The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography

Next Wave: New Directions in Women's Studies

by Jennifer C. Nash

In The Black Body in Ecstasy, Jennifer C. Nash rewrites black feminism's theory of representation. Her analysis moves beyond black feminism's preoccupation with injury and recovery to consider how racial fictions can create a space of agency and even pleasure for black female subjects. Nash's innovative readings of hardcore pornographic films from the 1970s and 1980s develop a new method of analyzing racialized pornography that focuses on black women's pleasures in blackness: delights in toying with and subverting blackness, moments of racialized excitement, deliberate enactments of hyperbolic blackness, and humorous performances of blackness that poke fun at the fantastical project of race. Drawing on feminist and queer theory, critical race theory, and media studies, Nash creates a new black feminist interpretative practice, one attentive to the messy contradictions—between delight and discomfort, between desire and degradation—at the heart of black pleasures.

Genres: Nonfiction, Race, Feminism, Sexuality, Sociology, Theory, Research

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Jennifer C. Nash is Associate Professor of African American and Gender and Sexuality Studies at Northwestern University, author of The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography, also published by Duke University Press, and editor of Gender: Love.

Reviews

[Colin Cox · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jennifer C. Nash's The Black Body in Ecstasy is a provocative study of pornography. Nash offers a heterodox feminist reading of pornography by finding moments when the Black body, as represented in and by pornographic films, is "fraught, complex, and potentially exciting...for black subjects" (87).

Nash asserts that her treatment of "blackness" in The Black Body in Ecstasy can "thrill, excite, and arouse, even as it wounds and terrorizes" (87). This passage represents the dialectical nature of Nash's treatment of Blackness in pornography. For Nash, Black bodies in pornography do more than bear witness to systemic representations of racism and racial injustice. Instead, for Nash, the Black body in some pornographic spaces creates the condition for a politics of liberation via excitation. Nash's term for this dialectical process is ecstasy, which she defines as "the messy and sometimes uncomfortable nexus of racial and sexual pleasure" (31). She also suggests that ecstasy attempts signify "forms of racial-sexual pleasure that have heretofore been unnamed (and some that have been too taboo to name), included blissful performances of hyperbolic racialization and uncomfortable enjoyment in embodied racialization" (2-3).

When defining ecstasy early in The Black Body in Ecstasy, Nash borrows the psychoanalytic term jouissance. However, Freud's notion of the death drive is, potentially, a more appropriate framework for understanding ecstasy. For Freud, the death drive is a repetition compulsion or, as I prefer to think of it, a psychic maneuver designed to maximize and sustain excitation. For example, Nash has much to say of the place of the phallus, specifically the Black phallus, in pornography, a literal and symbolic element of all pornographic diegesis. While there are moments when the Black phallus is triumphant, more often than not, Nash traces moments of phallic failure. These moments of acute failure create "space for a variety of black spectators and their heterogeneous and varied longings" (81). Here, failure is synonymous with continuation or prolongation, and Nash is quite good at articulating moments of triumph but, more importantly, failure in Black pornography.

The Black Body in Ecstasy is a dense but rewarding book to study. I have so much more I want to say, and I can imagine returning to this book in the future. Furthermore, The Black Body in Ecstasy is a provocative book. It takes pornography seriously without devolving into crass, exploitative titillation. Nash's close-readings are thorough yet approachable. Plus, the introduction and first chapter effectively explore the contours of feminism's response to pornography, which is useful for anyone interesting in delving into this critical field of scholarship.

[Ife · Rating 4 out of 5]

By alluding to commonly known racial stereotypes, racialized pornography produces both an erotic and a political charge. The pleasure of the racialized scene, then, is that it flirts with collectively held racial fictions without ever explicitly engaging questions of race. While it seems obvious that pornography does not question the workings of racial domination—after all, how arousing would an investigation of racial formation be?—racialized pornography incessantly and necessarily alludes to collective racial “knowledge.” In the racialized pornographic scene, race is both ubiquitous and absent; it is the background informing the narrative, yet its importance to the pornographic narrative is never explicitly addressed.

What do you think when you hear of a Black feminist book on representations of Black women in pornography?

Explorations of fetishization? Fragmentation? Racialised gendered violence? Stereotypes? Jezebel? Sapphire? Injury?

Nash disrupts all those expectations. Instead, she gives us an aggressive counter reading against dominant Black feminism's modalities, suggesting that these frameworks of oppositional reading, à la bell hooks, have focused solely on the "twin logics of injury and recovery" (how images harm Black women or serve as "positive representations"). Using a host of notable porn films she argues against a larger Black feminist approach to representation to argue that these representations often seen to be a visual celebration of Black women's sexual subordination can instead be seen to be a site of Black women's 'race-pleasure', or to be poking fun at racial fictions.

A lot of negative feedback of this book has oddly focused on whether she is being too critical of Black feminism. Disregarding the fact that her characterisation of Black feminism is only auxiliary to the more important point that pornographic spectatorship of racialised pornography and the pleasures therein are more complex than often thought of, her assessment is absolutely correct. I don't think she is arguing that she is the first Black feminist thinker to think of representation outside of the binary of 'harming or helping'; She is saying that when it comes to images and most especially pornographic images, Black feminist thinkers have been bogged down by this binary.

Her analysis of the films is logically tight and she daringly includes images of the scenes she is talking about which allow a reader to follow along without having to watch the whole of the film she is talking about.

I would like to have seen Nash answer some questions that I think she sort of shies away from: For one, she gestures several times towards the fact that Black women and Black people at large also sometimes enjoy watching pornographic films that Black feminism may deem fetishistic, but she never tells us what to make of this pleasure. Is it internalised racism? Should it be critiqued? Another one is how does her analysis relate to racialised pornography today? No doubt she picks notable works in the racialised porn canon, but as narrative pornography has gone out of favour a lot of her critiques have become hard to apply. Writing this in 2014, it is curious that she doesn't attend to the mass proliferation of porn with unambiguously misogynoiristic titles like "Black B*tch Gets Ploughed by White C*ck" and how these may expose that the dominant critique within Black feminism is the relevant one. She does clarify that she is not trying to exculpate racialised pornography from being at times problematic, but I think she could have further emphasised the relevance of the Black feminist critiques she often dismisses.

All in all, I haven't read Black feminist thought that feels this rebellious in a while. Jennifer C. Nash is the devil's advocate that Black feminism needs. Such an exciting book that anyone who is doing porn studies needs to read.

[Ayanna Dozier · Rating 2 out of 5]

Jennifer Nash’s book posits a compelling study on the representation of Black women’s pleasure in silver age pornographic films, unfortunately for this study, Nash’s analysis falls incredibly short due to her over investment in critiquing Black feminist thought and scholarship on representation from the 1990s. One, it is critical to note that when Nash critiques Black feminism, she is critiquing popular Black feminist writing from 1986 to 1995 and rarely engages with Black feminist thought beyond 1995. In critiquing this narrow field of Black feminist scholarship, Nash is can boldly and incorrectly state that “all” Black feminist scholarship views Black women’s bodies as sites of injury and that Black feminism makes “no room for pleasure due to their emphasis on oppositional viewing” (61). Having read the body of literature that Nash critiques, I can attest that she is correct to critique the oppositional viewing framework proposed by bell hooks in her series of essays, Black Looks: Race & Representation as hooks leaves little room for negotiation with viewing film texts. But in focusing only on this period of Black feminist thought, Nash omits the breadth of Black feminist scholarship that examines pleasure, negotiation, and the fugitivity of Black women’s desires on and off screen. Quite simply put, I do not believe that Nash’s contribution to the study of Black women’s pleasures is as innovative as she claims it to be.

Additionally, Nash’s desire to critique, nearly, all Black feminist scholarship leaves her argument to fall a bit flat. For example, the Mireille Miller-Young analysis in A Taste for Brown Sugar (the only other full study to Black women’s representation in pornography) is dismissed and often used as an example of “mis-reading” the text due to Miller-Young’s emphasis on reading through a Black feminist perspective. I believe that Nash misreads Miller Young’s analysis. Nash uses the same films that Miller-Young utilizes for her study and often compares Miller-Young’s analysis with her own, with Miller-Young bearing the “limited” analysis in Nash’s view. Having read Miller-Young’s work, I view Nash’s critique as somewhat constricted. Miller-Young’s driving framework in A Taste for Brown Sugar is negotiation, and although she reads difficult and somewhat racist depictions of Black women’s bodies in pornography, Miller-Young never negates Black women’s pleasure from the scenario and fundamentally speaks against the “injured body” trope attached to Black women’s bodies. I am unsure of what Nash was trying to accomplish with this me against them (Black feminist thought) argument but I believe that it robs this book of its promised intellectual and, potentially, innovative depth and insight.

[Ciahnan Darrell · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the less obvious evils hegemonic racial prejudice imposes on those it subjugates is a form or erasure whereby those population are deprived of positive images of themselves their "people." This book delves into the centuries old myth of black concupiscence and sexual pathology, in order to deconstruct them, and replace such carcinogenic images and narratives with ones that will allow for the celebration of black bodies and sexuality.

It's insightful, well written, and absolutely worth reading.

[Krystle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well written
This book is a great analysis of black women and men's portrayal in racialized pornography and the possible pleasures that lies therein. Nash's arguments were thought provoking and enlightening. It is a wonderful body of work which examines the pleasures that can be found within an often taboo subject.

[fatma · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wiked it uwu

[DM · Rating 5 out of 5]

The inspiration I take from this is it is ok to read texts differently than how you might have been socialized or taught to read them.

[E]

Quite like this. The readings don't quite live up to the promises of the theoretical interventions staged in the intro + first chapter (which I thought were very insightful), but they model a way of thinking/seeing that is urgently needed.

[Mills College Library]

791.43652 N251 2014

[Amanda Hobson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nash's The Black Boady in Ecstasy is just excellent scholarship. It is infinitely readable and incredibly thoughtful. Nash's exploration of racial iconography in racialized pornography is a great guide for feminist scholars. I highly recommend this text.