The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM, and Pornography (Sexual Cultures) by Ariane Cruz

Author:Ariane Cruz [Cruz, Ariane]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: ART057000 Art / Film & Video
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2016-10-03T22:00:00+00:00

The premise is simple: there’s an apartment, and if you’re lucky enough to be given the key, you can let yourself in . . . and let yourself go. This isn’t fake lesbian porn with pointless high heels and starlets barely able to conceal their distaste as they awkwardly tongue kiss. Real sex, real orgasms, real sweat, real bodily fluids, real laughter—this is the genuine article, so utterly natural that the fact it’s being filmed seems nearly incidental.156

The rhetoric of authenticity in Houston’s work becomes an important, but problematic, strand weaving through the work of a broader wave of contemporary black female produced pornography.157 That is, Houston is imagined and imagines herself to be making pornography that caters to the real fantasies of real black women and as work that represents real bodies, the kind we do not typically see in mainstream porn. The furtive locale of the crash pad provides the ground for an authentically imagined staging of queer sex. The equally mysterious mythical key opens more than the doors to the crash pad; it serves as a powerful metaphorical device that symbolizes a broader expansion of racialized sexualities in the landscape of contemporary American commercial porn, opening and unlocking a queered, destabilized deconstruction of sexual categories. Beyond depicting queer relations and sexual fantasy, the Crash Pad series is politically invested in a critique of the dichotomies of heteronormativity. As L. H. Stallings had argued in her visionary theorization of a radical black female sexual subjectivity, “Real resistance to negative stereotypes would entail more than simply reversing the binary logic of stereotypes about Black women’s sexuality: it would mean destroying systems of gender and sexuality that make the stereotypes possible. Such action would aid in the initial construction of radical Black female sexual subjectivities.”158 Technology is a key to this resistance: Houston tells me that technology is “power.”159 The Internet has enabled her to “build something that [I] was going to be able to create content on a regular basis.”160 We can understand the medium facilitating not a kind of singular interruption but an ongoing process of continual permutation reflecting the dynamism and multivalence of black female sexuality itself. By providing this type of constant content, Houston deploys the technology of the Internet to make possible an ever-evolving performance of black womanhood.

Having “no fear of the technology,” Houston imagines cyberspace as a laboratory for the invention of new and dynamic representational paradigms of black female sexuality.161 As I argue elsewhere, we need to pay critical attention to pornography produced by black women as a salient force in a larger digital renaissance of black female cultural production and look toward black female pornographers as pioneers in black women’s commandeering of new media as vehicles for self-representation.162 While we need to look more closely, and certainly more seriously, at Internet pornography and the ways it allows new and different groups of people, often those who have traditionally been marginalized, to actively participate in important discourses about gender, race, sexuality this examination

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