Playing with the Politics of Perversion: Policing BDSM, Pornography, and Black Female Sexuality. Issue 2 (1st October 2016)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Cruz, Ariane
• Is Part Of: Souls. Volume 18:Issue 2/42016)
• Page Start: 379
• Page End: 407
• Publication Date: 2016-10-01
• Subjects: anti-black violence -- BDSM -- black female sexuality -- black feminism -- black lives matter -- criminalization -- fetish -- kink -- perverse -- perversion -- pleasure -- police -- policing -- politics of respectability -- pornography -- queer desire -- race play -- sexuality; African Americans -- Periodicals; African Americans -- Social conditions -- Periodicals; African Americans -- History -- Periodicals; United States -- Race relations -- Periodicals; 305.896
• DOI: 10.1080/10999949.2016.1230817
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1099-9949

Abstract

Abstract : In this article I use policing—literal and symbolic—to illuminate how race operates not only as an apparatus of power, but also one of pleasure. Through the lens of bondage and discipline, domination and submission, and sadism and masochism (BDSM) race play and race play pornography, I explore the complex relationship between discipline, pleasure, power, and violence hinged at the site of black female sexuality. First, I present my theory of the "politics of perversion." As both a theoretical framework and praxis of black female sexuality, the politics of perversion pushes back against respectability politics to take seriously the perverse, as not merely a mode of producing pleasure but of black queer world-making. Second, I discuss black women's fraught practice of race play, a controversial BDSM practice that eroticizes racial difference and often employs racism as an erotic tool of power exchange. Contextualizing black women's modern-day performance of race play within historical feminist debates over BDSM reveals the longstanding reign of the politics of respectability on black women's sexuality. Finally, I read an example of black/white interracial lesbian race play pornography that enacts the unspeakable and queer pleasures of race play, while illustrating the literal and metaphorical dimensions of the policing of blackness, queerness, and black queer female sexuality.