Interracial Iterations and Internet In(ter)ventions

Chapter 3 analyzes the adult entertainment industry niche of interracial pornography focusing on performances of (inter)racial aggression. I argue that BDSM becomes a critical lens for elucidating the dynamics of racialized shame, humiliation, and pleasure that undergird interracial pornography, a profitable genre of commercial American pornography that is deeply invested in the miscegenation taboo. The lens of BDSM enacts a critical queering of interracial “heterosexual” pornography in order to read across the gendered and racialized subject positions of pleasure, power, and desire and to analyze homoerotic desire, pleasure, and anxiety as working in tandem with the genre’s eroticization of racial-sexual alterity. I discuss pornography as a historic site of racial-sexual revenge—a contemporary staging of racialized sexualized violence in which the retaliatory rhetoric of interracial aggression is enacted. Though I focus on contemporary Internet pornography, this chapter reads across the convergent pornography landscape—the stag genre, the golden age, and the video age—to provide a contextual frame for reading performances of black-white interracial intimacy in pornography and tracing the black female body as an ambivalent site of absence and presence in the genre.

The Dark Side of Desire

This chapter examines black women’s participation in BDSM and how these performances illustrate a complex and contradictory brokering of pain, pleasure, and power for the black female performer. I reveal BDSM as a critical site for reconsidering the entanglement of black female sexuality and violence. Within BDSM, violence becomes both a mode of pleasure and a vehicle for accessing and contesting power. The chapter begins with a brief section that frames black women practitioners of BDSM in the context of still very vigorous feminist debates surrounding sexuality, violence, and BDSM. Here, I stage the unique theoretical and practical challenges of the unspeakable pleasures aroused in racial submission and domination that BDSM presents to black women specifically. I examine race play as a particularly problematic yet powerful BDSM practice for black women, one that unveils the contradictory dynamics of racialized pleasure and power via the eroticization of racism and racial-sexual alterity. In particular, I argue that race play unsettles the dichotomies of transgression/compliance, subversion/reproduction, mind/body, and fantasy/reality that buttress BDSM. This chapter unveils performances of black female sexual domination and submission in BDSM as critical modes for and of black women’s pleasure, power, and agency.

Conclusion

“Racist remarks” are not the only things kink.com prohibits in online comments. “Unnecessarily repetitive” posts are also prohibited, yet they are rife. If the posts are incredibly repetitive—using the same limited lexicon to describe female physicality (“hot,” “hottie,” “smokin’ hot,” “super hot,” typically followed by an inordinate number of exclamation marks)—so too are the performances. In the peculiar cacophony of human and nonhuman sounds that becomes a sort of soundtrack in fucking-machine videos—moaning, groaning, slurping, sucking, clicking, droning, buzzing—it is the somnolent humming that energizes the repetitive thrusts of the machines that is most prominent. The repetition of the machines, as tangled technologies of gender, race, sexuality, pleasure, and visuality, ignite the multiple themes of this book. In this conclusion, I use the repetition of fucking machines to illuminate the larger, if less pronounced, processes of rote at work in pornography’s performance of racialized sexuality and to recapitulate the motifs in this book. There is much repetition here: the repetition of tensions between the binaries of fantasy/reality, black/white, absence/presence, and inside/outside; the fact that BDSM and pornography both serve as platforms for the dynamic spectacle of race play; the repetition of the narratives of historical trauma and black abjection that script performances in both of these genres; and our own tenacious disciplining of the enactment of these performances....

Pornography’s Play(ing) of Race

Chapter 2 reads black women’s diverse performance of race play in contemporary American pornography, focusing on three sites of analysis. First, I discuss the performance of black female/white male humiliation in the BDSM femdom website of a veteran black female performer/pornographer, Vanessa Blue, arguing that race is a critical technology of interracial BDSM pornography. Next, I read a performance of black female submission staged as a historical reenactment of chattel slavery in hard-core mainstream race-play pornography to illustrate the hold this history maintains over our erotic imaginary. Then, I turn to amateur Internet race-play pornography to analyze queer race-play performance in porn. From amateur to high budget, mainstream to margins, and across the shifting racial and gender dynamics of production and positions of domination and submission, pornographic performances of race play exhibit an unfaltering racial hyperbole and eroticization of black female racial-sexual alterity and its anxiety. Though I demonstrate the salience of race play in the pornographic imaginary, I analyze race play as a comprehensive performance with a more universal sociocultural currency and relevance. Far from being a liminal sexual practice, race play delineates the performance of racialized sexuality more generally.

Introduction

In many cases, desire lies like a bodily boundary between the everyday and the unspeakable. —Samuel R. Delany1 Black female visual artist crystal am nelson’s Building Me a Home (2009), an eight-minute, three channel video, engages the unspeakable pleasures of black female sexuality that anchor this book, an exploration of black women, BDSM, and pornography that presents BDSM as a stage for analyzing black women’s sexuality and its representation in order to unveil the complex desires and self-making practices of black women subjects....

Techno-Kink

Chapter 4 interrogates the simultaneity of the “technologies” of sexuality, race, gender, pleasure, and visuality. Focusing my analysis on one popular contemporary U.S. hard-core BDSM pornography website, kink.com, and its use of fucking machines, I analyze performances of racialized sexuality staged through multimodal intimate points of encounter—between human and machine; black and white; “man,” “woman,” and cyborg; self and other. I examine the collaborative laboring of technologies—sexuality, race, gender, pleasure, and visuality—as they delineate the material and symbolic ontological boundaries of the black female body and black women’s erotic subjectivity. While the machines most explicitly labor as technologies of pleasure, they also operate as technologies of race that reveal race as a technology. I read the fucking-machine performances as imbricated technologies of racialization, sexualization, gendering, visuality, and pleasure in the context of theories of race and/as technology and “new media” discourses of race in cyberspace. Fuckingmachines.com exhibits complex technologies of racialization performed at multiple, overlapping sites: machines, performers, and spectators. Illuminating the racialized and gendered corporealization of sex and sexual pleasure, these fucking machines and their sexual performances reveal the interlocking systems of race, gender, and sexuality as not only mechanized but also as mechanisms of power.