Master-Slave Sex Acts: Mandingo and the Race/Sex Paradox

Abstract

Is pleasure possible within relations of domination? The question of how power works between those empowered and those enslaved persists as a moral and ethical dilemma within contemporary relations and representations. Representations of sexuality and race, in particular, raise particular challenges that the film Mandingo continues to bring to the fore today. Not quite blaxploitation and not quite plantation-genre film, Dino De Laurentis’ Mandingo (1975) portrays the private sex act between masters and slaves as an intense paradoxical site of sexual pleasure and racial domination. Against a Hollywood history of representing rape and sexual assault of innocent white women by menacing black men such as in D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915), Mandingo posits sex acts as the primary constitutive technology of racial domination in US slavery while raising the possibility of mutuality, recognition, and affection between masters and slaves. The film’s polemic proposal evades more serious engagement when most frequently described as a “trashy southern gothic that uses interracial sex as its steamy selling point”1 or as “a sadomasochistic Old South wonder”2 that capitalized on sex for box office profit.3 Prematurely, the film is dismissed as a pastorally racist project – a telling of slavery from the point of view of slave sexual contentment. In this article, I explore how paying attention to sexual relations and the explicit sex act acknowledges the paradox of pleasure and violence in racial subjection. Through a consideration of explicit sex acts between masters and slaves as both a form of disciplining subjugation and of liberatory self-formation for racial subjects, I will formulate better understanding of the relationship between sexual subjugation and racial subjectivity.