Jennifer Nash Faculty & Graduate Seminar, "Race-Pleasure on the Pornographic Screen."

This event is hosted by the Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

 

Jennifer Nash's work focuses on black feminism, black sexual politics, race and visual culture, and race and law. She is an assistant professor of American Studies in American Studies at George Washington University. 

 

 

Nash's last publication The Black Body in Ecstasy will be one of four of 2014 NWSA's Authors Meet Critics sessions. Nash rewrites black feminism's theory of representation. Her analysis moves beyond black feminism's preoccupation with injury and recovery to consider how racial fictions can create a space of agency and even pleasure for black female subjects. Nash's innovative readings of hardcore pornographic films from the 1970s and 1980s develop a new method of analyzing racialized pornography that focuses on black women's pleasures in blackness: delights in toying with and subverting blackness, moments of racialized excitement, deliberate enactments of hyperbolic blackness, and humorous performances of blackness that poke fun at the fantastical project of race. Drawing on feminist and queer theory, critical race theory, and media studies, Nash creates a new black feminist interpretative practice, one attentive to the messy contradictions—between delight and discomfort, between desire and degradation—at the heart of black pleasures.

 

Nash's current book project, "Black Feminism Remixed", examines the complex relationship between black feminism and women's studies.  The book’s point of departure is a paradox: women’s studies treats black feminism both as an out-dated practice in need of critical reformation and as the site of women’s studies most important theoretical innovations.  The project focuses on two sites which mark black feminism’s paradoxical relationship with women’s studies: pleasure and intersectionality.   Women’s studies scholarship often treats black feminism’s relationship to pleasure as antiquated because black feminists are thought to be invested in respectability, and in shielding the black female body from scrutiny, rather than in the imagined freedoms of sexual expression, performance, and play.  If pleasure is a site where black feminism is often located in the historical past, intersectionality - a theoretical innovation emerging from black feminism that captures how identity is constituted by the intersections of gender, race, class, and sexuality – is often celebrated as the future of women’s studies.  Indeed, myriad conferences and special issues of journals have been devoted to the virtues of intersectionality, and it is now commonplace that Women’s Studies programs and departments define themselves by a commitment to intersectional scholarship.  Her project uses these two sites to trace the contours of a moment where black feminism is positioned both as past and as future, as historical relic or as utopia, but never as part of the present moment.

 

This event is co-sponsored by the Department of English, the Department of African American and African Studies, the Department of Comparative Studies, and the Sexuality Studies Program