The next session of the Queer STS reading group - and the final session of 2020 - will be taking place on Thursday 10th December at 5pm-6pm (London time). We will be discussing Jennifer C. Nash’s' (20014) essay ‘Black Anality’.
In this essay, Nash undertakes a sustained analysis of the anus' role in the imagination of Black pleasure as attached to what she describes as “anal ideologies including spatiality, waste, toxicity, and filth.” By analysing the way that the Black female body is represented in heterosexual pornography, Nash argues that blackness and anality become tethered in two crucial ways. First, through the flattening of the hidden space of the “anus” and the “paradigmatic otherworldly racially marked space” of the ghetto. And secondly, in the depiction of Black sexualities as non-reproductive and wasteful - as in scatalogical and also as in “recreational, excessively pleasurable, excessively absurd, excessively fun, and excessively consumerist.”
Please be mindful that, although Nash’s piece insists on a note of optimism for the anus as a space of pleasure and delight, our conversation will inevitably touch on a range of sensitive themes, including racism and pornography. As always, I will endeavour to facilitate discussion in a safe and sensitive way but if you would like to attend and have concerns about this, do let me know and I will take these into consideration.
Here's the abstract:
“Black Anality” argues that “black” and “anal” are rendered ideologically, discursively, and representationally synonymous, and that black female flesh becomes the material space on which this convergence occurs. Drawing on an archive of online, widely accessible black pornographies, I develop the term black anality to describe how black pleasures are represented as peculiarly and particularly oriented toward the anus, and thus as peculiarly and particularly attached to anal ideologies. In doing so, I depart from black feminist scholarship, which has long examined the buttocks as an imagined locus of racial-sexual difference and which has developed a set of analytics that now predominate in the study of black female sexualities: spectacularity, excess, grotesquerie, and display. “Black Anality” offers a new set of analytics for black feminist work on sexuality: spatiality, waste, toxicity, and filth. These analytics, I argue, allow black feminists to consider how black female sexuality is imagined to be rooted in (and perhaps generative of) certain kinds of filthy spaces, particularly the ghetto; how black sexuality is constructed as literally and metaphorically dirty; how black sexuality is posited as toxic, non-productive, and nonreproductive; and how black sexuality is imagined as wasteful. In turning attention to this understudied and overdetermining space — the black anus — “Black Anality” considers the racial meanings produced in pornographic texts that insistently return to the black female anus as a critical site of pleasure, peril, and curiosity.
The link to the text is here: https://read.dukeupress.edu/glq/article-abstract/20/4/439/34905 And the link to the Zoom session is here: https://ucl.zoom.us/j/91904925170 If anyone has any issues accessing the text, drop me a line!