colin_cox's review against another edition
5.0
Jennifer C. Nash's The Black Body in Ecstasy is a provocative study of pornography. Nash offers a heterodox feminist reading of pornography by finding moments when the Black body, as represented in and by pornographic films, is "fraught, complex, and potentially exciting...for black subjects" (87).
Nash asserts that her treatment of "blackness" in The Black Body in Ecstasy can "thrill, excite, and arouse, even as it wounds and terrorizes" (87). This passage represents the dialectical nature of Nash's treatment of Blackness in pornography. For Nash, Black bodies in pornography do more than bear witness to systemic representations of racism and racial injustice. Instead, for Nash, the Black body in some pornographic spaces creates the condition for a politics of liberation via excitation. Nash's term for this dialectical process is ecstasy, which she defines as "the messy and sometimes uncomfortable nexus of racial and sexual pleasure" (31). She also suggests that ecstasy attempts signify "forms of racial-sexual pleasure that have heretofore been unnamed (and some that have been too taboo to name), included blissful performances of hyperbolic racialization and uncomfortable enjoyment in embodied racialization" (2-3).
When defining ecstasy early in The Black Body in Ecstasy, Nash borrows the psychoanalytic term jouissance. However, Freud's notion of the death drive is, potentially, a more appropriate framework for understanding ecstasy. For Freud, the death drive is a repetition compulsion or, as I prefer to think of it, a psychic maneuver designed to maximize and sustain excitation. For example, Nash has much to say of the place of the phallus, specifically the Black phallus, in pornography, a literal and symbolic element of all pornographic diegesis. While there are moments when the Black phallus is triumphant, more often than not, Nash traces moments of phallic failure. These moments of acute failure create "space for a variety of black spectators and their heterogeneous and varied longings" (81). Here, failure is synonymous with continuation or prolongation, and Nash is quite good at articulating moments of triumph but, more importantly, failure in Black pornography.
The Black Body in Ecstasy is a dense but rewarding book to study. I have so much more I want to say, and I can imagine returning to this book in the future. Furthermore, The Black Body in Ecstasy is a provocative book. It takes pornography seriously without devolving into crass, exploitative titillation. Nash's close-readings are thorough yet approachable. Plus, the introduction and first chapter effectively explore the contours of feminism's response to pornography, which is useful for anyone interesting in delving into this critical field of scholarship.
Nash asserts that her treatment of "blackness" in The Black Body in Ecstasy can "thrill, excite, and arouse, even as it wounds and terrorizes" (87). This passage represents the dialectical nature of Nash's treatment of Blackness in pornography. For Nash, Black bodies in pornography do more than bear witness to systemic representations of racism and racial injustice. Instead, for Nash, the Black body in some pornographic spaces creates the condition for a politics of liberation via excitation. Nash's term for this dialectical process is ecstasy, which she defines as "the messy and sometimes uncomfortable nexus of racial and sexual pleasure" (31). She also suggests that ecstasy attempts signify "forms of racial-sexual pleasure that have heretofore been unnamed (and some that have been too taboo to name), included blissful performances of hyperbolic racialization and uncomfortable enjoyment in embodied racialization" (2-3).
When defining ecstasy early in The Black Body in Ecstasy, Nash borrows the psychoanalytic term jouissance. However, Freud's notion of the death drive is, potentially, a more appropriate framework for understanding ecstasy. For Freud, the death drive is a repetition compulsion or, as I prefer to think of it, a psychic maneuver designed to maximize and sustain excitation. For example, Nash has much to say of the place of the phallus, specifically the Black phallus, in pornography, a literal and symbolic element of all pornographic diegesis. While there are moments when the Black phallus is triumphant, more often than not, Nash traces moments of phallic failure. These moments of acute failure create "space for a variety of black spectators and their heterogeneous and varied longings" (81). Here, failure is synonymous with continuation or prolongation, and Nash is quite good at articulating moments of triumph but, more importantly, failure in Black pornography.
The Black Body in Ecstasy is a dense but rewarding book to study. I have so much more I want to say, and I can imagine returning to this book in the future. Furthermore, The Black Body in Ecstasy is a provocative book. It takes pornography seriously without devolving into crass, exploitative titillation. Nash's close-readings are thorough yet approachable. Plus, the introduction and first chapter effectively explore the contours of feminism's response to pornography, which is useful for anyone interesting in delving into this critical field of scholarship.
toffishay's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
3.75
This is a very academic text exploring the history of pornography and it's relation to race and representations of Black people. This book really opened my eyes to a new perspective on understanding racialized pornography. The author takes great steps to lay out their arguments and place their work in the broader cannon of Black feminist understanding and critiques of pornography. I came away with more thoughts and questions than clear answers, but sometimes that can be all I need from a book, especially one that is so theoretical and sociological in nature.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Sexual content
Moderate: Sexism, Incest, and Racism
Minor: Slavery, Homophobia, and Sexual violence
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