Not a moment too soon: A juncture of BDSM and race

This piece reflects on the contemporary scholarly juncture of bondage/discipline, dominance/submission, and sadism/masochism (BDSM) and race. After a period largely marked by the invisibility and marginalization of racialized sexuality in the study of kink, scholars have recently taken up race, specifically blackness, as central not periphery to the study of BDSM. Intervening in and building upon a black feminist tradition that has historically exhibited an ambivalent relationship to topics of BDSM, pornography, and sex work in the context of black female sexuality specifically as well as an investment in politics of respectability, this work illuminates the racialized erotics of pleasure and power at the core of sexuality.

Racialized Sexuality: From Colonial Product to Creative Practice

Racialized sexuality is a term that describes the linking of racial attributes to sexual comportment. Racialized sexualities have been produced through colonial conquest in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. European discourses framed colonized subjects as racial and thus sexual others—as different kinds of human beings with deviant erotic practices. The colonial and racist underpinnings of religion, law, and science have produced pervasive tropes of, for example, the sexual excess of Native and African peoples and the sexual submissiveness of Asian peoples. These stereotypes have had an enduring impact on the representations of racialized people’s sexual subjectivities in art and media, in addition to academic knowledge production. Representations of the insatiable lust and spitfire of Black and Latina women, the sexual submissiveness of Asian women, the lack of Asian men and the predatory sexualities of Black men, stem from centuries of discursive circulation in fields ranging from biology to anthropology, which in turned shaped how such tropes have been taken up and reproduced in cultural production. With the understanding that racialized sexuality is a colonial product, scholars invested in anti-racism and queer politics have problematized the scientific racisms that have upheld dominant discourses of racialized sexualities by exposing their deficient methodologies, ethical violations, and often eugenicist agendas. Racialized sexualities have been lived by colonized subjects through a wide range of violences via chattel slavery, and in the early 21st century, through eroticized violence such as that inflicted on the Arab detainees of Abu Gharib prison by the United States military following 9/11. While acknowledging how racialized sexuality is intimately wedded to experiences of violation and injury, contemporary artists and scholars of sexuality have also worked to show how the very tropes that dehumanize people of color are also marked by ambivalence. These representations often present the possibilities of both pleasure and pain for racialized subjects and thus are in turns claimed, disavowed, and altered through art and scholarship in order to highlight the complexities of how racialized sexualities are experienced. Queer and trans artists of color are at the forefront of demonstrating the potential of transforming racialized sexualities from a colonial product to a creative practice.

Sexing Farina: Our Gang's Episodes of Racial Childhood

By examining the episodically shiting gender of the character Farina in Hal Roach's Our Gang series, this article argues that the integrationist fantasy Roach offered depended on a strategy for representing black children that shows the speciically temporal limits to popular entertainment's ability to imagine black adolescence in the early twentieth century. he two prevailing views of the series—Our Gang as integrationist and Our Gang as mired in racist stereotypes—are not exclusive but mutually constitutive, and the tie that binds the two is the strange pleasure audiences found in the black child whose gender changed. By attending to the fact that the integration in the series happened in relation to black boys in particular, we can see Our Gang's episodic treatment of Farina as a formal response to national anxieties about black masculinity and racialized sexuality.

Moral Panics

This chapter examines how state and nongovernmental organizations' campaigns in Brazil construct sex tourism as a problem to be eradicated in part by conflating it with trafficking, along with the questions it raises about the possibilities of transnational mobility for socioeconomically disadvantaged Brazilian women. The chapter begins with a historical overview of the concept of trafficking and of global antitrafficking movements as well as the ways in which “trafficking” has been confused and conflated with “sex tourism.” It then considers how trafficking and sex tourism have been constituted as objects of knowledge before discussing the campaign activities of Aprosba and CHAME (Humanitarian Center for the Support of Women). It shows that CHAME's anti-trafficking educational campaign materials constitute an “archive of racialized sexuality” that creates “moral panics” about interracial sex and transnational border crossings that reinforces notions of who is worthy of the privileges of transnational mobility.

Conclusion

“Racist remarks” are not the only things kink.com prohibits in online comments. “Unnecessarily repetitive” posts are also prohibited, yet they are rife. If the posts are incredibly repetitive—using the same limited lexicon to describe female physicality (“hot,” “hottie,” “smokin’ hot,” “super hot,” typically followed by an inordinate number of exclamation marks)—so too are the performances. In the peculiar cacophony of human and nonhuman sounds that becomes a sort of soundtrack in fucking-machine videos—moaning, groaning, slurping, sucking, clicking, droning, buzzing—it is the somnolent humming that energizes the repetitive thrusts of the machines that is most prominent. The repetition of the machines, as tangled technologies of gender, race, sexuality, pleasure, and visuality, ignite the multiple themes of this book. In this conclusion, I use the repetition of fucking machines to illuminate the larger, if less pronounced, processes of rote at work in pornography’s performance of racialized sexuality and to recapitulate the motifs in this book. There is much repetition here: the repetition of tensions between the binaries of fantasy/reality, black/white, absence/presence, and inside/outside; the fact that BDSM and pornography both serve as platforms for the dynamic spectacle of race play; the repetition of the narratives of historical trauma and black abjection that script performances in both of these genres; and our own tenacious disciplining of the enactment of these performances....