicates
that some
black women working in porn understand the historical
depictions of their
bodies as containing dynamic possibilities for reinterpretation
and re- creation
through performance. These women work on representations of
black sexu-
ality by using their own bodies and imaginations. These
representations—
painful, punishing, or pleasurable—are part of what Asian
American studies
scholar and filmmaker Celine Parreñas Shimizu terms the “bind
of repre-
sentation.”42 As for Asian American women and other women
of color in
the United States, racialized sexual representation forms black
women’s “very
self- recognition every day and every minute.”43 Because black
women are
tethered to ontological concepts of sexual deviance, it is vital to
acknowl-
edge hypersexuality as a disciplinary instrument that effects
pain, trauma,
and abuse in their lives, and which, like other problematic
representations of
race, gender, and sexuality, is extremely hard to escape.44
Black women are not just victims of representation, however.

Referencing
three black Oscar- winning Hollywood actresses—Hattie
McDaniel, Whoopi
Goldberg, and Halle Berry—feminist literary and media scholar
Rebecca
Wanzo shows how many black women entertainers recognize
the potentially
recuperative nature of their performances. “Familiar with
stereotypes about
black female identity,” writes Wanzo, “they have attempted to
reconfigure
themselves as central agents of a particular project and then see
themselves
as making themselves objects in relationship to this racist
history on their
own terms.”45 Like actresses in the racist and sexist Hollywood
film industry,
some black actresses in the adult industry also recognize their
performances
as spaces to negotiate the overdetermined and reductive
depictions, and try
to engage them on their own terms. White American women are
not judged
in the same way, nor are they accused of representing the
“hypersexuality of
white womanhood.”46 Yet black women, as individuals, often
come to stand
for their entire racial group. Not only are black women
performers burdened
14 I N T RO D U C T I O N
with representing every other black woman, they are seen to
depict only sim-

plistic and denigrating types.47 Black porn actresses understand
that they are
seen as archetypical whores and bad women by both the black
community
and the broader, categorically white, culture.
Crucially, these women often assert themselves within these
archetypes.
Performers who not only fit the stereotype, but also boldly put
it to work in
their performances can be read as having more sophisticated
understandings
and counterresponses in relationship to representation than
previously ac-
knowledged. In discussing her role as the “voodoo girl” in Let
Me Tell Ya ’Bout
Black Chicks, Jeannie explained that she chose a role that,
though still a stereo-
typical representation of exotic, supernatural, and hypersexual
black woman-
hood, she saw as an alternative to the then- standard role of the
maid: “So I
played the part of the voodoo girl. I wanted that part. I was glad
to have [it]. I
loved the way they dressed me up, with the costume. They made
me look very
exotic with all the makeup and feathers, and I was running
around [acting
possessed]. But I didn’t want to play the maids. Those other
girls were playing
maids. . . . But I like my part.” By playing the exotically
fetishized black woman
instead of the recognizable fetish of the servile black maid,
Jeannie negotiated
what she saw as a demeaning representation.48 The voodoo girl
was not neces-

sarily a positive representation against the maid’s negative one,
but it allowed
space for Jeannie to take pleasure in what she identified as a
more complex
performance. Dressed as the primitive, magical savage in a
tinsel skirt that
looks more fitting for a luau than a voodoo ceremony, colorful
neon bangles,
and 1980s eye- shadow- heavy makeup, Jeannie’s voodoo girl
uses a magic spell
to conjure two white men to satisfy her sexual appetite. Jeannie
brings erotic
charisma and skill to her enthusiastic performance, stretching it
beyond its
impish and narrow construction. And, as she attests, her choice
to perform
a playful, mysterious, and (literally) self- possessed female
character was a
strategic move. Even though this move did not fully dismantle
racist regimes
of representation for black women in pornography, Jeannie’s
tactics for self-
representation are important to recognize.
Angel Kelly, a contemporary of Jeannie Pepper in the 1980s,
was the first
black woman to win an exclusive contract from an adult film
production
company, Perry Ross’s Fantasy Home Video. An A- list actress
like Jeannie,
Angel desperately wanted to make choices in her career that
would show her
in what she saw as a positive light: as glamorous, sexy, and
beautiful. How-
ever, sometimes the nature of the industry meant that she
became mired in

the stereotypical construction of black women’s sexuality. Like
Jeannie, Angel
was pressured to portray a “voodoo woman”:
B ROW N SU G A R 15
There is one video called Welcome to the Jungle, where I look
like an
African, I look like voodoo woman [on the video box cover]. I
hate that
picture. I hated it. I hated it! And that’s why I wouldn’t do the
movie for
it. So there was no movie, but there was a [video box] cover
called Wel-
come to the Jungle and what [the producer, Perry Ross] did was
he just
made it a compilation tape. See, they can screw you that way
anyway
because when they are shooting pictures they got footage on
you, and
they can take all your scenes out of one movie and put it with
another
cover in another movie.
As Angel describes, she importantly chose to stand up to the
demands of her
producer by refusing to star in the production. Yet she did feel
pressure to
dress like an “African voodoo woman” for the Welcome to the
Jungle (1988)
photo shoot, because as she told me during our phone interview
in 2013,
“Sometimes if you wanted to work you had to swallow it. I tried
to hold on

the best I could.” Angel felt bitterly about the experience,
noting her lack of
power in relationship to the greater power of studios to use and
manipulate
her images. For Angel, who had on occasion played the
shuffling maid to a
white family (see The Call Girl), negotiating porn work
included evaluating
the terms of each production and deciding how she might infuse
the role
with her own desires. Angel expressed to me the pleasures she
gained in her
work: “I had a chance to play all types of great characters a man
could fanta-
size about. I was surprised that I had as many female fans as I
did male fans.
I had the opportunity to be a star.”
Black women’s counterstrategies of representation involve at
times at-
tempting to play the stereotype in order to reverse or go beyond
it. At other
times they offer alternative, more complex images of black
sexuality, or they
may refuse the roles altogether.49 In my analyses of black
women’s participa-
tion in pornography, I identify where they tell stereotypical
stories in their
performances, but also where performers appear to tell stories
about them-
selves that aspire to go beyond stereotypes, the “immediately
available” stories
told about black women.50 Illicit eroticism, like José Esteban
Muñoz’s concept
of “disidentification,” describes how cultural workers enact a
repertoire of

skills and theories—including appropriating or manipulating
certain stereo-
types—to “negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere that
continuously
elides or punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform
to the phan-
tasm of normative citizenship.”51 Unlike disidentification,
illicit eroticism de-
scribes a repertoire of appropriations distinct to the realm of
sexual and sexu-
alized labor, available to those whose sexuality has been
marked specifically
16 I N T RO D U C T I O N
as illicit, including people of color, and queer folk, including
queer people of
color. Illicit eroticism conceptualizes how these actors use
sexuality in ways
that necessarily confront and manipulate discourses about their
sexual devi-
ance while remaining tied to a system that produces them as
marginalized
sexual laborers. For Jeannie Pepper and others, leveraging one
stereotype can
mean avoiding another. Yet these performers’ layered work as
black women
remains connected to their very survival within a punishing
field of repre-
sentation and labor.
Both Jeannie and Angel tell of their aspirations to be seen as
more com-
plicated subjects than the pornographic script allowed. Playing

up, against,
and within caricature, Jeannie, who delved into a stereotyped
role, imagined
herself as an actor depicting a woman with power, one who
magically and
mischievously produces men to service her sexual desires, while
generating a
kind of glamour and joviality. Imagining a black female
pornographic sexu-
ality as joyful, subversive, and attractive, Jeannie’s
performance asserts erotic
sovereignty. Her performance attempts to reterritorialize the
always already
exploitable black female body as a potential site of self-
governing desire, sub-
jectivity, dependence and relation with others, and erotic
pleasure.52 Erotic
sovereignty is a process, rather than a completely achieved state
of being,
wherein sexual subjects aspire and move toward self- rule and
collective af-
filiation and intimacy, and against the territorializing power of
the disci-
plining state and social corpus. It is part of an ongoing
ontological process
that uses racialized sexuality to assert complex subjecthood,
inside of the
overwhelming constraints of social stigma, stereotype,
structural inequality,
policing, divestment, segregation, and exploitation under the
neoliberal state.
Jeannie’s interventions are never separate from the conditions
that propelled
and shaped her work in the porn industry during the 1980s,
including the
impact of Ronald Reagan’s devastating economic policies on

African Ameri-
cans, and the porn business’s interest in capturing white
consumers for black-
cast products during the video era.
By foregrounding the testimonies of black porn actresses like
Jeannie Pep-
per and Angel Kelly, I hope to explain how black porn actresses
might simul-
taneously challenge and conform to the racial fantasies that
overwhelmingly
define their representations and labor conditions. Their
negotiations offer a
view into black women’s needs, desires, and understandings,
and into the
deeply felt conflict between what stories about black women
exist and what
stories they long to imagine for themselves. Agency, a central
concept in femi-
nist thought, is generally understood as a person’s ability to
achieve free-
dom or “progressive change” in the context of everyday and
manifold forms
B ROW N SU G A R 17
of oppression. I draw on postcolonial scholar Saba Mahmood’s
productive
conceptualization of agency as a “capacity for action that
historically specific
relations of subordination enable and create.”53 Not eliding the
role of sub-
ordination, Mahmood reveals agency as existing along a
continuum. At times

agency enables progressive change or resistive action, and at
other times and
contexts it is the “capacity to endure, suffer, and persist.”54
Rethinking the meaning of agency in relationship to black
women’s sexu-
ality, I propose to open up the concept of agency by moving
away from read-
ings of its equivalence with resistive (sexual) freedom. We
might instead read
agency as a facet of complex personhood within larger
embedded relations
of subordination. Depending on the historical moment, agency
emerges dif-
ferently and operates along divergent nodes of power. Agency
then might be
seen as a dialectical capacity for pleasure and pain, exploration
and denial, or
for progressive change as well as everyday survival. Through
my close read-
ings of interviews with black performers in the pornography
industry, we can
observe their differing forms of agency given changing contexts
of represen-
tation and circuits of sexual economy.
The tension described above between aspiration and inescapable
con-
straint forms the critical spine of this book. Although it is
impossible to de-
cipher what early black pornography actors imagined and
desired as they
performed during the rise of pornographic photography and film
in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century, it is important to think
through the

foundational nature of early pornography as it set the terms for
the later per-
formances, labor conditions, and forms of negotiation deployed
by black
adult actresses. Chapter 1 examines the fetishization of black
women’s bodies
in early pornography and considers how those bodies served as
objects of
spectacle, fascination, and disdain within the visual regimes of
slavery, colo-
nialism, and Jim Crow. A compulsive desire to sexualize race
and to consume
sexual images of black women and men intersected with the rise
of commer-
cial pornography, creating a distinct genre that I call “race
porn.” Photographs
and films concerning black and black- white sex illuminate how
discourses
of racial and sexual difference became calcified during this
period. Even in
the most intimate interactions in early pornography racial-
sexual borders
are erected, permeated, and then built up again. Deploying what
I call a black
feminist pornographic lens, I read the archive of early race porn
to contem-
plate the ways in which early black models and actresses may
have reached
past the confines of porn texts to provide performances that
give us a sur-
prising view of black female sensuality, playfulness, and erotic
subjectivity.
Chapter 2 explores the performances of black porn actresses,
like Desiree

18 I N T RO D U C T I O N
West, during the “Golden Age” of pornography in the 1970s.
Not only did
large- scale social transformations alter racial- sexual borders in
the United
States during this period, they also transformed meanings and
interactions
around pornography itself, such that newly popularized sexual
media be-
came an important site for black women. A combination of
white fascination
with black sexuality and African Americans’ desire to express a
new, asser-
tive sexual politics resulted in what I call “soul porn,” a genre
that power-
fully shaped black women’s performances and labor. Yet as
black actresses
became agents in the production of an emergent porn industry,
they faced
the anxieties and subjugations of racial fetishism and were
sidelined by the
extreme focus on black male sexuality as the archetype for
racial- sexual bor-
der crossing.
Throughout its history, technological and social forces have
continuously
altered the landscape of the adult industry. In the process
technology has
transformed the kinds of texts and modes of production black
porn actresses
encountered. Chapter 3 investigates how the adult industry’s
adoption of VHS

allowed for the growth of specific markets for black and
interracial video. In
this new interracial subgenre black actresses like Jeannie
Pepper and Angel
Kelly negotiated ways to assert their performances and
professional personas
into a restrictive formula and sometimes hostile terrain. In the
early 1990s,
digital media began to shift the production, marketing, and
consumption of
pornography, just as the rise of hip hop music began to shift the
representa-
tions, discourses, and aesthetics associated with black female
sexuality.
Chapter 4 interrogates how the convergence of hip hop and
pornography
helped establish the trope of the black working- class woman as
“ho.” Deploy-
ing this figure, the porn industry maintained a segregated,
niche- oriented
market for black sexuality based on commercial hip hop
aesthetics. In the
process, the ho became an inescapable text that black women in
porn must
decipher, and an archetype that speaks to black women’s battles
to prevail in
the sexual economy. Using what I call “ho theory,” I analyze
the representa-
tion of working- class black women’s corporeal labors to insert
themselves in
the marketplace of desires, and to both take pleasure in and
benefit from the
fetishization of black women’s bodies. In addition, I explore the
roles of black
men in hip hop pornography as they are called upon to perform

the roles of
pimp or stud in their sex work.
Chapter 5 focuses on the labors of black women performers by
asking
what socioeconomic or other forces catalyze them to pursue
pornography as
a field of work and site of imagination. How does illicit
eroticism, the pro-
cess by which subjects convert sexuality into a usable resource
in the face of
B ROW N SU G A R 19
a number of compelling forces and constraints, factor into their
motivations
to become porn stars? What do black women in porn identify as
the most
desirable, pleasurable, and powerful aspects of the industry?
Because money,
sex, and fame are the hydraulic factors in my informants’
articulations of the
need and desire for this work, it is important to unpack how the
realities of
the business meet with these expectations.
If chapter 5 is concerned with how aspirations collide with real-
life experi-
ences, chapter 6 analyzes these real- life experiences and the
particular kinds
of entanglements and pressures black porn actresses report as
constitutive
elements of their illicit erotic work. Former and current black
porn actresses

speak about the undeniable hurdles pornographic labor poses,
and about how
they grapple with issues of marginalization, discrimination, and
abuse as they
seek to promote their erotic capital under tremendous constraint
in a busi-
ness that profits from their objectification and exploitation.
Ultimately, these
sexual laborers expose how black women are made vulnerable
by—yet criti-
cally intervene in—the larger sexualized economy of advanced
capitalism in
the United States. Black porn workers offer an alternative moral
economy
that sheds light on how marginalized people within industries
like porn can
cocreate social meanings, challenge conditions, and imagine
other worlds.
This book identifies pornography as an important location to
think about
sexual culture and racial ideologies, particularly in the context
of the sexu-
alization of both popular culture and economic opportunities for
women.
As such, it is necessarily in conversation with feminist critics
and provides a
launching pad to advance the conversation about the role of
pornography in
women’s lives. Pornography is a hugely controversial topic for
feminists. For
more than thirty years, feminists have been engaged in a fierce
debate, widely
known as the Sex Wars, about pornography’s role in society.
The feminist anti-
pornography movement emerged out of radical feminist

activism during the
1970s, against what was viewed as the proliferation of explicit,
misogynistic
images in the media. Antipornography feminists like Andrea
Dworkin and
Catharine MacKinnon defined pornography as equivalent to
gendered vio-
lence, believing that pornography was the “subordination of
women perfectly
achieved.”55 For them, pornography commodifies rape and
endorses and en-
courages men’s abusive sexual desires and violent behaviors
toward women.56
Alternately, a diverse coalition of queer, anticensorship, liberal,
and sex-
positive feminists rejected the claims of radical antipornography
femi-
nists, citing porn as a convenient scapegoat for social-
conservative attacks
on sexual dissent. These critics and activists identified
pornography not as
a “unified (patriarchal) discourse with a singular (misogynist)
impact,” but
20 I N T RO D U C T I O N
rather, as Feminist Anti- Censorship Taskforce member Lisa
Duggan con-
tends, as sexual discourse that is “full of multiple,
contradictory, layered, and
highly contextual meanings.”57 In other words, viewing
practices for por-
nography are varied and dynamic; viewers are not solely abused

by porn or
trained for violent, misogynistic behaviors. While the adult
industry is shaped
by the problematics of heteronormative, homophobic,
transphobic, and racist
corporatist practices, pornography is not a monolithic or static
entity. Porn is
dynamic, diverse, and open for revision, including by those on
the margins
such as women, sexual minorities, and people of color.
Black feminists have often followed the antiporn feminist
critique de-
scribed above, arguing that pornography as an industry
perpetuates harm-
ful stereotypes about black women’s sexuality.58 While these
black feminist
writers are not wrong, the story is more complex, and black
women’s perfor-
mances deserve a more nuanced analysis. Not only do black
women’s rep-
resentations in porn include portrayals that sometimes
undermine stereo-
types, black actresses often try to capture something quite
different from the
meanings normatively attached to their bodies. Moreover, black
women in
porn often try to revalue their images and work by fighting for
better rep-
resentations, asserting themselves in their roles, attempting to
take control
over their products, and helping other black women in the
industry. Black
women in porn also see themselves as a mirror for black women
porn view-
ers. They imagine their relationship with black female porn

fans—the group
from which many of these performers came—as empowering
and challeng-
ing to black women’s sexual politics. By including the
performers’ voices in
the discussion we can address questions that are vital to black
feminisms, such
as the critical significance of pornography for black women’s
sexual labor and
its significance for their own fantasy lives.
Before she started working in porn, Jeannie Pepper was a porn
fan. She
had watched sex films in X- rated theaters and imagined seeing
more black
women like her represented. Yet she also knew that such a move
into the
industry would mark her with a deviance that was
overdetermined by the
historical construction of black gender and sexuality. While
Jeannie has re-
mained critical of the limits placed on black women in the adult
industry and
by black respectability politics, she found affiliation with the
iconic celebrity
of Josephine Baker. Baker, for Jeannie, represented a story of
financial suc-
cess, glamour, mobility, autonomy, and sexual rebellion. Baker,
like Jeannie,
was an erotic performer who became an icon. It is crucial to
understand the
attractions that draw black women to the pornography business.
I suggest that
porn work is part of a long struggle by black women to occupy
their bodies.59

B ROW N SU G A R 21
The primary methodological interventions of this project are
twofold: first,
I converse with porn actresses directly, listening to their voices
and taking
seriously their descriptions of their experiences; second, I read
the com-
plexity of their performances in pornographic imagery. Even as
more atten-
tion is given to the workings of race in pornography, few have
endeavored
to learn about porn’s meanings by looking at the self-
presentations and self-
understandings of black women working inside the industry.60
Over more
than ten years of fieldwork, I conducted ethnographic research
with nearly
sixty black women, and more than forty others involved in the
porn busi-
ness. My research included directors, producers, distributors,
agents, crew,
and actors. I talked to black women porn performers while they
made dinner
at home, signed autographs at industry conventions, networked
and partied
at social events, and prepared for sex scenes on porn sets. As a
black woman, I
discovered an affinity with my informants that unsettled the
traditional meth-
odological division between researcher and object of study. My
informants
trusted me, called on me, and embraced me in their lives. I also
became an

advocate for them: I brought my informants to speak to my
classes, published
their essays, and strategized with them about how to overcome
career and
family hardships. What I found during this decade of fieldwork
and personal
interactions challenged the views I had at the start.
For instance I, like many people, thought that women in porn
were pri-
marily survivors of sexual abuse who got off a bus in
Hollywood and were
whisked away to Porn Valley by some shady pimp. Reading
nostalgic accounts
of the “Golden Age” of porn in the 1970s, I also imagined film
sets to be an
updated version of Boogie Nights, where playful orgiastic sex
ensued between
people who really didn’t care much if the camera was rolling.
Instead I found
no single story for the women that enter the porn business.
While some ad-
mitted coming from abusive or neglectful family backgrounds,
others spoke
about having grounded and loving single or dual- parent
households. Where I
expected to see unmitigated eroticism I found work sites that
were decidedly
desexualized, where cast and crew moved about with
workmanlike focus to
get their movies made on time and, ideally, under budget.
It is only by talking to those involved in the production of
pornography
that we can move past some of the myths and categorical
generalizations

about the business and its controversial products. As a
historian, I wanted to
know more about how black women became part of
pornography, and what
the changing regulatory, technological, and social contexts of
porn’s develop-
ment over the past century or more meant for black women’s
representations,
working conditions, identities, and aspirations. In hunting down
long- lost
22 I N T RO D U C T I O N
vintage pornographic images in libraries and private collections,
I soon real-
ized that there was a vast missing archive of black pornography
and erotica,
and that black women performing in pornography prior to its
deregulation
would unfortunately have to remain unknown and, to an extent,
unknowable.
As a feminist, I wanted to understand how mainstream
pornography,
which appears to be so extremely focused on addressing white
heterosexual
male pleasure, is actually experienced by the women involved in
making it.
While it was not possible to track down black adult film
actresses who worked
prior to the 1980s, I discovered that the women I did contact
were willing, if
not eager, to talk about their experiences and to be understood.
Like Jeannie

Pepper, they knew that even to speak about their lives and work
would chal-
lenge the stigma and silence around these issues for black
women. Yet my
informants fiercely desired to be seen and heard, to tell their
stories and ex-
plain their performances, especially to another black woman. I
had no choice
but to see and hear them. This book is my attempt to recover
and redress an
untold dimension of black women’s sexual lives, by letting them
speak for
themselves.
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Constructing a crisis: porn panics and public
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Valerie Webber & Rebecca Sullivan
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INTRODUCTION
Constructing a crisis: porn panics and public health
Valerie Webbera and Rebecca Sullivanb
aCommunity Health & Humanities, Memorial University of
Newfoundland, St. John’s, Canada; bDepartment of
English, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada

Who has the luxury to worry about porn’s impact on health?
And who has the power to define
what is ‘healthy sexuality’?
Labelling porn a public health crisis has become the newest
tactic for anti-porn activists
seeking to curtail pornography distribution. Thus far, seven
American states have declared
pornography a public health crisis and four more have filed
similar bills. Hearings on the
matter were held in Canada, although the final decision was that
the evidence was too
contradictory to draw any conclusions. Lobbyists in Australia
and the United Kingdom
are asking their governments to investigate not so much whether
there is a public
health crisis, but to leap ahead and determine how to solve the
crisis of pornography.
Yet not one global health agency – the usual experts to identify
and define the scope
of a public health issue – supports their claims. Traditionally,
the field of public health
has concerned itself with disease prevention by addressing the
systemic causes of perva-
sive health problems that impact either a significant majority of
people (e.g. sanitation
systems or childhood vaccinations) or the most marginalized
segments of a population
(e.g. HIV prevention or safe injection sites). Pornography
consumption meets neither of
these criteria. Why then has this debate occupied valuable
government time and
resources?
Treating pornography as a ‘public health crisis’ is a gross
misallocation of priorities. We

do not believe such claims are motivated by a desire to ensure
the physical and social well-
being of the populace. Rather, employing the language of
‘public health’, ostensibly apo-
litical and objective, is a well-devised strategy to impose
sexually conservative moral
imperatives. The fact that the public health argument is
operationalized primarily by
moral activists with a retrograde understanding of both health
and media scholarship,
not by public health professionals or people involved in the
pornography industry,
should be enough to give any person pause. Thus, the pieces in
this special forum do
not engage with the question ‘is porn a public health crisis’ so
much as they critically
reflect upon the catalysts and consequences of this particular
turn to public health dis-
course by anti-porn groups.
It is our contention that framing pornography as a health issue
is a privileged and pol-
itically motivated misdirection of public health resources. As
such, we want to claim our
own space here not to debate on their terms the data,
definitions, and untested assump-
tions embedded in that frame. Rather, we regard this effort as an
opportunity to diversify
the limited narratives of pornography consumption that
presently dominate. The call for
© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
CONTACT Valerie Webber [email protected]
PORN STUDIES
2018, VOL. 5, NO. 2, 192–196

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specific types of ‘evidence’ grants us opportunity to conduct
research that makes visible
the experiences of sexual subjectivities which are so often
silenced. Indeed, as Filippa
Fox argues, the maintenance of the theory that pornography
damages the public’s
health requires the wilful exclusion of the voices of sex
workers. This denial that sex
workers are in fact part of ‘the public’ has real and direct
consequences on sex workers’
ability to access adequate and respectful healthcare, while
health questions of actual rel-
evance to sex workers’ lives go unanswered.
Cicely Marston demonstrates that much of the public health
rhetoric about pornogra-
phy begins from the assumption that a healthy sexuality is one
that conforms to the social
and cultural conventions of white, settler, heterosexual, middle-
class, monogamous pro-
priety. It also singles out pornography as a uniquely and
exclusively negative form of
media. Katie Newby and Anne Philpott present ways to think
about how explicit sexual
content could be ethically produced and incorporated into
sexual health curricula,
especially to discuss consent, safer sex, and distinguishing
between visual fantasy and

real-life sex. These efforts by public heath scholars to integrate
critical media studies of
sexuality into their research opens up an exciting new vista of
academic collaboration
long missing from the media effects models that have dominated
public health and
social psychology studies.
If porn is a public health crisis, then, what exactly are the
health outcomes of watching
too much pornography? That is the fundamental stumbling block
of anti-porn advocates.
David Ley, an American sex therapist, outlines a series of
epistemological and methodo-
logical fallacies that are central to anti-porn claims about the
health risks of porn. While
the science of porn addiction and negative neurological effects
is contentious at best,
there is something well worth studying here: that is, the shift in
political lobbying from
claims of undiagnosable ‘harms’ to women and children, to
insisting that young men
are the unwilling victims of a runaway epidemic of
pornography. Very little of the
public health debates even acknowledges that porn may be
consumed by young
women, or that it has particular and distinct saliency for
LGBTQ2IA+ youth. Indeed, as
Madita Oeming points out, the conversation of porn’s supposed
harms revolves largely
around the mainstream white, heterosexual, cisgendered male, a
victim of his own limit-
less capacity for porn consumption. Diseases of over-
consumption are quintessentially
moral, not health crises. They require and invoke a class of
passive and entitled consumers

whose supposed well-being outweighs any public or
occupational health programmes to
support porn workers, a phenomenon Heather Berg unravels in
her contribution to this
forum.
To suggest that a conversation on the health effects of
pornography is a privileged one
is not to say that we do not welcome complex and even
contentious academic debate on
sexuality. Sexual norms and cultures are important for health
outcomes and therefore
require balanced, thoughtful discussion and consideration of the
relationship of sexual
media to sexual health. Indeed, critical media and cultural
scholars have been engaged
in this work for decades. Sophisticated qualitative methods for
understanding how
youth negotiate their media viewing and integrate it with their
sexual becoming is
easily accessible but still poorly integrated even by public
health scholars who contest
the anti-porn arguments. Research on sexting (Burkett 2015;
Albury 2017), online com-
munication (De Ridder and Van Bauwel 2013; Keller 2015;
Naezer 2017), media sexualiza-
tion (McRobbie 2008; Attwood 2010; McKee 2010; Smith 2010;
Duits and van Zoonen
PORN STUDIES 193
2011), and porn consumption (Attwood 2005; McKee 2007;
Smith 2007; Paasonen et al.
2015) that assemble multifaceted analytical frameworks serves

to locate pornography
within a complex matrix of sexual media production,
distribution, and consumption. Fur-
thermore, it provides opportunities to integrate sexual media
into debates on media lit-
eracy and digital citizenship as something other than a risky
behaviour to avoid (Keller
and Brown 2002; Jones and Mitchell 2016). Frameworks already
exist to educate children
and youth on healthy media usage, rights and responsibilities of
social media engage-
ment, critical meaning-making, and identity self-construction.
As these issues spill over
into sexual education curricula, it becomes more urgent that we
talk about ethical pro-
duction and consumption of sexual media. Yet educational,
medical, religious, and
other social systems (not to mention families) still revert to
hand-wringing over media
access rather than considering the wider economic,
sociocultural, and historical contexts
in which sexual media are embedded. Without these contexts,
we cannot have important
conversations about the realities of porn’s pervasiveness in
society – what Brian McNair
calls ‘the pornosphere’ (2002, 35) – and how porn can
contribute to broadening, rather
than narrowing, the possibilities for safe and fulfilling sexual
lives.
The appropriation of public health legislation by anti-porn
advocates also illustrates the
importance of public health ethics. Any interventions on private
sexual practices must
balance individual rights and security with the public good. It
was a hard lesson learned

in the early stages of the HIV/AIDS epidemic – a true public
health crisis, but also one
riddled with stigma and discrimination. As concern over the
disease mounted, many
health practitioners, decision-makers, and activists campaigning
in the name of public
health considered drastic violations of people’s privacy and
autonomy as necessary and
justified. This included interventions such as mandatory testing,
reporting, and quarantine,
as well as the closure of community sexual spaces such as
bathhouses (Herek 1999;
Disman 2003). It continues today in the form of mandatory
testing and reporting
(Webber, Bartlett, and Brunger 2016), blood bans for men who
have sex with men
(Cascio and Yomtovian 2013; Arora 2017; Crath and Rangel
2017), and the criminalization
of non-disclosure of one’s HIV status to sexual partners
(Mykhalovskiy 2011; O’Byrne,
Bryan, and Woodyatt 2013). HIV is an interesting comparative
case study to the current
porn panic because it demonstrates how interventions ostensibly
intended to protect
the health of the ‘public’ deliberately privilege specific forms
of sexual and relational prac-
tice. Public sexual health campaigns and policies based upon
weak evidence are danger-
ous because they conflate moral judgment with health
intervention, further ostracizing
sexually non-normative populations while failing to result in
any measurable improve-
ments to public health.
As the example of HIV illustrates, it is imperative that public
health always first and fore-

most considers the ethical implications of its own practice, in
order to balance ‘the need to
exercise power to ensure the health of populations and, at the
same time, to avoid abuses
of such power’ (Thomas et al. 2002, 1057). Public health ethics
hinges upon defining the
boundaries of the public/private divide. Sexuality, especially
with regards to its relation-
ship with pornography, tends to incite chaotic interpretations of
ethics because of the
many ways in which it brings ‘the public’ and ‘the private’ into
complicated collision
with one another. How the public/private divide is drawn – how
the private is perceived
to ooze out and corrupt the public – is an important factor in
determining when and how
the collective should be entitled to compel the individual
towards ‘healthy’ decisions.
194 V. WEBBER AND R. SULLIVAN
Tragically, the history of public health interventions on
people’s sexuality is rife with
abuse: forced sterilizations, false mental health diagnoses,
criminalization and incarcera-
tion, dangerous and untested therapeutic interventions, medical
incompetence, and
human rights violations. The examples are too long to
exhaustively list, but some that
stand out include the Puerto Rican birth control pill trials
(1956), the Tuskegee syphilis
experiments conducted on African American men (1932–1972),
and the incarceration of
‘promiscuous’ women in Magdalene Laundries (which lasted

until the 1990s in some
countries). Abuses like these have disproportionately impacted
racialized communities,
sex workers, and sexually non-normative folks. The claims in
favour of labelling porn a
public health crisis promise nothing different.
Our reasons for drawing attention to dark chapters in the history
of public regulation of
sexuality is not to say that sex should be off-limits to public
health officials and experts, but
to insist that we learn from past errors and abuses. People of
marginalized genders and
sexualities who have historically encountered stigma and
discrimination due to previous
sexual health policies must be consulted and their experiences
prioritized. In our own
work, as a public health scholar and a media studies scholar, we
seek out sex workers,
LGBTQ2IA+, HIV+ people, and racialized groups unjustly
labelled as ‘hypersexual’ as
those who must be heard first and loudest (Webber 2017;
Sullivan 2014; Sullivan and
McKee 2015). They were all but absent in recent hearings in
Canada, which had substan-
tially more submissions from evangelical leaders and anti-porn
organizations than they did
from public health scientists or sexual health harm reduction
agencies.
Health can be too easily portrayed as value-free and easily
understood. Similarly,
healthy sexuality is often narrowly defined to conform to
heteronormative, middle-class,
nuclear family-oriented ideals. When a public health debate that
could potentially result

in legislation begins from weak frameworks and over-simplified
definitions, the conse-
quences can be catastrophic. As Thomas et al. (2002, 1058)
state, the fundamental
ethical principle of public health is that ‘programs and policies
should incorporate a
variety of approaches that anticipate and respect diverse values,
beliefs, and cultures in
the community’. Porn is a factor of public sexual health, on that
point we heartily
concur. However, it is not necessarily intoxicating our youth or
decaying social values. It
is also sometimes a path to sexual self-discovery, a vehicle for
safer and consensual sex
practices, and a window into the spectrum of gender and sexual
diversity. Thus, we can
perhaps express some gratitude to those who began this debate –
as deceptively as
they did – so that we can begin to develop public health policies
and programmes that
support more expressive, diverse, and inclusive sexualities. The
pieces in this forum are
offered as a beginning of a new debate, thoughtfully framed and
ethically accountable.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
References
Albury, Kath. 2017. ‘Just Because It’s Public Doesn’t Mean It’s
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Disruptions in Respectability: A Roundtable
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Mali D. Collins-White, Ariane Cruz, Jillian Hernandez, Xavier
Livermon, Kaila
Story & Jennifer Nash
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Souls
Vol. 18, Nos. 2–4, April–December 2016, pp. 463–475
Disruptions in Respectability: A
Roundtable Discussion
Mali D. Collins-White, Ariane Cruz, Jillian Hernandez,
Xavier Livermon, Kaila Story, and Jennifer Nash
What do the politics of representation present in the realm of
knowledge production?
This roundtable of scholars of gender, sexuality, Black, and
Latino studies circle the dis-
cussion around this question by positioning politics of
representation and respectability
within the realm of popular culture, pornography studies, and
other highly consumed
forms of media. The discussion also points toward themes of
intramural policing, and
other forms of oppression performed within Black and Brown
communities as ways to
understand how respectability politics are martialed in the
public sphere.
Keywords: Black studies, policing, pop culture, representation,
respectability
This roundtable was curated to create an open dialogue with
scholars who engage
with a sort of anti-respectability politics. Anti-respectability
politics is a practice that
engages with material, content, or subject matter free from
heteronormative or

specifically Western contours of African American
representation. In this sense,
these scholars’ critique of anti-respectability takes form
intellectually, conceptually,
or in the immeasurable labor they perform in their respective
disciplines of Gender
and Sexuality Studies, Africana Studies, and various
interdisciplinary departments
across the United States. I asked five scholars, Dr. Ariane Cruz,
Dr. Jillian
Hernandez, Dr. Jennifer Nash, Dr. Kaila Story, and Dr. Xavier
Livermon to contrib-
ute to the conversation. These scholars’ work directly contests
the rhetoric of uplift
and materialism to interrogate the ways in which Black and
Brown cultures under-
mine respectability as a neo-colonialist measure. As I read their
work in my study of
Black cultural archives, I am drawn, methodologically, to the
forms of violence that
shape these archives toward and/or for Western motivations of
categorization and
classification of race, gender, and sexuality. Thus, I am
exceedingly drawn to the
deployment of anti-respectability as a methodology to carve
new territories for Black
ISSN 1099-9949 print/1548-3843 online #�2016 University of
Illinois at Chicago
DOI: 10.1080/10999949.2016.1230813
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10999949.2016.1230813
and Gender Studies, respectively. This discussion centers
intramural policing of

sexuality and the body, pornography, and the general
consideration of the role of
respectability politics in our cultural archives. The contributors’
work is international
and transnational, and concerned with the systemization of
respectability in both
public and private spheres.
Part I: Intramural Policing and Generational Politics
Intramural policing is an acute form of respectability policing.
More generally, it
engages a level of violence that alienates Black folks from the
self which informs a
lifetime relationship with Blackness as an identity. But
intramural respectability
politics is ever changing and takes many forms. Where Black
bodies may have once
been shunned for certain material or social practices, Black
bodies performing these
practices may be acceptable contemporarily. Yet, themes of
hyper-sexualization,
guilt, (self-) hatred, and anti-Blackness remain steadfast. In
what ways do you see
the fraught history of respectability politics being played out in
trans-generational
relationships in both the public and private spheres? What do
the concepts of place
and time offer us a useful terrain to map respectability as a
cultural accompaniment
to white supremacy evolution?
AC: Intramural policing is a mode of respectability politics that
engages a range
of levels of violence—both materially and symbolically.
However, I want to
use the concept of the fraught history of respectability politics

and how it
played out in transgenerational relationships in a broader and
more figurat-
ive way to think about the academy and the regulatory regimes
and symbolic
order(s) of Black knowledge. More specifically, I’d like to use
transgenera-
tional relationships as a frame to think about the disciplinary
relationships
in the academy, in particular the epistemological legacies of
Black feminism
in the U.S. I see this matrilineal transgenerational relationship
as a terrain to
map respectability as a primary technique of power and
knowledge, parti-
cularly in relation to the discursive production of Black female
sexuality.
This kind of metaphor of the family is not to return to
(re)production as
a site of racial and sexual exclusion and failure, but rather to
trouble repro-
duction and its troublesome claims of racial and sexual
belonging while con-
veying the intimate relations we maintain with our research, and
the range
of affects (and allegiances) we experience as a result of the
legacies and net-
works of scholarly production that we frame our work within
and against.
So I might encourage us to think about the way that our
citational politics
are informed by notions of respectability in ways that cite and
recite hegem-
onic institutions of knowledge while offering opportunities to
challenge and
intervene in this history. The multiple meaning of the word

discipline—as a
branch of scholarly knowledge and a practice of regulation—
signals the
scholarly disciplinary terrain is as a site of policing, order, and
negotiation.
I often think about my own ambivalent transgenerational
relationship with a kind
of U.S. Black feminist archive in the theoretical landscape of
Black female sexuality
and pornography. When I first began studying pornography I
experienced a sort of
conflict that emanated from the sociocultural and institutional
policing of Black
female sexuality and the influence of respectability politics on
Black knowledge
production. I have written about this conflict—which resonated
at both the personal
464 Souls April–December 2016
and the professional levels—and my desire to almost reconcile
my identification as a
Black feminist scholar studying pornography who did not see it
as wholly oppressive,
inimical, and definitively oppositional to a kind of Black
feminist political agenda. My
leaning towards a more “pro-pornography” point of view
seemed to distance me from
a number of seminal Black feminist scholars—Audre Lorde,
Alice Walker, Patricia
Hill Collins, Audre Lorde, Jewel D. Amoah, Tracey A. Gardner,
and Luisah Teish
among others—whose work I hold in high regard yet who have

argued (and some
rather vehemently) against pornography. Such scholars have
done vital work in the
arena of a Black feminist critique of pornography and Black
female sexuality; how-
ever, the substratum of racism, sexism, exploitation, and
victimization that buttresses
this body of work often prevents a more nuanced, radical
analysis of the polyvalence
of pornography, its vital narration of the complexities of Black
female sexuality, and
its productive opportunities for Black female sexual pleasure
and power.
MC: What interests me about respectability practices is how it
informs our plea-
sure centers rather than what it turns us off to, or what it
promotes that we
should eschew. Understanding what makes us feel good in
fundamentally
anti-Black economies (social, political, and economic) can
provide greater
insight into the inner workings of white supremacy than the
things that
we no longer “like” or find “socially acceptable.” An example
of this in
the public sphere is social media, where Black folks—especially
those under
the age of 30—dominate almost all major media outlets such as
Facebook,
Twitter, and Instagram. My work engages with cultural archives
and the
role that anti-Blackness takes in informing them. I find that the
simul-
taneous permanent/ephemeral functionality of social media is
what perhaps

causes so much pleasure (instant gratification, affirmation of
material sta-
tus) and perhaps so much pain. Social media provides a fertile
ground for
the visibility of alternative politics and also for a certain type of
culture—
maybe it’s not “respectable,” but it sure is there. This culture
promotes cer-
tain body ideals and general aesthetics that complicate the site
of pleasure as
also one of pain; one where Blacks perhaps need to perform or
subject our-
selves to scrutiny, but perhaps also inventing a social space to
articulate cul-
ture politics.
JH: Much of my work is based on the community arts praxis I
have engaged in
with Black and Latina girls and young women in Miami, Florida
for over a
decade. The particular racial mapping of Miami as a site has
provided an
intra- and inter-racial lens through which I have observed and
analyzed
the gender and sexual policing of Black girls’ bodies. Although
the popu-
lation in Miami is overwhelmingly [email protected], the girls
with whom I have
worked through arts outreach to various government, social
service, and
educational institutions, such as the Miami-Dade Regional
Juvenile Deten-
tion Center, have primarily been Black girls. This alerted me to
the ways
in which Black communities in the city are much more heavily
policed, with

the white-identifying [email protected] population functioning
as a hegemonic
majority.
I found that there was a common discourse at work in these
institutions that
attempted to “empower” girls by training them to perform a
very prescribed notion
of gendered respectability—acting like “ladies.” This script
entailed a particularly
Short Takes 465
classed performance of sexual and gender propriety that was
juxtaposed against the
figures of the pregnant Black girl, the loud Black girl, the ho,
the hoochie. I witnessed
both Black and Latina youth serving professionals espousing
this rhetoric and mode
of disciplining in their roles as correction officers, program
coordinators, teachers,
and mental health counselors. In my book project Aesthetics of
Excess: The Art
and Politics of Black and Latina Embodiment I discuss how
Black girls have
responded to the disciplining of their bodies through artistic
authorship, namely
in using their bodies to craft their own representations and
performances that trans-
gress these policing efforts. I also describe how the working-
class Latina girls pejora-
tively labeled “chongas” in Miami are vilified due to their
perceived proximity to
Blackness via sartorial style. So notions of Blackness as deviant

also shape how work-
ing-class [email protected] bodies are (de)valued.
Thinking historically, I have found that respectability politics
have been persist-
ently elaborated through cross-racial juxtapositions. Rather than
the Black and
Latina relational processes of racialization I examine (which are
nevertheless framed
by and for white gazes), in previous decades these dynamic
tracked a more strin-
gently Black/white colorline. One text I use often in my
teaching that illustrates this
is Anne Meis Knupfer’s “‘To Become Good, Self-Supporting
Women’: The State
Industrial School for Delinquent Girls at Geneva, Illinois, 1900-
1935,” (2001),1 in
which she illustrates how white girls would be punished for
sexual activity by the
women who worked at this quasi-juvenile detention school when
it was perceived
that they were engaging with or emulating the sexuality of
Black girls, who were
treated as already hypersexual, incorrigible, and incapable of
performing normative
femininity. So, I would say that although the dynamics of
respectability have evolved
they are not any less insidious. In fact, I find the persistence of
these values especially
troubling in the face of the changing racial makeup of the
United States to a soon to
be majority POC [people of color] population, which should
promise a more radical
social landscape. Yet, rather than forming cross-racial alliances
with Black communi-
ties, minoritized populations like [email protected] continue to

adopt the valuation of white-
ness in order to gain political privilege, which places
tremendous pressure on both
Black and Latina girls to embody and perform gender, class, and
sexual respectability
in order to avoid being perceived as social liabilities in their
communities.
XL: In my own work in South Africa, I think this is a very
interesting question.
Particularly because intramural policing has the added burden
of definitions
of Africanness at a time when one important goal of the
postapartheid
moment is to reclaim notions of Africanness and African
identity. One of
the things that colonialism and apartheid did to Black
communities in South
Africa is that it created a particular kind of anxiety around
definitions of
African identity and the need for Blacks to prove themselves in
relationship
to these concepts, either through proximity or distance.
Respectability poli-
tics during colonialism and apartheid were an important and
strategic way
for Blacks to make claims upon the state. But often times, these
very politics
obscured cultural practices and cultural formations and ways of
being that
could have provided a more inclusive vision of Black freedom.
Linking
specifically to some of my concerns regarding popular culture,
we can see
466 Souls April–December 2016

how trans-generational politics reflected the contested nature of
social
change and propriety. So if we look at something like kwaito
music for
example (an electronic dance music that became popular in mid
1990s South
Africa), the politics of respectability became a way to frame a
whole host of
other societal contestations. Hence, framing kwaito as vulgar
and hypersex-
ual became a way to dismiss alternative interpretations of the
past and alter-
native visions of the future promulgated by young South
Africans. Similarly,
the non-respectability of kwaito became a way to reinscribe
particular visions
of heteronormative gender formations and sexuality, to proclaim
certain
practices that resituated heteronormative male authority as
culturally tra-
ditional and authentic and so forth. While these kinds of debates
were not
necessarily new (we can see their corollary in jazz and
Sophiatown eras of
the 1950s) they took on an added urgency due to the new
political realities
of Black governance.
KS: I see the problematic projection of respectability politics
still remaining a sta-
ple and/or measure of many intergenerational relationships. It
manifests in
various forms from political discourse to popular culture.

Popular culture
in particular is a site where some of the most pernicious forms
of respect-
ability politics flourish because they get a pass as a solely an
“entertainment”
art form, rather than seen as hegemonic ideology. Many folks
continue to
look to pop culture to see how they should behave in their
relationships with
others. We see this in Steve Harvey’s relationship advice and
we also see this
in Tyler Perry’s films. The problem as I see it is that most folks
still look to
pop culture to inform their consciousness about how to act and
behave,
instead of taking into account their personal lives experiences
and social
locations.
Part II: Respectability and Cultural Archiving
How does respectability discourse organize the legacy of Black
culture work and the
archives they create? Are there any culture workers or scholarly
producers you see
engaging in the recovery of Black sexuality that undoes or does
away with respect-
ability? What methods do they deploy in doing so? How do you
see respectability
politics manifesting in cultural memory? What does queer and
sexuality studies more
broadly offer us to recover cultural archives of the African
Diaspora?
AC: Respectability discourse organizes, determines, and
polices the legacy of

Black culture work and the archives they create to reflect the
essential
relationship between knowledge and power. Respectability
discourse
instantiates a form of “power/knowledge,” highlighting how
power is consti-
tuted through accepted forms of knowledge, scientific
understanding, and
truth.2 The politics of respectability labors in the service of the
hegemonic
and disciplinary regimes of “power/knowledge,” networks that
also regulate
the discursive production of race, sexuality, and gender. The
U.S. Black fem-
inist archive has historically been one of a kind of recovery of
Black female
sexuality. That is, historically Black feminist discourse has
maintained an
investment in a critical reframing the Black female body—one
that is moti-
vated by reclamation. As Jennifer Nash’s recent work has
illuminated,
because the Black feminist archive has historically treated
representation
as a site of harm—wherein the Black female body is
misrepresented and
Short Takes 467
constructed as a body of difference and debasement, it remains
deeply
invested in “recovery work,” a type of Black feminist
representation that
seeks to not merely interrogate the representation of Black

womanhood,
but to correct and reclaim the Black female body in discourse.3
Such
recuperative labor is also highly visible in the work many well
known Black
female visual artists (e.g., Betye Saar, Carrie Mae Weems,
Renee Cox, and
others), and this visibility critically reveals representation as a
mode of
not only trauma (i.e., wherein the Black female body is
violently rendered),
but also a mode of salvage (i.e., wherein the Black female body
may be
re-invented). Recovery signifies a return to a place of
normativity from a
place of deviance. It is a movement predicated on the anxious,
and in need
of constant shoring up, binaries of normal/deviant, and
respectable/
reproachable.
One important way that scholars have engaged in the recovery
of Black sexuality is
through the topic of pleasure, a site which has been historically
policed and silenced
within a Black feminist archive itself historically aligned with a
project of recovery.
Maybe ironically, scholarly interest in pleasure is a sort of a
recovery of a recovery.
For example, work from scholars like Mireille Miller-Young,
Jennifer Nash, and my
own has been attentive to Black female pleasure in and of
pornography in ways that
do not so much contest a Black feminist scholarly tradition but
rather extend it. And
I think this more recent scholarly interest in the question of

pleasure in pornography
is linked to a larger academic interest around questions of
pleasure in critical race
theory and queer theory, and in research on racialized
sexualities more broadly in
the work of scholars such as LaMonda Horton Stallings, Joan
Morgan, Siobhan
Brooks, Shane Lee, Lisa Thompson, Riley Snorton, Xavier
Livermon, Amber Musser,
and others. Still, I would like to caution that while we celebrate
and realize the pot-
entiality of pleasure, we must be wary of adopting pleasure as
signifying a directional
shift away from respectability and even perhaps toward a kind
of sexual liberation.
Pleasure is fundamentally socially constructed and hierarchies
of sexual pleasure
reveal the dynamic ways that sexuality operates as a technology
power. Pleasure often
buttresses normative sexualities and sexual hierarchies in ways
that act to veil parti-
cular types of oppression and violence. I think we need to
question: What subjects
are entitled to experience certain types of pleasures and which
are prohibited? What
sexual acts are coded as normative or non-normative via
pleasure? Pleasure is a per-
formance that illuminates the ways that race, sexuality, and
gender are concomitantly
policed and disciplined.
MC: I am always quick to say that I do not see my project of
Black culture
archives and methodology development as a site for recovery.
That being
said, I am more intellectually interested in how African

diasporic peoples
can develop theoretical tools to name and understand what we
do not know
rather than trying to get to know common conventions of
“knowledge”
(especially pertaining to the African Diaspora or African
diasporic histor-
ies). The knowledge is not to be “recovered” “saved,” or fully
“understood.”
I find gender and sexuality studies an incredible space to
interrogate how
these conventions are being dismantled, especially when we
study how these
rules/norms/standards are embodied.
468 Souls April–December 2016
JH: Cultural production is a site of tremendous potential for the
recovery of
Black sexualities outside the paradigms of respectability.
Thinking about
folks who have laid the groundwork for my own research,
people like Mir-
eille Miller-Young, LaMonda Horton-Stallings, Jennifer Nash—
the theory
and scholarship they craft is inspired variously by the
performances, creative
work, and theorizing of Black women and men in pornography,
literature,
and hip hop.
I find the hip hop production of underground Black girl hip hop
artists so inspir-
ing in expanding representations of Black sexualities! So over

the last few years I have
worked with my collaborators Anya Wallace and Christina
Carney in documenting
and archiving their work. In 2014, Anya and I co-authored an
article on Pretty Tak-
ing All Fades (P.T.A.F.).4 P.T.A.F. is an emerging performance
group of young Black
women from Crenshaw, Los Angeles who met and began to
compose their original
hip hop music in high school. They entered popular culture as
teenagers through the
viral circulation of their do-it-yourself music video “Boss Ass
Bitch,” which was
posted on YouTube in May 2012 and has amassed over 13
million hits to date. Anya
and I were moved by how the girls declared their sexual self-
determination through
explicit description of their desires, “If you use your tongue
I’ma like that/Pin my
arms to the bed I’ma fight back … Before you eat the pussy you
gon’ bite my
neck/Bend me over the bed, make me soakin’ wet”—in addition
to their command-
ing rhyme delivery and performance. In the article we discuss
how the girls were vili-
fied online as grotesque and sexually depraved through
comments like, “These are
the type of sluts giving Blacks everywhere a bad name.”
This was happening around the same time that Nicki Minaj was
being attacked for
her use of an image of Malcolm X in the promotion for her
single “Lookin’ Ass,” and
when she also created a remix of P.T.A.F.’s “Boss Ass Bitch”—
which we theorized as
an expression of women/girl of color erotic solidarity in the

face of respectability and
policing. When Anya and I think back to this work in a post-
“Formation” moment,
of how Beyoncé’s nod to the Black Panthers at the 2016 Super
Bowl has been cel-
ebrated by women of color feminists while Minaj’s reference to
Malcolm X in
2014 was overwhelmingly disparaged among them, despite the
fact that “Lookin’
Ass” is a song that has blatant feminist politics in speaking
back to the male gaze.
Although both artists are doing the work of expanding
representations of Black
women’s erotics beyond respectability—especially in their
spectacular collaborations
in “Feeling Myself” and the “Flawless” remix, Beyoncé’s
identity as a married woman
and mother ultimately afford her cultural production and
race/gender politics more
legitimacy and respectability than Nicki’s. Anya and I are
extending this work with
our colleague Christina Carney in a forthcoming article in the
Journal of Popular
Music Studies by looking at how the circulation of memes in
social media frame
Black women cultural producers like Nicki Minaj as sexually
deviant and threatening
to a contrived notion of “respectable” Black girlhood.
I’m also really interested in Vixen ENT, an underground all-girl
hip hop group
from northern California known locally and state-wide for their
Jerkin’ music,
crafted for consumption in the club. They are lifelong friends
who recognized their

Short Takes 469
talent, “we knew how to rap,” and collaboratively wrote hits
such as “I Need That,” “I
Toot My Shit,” and “By the Bar,” which appear to have
circulated via social media
and underground hip hop networks around 2009. Their lyrics
celebrate their bodies,
declare their sexual desires and pleasures in getting fucked up
in the club, drinking,
and dancing. They describe their practice as the expression of
alter egos, without5
disavowing their content as problematic, and they have the
support of their families.
This kind of complexity, which is often not recognized as such,
is what inspires me to
archive their work.
XL: Well, I think one of the things that happens with
respectability discourse is
the loss of so much in the archive. So when we look at archives,
what is the
creative work that we have to do to reclaim and reconfigure
Black sexuality
at its most expressive and diverse? In the South African case, I
have been
impressed with the labor of various different cultural
practitioners to reim-
agine these archives and create new ways of seeing. Queer for
me then offers
the possibility to allow us to see differently. So that when we
look at archives
we might re-imagine what they reveal to us. I am thinking right

$now of the work of Zethu Matebeni and Jabu Perreira in their amazing collection “Rethinking Afrikan.” To quote them, queer is a “critical space that pushes the boundaries of what is embraced as normative.”6 This allows them to reclaim the very notions of Africa, breaking boundaries and moving beyond fracture and disconnect7 to a whole that is not currently represented in Africa as it has been currently defined. Of course Zanele Muholi’s work would fall into this categorization as well; she literally creates new archives which force us to “see differently.” I would argue this process of creating new archives of queer visuality also requires us to rethink already existent archives. It also reminds us that archives are living, breathing, and processual documents constantly being recreated and remade. KS: I see a number of scholars and cultural workers who are at the forefront in reshaping these types of conversations around respectability, especially when it comes to Black sexuality and gender. I of course include myself in this endeavor, but some others folks who are doing this are Tamura Lomax and Aishah Simmons at the Feminist Wire, Darnell Moore, and Wade Davis. Of course E. Patrick Johnson and Marlon Bailey, as well as Dr. Brittney Cooper, Dr. Treva Lindsey, Joan Morgan, Dr. Yaba Blay, and$

Esther Armah
are doing this in their work as well. I also think Bettina Love
and Alexis Pau-
line Grumbs are doing this in their work as well.
JN: I think the poles of respectability and disrespectability
have fundamentally
organized much of the scholarly work on Black sexualities. And
I think a
new cohort of scholars—Amber Jamilla Musser, Uri McMillan,
Ariane Cruz,
Riley Snorton, Lyndon Gill, to name just a few—are advancing
analytics
other than respectability and disrespectability to offer us new
vocabularies
for theorizing Black sexualities. These analytics include
liquidity, spatiality,
temporality, diaspora, and flesh (to name a few) and they push
us beyond
a dynamic that I think has permeated the scholarship—seeking
to recover
the “disrespectable” and/or seeking to uncover how
respectability operates
to police Black pleasures.
My own work isn’t interested in “recovery” as a project (in fact,
recovery is some-
thing I critique in The Black Body in Ecstasy). I think
“recovery” work can often
470 Souls April–December 2016
reproduce ideas of respectability. Let me talk about this with
some degree of speci-

ficity vis-à-vis the archive I work with in that book:
pornography. I argue that Black
feminists have engaged in both tracing the violence of the
visual field (racialized por-
nography is treated as the paradigmatic example of this
violence) and celebrating
“recovery” work, images of that Black female body that attempt
to salvage the body
from the imagined violence of the visual field. These
“recovery” projects are often
projects of self-representation which are imagined to expose
and undo the dominant
logics of visuality. Here, “recovery” and “respectability” can go
hand-in-hand as
many of the images that I discuss in the book are hailed as
erotic but not necessarily
pornographic.
I do think the idea(s) of respectability and disrespectability are
incredibly useful,
though, for thinking about what it means to be a scholar who
works on questions of
Black sexualities. What can be shown in the classroom? What
does a scholar of Black
sexualities want to include in (or exclude from) a tenure
dossier? How does a Black
scholar teach about Black sexualities at a historically white
university when one’s stu-
dents presume that the pleasures discussed are the professor’s
pleasures? How does a
scholar convince one’s colleagues of the merit of her work when
her archive is the
low, the funky, the fleshy, the things that make bodies moan,
groan, shudder? To
me, these questions are fundamentally tied up with what kind of
scholarly work is

assumed to be respectable, and thus what kind of scholarly work
is valued (or
devalued).
Part III: Respectability Politics in the Archives
In what ways do you see your own scholarship upholding
ideologies of respectability
that you may critique in your own work? Or, how do you find
respectability upheld
in institutional Black knowledge production? What are your
stakes in undoing
respectability in the archives you work with? How do
institutional modes of policing
or exclusion influence the way you research Blackness?
AC: I might begin my noting that I am less interested in
undoing respectability
politics than in laying bare how they continue to function in
dynamic ways
to discipline race and sexuality, how race and sexuality operate
as technol-
ogies of power, and how we, as scholars, negotiate these
politics as they
influence the subjects of our analysis. Nevertheless, I am
acutely aware of
the kind of scholarly reach of respectability politics and the
effects these
ideologies have on my work, which explores how Black women
engage, per-
form, mediate, and negotiate the “unspeakable” pleasures of
Blackness in the
context of BDSM [bondage and discipline, domination and
submission, and
sadism and masochism] and pornography—that is, pleasures in
Blackness as

an apparatus of racial-sexual alterity (and often violent)
domination and
submission.
As someone who researches not only Black female sexuality but
also its represen-
tation in pornography and BDSM, I envision my work as
intervening in the silence
that has marked the subject of Black female sexuality. As a
mode of intramural poli-
cing, the politics of respectability has historically manifested as
a mode of silencing
Short Takes 471
perpetuating what Darlene Clark Hine terms the “culture of
dissemblance” the poli-
tics of silence shrouding expressions of Black female
sexuality.8 In my work, I explore
how performances of Black female sexual aggression,
domination, humiliation, and
submission in BDSM and pornography function as critical
modes for and of Black
women’s pleasure, power, and agency. I imagine this work is
engaged in deconstruct-
ing the “culture of dissemblance” to open up the dialogue
surrounding Black
women’s diverse sexuality.9 I am interested in the silences that
convene around a
particular type of unspeakable pleasures—pleasures that are
positioned as not only
perverse, but also often purportedly antithetical to a kind of
project of racial uplift
and deemed unfit for occupancy within the archives of Black

culture. Yet these plea-
sures are, as I argue, mainstream and pervasive nonetheless. Not
heeding the “don’t
go there” attitude that often quashes discussions of Black
women, sexual violence,
and sexual pleasure, my research is invested in a type of work
aligned with what Hor-
tense Spillers might call “the retrieval of mutilated bodies.”10
My stakes in laying bare respectability politics in my own
research and the
archives I work with/in inform my methodology. I often use
interviews to sup-
plement my readings of various performances of Black female
sexuality because I
think that contextualizing sexual fantasies, desires, and
performances from the view-
point of the “actors” can be important in gaining both a more
cohesive, holistic
understanding of sexuality and one that has the potential to
temper the moralizing
force behind the purportedly perverse and disrespectable.
Listening to the voices
of Black women narrate their own sexual experiences of
domination, submission,
and erotic power exchange in BDSM and pornography—their
boundaries, conflicts,
pleasures, pains, fantasies, and histories—brings us closer to a
more comprehensive
understanding of these performances, disrupts monolithic views
of Black female
sexuality as anchored in a bedrock of normativity and silence,
and works towards
a destigmatization of varied and transgressive (and often queer)
Black women’s sex-
ual pleasures such as BDSM. These voices do more than merely

de-silence those of
marginalized sexualities or instantiate the discursive production
of sexuality, they
also constitute the foundation of my claim that race is central to
an understanding
of BDSM and that BDSM serves as a critical paradigm for
racialized sexuality.
I think a lot of this is tied to longstanding, deep-seated, and
pernicious ideas of
Black authenticity. In other words the problem of silence is
produced from not only
the lack of speaking, but also the lack of recognition of
particular voices as speaking.
So which voices continue to speak but remain silent?
Authenticity continues to disci-
pline Blackness and Black culture in myriad ways and this
question of who has his-
torically been allowed to “speak for” and act as representatives
of Blackness and
mascots of Black culture.11 For example, illuminating how we,
specifically Black
intellectuals, participate in the discursive practice of racial
essentialism that con-
structs, indeed legitimates, certain voices and bodies as
authentic voices of and in
the community, Dwight McBride has long unveiled the
heteronormative politics of
inclusion and exclusion determining such a body, and ultimately
the failure of
anti-racist discourse to critically intervene (in) Black
homophobia.12 Yet, I don’t
think we have adequately “listened.” Authenticity remains
problematically wedded
472 Souls April–December 2016

to heteropatriarchal and normative modes of identification as a
regulatory regime
that enables particular bodies—like those of Black queer
women—to be violently
excised, while the “radical potential of queer politics” has yet
to reach its fullest
realization.13
MC: I see my work combatted when some scholars are reluctant
in the ways
many scholars have called for the African Diaspora to be
imagined; and
some are reluctant to “imagine” it at all. A project that I am
currently work-
ing on is “‘Insights into the Archives’: Realizing (B)Lackness
through Queer
Methodologies.” This project addresses queer methods as
anything outside
of western ideological modes of “discovery,” time, place, and
form, and
prioritizes things like hauntings and the “after-images” of
slavery as Kim-
berly Juanita Brown and many others have called them. Most
often I find
that many folks are very resistant to place ideas of imagination,
queerness,
or anything “speculative” within diasporic African historical
contexts. We
seem very guarded in how we think about Black American
history in parti-
cular. My work emerges into a discourse of folks like Christina
Sharpe,
Kimberly Juanita Brown, and Stephanie Smallwood who suggest

that re-
orienting our conceptions of Black archives, communities, or
society in gen-
eral outside of just fact, figures, and artifacts offers useful ways
to think
about cultural archives and Black subject making.
JH: The attacks that I am subject to when I present my work on
Black and Latina
girls/women and sexuality are a significant motivation for my
work. From
being attacked by major cultural arbiters in Miami for my work
on chonga
girls, to the anger I am met with when I present work on
P.T.A.F. and Nicki
Minaj by students, fellow academics, and members of the
public. At times
these critiques have resulted in my being framed as an aberrant
and sus-
picious subject with a problematic agenda. At others I’ve been
described as
potentially “disempowering” the girls I work with because of
my sexual poli-
tics. Although these responses have caused me anxiety, stress,
and at times
have made me fear for my job security and physical safety—
they remind
me of what the stakes are and why this work needs to persist.
I have to say that I have not felt as much pushback
institutionally as I have from
fellow folks of color. I owe this institutional legitimacy to the
groundwork laid by
sex-positive scholars of color like Celine Parreñas Shimizu,
Mireille Miller-Young,
Juana María Rodríguez, José Estéban Muñoz, Jennifer Nash,

LaMonda Horton Stal-
lings, Hoang Tan Nguyen, Kobena Mercer, and others. The last
fifteen years of
women and queer of color scholarship has been absolutely
transformative in estab-
lishing academic spaces where we can have conversations that
trouble the politics of
respectability. There is still much more work to be done.
XL: I think in the South African case, and perhaps the larger
field of African Stu-
dies as it exists in the North American academy, we are seeing a
“queer
moment.” For whatever reason this has become a legitimate
field of study
that the academy and various different NGOs [nongovernmental
organiza-
tions] seem invested in. I do not always think the interest is
entirely benign
and I wonder to what extent much of the interest simply
reproduces parti-
cular kinds of colonial tropes concerning the idea of “African
Sexuality” and
its supposed deviance from western normativity. That being
said, there is
some very critical and important work being done, and from
what I can
Short Takes 473
see the academy and the prominent journals and presses in the
field are mak-
ing space for this work. Nevertheless, there is still a great deal
of conserva-

tism even around the discussion of heterosexuality in relation to
scholarship
about Africa. There is also a sense that discussion of non-
normative gender
and sexuality formations in the African continent is a
predominantly white
western and/or Afrodiasporic concern. So I do believe that in
doing my
scholarship I have had to work hard to undo particular
assumptions about
why I am doing the work and why I am making particular
connections
between Black experiences on the continent and Black
experiences Afrodias-
porically. Honestly, I feel like that has been the biggest
challenge for me to
bring discussions of continental African sexuality into larger
conversations
happening in Afrodiasporic scholarship and to convince both
Afrodiasporic
scholars of Black sexuality and African scholars of the
importance of these
kinds of connections. I can’t say though, that I have done my
work any dif-
ferently, because for me I feel that one of the central political
stakes of my
work has been to make these connections. And honestly, I think
that these
kinds of conversations (and having someone who works on
continental
Africa be a part of them) are key. I am sure that there may have
been fellow-
ships, jobs, or publishing opportunities that I may have missed
out on
because of my research topic(s) and the ways in which I embody
my research

subjects. But I also feel that because of the difficult and
pioneering work
done by Black Feminists in the U.S. academy, the space has
been created
to allow me to slip in and do my work, and for that I am
thankful.
Notes
1. Anne Meis Knupfer, “To Become Good, Self-Supporting
Women: The State Industrial School
for Delinquent Girls at Geneva, Illinois, 1900–1935,” Journal of
the History of Sexuality 9, no.
4 (2001): 420–46.
2. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction
Volume 1 (New York: Vintage
Books, 1990), 98–99.
3. Jennifer C. Nash, The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race
Reading Pornography (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 47.
4. http://www.thefeministwire.com/2014/03/minaj-erotics/.
5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WilFgLXz-S0.
6. Zethu Matebeni and Jabu Perreira, “Preface,” in Reclaiming
Afrikan: Queer Perspectives on
Sexual and Gender Identities, edited by Zethu Matebeni (Cape
Town: Modjaji Books, 2014), 7.
7. ibid.
8. Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black
Women in the Middle West,” Signs
14, no. 4 (Summer, 1989).
9. Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the

Middle West.”.
10. Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An
American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17,
no. 2 (1987): 68.
11. Dwight A. McBride, “Can the Queen Speak? Racial
Essentialism, Sexuality and the Problem of
Authority,” Callaloo 21, no. 2 (1998), 364–77.
12. Ibid.
13. 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.
474 Souls April–December 2016
http://www.thefeministwire.com/2014/03/minaj-erotics/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WilFgLXz-S0
About the Authors
Mali D. Collins-White is a doctoral student at the University of
California, Irvine, in
the Culture and Theory program. Before joining the department
she was an activist
and creative writer in Brooklyn, NY. She has been published in
Bitch magazine,
on The Root.com, and for SALT.: Contemporary Art þFeminism
(UK). She is the
Co-Founder and Program Director at The Compton Center for
Black Life.

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.
Jillian Hernandez, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Ethnic and
Critical Gender
Studies at the University of California, San Diego. She curates
exhibitions, makes art,
teaches art to girls and young women of color in Miami, Florida
along with her
friends, and bumps Nicki Minaj and reggaeton in the car with
her mother and
teenage daughter as they navigate hot and congested Miami
streets to reach Cuban
pastry shops. Her research investigates processes of
racialization, sexualities, embodi-
ment, girlhood, and the politics of cultural production ranging
from underground
and mainstream hip hop to visual and performance art.
Xavier Livermon is an Assistant Professor of African and
African Diaspora Studies
at the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests
include the intersection of
popular culture and gender and sexuality in Africa and the
African Diaspora. His
forthcoming book, tentatively entitled Kwaito Futurity:
Performance, Politics, and
Freedom in Postapartheid South Africa, explores popular music

as a site of new
political cultures in contemporary South Africa.
Kaila Story is an Associate Professor in the departments of
Women’s and Gender
Studies and Pan African Studies at the University of Louisville.
Dr. Story also holds
the Audre Lorde Endowed Chair in Race, Gender, Class and
Sexuality Studies at the
University of Louisville. Last, Dr. Story is also the co-host of
the popular radio show
“Strange Fruit: Musings on Politics, Pop Culture, and Black
Gay Life,” that airs every
Saturday night on WFPL (89.3).
Jennifer Nash’s work focuses on Black feminism, Black sexual
politics, race and
visual culture, and race and law. She held fellowships at the
W.E.B. Du Bois Institute
for African and African American Research and at Columbia
University’s Society of
Fellows. Her research has also been supported by George
Washington University’s
University Facilitating Fund and Columbian College Facilitating
Fund, and by the
Woodrow Wilson Fellowship in Women’s Studies and the
Woodrow Wilson Junior
Faculty Career Enhancement Fellowship.
Short Takes 475
Part I: Intramural Policing and Generational PoliticsPart II:
Respectability and Cultural ArchivingPart III: Respectability
Politics in the ArchivesNotesAbout the Authors

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The Feminist Porn Book is the first collection to bring togeth.docx

1.
The Feminist PornBook is the first collection to bring together writ-ings by feminist porn producers and feminist porn scholars to engage, challenge, and re-imagine pornography. As collaborating editors of this volume, we are three porn professors and one porn direc- tor who have had an energetic dialogue about feminist politics and por- nography for years. In their criticism, feminist opponents of porn cast pornography as a monolithic medium and industry and make sweep- ing generalizations about its production, its workers, its consumers, and its effects on society. These antiporn feminists respond to feminist por- nographers and feminist porn professors in several ways. They accuse us of deceiving ourselves and others about the nature of pornography; they claim we fail to look critically at any porn and hold up all porn as empowering. More typically, they simply dismiss out of hand our abil- ity or authority to make it or study it. But The Feminist Porn Book offers arguments, facts, and histories that cannot be summarily rejected, by providing on-the-ground and well-researched accounts of the politics of producing pleasure. Our agenda is twofold: to explore the emergence
2.
and significance ofa thriving feminist porn movement, and to gather some of the best new feminist scholarship on pornography. By putting our voices into conversation, this book sparks new thinking about the richness and complexity of porn as a genre and an industry in a way that helps us to appreciate the work that feminists in the porn industry are doing, both in the mainstream and on its countercultural edges. So to begin, we offer a broad definition of feminist porn, which will be fleshed out, debated, and examined in the pieces that follow. As both an established and emerging genre of pornography, feminist porn uses sexually explicit imagery to contest and complicate dominant represen- tations of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, ability, age, body type, and other identity markers. It explores concepts of desire, agency, power, beauty, and pleasure at their most confounding and difficult, including pleasure within and across inequality, in the face of injustice, and against the limits of gender hierarchy and both heteronormativity and homo- Introduction: The Politics of Producing Pleasure CONSTANCE PENLEY, CELINE PARREÑAS SHIMIZU, MIREILLE MILLER-YOUNG, and TRISTAN TAORMINO
3.
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 9 11/14/122:24 PM normativity. It seeks to unsettle conventional definitions of sex, and expand the language of sex as an erotic activity, an expression of identity, a power exchange, a cultural commodity, and even a new politics. Feminist porn creates alternative images and develops its own aes- thetics and iconography to expand established sexual norms and dis- courses. It evolved out of and incorporates elements from the genres of “porn for women,” “couples porn,” and lesbian porn as well as feminist photography, performance art, and experimental filmmaking. It does not assume a singular female viewer, but acknowledges multiple female (and other) viewers with many different preferences. Feminist porn makers emphasize the importance of their labor practices in production and their treatment of performers/sex workers; in contrast to norms in the mainstream sectors of the adult entertainment industry, they strive to create a fair, safe, ethical, consensual work environment and often cre- ate imagery through collaboration with their subjects. Ultimately, femi- nist porn considers sexual representation—and its production—a
4.
site for resistance, intervention,and change. The concept of feminist porn is rooted in the 1980s—the height of the feminist porn wars in the United States. The porn wars (also known as the sex wars) emerged out of a debate between feminists about the role of sexualized representation in society and grew into a full-scale divide that has lasted over three decades. In the heyday of the women’s movement in the United States, a broad-based, grassroots activist struggle over the proliferation of misogynistic and violent representations in corporate media was superceded by an effort focused specifically on legally ban- ning the most explicit, and seemingly most sexist, media: pornography. Employing Robin Morgan’s slogan, “Porn is the theory, rape is the prac- tice,” antipornography feminists argued that pornography amounted to the commodification of rape. As a group called Women Against Pornog- raphy (WAP) began to organize in earnest to ban obscenity across the nation, other feminists, such as Lisa Duggan, Nan D. Hunter, Kate Ellis, and Carol Vance became vocal critics of what they viewed as WAP’s ill- conceived collusion with a sexually conservative Reagan administration and Christian Right, and their warping of feminist activism into
5.
a moral hygiene orpublic decency movement. Regarding antiporn feminism as a huge setback for the feminist struggle to empower women and sexual minorities, an energetic community of sex worker and sex- radical activ- ists joined anticensorship and sex-positive feminists to build the founda- tion for the feminist porn movement.1 The years that led up to the feminist porn wars are often referred to as the “golden age of porn,” a period from the early 1970s to the early 1980s, INTRODUCTION10 Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 10 11/14/12 2:24 PM marked by large budget, high-production-value feature films that were theatrically released. A group of female porn performers who worked during the golden age—including Annie Sprinkle, Veronica Vera, Can- dida Royalle, Gloria Leonard, and Veronica Hart—formed a support group (the first of its kind) called Club 90 in New York City. In 1984, the feminist arts collective Carnival Knowledge asked Club 90 to participate in a festival called The Second Coming, and explore the question, “Is
6.
there a feministpornography?”2 It is one of the first documented times when feminists publicly posed and examined this critical query. That same year, Club 90 member Candida Royalle founded Femme Productions to create a new genre: porn from a woman’s point of view.3 Her films focused on storylines, high production values, female plea- sure, and romance. In San Francisco, publishers Myrna Elana and Debo- rah Sundahl, along with Nan Kinney and Susie Bright, co- founded On Our Backs, the first porn magazine by and for lesbians. A year later, Kin- ney and Sundahl started Fatale Video to produce and distribute lesbian porn movies that expanded the mission that On Our Backs began.4 In the mainstream adult industry, performer and registered nurse Nina Hartley began producing and starring in a line of sex education videos for Adam and Eve, with her first two titles released in 1984. A parallel movement began to emerge throughout Europe in the 1980s and 90s.5 By the 1990s, Royalle and Hartley’s success had made an impact on the mainstream adult industry. Major studios, including Vivid, VCA, and Wicked, began producing their own lines of couples porn that reflected Royalle’s vision and generally followed a formula of softer, gentler, more
7.
romantic porn withstorylines and high production values. The growth of the “couples porn” genre signified a shift in the industry: female desire and viewership were finally acknowledged, if narrowly defined. This provided more selection for female viewers and more opportunities for women to direct mainstream heterosexual films, including Veron- ica Hart and Kelly Holland (aka Toni English). Independent, lesbian- produced lesbian porn grew at a slower pace, but Fatale Video (which continued to produce new films until the mid-1990s) finally had some company in its micro-genre with work by Annie Sprinkle, Maria Beatty, and Shar Rednour and Jackie Strano. Sprinkle also made the first porn film to feature a trans man, and Christopher Lee followed with a film starring an entire cast of trans men.6 In the early 2000s, feminist porn began to take hold in the United States with the emergence of filmmakers who specifically identified themselves and/or their work as feminist including Buck Angel, Dana Dane, Shine Louise Houston, Courtney Trouble, Madison Young, and 11INTRODUCTION Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 11 11/14/12 2:24 PM
8.
Tristan Taormino. Simultaneously,feminist filmmakers in Europe began to gain notoriety for their porn and sexually explicit independent films, including Erika Lust in Spain; Anna Span and Petra Joy in the UK; Emi- lie Jouvet, Virginie Despentes, and Taiwan-born Shu Lea Cheang in France; and Mia Engberg, who created a compilation of feminist porn shorts that was famously funded by the Swedish government. The modern feminist porn movement gained tremendous ground in 2006 with the creation of The Feminist Porn Awards (FPAs). Chanelle Gallant and other staffers at sex-positive sex toy shop Good for Her in Toronto created the awards, which were open to films that met one or more of the following criteria: (1) A woman had a hand in the production, writing, direction, etc. of the work; (2) It depicts genuine female pleasure; and/or (3) It expands the boundaries of sexual representation on film and chal- lenges stereotypes that are often found in mainstream porn. And of course, it has to be hot! Overall, Feminist Porn Award winners tend to show movies that consider a female viewer from start to finish.
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This means thatyou are more likely to see active desire and consent, real orgasms, and women taking control of their own fantasies (even when that fantasy is to hand over that control).7 These criteria simultaneously assumed and announced a viewership, an authorship, an industry, and a collective consciousness. Embedded in the description is a female viewer and what she likely wants to see—active desire, consent, real orgasms, power, and agency—and doesn’t want to see: passivity, stereotypes, coercion, or fake orgasms. The language is broad enough so as not to be prescriptive, yet it places value on agency and authenticity, with a parenthetical nod to the possibility that not every woman’s fantasy is to be “in control.” While the guidelines nota- bly focus on a woman’s involvement in production, honored filmmakers run the gamut from self-identified feminist pornographers to indepen- dent female directors to mainstream porn producers; the broad criteria achieve a certain level of inclusiveness and acknowledge that a range of work can be read by audiences, critics, and academics as feminist. The FPA ceremony attracts and honors filmmakers from around the world, and each year since its inception, every aspect of the event has grown,
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from the numberof films submitted to the number of attendees. The FPAs have raised awareness about feminist porn among a wider audi- ence and helped coalesce a community of filmmakers, performers, and fans; they highlight an industry within an industry, and, in the process, nurture this growing movement. In 2009, Dr. Laura Méritt (Berlin) cre- INTRODUCTION12 Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 12 11/14/12 2:24 PM ated the PorYes campaign and the European Feminist Porn Award mod- eled on the FPAs. Because the movement has had the most momentum in Europe and North America, this volume concentrates on the scholar- ship and films of Western nations. We acknowledge this limitation: for feminist porn to be a global project, more would need to be done to include non-Western scholars and pornographers in the conversation. The work we do now, as scholars and producers, could not exist without early examinations of the history and context of pornogra- phy, including Caught Looking: Feminism, Pornography and Censorship by FACT, the Feminist Anti-Censorship Task Force. Linda
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Williams’s groundbreaking 1989 HardCore: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” opened the door for feminist scholars to productively examine pornography as film and popular culture, as a genre and industry, tex- tually, historically, and sociologically. Laura Kipnis’s 1996 Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America made the strongest possible case that “the differences between pornography and other forms of culture are less meaningful than their similarities.”8 Jane Juffer’s 1996 At Home with Pornography: Women, Sex, and Everyday Life urged us to pay close attention not just to the hardcore porn typi- cally consumed by men but to the uses of pornography in the daily lives of ordinary women. Since 1974 the film magazine Jump Cut has pub- lished more original scholarship on porn from a pro-sex, anticensorship perspective than any other media journal and by leading figures in the field, including Chuck Kleinhans, Linda Williams, Laura Kipnis, Rich- ard Dyer, Thomas Waugh, Eithne Johnson, Eric Schaefer, Peter Lehman, Robert Eberwein, and Joanna Russ. More recently, Drucilla Cornell’s Feminism and Pornography, Linda Williams’s Porn Studies, and Pamela Church Gibson’s More Dirty Looks: Gender, Pornography and
12.
Power cemented the valueof porn scholarship.9 The Feminist Porn Book seeks to further that scholarship by adding a significant, valuable component: feminists creating pornography. In this book, we identify a forty-year-long movement of thinkers, viewers, and makers, grounded in their desire to use pornography to explore new sexualities in representation. The work we have collected here defies other feminist conceptions of sexuality on screen as forever marked by a threat. That threat is the specter of violence against women, which is the primary way that pornography has come to be seen. Claim- ing that explicit sexual representations are nothing but gender oppres- sion means that pornography’s portrayal of explicit sex acts is a form of absolute discipline and subjugation for women. Within this frame, women who watch, study, or work in pornography bear the mark of 13INTRODUCTION Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 13 11/14/12 2:24 PM false consciousness—as if they dabble in fire while ignoring the risk of
13.
burning. The overwhelming popularityof women’s erotic literature, illustrated by the recent worldwide best seller, Fifty Shades of Grey by EL James, and the flourishing women’s fan fiction community from which it emerged, proves that there is great demand among women for explicit sexual rep- resentations. Millions of female readers embraced the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy—which follows a young woman who becomes the submis- sive sexual partner to a dominant man—not for its depiction of oppres- sion, but for its exploration of erotic freedom. Women-authored erotica and pornography speaks to fantasies women actually have, fantasies that are located in a world where women must negotiate power constantly, including in their imaginations and desires. As with the criteria for win- ning a Feminist Porn Award, these books and the feminist porn move- ment show that “women are taking control of their own fantasies (even when that fantasy is to hand over control).” With the emergence of new technologies that allow more people than ever to both create and consume pornography, the moral panic- driven fears of porn are ratcheted up once again. Society’s dread of women who
14.
own their desire,and use it in ways that confound expectations of proper female sexuality, persists. As Gayle Rubin shows, “Modern Western societies appraise sex acts according to a hierarchical system of sexual value.”10 Rubin maps this system as one where “the charmed circle” is perpetually threatened by the “outer limits” or those who fall out of the bounds of the acceptable. On the bottom of this hierarchy are sexual acts and identities outside heterosexuality, marriage, monogamy, and repro- duction. She argues that this hierarchy exists so as to justify the privi- leging of normative and constricted sexualities and the denigration and punishment of the “sexual rabble.”11 The Feminist Porn Book showcases precisely these punishable sex acts and identities that are outside of the charmed circle and proudly sides with the sexual rabble. Spotlighting the numerous ways people confront the power of sexuality, this book paves the way for exploring the varieties of what were previously dismissed as perversities. At the same time, feminist porn can also expose what passes for “normal” sexuality at the center of that charmed circle. One of the unfortunate results of the porn wars was the fixing of an antiporn camp versus a sex-positive/pro-porn camp. On one side, a capital P “Pornography” was a visual embodiment of the
15.
patriarchy and violence againstwomen. On the other, Porn was defended as “speech,” or as a form that should not be foreclosed because it might some day be transformed into a vehicle for women’s erotic expression. The nuances INTRODUCTION14 Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 14 11/14/12 2:24 PM and complexities of actual lowercase “pornographies” were lost in the middle. For example, sex-positive thinking does not always accom- modate the ways in which women are constrained by sexuality. But the problem with antipornography’s assumption that sex is inherently oppressive to women—that women are debased when they have sex on camera—ignores and represses the sexuality of women. Hence, for us, sex-positive feminist porn does not mean that sex is always a ribbon-tied box of happiness and joy. Instead, feminist porn captures the struggle to define, understand, and locate one’s sexuality. It recognizes the impor- tance of deferring judgment about the significance of sex in intimate and social relations, and of not presuming what sex means for specific peo-
16.
ple. Feminist pornexplores sexual ideas and acts that may be fraught, confounding, and deeply disturbing to some, and liberating and empow- ering to others. What we see at work here are competing definitions of sexuality that expose the power of sexuality in all of its unruliness. Because feminist porn acknowledges that identities are socially situ- ated and that sexuality has the power to discipline, punish, and subju- gate, that unruliness may involve producing images that seem oppressive, degrading, or violent. Feminist porn does not shy away from the darker shades of women’s fantasies. It creates a space for realizing the contradic- tory ways in which our fantasies do not always line up with our politics or ideas of who we think we are. As Tom Waugh argues, participation in pornography, in his case as spectator, can be a “process of social identity formation.”12 Indeed, social identities and ideas are formed in the act of viewing porn, but also in making and writing about it. Strongly influenced by other social movements in the realm of sexu- ality, like the sex-positive, LGBT rights, and sex workers’ rights move- ments, feminist porn aims to build community, to expand liberal views on gender and sexuality, and to educate and empower
17.
performers and audiences. Itfavors fair, ethical working conditions for sex workers and the inclusion of underrepresented identities and practices. Feminist porn vigorously challenges the hegemonic depictions of gender, sex roles, and the pleasure and power of mainstream porn. It also challenges the anti- porn feminist interpretive framework for pornography as bankrupt of progressive sexual politics. As a budding movement, it promotes aes- thetic and ethical practices that intervene in dominant sexual represen- tation and mobilize a collective vision for change. This erotic activism, while in no way homogeneous or consistent, works within and against the marketplace to imagine new ways to envision gender and sexuality in our culture. But feminist porn is not only an emergent social movement and an 15INTRODUCTION Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 15 11/14/12 2:24 PM alternative cultural production: it is a genre of media made for profit. Part of a multibillion dollar business in adult entertainment media, feminist
18.
porn is anindustry within an industry. Some feminist porn is produced independently, often created and marketed by and for underrepresented minorities like lesbians, transgender folks, and people of color. But femi- nist porn is also produced within the mainstream adult industry by fem- inists whose work is funded and distributed by large companies such as Vivid Entertainment, Adam and Eve, and Evil Angel Productions. As outliers or insiders (or both) to the mainstream industry, feminists have adapted different strategies for subverting dominant pornographic norms and tropes. Some reject nearly all elements of a typical adult film, from structure to aesthetics, while others tweak the standard formula (from “foreplay” to “come shot”) to reposition and prioritize female sex- ual agency. Although feminist porn makers define their work as distinct from mainstream porn, it is nonetheless viewed by a range of people, including people who identify as feminist and specifically seek it out, as well as other viewers who don’t. Feminist porn is gaining momentum and visibility as a market and a movement. This movement is made up of performers turned directors, independent queer producers, politicized sex workers, porn geeks and bloggers, and radical sex educators. These
19.
are the voicesfound here. This is the perfect time for The Feminist Porn Book. In this book, we place academics alongside and in conversation with sex industry workers to bridge the divide between rigorous research and critique, and real world challenges and interventions. In Jill Nagle’s semi- nal work Whores and Other Feminists, she announced, “This time . . . sex worker feminists speak not as guests, nor as disgruntled exiles, but as insiders to feminism.”13 As in Nagle’s collection, here those working in the porn industry speak for themselves, and their narratives illuminate their complicated experiences, contradict one another, and expose the damaging one-dimensional rhetoric of the antiporn feminist resurgence. Like feminist porn itself, the diverse voices in this collection challenge entrenched, divisive dichotomies of academic and popular, scholar and sex worker, pornographer and feminist. In the first section of the book, Making Porn, Debating Porn, feminist porn pioneers Betty Dodson, Candida Royalle, and Susie Bright give a grounded history of feminist porn as it emerged in the 1980s in response to the limiting sexual imagination of both mainstream porn and anti-
20.
porn feminism. Providinga window into the generative and deeply con- tested period of the sex wars, these feminist pornographers highlight the stakes and energies surrounding the birth of feminist porn activism in INTRODUCTION16 Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 16 11/14/12 2:24 PM the face of an antiporn feminism that ignored, misunderstood, or vilified them and their efforts. Bright’s account of watching her first porn film, sitting among suspicious men in a dark adult theater, sets the stage for how the invention of the VHS player shifted women’s consumption of porn and dramatically changed the marketplace. In the last decade, a new war on porn has been resurrected and rede- fined by Gail Dines, Sheila Jeffries, Karen Boyle, Pamela Paul, Robert Jensen, and others. Feona Attwood and Clarissa Smith show how this resurgent antiporn movement resists theory and evidence, and tenden- tiously reframes the production and consumption of porn as a mode of sex trafficking, a form of addiction, or a public health problem of epi- demic proportions. Attwood and Smith’s work powerfully
21.
exposes how feminist pornremains challenged and often censored in contemporary popular discourse. Lynn Comella focuses on the consequences of por- nography going public. She examines one of the most significant ele- ments of the emergence of feminist porn: the growth of sex- positive, women-owned-and-run sex shops and a grassroots sex education move- ment that create space for women to produce, find, and consume new kinds of pornography. Watching and Being Watched examines how desire and agency inform pornographic performance, representation, and spectatorship. Sinnamon Love and Mireille Miller-Young explore the complex position of African American women as they watch, critique, and create repre- sentations of black women’s sexuality. Dylan Ryan and Jane Ward take up the concept of authenticity in porn: what it means, how it’s read, and why it is (or is not) crucial to feminist porn performance and spectatorship. Ingrid Ryberg looks at how public screenings of queer, feminist, and les- bian porn can create spaces for sexual empowerment. Tobi Hill- Meyer complicates Ryberg’s analysis by documenting who, until very recently, was left out of these spaces: trans women. Keiko Lane echoes Ryberg’s
22.
argument of theradical potential of queer and feminist porn and offers it as a tool for understanding and expressing desire among marginalized communities. The intersection of feminist porn as pedagogy and feminist pedago- gies of porn is highlighted in Doing It In School. As porn scholars, Con- stance Penley and Ariane Cruz grapple with teaching and studying porn from two very different perspectives. Kevin Heffernan offers a history of sex instruction in film and contrasts it with work from Nina Hartley and Tristan Taormino in educational porn movies. Hartley discusses how she has used porn to teach throughout her twenty-five-plus years in the industry, and Taormino outlines her practice as a feminist pornographer 17INTRODUCTION Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 17 11/14/12 2:24 PM offering organic, fair-trade porn that takes into account the labor of its workers. Performer Danny Wylde documents his personal experiences with power, consent, and exploitation against a backdrop of antiporn rhetoric. Lorelei Lee offers a powerful manifesto that demands
23.
we all become betterstudents in order to achieve a more nuanced, discerning, and thoughtful discourse about porn and sex. Now Playing: Feminist Porn takes up questions of hyper- corporeality, genderqueerness, transfemininity, feminized masculinity, transgressive racial performance, and disability. Jiz Lee discusses how they14 use their transgressive female body and genderqueer identity to defy categories. April Flores describes herself as “a fat Latina with pale skin, tattoos, and fire engine red hair,” and gives her unique take on being (and not being) a Big Beautiful Woman (BBW) performer. Bobby Noble explores the role of trans men and the interrogation of mascu- linities in feminist porn, while renowned trans male performer Buck Angel explodes sex/gender dichotomies by embodying his identity of a man with a vagina. Also concerned with the complex representation and performance of manhood in feminist pornography, Celine Parreñas Shimizu asks how race shapes the work of straight Asian male performer Keni Styles. Loree Erickson, a feminist pornographer and PhD candi- date, represents not only a convergence of scholarship and sex work, but one of the most overlooked subjects in pornography and one de- erot-
24.
icized in society:“queer femmegimp.” Emerging to speak from group identities previously missing or misnamed, the pieces in this section are by people who show the beauty of their desires, give shape to their reali- ties, reject and reclaim attributions made by others, and describe how they create sexual worlds that denounce inequality. Throughout the book, we explore the multiple definitions of feminist porn, but we refuse to fix its boundaries. Feminist porn is a genre and a political vision. And like other genres of film and media, feminist porn shares common themes, aesthetics, and goals even though its parameters are not clearly demarcated. Because it is born out of a feminism that is not one thing but a living, breathing, moving creation, it is necessar- ily contested—an argument, a polemic, and a debate. Because it is both genre and practice, we must engage it as both: by reading and analyzing its cultural texts and examining the ideals, intentions, and experiences of its producers. In doing so, we offer an alternative to unsubstantiated oversimplifications and patronizing rhetoric. We acknowledge the com- plexities of watching, creating, and analyzing pornographies. And we believe in the radical potential of feminist porn to transform sexual rep-
25.
resentation and theway we live our sexualities. INTRODUCTION18 Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 18 11/14/12 2:24 PM Notes 1. Robin Morgan, “Theory and Practice: Pornography and Rape,” in Take Back the Night, ed. Laura Lederer (New York: William Morrow, 1980), 139. On the porn wars or sex wars, see Carolyn Bronstein, Battling Pornography: The American Feminist Antipornography Movement, 1976–1986 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Lisa Duggan and Nan D. Hunter, Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Politi- cal Culture (New York: Routledge, 1995); Carole Vance, ed. Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality (Boston and London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984); Pamela Church Gibson and Roma Gibson, eds., Dirty Looks: Women, Pornography and Power (London: British Film Institute, 1993); and the documentary film by Har- riet Koskoff, Patently Offensive: Porn Under Siege (1991). 2. Annie Sprinkle, Post-Porn Modernist: My 25 Years as a Multimedia Whore (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 1998), 149–51. 3. Annette Fuentes and Margaret Schrage, “Deep Inside Porn Stars,” Jump Cut: A
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Review of ContemporaryMedia 32 (1987): 41–43, http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/ onlinessays/JC32folder/PornWomenInt.html. 4. Susie Bright, Big Sex, Little Death: A Memoir (Berkeley: Seal Press, 2011) and Susie Bright, “A History Of On Our Backs: Entertainment for the Adventurous Les- bian, The Original: 1984–1990,” http://susiebright.blogs.com/History_of_OOB.pdf. See also, “About Fatale Media,” accessed September 5, 2011, http://www.fatalemedia. com/about.html. 5. Feminists in Europe who used sexually explicit photography and film to explore themes like female pleasure, S/M, bondage, gender roles, and queer desire include Monika Treut (Germany), Cleo Uebelmann (Switzerland), Krista Beinstein (Germany and Austria), and Della Grace (England). In 1998, Danish film produc- tion company Zentropa wrote the Puzzy Power Manifesto that outlined its guide- lines for a new line of porn for women, which echoed Royalle’s vision: their films included plot-driven narratives that depicted foreplay and emotional connection, women’s pleasure and desire, and male and female bodies beyond just their genitals. See Laura Merrit, “PorYes! The European Feminist Porn Movement,” [unpublished manuscript] and Zentropa, “The Manifesto,” accessed January 29, 2012, http://www. puzzypower.dk/UK/index.php/om-os/manifest.
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6. In addition,we must acknowledge the early work of Sachi Hamano, the first woman to direct “pink films” (Japanese softcore porn). Hamano directed more than three hundred in the 1980s and 90s in order to portray women’s sexual power and agency, and challenge the representation of women as sex objects only present to fulfill men’s fantasies. See Virginie Sélavy, “Interview with Sachi Hamano,” December 1, 2009, http://www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk/features/2009/12/01/int erview- with-sachi-hamano/. 7. Feminist Porn Awards, accessed September 5, 2011, http://goodforher.com/ feminist_porn_awards. 8. Laura Kipnis, Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America (New York: Grove Press, 1996), viii. 9. See Feminist Anti-Censorship Task Force, Caught Looking: Feminism, Pornog- raphy and Censorship, 3rd ed. (New Haven, CT: LongRiver Books, [1986] 1992); Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (Berke- ley: University of California Press, 1989); Jane Juffer, At Home with Pornography: Women, Sex, and Everyday Life (New York: NYU Press, 1998); Jump Cut: A Review 19INTRODUCTION
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Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 19 11/14/122:24 PM of Contemporary Media, eds. Julia Lesage, Chuck Kleinhans, John Hess (http://www. ejumpcut.org); Drucilla Cornell, ed., Feminism and Pornography (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Linda Williams, ed., Porn Studies (Durham, NC: Duke Uni- versity Press, 2004); and Pamela Church Gibson, ed., More Dirty Looks: Gender, Por- nography and Power (London: British Film Institute, 2004). 10. Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexu- ality,” in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carole S. Vance (Bos- ton and London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 279. 11. Rubin, “Thinking Sex,” 280. 12. Tom Waugh, “ Homoerotic Representation in the Stag Film 1920–1940: Imag- ining An Audience,” Wide Angle 14, no. 2 (1992): 4. 13. Jill Nagle, ed., Whores and Other Feminists (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 3. Emphasis in original text. 14. Lee’s favored gender-neutral pronoun. INTRODUCTION20 Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 20 11/14/12 2:24 PM
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I MAKING PORN, DEBATINGPORN I MAKING PORN, DEBATING PORN Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 21 11/14/12 2:24 PM Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 22 11/14/12 2:24 PM Artist, author, and sexologist Betty Dodson has been one of the prin- cipal advocates for women’s sexual pleasure and health for over three decades. After her first one-woman show of erotic art in 1968, Dod- son produced and presented the first feminist slide show of vulvas at the 1973 NOW Sexuality Conference in New York City where she introduced the electric vibrator as a pleasure device. For twenty-five years, she ran Bodysex Workshops, teaching women about their bod- ies and orgasms. Her first book, Liberating Masturbation: A Meditation on Selflove, became a feminist classic. Sex for One sold over a million copies. Betty and her young partner Carlin Ross continue to
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provide sex education atdodsonandross.com. This piece is excerpted from Dodson’s memoir, My Romantic Love Wars: A Sexual Memoir. When it comes to creating or watching sexual material, women are still debating what is acceptable to make, view, or enjoy. The porn wars rage on while most guys secretly beat off to whatever turns them on. Meanwhile, far too many feminists want to control or censor porn. Most people will agree that sex is a very personal matter, but now that sexual imagery has become prevalent with Internet porn available on our computers 24/7, I’d say—like it or not—porn is here to stay. The fact that pornography is a multibillion-dollar industry and the engine that first drove the Internet proves that most people want to see images of sex whether they admit it openly or not. After women’s sex- ual liberation got underway in the sixties and seventies, women turned against each other to debate whether an image was erotic or porno- graphic. Unfortunately this endless and senseless debate continues today. My first attempt at drawing sex was a real eye opener. In 1968, I had my first one-woman show of erotic art titled The Love Picture Exhibition.
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The experience raisedmy awareness of the many people who enjoyed seeing beautiful drawings of couples having intercourse and oral sex. Porn Wars BETTY DODSON Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 23 11/14/12 2:24 PM With my second show—of masturbating nudes—all hell broke loose. The show not only ended my gallery affiliation, but it was then that I became aware of how ignorant most Americans were about human sex- uality. My six-foot drawing of a masturbating woman holding an electric vibrator next to her clitoris—an erect one at that—might have been the first public appearance of the clitoris in recent history. It was 1970—the year I became a feminist activist determined to liberate masturbation. In 1971, I had my first encounter with censorship when Evergreen magazine published images of my erotic art. A Connecticut district attorney threatened to issue an injunction if the magazine was not removed from the local public library. My friend and former lover Grant
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Taylor drove usto Connecticut to meet with the DA. His main objection was my painting of an all-women orgy. He pounded his fist on the page spewing out the words, “Lesbianism is a clear sign of perversion!” When the meeting ended, the press descended on me. I don’t recall what I said except that sex was nice and censorship was dirty and that kids were never upset by my art, but their parents often were. A few peo- ple complimented me on my words and art. One woman said she found my art “disgusting and pornographic,” but that I had a right to show it. Her comment was the most upsetting. Driving home, I remember ask- ing Grant how anyone could call my beautifully drawn nudes disgust- ing: “Why can’t people distinguish between art that’s erotic and art that’s pornographic?” “Betty, it’s all art,” he said. “Beauty or pornography will always be in the eyes of the beholder.” He went on to warn me against making the mistake of trying to define either one. It was an intellectual trap that led to endless debates with no agreements in sight. After thinking about it, I knew he was right! That night I decided to forget about defining erotic art as being superior to pornographic images. Instead, I
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embraced the label “pornographer.”All at once, I felt exhilarated by the thought that I could become America’s first feminist pornographer. The next day, I got out my dictionary and found the word pornography originated from the Greek pornographos: the writings of prostitutes. If society treated sex with any dignity or respect, both pornographers and prostitutes would have status, which they obviously had at one time. The sexual women of antiquity were the artists and writers of sexual love. Since organized religions have made all forms of sexual pleasure evil, no modern equivalent exists today. As a result, knowledge of the esteemed courtesans was lost, buried in our collective unconscious, suppressed by the authoritarian organized religions that consistently excluded women. The idea of reclaiming women’s sexual power by creating pornogra- BETTY DODSON24 Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 24 11/14/12 2:24 PM phy was a heady concept. Feminists could restore historical perspectives of the ancient temple priestesses of Egypt, the sacred
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prostitutes, the Amazons ofLesbos, and the royal courtesans of the Sumerian palaces. Sexual love was probably what people longed for, so I gave myself per- mission to break the next thousand rules of social intimidation aimed at controlling women’s sexual behavior. I did just that and continue to do so to this day. In order for women to progress, we must question all authority, be willing to challenge any rule aimed at controlling our sexual behavior, and avoid doing business as usual, thereby maintaining the status quo. After I fully enjoyed the United States’ brief outbreak of sexual free- doms that began at the end of the 1960s, my glorious group sex par- ties allowed me to realize how many women were faking orgasms. So in 1971, I designed the Bodysex Workshops to teach women about sex through the practice of masturbation. It was sexual consciousness-rais- ing at its best as we went around the circle with each woman answering my question: “How do you feel about your body and your orgasm?” We also eliminated genital shame by looking at our own vulvas and each other’s. Finally, we learned to harness the power of the electric vibra- tor with the latest techniques for self-stimulation during our all-
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women masturbation circles. The BodysexWorkshops continued over the next twenty-five years. They took a lot out of me; I ended up sacrificing my hip joints to women’s sexual liberation! These groups also offered unique fieldwork in female masturbation, a subject rarely researched in academia, and I ended up with a PhD in sexology. In 1982 at the age of fifty-three, I joined a support group of lesbian and bisexual women who were into consensual S/M. Perhaps I had avoided this small subculture because I suspected there was something unhealthy about mixing pain with pleasure. Instead of finding sick, con- fused women, I discovered a group of feminists who were enjoying the most politically incorrect sex imaginable. One of our first big mistakes as feminists was to establish politically correct sex, defined as the ideal of love between equals with both partners remaining monogamous. For heterosexual women, politically correct sex put us in the age old bind of trying to change men by getting them to shape up and settle down. That meant men had to also practice monogamy—a project that has consistently failed for centuries. Most men are hardwired to
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have multiple sex partnerswhile women who want children need a more last- ing and secure relationship in order to raise a family. Those of us who remained single also wanted multiple sex partners. Our efforts to expand 25PORN WARS Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 25 11/14/12 2:24 PM the idea of feminist sex were censored by mainstream feminists and the media at every turn. The night of my first S/M meeting, I entered the small apartment and as I looked around the room, I didn’t see one familiar face among these younger women. My internal dialogue was like a broken record: “They’re probably all lesbian separatists and the minute they find out I’m bisexual, they won’t let me join.” I’d been discriminated against so many times in the past that the chip on my shoulder weighed heavily. As I sat there wallowing in my anticipated rejection, I visually fell into lust with every woman there. What a marvelous variety from stone butch to lipstick les- bians. When the meeting began, each woman introduced herself, then
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stated whether shewas dominant or submissive, and said a few words about how she liked to play. The closer they got to me, the faster the butterflies in my belly fluttered. When all eyes were on me, I defensively said, “I’m a bisexual lesbian who’s into self-inflicted pleasure!” Several women smiled. One asked how I inflicted my pleasure, and when I said it was with an electric vibrator, the room broke up laughing. A group of lesbian and bisexual feminists who were willing to explore kinky sex was my fondest dream come true and within no time, I was right at home. Gradually I began to understand that all forms of sex were an exchange of power, whether it was conscious or unconscious. My focus had been on the pleasure in sex, not the power. The basic principle of S/M was that all sexual activity between one or more adults had to be consensual and required a verbal negotiation, followed by an agreement between the players. All my years of romantic sex, when we tried to read each other’s minds, were basically nonconsensual sex. Romantic love is one of the most damaging concepts on the planet for women—little girls raised on Disney’s Sleeping Beauty are taught to wait for a prince to awaken them.
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By the timeI was in my midthirties and sport fucking, I learned to take control and be a top as a means of getting what I wanted. But none of these sexual activities were ever discussed or agreed upon openly. As I looked at sexuality in terms of this power dynamic, it felt like I was wak- ing from a deep sleep. That spring, Dorothy, the founding mother of our group, invited me to join her at a conference organized by Women Against Pornography (WAP). Her commitment to feminism was contagious and she was aware of all the current happenings in the movement. By then I had dropped out of feminism so I was learning a lot from Dorothy, a thirty- year-old radical lesbian who had been trashed by other feminists because of her BETTY DODSON26 Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 26 11/14/12 2:24 PM S/M sexual preferences. As a post-menopausal hedonist in my fifties, I looked forward to my first public feminist forum dressed as a leather dyke.
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The two ofus trooped into the WAP conference arm in arm, wearing boots and jeans with large silver studded belts under our black leather jackets—high-visibility leather dykes sitting in the front row just to the left of the podium. The women glared at us, signaling that we were out of place, while we wore our political incorrectness like a badge of honor. At the time, I had difficulty taking this group seriously. After femi- nists had fought against censoring information about birth control, abortion, sexuality, and lesbianism, the idea that there was now a group that wanted to censor pornography seemed absurd. Surely WAP was only a small percentage of feminists, but Dorothy said they were gain- ing strength and growing in numbers. Ms. magazine had contributed money to WAP, and under pressure from members, NOW (National Organization for Women) had approved a resolution that condemned pornography without defining it. Several local NOW chapters actively supported WAP. Censorship was coiled like a rattlesnake ready to strike at our freedom and poison people’s enjoyment of masturbating while looking at pictures of sex. Unbelievable! The large meeting room at NYU was packed with women only—
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nearly a thousandhad assembled. A red cloth banner with big black letters stretched across the back of the stage: WOMEN AGAINST PORNOG- RAPHY. That had to cost a pretty penny. There was also a first- rate sound system, along with expensive printed flyers—all done very profession- ally. This was no makeshift feminist conference where we had mimeo- graphed handouts. Dorothy leaned in close and asked, “When have you ever seen a conference dealing with women’s issues that had this kind of money behind it?” We both agreed that WAP most likely had been secretly funded by the CIA, the Christian Right, or both. The Good Old Boys were setting us up again—divide and conquer! Drifting into a reverie, I thought about the 1973 NOW Sexuality Conference. I remembered how brave we’d been, questioning sex roles and sexual taboos, exploring female sexual pleasure, and daring to create better sex lives for women with information and education. We’d been so sex positive and filled with excitement that we would change the world. How, in just ten short years, could we have ended up against pornog- raphy, which put feminists in the same bed as Christians preaching the gospel? The WAP conference featured many speakers. Each gave a
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brief, per-featured manyspeakers. Each gave a brief, per- sonal history, and nearly every one had a horror story of sexual abuse at 27PORN WARS Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 27 11/14/12 2:24 PM the hands of a father, brother, husband, lover, or boss. There were stories of rape, battered wives, child abuse, harassment, and forced prostitution. Dorothy was busy taking notes while I sat there stunned by the realiza- tion that I was in the midst of an orgy of suffering, angry women. Each speaker’s words and tears were firing up the group into a unified rage. Emotionalism without intellect from victims without power was how lynch mobs and nationwide hate groups were formed—the basic strat- egy of fascism, I concluded with a shiver. It saddened me to hear how these women had suffered, and I would never deny that their pain was real. For most of them, sex had truly been a misery or a violent trauma. No sane person was for rape or incest, but this one-dimensional attack on images of sex was totally unacceptable. Blaming pornography as the sole cause of women’s sexual problems was
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ludicrous. Why weren’tthey going after big problems like war, poverty, organized religion, and sexual ignorance due to the total absence of decent sex education in our school system? An attractive blonde in her midthirties stood at the mic. With her rage barely controlled, she described her childhood sexual abuse. Every Saturday when her mother pulled out of the driveway to do the grocery shopping, her father got out his “disgusting, filthy pictures” and forced her to perform an “unnatural act.” She didn’t say what it was, but the audience was surely fantasizing an adult penis penetrating an eleven- year-old girl. The whole room was emotionally whipped up into a rage with their own private images of child rape, while at the same time, rev- eling in the awfulness of it. The speaker went on to blame the entire incident on pornography! There was no mention of society’s denial of sexual expression, especially masturbation. Maybe the father was a devout Catholic who knew he’d go to hell if he took hold of his own penis. How about the nuclear fam- ily taking some of the blame with its restrictive sexual mores? But none of these other possibilities occurred to her. She was adamant that “dirty
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pictures” had beenthe sole cause of her incest. The WAP meeting ended with an open mic session, and within moments, emotional chaos broke loose. Women were crying and screaming hysterically, so we got out fast. Once outside, we took a deep breath to release our own tension. We both felt drained. Although we disagreed with WAP, they had a right to their opinions even though they didn’t respect our rights. We remained sexual outlaws. The 1980s also ushered in AIDS, and the Reagan government was slow to respond to this looming crisis. How perfect: AIDS ended casual sex and sent the population back into committed relationships and BETTY DODSON28 Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 28 11/14/12 2:24 PM monogamy—the glue that binds. Child sexual abuse was rampant and getting national attention, while no one paid any attention to how pov- erty was really hurting our kids. Finally women were being heard, but it was only half the conversation. We were not getting ahead by avoiding central issues—and we certainly were not liberating our sexualities.
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During this time,women showed up at my workshops and broke down in tears as they began to talk about being sexually abused. Each time, I would ask them to leave, with the explanation that my groups were about exploring pleasure, not sexual abuse. They needed to see a therapist and then come back for a Bodysex Workshop later on. Some women accused me of having a hard heart, but I simply stayed on mis- sion of liberating women’s independent orgasms so we could come back to life—actually and fully. My Bodysex Workshops were well received, so I decided to film one. You just can’t beat the moving image; it’s an opportunity to give people images of what sex might be. The best way for us to learn is to find out what’s going on with everyone else. My girlfriend and I used a home video camera, and it took me two years to edit it on two clunky tape decks. My films were automatically labeled porn, because if you see a pussy or a penis, it’s porn. But you can’t teach sex without getting explicit, so, again, I found myself embracing the role of pornographer. Before the Internet, every time I said “masturbation,” it either sent folks into gales of laughter or provoked embarrassed looks as they quickly changed the subject. My articles for magazines were
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canceled and interviews fortelevision ended up on the cutting room floor. The bottom line of sexual repression is the prohibition of childhood mastur- bation. This humble activity is the basis for all of human sexuality. The Internet was the first place in my long career that I was not censored. My old lover Grant ran my first website. At the end, he was classified as legally blind, and held a magnifying glass, with his nose an inch from the screen. When I joined forces with law school grad and cyber geek Carlin Ross, we created a new website. I believe that once Grant met Carlin, he was able to leave his disintegrating body. He made it to his eighty-sixth birthday and died proud with his boots on, with the next upload for my website sitting on his hard drive. I miss him terribly to this day. We had the most passionate love/hate affair of the century. Carlin and I offer free, accessible sex information, both visual and written, to women and men. We call the clips where we show sexual skills, “The New Porn.” Sex education must be entertaining, not aca- demic, dry, boring, or stilted. I’m not afraid of the word porn. If people 29PORN WARS
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Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 29 11/14/122:24 PM are going to call my explicit sex education porn, then I say embrace the word. Be the new porn, be the porn you want to see. While it’s true that a lot of pornography out there is shitty for the most part, it still works: it gets people hot. The biggest turn on for me is to have a fully orgasmic partner, not someone pretending or playing. We all know the real deal when it’s happening—authentic orgasms are unmistakable. I’m a sex- positive feminist, liberating women one orgasm at a time. Our site represents a new feminist sexual politics that’s well beyond any victimhood of rape and sexual abuse. We represent orgasmic feminism—a new movement of women who have taken control of our sex lives, and who dare to design them in any way we choose whether we’re straight, bi, lesbian, or a combination, and we can enjoy our bodies in any way we desire. Recently, I love answering sex questions for free from all kinds of young, middle-aged, and older women, as well as boys and men. I’m learning about the concerns and sexual problems of Americans
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and people from aroundthe world. Let me tell you: sexuality is in a lot of trouble. Young women today do not know what, when, where, or how to have an orgasm. Many of them have grown up without childhood mas- turbation, thanks to the growing influence of religion and the censor- ship of sexual information. Without access to proper sexual information, porn has been their primary form of sex education. The issue here is that the most readily available porn is basically entertainment for men. One young woman said she was sure she’d never had an orgasm because she’d never ejaculated. Unfortunately, the G-spot has become the new name for vaginal orgasms. It’s unfortunate because a very small percentage of women squirt when they experience an orgasm. I wrote my first book to help those few women know that this response was natural. Now we have a nation of young women trying to learn how to ejaculate. Well-meaning friends suggest that I should drop the word “feminist,” and perhaps the entire concept, because feminism is so “old hat.” Young women today have lost interest in feminism because they believe it’s antisex and that all feminists are man haters. Let me tell you something, girlfriends. That’s exactly what the powers-that-be want us to
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think and do. Feminismhas become a dirty word, and I want to save it, to revive it. I want feminism to signify a woman who knows what she wants in bed and gets it. Guys will be saying, “I’ve got to find me a feminist to fuck!” At eighty-two, I’ve decided to make a documentary based on the Bodysex Workshops. In a sense, I’m going back to the beginning, to document the heart of my work. The all-women’s masturbation circle is BETTY DODSON30 Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 30 11/14/12 2:24 PM my sewing circle. “How do you feel about your body and your orgasm?” is a question still worth asking and the resulting conversation is one still worth having. We are there to listen to and honor each woman’s personal story. We celebrate our independent orgasms without a partner or with one. This time around, it will be captured professionally with a film crew and better quality lighting and sound. I want to document this with the esteem it deserves, so I can leave the planet happy in the knowledge
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that this incredibleworkshop, designed by the early women who first attended, will be captured for all to see. It will be my most brilliant work of art, my Sistine Chapel. Now I have to have the courage to be an old Crone on film. I’m willing to set an example for seniors who are giving up on sex way too soon. After all, my ageing body can still see, hear, eat, drink, laugh, talk, walk, sing, dance, shit, masturbate, fuck, create, draw, write, and have orgasms! In my heart, I believe that women and girls will not be self- motivated and self-possessed if they cannot give themselves orgasms. If they rely on someone else for sexual pleasure, they are potential victims of whatever society is pushing as “normal.” Masturbation is a meditation on self-love. It is essential. Sex-positive feminism is alive and well and we will change the world. It’s just going to take a bit longer than expected. Viva la Vulva! 31PORN WARS Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 31 11/14/12 2:24 PM Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalC
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ode=rwap20 Download by: [Universityof California, Berkeley] Date: 20 April 2016, At: 11:44 Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory ISSN: 0740-770X (Print) 1748-5819 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rwap20 Pornographic encounters and interpretative interventions: Vanessa del Rio: Fifty Years of Slightly Slutty Behavior Juana María Rodríguez To cite this article: Juana María Rodríguez (2015) Pornographic encounters and interpretative interventions: Vanessa del Rio: Fifty Years of Slightly Slutty Behavior, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 25:3, 315-335, DOI: 10.1080/0740770X.2015.1124669 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0740770X.2015.1124669 Published online: 23 Feb 2016. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 22 View related articles View Crossmark data
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http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalC ode=rwap20 http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rwap20 http://www.tandfonline.com/action/showCitFormats?doi=10.108 0/0740770X.2015.1124669 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0740770X.2015.1124669 http://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?journalCo de=rwap20&page=instructions http://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?journalCo de=rwap20&page=instructions http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/10.1080/0740770X.2015.11 24669 http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/10.1080/0740770X.2015.11 24669 http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1080/0740770X.20 15.1124669&domain=pdf&date_stamp=2016-02-23 http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1080/0740770X.20 15.1124669&domain=pdf&date_stamp=2016-02-23 Pornographic encounters andinterpretative interventions: Vanessa del Rio: Fifty Years of Slightly Slutty Behavior Juana María Rodríguez* Gender and Women’s Studies & Performance Studies, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, United States of America Using the auto/biography, Vanessa del Rio: Fifty Years of Slightly Slutty Behavior as the primary text, this paper investigates how an embodied understanding of race and class alters our understanding of gendered experiences of violence
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and pleasure. Itasks: what happens when the life experiences of an aging Afro-Latina porn star are positioned at the very heart of feminist investigations into the relationship between sexual experience and knowledge production? In the process, this paper reflects on how images and text function as complicated triggers for the attachments, identifications, desires, and traumas of our own corporeal embodiments and sexual histories. Keywords: pornography; Latina; sexuality; sexual violence; auto/biography; sexual pleasure; masochism The book Vanessa del Rio: Fifty Years of Slightly Slutty Behavior (2010), defies understand- ings of literary genres and racialized sexualities, demanding the kind of lingering in uncer- tainty that latinidad itself registers.1 This chronicle of the life of an Afro-Latina adult-film icon simultaneously intimates and distorts the conventions of autobiography, documentary, testimonio, and pornography to unsettle assumptions about Latina sexuality and feminist interpretive practices. It is a mammoth tome, weighing in at over six pounds and containing 326 glossy pages.2 It includes images from adult magazines, movie posters, films, and photographs from her private collection; text transcribed from interviews conducted both on and off camera; memorabilia spanning her childhood to the present day; and a 140- minute DVD that includes an on-camera interview, a few “day- in-the-life” scenes that
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follow the contemporaryVanessa del Rio through the streets of her New York, and numer- ous clips from her many pornographic films. Whether or not the name Vanessa del Rio is familiar to you, it already registers a certain proximity to the worlds in which race and pornography intersect.3 The only child of a Puerto Rican mother and a philandering Afro-Cuban father, Vanessa was born Ana María Sanchez on 31 March 1952. She grew up on 111th Street in Harlem and attended Catholic school before leaving home in her teens to venture out into the New York City of the 1970s, a © 2016 Women & Performance Project Inc. *Email: [email protected] Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 2015 Vol. 25, No. 3, 315–335, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0740770X.2015.1124669 D ow nl oa de d by [ U ni
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ve rs it y of C al if or ni a, B er ke le y] a t 11 :4 4 20 A pr
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il 2 01 6 http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2867-4520 mailto:[email protected] http://www.tandfonline.com world flavoredwith all the possibilities that sexual liberation, civil rights, and drugs seemed to promise. Vanessa del Rio was and is huge – legendary even – not because she starred in many films (the pervasive racism of the film industry meant she rarely received top billing) but because in the world of adult entertainment, during the golden age of pornography, Vanessa del Rio was a star. Black, Latina, and always glamorous, she was dubbed “our Marilyn” by her many Uptown fans. While a few African- American, Asian, and Latino men and women passed through these early years of the porn industry, none developed the name recognition of Vanessa del Rio. Del Rio worked steadily in pornographic films from 1974 until 1985, appearing in over 100 films, yet she was rarely offered starring roles, playing instead the maid, the hooker, or the Latina spitfire, her racialized difference feeding seemingly endless appetites for forbidden fruit.4 Despite the roles she was offered, del Rio always brought her own brand of Latina glamour to the racial caricatures she was
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paid to play:lips and nails done in crimson red, makeup always flawless, cleavage and shoes always poised to attract attention, attesting to Marcia Ochoa’s assertion that “glamour allows its practitioners to conjure a contingent space of being and belonging” (2014, 89). In every role she was given, del Rio performed star, even before she was one, conjuring an alternate universe in which a young Afro-Latina from Harlem could become an international porn sensation. Before retiring from adult films in 1985 in response to her own fears of AIDS, her fame was undisputed and she did a series of pornographic films in which she simply played herself.5 After her retirement, many of her previous performances began to be edited together and reissued as compilations, and previous films were retitled to profit from her popularity.6 Today she hosts her own X-rated porn site and e-Bay site spe- cializing in signed collectibles. As a public figure, she frequently appears at adult conventions to sign photos and books and has also appeared in minor television roles and in a few hip-hop music videos. And 30 years after she last appeared in an adult feature, she remains an icon. 7 This paper, however is not about the history of racialized pornography or an analysis of how race, gender, and sexuality come together in these films: I will leave those invaluable aca- demic efforts in the capable hands of scholars like Mireille Miller-Young (2014), author of A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography, or Jennifer Nash’s (2014) imprint The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography.8
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Instead, I aminterested in older, less precise questions that have preoccupied feminist academics for generations: How do we understand experience? How does an embodied understanding of race, sexuality, and gender as performative practices alter what we might know about experience, and how does an engagement with aesthetics complicate how we might feel about it? More to the point, what happens when the life experiences of an aging bisexual Afro-Latina porn star are positioned at the very heart of feminist investigations into the relationship between experi- ence and knowledge production? Unlike other textual accounts of life stories, or cinematic biographical recreations, here the graphic presence of the contemporary speaking subject imposes its own interpretive power through the visualization of documentary. But in combin- ing biographical documentary with pornography, something else is also ignited. Testimonio, documentary, porn It is well understood that visual images have the uncanny ability to transfer affect, from the moment of their production to the moment of their reception. In the pornographic image, 316 J.M. Rodríguez D ow nl oa
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11 :4 4 20 A pr il 2 01 6 when what isdepicted is sex, that affective charge is activated through its encounter with our own sexual archives of feeling. In this essay, I want to allow a space to register what that affective difference might open up or foreclose, not about the text per se but about the very act of interpretation. Thinking experience through queer latinidad, through the life story of a porn star, through the shifting textual, photographic, and cinematic traces of racialized sexuality, accentuates the buried tensions between lived experiences and the theories we might use to account for them. Equally as intimidating, it requires that we acknowledge how our own racialized archives of feeling, of gendered embodiment, and sexualized attachments animate and unsettle our scholarly practices.
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It was thesequestions that led me to a consideration of testimonio as an analytical lens, that hybridized genre that captures elements of the legal discourse of testimony, the African American tradition of testifying, and the particularly Latin American genre of life story as evidence in the public claim for human rights.9 Reading Fifty Years as testimonio makes salient the racialized sexual politics that undergird del Rio’s story, as it illuminates aspects of the text that complicate an already complicated genre. Following John Beverly’s foundational work on testimonio, we might argue that as a woman of color in the sex indus- try – in addition to appearing in pornographic films, del Rio also worked as a stripper, escort, and streetwalker – her life story exists at the margins of literature, excluded from authorized representations of Latina sexuality. Her sex-laden text certainly functions as an “extraliterary or even antiliterary form of discourse” (Beverly 1993, 84). Furthermore, like other notable testimonios, del Rio could be said to use her life story to promote a fuller understanding of a community and a history that has been erased from public dis- course, to make a claim for the human rights of sex workers. And her text is replete with instances of sexual violence, police harassment, and abuse that evidence this as an urgent political project. Like many working in the various sectors of the sex industry, in this text del Rio recounts the numerous times she was arrested and jailed, and speaks of the hypocrisy, futility, and harm of laws that criminalize
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consensual adult sexwork.10 Similar to other testimonios, del Rio’s life story is narrated in the familiar “as told to” format. However, rather than an anthropologist or an enlightened intellectual, the inter- viewer, editor, and transcriber in this case, Dian Hanson, is herself a longtime regular in the adult-publishing world, having worked not only as an actress in adult films, but also as the editor of such titles as Juggs and Big Butt magazines and now as the editor for Taschen’s Sexy Books series. Taschen, a German publisher that specializes in art, architec- ture, and pop culture is best known for producing over-sized collector-edition volumes by such notable photographers as Annie Leibovitz and Helmut Newton, and coffee-table stan- dards of French Impressionists, and mid-century design. Their Sexy Books catalogue speaks to the mainstreaming of pornography and includes books on Tom of Finland (Hanson 2009), Japanese bondage, and the Big Book of Breasts (Hanson 2011), which comes complete with 3-D glasses. This framing within the world of publishing situates del Rio’s text, not as tes- timonio or even autobiography, but as art, as visual object, as living-room adornment. Here, rather than 3-D glasses, the 140-minute DVD included with 50 Years (Figure 1) functions as its special marketing feature that augments the static photographic images of the text. Like some other Taschen art books, Vanessa del Rio: Fifty Years of Slightly Slutty Be- havior is available in multiple formats: a trade version that sells
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for US$59.99, andtwo limited-edition formats, one that retails for US$700, and another that goes for an astounding Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 317 D ow nl oa de d by [ U ni ve rs it y of C al if or ni
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a, B er ke le y] a t 11 :4 4 20 A pr il 2 01 6 US$1800 and includesa signed print and a chance to spend an evening with the star herself. All include over 300 glossy, image-rich pages documenting Vanessa’s life on and off screen. The book and the DVD cover much of the same material, and many of the taped interviews are unfaithfully transcribed in the book, revealing
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the seams ofpost-production editing.11 In both, del Rio narrates her childhood as a young Latina growing up in Harlem, her life in the white-dominated adult-film industry, and her current career as a pop-culture icon. And both contain sizable chunks of what can only be described as hardcore pornogra- phy. Unapologetically sexual, over the course of the project del Rio describes the countless adventures and misadventures of her life in the sex industry. She also opines on how to deliver a great blowjob, the current state of the porn industry, and the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church. What remains constant throughout the text is del Rio’s unfaltering investment in shaping the interpretation of her life story, particularly with regards to her sexual agency. Figure 1. Book Cover with sticker announcing “140-min DVD.” 318 J.M. Rodríguez D ow nl oa de d by [ U
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pr il 2 01 6 Authorizing subjects In 50Years of Slightly Slutty Behavior, del Rio is presented as both a visual object, whose body and sexuality is available for our ocular consumption, and as an authorizing subject, who is enlisted to interpret the narratives she herself provides. These shifts between one kind of visual encounter – porn, and another – the speaking subject of documentary, require that viewers who might wish to revel unproblematically in the pornographic gaze bear witness to the stories of racism, violence, criminalization, and racialized feminine desire that also form part of the narrative.12 Equally as important from a feminist-studies perspective, it requires those interested in accessing the biographical details of this Afro- Latina icon to confront the explicit rawness of the pornographic image, and del Rio’s own accounts of herself. In many ways, the DVD and the pervasive technology of digital capture wholly undercuts the genre of testimonio; no longer is the imagined “voice- less” subject of testimonio dependent on a literate intermediary to convey their message to
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the larger public.Like Subcomandante Marcos, like protesters in Greece, Ferguson, or Iguala, Mexico those wishing to broadcast their stories to a global audience just need to upload their “truth” onto YouTube, and the more sophisticated cinematic genre of docu- mentary, made possible in part by technological access, is increasingly becoming a central feature of how we learn about the world. Nevertheless, today as publics are inun- dated with the visual packaging of life stories in reality television, tell-all biographies, and cinematic political propaganda, the imagined veracity of biographical documentary, like that of its textual counterpart, is rarely accepted as a given, understood instead as a cul- tural product mediated and designed to construct a narrative out of the “real,” to frame experience in the shape of meaning. In many ways, Vanessa del Rio personifies the aggressive racialized woman who sees something or someone and goes for it, an image she is invested in controlling and promot- ing – even now. Several times throughout the book, she credits Isabel Sarli (Figure 2), the Argentinean actress of the 1950s and 1960s, as being an early influence on her, and describes seeing Sarli’s Spanish-language movies on 42nd Street with her mother.13 She writes: Sarli’s films sometimes ended tragically, but I think I consciously didn’t pay too much atten- tion to the ends of the film, I was admiring the sin … I was liking her power and daring, the life
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that that represented,her confidence in her sexuality, and to be able to use it, to be that type of woman, to be all woman. (28) In Vanessa’s retelling, rather than Latina sexuality being shrouded in Catholic propriety and sexual repression, she narrates growing up surrounded by culturally authorized perform- ances of a Latina hyper-sexuality, gender performances that were foundational to her self-fashioning. Moreover, this passage makes clear her early innate understanding of gender as performance, and sexuality as a self-styled instrument of power. She goes on to say: [W]atching Fuego, a movie I originally saw when I was 16, I thought how most people don’t want to accept all aspects of woman, they just want to praise the Madonna, the mother, and not explore the slut. … I like the word slut. It is a strong word for women who embrace their sexu- ality and refuse to be sexually controlled. (28) Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 319 D ow nl oa de d by
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20 A pr il 2 01 6 For del Rio,embracing sexuality and refusing to be sexually controlled becomes a way to counter the standard formula of victimhood and recovery that is so prevalent in tell-all bio- graphies of retired Anglo porn stars like Linda Lovelace, Jenna Jameson, Traci Lorde, and Jennie Ketcham.14 Keenly aware of how others have been able to profit by fulfilling narra- tive desires for confession and redemption, del Rio seems to hold those who claim they “only did it for the money” in particular disdain. As a genre, the biographies of porn stars tend to traffic in sad stories of teenage sexual abuse and addiction and when, and if, they survive to tell the tale themselves, generally end with the triumph of true love. For example, the Publisher’s Weekly review of Jenna Jame- son’s New York Times best-seller How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale, claims: “Beneath Jameson’s monstrous diva exterior, however, was a girl who just wanted to become a loving mother and wife. After many failures, she
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finally succeeded, andher X- rated book ends on an uplifting family-values note” (Strauss 2014). Without a hint of irony, in Jameson’s text, rather than chapter titles, each section is divided into books with Roman numerals, preceded by an epigraph from a Shakespearean sonnet. Here we see how white- ness, particularly when paired with motherhood, works to authenticate narratives of redemption and romance even as it facilitates the mainstreaming of pornography. In con- trast, del Rio refuses to cast herself as a victim of the porn industry or of life, and reiterates her sense of control and sexual agency throughout the book. But she is invested in asserting more than her agency; what del Rio seems most intent in describing is her pleasure, the Figure 2. Isabel Sarli. 320 J.M. Rodríguez D ow nl oa de d by [ U ni
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il 2 01 6 sheer joy andsatisfaction of her many sexual escapades. She clearly avows, “I like sex, I have always liked sex; and I will never deny liking sex” (28), and throughout the text, she narrates an almost insatiable appetite for sexual adventure. A story that seems emblematic of this attitude takes place when responding to a question about her first performance in an adult film wherein she describes her nervousness, not about having sex on camera, but about saying her lines correctly. Part way through the on-camera interview, she interrupts herself, turns to us, her viewers, and blurts out: “And I blew the cameraman! During a break!” At this point in the interview, she begins to laugh uncontrollably, finally adding, “In those days everybody just had a good ol’time” (DVD min. 31). Blowing the cameraman, in this story as in others, becomes a way for her to assert that sex was not just something she did for money: it was something she did for fun.15 Refusing victim The structure of the book, chapters that are not quite
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chronological, and notquite thematic, suggest that the editor – Dian Hanson – tried as best she could to group hours of filmed interview material into some sort of narrative shape. For example, a chapter entitled “Chicka Chicka Boom” is devoted to her discussion of how racial politics informed del Rio’s career in the adult-film industry, one aspect of the porn industry she is not shy about critiquing. Another chapter, “Gym Rat,” is devoted to a brief period where she left porn, took steroids, and began a career as a body builder. Even as this project with Dian Hansen and Taschen is another attempt to reinvigorate her brand – the book is dedicated “To My Fans, May I Always Be Your Mistress of Masturbatory Memories” – and turn a profit doing it, it is also an opportunity to demonstrate her control of her public image, to control how she will be remembered. Unlike most “as told to” print autobiographies, the addition of on-screen interviews allows the consumer of these narratives to see the subject speaking on camera. We get not just her story but the performance of her story; we are able to see her laugh and gesture and several times, turn away from Hansen to address us, the audience, directly. Not only does she insist on telling her story her way, she also insists on interpreting it within her own frame of understanding. And it is this element that I ultimately found most provocative about the text and most challenging as a critic. Throughout the recorded interview and repeated throughout the
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text, she continually insiststhat she never really had any “bad” experiences sexually, stating: “I really enjoyed my life, I never did anything that I didn’t want to do where I wasn’t in on it, even if I felt it was something that I had to do, I would always find someway to be in on it. I would never let myself become the victim or feel victimized” (DVD min. 13). The book does not shy away from describing the many forms of violation and victimization that impact the lives of women, people of color, and sex workers, and del Rio acknowledges she is grateful she never got “sucked in” and “spit out,” but she also distinguishes that from feeling like a victim (DVD min. 23). Del Rio’s refusal of the term victim marks an important interpretive intervention into dominant narratives that cast the subjects of gendered violence as perpetual, de facto, ahistorical victims. Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 321 D ow nl oa de d by [
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A pr il 2 01 6 In juridical discourse,the term victim operates within the binary poles of guilt and inno- cence, victim and victimizer, setting the foundation for reparations and punishment. But the term also contains other meanings that surface in its deployment, a religious reference to sacrifice that is linked to salvation, and another that defines it as “one who is reduced or destined to suffer some oppressive or destructive agency” (O.E.D.). The Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor’s term “survivance” provides an apt meditation to help elucidate del Rio’s discomfort with the term victim. He writes: “Survivance is an active sense of pres- ence, the continuance of native stories, not a mere reaction, or a survivable name. Native survivance stories are renunciations of dominance, tragedy and victimry” (1994, iii). Like the indigenous populations of North America and elsewhere, sex workers are most often narratively depicted as the perpetual victims of patriarchal power, damaged beyond repair, even as liberal politics plot their salvation. In contrast, Vizenor’s term survivance
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brings together theresilience of survival as resistance, as it insists on acknowledging pres- ence in the face of societal demands for disappearance. Del Rio’s repeated insistence on not wanting to be cast as a victim functions to repudiate some feminist critiques of those that work in the porn industry while refusing salvation or erasure. But survival and resistance have also come to function as familiar and expected narrative tropes in feminist scholarship on sexuality, eliding the more complicated and vexed question of how pleasure might endure. Nicole Fleetwood makes this point most powerfully in her essay “The Case of Rihanna: Erotic Violence and Black Female Desire,” when she asserts that “black women are brought into dominant narrative folds as victims of unbearable suffering” (2012, 422) and she urges cultural critics to probe pos- sibilities for black sexual practices that are not framed through dominant frameworks of suf- fering, resistance, or exploitation” (2012, 422). Jennifer Nash in her work on race and pornography similarly argues against what she terms the “twin logics of injury and recovery which make theorizing black female pleasure from within the parameters of the [porno- graphic] archive a kind of impossibility” (2014, 25–26). These African American feminist scholars echo del Rio in their refusal to elide questions of black female pleasure, and it is this resolute determination to assert possibilities for pleasure that functions as del Rio’s ongoing retort to her imagined feminist critics. She declares: “Some feminists have said,
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‘Wasn’t that exploitation?’And I’d say, ‘No, that was my pleasure’” (84). But del Rio’s insistence on not being perceived as a victim can also be read as her demand that she be recognized as an authorial agent, capable of not only narrating her life but determining its significance. Many of the stories in the book are those you might expect from a porn star, her on- screen accomplishments (she claims the distinction of having filmed the first double pen- etration in porn); her frustration at being continually typecast as the ethnic Other to the blondes who received top billing and top salaries; and her early days in an industry that was just starting to explode with cross-over films like Deep Throat (1972) and The Devil in Miss Jones (1973). But del Rio’s book also recounts stories that are considerably more disturbing, if also equally commonplace, stories that too often constitute the sad stuff of the everyday for many women of color. In del Rio’s narrative the lecherous uncle, the manipulative boyfriend, the abusive police officer – all make routine appear- ances. The familiarity of these tales is itself unsettling. However, rather than recount these stories through the language of victimhood and trauma, del Rio narrates them with 322 J.M. Rodríguez D ow
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a t 11 :4 4 20 A pr il 2 01 6 almost comic nonchalance,as another obstacle to overcome, another futile attempt to make her feel less than whole, as another testament of survivance. This repeated insistence on narrating everyday forms of trauma without recourse to “fixing” in the Fanonian sense, subjects as traumatized victims, reorients feminist sexual poli- tics away from gendered norms of protected white womanhood, positioning those of us that have been violated, colonized, abused, harmed, and exploited at the very heart of feminist politics, as the norm of what constitutes a gendered experience.16 For Latinas, these everyday violations include the nefarious modes through which our sexuality is used to define and dis-
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cipline the possibilitiesof our social worlds; the ways our bodies and tongues – tinged by colonial anxieties that mark us as both colonizer and colonized – render our sexual counte- nance as wholly excessive, yet always lacking; and the ways our sex has been used to shame us. Frances Negrón Muntaner situates the trope of shame as foundational to the ethnic, racial, and gendered identities of Puerto Ricans, declaring: [B]oricua bodies are persistently negotiating their shameful constitution, refashioning the looks that aim to humiliate or take joy away from them. At the same time, it is impossible to deny that our most vital cultural production as boricuas has sprung not from the denial of shame, but from its acknowledgement into wounds that we can be touched by. (xviii) Frequently in her narrative, del Rio asks readers to dwell in the complicated, shameful erotic registers that violence can sometimes instantiate, even as she actively describes how the lines between fantasy, reality, the narrative scripts of porn, and her own intimate sexual play melt into one another. Early on in the book, she recalls being around 12 and hearing her mother warn her of the dangers of the streets by reading her newspaper articles about young girls getting raped. Rather than instilling terror or inspiring caution, although perhaps this was also their impact, the young girl that grew up to be Vanessa del Rio used those stories as the narrative building blocks for her sexual fantasies. She states:
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There was apopular Spanish wrestler. … El Santo, [he] was the masked good guy, but he became tangled up in my fantasies. I developed scenarios about being overpowered by masked rapists based on his image, which I later played out with my lover, Reb. (32) Already in this moment of recounting her childhood, we witness how the link between sex and violence gets mined for its erotic potential, as she manages to hold in tension the threat of violence and possibility of pleasure. Returning to Nicole Fleetwood’s pointed insights proves invaluable here. Fleetwood challenges what she terms “a coercive agenda” of “black recuperative heterosexuality” (2012, 422) to offer alternative forms of understanding erotic attachments to violence “that do not conform to dominant frameworks of exploitation, of racial uplift and respect- ability” and that are not predicated on narratives of victimization or pathology. She writes: How do cultural critics account for highly eroticized attachments in black heterosexual intima- cies that are hinged on the force of masculinized violence? In moving the analysis of sexual subjugation beyond the framework of fantasy, we need to fashion analytic tools to examine black women’s sexual practices where pleasure and attachment are interwoven with the threat or reality of physical harm. (421) Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 323
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le y] a t 11 :4 4 20 A pr il 2 01 6 As Fleetwood suggests,moving the analysis beyond the framework of fantasy complicates our ability to come to terms with all the ways that as women of color, violence gets multiply coded into our sexual lives, and the ways domination and abjection haunt the sexual ima- ginary of racialized subjects. In Vanessa del Rio’s retelling of her life, we see not just the eroticization of violence and even terror, but we also witness the possibility that some forms of corporeal and psychic violence might come to function as self-defined forms of sexual
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pleasure. Let me presentanother biographical scene that pushes the boundaries of intelligibility even further, well beyond fantasy. In another episode, del Rio describes having to have sex with a state trooper in order to get her boyfriend out of jail – she begins telling the story by explaining: It was like the movies, where you have to put out to get your boyfriend out of jail. And to the extent that it was like the movies, there was something exciting about it – plus he was hand- some, blond, and ruggedly studly. (107)17 Once again del Rio returns to the images of sexuality that have been projected on the silver screen as a narrative filter through which to make sense of what is happening in her real life. And while the trope of “a good girl forced to do something immoral to save the man she loves” might be a familiar one in Hollywood, the story takes a decidedly twisted turn when she reveals that over the course of the exchange with the officer she had an orgasm. She goes on to exclaim: It was so theatrical, such a humiliating adventure, that I have an orgasm but I don’t let him know because I don’t want to give him the satisfaction. I don’t think he would have believed it if he’d known, since this was supposed to be his power game … . Ooh, I felt like such a dirty girl for enjoying it! (107)18
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In the filmedinterview, she ends her account laughing, as if she is keenly aware of the ironic perversity of the juxtaposition of state coercion and her own sexual gratification. At this point the DVD cuts to a clip of one of her porn performances in which she is playing an inmate being forced to sexually accommodate her prison guard, and we witness another, much campier, representation of state sexual violence. On one level this story seems ripped from the headlines about the Oklahoma police officer Daniel Holtzclaw who was convicted of raping and sexually assaulting more than a dozen Black women, some of whom were street-level prostitutes, because he felt they were unlikely to report his rape and abuse (Philipps 2015). And both stories affirm studies that document the relationship between the criminalization of sex work, police enforcement practices, and violence against those suspected of being prostitutes. One study goes as far as suggesting that “prior assault by police had the strongest correlation with both sexual and client perpetrated violence against female sex workers” (Shannon et al. 2009, 5). In fact, in her written account of this incident, del Rio mentions that she “thought he must have done this before because he just nodded at the motel clerk and drove straight to the room” (107). Sadly, sexual harassment and assault of women imagined to be prostitutes by police is a common-day occurrence, a direct result of laws that crimi- nalize sex work. Dark, Latina, and daring to occupy the public sphere as a sexual being,
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324 J.M. Rodríguez D ow nl oa de d by [ U ni ve rs it y of C al if or ni a, B
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er ke le y] a t 11 :4 4 20 A pr il 2 01 6 Vanessa del Riofit the racially gendered profile for prostitute, even when she was not engaged in sex work. Even if the events are strikingly similar and equally horrific, watching del Rio tell the story onscreen feels different to me as spectator because of how it is told. Sitting in her living room, surrounded in leopard prints (“leopard” is her favorite color), drinking wine
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and telling storyafter story, her image on-screen assures the viewer that she is just fine, that she not only endured the violence of her youth but managed to thrive (Figure 3).19 In recounting the story through the lens of mainstream cinema, del Rio uses the narra- tive familiarity as a way to normalize the violence, “where you have to put out to get your boyfriend out of jail.” But as the scene continues, she uses this event to offer her rendering of how she was able to assimilate this violation within the interpretative framework of her own world-view. “This is the kind of thing I mean, where I take away but they don’t take anything from me, I take from it” (DVD min. 1:14). Del Rio regards this experience, not as evidence of trauma, but as an act of revenge that is made available to her through her ability to access pleasure, a pleasure that includes both her orgasm and her delight in hiding that fact from her assailant. In making sense of her experience, as one that is defined by coercion but which also includes her ability to experience orgasm, she attempts to rewrite the terms under which sexual violence, resistance, and retribution are understood. As a critic, I return again and again to the axiom from Joan Scott’s essay “The Evidence of Experience”: “Experience is at once always already an interpretation and something that needs to be interpreted” (1993, 412). In that piece, Scott asks us to do more than just include other voices in our feminist formulations of experience; she compels us to think about the
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available frameworks ofintelligibility that experience enters as it comes into language. Read through Scott, we can understand that del Rio’s account of her experience already implies a level of interpretation; it has already been framed by the interpretive possibilities available to her, including those offered by both mainstream cinema and mainstream fem- inism. Following Fleetwood and Nash, we also see how race functions to censor the sexual narratives of certain subjects, making some accounts unspeakable. Yet for both the young Afro-Latina who was stopped and assaulted by the police for no apparent reason, and present-day del Rio, the seasoned sex worker and porn star who has lived in intimate proxi- mity to sexual violence and is now looking back on that moment, the interpretive possibi- lities include her ability to access her own sexual pleasure and script it as an act of sexual subversion, even in the midst of a coercive encounter. Furthermore, del Rio’s account of herself exposes the ways the experiences of racialized subject positions that are not white, middle-class, or “respectable” are made illegible within feminist frameworks that fail to account for the possibility of pleasure in the sexual lives of those who are constituted by violence. As a critic, I might be able to argue with her analysis of these events, but in order to do justice to del Rio’s version of this story, I also have to find a way to make sense of the trace of the real, of her laughter, of the materiality of her orgasm, and of her desire to control the terms
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under which intelligibilityfunctions. In her essay, “Ruminations on Lo Sucio as a Latino Queer Analytic,” Deborah Vargas (2014) proposes lo sucio, as a way to account for the dirty sensory pleasures of non-normative sexualities of those “deemed collateral genders within a social world invested in the fiscal benefits of normative sexual intimacies.” For Vargas, lo sucio offers “a way to theorize the performative tactics that genderqueer feminine Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 325 D ow nl oa de d by [ U ni ve rs it y of C
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sexualities enact toremain the magnificent refuse of surplus while in refusal of vanishing.” Even in the face of police violence that aims to subjugate and dehumanize her, Vanessa del Rio rebuffs efforts to reduce her experience to the narrative tropes of normative hetero- femininity or redemptive victimhood. She refuses to vanish, and instead shamelessly relishes the dirty, sensory, and performative excesses associated with la puta, the slut, the whore. Because Latinas come to sexuality through the multifarious forms of violence brought about through colonization, enslavement, migration, and the wounds of public and private patriarchy, scenes of violence, violation, and shame are core to our understandings of sexual subjectivity, kindling an explosion of diverse and divergent affective responses. Each response fashions its own meaning from the paradox of logic and chaos that defines cruelty, each functions as its own form of acknowledgement that some glimmer of self-love might outlive the harms. However, even as these rejoinders to the extravagant and quotidian harms that surround us can never fully redress the injuries we have endured, they serve to rupture any semblance of an appropriate, rational response to the logic of sexual and racial subjection that is intent on defining our position in the world. The Reb Stout affair In a book that repeatedly asserts del Rio’s sense of control and sexual agency, the inclusion
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of one particularchapter stands out for the ways it complicates narratives of how sexual empowerment might be understood. Entitled the “Reb Stout Affair,” it is devoted to a Figure 3. Still from untitled Taschen DVD. 326 J.M. Rodríguez D ow nl oa de d by [ U ni ve rs it y of C al if
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or ni a, B er ke le y] a t 11 :4 4 20 A pr il 2 01 6 seven-month affair withReb Stout, a Los Angeles native and S/M aficionado. Stout claimed to have seven distinct personalities with male, female, and genderqueer manifestations,
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each with adistinct name, wardrobe, and sexual proclivities, some quite dominant and indeed sadistic, some wholly submissive. Curiously, no mention of this period and no refer- ence to these images occur in the DVD. And while the rest of the book is full of glossy movie posters and professional stills from her films and colorful magazine spreads, the photographs in this chapter are taken from the extensive amateur photographic archive Stout and del Rio produced during their time as lovers, images that often include costumes, wigs, ropes, whips, and assorted sexual paraphernalia. In the introduction to this chapter Hanson states, “every sexual encounter was captured on film, including all the ecstasy, terror and tears. It was love 1970s style and not for the faint of heart” (163). Figure 4. Source: Image courtesy of Reb Stout Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 327 D ow nl oa de d by [ U
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pr il 2 01 6 Vanessa del Riodescribes her initial coming together with Stout stating: “It was, ‘Oh, you like to wear makeup and women’s clothing and stick dildos up your ass? And jerk off and take pictures? Ok!’”(167). Some of these images are quite playful and queer and depict the spirit of endless sexual experimentation that their brief affair was founded upon. In Figure 4 we see Stout in a platinum-blonde wig, spike heels, and pearls bound and bent over while del Rio stares in the camera coquettishly with her mouth agape as she yanks his penis back between his legs. Other images reveal a more conscious self-posing against the makeshift background of a rather ordinary domestic space, a space that includes a fish tank, assorted six-inch high heels, potted plants, erotic art, a fishing net with starfish, scattered sex toys, and lots and lots of mirrors. “Whenever we got together we had a scene, every day. Sometimes other people would be there … and we’d always take photos” (167). Twenty-one photographs are included in this chapter, nine black-and-white images, and 12 color images, but we
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can imagine thatmany more were produced during their brief period together. In several of the photographs, Vanessa is seen wearing her lover’s exaggerated blond wig, the only images of her as a blond that we see in a book that is replete with images of physical trans- formation.20 If in her professional career her dark tresses were central to her Latina vixen persona, here she is free to play with racial self-fashioning. While she is frequently photo- graphed staring into the camera, Stout’s face never appears in the images included in this chapter, his face either covered with flowing long hair, or concealed behind the black mask of his “Ripper” persona, which del Rio describes as “an extreme male fantasy of rape and force” (167). While del Rio has appeared in several S/M themed films, or “roughies,” as they were called, and describes enjoying the emotional potency, stamina, and physicality that they require, the images in this chapter have another feel altogether, their amateur quality exudes a different kind of intensity and intimacy. It is not that the other scenes of her having sex are not real – or do not depict real pleasure, they do, but because they were also work, because she was also acting and aware of performing for an audience, she seems to maintain a certain composure, even perhaps glamour in the midst of scenes of sexual submission that suggest her control of the scene. In contrast, in several of the photo- graphs in this chapter, we are allowed to glimpse something else – a sexual vulnerability
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that exposes herwillingness to experience something beyond the carnal pleasures of sex, outside of the structures of rationality. By fully inhabiting her body, del Rio manages to hold in tension violence and pleasure, submission and agency. Thinking back to that time, she reflects: As I got deeper into the relationship with Reb I pushed all the limits of his personalities and found I liked being really frightened. I wanted to push them until I believed their threats, not just submit because someone said to submit … . “make me,” I always said. Reb told me I was a SAM, a Smart-Ass-Masochist, always egging on the dominant. (171) Del Rio is not just asking to be dominating, she is demanding it, goading her top into seizing greater control. Here, the romanticized kernel of a childhood sexual fantasy about El Santo is transformed into an affective encounter with terror in adult sexual play, an opportunity to use sex to explore the psychic residue that her experiences have imparted, and make of them something else. She continues: 328 J.M. Rodríguez D ow nl oa de
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:4 4 20 A pr il 2 01 6 Every scene wasabout trying to break me, but I didn’t know how to be broken. Breaking would have meant tears, I think, tears of total submission. There was sobbing, from pain and discomfort and sexual pleasure, but the pleasure always won out, which I guess meant that I stayed strong. (171–2) Curiously, none of this dialogue is captured in the DVD, and appears only in the book, even as the tone suggests the kind of conversation that might occur between friends. It bears emphasizing that this was consensual sex, it was desired abjection, and in del Rio’s mind, this scene, and these images capture an emotional intensity her many years in front of a camera were never able to see – a corporeal desire to be free from the rational demands of self-control and composure. For a porn star like
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Vanessa del Rio,whose sexualized body has been captured, reproduced, and circulated a million different ways, the photographic memorialization of an intimate affair offers something beyond autobiogra- phical documentation, it captures an affective moment in time, a psychic space that func- tions to disrupt subjectivity. Del Rio describes this desire for a release of subjectivity, and an inability to allow herself to exceed the limits of reason when she states: “I didn’t know how to be broken.” Let me conclude by offering an image from the series of photographs that depict one of her sexual encounters with “Ripper,” the very photographs that she describes in a pro- motional video for Taschen, as being her favorite images in the entire book (Vanessa). Of this series of images she writes: I think the only time I truly submitted is in these pictures where Reb’s in his Ripper personality and his balls are in my mouth and you see the sweat and mascara running because I was choking on them. It wasn’t horrible in any way, but it was total submission, and that was a strange feeling for me. It felt freeing; I didn’t feel any responsibility in any way. It was also very rough. (172) We can imagine that “very rough” might refer to being bound and nearly gagged by her lover’s testicles, but I have seen enough of her on-screen performances to know that the phys- ical demands of this scene were not unfamiliar to Vanessa del
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Rio the actress.Instead, perhaps what was “very rough” was the freedom, the freedom to submit completely, to give herself over to another and to herself and dwell in the space beyond rationality and reason. The image is striking (Figure 5). Stout’s shaved pubis appears almost feminine, queerly juxtaposed against the hairiness of his arms. Here, del Rio’s always flawless makeup is smeared from sweat and tears; her eyes, thick with smudged mascara, are closed; her mouth ajar; her teeth showing slightly as the head of his penis rests between her lips. This is not about glamour. Even as we read this as an image of physical and emotional inten- sity, there is also tenderness in the position of his fingers on her face. The photograph exudes a calmness that defines her submission. While Stout’s face never appears in this chapter, his words do. And in reference to these images he states: “She had tears in her eyes while she was cumming – a series of concentrated orgasms like I’d never seen before … and it was marvelous to see!” (176). Even as it is her pain, her submission that is evident in these photographs, the absence of his face in these images, like his testicles in her mouth, serves to evidence his vulnerability – to exposure, to memory, to encountering the affective power of his own carnal and psychic desires. Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 329 D ow
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a t 11 :4 4 20 A pr il 2 01 6 Entrega total In hereloquent treatise, Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism, Amber Musser (2014) declares: “Reading [masochism] as exceptional reifies norms of whiteness and mas- culinity and suppresses other modes of reading power, agency, and experience” (6). Maso- chism implies the renunciation of power and control, therefore for racialized feminine subjects it functions as a way to both claim an intrinsic power that can then be surrendered, and to actively inhabit the social and sexual roles to which we have been assigned on our own terms.21 In the book, the caption for this photograph reads
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as follows: “Iwill refer you to the Spanish saying, ‘Sin palabras’, without words” (176). In this moment, without words, del Rio resorts to the Spanish to mark something beyond the logocentrism demanded of rational subjects. Vanessa del Rio’s auto/biographical narrative, and the images used to document them, represent complicated psychic realities that require us to question how we engage with those stories that are too painful, too raw to process fully in language. Confronted with her testimonio, del Rio’s account of herself, we attempt to make meaning from the traces of the real that her text provides. But testimonio can also slide into the spectacle of the ethno- graphic, seeming to provide entry into the psychic realities of the Other whose experiences Figure 5. Source: Image courtesy of Reb Stout 330 J.M. Rodríguez D ow nl oa de d by [
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A pr il 2 01 6 might seem sodivorced from our own frames of intelligibility. Therefore, it is del Rio’s insis- tence on authorizing her own interpretive frame, rather than the experiences themselves, that pose the greatest challenge to existing feminist formulations of sexual politics. Vanessa del Rio’s narrative performance of sexual adventure, power, violence, and plea- sure demands an audience, but we cannot embrace the sexual agency of this icon of Latina sexuality without grappling with the more difficult registers of racialized sexuality that her text also reveals; similarly we cannot simply dismiss her account of her life because it does not conform to the feminist interpretations we might wish to impose. So how can we talk about pleasure, narrate its peculiarities in ways that account for the complicated emotions that are so often wrapped around its articulation? And speaking directly to the contours of this project, how can we represent someone else’s pleasure or indeed their experience of violence or trauma without privileging our own interpretive frameworks?
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Violence permeates thistext, yet del Rio’s reaction to it, whether it is news reports of neighborhood rapes, her own violation at the hands of a state trooper, or her desire for sexual submission with her lover Reb – at times seems to call her account of herself into question, making her sexuality seemingly unintelligible. Yet, that unintelligibility is pre- cisely what offers a critical perspective on the very structures of meaning that would suggest that an adequate, rational, and recognizable response to sexual violence is possible. Furthermore, it exposes how feminist frameworks that have been sculpted through the life experiences of those for whom the privileges of race, class, or social position have provided shelter, have failed to account for the profound power of the sexual experiences of so many racialized feminine subjects. For women of color, for whom extravagant and quotidian cruelties are the norm, there can never be one “right” affective response to violence, one interpretive trope for engaging the harms that surround us. That an aging Afro-Latina porn star might offer us alternative understandings of the workings of female sexual survi- vance and pleasure, makes it all the more urgent that we wrestle with the ability of speaking subjects to narrate their own complex realities, even and especially when their interpret- ations unsettle the preexisting logics we might wish to impose. But while we need to listen to these alternate forms of meaning making, we also need to leave room for those moments that resist meaning, those moments that allow us to
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refuse the imperativeto “be strong” if only for a minute. In a world where so many of us are defined as always already irrational and outside structures of sexual and social legibility, those deeply painful and powerful moments of carnal pleasure, liberated from the constraints of language, image, and reason, might burst open to create possibilities for something akin to freedom. Notes 1. I wish to thank the co-editors of this volume for their generous engagement with my work. I am further indebted to my anonymous peer reviewers who shared their knowledge and expertise on the pornographic archive, and my colleagues Shari Huhndorf and Leigh Raiford, each of whom provided key insights at critical points in the writing process. This paper was presented at numerous academic venues before publication; each audience contributed to my own thinking and theorization of this work, and deserves my heartfelt thanks for allowing me to work through these ideas aloud. Finally, I am indebted to Ana María Sanchez (AKAVanessa del Rio), for her permission to reproduce these images, for following me on Twitter, and for her many films. As a young Latina who came of age watching pornography, her films offered me a vital vision of Latina sexuality, an image that continues to inspire me many years later. Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 331 D
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y] a t 11 :4 4 20 A pr il 2 01 6 2. All referencesto the book refer to the trade version. Two other versions of the book are available on Taschen’s website, the weight and page count for those versions are slightly different. The book is published by Taschen, based in Cologne, Germany and printed in Italy. The book includes translations of the text into German and French at the end, an indication of how Vanessa del Rio has traveled transnationally. 3. The bibliography for porn studies has been growing exponentially since Williams’s (1999) groundbreaking text Hardcore: Power, Pleasure and the “Frenzy of the Visible,” originally pub-
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lished in 1989.For intersections of race and pornography see Nash (2014) and Miller-Young (2014), discussed in greater detail below; see also Shimizu (2007) and Nguyen (2014). Useful edited volumes include Porn Archives (Dean et al. 2014); The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (Taormino et al. 2013); Porn Studies (Williams 2004); New Views on Pornography: Sexuality, Politics, and the Law (Comella and Tarrant 2015); and Coming Out Like a Porn Star: Essays on Pornography, Protection, and Privacy (Lee 2015). A new academic journal Porn Studies devoted to this burgeoning field of academic inquiry was launched in 2014. 4. As one reviewer smartly indicated, the issue of having del Rio play a maid is considerably more complicated than this sentence might suggest. For example, in the 1984 film Maid in Manhat- tan, sometimes referenced as Vanessa: Maid in Manhattan, del Rio received star billing and the film, including its title, is centered on her character. However, in her book, del Rio frequently describes what it was like being one of very few women of color, stating: “No matter how gla- morous I looked I’d still be the maid or some smart ass hoochie mama” (194). In 2002, Jennifer Lopez, another famous Puerto Rican, also starred in a film of the same name. 5. Examples include Play Me Again Vanessa and Viva Vanessa, both of which appeared in 1984. 6. There are numerous compilation videos; those released before her retirement include Vanessa’s
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Bed of Pleasuresand Vanessa’s Hot Nights, released in 1980; and The Erotic World of Vanessa #1, The Erotic World of Vanessa #2, and Vanessa del Rio’s Fantasies, all released in 1981. Those released after her retirement include, Hot Shorts: Vanessa del Rio, Vanessa Obsession (1987), Best of Vanessa del Rio (1988), and Taste of Vanessa del Rio (1990). A decade later, in 2001, three new compilations were released: Vanessa del Rio—Dirty Deeds, Vanessa del Rio—Some Like it Hot, Vanessa del Rio Stars in Celebrity Sinners, and Vanessa X-Posed. And 2004 saw the release of Vanessa’s Anal Fiesta, Vanessa and Friends, as well as her inclusion in the compilations Mucho Mucho Latinas, Ah Carumba, and Strokin’ to the Oldies. Examples of films that were reissued to profit from her popularity include the 1976 film Come to Me retitled as Hot Wired Vanessa and the 1977 film Reunion retitled as both Vanessa Gets It! and as Vanessa’s Wild Reunion. 7. While del Rio’s iconicity exceeds the scope of this paper, it bears mentioning and speaks to the multiple audiences for whom she is legendary. Included among those that contributed blurbs for this book are the rappers Snoop Dogg and Foxy Brown; the feminist pornographer and creator of Femme Productions, Candida Royale; and the cartoonist Robert Crumb. She is also refer- enced through different forms of popular culture. Del Rio makes cameo appearances in a 1996 episode of NYPD Blue entitled “Head Case” and the music video “Get Money,” by Junior M.A.F.I.A. featuring The Notorious B.I.G. (Rivera 1996); and her name is referenced
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in the DigitalUnderground (1990) song “Freaks of the Industry,” and Chubb Rock’s (1990) “Just the Two of Us” to name just a few. On Twitter del Rio has over 53,000 followers. She hosts a X-rated porn site, vanessadelrio.com where she performs weekly live web-cam shows for members and she has a designated page on ebay to sell memorabilia, http://stores.ebay. com/vanessadelriomemorabilia/. With her cooperation, the director Thomas Mignone is cur- rently filming a bio-pic film project based on her life in Times Square during the 1970s and early 1980s. It is being described as Boogie Nights meets Taxi Driver (Obenson 2015). For more on the black body as icon see Nicole Fleetwood’s On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination (2015). 8. While these books both tackle the subject of black women and pornography, they are also quite different in their approaches and are both highly recommended. Miller-Young’s more 332 J.M. Rodríguez D ow nl oa de d by [
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A pr il 2 01 6 http://stores.ebay.com/vanessadelriomemorabilia/ http://stores.ebay.com/vanessadelriomemorabilia/ historically inflected textincludes numerous interviews with key figures and extensive archival material, including references from early stag films, the golden age of porn, the home-video era, and the current digital circulation of pornography. Focused more on close textual analysis of specific films and the (im)possibility of “the black body in ecstasy” in pornographic films pro- duced in the 1970s and 1980s, Jennifer Nash’s book offers theoretically generative and artfully crafted close readings of a smaller archive of films. Both authors provide significantly more con- textual information on the era I reference here as the “golden age of porn” than this article allows. That period, roughly from 1970–85, marked a period in which some adult feature films were screened in movie theaters and reviewed in mainstream press including the New York Times and Variety. That heightened publicity allowed a star-system to develop and also generated more elaborate marketing campaigns oriented around specific actors. The rise
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of the homevideo marked the end of this period. 9. For more on the politics and performance of testimonial literature in Latin America, see Bev- erley (1993) and the anthology The Real Thing, edited by George M. Gugelberger (1996). 10. In 2015, Amnesty International began to advocate for the decriminalization of sex work as part of an effort to address human-rights violations against sex workers (Carvajal 2015). Human Rights Watch (2014) issued a similar statement in their World Report 2014. Linking the decri- minalization of sex work to a parallel effort to decriminalize simple drug use and possession, their report states: “Criminalization in both cases can cause or exacerbate a host of ancillary human rights violations, including exposure to violence from private actors, police abuse, dis- criminatory law enforcement, and vulnerability to blackmail, control, and abuse by criminals. These severe and common consequences, and the strong personal interest that people have in making decisions about their own bodies, mean it is unreasonable and disproportionate for the state to use criminal punishment to discourage either practice” (47). See also the Human Rights Watch (2015) report, Condoms as Evidence, for their study on how condom possession is being used to prosecute sex workers and target those imagined to be sex workers, pointing to the ways these policing practices disproportionately impact transwomen and women of color. 11. There are entire sections that are recorded on camera, such as her describing the Santeria practices
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ofherCubanfather, thatarenotreferencedinthebook.Therearealsosectionsinthebookth athave no corresponding mentionin the DVD, most notably the Reb Stout chapter discussed later. To complicate matters further, there are passages in the book that do correspond to on-camera interviews but which appear to have been edited somewhat in post-production for clarity. In this essay,Icitethespecificsource,eitherthebookortheDVD,andmentio nnotablediscrepancies. 12. This is not to suggest that her audience consists of solely white men who have no connection to stories of racial and gendered violence, her fan base is quite diverse. Yet, being reminded of these more realistic aspects of del Rio’s story may complicate a more sexually inflected viewing of the film. 13. For more on Sarli see Ruétela (2004) and Foster (2008). 14. More recently the genre of porn-star memoir has exploded, including more texts by women of color; see recent titles by Asia Akira (2015), India Morel (2013), and Roxy Reynolds (2014). 15. Nash’s (2014) chapter, “Laughing Matters,” in The Black Body in Ecstasy might be particularly useful in reading how humor functions in del Rio’s films, and in her own narrative as a way to make visible the absurdity of racist and gendered fictions surrounding sexual pleasure. 16. In his essay “The Fact of Blackness,” in Black Skins White
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Masks, Frantz Fanon(1967) writes of the colonial gaze, “the glances of the other fixed me there, in the sense in which a chemical sol- ution is fixed by a dye” (109). 17. This is an instance where the recorded audio and the “transcribed” interview are not quite iden- tical. In the recorded interview there is no mention of him being “handsome, blond, and rug- gedly studly.” In both the written version and the on-screen interview, the story itself is quite long and detailed. The written account is over three paragraphs long and appears in a section about run-ins with the police. I have elected to cite the textual version for clarity. 18. Once again the language in the film clip is slightly different than what is printed in the book. In the DVD there is no mention of it being “so theatrical, such a humiliating adventure” and also no Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 333 D ow nl oa de d by [ U
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pr il 2 01 6 mention of “Ooh,I felt like such a dirty girl for enjoying it!” These additions appear to have been added later. 19. In a list included in the book entitled “The Basic Vanessa,” in addition to listing leopard as a favorite color, she lists her favorite book/author as Macho Sluts by Pat Califia, and her hero as Muhammad Ali (258). 20. The physical changes to her face, hair, skin color, genitals, and body, brought about through self-styling, photographic manipulation, age, and technologies of the body are quite evident throughout the book. In the chapter “Gym Rat,” she describes a brief period where she began to take steroids, developing both her muscles and the size of her clitoris, which is reported to be over five centimeters long (224). Later in her life, she also underwent breast augmentation, and the newer images include tattoos. 21. In addition to Musser’s superb text, for additional readings at the nexus of race and sexualized forms of power relations, see also Hoang Tan Nguyen’s (2014) A View of the Bottom: Asian
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American Masculinity andSexual Representation; Darieck Scott’s (2010) Extravagant Abjec- tion: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination, and my own Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings (Rodríguez, 2014). Note on contributor Juana María Rodríguez is Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Performance Studies at UC- Berkeley. ORCID Juana María Rodríguez http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2867-4520 References Akira, Asa. 2015. Insatiable: Porn—A Love Story. New York: Grove. Beverley, John. 1993. Against Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Carvajal, Doreen. 2015. “Amnesty International Votes for Policy Calling for Decriminalization of Prostitution.” The New York Times, August 11. Comella, Lynn, and Shira Tarrant, eds. 2015. New Views on Pornography: Sexuality, Politics, and the Law. Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger. Dean, Tim, Steven Ruszczycky, and David Squires, eds. 2014. Porn Archives. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books. Digital Underground. 1990. “Freaks of the Industry.” Sex Packets. Tommy Boy/Eurobond Records. Fanon, Frantz. 1967. “The Fact of Blackness.” In Black Skins,
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White Masks, translatedby Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove. Fleetwood, Nicole R. 2012. “The Case of Rihanna: Erotic Violence and Black Female Desire.” African American Review 45 (3): 419–435. Fleetwood, Nicole R. 2015. On Racial Icons: Blackness and the Public Imagination. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Foster, David William. 2008. “Las lolas de la Coca: el cuerpo femenino en el cine de Isabel Sarli.” Karpa: Dissident Theatricalities, Visual Arts and Culture 1 (2): n. pag. Accessed July 17, 2015. http://web.calstatela.edu/misc/karpa/Karpa- B/Site%20Folder/foster.html Gugelberger, Georg M., ed. 1996. The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America. Durham, NC.: Duke University Press. Hanson, Dian, ed. 2009. Tom of Finland XXL. Cologne: Taschen. Hanson, Dian, ed. 2011. The Big Book of Breasts 3D. Cologne: Taschen. Human Rights Watch. 2014. “World Report 2014.” Accessed August 14, 2014. https://www.hrw.org/ world-report/2014. 334 J.M. Rodríguez D ow
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a t 11 :4 4 20 A pr il 2 01 6 http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2867-4520 http://web.calstatela.edu/misc/karpa/Karpa- B/Site%20Folder/foster.html https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2014 https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2014 Human Rights Watch.2015. “Sex Workers at Risk: Condoms as Evidence of Prostitution in Four US Cities.” Accessed August 14, 2015. http://www.hrw.org/node/108794. Lee, Jiz, ed. 2015. Coming Out Like a Porn Star: Essays on Pornography, Protection, and Privacy. Berkeley, CA: ThreeL Media. Miller-Young, Mireille. 2014. A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black
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Women in Pornography.Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books. Morel, India. 2013. Infamous: Memoirs of a XXX Star. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. Musser, Amber Jamilla. 2014. Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism. New York: NYU Press. Nash, Jennifer Christine. 2014. The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books. Nguyen, Hoang Tan. 2014. A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books. Obenson, Tambay A. 2015. “Vanessa Del Rio Biopic Casts Zulay Henao to Star + DatariTurner Will Co- Produce.” Shadow and Act. Accessed August 10, 2015. http://blogs.indiewire.com/shadowandact/ vanessa-del-rio-biopic-casts-zulay-henao-to-star-datari-turner- will-produce-20140729. Ochoa, Marcia. 2014. Queen for a Day: Transformistas, Beauty Queens, and the Performance of Femininity in Venezuela. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books. Philipps, Dave. 2015. “Former Oklahoma City Police Officer Found Guilty of Rapes.” The New York Times, December 10. Reynolds, Roxy. 2014. Secrets of a Porn Star. Stockbridge, GA: G Street Chronicles. del Rio, Vanessa, as told to Dian Hanson. 2010. Vanessa Del Rio: Fifty Years of Slightly Slutty
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Behavior. Cologne: Taschen. Rivera,Lance. 1996. “Un.” Director. Junior M.A.F.I.A. Feat. The Notorious B.I.G. - Get Money. Accessed October 8, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDXF78pXeEg. Rock, Chubb. 1990. “Just the Two of Us,” The One. Select Records. Rodríguez, Juana María. 2014. Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings. New York: NYU Press. Ruétalo, Victoria. 2004. “Temptations: Isabel Sarli Exposed.” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 13 (1) (1 March): 79–95. Scott, Darieck. 2010. Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination. Sexual Cultures. New York: New York University Press. Scott, Joan. 1993. “The Evidence of Experience.” In The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, edited by Michele Aina Barale, and David Halperin Henry Abelove, 397– 415. New York: Routledge. Shannon, K., T. Kerr, S. A. Strathdee, J. Shoveller, J.S. Montaner, and M.W. Tyndall. 2009. “Prevalence and Structural Correlates of Gender Based Violence among a Prospective Cohort of Female Sex Workers.” BMJ 339 (11 August): b2939–b2939. Shimizu, Celine Parreñas. 2007. The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on
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Screen and Scene.Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books. Strauss, Neil. 2014. “Nonfiction Book Review: How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale by Jenna Jameson.” PublishersWeekly.com. Accessed December 30, 2014. http://www. publishersweekly.com/978-0-06-053909-2. Taormino, Tristan, Constance Penley, Celine Parrenas Shimizu, and Mireille Miller-Young, eds. 2013. The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure. New York, NY: The Feminist Press at CUNY. Vanessa Del Rio - Www.taschen.com. 2008. Accessed July 17, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=bniQ8-5R434&feature=youtube_gdata_player. Vargas, Deborah R. 2014. “Ruminations on Lo Sucio as a Latino Queer Analytic.” American Quarterly 66 (3): 715–726. Vizenor, Gerald. 1994. Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press. Williams, Linda. 1999. Hardcore: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible”, Expanded Edition. Berkeley: University of California Press. Williams, Linda. 2004. Porn Studies. Durham, DC: Duke University Press Books. Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 335 D
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y] a t 11 :4 4 20 A pr il 2 01 6 http://www.hrw.org/node/108794 http://blogs.indiewire.com/shadowandact/vanessa-del-rio- biopic-casts-zulay-henao-to-star-datari-turner-will-produce- 20140729 http://blogs.indiewire.com/shadowandact/vanessa-del-rio- biopic-casts-zulay-henao-to-star-datari-turner-will-produce- 20140729 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDXF78pXeEg http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-06-053909-2 http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-06-053909-2 http://Www.taschen.com https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bniQ8- 5R434&feature=youtube_gdata_player https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bniQ8- 5R434&feature=youtube_gdata_playerAbstractTestimonio, documentary, pornAuthorizing subjectsRefusingvictimThe Reb
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Stout affairEntrega totalNotesNoteon contributorORCIDReferences Introduction Brown Sugar Theorizing Black Women’s Sexual Labor in Pornography You are not supposed to talk about liking sex because you are already assumed to be a whore.—J E A N N I E PE PPE R In a private gathering following the East Coast Video Show in Atlantic City in 2002, legendary performer Jeannie Pepper received a special achievement award for twenty years in the porn industry, the longest career for any black adult actress. “It’s been a long, hard road,” she said to the audience of adult entertainment performers, insiders, and fans as she accepted the award from popular adult film actor Ron Jeremy. “There weren’t many black women in the business when I started.”1 In 1982, when Jeannie Pepper began her career as an actress in X- rated films, there were few black women in the adult film industry. Performing in more than two hundred films over three decades, Jeannie broke barriers to achieve porn star status and opened doors for other women of color to follow.2 She played iconic roles as the naughty maid, the erotically possessed “voodoo girl,” and the incestuous sister in films like Guess
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Who Came atDinner?, Let Me Tell Ya ’Bout Black Chicks, and Black Taboo. She traveled abroad as a celebrity, working and living in Germany for seven years. In a career that spanned the rise of video, DVD, and the Internet, Jeannie watched the pornography business transform from a quasi- licit cottage in- dustry into a sophisticated, transnational, and corporate- dominated industry. In 1997 Jeannie was the first African American porn actress to be inducted into the honored Adult Video News (AVN) Hall of Fame. By all accounts, Jeannie had an exceptionally long and successful career for an adult actress: she was well liked by her colleagues, and was a mentor to young women new to the porn business. Yet, as her acceptance speech reveals, her experience of being a black woman in the porn industry was shaped by formidable chal- lenges. As in other occupations in the United States, black women in the adult FIGURE I. 1. Jeannie Pepper during her tour of Europe, Cannes, France, 1986. Courtesy of JohnDragon.com. B ROW N SU G A R 3
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film industry aredevalued workers who confront systemic marginalization and discrimination. Jeannie became a nude model and adult film actress in her twenties be- cause she enjoyed watching pornography and having sex, and she was keen to become a path- maker in an industry with few black female stars: “I just wanted to show the world. Look, I’m black and I’m beautiful. How come there are not more black women doing this?”3 She felt especially beautiful when in 1986 she did a photo shoot with her photographer husband, a Ger- man expatriate known as John Dragon, on the streets of Paris. Dressed only in a white fur coat and heels, Jeannie walked around, posing in front of the Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe, cafés, luxury cars, and shops. Coyly allowing her coat to drape open (or off altogether) at opportune moments, she drew the attention of tourists and residents alike. She imagined herself as Josephine Baker, admired in a strange new city for her beauty, class, and grace. Finding esteem and fearlessness in showing the world her blackness and beauty, even in the cityscapes of Paris, Hamburg, or Rome, Jeannie felt she embodied an emancipated black female sexuality. Still, she remained conscious of the dual pressures of needing to fight for
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recognition and opportunityin the adult business, especially in the United States, and having to defend her choice to pursue sex work as a black woman.4 FIGURE I.2. Jeannie Pepper poses in the nude before onlookers outside of the Carlton Hotel, Cannes, France, 1986. Courtesy of JohnDragon.com. 4 I N T RO D U C T I O N As Jeannie asserts in the epigraph, she perceived that part of the difficulty of being a professional “whore”—in photographs and films—was the expec- tation that she was not supposed to talk about or inhabit her sexuality in ways that would seem to exacerbate harmful stereotypes about black women, namely their alleged hypersexuality. Black women sexual performers and workers have had to confront a prevailing stigma: if all black women are con- sidered to be sexually deviant, then those who use sex to make a living are the greatest threat to any form of respectable black womanhood. “Brown sugar,” this popular imaginary of African American women, satu- rates popular culture. In songs, films, music videos, and everyday life, the dis- course of brown sugar references the supposed essence of black female sexu- ality. It exposes historical mythologies about the desirable yet
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deviant sexual nature ofblack women. Publicly scorned and privately enjoyed, the alluring, transformative, and supposedly perverse sexuality of black women is thor- oughly cemented in the popular imaginary. Seen as particularly sexual, black women continue to be fetishized as the very embodiment of excessive or non- normative sexuality. What is most problematic about this sticky fetishism—in addition to the fact that it spreads hurtful and potentially dangerous stereo- types with very real material effects—is that the desire for black women’s sexuality, while so prevalent, is unacknowledged and seen as illegitimate in most popular discourse. As a metaphor, brown sugar exposes how black women’s sexuality, or more precisely their sexual labor, has been historically embedded in culture and the global economy. Now a key component of the profitable industries of entertainment and sex in the United States, brown sugar played a central role in the emergence of Western nation- states and the capitalist economies. Across the American South and the Caribbean, black slaves cultivated and manufactured sugar that sweetened food, changed tastes, and energized fac- tory workers in the Industrial Revolution.5 In addition to physical labor, their sexual labor was used to “give birth to white wealth,”6 and was
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thus the key mechanismfor reproducing the entire plantation complex. “Sugar was a mur- derous commodity,” explains Vincent Brown, “a catastrophe for workers that grew it.”7 The grinding violence and danger that attended sugar’s cultivation in colonial plantations literally consumed black women’s labor and bodies.8 Brown sugar, as a trope, illuminates circuits of domination over black women’s bodies and exposes black women’s often ignored contributions to the economy, politics, and social life. Like sugar that has dissolved without a trace, but has nonetheless sweetened a cup of tea, black women’s labor and the mechanisms that manage and produce it are invisible but nonetheless there. B ROW N SU G A R 5 To take the metaphor a bit further, the process of refining cane sugar from its natural brown state into the more popular white, everyday sweetener reflects how black women, like brown sugar, represent a raw body in need of refine- ment and prone to manipulation. The lewdness and raw quality associated with brown sugar in popular discourse today thus shows how ideas about black women as naturally savage, super- sexual beings have
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flavored popular tastes evenas they have driven a global appetite for (their) sweetness. While processed white sugar is held up as the ideal, there remains a powerful desire, indeed a taste, for the real thing. The metaphor of brown sugar exposes how representations shape the world in which black women come to know themselves. But stereotypes usually have dual valences: they may also be taken up by the oppressed and refash- ioned to mean something quite different. Although brown sugar has been used as a phrase to talk about black women as lecherous, prurient sex ob- jects, unlike other tropes such as the Mammy, Jezebel, or Sapphire, it conveys sweetness, affection, and respect. In African American vernacular speech and song, brown sugar often expresses adoration, loveliness, and intimacy even as it articulates lust, sensuality, and sex (along with other illicit, pleasure- giving materials like heroin or marijuana).9 As in the saying, “the blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice,” brown sugar is sometimes used by black people to speak to the complex pleasures they derive from their own eroticism. In this book brown sugar references a trope that black women must always bro- ker. Sometimes they refashion this trope to fit their needs. As Jeannie Pepper shows, some black women choose to perform brown sugar—the
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perverse, pleasurable imago projectedonto black women’s bodies—in an effort to ex- press themselves as desired and desiring subjects. Given the brutal history of sexual expropriation and objectification of black bodies, these attempts by black women to reappropriate a sexualized image can be seen as a bid to reshape the terms assigned to black womanhood. In this case, brown sugar might be a realm for intervention in their sexualization. Some black women might view Jeannie Pepper, the porn star, as a menace to the hard- fought image of respectable womanhood they have sought to cre- ate for more than one hundred years.10 Nevertheless, even though black sex workers know that their labor is seen to constitute a betrayal of respectable black womanhood, some pursue it. Their reasons may be purely economic: it’s a job, and they must survive and take care of their families, after all. Or, in Jeannie Pepper’s case, their motivations could be to take pleasure in “show- [ing] the world” a beautiful and sexually self- possessed black woman. While such a move to represent oneself may be viewed, especially by many in the 6 I N T RO D U C T I O N
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African American community,as perpetuating historical and ongoing stereo- types born out of horrible abuse, it is a powerful statement about how some black women redefine what respectable womanhood means for them. For Jeannie, more important than respectability, is respect.11 Respect means being acknowledged and valued for her performative sexual labor and treated as a star. Jeannie Pepper’s story illustrates how the perception of black women as hypersexual, which has persisted since the slave trade, has made it extremely difficult to acknowledge that some black women have an interest in leverag- ing hypersexuality. But it is possible to leverage this treacherous discourse and the black women who speak to us in A Taste for Brown Sugar explain how. They use the seductive power of brown sugar to intervene in representation, to assert their varied sexual subjectivities, and to make a living. In the process of making tough choices about how and when to commodify their sexualities, these women offer more complex readings of black gender and sexual identity than now prevail in the academy and popular culture. Porn is an important terrain in which this alternative sexual politics can emerge. Pornography as Culture and Industry Pornography is a highly controversial category, not just for its content but
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because it sparksheated debates about its role in society. Most often por- nography is defined as a genre of mass- produced written or visual materials designed to arouse or titillate the reader or viewer. A facet of entertainment culture and a domain of the commercial sex industry since its modern cir- culation in literature, photography, and film in the nineteenth century, por- nography has been powerfully regulated as the explicit, obscene edge of ac- ceptable forms of sexuality. It is also more than a kind of object or media; pornography is an idiom that communicates potent, blunt, and transgres- sive sexuality operating at the boundaries of licit and illicit, sacred and pro- fane, private and public, and underground and mainstream culture. Hence, as Walter Kendrick argues, “ ‘pornography’ names an argument, not a thing.”12 Pornography becomes a map of a culture’s borders, a “detailed blueprint of the culture’s anxieties, investments, contradictions,”13 and a site of cultural contest about social access and social prohibition.14 Focusing on pornogra- phy since the rise of the modern adult film industry in the 1970s, A Taste for Brown Sugar analyzes the operation of black women’s sexuality—its condi- tions of production, modes of representation, and strategic performances— in both the industry and idiom of pornography. This book traces the work of
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B ROW NSU G A R 7 the black female body in pornography as a material object, but it also delves into pornography’s function as a cultural discourse about racialized sexuality. Does pornography really make much of an impact on how we view sex, race, and gender? One argument about porn’s relevance is that it is big busi- ness with big cultural effects. Many critics have cited the broad impact of por- nography on American life since its legalization during the sexual revolution of the 1960s and ’70s.15 With revenues of nearly $8–$10 billion a year, the adult entertainment industry is one of the largest entertainment industries in the United States.16 Pornographic films, videos, and websites are one part of this larger industry that includes exotic dance clubs, phone sex, magazines, peep booths, and sex toys. While Hollywood makes nearly four hundred films each year, the adult industry makes more than ten thousand.17 This book focuses on photographic film and digital media from the turn of the twentieth century to the early twenty- first, a period during which pornog- raphy became a “phenomenon of media culture and a question of mass pro-
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duction.”18 Indeed, mechanismsof mass production and consumption have become central to the growing convergence of sexual aesthetics and media industries, and their prominent role in defining private fantasies and pub- lic spaces. In recent years we have seen this convergence happening within popular culture, from “porno chic” fashion, to reality TV shows such as The Girls Next Door, to mainstream films like Zack and Miri Make a Porno and Boogie Nights, to adult actress and entrepreneur Jenna Jameson being inter- viewed on Oprah. Porn as an entrance into everyday consumer life can be seen as producing what many critics have termed the “pornification” or “porne- tration” of culture.19 Previously illicit subcultures, communities, and sexual practices have been brought into the public eye through pornography, and in the process they have made their way into other modes of culture, including fashion, art, mainstream film, music, and television. Celebrity sex tapes, po- litical sex scandals, and popular sex panics around issues like youth “sexting” have popularized the idea of public sex as a symptom of a pornographic main- stream media; they ignite worry that what is being projected and amplified is the worst of American sexual experience in terms of taste, values, and poli- tics. Indeed, based on documentaries such as Chyng Sun’s The Price of Plea-
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sure, one wouldimagine that the biggest threat to society is not war, torture, poverty, or environmental degradation, but the proliferation of pornography and its representation of “bad sex.”20 Rather than an act of romance, intimacy, or love, bad sex is seen as the product of the narcissistic, self- interested char- acter of our culture. This unfeeling, vulgar kind of sex rubs up against expec- 8 I N T RO D U C T I O N tations of personal morality and rational social values rooted in traditional, bourgeois views of sex for the reproduction of proper families and citizens. Thus, fears of bad sex expose powerful anxieties about how changing mean- ings and practices around sex might lead to a downward spiral, a debasing of social life and the nation.21 More than a debate about how sex is represented in our culture, porn is a site of moral panic about sex itself. As an act of speech that speaks the unspeakable, pornography has been defined by what the state has tried to suppress.22 In the process of pushing against censorship and obscenity regulation, porn presses and redefines the limits of the culture of sex. Media technologies have played a leading role in making porn increasingly accessible and part of the public
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domain. With so manygenres and subgenres of erotic fascination making up pornogra- phy’s “kaleidoscopic variorum” we might even think of it in a plural sense: as pornographies.23 Yet despite its vast proliferation, increased pluralism, and rich potential for the reimagining of allowable forms of desire, pornography’s commodification of sex has produced what Richard Fung notes as a “limited vision of what constitutes the erotic.”24 That porn reproduces predictable, indeed stereotypical, representations of sexuality for an increasingly niche- oriented marketplace is not surprising given its profit motive. This limited erotic vision may also be the result of sexually conservative regulatory sys- tems, such as obscenity laws, which have defined what may or may not be broadcast via media technologies like television or the Internet or sold in stores, whether locally or across state lines.25 In addition to affecting media policy, the regulation of sexual culture has reinforced severely narrow repre- sentations of gender, desire, and sexuality that make it difficult to construct alternative imaginaries, even in supposedly transgressive spaces like pornog- raphy.26 Nevertheless, pornography reliably takes up the challenge of subvert- ing norms, even as it catalyzes and perpetuates them. The fantasies it produces offer fertile spaces to read how eroticism, proliferation,
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commodification, and regulation getplayed out at the very heart of our public consciousness. In many ways porn is a political theater where—in addition to gender, sex, and class—racial distinctions and barriers are reiterated even as they may also be manipulated or transformed.27 Race, or more properly racialization, the process by which meanings are made and power is structured around racial differences, informs the production side of commercial pornography in at least two important ways: in the titillating images themselves and in the behind- the- scenes dynamics where sex workers are hired to perform in the production of those images.28 Black women, and other people of color, have historically been included in pornography to the extent that its producers B ROW N SU G A R 9 seek to commoditize, circulate, and enable the consumption of their images. Their bodies represent stereotypes of racial, gender, and sexual difference and the fantasies or deeper meanings behind them.29 Until recently, when black women and men started to produce and circulate their own pornographies, those fantasies were seldom authored by black people.
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Black women’s imagesin hardcore porn show that the titillation of por- nography is inseparable from the racial stories it tells. A central narrative is that black women are both desirable and undesirable objects: desirable for their supposed difference, exoticism, and sexual potency, and undesirable be- cause these very same factors threaten or compromise governing notions of feminine sexuality, heterosexual relations, and racial hierarchy. Pornography did not create these racial stories, these fraught imaginings of black being and taboo interactions across racial difference, but it uses them. What interests me is the work of racial fantasy, particularly fantasy involving black women. Given our racial past and present, what is the labor of the black female body in pornography? As my informants show, the players of pornography’s racial imaginarium are the ones who can best discern the crucial implications of these fantasies for black women’s sexual identities and experiences. They reveal how some black porn actresses tactically employ the performative labor of hypersexuality to intervene in their representation, “contest it from within,”30 and provide a deeper, more complex reading of their erotic lives. Working On, Within, and Against
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Historically, enslaved blackwomen were marked as undesirable objects for white men due to their primitive sexuality. These women, as the myth went, were so supersexual that they virtually forced white men into sex they os- tensibly did not want to have.31 Enslaved black women needed their sexual powers because otherwise these unwitting white men would never desire them. This myth concealed, denied, and suppressed the plain sexual exploi- tation of enslaved and emancipated African American women by casting the demand for their sexuality, both in images and as labor, as impossible. Chief to the racial fetishism of black women in pornography, then, is a double focus: a voyeurism that looks but also does not look, that obsessively enjoys, lingers over, and takes pleasure in the black female body even while it declares that body as strange, Other, and abject.32 Black women are of course aware of this regime of racial fetishism in rep- resentation (and the social and legal apparatus that sustains it), which li- censes the voyeuristic consumption of their bodies as forbidden sex objects. 10 I N T RO D U C T I O N As Jeannie Pepper noted, black women are always “already
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assumed to be” whores.She, then, uses this insistent myth in her own work. That is, Jeannie Pepper employs her own illicit desirability in a kind of sexual repertoire. By precisely staging her sexuality so as to acknowledge and evoke the taboo desire for it, she shows that racial fetishism can actually be taken up by its ob- jects and used differently. Standing nude on the beach in the South of France as throngs of tourists look on, Jeannie takes pleasure in presenting herself as irresistibly captivating and attractive in the face of the denial of those very capacities. In this way, Jeannie Pepper exposes the disgust for black female sexuality as a facade for what is really forbidden desire. It is a myth that can be reworked and redeployed for one’s own purposes. Jeannie Pepper shows us how black women—particularly sex workers— mobilize what I term “illicit eroticism” to advance themselves in adult enter- tainment’s sexual economy.33 Actively confronting the taboo nature and fraught history of black female sexuality, black sex workers choose to pur- sue a prohibited terrain of labor and performance. Illicit eroticism provides a framework to understand the ways in which black women put hypersexu- ality to use. They do so in an industry that is highly stratified with numerous structures of desire and “tiers of desirability.”34 Black women’s
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illicit erotic work manipulatesand re- presents racialized sexuality— including hyper- sexuality—in order to assert the value of their erotic capital.35 In an industry where they are marginal to the most lucrative produc- tions, and where the quality of productions are largely based on demand, black women, along with Latinas and Asian women, face a lack of opportu- nities, pay disparities, and racially biased treatment in comparison to white women.36 Black women are devalued in terms of their erotic worth, and they are critical of how they are made lesser players in pornography’s theater of fantasy. These women seek to mobilize their bodies to position themselves to the greatest advantage. This mobilization requires a complex knowledge of what it means to “play the game” and to “play up” race by moving and per- forming strategically. However, because not everyone is able to increase their status in the established hierarchies of desire, black women employing illicit erotic labor face a complicated dilemma: lacking erotic capital, how can they produce more, and in the process enhance their erotic power, social signifi- cance, and economic position? One strategy for black women in pornography is to work extremely hard to carve out space and fabricate themselves as marketable and
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desirable actors. Their appearanceis important to them; they invest a great deal of time and money on self- fashioning and taking care of their bodies in order to achieve FIGURE I. 3. Jeannie Pepper standing before the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France, during her European tour in 1986. Courtesy of JohnDragon.com. 12 I N T RO D U C T I O N competitiveness. Performance is critical; most performers attempt to portray seductive eroticism and sexual skill, which may give them an edge with con- sumers and added appreciation by other actors and producers. In addition to appearing in adult videos, they actively cultivate themselves as “porn stars,” which includes creating a captivating persona and becoming a savvy finan- cial manager and entrepreneur. Selling themselves as brands or commodities means spending a great deal of time on promotion, including at photo shoots, appearances at trade conventions and entertainment- industry events, and on their websites, social networks, and chat rooms, to foster a fan base. All these spaces are spaces of work and contestation where black women must fight
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for their worth.Even more important, these primarily young, working- class black women do all this while also acting as mothers, aunts, daughters, sisters, and partners called upon to play important caretaking roles in their families. They are women who use their bodies as resources and their determined intel- lect as tools to make a living, and sometimes make a name too. Marginalized and exploited in the labor market, many young, working- class black women today identify the sex industries as preferred spaces to make a living for themselves and their families.37 This is not new. As the his- tory of black sexual labor attests, this choice has been recorded as part of their negotiations of the labor market since slavery and through the Great Depression.38 Black sex workers make a living when they take sex, which is associated with leisure and play, and turn it into what Robin D. G. Kelley calls “play- labor.”39 In commodifying sexuality, play- labor does not necessarily re- sist or overturn hegemonic institutions of power like patriarchy and racial capitalism. That is not its purpose. Play- labor is one strategy by which black women (and others) try to negotiate the existing political economy by using their corporeal resources, which are some of the only resources many black working- class women may in fact possess. Given that the other options open
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to working- classblack women appear in service, care work, or other contin- gent labor industries, the “choice” to pursue sex work is of course constrained within a modern capitalist system where all work is exploited work, and black women’s work is super exploited.40 Part of a continuum of sex work—including streetwalking, private es- corting, erotic dancing, modeling, phone sex, and S/M role play—and part of a history of black women working in underground or gray economies as “mojo women . . . bootleggers, numbers backers and bawdy house operators,” black women’s work in pornography maneuvers within illicit and licit sexual economies to pursue what Sharon Harley describes as “personal and commu- B ROW N SU G A R 13 nity survival.”41 Their maneuvers are generally prompted by market concerns, like porn’s relatively flexible and high- income work, but also by nonmarket motives, such as sexual pleasure and the enjoyment of erotic performance. Garnering fame in the adult entertainment industry is often regarded by per- formers as a viable aspiration and a stepping- stone to more opportunities in entertainment. For young black women, attaining fame could
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also reflect a desireto harness the erotic capital possessed by recognized black enter- tainers and actresses such as Beyoncé, Nicki Minaj, Halle Berry, Pam Grier, and Josephine Baker. Jeannie Pepper’s identification with Josephine Baker indicates that some black women working in porn understand the historical depictions of their bodies as containing dynamic possibilities for reinterpretation and re- creation through performance. These women work on representations of black sexu- ality by using their own bodies and imaginations. These representations— painful, punishing, or pleasurable—are part of what Asian American studies scholar and filmmaker Celine Parreñas Shimizu terms the “bind of repre- sentation.”42 As for Asian American women and other women of color in the United States, racialized sexual representation forms black women’s “very self- recognition every day and every minute.”43 Because black women are tethered to ontological concepts of sexual deviance, it is vital to acknowl- edge hypersexuality as a disciplinary instrument that effects pain, trauma, and abuse in their lives, and which, like other problematic representations of race, gender, and sexuality, is extremely hard to escape.44 Black women are not just victims of representation, however.
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Referencing three black Oscar-winning Hollywood actresses—Hattie McDaniel, Whoopi Goldberg, and Halle Berry—feminist literary and media scholar Rebecca Wanzo shows how many black women entertainers recognize the potentially recuperative nature of their performances. “Familiar with stereotypes about black female identity,” writes Wanzo, “they have attempted to reconfigure themselves as central agents of a particular project and then see themselves as making themselves objects in relationship to this racist history on their own terms.”45 Like actresses in the racist and sexist Hollywood film industry, some black actresses in the adult industry also recognize their performances as spaces to negotiate the overdetermined and reductive depictions, and try to engage them on their own terms. White American women are not judged in the same way, nor are they accused of representing the “hypersexuality of white womanhood.”46 Yet black women, as individuals, often come to stand for their entire racial group. Not only are black women performers burdened 14 I N T RO D U C T I O N with representing every other black woman, they are seen to depict only sim-
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plistic and denigratingtypes.47 Black porn actresses understand that they are seen as archetypical whores and bad women by both the black community and the broader, categorically white, culture. Crucially, these women often assert themselves within these archetypes. Performers who not only fit the stereotype, but also boldly put it to work in their performances can be read as having more sophisticated understandings and counterresponses in relationship to representation than previously ac- knowledged. In discussing her role as the “voodoo girl” in Let Me Tell Ya ’Bout Black Chicks, Jeannie explained that she chose a role that, though still a stereo- typical representation of exotic, supernatural, and hypersexual black woman- hood, she saw as an alternative to the then- standard role of the maid: “So I played the part of the voodoo girl. I wanted that part. I was glad to have [it]. I loved the way they dressed me up, with the costume. They made me look very exotic with all the makeup and feathers, and I was running around [acting possessed]. But I didn’t want to play the maids. Those other girls were playing maids. . . . But I like my part.” By playing the exotically fetishized black woman instead of the recognizable fetish of the servile black maid, Jeannie negotiated what she saw as a demeaning representation.48 The voodoo girl was not neces-
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sarily a positiverepresentation against the maid’s negative one, but it allowed space for Jeannie to take pleasure in what she identified as a more complex performance. Dressed as the primitive, magical savage in a tinsel skirt that looks more fitting for a luau than a voodoo ceremony, colorful neon bangles, and 1980s eye- shadow- heavy makeup, Jeannie’s voodoo girl uses a magic spell to conjure two white men to satisfy her sexual appetite. Jeannie brings erotic charisma and skill to her enthusiastic performance, stretching it beyond its impish and narrow construction. And, as she attests, her choice to perform a playful, mysterious, and (literally) self- possessed female character was a strategic move. Even though this move did not fully dismantle racist regimes of representation for black women in pornography, Jeannie’s tactics for self- representation are important to recognize. Angel Kelly, a contemporary of Jeannie Pepper in the 1980s, was the first black woman to win an exclusive contract from an adult film production company, Perry Ross’s Fantasy Home Video. An A- list actress like Jeannie, Angel desperately wanted to make choices in her career that would show her in what she saw as a positive light: as glamorous, sexy, and beautiful. How- ever, sometimes the nature of the industry meant that she became mired in
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the stereotypical constructionof black women’s sexuality. Like Jeannie, Angel was pressured to portray a “voodoo woman”: B ROW N SU G A R 15 There is one video called Welcome to the Jungle, where I look like an African, I look like voodoo woman [on the video box cover]. I hate that picture. I hated it. I hated it! And that’s why I wouldn’t do the movie for it. So there was no movie, but there was a [video box] cover called Wel- come to the Jungle and what [the producer, Perry Ross] did was he just made it a compilation tape. See, they can screw you that way anyway because when they are shooting pictures they got footage on you, and they can take all your scenes out of one movie and put it with another cover in another movie. As Angel describes, she importantly chose to stand up to the demands of her producer by refusing to star in the production. Yet she did feel pressure to dress like an “African voodoo woman” for the Welcome to the Jungle (1988) photo shoot, because as she told me during our phone interview in 2013, “Sometimes if you wanted to work you had to swallow it. I tried to hold on
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the best Icould.” Angel felt bitterly about the experience, noting her lack of power in relationship to the greater power of studios to use and manipulate her images. For Angel, who had on occasion played the shuffling maid to a white family (see The Call Girl), negotiating porn work included evaluating the terms of each production and deciding how she might infuse the role with her own desires. Angel expressed to me the pleasures she gained in her work: “I had a chance to play all types of great characters a man could fanta- size about. I was surprised that I had as many female fans as I did male fans. I had the opportunity to be a star.” Black women’s counterstrategies of representation involve at times at- tempting to play the stereotype in order to reverse or go beyond it. At other times they offer alternative, more complex images of black sexuality, or they may refuse the roles altogether.49 In my analyses of black women’s participa- tion in pornography, I identify where they tell stereotypical stories in their performances, but also where performers appear to tell stories about them- selves that aspire to go beyond stereotypes, the “immediately available” stories told about black women.50 Illicit eroticism, like José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of “disidentification,” describes how cultural workers enact a repertoire of
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skills and theories—includingappropriating or manipulating certain stereo- types—to “negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere that continuously elides or punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform to the phan- tasm of normative citizenship.”51 Unlike disidentification, illicit eroticism de- scribes a repertoire of appropriations distinct to the realm of sexual and sexu- alized labor, available to those whose sexuality has been marked specifically 16 I N T RO D U C T I O N as illicit, including people of color, and queer folk, including queer people of color. Illicit eroticism conceptualizes how these actors use sexuality in ways that necessarily confront and manipulate discourses about their sexual devi- ance while remaining tied to a system that produces them as marginalized sexual laborers. For Jeannie Pepper and others, leveraging one stereotype can mean avoiding another. Yet these performers’ layered work as black women remains connected to their very survival within a punishing field of repre- sentation and labor. Both Jeannie and Angel tell of their aspirations to be seen as more com- plicated subjects than the pornographic script allowed. Playing
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up, against, and withincaricature, Jeannie, who delved into a stereotyped role, imagined herself as an actor depicting a woman with power, one who magically and mischievously produces men to service her sexual desires, while generating a kind of glamour and joviality. Imagining a black female pornographic sexu- ality as joyful, subversive, and attractive, Jeannie’s performance asserts erotic sovereignty. Her performance attempts to reterritorialize the always already exploitable black female body as a potential site of self- governing desire, sub- jectivity, dependence and relation with others, and erotic pleasure.52 Erotic sovereignty is a process, rather than a completely achieved state of being, wherein sexual subjects aspire and move toward self- rule and collective af- filiation and intimacy, and against the territorializing power of the disci- plining state and social corpus. It is part of an ongoing ontological process that uses racialized sexuality to assert complex subjecthood, inside of the overwhelming constraints of social stigma, stereotype, structural inequality, policing, divestment, segregation, and exploitation under the neoliberal state. Jeannie’s interventions are never separate from the conditions that propelled and shaped her work in the porn industry during the 1980s, including the impact of Ronald Reagan’s devastating economic policies on
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African Ameri- cans, andthe porn business’s interest in capturing white consumers for black- cast products during the video era. By foregrounding the testimonies of black porn actresses like Jeannie Pep- per and Angel Kelly, I hope to explain how black porn actresses might simul- taneously challenge and conform to the racial fantasies that overwhelmingly define their representations and labor conditions. Their negotiations offer a view into black women’s needs, desires, and understandings, and into the deeply felt conflict between what stories about black women exist and what stories they long to imagine for themselves. Agency, a central concept in femi- nist thought, is generally understood as a person’s ability to achieve free- dom or “progressive change” in the context of everyday and manifold forms B ROW N SU G A R 17 of oppression. I draw on postcolonial scholar Saba Mahmood’s productive conceptualization of agency as a “capacity for action that historically specific relations of subordination enable and create.”53 Not eliding the role of sub- ordination, Mahmood reveals agency as existing along a continuum. At times
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agency enables progressivechange or resistive action, and at other times and contexts it is the “capacity to endure, suffer, and persist.”54 Rethinking the meaning of agency in relationship to black women’s sexu- ality, I propose to open up the concept of agency by moving away from read- ings of its equivalence with resistive (sexual) freedom. We might instead read agency as a facet of complex personhood within larger embedded relations of subordination. Depending on the historical moment, agency emerges dif- ferently and operates along divergent nodes of power. Agency then might be seen as a dialectical capacity for pleasure and pain, exploration and denial, or for progressive change as well as everyday survival. Through my close read- ings of interviews with black performers in the pornography industry, we can observe their differing forms of agency given changing contexts of represen- tation and circuits of sexual economy. The tension described above between aspiration and inescapable con- straint forms the critical spine of this book. Although it is impossible to de- cipher what early black pornography actors imagined and desired as they performed during the rise of pornographic photography and film in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, it is important to think through the
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foundational nature ofearly pornography as it set the terms for the later per- formances, labor conditions, and forms of negotiation deployed by black adult actresses. Chapter 1 examines the fetishization of black women’s bodies in early pornography and considers how those bodies served as objects of spectacle, fascination, and disdain within the visual regimes of slavery, colo- nialism, and Jim Crow. A compulsive desire to sexualize race and to consume sexual images of black women and men intersected with the rise of commer- cial pornography, creating a distinct genre that I call “race porn.” Photographs and films concerning black and black- white sex illuminate how discourses of racial and sexual difference became calcified during this period. Even in the most intimate interactions in early pornography racial- sexual borders are erected, permeated, and then built up again. Deploying what I call a black feminist pornographic lens, I read the archive of early race porn to contem- plate the ways in which early black models and actresses may have reached past the confines of porn texts to provide performances that give us a sur- prising view of black female sensuality, playfulness, and erotic subjectivity. Chapter 2 explores the performances of black porn actresses, like Desiree
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18 I NT RO D U C T I O N West, during the “Golden Age” of pornography in the 1970s. Not only did large- scale social transformations alter racial- sexual borders in the United States during this period, they also transformed meanings and interactions around pornography itself, such that newly popularized sexual media be- came an important site for black women. A combination of white fascination with black sexuality and African Americans’ desire to express a new, asser- tive sexual politics resulted in what I call “soul porn,” a genre that power- fully shaped black women’s performances and labor. Yet as black actresses became agents in the production of an emergent porn industry, they faced the anxieties and subjugations of racial fetishism and were sidelined by the extreme focus on black male sexuality as the archetype for racial- sexual bor- der crossing. Throughout its history, technological and social forces have continuously altered the landscape of the adult industry. In the process technology has transformed the kinds of texts and modes of production black porn actresses encountered. Chapter 3 investigates how the adult industry’s adoption of VHS
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allowed for thegrowth of specific markets for black and interracial video. In this new interracial subgenre black actresses like Jeannie Pepper and Angel Kelly negotiated ways to assert their performances and professional personas into a restrictive formula and sometimes hostile terrain. In the early 1990s, digital media began to shift the production, marketing, and consumption of pornography, just as the rise of hip hop music began to shift the representa- tions, discourses, and aesthetics associated with black female sexuality. Chapter 4 interrogates how the convergence of hip hop and pornography helped establish the trope of the black working- class woman as “ho.” Deploy- ing this figure, the porn industry maintained a segregated, niche- oriented market for black sexuality based on commercial hip hop aesthetics. In the process, the ho became an inescapable text that black women in porn must decipher, and an archetype that speaks to black women’s battles to prevail in the sexual economy. Using what I call “ho theory,” I analyze the representa- tion of working- class black women’s corporeal labors to insert themselves in the marketplace of desires, and to both take pleasure in and benefit from the fetishization of black women’s bodies. In addition, I explore the roles of black men in hip hop pornography as they are called upon to perform
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the roles of pimpor stud in their sex work. Chapter 5 focuses on the labors of black women performers by asking what socioeconomic or other forces catalyze them to pursue pornography as a field of work and site of imagination. How does illicit eroticism, the pro- cess by which subjects convert sexuality into a usable resource in the face of B ROW N SU G A R 19 a number of compelling forces and constraints, factor into their motivations to become porn stars? What do black women in porn identify as the most desirable, pleasurable, and powerful aspects of the industry? Because money, sex, and fame are the hydraulic factors in my informants’ articulations of the need and desire for this work, it is important to unpack how the realities of the business meet with these expectations. If chapter 5 is concerned with how aspirations collide with real- life experi- ences, chapter 6 analyzes these real- life experiences and the particular kinds of entanglements and pressures black porn actresses report as constitutive elements of their illicit erotic work. Former and current black porn actresses
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speak about theundeniable hurdles pornographic labor poses, and about how they grapple with issues of marginalization, discrimination, and abuse as they seek to promote their erotic capital under tremendous constraint in a busi- ness that profits from their objectification and exploitation. Ultimately, these sexual laborers expose how black women are made vulnerable by—yet criti- cally intervene in—the larger sexualized economy of advanced capitalism in the United States. Black porn workers offer an alternative moral economy that sheds light on how marginalized people within industries like porn can cocreate social meanings, challenge conditions, and imagine other worlds. This book identifies pornography as an important location to think about sexual culture and racial ideologies, particularly in the context of the sexu- alization of both popular culture and economic opportunities for women. As such, it is necessarily in conversation with feminist critics and provides a launching pad to advance the conversation about the role of pornography in women’s lives. Pornography is a hugely controversial topic for feminists. For more than thirty years, feminists have been engaged in a fierce debate, widely known as the Sex Wars, about pornography’s role in society. The feminist anti- pornography movement emerged out of radical feminist
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activism during the 1970s,against what was viewed as the proliferation of explicit, misogynistic images in the media. Antipornography feminists like Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon defined pornography as equivalent to gendered vio- lence, believing that pornography was the “subordination of women perfectly achieved.”55 For them, pornography commodifies rape and endorses and en- courages men’s abusive sexual desires and violent behaviors toward women.56 Alternately, a diverse coalition of queer, anticensorship, liberal, and sex- positive feminists rejected the claims of radical antipornography femi- nists, citing porn as a convenient scapegoat for social- conservative attacks on sexual dissent. These critics and activists identified pornography not as a “unified (patriarchal) discourse with a singular (misogynist) impact,” but 20 I N T RO D U C T I O N rather, as Feminist Anti- Censorship Taskforce member Lisa Duggan con- tends, as sexual discourse that is “full of multiple, contradictory, layered, and highly contextual meanings.”57 In other words, viewing practices for por- nography are varied and dynamic; viewers are not solely abused
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by porn or trainedfor violent, misogynistic behaviors. While the adult industry is shaped by the problematics of heteronormative, homophobic, transphobic, and racist corporatist practices, pornography is not a monolithic or static entity. Porn is dynamic, diverse, and open for revision, including by those on the margins such as women, sexual minorities, and people of color. Black feminists have often followed the antiporn feminist critique de- scribed above, arguing that pornography as an industry perpetuates harm- ful stereotypes about black women’s sexuality.58 While these black feminist writers are not wrong, the story is more complex, and black women’s perfor- mances deserve a more nuanced analysis. Not only do black women’s rep- resentations in porn include portrayals that sometimes undermine stereo- types, black actresses often try to capture something quite different from the meanings normatively attached to their bodies. Moreover, black women in porn often try to revalue their images and work by fighting for better rep- resentations, asserting themselves in their roles, attempting to take control over their products, and helping other black women in the industry. Black women in porn also see themselves as a mirror for black women porn view- ers. They imagine their relationship with black female porn
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fans—the group from whichmany of these performers came—as empowering and challeng- ing to black women’s sexual politics. By including the performers’ voices in the discussion we can address questions that are vital to black feminisms, such as the critical significance of pornography for black women’s sexual labor and its significance for their own fantasy lives. Before she started working in porn, Jeannie Pepper was a porn fan. She had watched sex films in X- rated theaters and imagined seeing more black women like her represented. Yet she also knew that such a move into the industry would mark her with a deviance that was overdetermined by the historical construction of black gender and sexuality. While Jeannie has re- mained critical of the limits placed on black women in the adult industry and by black respectability politics, she found affiliation with the iconic celebrity of Josephine Baker. Baker, for Jeannie, represented a story of financial suc- cess, glamour, mobility, autonomy, and sexual rebellion. Baker, like Jeannie, was an erotic performer who became an icon. It is crucial to understand the attractions that draw black women to the pornography business. I suggest that porn work is part of a long struggle by black women to occupy their bodies.59
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B ROW NSU G A R 21 The primary methodological interventions of this project are twofold: first, I converse with porn actresses directly, listening to their voices and taking seriously their descriptions of their experiences; second, I read the com- plexity of their performances in pornographic imagery. Even as more atten- tion is given to the workings of race in pornography, few have endeavored to learn about porn’s meanings by looking at the self- presentations and self- understandings of black women working inside the industry.60 Over more than ten years of fieldwork, I conducted ethnographic research with nearly sixty black women, and more than forty others involved in the porn busi- ness. My research included directors, producers, distributors, agents, crew, and actors. I talked to black women porn performers while they made dinner at home, signed autographs at industry conventions, networked and partied at social events, and prepared for sex scenes on porn sets. As a black woman, I discovered an affinity with my informants that unsettled the traditional meth- odological division between researcher and object of study. My informants trusted me, called on me, and embraced me in their lives. I also became an
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advocate for them:I brought my informants to speak to my classes, published their essays, and strategized with them about how to overcome career and family hardships. What I found during this decade of fieldwork and personal interactions challenged the views I had at the start. For instance I, like many people, thought that women in porn were pri- marily survivors of sexual abuse who got off a bus in Hollywood and were whisked away to Porn Valley by some shady pimp. Reading nostalgic accounts of the “Golden Age” of porn in the 1970s, I also imagined film sets to be an updated version of Boogie Nights, where playful orgiastic sex ensued between people who really didn’t care much if the camera was rolling. Instead I found no single story for the women that enter the porn business. While some ad- mitted coming from abusive or neglectful family backgrounds, others spoke about having grounded and loving single or dual- parent households. Where I expected to see unmitigated eroticism I found work sites that were decidedly desexualized, where cast and crew moved about with workmanlike focus to get their movies made on time and, ideally, under budget. It is only by talking to those involved in the production of pornography that we can move past some of the myths and categorical generalizations
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about the businessand its controversial products. As a historian, I wanted to know more about how black women became part of pornography, and what the changing regulatory, technological, and social contexts of porn’s develop- ment over the past century or more meant for black women’s representations, working conditions, identities, and aspirations. In hunting down long- lost 22 I N T RO D U C T I O N vintage pornographic images in libraries and private collections, I soon real- ized that there was a vast missing archive of black pornography and erotica, and that black women performing in pornography prior to its deregulation would unfortunately have to remain unknown and, to an extent, unknowable. As a feminist, I wanted to understand how mainstream pornography, which appears to be so extremely focused on addressing white heterosexual male pleasure, is actually experienced by the women involved in making it. While it was not possible to track down black adult film actresses who worked prior to the 1980s, I discovered that the women I did contact were willing, if not eager, to talk about their experiences and to be understood. Like Jeannie
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Pepper, they knewthat even to speak about their lives and work would chal- lenge the stigma and silence around these issues for black women. Yet my informants fiercely desired to be seen and heard, to tell their stories and ex- plain their performances, especially to another black woman. I had no choice but to see and hear them. This book is my attempt to recover and redress an untold dimension of black women’s sexual lives, by letting them speak for themselves. Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journal Code=rprn20 Porn Studies ISSN: 2326-8743 (Print) 2326-8751 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rprn20 Constructing a crisis: porn panics and public health Valerie Webber & Rebecca Sullivan To cite this article: Valerie Webber & Rebecca Sullivan (2018) Constructing a crisis: porn panics and public health, Porn Studies, 5:2, 192-196, DOI: 10.1080/23268743.2018.1434110
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To link tothis article: https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2018.1434110 Published online: 20 Mar 2018. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 1371 View Crossmark data https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journal Code=rprn20 https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rprn20 https://www.tandfonline.com/action/showCitFormats?doi=10.10 80/23268743.2018.1434110 https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2018.1434110 https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?journalC ode=rprn20&show=instructions https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?journalC ode=rprn20&show=instructions http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1080/23268743.20 18.1434110&domain=pdf&date_stamp=2018-03-20 http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1080/23268743.20 18.1434110&domain=pdf&date_stamp=2018-03-20 INTRODUCTION Constructing a crisis: porn panics and public health Valerie Webbera and Rebecca Sullivanb aCommunity Health & Humanities, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John’s, Canada; bDepartment of English, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada
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Who has theluxury to worry about porn’s impact on health? And who has the power to define what is ‘healthy sexuality’? Labelling porn a public health crisis has become the newest tactic for anti-porn activists seeking to curtail pornography distribution. Thus far, seven American states have declared pornography a public health crisis and four more have filed similar bills. Hearings on the matter were held in Canada, although the final decision was that the evidence was too contradictory to draw any conclusions. Lobbyists in Australia and the United Kingdom are asking their governments to investigate not so much whether there is a public health crisis, but to leap ahead and determine how to solve the crisis of pornography. Yet not one global health agency – the usual experts to identify and define the scope of a public health issue – supports their claims. Traditionally, the field of public health has concerned itself with disease prevention by addressing the systemic causes of perva- sive health problems that impact either a significant majority of people (e.g. sanitation systems or childhood vaccinations) or the most marginalized segments of a population (e.g. HIV prevention or safe injection sites). Pornography consumption meets neither of these criteria. Why then has this debate occupied valuable government time and resources? Treating pornography as a ‘public health crisis’ is a gross misallocation of priorities. We
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do not believesuch claims are motivated by a desire to ensure the physical and social well- being of the populace. Rather, employing the language of ‘public health’, ostensibly apo- litical and objective, is a well-devised strategy to impose sexually conservative moral imperatives. The fact that the public health argument is operationalized primarily by moral activists with a retrograde understanding of both health and media scholarship, not by public health professionals or people involved in the pornography industry, should be enough to give any person pause. Thus, the pieces in this special forum do not engage with the question ‘is porn a public health crisis’ so much as they critically reflect upon the catalysts and consequences of this particular turn to public health dis- course by anti-porn groups. It is our contention that framing pornography as a health issue is a privileged and pol- itically motivated misdirection of public health resources. As such, we want to claim our own space here not to debate on their terms the data, definitions, and untested assump- tions embedded in that frame. Rather, we regard this effort as an opportunity to diversify the limited narratives of pornography consumption that presently dominate. The call for © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group CONTACT Valerie Webber [email protected] PORN STUDIES 2018, VOL. 5, NO. 2, 192–196
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https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2018.1434110 http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1080/23268743.20 18.1434110&domain=pdf mailto:[email protected] http://www.tandfonline.com specific typesof ‘evidence’ grants us opportunity to conduct research that makes visible the experiences of sexual subjectivities which are so often silenced. Indeed, as Filippa Fox argues, the maintenance of the theory that pornography damages the public’s health requires the wilful exclusion of the voices of sex workers. This denial that sex workers are in fact part of ‘the public’ has real and direct consequences on sex workers’ ability to access adequate and respectful healthcare, while health questions of actual rel- evance to sex workers’ lives go unanswered. Cicely Marston demonstrates that much of the public health rhetoric about pornogra- phy begins from the assumption that a healthy sexuality is one that conforms to the social and cultural conventions of white, settler, heterosexual, middle- class, monogamous pro- priety. It also singles out pornography as a uniquely and exclusively negative form of media. Katie Newby and Anne Philpott present ways to think about how explicit sexual content could be ethically produced and incorporated into sexual health curricula, especially to discuss consent, safer sex, and distinguishing between visual fantasy and
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real-life sex. Theseefforts by public heath scholars to integrate critical media studies of sexuality into their research opens up an exciting new vista of academic collaboration long missing from the media effects models that have dominated public health and social psychology studies. If porn is a public health crisis, then, what exactly are the health outcomes of watching too much pornography? That is the fundamental stumbling block of anti-porn advocates. David Ley, an American sex therapist, outlines a series of epistemological and methodo- logical fallacies that are central to anti-porn claims about the health risks of porn. While the science of porn addiction and negative neurological effects is contentious at best, there is something well worth studying here: that is, the shift in political lobbying from claims of undiagnosable ‘harms’ to women and children, to insisting that young men are the unwilling victims of a runaway epidemic of pornography. Very little of the public health debates even acknowledges that porn may be consumed by young women, or that it has particular and distinct saliency for LGBTQ2IA+ youth. Indeed, as Madita Oeming points out, the conversation of porn’s supposed harms revolves largely around the mainstream white, heterosexual, cisgendered male, a victim of his own limit- less capacity for porn consumption. Diseases of over- consumption are quintessentially moral, not health crises. They require and invoke a class of passive and entitled consumers
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whose supposed well-beingoutweighs any public or occupational health programmes to support porn workers, a phenomenon Heather Berg unravels in her contribution to this forum. To suggest that a conversation on the health effects of pornography is a privileged one is not to say that we do not welcome complex and even contentious academic debate on sexuality. Sexual norms and cultures are important for health outcomes and therefore require balanced, thoughtful discussion and consideration of the relationship of sexual media to sexual health. Indeed, critical media and cultural scholars have been engaged in this work for decades. Sophisticated qualitative methods for understanding how youth negotiate their media viewing and integrate it with their sexual becoming is easily accessible but still poorly integrated even by public health scholars who contest the anti-porn arguments. Research on sexting (Burkett 2015; Albury 2017), online com- munication (De Ridder and Van Bauwel 2013; Keller 2015; Naezer 2017), media sexualiza- tion (McRobbie 2008; Attwood 2010; McKee 2010; Smith 2010; Duits and van Zoonen PORN STUDIES 193 2011), and porn consumption (Attwood 2005; McKee 2007; Smith 2007; Paasonen et al. 2015) that assemble multifaceted analytical frameworks serves
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to locate pornography withina complex matrix of sexual media production, distribution, and consumption. Fur- thermore, it provides opportunities to integrate sexual media into debates on media lit- eracy and digital citizenship as something other than a risky behaviour to avoid (Keller and Brown 2002; Jones and Mitchell 2016). Frameworks already exist to educate children and youth on healthy media usage, rights and responsibilities of social media engage- ment, critical meaning-making, and identity self-construction. As these issues spill over into sexual education curricula, it becomes more urgent that we talk about ethical pro- duction and consumption of sexual media. Yet educational, medical, religious, and other social systems (not to mention families) still revert to hand-wringing over media access rather than considering the wider economic, sociocultural, and historical contexts in which sexual media are embedded. Without these contexts, we cannot have important conversations about the realities of porn’s pervasiveness in society – what Brian McNair calls ‘the pornosphere’ (2002, 35) – and how porn can contribute to broadening, rather than narrowing, the possibilities for safe and fulfilling sexual lives. The appropriation of public health legislation by anti-porn advocates also illustrates the importance of public health ethics. Any interventions on private sexual practices must balance individual rights and security with the public good. It was a hard lesson learned
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in the earlystages of the HIV/AIDS epidemic – a true public health crisis, but also one riddled with stigma and discrimination. As concern over the disease mounted, many health practitioners, decision-makers, and activists campaigning in the name of public health considered drastic violations of people’s privacy and autonomy as necessary and justified. This included interventions such as mandatory testing, reporting, and quarantine, as well as the closure of community sexual spaces such as bathhouses (Herek 1999; Disman 2003). It continues today in the form of mandatory testing and reporting (Webber, Bartlett, and Brunger 2016), blood bans for men who have sex with men (Cascio and Yomtovian 2013; Arora 2017; Crath and Rangel 2017), and the criminalization of non-disclosure of one’s HIV status to sexual partners (Mykhalovskiy 2011; O’Byrne, Bryan, and Woodyatt 2013). HIV is an interesting comparative case study to the current porn panic because it demonstrates how interventions ostensibly intended to protect the health of the ‘public’ deliberately privilege specific forms of sexual and relational prac- tice. Public sexual health campaigns and policies based upon weak evidence are danger- ous because they conflate moral judgment with health intervention, further ostracizing sexually non-normative populations while failing to result in any measurable improve- ments to public health. As the example of HIV illustrates, it is imperative that public health always first and fore-
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most considers theethical implications of its own practice, in order to balance ‘the need to exercise power to ensure the health of populations and, at the same time, to avoid abuses of such power’ (Thomas et al. 2002, 1057). Public health ethics hinges upon defining the boundaries of the public/private divide. Sexuality, especially with regards to its relation- ship with pornography, tends to incite chaotic interpretations of ethics because of the many ways in which it brings ‘the public’ and ‘the private’ into complicated collision with one another. How the public/private divide is drawn – how the private is perceived to ooze out and corrupt the public – is an important factor in determining when and how the collective should be entitled to compel the individual towards ‘healthy’ decisions. 194 V. WEBBER AND R. SULLIVAN Tragically, the history of public health interventions on people’s sexuality is rife with abuse: forced sterilizations, false mental health diagnoses, criminalization and incarcera- tion, dangerous and untested therapeutic interventions, medical incompetence, and human rights violations. The examples are too long to exhaustively list, but some that stand out include the Puerto Rican birth control pill trials (1956), the Tuskegee syphilis experiments conducted on African American men (1932–1972), and the incarceration of ‘promiscuous’ women in Magdalene Laundries (which lasted
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until the 1990sin some countries). Abuses like these have disproportionately impacted racialized communities, sex workers, and sexually non-normative folks. The claims in favour of labelling porn a public health crisis promise nothing different. Our reasons for drawing attention to dark chapters in the history of public regulation of sexuality is not to say that sex should be off-limits to public health officials and experts, but to insist that we learn from past errors and abuses. People of marginalized genders and sexualities who have historically encountered stigma and discrimination due to previous sexual health policies must be consulted and their experiences prioritized. In our own work, as a public health scholar and a media studies scholar, we seek out sex workers, LGBTQ2IA+, HIV+ people, and racialized groups unjustly labelled as ‘hypersexual’ as those who must be heard first and loudest (Webber 2017; Sullivan 2014; Sullivan and McKee 2015). They were all but absent in recent hearings in Canada, which had substan- tially more submissions from evangelical leaders and anti-porn organizations than they did from public health scientists or sexual health harm reduction agencies. Health can be too easily portrayed as value-free and easily understood. Similarly, healthy sexuality is often narrowly defined to conform to heteronormative, middle-class, nuclear family-oriented ideals. When a public health debate that could potentially result
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in legislation beginsfrom weak frameworks and over-simplified definitions, the conse- quences can be catastrophic. As Thomas et al. (2002, 1058) state, the fundamental ethical principle of public health is that ‘programs and policies should incorporate a variety of approaches that anticipate and respect diverse values, beliefs, and cultures in the community’. Porn is a factor of public sexual health, on that point we heartily concur. However, it is not necessarily intoxicating our youth or decaying social values. It is also sometimes a path to sexual self-discovery, a vehicle for safer and consensual sex practices, and a window into the spectrum of gender and sexual diversity. Thus, we can perhaps express some gratitude to those who began this debate – as deceptively as they did – so that we can begin to develop public health policies and programmes that support more expressive, diverse, and inclusive sexualities. The pieces in this forum are offered as a beginning of a new debate, thoughtfully framed and ethically accountable. Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors. References Albury, Kath. 2017. ‘Just Because It’s Public Doesn’t Mean It’s Any of Your Business: Adults’ and Children’s Sexual Rights in Digitally Mediated Spaces.’ New Media & Society 19 (5): 713–725.
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Arora, Kavita Shah.2017. ‘Righting Anachronistic Exclusions: The Ethics of Blood Donation by Men Who Have Sex with Men.’ Journal of Gay & Lesbian Social Services 29 (1): 87–90. PORN STUDIES 195 Attwood, Feona. 2005. ‘What Do People Do With Porn? Qualitative Research Into the Consumption, Use, and Experience of Pornography and Other Sexually Explicit Media.’ Sexuality and Culture 9 (2): 65–86. Attwood, Feona. 2010. Mainstreaming Sex: The Sexualization of Western Culture. London: I.B. Tauris. Burkett, Melissa. 2015. ‘Sex(t) Talk: A Qualitative Analysis of Young Adults’ Negotiations of the Pleasures and Perils of Sexting.’ Sexuality & Culture 19 (4): 835–863. Cascio, M. Ariel, and Roslyn Yomtovian. 2013. ‘Sex, Risk, and Education in Donor Educational Materials: Review and Critique.’ Transfusion Medicine Reviews 27 (1): 50–55. Crath, Rory, and Cristian Rangel. 2017. ‘Paradoxes of an Assimilation Politics: Media Production of Gay Male Belonging in the Canadian “Vital Public” From the Tainted Blood Scandal to the Present.’ Culture, Health & Sexuality 19 (7): 796–810. De Ridder, Sander, and Sofie Van Bauwel. 2013. ‘Commenting on Pictures: Teens Negotiating Gender
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and Sexualities onSocial Networking Sites.’ Sexualities 16 (5– 6): 565–586. Disman, Christopher. 2003. ‘The San Francisco Bathhouse Battles of 1984: Civil Liberties, AIDS Risk, and Shifts in Health Policy.’ Journal of Homosexuality 44 (3– 4): 71–129. Duits, Linda, and Liesbet van Zoonen. 2011. ‘Coming to Terms with Sexualization.’ European Journal of Cultural Studies 14 (5): 491–506. Herek, Gregory M. 1999. ‘AIDS and Stigma.’ American Behavioral Scientist 42 (7): 1106–1116. Jones, Lisa M., and Kimberly J. Mitchell. 2016. ‘Defining and Measuring Youth Digital Citizenship.’ New Media & Society 18 (9): 2063–2079. Keller, Jessalynn. 2015. Girls’ Feminist Blogging in a Postfeminist Age. New York: Routledge. Keller, Sarah N., and Jane D. Brown. 2002. ‘Media Interventions to Promote Responsible Sexual Behavior.’ Journal of Sex Research 39 (1): 67–72. McKee, Alan. 2007. ‘The Relationship Between Attitudes Towards Women, Consumption of Pornography, and Other Demographic Variables in a Survey of 1023 Consumers of Pornography.’ International Journal of Sexual Health 19 (1): 31–45. McKee, Alan. 2010. ‘Everything is Child Abuse.’ Media International Australia 135: 131–140. McNair, Brian. 2002. Striptease Culture: Sex, Media and the Democratization of Desire. New York:
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Routledge. McRobbie, Angela. 2008.‘Pornographic Permutations.’ The Communication Review 11 (3): 225–236. Mykhalovskiy, Eric. 2011. ‘The Problem of “Significant Risk”: Exploring the Public Health Impact of Criminalizing HIV Non-Disclosure.’ Social Science & Medicine 73 (5): 668–675. Naezer, Marijke. 2017. ‘From Risky Behaviour to Sexy Adventures: Reconceptualising Young People’s Online Sexual Activities.’ Culture, Health & Sexuality 9: 1–15. O’Byrne, Patrick, Alyssa Bryan, and Cory Woodyatt. 2013. ‘Nondisclosure Prosecutions and HIV Prevention: Results From an Ottawa-Based Gay Men’s Sex Survey.’ Journal of the Association of Nurses in AIDS Care 24 (1): 81–87. Paasonen, Susanna, Katariina Kyröjä, Kaarina Nikunen, and Laura Saarenmaa. 2015. ‘“We Hid Porn Magazines in the Nearby Woods”: Memory-Work and Pornography Consumption in Finland.’ Sexualities 18 (4): 394–412. Smith, Clarissa. 2007. One For the Girls. London: Intellect Ltd. Smith, Clarissa. 2010. ‘Pornographication: A Discourse For All Seasons.’ International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics 6 (1): 103–108. Sullivan, Rebecca. 2014. Bonnie Sherr Klein’s Not a Love Story. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Sullivan, Rebecca, and Alan McKee. 2015. Pornography: Structures, Agency, and Performance. London:
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Polity. Thomas, James C.,Michael Sage, Jack Dillenberg, and V. James Guillory. 2002. ‘A Code of Ethics for Public Health.’ American Journal of Public Health 92 (7): 1057–1059. Webber, Valerie. 2017. ‘“I‘m Not Gonna Run Around and Put a Condom on Every Dick I See”: Tensions in Safer Sex Activism Among Queer Communities in Montreal, Québec.’ Sexuality & Culture, https:// doi.org/10.1007/s12119-017-9490-2. Webber, Valerie, Janet Bartlett, and Fern Brunger. 2016. ‘Stigmatizing Surveillance: Blood-Borne Pathogen Protocol and the Dangerous Doctor.’ Critical Public Health 26 (4): 359–367. 196 V. WEBBER AND R. SULLIVAN https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-017-9490-2 https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-017-9490-2Disclosure statementReferences Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journal Code=usou20 Souls A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society ISSN: 1099-9949 (Print) 1548-3843 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/usou20
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Disruptions in Respectability:A Roundtable Discussion Mali D. Collins-White, Ariane Cruz, Jillian Hernandez, Xavier Livermon, Kaila Story & Jennifer Nash To cite this article: Mali D. Collins-White, Ariane Cruz, Jillian Hernandez, Xavier Livermon, Kaila Story & Jennifer Nash (2016) Disruptions in Respectability: A Roundtable Discussion, Souls, 18:2-4, 463-475, DOI: 10.1080/10999949.2016.1230813 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10999949.2016.1230813 Published online: 14 Dec 2016. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 733 View Crossmark data https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journal Code=usou20 https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/usou20 https://www.tandfonline.com/action/showCitFormats?doi=10.10 80/10999949.2016.1230813 https://doi.org/10.1080/10999949.2016.1230813 https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?journalC ode=usou20&show=instructions https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?journalC ode=usou20&show=instructions http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1080/10999949.20 16.1230813&domain=pdf&date_stamp=2016-12-14
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http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1080/10999949.20 16.1230813&domain=pdf&date_stamp=2016-12-14 Souls Vol. 18, Nos.2–4, April–December 2016, pp. 463–475 Disruptions in Respectability: A Roundtable Discussion Mali D. Collins-White, Ariane Cruz, Jillian Hernandez, Xavier Livermon, Kaila Story, and Jennifer Nash What do the politics of representation present in the realm of knowledge production? This roundtable of scholars of gender, sexuality, Black, and Latino studies circle the dis- cussion around this question by positioning politics of representation and respectability within the realm of popular culture, pornography studies, and other highly consumed forms of media. The discussion also points toward themes of intramural policing, and other forms of oppression performed within Black and Brown communities as ways to understand how respectability politics are martialed in the public sphere. Keywords: Black studies, policing, pop culture, representation, respectability This roundtable was curated to create an open dialogue with scholars who engage with a sort of anti-respectability politics. Anti-respectability politics is a practice that engages with material, content, or subject matter free from heteronormative or
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specifically Western contoursof African American representation. In this sense, these scholars’ critique of anti-respectability takes form intellectually, conceptually, or in the immeasurable labor they perform in their respective disciplines of Gender and Sexuality Studies, Africana Studies, and various interdisciplinary departments across the United States. I asked five scholars, Dr. Ariane Cruz, Dr. Jillian Hernandez, Dr. Jennifer Nash, Dr. Kaila Story, and Dr. Xavier Livermon to contrib- ute to the conversation. These scholars’ work directly contests the rhetoric of uplift and materialism to interrogate the ways in which Black and Brown cultures under- mine respectability as a neo-colonialist measure. As I read their work in my study of Black cultural archives, I am drawn, methodologically, to the forms of violence that shape these archives toward and/or for Western motivations of categorization and classification of race, gender, and sexuality. Thus, I am exceedingly drawn to the deployment of anti-respectability as a methodology to carve new territories for Black ISSN 1099-9949 print/1548-3843 online #�2016 University of Illinois at Chicago DOI: 10.1080/10999949.2016.1230813 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10999949.2016.1230813 and Gender Studies, respectively. This discussion centers intramural policing of
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sexuality and thebody, pornography, and the general consideration of the role of respectability politics in our cultural archives. The contributors’ work is international and transnational, and concerned with the systemization of respectability in both public and private spheres. Part I: Intramural Policing and Generational Politics Intramural policing is an acute form of respectability policing. More generally, it engages a level of violence that alienates Black folks from the self which informs a lifetime relationship with Blackness as an identity. But intramural respectability politics is ever changing and takes many forms. Where Black bodies may have once been shunned for certain material or social practices, Black bodies performing these practices may be acceptable contemporarily. Yet, themes of hyper-sexualization, guilt, (self-) hatred, and anti-Blackness remain steadfast. In what ways do you see the fraught history of respectability politics being played out in trans-generational relationships in both the public and private spheres? What do the concepts of place and time offer us a useful terrain to map respectability as a cultural accompaniment to white supremacy evolution? AC: Intramural policing is a mode of respectability politics that engages a range of levels of violence—both materially and symbolically. However, I want to use the concept of the fraught history of respectability politics
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and how it playedout in transgenerational relationships in a broader and more figurat- ive way to think about the academy and the regulatory regimes and symbolic order(s) of Black knowledge. More specifically, I’d like to use transgenera- tional relationships as a frame to think about the disciplinary relationships in the academy, in particular the epistemological legacies of Black feminism in the U.S. I see this matrilineal transgenerational relationship as a terrain to map respectability as a primary technique of power and knowledge, parti- cularly in relation to the discursive production of Black female sexuality. This kind of metaphor of the family is not to return to (re)production as a site of racial and sexual exclusion and failure, but rather to trouble repro- duction and its troublesome claims of racial and sexual belonging while con- veying the intimate relations we maintain with our research, and the range of affects (and allegiances) we experience as a result of the legacies and net- works of scholarly production that we frame our work within and against. So I might encourage us to think about the way that our citational politics are informed by notions of respectability in ways that cite and recite hegem- onic institutions of knowledge while offering opportunities to challenge and intervene in this history. The multiple meaning of the word
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discipline—as a branch ofscholarly knowledge and a practice of regulation— signals the scholarly disciplinary terrain is as a site of policing, order, and negotiation. I often think about my own ambivalent transgenerational relationship with a kind of U.S. Black feminist archive in the theoretical landscape of Black female sexuality and pornography. When I first began studying pornography I experienced a sort of conflict that emanated from the sociocultural and institutional policing of Black female sexuality and the influence of respectability politics on Black knowledge production. I have written about this conflict—which resonated at both the personal 464 Souls April–December 2016 and the professional levels—and my desire to almost reconcile my identification as a Black feminist scholar studying pornography who did not see it as wholly oppressive, inimical, and definitively oppositional to a kind of Black feminist political agenda. My leaning towards a more “pro-pornography” point of view seemed to distance me from a number of seminal Black feminist scholars—Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Patricia Hill Collins, Audre Lorde, Jewel D. Amoah, Tracey A. Gardner, and Luisah Teish among others—whose work I hold in high regard yet who have
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argued (and some rathervehemently) against pornography. Such scholars have done vital work in the arena of a Black feminist critique of pornography and Black female sexuality; how- ever, the substratum of racism, sexism, exploitation, and victimization that buttresses this body of work often prevents a more nuanced, radical analysis of the polyvalence of pornography, its vital narration of the complexities of Black female sexuality, and its productive opportunities for Black female sexual pleasure and power. MC: What interests me about respectability practices is how it informs our plea- sure centers rather than what it turns us off to, or what it promotes that we should eschew. Understanding what makes us feel good in fundamentally anti-Black economies (social, political, and economic) can provide greater insight into the inner workings of white supremacy than the things that we no longer “like” or find “socially acceptable.” An example of this in the public sphere is social media, where Black folks—especially those under the age of 30—dominate almost all major media outlets such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. My work engages with cultural archives and the role that anti-Blackness takes in informing them. I find that the simul- taneous permanent/ephemeral functionality of social media is what perhaps
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causes so muchpleasure (instant gratification, affirmation of material sta- tus) and perhaps so much pain. Social media provides a fertile ground for the visibility of alternative politics and also for a certain type of culture— maybe it’s not “respectable,” but it sure is there. This culture promotes cer- tain body ideals and general aesthetics that complicate the site of pleasure as also one of pain; one where Blacks perhaps need to perform or subject our- selves to scrutiny, but perhaps also inventing a social space to articulate cul- ture politics. JH: Much of my work is based on the community arts praxis I have engaged in with Black and Latina girls and young women in Miami, Florida for over a decade. The particular racial mapping of Miami as a site has provided an intra- and inter-racial lens through which I have observed and analyzed the gender and sexual policing of Black girls’ bodies. Although the popu- lation in Miami is overwhelmingly [email protected], the girls with whom I have worked through arts outreach to various government, social service, and educational institutions, such as the Miami-Dade Regional Juvenile Deten- tion Center, have primarily been Black girls. This alerted me to the ways in which Black communities in the city are much more heavily policed, with
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the white-identifying [emailprotected] population functioning as a hegemonic majority. I found that there was a common discourse at work in these institutions that attempted to “empower” girls by training them to perform a very prescribed notion of gendered respectability—acting like “ladies.” This script entailed a particularly Short Takes 465 classed performance of sexual and gender propriety that was juxtaposed against the figures of the pregnant Black girl, the loud Black girl, the ho, the hoochie. I witnessed both Black and Latina youth serving professionals espousing this rhetoric and mode of disciplining in their roles as correction officers, program coordinators, teachers, and mental health counselors. In my book project Aesthetics of Excess: The Art and Politics of Black and Latina Embodiment I discuss how Black girls have responded to the disciplining of their bodies through artistic authorship, namely in using their bodies to craft their own representations and performances that trans- gress these policing efforts. I also describe how the working- class Latina girls pejora- tively labeled “chongas” in Miami are vilified due to their perceived proximity to Blackness via sartorial style. So notions of Blackness as deviant
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also shape howwork- ing-class [email protected] bodies are (de)valued. Thinking historically, I have found that respectability politics have been persist- ently elaborated through cross-racial juxtapositions. Rather than the Black and Latina relational processes of racialization I examine (which are nevertheless framed by and for white gazes), in previous decades these dynamic tracked a more strin- gently Black/white colorline. One text I use often in my teaching that illustrates this is Anne Meis Knupfer’s “‘To Become Good, Self-Supporting Women’: The State Industrial School for Delinquent Girls at Geneva, Illinois, 1900- 1935,” (2001),1 in which she illustrates how white girls would be punished for sexual activity by the women who worked at this quasi-juvenile detention school when it was perceived that they were engaging with or emulating the sexuality of Black girls, who were treated as already hypersexual, incorrigible, and incapable of performing normative femininity. So, I would say that although the dynamics of respectability have evolved they are not any less insidious. In fact, I find the persistence of these values especially troubling in the face of the changing racial makeup of the United States to a soon to be majority POC [people of color] population, which should promise a more radical social landscape. Yet, rather than forming cross-racial alliances with Black communi- ties, minoritized populations like [email protected] continue to
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adopt the valuationof white- ness in order to gain political privilege, which places tremendous pressure on both Black and Latina girls to embody and perform gender, class, and sexual respectability in order to avoid being perceived as social liabilities in their communities. XL: In my own work in South Africa, I think this is a very interesting question. Particularly because intramural policing has the added burden of definitions of Africanness at a time when one important goal of the postapartheid moment is to reclaim notions of Africanness and African identity. One of the things that colonialism and apartheid did to Black communities in South Africa is that it created a particular kind of anxiety around definitions of African identity and the need for Blacks to prove themselves in relationship to these concepts, either through proximity or distance. Respectability poli- tics during colonialism and apartheid were an important and strategic way for Blacks to make claims upon the state. But often times, these very politics obscured cultural practices and cultural formations and ways of being that could have provided a more inclusive vision of Black freedom. Linking specifically to some of my concerns regarding popular culture, we can see 466 Souls April–December 2016
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how trans-generational politicsreflected the contested nature of social change and propriety. So if we look at something like kwaito music for example (an electronic dance music that became popular in mid 1990s South Africa), the politics of respectability became a way to frame a whole host of other societal contestations. Hence, framing kwaito as vulgar and hypersex- ual became a way to dismiss alternative interpretations of the past and alter- native visions of the future promulgated by young South Africans. Similarly, the non-respectability of kwaito became a way to reinscribe particular visions of heteronormative gender formations and sexuality, to proclaim certain practices that resituated heteronormative male authority as culturally tra- ditional and authentic and so forth. While these kinds of debates were not necessarily new (we can see their corollary in jazz and Sophiatown eras of the 1950s) they took on an added urgency due to the new political realities of Black governance. KS: I see the problematic projection of respectability politics still remaining a sta- ple and/or measure of many intergenerational relationships. It manifests in various forms from political discourse to popular culture.
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Popular culture in particularis a site where some of the most pernicious forms of respect- ability politics flourish because they get a pass as a solely an “entertainment” art form, rather than seen as hegemonic ideology. Many folks continue to look to pop culture to see how they should behave in their relationships with others. We see this in Steve Harvey’s relationship advice and we also see this in Tyler Perry’s films. The problem as I see it is that most folks still look to pop culture to inform their consciousness about how to act and behave, instead of taking into account their personal lives experiences and social locations. Part II: Respectability and Cultural Archiving How does respectability discourse organize the legacy of Black culture work and the archives they create? Are there any culture workers or scholarly producers you see engaging in the recovery of Black sexuality that undoes or does away with respect- ability? What methods do they deploy in doing so? How do you see respectability politics manifesting in cultural memory? What does queer and sexuality studies more broadly offer us to recover cultural archives of the African Diaspora? AC: Respectability discourse organizes, determines, and polices the legacy of
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Black culture workand the archives they create to reflect the essential relationship between knowledge and power. Respectability discourse instantiates a form of “power/knowledge,” highlighting how power is consti- tuted through accepted forms of knowledge, scientific understanding, and truth.2 The politics of respectability labors in the service of the hegemonic and disciplinary regimes of “power/knowledge,” networks that also regulate the discursive production of race, sexuality, and gender. The U.S. Black fem- inist archive has historically been one of a kind of recovery of Black female sexuality. That is, historically Black feminist discourse has maintained an investment in a critical reframing the Black female body—one that is moti- vated by reclamation. As Jennifer Nash’s recent work has illuminated, because the Black feminist archive has historically treated representation as a site of harm—wherein the Black female body is misrepresented and Short Takes 467 constructed as a body of difference and debasement, it remains deeply invested in “recovery work,” a type of Black feminist representation that seeks to not merely interrogate the representation of Black
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womanhood, but to correctand reclaim the Black female body in discourse.3 Such recuperative labor is also highly visible in the work many well known Black female visual artists (e.g., Betye Saar, Carrie Mae Weems, Renee Cox, and others), and this visibility critically reveals representation as a mode of not only trauma (i.e., wherein the Black female body is violently rendered), but also a mode of salvage (i.e., wherein the Black female body may be re-invented). Recovery signifies a return to a place of normativity from a place of deviance. It is a movement predicated on the anxious, and in need of constant shoring up, binaries of normal/deviant, and respectable/ reproachable. One important way that scholars have engaged in the recovery of Black sexuality is through the topic of pleasure, a site which has been historically policed and silenced within a Black feminist archive itself historically aligned with a project of recovery. Maybe ironically, scholarly interest in pleasure is a sort of a recovery of a recovery. For example, work from scholars like Mireille Miller-Young, Jennifer Nash, and my own has been attentive to Black female pleasure in and of pornography in ways that do not so much contest a Black feminist scholarly tradition but rather extend it. And I think this more recent scholarly interest in the question of
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pleasure in pornography islinked to a larger academic interest around questions of pleasure in critical race theory and queer theory, and in research on racialized sexualities more broadly in the work of scholars such as LaMonda Horton Stallings, Joan Morgan, Siobhan Brooks, Shane Lee, Lisa Thompson, Riley Snorton, Xavier Livermon, Amber Musser, and others. Still, I would like to caution that while we celebrate and realize the pot- entiality of pleasure, we must be wary of adopting pleasure as signifying a directional shift away from respectability and even perhaps toward a kind of sexual liberation. Pleasure is fundamentally socially constructed and hierarchies of sexual pleasure reveal the dynamic ways that sexuality operates as a technology power. Pleasure often buttresses normative sexualities and sexual hierarchies in ways that act to veil parti- cular types of oppression and violence. I think we need to question: What subjects are entitled to experience certain types of pleasures and which are prohibited? What sexual acts are coded as normative or non-normative via pleasure? Pleasure is a per- formance that illuminates the ways that race, sexuality, and gender are concomitantly policed and disciplined. MC: I am always quick to say that I do not see my project of Black culture archives and methodology development as a site for recovery. That being said, I am more intellectually interested in how African
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diasporic peoples can developtheoretical tools to name and understand what we do not know rather than trying to get to know common conventions of “knowledge” (especially pertaining to the African Diaspora or African diasporic histor- ies). The knowledge is not to be “recovered” “saved,” or fully “understood.” I find gender and sexuality studies an incredible space to interrogate how these conventions are being dismantled, especially when we study how these rules/norms/standards are embodied. 468 Souls April–December 2016 JH: Cultural production is a site of tremendous potential for the recovery of Black sexualities outside the paradigms of respectability. Thinking about folks who have laid the groundwork for my own research, people like Mir- eille Miller-Young, LaMonda Horton-Stallings, Jennifer Nash— the theory and scholarship they craft is inspired variously by the performances, creative work, and theorizing of Black women and men in pornography, literature, and hip hop. I find the hip hop production of underground Black girl hip hop artists so inspir- ing in expanding representations of Black sexualities! So over
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the last fewyears I have worked with my collaborators Anya Wallace and Christina Carney in documenting and archiving their work. In 2014, Anya and I co-authored an article on Pretty Tak- ing All Fades (P.T.A.F.).4 P.T.A.F. is an emerging performance group of young Black women from Crenshaw, Los Angeles who met and began to compose their original hip hop music in high school. They entered popular culture as teenagers through the viral circulation of their do-it-yourself music video “Boss Ass Bitch,” which was posted on YouTube in May 2012 and has amassed over 13 million hits to date. Anya and I were moved by how the girls declared their sexual self- determination through explicit description of their desires, “If you use your tongue I’ma like that/Pin my arms to the bed I’ma fight back … Before you eat the pussy you gon’ bite my neck/Bend me over the bed, make me soakin’ wet”—in addition to their command- ing rhyme delivery and performance. In the article we discuss how the girls were vili- fied online as grotesque and sexually depraved through comments like, “These are the type of sluts giving Blacks everywhere a bad name.” This was happening around the same time that Nicki Minaj was being attacked for her use of an image of Malcolm X in the promotion for her single “Lookin’ Ass,” and when she also created a remix of P.T.A.F.’s “Boss Ass Bitch”— which we theorized as an expression of women/girl of color erotic solidarity in the
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face of respectabilityand policing. When Anya and I think back to this work in a post- “Formation” moment, of how Beyoncé’s nod to the Black Panthers at the 2016 Super Bowl has been cel- ebrated by women of color feminists while Minaj’s reference to Malcolm X in 2014 was overwhelmingly disparaged among them, despite the fact that “Lookin’ Ass” is a song that has blatant feminist politics in speaking back to the male gaze. Although both artists are doing the work of expanding representations of Black women’s erotics beyond respectability—especially in their spectacular collaborations in “Feeling Myself” and the “Flawless” remix, Beyoncé’s identity as a married woman and mother ultimately afford her cultural production and race/gender politics more legitimacy and respectability than Nicki’s. Anya and I are extending this work with our colleague Christina Carney in a forthcoming article in the Journal of Popular Music Studies by looking at how the circulation of memes in social media frame Black women cultural producers like Nicki Minaj as sexually deviant and threatening to a contrived notion of “respectable” Black girlhood. I’m also really interested in Vixen ENT, an underground all-girl hip hop group from northern California known locally and state-wide for their Jerkin’ music, crafted for consumption in the club. They are lifelong friends who recognized their
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Short Takes 469 talent,“we knew how to rap,” and collaboratively wrote hits such as “I Need That,” “I Toot My Shit,” and “By the Bar,” which appear to have circulated via social media and underground hip hop networks around 2009. Their lyrics celebrate their bodies, declare their sexual desires and pleasures in getting fucked up in the club, drinking, and dancing. They describe their practice as the expression of alter egos, without5 disavowing their content as problematic, and they have the support of their families. This kind of complexity, which is often not recognized as such, is what inspires me to archive their work. XL: Well, I think one of the things that happens with respectability discourse is the loss of so much in the archive. So when we look at archives, what is the creative work that we have to do to reclaim and reconfigure Black sexuality at its most expressive and diverse? In the South African case, I have been impressed with the labor of various different cultural practitioners to reim- agine these archives and create new ways of seeing. Queer for me then offers the possibility to allow us to see differently. So that when we look at archives we might re-imagine what they reveal to us. I am thinking right
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now of the workof Zethu Matebeni and Jabu Perreira in their amazing collection “Rethinking Afrikan.” To quote them, queer is a “critical space that pushes the boundaries of what is embraced as normative.”6 This allows them to reclaim the very notions of Africa, breaking boundaries and moving beyond fracture and disconnect7 to a whole that is not currently represented in Africa as it has been currently defined. Of course Zanele Muholi’s work would fall into this categorization as well; she literally creates new archives which force us to “see differently.” I would argue this process of creating new archives of queer visuality also requires us to rethink already existent archives. It also reminds us that archives are living, breathing, and processual documents constantly being recreated and remade. KS: I see a number of scholars and cultural workers who are at the forefront in reshaping these types of conversations around respectability, especially when it comes to Black sexuality and gender. I of course include myself in this endeavor, but some others folks who are doing this are Tamura Lomax and Aishah Simmons at the Feminist Wire, Darnell Moore, and Wade Davis. Of course E. Patrick Johnson and Marlon Bailey, as well as Dr. Brittney Cooper, Dr. Treva Lindsey, Joan Morgan, Dr. Yaba Blay, and
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Esther Armah are doingthis in their work as well. I also think Bettina Love and Alexis Pau- line Grumbs are doing this in their work as well. JN: I think the poles of respectability and disrespectability have fundamentally organized much of the scholarly work on Black sexualities. And I think a new cohort of scholars—Amber Jamilla Musser, Uri McMillan, Ariane Cruz, Riley Snorton, Lyndon Gill, to name just a few—are advancing analytics other than respectability and disrespectability to offer us new vocabularies for theorizing Black sexualities. These analytics include liquidity, spatiality, temporality, diaspora, and flesh (to name a few) and they push us beyond a dynamic that I think has permeated the scholarship—seeking to recover the “disrespectable” and/or seeking to uncover how respectability operates to police Black pleasures. My own work isn’t interested in “recovery” as a project (in fact, recovery is some- thing I critique in The Black Body in Ecstasy). I think “recovery” work can often 470 Souls April–December 2016 reproduce ideas of respectability. Let me talk about this with some degree of speci-
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ficity vis-à-vis thearchive I work with in that book: pornography. I argue that Black feminists have engaged in both tracing the violence of the visual field (racialized por- nography is treated as the paradigmatic example of this violence) and celebrating “recovery” work, images of that Black female body that attempt to salvage the body from the imagined violence of the visual field. These “recovery” projects are often projects of self-representation which are imagined to expose and undo the dominant logics of visuality. Here, “recovery” and “respectability” can go hand-in-hand as many of the images that I discuss in the book are hailed as erotic but not necessarily pornographic. I do think the idea(s) of respectability and disrespectability are incredibly useful, though, for thinking about what it means to be a scholar who works on questions of Black sexualities. What can be shown in the classroom? What does a scholar of Black sexualities want to include in (or exclude from) a tenure dossier? How does a Black scholar teach about Black sexualities at a historically white university when one’s stu- dents presume that the pleasures discussed are the professor’s pleasures? How does a scholar convince one’s colleagues of the merit of her work when her archive is the low, the funky, the fleshy, the things that make bodies moan, groan, shudder? To me, these questions are fundamentally tied up with what kind of scholarly work is
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assumed to berespectable, and thus what kind of scholarly work is valued (or devalued). Part III: Respectability Politics in the Archives In what ways do you see your own scholarship upholding ideologies of respectability that you may critique in your own work? Or, how do you find respectability upheld in institutional Black knowledge production? What are your stakes in undoing respectability in the archives you work with? How do institutional modes of policing or exclusion influence the way you research Blackness? AC: I might begin my noting that I am less interested in undoing respectability politics than in laying bare how they continue to function in dynamic ways to discipline race and sexuality, how race and sexuality operate as technol- ogies of power, and how we, as scholars, negotiate these politics as they influence the subjects of our analysis. Nevertheless, I am acutely aware of the kind of scholarly reach of respectability politics and the effects these ideologies have on my work, which explores how Black women engage, per- form, mediate, and negotiate the “unspeakable” pleasures of Blackness in the context of BDSM [bondage and discipline, domination and submission, and sadism and masochism] and pornography—that is, pleasures in Blackness as
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an apparatus ofracial-sexual alterity (and often violent) domination and submission. As someone who researches not only Black female sexuality but also its represen- tation in pornography and BDSM, I envision my work as intervening in the silence that has marked the subject of Black female sexuality. As a mode of intramural poli- cing, the politics of respectability has historically manifested as a mode of silencing Short Takes 471 perpetuating what Darlene Clark Hine terms the “culture of dissemblance” the poli- tics of silence shrouding expressions of Black female sexuality.8 In my work, I explore how performances of Black female sexual aggression, domination, humiliation, and submission in BDSM and pornography function as critical modes for and of Black women’s pleasure, power, and agency. I imagine this work is engaged in deconstruct- ing the “culture of dissemblance” to open up the dialogue surrounding Black women’s diverse sexuality.9 I am interested in the silences that convene around a particular type of unspeakable pleasures—pleasures that are positioned as not only perverse, but also often purportedly antithetical to a kind of project of racial uplift and deemed unfit for occupancy within the archives of Black
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culture. Yet theseplea- sures are, as I argue, mainstream and pervasive nonetheless. Not heeding the “don’t go there” attitude that often quashes discussions of Black women, sexual violence, and sexual pleasure, my research is invested in a type of work aligned with what Hor- tense Spillers might call “the retrieval of mutilated bodies.”10 My stakes in laying bare respectability politics in my own research and the archives I work with/in inform my methodology. I often use interviews to sup- plement my readings of various performances of Black female sexuality because I think that contextualizing sexual fantasies, desires, and performances from the view- point of the “actors” can be important in gaining both a more cohesive, holistic understanding of sexuality and one that has the potential to temper the moralizing force behind the purportedly perverse and disrespectable. Listening to the voices of Black women narrate their own sexual experiences of domination, submission, and erotic power exchange in BDSM and pornography—their boundaries, conflicts, pleasures, pains, fantasies, and histories—brings us closer to a more comprehensive understanding of these performances, disrupts monolithic views of Black female sexuality as anchored in a bedrock of normativity and silence, and works towards a destigmatization of varied and transgressive (and often queer) Black women’s sex- ual pleasures such as BDSM. These voices do more than merely
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de-silence those of marginalizedsexualities or instantiate the discursive production of sexuality, they also constitute the foundation of my claim that race is central to an understanding of BDSM and that BDSM serves as a critical paradigm for racialized sexuality. I think a lot of this is tied to longstanding, deep-seated, and pernicious ideas of Black authenticity. In other words the problem of silence is produced from not only the lack of speaking, but also the lack of recognition of particular voices as speaking. So which voices continue to speak but remain silent? Authenticity continues to disci- pline Blackness and Black culture in myriad ways and this question of who has his- torically been allowed to “speak for” and act as representatives of Blackness and mascots of Black culture.11 For example, illuminating how we, specifically Black intellectuals, participate in the discursive practice of racial essentialism that con- structs, indeed legitimates, certain voices and bodies as authentic voices of and in the community, Dwight McBride has long unveiled the heteronormative politics of inclusion and exclusion determining such a body, and ultimately the failure of anti-racist discourse to critically intervene (in) Black homophobia.12 Yet, I don’t think we have adequately “listened.” Authenticity remains problematically wedded 472 Souls April–December 2016
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to heteropatriarchal andnormative modes of identification as a regulatory regime that enables particular bodies—like those of Black queer women—to be violently excised, while the “radical potential of queer politics” has yet to reach its fullest realization.13 MC: I see my work combatted when some scholars are reluctant in the ways many scholars have called for the African Diaspora to be imagined; and some are reluctant to “imagine” it at all. A project that I am currently work- ing on is “‘Insights into the Archives’: Realizing (B)Lackness through Queer Methodologies.” This project addresses queer methods as anything outside of western ideological modes of “discovery,” time, place, and form, and prioritizes things like hauntings and the “after-images” of slavery as Kim- berly Juanita Brown and many others have called them. Most often I find that many folks are very resistant to place ideas of imagination, queerness, or anything “speculative” within diasporic African historical contexts. We seem very guarded in how we think about Black American history in parti- cular. My work emerges into a discourse of folks like Christina Sharpe, Kimberly Juanita Brown, and Stephanie Smallwood who suggest
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that re- orienting ourconceptions of Black archives, communities, or society in gen- eral outside of just fact, figures, and artifacts offers useful ways to think about cultural archives and Black subject making. JH: The attacks that I am subject to when I present my work on Black and Latina girls/women and sexuality are a significant motivation for my work. From being attacked by major cultural arbiters in Miami for my work on chonga girls, to the anger I am met with when I present work on P.T.A.F. and Nicki Minaj by students, fellow academics, and members of the public. At times these critiques have resulted in my being framed as an aberrant and sus- picious subject with a problematic agenda. At others I’ve been described as potentially “disempowering” the girls I work with because of my sexual poli- tics. Although these responses have caused me anxiety, stress, and at times have made me fear for my job security and physical safety— they remind me of what the stakes are and why this work needs to persist. I have to say that I have not felt as much pushback institutionally as I have from fellow folks of color. I owe this institutional legitimacy to the groundwork laid by sex-positive scholars of color like Celine Parreñas Shimizu, Mireille Miller-Young, Juana María Rodríguez, José Estéban Muñoz, Jennifer Nash,
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LaMonda Horton Stal- lings,Hoang Tan Nguyen, Kobena Mercer, and others. The last fifteen years of women and queer of color scholarship has been absolutely transformative in estab- lishing academic spaces where we can have conversations that trouble the politics of respectability. There is still much more work to be done. XL: I think in the South African case, and perhaps the larger field of African Stu- dies as it exists in the North American academy, we are seeing a “queer moment.” For whatever reason this has become a legitimate field of study that the academy and various different NGOs [nongovernmental organiza- tions] seem invested in. I do not always think the interest is entirely benign and I wonder to what extent much of the interest simply reproduces parti- cular kinds of colonial tropes concerning the idea of “African Sexuality” and its supposed deviance from western normativity. That being said, there is some very critical and important work being done, and from what I can Short Takes 473 see the academy and the prominent journals and presses in the field are mak- ing space for this work. Nevertheless, there is still a great deal of conserva-
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tism even aroundthe discussion of heterosexuality in relation to scholarship about Africa. There is also a sense that discussion of non- normative gender and sexuality formations in the African continent is a predominantly white western and/or Afrodiasporic concern. So I do believe that in doing my scholarship I have had to work hard to undo particular assumptions about why I am doing the work and why I am making particular connections between Black experiences on the continent and Black experiences Afrodias- porically. Honestly, I feel like that has been the biggest challenge for me to bring discussions of continental African sexuality into larger conversations happening in Afrodiasporic scholarship and to convince both Afrodiasporic scholars of Black sexuality and African scholars of the importance of these kinds of connections. I can’t say though, that I have done my work any dif- ferently, because for me I feel that one of the central political stakes of my work has been to make these connections. And honestly, I think that these kinds of conversations (and having someone who works on continental Africa be a part of them) are key. I am sure that there may have been fellow- ships, jobs, or publishing opportunities that I may have missed out on because of my research topic(s) and the ways in which I embody my research
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subjects. But Ialso feel that because of the difficult and pioneering work done by Black Feminists in the U.S. academy, the space has been created to allow me to slip in and do my work, and for that I am thankful. Notes 1. Anne Meis Knupfer, “To Become Good, Self-Supporting Women: The State Industrial School for Delinquent Girls at Geneva, Illinois, 1900–1935,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 9, no. 4 (2001): 420–46. 2. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction Volume 1 (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 98–99. 3. Jennifer C. Nash, The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race Reading Pornography (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 47. 4. http://www.thefeministwire.com/2014/03/minaj-erotics/. 5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WilFgLXz-S0. 6. Zethu Matebeni and Jabu Perreira, “Preface,” in Reclaiming Afrikan: Queer Perspectives on Sexual and Gender Identities, edited by Zethu Matebeni (Cape Town: Modjaji Books, 2014), 7. 7. ibid. 8. Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West,” Signs 14, no. 4 (Summer, 1989). 9. Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the
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Middle West.”. 10. HortenseSpillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 68. 11. Dwight A. McBride, “Can the Queen Speak? Racial Essentialism, Sexuality and the Problem of Authority,” Callaloo 21, no. 2 (1998), 364–77. 12. Ibid. 13. 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. 474 Souls April–December 2016 http://www.thefeministwire.com/2014/03/minaj-erotics/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WilFgLXz-S0 About the Authors Mali D. Collins-White is a doctoral student at the University of California, Irvine, in the Culture and Theory program. Before joining the department she was an activist and creative writer in Brooklyn, NY. She has been published in Bitch magazine, on The Root.com, and for SALT.: Contemporary Art þFeminism (UK). She is the Co-Founder and Program Director at The Compton Center for Black Life.
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Ariane Cruz isan 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. Jillian Hernandez, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Ethnic and Critical Gender Studies at the University of California, San Diego. She curates exhibitions, makes art, teaches art to girls and young women of color in Miami, Florida along with her friends, and bumps Nicki Minaj and reggaeton in the car with her mother and teenage daughter as they navigate hot and congested Miami streets to reach Cuban pastry shops. Her research investigates processes of racialization, sexualities, embodi- ment, girlhood, and the politics of cultural production ranging from underground and mainstream hip hop to visual and performance art. Xavier Livermon is an Assistant Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. His research interests include the intersection of popular culture and gender and sexuality in Africa and the African Diaspora. His forthcoming book, tentatively entitled Kwaito Futurity: Performance, Politics, and Freedom in Postapartheid South Africa, explores popular music
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as a siteof new political cultures in contemporary South Africa. Kaila Story is an Associate Professor in the departments of Women’s and Gender Studies and Pan African Studies at the University of Louisville. Dr. Story also holds the Audre Lorde Endowed Chair in Race, Gender, Class and Sexuality Studies at the University of Louisville. Last, Dr. Story is also the co-host of the popular radio show “Strange Fruit: Musings on Politics, Pop Culture, and Black Gay Life,” that airs every Saturday night on WFPL (89.3). Jennifer Nash’s work focuses on Black feminism, Black sexual politics, race and visual culture, and race and law. She held fellowships at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research and at Columbia University’s Society of Fellows. Her research has also been supported by George Washington University’s University Facilitating Fund and Columbian College Facilitating Fund, and by the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship in Women’s Studies and the Woodrow Wilson Junior Faculty Career Enhancement Fellowship. Short Takes 475 Part I: Intramural Policing and Generational PoliticsPart II: Respectability and Cultural ArchivingPart III: Respectability Politics in the ArchivesNotesAbout the Authors