Race, power, and the pornographic : naughty Black femme schoolgirls in interracial pornography, public schools, and policing encounters
Creators: name: El Henson, Peace
Publisher: name: The University of Texas at Austin
Year: 2021
Subjects: Black queer femmes
Naughty Black femme schoolgirls
Racialized porntrope formation
Antiblack genocide porn and its symbolic money shot
Erotic mastery
The racialized pornographic economy of antiblack genocide

description: In her 2012 pornographic role-play scene, Skin Diamond, a black queer femme, performs as the rebellious naughty schoolgirl who is punished by getting fucked hard by her white male teacher in detention. She teaches him a lesson by returning this hardcore fuck. In a viral 2015 case, Shakara, a black femme-presenting teenager, refuses to be sent out of a South Carolina public high school classroom and is punished by getting socially and symbolically fucked, hard; Shakara is brutally arrested by a white male police officer, taken into custody, and subjected to legal charges. “Race, Power, and the Pornographic” uses theatrical performances from interracial pornography to read real-life state encounters and vice versa. Specifically, drawing on Black Feminisms, Black Sexuality, Genocide, and Afterlife of Slavery (BBGA) scholarships, I close read Skin’s schoolgirl performance and Shakara’s school policing encounter. I aim to denude the unconscious racialized pornographic BDSM (Bondage and Discipline/Domination and Submission/Sadism and Masochism/Sadomasochism) structured into interracial relations across porn, public schools, and beyond. Visual, discursive, and textual analysis exposes how U.S. civil society depends on coercive modes of this BDSM practice to (re)produce the State itself and dominion over black communities, particularly black femmes. More precisely, I assert that genocidal antiblack policing and captivity are racializing, sexualizing, gendering, and erotic acts. These concomitant features set the ground work for these types of violences to unavoidably serve a pornographic purpose, and in fact, function as a type of pornography for state forces on, and most problematically, off the pornographic screen. To sustain this sexually electrifying and titillating process, I argue that the antiblack State and its forces continually construct and project racialized pornographic tropes onto black femmes for sexual amusement as well as self and State coherence. Particularly, I focus on The Naughty Black Femme Schoolgirl trope and the material consequences of this fantasy and fetish of these femmes in schoolgirl porn and public schools. This looks like their subjection to parodied or deadly racial-sexual punishment, respectively. Furthermore, I contend that black femmes employ, what I call, erotic mastery to reject, toy with, or transform elements of racialized BDSM to flip-the-script in these interracial encounters. For example, Skin offers us this via virtuosic sexual actions like sultry sex positions, ecstatic moans, and rebellious humor that toy with domination, submission, and its sexy in-betweens. For Shakara, this emerges in her brave refusal to school staff disciplinary orders and self-defense against lethal police violence. In doing so, Skin, Shakara, and other similar black femmes’ employment of erotic mastery rattles trope formation, on and off-screen interracial pornography, and the broader racialized pornographic economy of antiblack genocide that produces and is produced by this collective process. An alarming process fraught with pain, pleasure and power. This vexed and knotty relation may present black communities with an opportunity to imagine other pornographic and social worlds in black autonomous spaces.