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....