Beyond Black and Blue: BDSM, Internet Pornography, and Black Female Sexuality

Abstract

Feminist Studies 41, no. 2. © 2015 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 409 Ariane Cruz Beyond Black and Blue: BDSM, Internet Pornography, and Black Female Sexuality I have been the meaning of rape I have been the problem everyone seeks to eliminate by forced penetration with or without the evidence of slime and/ but let this be unmistakable in this poem is not consent I do not consent —June Jordan, Poem about My Rights Introduction: The Evidence of Slime Slavery, itself a kind of “slime,” remains an active marketplace for the production of Black female sexuality and its representations.1 The impact of chattel slavery and the pervasive rape of Black female slaves on modern 1. In using the term “Black women,” I am referring to African American women for whom the history of chattel slavery in the Americas has produced the socio-historical conditions that uniquely inform Black female subjectivity and sexual politics. My use of this term is not to essentialize Black American womanhood; rather, like Black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins, I use the term to gesture to a Black women’s standpoint influenced by the condition and experience of gendered and racialized abjection, a “common experience of being Black women in a society that denigrates women of African descent.” Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (London: Routledge, 1990), 22. In this essay, I focus on Black women who practice BDSM, a small but nonetheless heterogeneous group of women in the already-marginalized larger kink community. 410 Ariane Cruz constructions and representations of Black women has been well theorized , in particular by a number of Black feminist scholars who have worked to rupture what Darlene Clark Hine terms the “culture of dissemblance ,” the politics of silence shrouding expressions of Black female sexuality.2 While the antebellum legacy of sexual violence on Black women is substantive, what has not been effectively considered is how Black women deliberately employ the shadows of slavery in the deliverance and/or receiving of sexual pleasure. That is, how the “slime”—a staining sludge of pain and violence—becomes a type of lubricant to stimulate sexual fantasies, access sexual pleasure, and heighten sexual desire. In this paper, I explore how Black women facilitate a complex and contradictory negotiation of pain, pleasure, and power in their performances in the fetish realm of BDSM.3 Situating my analysis in the context of hardcore BDSM Internet pornography and the controversial praxis of race play, I argue that BDSM is a critical site from which to reimagine the formative links between Black female sexuality and violence. Race play is a BDSM practice that explicitly uses race to script power exchange and the dynamics of domination and submission. Most commonly an interracial erotic play, race play employs racism, often involving the exchange of racist language, role-playing, and the construction of racist scenes. Eroticizing not just racism, but the miscegenation taboo, racial difference, and (hyper) 2. See Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West,” Signs 14, no. 4 (1989): 912–920. For more on Black female slave sexual assault and its aftermath, see Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Ann duCille, “‘Othered’ Matters: Reconceptualizing Dominance and Difference in the History of Sexuality in America,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 1, no. 1 (1990): 102–27; Elsa Barkley Brown, “Imaging Lynching: African American Women, Communities of Struggle, and Collective Memory,” in African American Women Speak Out on Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas, ed. Geneva Smitherman (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1995), 100–24; and Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness As Property ,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (June 1993): 1707–91. 3. BDSM is an umbrella term that stands in for bondage/discipline (B/D), domination /submission (D/S), and sadism/masochism or sadomasochism (S/M). For the purposes of this paper I exchange S/M, S&M, and/or SM with the more contemporary label BDSM. For more about the terminology of BDSM, see Margot Weiss, Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). Ariane Cruz 411 racialization itself...