Strange Bedfellows

Abstract

Saartjie Baartman's story has become central to black feminist theory and politics, serving as the primary analytic vehicle for explaining the violence that the dominant visual field inflicts on black female bodies. The re-telling of Baartman's story has also provided black feminists with tools for grappling with racialized pornography, which is thought to re-enact Baartman's violent exhibition by rendering black women objects for white male spectators' consumption. This article argues that the constant invocation of Baartman's story has allowed an anti-pornography formation to flourish within black feminism, masked as racial progressivism. Ultimately, this strain of anti-pornography politics has promoted a black feminist sexual conservatism which systematically ignores questions of black women's pleasure, sexual agency, and desires, and has generated a normative – rather than analytical – engagement with racialized-sexualized imagery. In place of normative readings of racialized pornography, this paper offers a new reading practice – racial iconography – which examines the ways that pornography mobilizes race in particular social moments, under particular technological conditions, to produce a historically contingent set of racialized meanings, pleasures, and profits.