The black body in ecstasy

Jennifer C. Nash

Feminist scholarship on racialized pornography assumes that pornographic images of black women's bodies titillate the white male spectator with "proof' of black women's imagined sexual differences. This dominant reading envisions racialized pornography as a fundamentally racist endeavor which degrades and objectifies the black female body. The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography challenges this dominant interpretation by examining pornography's racialized, but not necessarily racist, uses of black women's bodies. In place of a normative assessment of racialized pornography, my dissertation offers a new analytical practice for reading pornography: a method I call racial iconography. Racial iconography is a critical hermeneutic attentive to the socio-historical specificity of race as a pornographic trope, and to the multiplicity of ways that race produces meaning in...