The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (20 page)

The maneuvers by sex workers like Vanessa Blue to re-appropriate their images for their own profit and politics are necessarily shaped by the stultifying power of race in pornography’s structural and social relations. While all of porn’s workers are subject to the disciplining force of racialized sexuality, even the idealized white female porn star, women of color are specifically devalued within a tiered system of racialized erotic capital.
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Within this hierarchy black bodies are some of the most degraded, and their degradation mobilizes the very fetishism driving their representations. According to one adult video director I overheard at the Adult Video News Adult Entertainment Expo, “black chicks are fucking skanks.”
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Not only does black-cast pornography tend to be organized around a view of black sexual deviance and pathology—often a low-budget affair presenting pimps and players trolling the ‘hood for hoes and hookers—but black porn actors tend to be paid rates half to three quarters of what white actors earn. In this way, black labor in porn mirrors the exploitation of black labor in “legitimate” arenas like service sector blue and pinkcollar jobs where black workers confront systemic inequality, prejudice, and occupational health risks. Hence, in order to understand the ways in which black pornographers like Vanessa Blue come to self-authorship and to make critical feminist interventions in the porn industry—and what is at stake in this important move—we must take seriously the overwhelming restrictions placed on black women’s sexual agency as performers and producers of porn.

In vital ways, black women pornographers take on material constraints to enact expansive, and even radical, views of black sexuality against deeply fraught imaginings of black being. They work to alter the
terms by which black women’s bodies are represented as simultaneously desirable and undesirable objects. Desirable for their supposed difference, exoticism, and sexual potency, black women are at the same time constructed as undesirable, as these very same constructions threaten governing notions of feminine sexuality, heteronormativity, and racial hierarchy. In an industry where excessive sexuality would seem to be an asset, black women’s presumed hypersexuality ironically only undermines their value in the desire industries.
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Whether located in the mainstream heterosexual market of pornography or on its marginalized outer limits, the disabling discursive construction of black female sexuality provides an inescapable text that black women behind the camera must confront and grapple with as they strive to author a pornographic imaginarium of and for themselves.

Resulting from the new ease and affordability of making and distributing pornography with digital technology, increasing numbers of black women performers such as Vanessa Blue, Diana DeVoe, and Damali XXXPlosive Dares are getting into the production side of the industry. Building on the legacy of earlier black women who attempted to create a black women’s sex cinema from inside the business, like Angel Kelly in the late 1980s, their work makes visible how pornographic authorship requires a new dimension of sexual labor. Not only are they becoming filmmakers in the traditional sense, they must fulfill a variety of roles: director, producer, editor, screenwriter, cinematographer, public relations agent, casting agent, acting coach, mentor, and distributor, to name a few. They must make themselves experts in new media technologies, ecommerce, and social networking in order to create, promote, and sell their films. Hence, calling them filmmakers, or even producers, does not capture the range of labor, expertise, or creativity involved in what they do.

Pornography created by black women attempts to expand their sexual representations, performances, and labor beyond the current limits of the pornography industry and the confines of pervading stereotypes.
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Vanessa’s
Taking Memphis,
Diana’s
Desperate Blackwives
series, and Damali’s
Maneater: The Prelude
all display an interest in creating more dynamic roles for black actresses in porn. Their work helps us rethink pornography and feminist pornography as voluptuous sites for black women’s intervention, imagination, and activism. Vanessa Blue’s film work explores power reversals and role play while Diana Devoe’s large body of work tends to play with class by presenting black women as bored, conniving, upper-income housewives (just like the reality TV
stars they parody), or as cute and stylish hip hop generationers that obviously counter the image of the abject, low-class “ghetto ho.”

Damali Dares, who is just getting started as a filmmaker, explained to me how her own sense of feminism motivated her to direct, produce, and star in
Maneater: The Prelude,
a film about a sexy detective who uses her sexuality to catch men who cheat: “Some guys would say I’m a man hater and I’m not. I just hate ignorant people, guys, or other females who try to take advantage of people. I’ve always been an activist and I’m always standing up for the underdog. So [the idea for the film] kind of came from both me as a person and also wanting to do that superhero type, save the world, one female at a time. It was really about empowering females.”
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As Damali describes, she was sometimes construed as a “man hater” for being outspoken about inequality and injustice, particularly, as she related to me, against sexism, racism, and homophobia. It is notable then that she turned an established antifeminist attack, “man hater” into “man eater” for a film that went on to be nominated for a 2010 Feminist Porn Award. Casting herself as the detective heroine who catches “guys who victimize women,” and as the cuckolded wife who becomes empowered by learning the truth of her husband’s infidelity (she walks out on him in the climactic scene of confrontation), Damali sought to use the dual role to portray women in charge of their lives, and in the process showed a dynamic figuration of black female agency—one that employs the good girl/bad girl binary and dismantles it.

Black women filmmakers who are not adult actors, such as Shine Louise Houston (
The Crash Pad, Superfreak, Champion
), Nenna Feel-more Joiner (
Tight Places: A Drop of Color, Hella Brown
), Abiola Abrams a.k.a Venus Hottentot (
AfroDite Superstar
), and Tune (
Day Dreamin
), also constitute part of this new black women’s sex cinema. Shine’s and Nenna’s work, which has garnered significant attention from queer and transgender communities of color, draws on performers and representations traditionally excluded from both mainstream heterosexual and alternative lesbian porn. Their work, rather, emphasizes the sheer range of embodiments, attractions, acts, and desires possible between black women, other women of color, white people, and genderqueer and transgender persons—figurations absent in most porn. This new school of black women porn filmmakers creates visual texts that forcefully intervene in the existing landscape of pornographic media and that prioritize complex views of desire and relation over static notions of race and gender performance. It also upsets ideas about consumption and the notion that black pornography can only ever be offered up for someone else’s
fantasy—the purported white male gaze. Although their work addresses and appeals to a wide audience, these filmmakers create images that necessarily address other black women. As black women making pornography from their own points of view, they also show the diversity of viewpoints, positionalities, and gazes of black women as spectators.

Yet black women porn filmmakers—both performers-turned-directors and non-performers—face a number of constraints. In my research in black women’s representations and labors in pornography, I interviewed dozens of black performers active in the business since the 1980s. These ethnographic interviews and encounters provided the critical insights—the voices of these women are vital sources of knowledge about what pornography means to and for black women. When I began my fieldwork as a graduate student at New York University in 2002 there was no work being done on the topic, and there were no black women working as directors. Presently there are far fewer black women active in directing and producing their own videos or video series than black men, who have benefited from the patronage of white men who own the major and minor production houses, and their work is not as well-financed. Unlike the predominantly white male directors, producers, and distributors who run the porn industry, or many of the white female directors who have innovated a veritable feminist pornography movement since the 1980s, black women do not have the capital, privilege, or influence to truly compete in the multibillion dollar trade of porn. They either must rely on traditional “boy’s club” networks for production or distribution, or invent new modes to produce or distribute their work directly to consumers, which tend to limit their sales. A reason they have to become so good at many facets of making and marketing porn is that they often lack the resources to do otherwise. As Vanessa Blue explains, for black women sex workers, gaining access to the means of production often involves negotiating a set of barriers and exploitations that do not exist for others: “I see that there are no women of my skin tone [making porn], I see that there are very few white women doing it. But what’s stopping us from doing it? The more I talked to people about it, the more I found out the truth. I had to fuck a few people to get some more information, and I did.” As a woman of color in the sex industry, no one takes you seriously, Vanessa told me, and they are certainly not willing to invest in you without some personal gain.

The phenomenon of black female porn makers must be evaluated in light of black sex workers’ continued attempts to survive and succeed against tremendous barriers. Black women performers-turned-directors face an added stigma that other black women pornographers do not.
Because they continue to perform in their own films they are implicated as sex workers in ways that black women directors coming from film schools and other paths not related to the sex industry avoid. Directors like Vanessa Blue and Damali XXXPlosive Dares also maintain other kinds of ties to the sex business through their performer websites and exotic dancing. Thus producing porn is for them part of an overall strategy to extend their professional persona into a lucrative brand, one with many formats, audiences, and streams of income. Yet creating images constitutes an important intervention into porn’s representational economy, which may be considered a kind of activism in addition to a savvy hustle.

Illicit eroticism
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is my term for conceptualizing how black women sex workers employ their mythic racialized hypersexuality in the sexual economy.
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By utilizing a sexuality intertwined with notions of deviance and pathology, I argue that black sex workers are positioned as sexual outlaws who convert forbidden and proscribed sexual desires, fantasies, and practices (including prostitution) into a form of defiant “play-labor.”
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I also want to assert that this paradigm for negotiating structural and discursive forces of sexualized racism might include an added vector of activist production. That is, illicit eroticism should also capture how black sex workers advocate for more just conditions in the sexual economy or greater personal autonomy when it comes to one’s sexual choices and labor. Hence, illicit erotic activism would include making porn that undermines, or re-imagines, the status quo of black representational politics and organizes labor to improve conditions for sex workers. Illicit erotic activism can thus theorize the involvement, incorporation, and interventions of black women in feminist pornography and as feminist pornographers.

Vanessa Blue welcomed me with a warm and mischievous smile. I followed her, barefoot and dressed in a colorful, flowing sundress, into her home office. Explaining that she was in the middle of some important edits for a new project, Vanessa sat down at her desk with a confident grace, like the conductor of an orchestra, eminently sure the various parts of the symphony will coalesce, forming a masterpiece. The room was cluttered with equipment, yet organized. On her desk a Mac laptop was open to the movie editing software Final Cut Pro; notes, technical books, hard drives, and DVDs occupied the rest of the desk surface. A high definition digital video camera stood on a tripod at the center of the room aimed at a canopy bed swathed in red satin and covered in velvet pillows. This was where she shot many of her videos. As Vanessa said, she likes “watching people be free and enjoy themselves.” She was drawn
to the idea of creating a space and environment where performers could take pleasure in their performances. “I knew I wanted to get behind the camera,” she told me, “and I wanted to control the scene so that either I could get to fuck the way I wanted to fuck or produce the scenes that I knew this industry was missing.”

“What is the porn industry missing?” I asked. “As a performer,” Vanessa explained, “sitting on the set and watching the director leave the room and leave the cameraman to finish the scene, to direct and make those people fuck a certain way. . .” She shook her head in disgust. “I grew up with an appreciation for smut, and it broke my heart that smut was being made by people who really didn’t care.” Vanessa powerfully indicts the management of porn production, which has standardized the filming of sex scenes to the extent that actors often feel they are handled more as automatons than real people, and directed to have sex that is mechanical, perfunctory, and even unerotic. This kind of schema is thought necessary to provide the market with a constant stream of pornographic media options that satisfy every taste at the cheapest cost. It replicates exactly what sells and innovates only when other things sell better. This economy opens up the process to an uncaring and sometimes unethical regime for sex workers. “Fucking” the way she wanted would mean having more freedom to decide how sex should proceed; that the interaction would be more organic and dynamic, if not erotic. It meant
not
following the predictable porn formula, but following a new calculus from her own imagination. Vanessa Blue rejects the politics of disposability that turns porn’s workers, like women of color working under the conditions of neoliberal capital around the world, into “a form of industrial waste” to be “discarded and replaced.”
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