Rustle in the Bush

reading race, racing pornography Jennifer Nash

Nash’s project in BBE is to make a crucial interjection into the black feminism had viewed pornography up to her time and interject an element of pleasure and liberation into it. She opens the book in Chapter 1 with a summary of the theory so far and what she feels is critically lacking. Nash explicitly looks at the way visual culture has been seen by black feminists and organized around ‘archives of pain’. Of Spillers, Hartman and Saidiya, Nash demonstrates they all believe that “Visual culture can never function as the locus of black women’s liberation”. And to this I think I largely remain convinced despite Nash’s argument. Part of my own reason for this is because it should be a truism that the American spectacle is one of a dominated by a visual culture and that the processes of continually reading texts as multivalence and layered for revolution at any step, the material basis seems poorly studied; I don’t think Nash knows why the average person uses pornography. Capital has no trouble embracing pain on the black woman’s body as long is it can exploit her labor, traffick her at young ages, and corner a new aspect of the market. It seems so far as if everybody has written as if pornography is just people having sex on screen and ignored production, reception, and intention.

I do agree with Nash’s idea though that the over investment in pain is not the only network. It reminded me of Gilles Deleuze’s book on DeSade and Masoch.  There he contests that sadomasochism is a pathological and binary pathology, instead of a logic of desire through the differing relationship of the sadist and masochist to their role. I don’t want to chase this however, because I think Deleuze’s arguments about the contractual and liberating role of the masochist will apply well to next wee’s text.

I also found the 4th Chapter illuminating. Deleuze also finds a special place for humor in his study, as does Nash. Deleuze in reverting Freud’s masochist model who is like the black woman is depicted as wounded, guiltily, and self-punishing makes himself into a drama in an ironic contract. Being ‘cold’ allows pleasure to be thought, and do we not find the stultified image of the cheesy two bit actor on the porn screen? No we don’t! We find hot, warm, and pulsing body. It isn’t irony that drives the scenes (That will also be next week if the book treats BDSM race play situation with a black dominatrix and white submissive) because Deleuze distinguishes irony from humor, Nash’s preoccupation. And so they go hand in hand. For Deleuze humor is a contractual performance of repetition. The law of the process and the over aggressive nature essentially beats the idea to death. (Identification beyond death is the great liberation after all). Nash calls this racial iconography, and we have to acknowledge this because it does not step outside of racial logic it is rather ‘the outside of racial logic’ itself. We unmask hierarchy through humor. The laughter isn’t without meaning, “Playing with racial mythologies in the context of a film depends on those mythologies in the context of a film that depends on those mythologies is a powerful form of critique.” (Nash, Ch.4)