The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (21 page)

“My fans will not want to hear this,” she explained, “but when I was working, it was a means to an end, and the end was to direct.” For Vanessa, acting was a way to transition from being a contracted worker in the uninspired milieu of gonzo porn, to being the creator of the image and the terms of sexual labor. Now Vanessa shoots films that she makes and she performs in roles that she designs. In the process of converting her labor from contracted to creative author, she presents black women’s sexuality in ways that highlight this drive for authorship and self-determination. She aspires to eschew the framework of the stereotyped black sexuality dominant in most porn, yet much of her work remarks on blackness in ways that show its inextricable connection to systems of power. Vanessa exposes how black feminist porn must contend with race, as black female sexuality is sutured to racial histories that inform our contemporary fantasies and sexual economies.

In her adult feature (full-length narrative) films, like
Dark Confessions, Taking Memphis,
and
Black Reign,
Vanessa emphasizes the sexual autonomy of the female characters. Employing tactics that serve to humanize the performers and the characters, her camera closes in on and lingers on the faces, offering an embodiment beyond the often fractured “tits and ass” styling of so much porn. Vanessa creates a space for black eroticism and black subjectivity, centering themes of intimacy, mischief, power dynamics, and role-play. The presentation of cross and interracial intimacy pushes against the notion that relationships between black men and women, and black women and white men, are inherently alienating and objectifying.

In
Dark Confessions,
Vanessa employs the trope of the confession to elicit testimonials from couples about their fantasies, and as the box cover advertises, the fantasy is in “revealing their darkest desires.” Vanessa takes on the role of the confessor, sitting invisibly behind the camera as she draws out the sexual fantasies of five black male-female couples in this film, which is distributed by Adam and Eve, and marketed for a heterosexual-couples audience. Each interview, filmed in a medium range black-and-white shot, presents the couple sitting closely, holding or leaning on one another. The professional porn actors portray a familiarity and intimacy that is not usually present in most black-cast porn, where normally a series of sex acts are strung together with little plot, characterization, or opportunity for the actors to speak. Here the actors improvise from the outline of a script, yet their articulations are fluid as they play off one another to construct an image of a relationship that appears quite realistic. Vanessa probes them with questions: How did you meet? How’s the sex? What’s your fantasy? Like most reality-influenced genres, we, the spectators, become participants in this will to knowledge of sexual desire and invested in its actuation. Rather than re-produce regulatory regimes of power on the subject, the discourses of sex produced by the confessional in this film present black performances of intimate disclosure and relation.
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The fantasy of the female character in the first couple (played by Nyomi Banxxx) is to be interrogated—she wants her partner (played by Sean Michaels) to act like an FBI agent, dapper and smooth in a suit, with “minty fresh breath.” The scene has a film noir quality, a spare set with a spotlight projected on a mysterious-looking woman in a vintage 1940s hat and dress. The color is faded to almost black and white save for the red of her lips, and later, her panties. True to noir aesthetics, she’s smoking a cigarette, and the smoke plumes around her in the chiaroscuro of light and shadow reflected on the wall, perhaps mirroring the shadowy,
forbidden nature of her desire. The fantasy here is the play of power through aggression and submission, mystery and impending action. Sean’s debonair FBI agent seduces Nyomi’s evasive femme fatale—her smoking, turning away, eye rolling, and resistance to his caresses and kisses build up the tension. With striking tenderness he holds her by the shoulders and kisses her cheeks and neck softly, and then as she finally returns the kiss, they move into an intense sex scene on top of the Federal Bureau of Investigation desk.

This refreshing intimacy does not mean, however, that Vanessa Blue avoids hardcore representations of dominance and alienation. In fact, she confronts power head-on and plays with it, especially in short films made for her website
FemmeDomX.com
. Using S/M fetishism—particularly the fantasy of black women dominating white men—she
queers
racial and gender hegemonies by exposing their very constructedness. By creating fantasies that explode assumptions about what constitutes proper pleasure and pain for the black body, she suggests that social power is changeable and that racialized sexuality can be toyed with for her own ends.

“Kink” is an under-explored arena of black sexual culture, and a technology of the self that is, if acknowledged in the public domain at all, seen as the epitome of deviant sexuality.
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The performances in Femme Dom X video shorts are very different from the sensuality of the feature film
Dark Confessions.
They involve ropes, chains, whips, torches, clamps, gags, harnesses, and other tools that evoke the historical, non-consensual mutilation and punishment of the black body under slavery, but that are used in this context to expose power as a terrain of (consensual) play in fantasy. Here, black dominatrixes, Vanessa included, torture white and black men by making them crawl, beg, and subject themselves to all manner of abuse, including by painting their faces with lipstick and otherwise emasculating them with taunting acts. Ever playful, Vanessa’s
EbonyTickle.com
uses “tickle torture” to show how even—here, in the excruciating and taunting tickling of female performers tied to her bed—kink can be mediated in ways that create a permissible environment where black women sexual outlaws can be seen to play with the ever dangerous position of subordination and powerlessness. With the performance of subjection as submissives in Ebony Tickle, or of merciless domination as dominatrixes in Femme Dom X, black actresses in Vanessa’s film work illuminate the significance of racialized kink fetishism as an important market in the pornography industry for black women looking to capitalize on the sexual scripts available for them.

Vanessa Blue’s illicit erotic activism is about the use of what may
be generally understood as super-deviant sexualities to empower black women’s sexual performances in pornography. For Vanessa, black women’s performances of submissiveness or domination can be enjoyable acts, and ones that might encourage black women spectators to explore their own “darkest desires.” And while her interest is not in presenting a narrative of racial progress, overthrowing patriarchy, or in making sexually emancipatory or pleasurable texts outside the marketplace, her intervention is, I argue, quite progressive. This work asks us to think about what we might learn from pornography’s most marginalized: how our pleasure is indeed tied to historical realities of our pain. What does it mean that some of the most preferable work for black sex workers in porn—since fetish work often does not require penetrative sex, but the performance of a dominant or submissive role in non-penetrative sex acts—is tied up with these brutal legacies of sexual expropriation and sexual myth? Could taking pleasure in the most deviant articulations of black sexual deviance offer a radical tool to negotiate and transform how power acts on our bodies and communities? Black women’s objectification in pornography has a long history, emerging from New World slavery as a pornographic, voyeuristic, sexual economy. Yet since the earliest photographic and film productions of sexually explicit material made for sale in a pornographic market of images, black models, and actresses could be seen to return the objectifying gaze, and gesture to their own subjective understandings as sex workers and as sexual subjects.
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If black women’s sex cinema offers a new frontier to present the inextricable bind between sexual labor and sexual fantasy, the task is to explore it as a new kind of voice in pornography, one that is never divorced from the marketplace, but in fact, shines a light on the ways in which black women’s sexualities are intimately linked with the project of authorship against, and in line with, inexorable myth.

Unconcerned with delineating what constitutes a positive or negative representation of black female sexuality, Vanessa Blue offers a view into how representations of black women’s sexuality remain caught up in confining, binary scripts. This relentless binary, which is problematic for all women but especially so for women of color whose sexualities have been deployed as a primary mechanism of colonization, expropriation, and genocide, exposes the impossibility of rendering an authentic view of black women’s sexualities in any media, let alone pornography. Black feminist pornography instead provides a space where black women performers can try on roles and stage imaginaries against expectations of decorum and normativity. This presents a powerful image for black women spectators, too. They might identify with the image and connect
it to their own sexual identities or experiences. Although there is little research on black women’s consumption of pornography, knowing that a black woman created these films might foster a sense that they are invited to view a very different kind of image.

Nonetheless, a large segment of Vanessa Blue’s work is not directed toward black women viewers, but instead white and black men. As a sex worker whose film work is tied to her professional persona and brand and who, in the absence of investment or opportunities to be hired to direct for major companies must launch her own “do-it-yourself” media—from short fetish videos to live webcam shows—she must necessarily address the primary market for black-oriented pornography. Like Diana DeVoe and Damali XXXPlosive Dares, Vanessa and other black women performers from the mainstream heterosexual porn industry make money by cultivating a white, black, and brown male fan base. Their authorship is always tied to the need for savvy self-promotion. This fact means that their work differs sharply from black women sex filmmakers who are not sex workers.

Abiola Abrams a.k.a. Venus Hottentot brought her background in film studies, art, and creative writing to her collaboration with pioneering feminist pornographer Candida Royalle for
AfroDite Superstar
(Femme Productions, 2007). Royalle’s Femme Productions produced the film and guaranteed its audience would be women and couples interested in her quasi-softcore aesthetic. Coming to the film as an unknown entity in the mainstream or feminist porn world, Abrams was freer to use goddess imagery, a critique of hip hop’s misogynist violence toward black women, and black feminist poetry throughout the film than if she had been a sex worker needing to assure fans would buy the film and keep her employed.
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In fact, she went into the project not seeing it as pornography for the purposes of titillation and masturbation, but as a “sex film” which would offer a powerful statement about the richness and complexity of black women’s fantasy lives.
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But her reliance on established porn actors to carry the film, such as India, Mr. Marcus, and Justin Long, as well as the less experienced leading actress’s performance (Simone Valentino), meant that the film would be marketed as a couples or woman-friendly porno even while it circulated as a form of feminist art. This fact underscores and expands upon Angela Carter’s insistence that pornography “can never be art for art’s sake. Honourably enough, it always has work to do.”
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Black feminist and queer filmmakers coming from outside the industry produce for a different market and face a different set of expectations from their audiences than black performers-turned-producers of
porn. For the former, consumers are largely women, transgenders, and queer people looking to find authentic images of themselves and their sexual communities, representations lacking in most porn. This sense of authenticity is underscored by the fact that the sex workers employed for these films are part of these very same communities, often renowned performance artists and actors from the San Francisco Bay area, the queer porn San Fernando Valley. Both Shine Louise Houston and Nenna Joiner use queer people of color from their own circles of friends and collaborators in their films, and market, in part, to those same circles. Although the consumption of their work extends much farther afield, this community-based approach also presents a kind of political intervention. While black performers-turned-directors employ filmmaking as a facet, albeit politically charged, of their strategic sexual labor, black women filmmakers who are not performers do not engage illicit erotics in the same way. Rather than use their own sexualities for commoditized gains, they propel the sexualities of others to enact fantasies of their own design, fantasies that intervene in the narrowed landscape of possibilities for black female sexuality under racial capitalism.

But that’s not to say that these black women auteurs do not deploy their own embodiments, and specifically the deviance attached to their black female bodies, in the pornoscape. Shine Louis Houston, for instance, launches her body into her texts in unexpected and subversive ways. In
Superfreak
she appears as the ghost of notoriously naughty funk singer Rick James, whose 1981 hit “Super Freak” describes “a very kinky girl, the kind you don’t take home to mother . . .” Inhabiting James’ spirit, Shine brings to life a trickster figure bent on turning one character after another into a “superfreak.” Using her own body to set in motion the pleasure inducing, orgiastic scene, Shine moves from cultural producer (whose role is to represent or depict sex) to sexual laborer (whose role is to trade/on sex) to sexual intellectual (whose role is to critique sex labor and sex representations, as I do) to superfreak (who performs all of the above). This schema, offered by L.H. Stallings in her radical theory of black erotic rebellion called the “Politics of Hoin’,” opens up ways of thinking about black women pornographers as not so much divided by their varied interests in porn as united by a shared politics—porn as a site of possibility for black women’s own intervention and critique.
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