Learning about race happen in the strangest ways.  I grew up in a white, middle class, and liberal (in the Canadian sense of the word) home, and I learned a lot about race without anyone ever uttering the word.  I learned about race in ways that might seem obvious:  by whose faces and stories were and were not in the books I was read, the public school I was sent to, the neighborhood where I lived and played.


  And I learned about race in spaces that might seem surprising.  Porn was one of them. 

I grew up during the rise of VCR technology, and I watched many of the films produced during the period known as the Golden Age of Porn.  In those days the options for porn actors of color were limited to roles that represented the worst racial stereotypes.  Some of that has changed, and a lot of it hasn’t.

But then, as now, some performers were able to twist, or in some cases overpower, the racist narratives of white producers and directors, and deliver performances that conveyed something about who they were, about their sexuality and power, that went far beyond the narrowly written characters they were given to inhabit.

Of course at the time I wasn’t thinking about the meaning of any of this. I was just turned on.  It was only  as I read Mireille Miller-Young's invaluable book A Taste for Brown Sugar (Duke University Press, 2014) that I started thinking through some of this.  

Miller-Young is an Associate Professor in the Department of Feminist Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara, and one of a handful of academics who work in the field known as porn studies.

  A Taste for Brown Sugar is the first academic text to offer an extensive history and thinking through of black women’s sexuality in the porn industry.  Informed by exhaustive archival research and dozens of interviews with the porn performers whose work she writes about, Miller-Young’s work is important on many levels, not least of which is that she documents performances and performers whose work was never properly archived and whose stories could have been lost forever.

After reading her book I felt a sense of gratitude to Professor Miller-Young for not only the ethical way she includes performers in what is essentially the telling of their professional story, but for all the unglamorous work of digging through archives to locate and document the kinds of people and events that never show up in hipster documentaries about the strange old days of porn.  I wanted to thank her directly, so I invited her to answer five questions about her work.

If you can only think of pornography as a matter of exploitation, no reason to read on.  But if you accept that, for better or worse, porn is one of the oldest and at times most complicated ways we humans grapple with sexuality and desire through cultural production, read on.

 

The title of your book, A Taste for Brown Sugar, might be confused with the title of one of the films you are writing about. Can you talk a bit about how you chose the title?

I came up with the title reading a sales catalogue for vintage pornographic videos for my research. It read something like: “If you have a taste for some brown sugar buy this tape.” I was struck by this ad because it describes perfectly the market for, and fascination with, black women in pornography. Black women are marketed as “brown sugar”—and that’s a term that goes way back in time in music and vernacular African American speech that connotes the loveliness and desirability of black women. Brown Sugar is also used in ways that are exploitative to black women, such as when the Rolling Stones reference it in their song Brown Sugar. Hence, the term also speaks to this idea that black women are “hypersexual” –that is, somehow abnormal in their sexual appetites—and available for anyone to use as sex objects.

I think there are still a lot of people who are surprised to hear that pornography is a topic of academic study.  Given how new the field is, I’m curious about how you came to study porn?  

I saw a course offered in college titled “Pornography,” and I was intrigued. It turned out to be the best course I ever took. It challenged all of my assumptions and expanded my worldview, especially as a feminist. I began to understand that pornography is not a thing but a debate—an argument in fact. What is known as “pornography” has constantly shifted throughout history, yet everyone thinks they “know it when they see it.”

Porn is at the center of feminist battles over sexual rights and protections, a goliath media industry, a force in the innovation of new technologies, and a prominent issue for those concerned with civil liberties like free speech and artistic expression. Sexualized media impacts our society in major ways, yet we are so repressed in talking about sex that we never seem to look closely at what porn means for us and how those meanings might be changing. Ultimately, I was attracted to the paradoxes and contradictions that pornography ignites in our culture and public conversations. Anything that is so politically volatile and transgressive must be valuable to study!

One of the things I found most exciting about the book is the archival research itself.  When I talk to younger people about pornography all they think about is the Internet.  But you went way, way back.  Where did you begin your archival research?

Before the 1970s pornography was illegal in the United States, and largely seen as a degraded form of expression, so most libraries did not keep records of it. In addition, many people who found collections of materials in their grandfather’s attic upon his death simply threw them away. When I was going to school in New York City in the 1990s I used to see a guy selling old men’s magazines on the street a lot. In exploring his collection in these old dusty bins on the sidewalk, I discovered these stunning photo spreads of African American models. I wanted to know more about the women in the images, and how it could be that these exciting and erotic photographs could be treated as garbage on the street, sold for a few cents each. It was like discovering valuable photographs of Marilyn Monroe or Yankee baseball cards in the trash!

I decided to seek out other collectors of vintage pornography and found out about the archive at the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research. There I discovered an expansive collection of photographs, magazines, catalogues, and films dating back to the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, much of which was donated by police departments that had confiscated the materials from regular people and sellers. I began to realize that we as a society really under-value our sexual history. Because of the shame and disgust we have had around explicit sexual images we are literally losing our history! Many of the old film reels are disintegrating from age and there is no funding to restore them. Archives are crucial to historians because we use them to understand people and stories that are largely unknown to us.

I discovered that one of the absolute requirements of my research would be to get my hands on as many archival materials as I could. I traveled to Paris to meet with collectors and learned about online communities of experts in erotic media collection and restoration. This was crucial for me in the process of learning what kinds of pornography featured black actors, how it was made and sold, and who the models and performers were in the images.

Two concepts you introduce in your book that I found particularly rich are illicit eroticism and erotic sovereignty.  Can you explain what those terms mean?

Illicit eroticism is a term that I came up with to describe how people may, sometimes, make creative use of the damaging stereotypes that are applied to them, particularly in the realm of sexuality because, in our society, depictions of sex (outside of the confines of heterosexual marriage and monogamy) is completely taboo.

What happens when women who are told to avoid being seen as sexual, because it is believed to contribute to the view that women are sex objects, do something explicitly sexual like perform in the porn industry? I argue that women in porn understand the risks associated with “misbehaving” but pursue sexual work and transgressive erotic lives anyway. They do it to make a living, to make a political point, to obtain social mobility, or because they take pleasure in being sexual.

I developed this theory around African American women because, for them, the stakes are especially high. They are seen as having this over-the-top sexuality, and so in African American communities black women are expected to behave in the opposite fashion, as “respectable” so to avoid the stereotype of hyperseuxality that disrespects African American women. So African American women who explicitly use sex in their work and art may be perceived as betraying this unspoken expectation for “respectability.” Their race and gender make them doubly vulnerable to the risks of sexual labor. They face the biggest stigma and the harshest forms of marginalization and abuse. But they put the stereotype of sexuality to work anyway, for their own needs and desires.

Erotic sovereignty is a term that I created to explore the idea that individuals all aspire to an autonomous, just, and free erotic life but nonetheless face many challenges in living erotic freedom. The challenges are many: stifling gender roles, sexism and misogyny, racism, traumatic histories of sexual exploitation and violence, classism, censorship, media misinformation and consumerism, and sexphobic education, among others. I see erotic sovereignty as a process that we all are involved in, rather than a something that we have already won. And we have a long fight ahead of us to ensure everyone can achieve sovereignty in their sexual lives.

 
I was debating whether or not to ask you about feminism and pornography.  I hesitated because it feels as if questions about the Sex Wars or feminists response to porn are too narrow a frame to talk about something so complicated.  But having read your book I know I have to ask anyway.

The Sex Wars are still raging. The feminist movement, which has expanded to include the effort to seek equality and justice for people of all genders and races, remains divided over whether pornography is always damaging or sometimes empowering. There are feminists who wish to make porn illegal (and to continue to criminalize all sex work), and there are others who are fighting for greater roles for women behind the camera and more expansive representations in front of it. There is also a flourishing international sex worker rights movement in which several feminists in the porn industry are involved.

For me, as a sex positive black feminist, I align with the latter view, and my research contributes to debates about porn that have spanned nearly forty years. My book is about the porn actresses and their struggles.

What I found is that, in addition to labor inequality based on sex and race, they are really frustrated with feminists who condemn pornography as only harmful to women. These performers feel that this view ignores the contributions women in the industry are making to opening up new ways to think about women’s desire and pleasure, and that it glosses over the real complex struggles they face as workers and artists in the business. This issue is especially compounded by race, as black porn actresses feel doubly marginalized by the industry on one hand, and by white feminists who are leading the anti-porn and anti-sex work movement on the other. They wish that anti-pornography feminists would actually speak to them and see them as more than victims of pimp-like pornographers.  

They are smart, savvy, and critical of injustice when they see it. They have a lot to say. And they are adamant that what they do is not simply act in “dirty movies”, but that their work actually helps women have a sexual fantasy life and to see themselves as agents of their own desires. They want feminists to talk to them and not at them. They have a vital voice that should be heard, and as I say in my book, as women working in ground zero of the Sex Wars, they have a lot to teach us about the stakes and uses of feminism today.