Analyzing 1880s Political Views

Paper Instructions
Paper 1 is your first attempt at an argumentative essay. It is
exactly that, an attempt. You have already familiarized your
self with our secondary source, the Yawp. In this paper, you
will also analyze at least 2 primary sources and combine these
elements to form one cohesive essay. This paper, like all of the
remaining papers, requires that you interpret primary source
evidence in a historical context, drawing from the assigned
course readings as your secondary source.
· Your paper must be 900-1200 words.
· Times 12 pt font DOUBLE SPACED 1" margins
· approx. 3-4 pages NOT including bibliography
· Chicago-style footnote citations
· Chicago-style Bibliography on separate page
· Review for errors of spelling and grammar—this is a formal
written report! I recommend using the advanced spelling and
grammar check functions in your word processor of choice
PROMPT
How and why do the authors of the two primary sources differ
or relate to each other in their views of African American
political participation and voting in the 1880s? Furthermore, if
so, what does this reveal about American society and politics in
the 1880s?
Both the authors of the Report of the Select Committee and
Philip Bruce believed that the future of American democracy
depended on whether or not African Americans participated in
the political process. Their agreement ended there. What does
the contrast between these two perspectives reveal about
America in the 1880s?
Note that this question does not ask you to evaluate which of

the two documents you agree with, nor does it ask you to
evaluate whether either document is reliable or biased. Both
documents are reliable sources of evidence about what their
authors thought at the time, and both authors have biases and
underlying assumptions. Your task is to explain how these two
contrasting perspectives— with two very different sets of
underlying assumptions—emerged from the same historical
context in the 1870s and 1880s.
HISTORY PAPER ORGANIZATION
Your paper must include an introduction, several distinctbody
paragraphs, and a conclusion.
Your introduction should not begin with an overly broad,
general statement, but instead should introduce the specific
time, place, and topic you are writing about. Do not assume that
your reader knows anything about the history you are
describing. Your introduction provides necessary context for the
reader that informs your paper of how the issue that you will
discuss in your thesis came to be. Good historical introductions
do not need catchy hooks or buzzwords. You should really be
introducing the reader to the historical causes of your thesis.
Also, please be mindful that for this class, you should not be
using footnotes in the introduction, as you have nothing to
prove until you have revealed your thesis. The last sentence or
sentences of you introduction must be your thesis. Your thesis
must directly answer the prompt and also provide groupings of
evidence that will preview the body paragraphs. Finishing your
introduction with your thesis provides a natural springboard for
the rest of your paper. Papers that do not have enough context
or a sound thesis in their introduction will lose introduction,
thesis, and structure points.
Your introduction must include
· a) historical context that provides the causes and context for
the thesis
· b) a thesis statement that is the last sentence or sentences of
your introduction that answers the prompt in way that does not

repeat the prompt or is obvious, and
· c) provides an overview of how the remainder of your paper
will be organized (a “roadmap” for your reader).
Your body paragraphs, a minimum of at least two, should each
be organized around a main idea or focal point of evidence, and
should each offer evidentiary analysis and contextualization to
support your thesis. This is where you will be citing primary
and secondary sources and including footnotes for the reader,
properly sourcing your evidence. The best body paragraphs have
topic sentences that introduce the main idea of the paragraph,
and have transition sentences into the the next body paragraph.
Papers that do not have distinct body paragraphs with clearly
grouped evidence and ideas will lose structure and analysis
points.
Your conclusion should summarize your arguments first, then it
provides space to add to your paper. Start your conclusion by
restating your thesis, and summarizing the main points made in
your body paragraphs. A wise exercise is to find a parallel with
another time period in history, and draw parallels and other
conclusions, like similarities or differences. A conclusion is
also an excellent place to present the reader with a rhetorical
question, or suggest an alternate pathway of historical
development given a change. Papers that do not have
conclusions and end abruptly without at least a restatement of
the thesis will lose structure points.
SOURCES -
YOU MAY ONLY CITE SOURCES LISTED BELOW -
OUTSIDE SOURCES WILL SEE POINT DEDUCTIONS
HISTORY.COM, ENCYCLOPEDIABRITANNICA.COM and
WIKIPEDIA ARE NOT ACADEMIC SOURCES AND WILL
SEE MAJOR POINT DEDUCTIONS
YOU MUST USE/CITE ALL OF THEM
You are expected to read all the sources below and cite them in
your paper as necessary and appropriately to support your
thesis. As stated above, you may not cite sources outside this

list, and will be penalized for doing so.
· PRIMARY SOURCE(S): MUST USE BOTH FOR FULL
CREDIT
· Report of the Select Committee to Inquire into the Mississippi
Election of 1883. 48th Congress, 1st session. Senate Report no.
512. (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1884)
Excerpted
· The Plantation Negro as A Freeman; Observations on His
Character, Condition, and Prospects in Virginia Bruce, Philip
Alexander (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1889) Excerpted
· SECONDARY SOURCE(S): MUST BE CITED IN EVERY
PAPER
· American Yawp (Links to an external site.) - Chapters on
Reconstruction, Segregation, and voting in the Gilded
Age, Chapters 14, 15, 16, and 17
CITATIONS - FOOTNOTES
· This paper must include several footnotes and a separate
bibliography on a new page to receive any points on the grading
rubric for proper citation
· Different sources will have the necessary information
sometimes in different places. You must find the relevant
information in each of the sources handled this semester. This
will include but is not limited to author, title, publication date,
etc.
· This information will vary from document to document and
will change depending on the type of medium. For example,
book citations require different pieces of information compared
to websites, newspaper articles, or speeches.
· Read the Chicago Style Footnotes: Learning The Basicsfor full
information on how to cite both footnotes and bibliographies,
located in the Getting Started Module
The Chicago style of citing we use requires footnotes (at the
bottom, or the "foot" of the page) rather than in-text or
parenthetical citations. Generally, you want to provide the
author’s name, publication title, publication information, date

of publication, and page number(s) if it is the first time the
source is being used. Any additional usage, simply use the
author’s last name, publication title, and date of publication.
Footnotes should match with a superscript number at the end of
the sentence referencing the source. You should begin with 1
and continue numerically throughout the paper. Do not start the
order over on each page.
Different word processors have different mechanisms for
inserting footnotes, therefore I STRONGLY SUGGEST YOU
GOOGLE OR SEARCH YOUTUBE FOR HOW TO INSERT A
FOOTNOTE ON MS WORD, GOOGLE DOCS, OR YOUR
PREFERRED WORD PROCESSOR.
CITATIONS - BIBLIOGRAPHY
All papers in this course require a bibliography, also in
Chicago-style, 12pt Times font, with 1" margins.
A bibliography is a list of the books and other sources that are
referred to in a scholarly work-such as an essay, term paper,
dissertation, or a book. The bibliography comes at the end of
the work.
Your bibliography will be on its own separate page, functioning
as the last page of all your papers. It will present a list of all the
sources referenced in your paper in alphabetical order. Another
way of thinking about it: if you used a book/source for footnote,
even if you cited the same document multiple times, then the
book/source needs to go in your bibliography.
I repeat, each source or book needs to be listed only once in
your bibliography, no matter how many times it is cited in the
footnotes of the paper.
ACADEMIC WRITING BEST PRACTICES
· Do not use the first person in Academic Writing EVER!!!
· Do not us "I" to refer to yourself in your essay, NEVER EVER
EVER. I know it's you because your name is at the top. Instead
of "I believe that the Civil War was caused by..." instead, write
"The causes of the Civil War were..." You want to present your
opinions as fact and it makes your writing read as sloppy and

informal.
· Do not use contractions in Academic Writing
· This means do not use "don't," "can't," "would've," etc. These
are all considered informal and not appropriate for a historical
essay. Instead, write out do not or did not, cannot, and would
have.
RUBRIC and GRADING
In order to receive full credit, all of your papers must:
· be organized around a thesis, argument, point, or central
claim.
· closely analyze and describe the assigned primary
sources using specifics and details
· use the Yawp, our scholarly secondary source text for
evidence about the historical context
· select and present evidence to prove a thesis in order to draw
conclusions beyond those that are immediately obvious from the
evidence
· have an introductory paragraph that provides historical context
for the time period being analyzed, and presents its thesis as its
last sentence
· be organized by having at least two body paragraphs that
present the main evidence and support for the thesis, and a
conclusion
· use correctly formatted footnote citations and include a
bibliography as described in the Chicago Style Citation
Manual, (Links to an external site.)
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Porn Studies

ISSN: 2326-8743 (Print) 2326-8751 (Online) Journal homepage:
https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rprn20
Constructing a crisis: porn panics and public
health
Valerie Webber & Rebecca Sullivan
To cite this article: Valerie Webber & Rebecca Sullivan (2018)
Constructing a crisis: porn panics
and public health, Porn Studies, 5:2, 192-196, DOI:
10.1080/23268743.2018.1434110
To link to this article:
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Published online: 20 Mar 2018.
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INTRODUCTION
Constructing a crisis: porn panics and public health
Valerie Webbera and Rebecca Sullivanb
aCommunity Health & Humanities, Memorial University of
Newfoundland, St. John’s, Canada; bDepartment of
English, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada
Who has the luxury to worry about porn’s impact on health?
And who has the power to define
what is ‘healthy sexuality’?
Labelling porn a public health crisis has become the newest
tactic for anti-porn activists
seeking to curtail pornography distribution. Thus far, seven
American states have declared
pornography a public health crisis and four more have filed
similar bills. Hearings on the
matter were held in Canada, although the final decision was that
the evidence was too
contradictory to draw any conclusions. Lobbyists in Australia
and the United Kingdom
are asking their governments to investigate not so much whether
there is a public
health crisis, but to leap ahead and determine how to solve the
crisis of pornography.
Yet not one global health agency – the usual experts to identify
and define the scope
of a public health issue – supports their claims. Traditionally,
the field of public health

has concerned itself with disease prevention by addressing the
systemic causes of perva-
sive health problems that impact either a significant majority of
people (e.g. sanitation
systems or childhood vaccinations) or the most marginalized
segments of a population
(e.g. HIV prevention or safe injection sites). Pornography
consumption meets neither of
these criteria. Why then has this debate occupied valuable
government time and
resources?
Treating pornography as a ‘public health crisis’ is a gross
misallocation of priorities. We
do not believe such claims are motivated by a desire to ensure
the physical and social well-
being of the populace. Rather, employing the language of
‘public health’, ostensibly apo-
litical and objective, is a well-devised strategy to impose
sexually conservative moral
imperatives. The fact that the public health argument is
operationalized primarily by
moral activists with a retrograde understanding of both health
and media scholarship,
not by public health professionals or people involved in the
pornography industry,
should be enough to give any person pause. Thus, the pieces in
this special forum do
not engage with the question ‘is porn a public health crisis’ so
much as they critically
reflect upon the catalysts and consequences of this particular
turn to public health dis-
course by anti-porn groups.
It is our contention that framing pornography as a health issue
is a privileged and pol-

itically motivated misdirection of public health resources. As
such, we want to claim our
own space here not to debate on their terms the data,
definitions, and untested assump-
tions embedded in that frame. Rather, we regard this effort as an
opportunity to diversify
the limited narratives of pornography consumption that
presently dominate. The call for
© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
CONTACT Valerie Webber [email protected]
PORN STUDIES
2018, VOL. 5, NO. 2, 192–196
https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2018.1434110
18.1434110&domain=pdf
mailto:[email protected]
http://www.tandfonline.com
specific types of ‘evidence’ grants us opportunity to conduct
research that makes visible
the experiences of sexual subjectivities which are so often
silenced. Indeed, as Filippa
Fox argues, the maintenance of the theory that pornography
damages the public’s
health requires the wilful exclusion of the voices of sex
workers. This denial that sex
workers are in fact part of ‘the public’ has real and direct
consequences on sex workers’
ability to access adequate and respectful healthcare, while
health questions of actual rel-
evance to sex workers’ lives go unanswered.

Cicely Marston demonstrates that much of the public health
rhetoric about pornogra-
phy begins from the assumption that a healthy sexuality is one
that conforms to the social
and cultural conventions of white, settler, heterosexual, middle-
class, monogamous pro-
priety. It also singles out pornography as a uniquely and
exclusively negative form of
media. Katie Newby and Anne Philpott present ways to think
about how explicit sexual
content could be ethically produced and incorporated into
sexual health curricula,
especially to discuss consent, safer sex, and distinguishing
between visual fantasy and
real-life sex. These efforts by public heath scholars to integrate
critical media studies of
sexuality into their research opens up an exciting new vista of
academic collaboration
long missing from the media effects models that have dominated
public health and
social psychology studies.
If porn is a public health crisis, then, what exactly are the
health outcomes of watching
too much pornography? That is the fundamental stumbling block
of anti-porn advocates.
David Ley, an American sex therapist, outlines a series of
epistemological and methodo-
logical fallacies that are central to anti-porn claims about the
health risks of porn. While
the science of porn addiction and negative neurological effects
is contentious at best,
there is something well worth studying here: that is, the shift in
political lobbying from
claims of undiagnosable ‘harms’ to women and children, to
insisting that young men

are the unwilling victims of a runaway epidemic of
pornography. Very little of the
public health debates even acknowledges that porn may be
consumed by young
women, or that it has particular and distinct saliency for
LGBTQ2IA+ youth. Indeed, as
Madita Oeming points out, the conversation of porn’s supposed
harms revolves largely
around the mainstream white, heterosexual, cisgendered male, a
victim of his own limit-
less capacity for porn consumption. Diseases of over-
consumption are quintessentially
moral, not health crises. They require and invoke a class of
passive and entitled consumers
whose supposed well-being outweighs any public or
occupational health programmes to
support porn workers, a phenomenon Heather Berg unravels in
her contribution to this
forum.
To suggest that a conversation on the health effects of
pornography is a privileged one
is not to say that we do not welcome complex and even
contentious academic debate on
sexuality. Sexual norms and cultures are important for health
outcomes and therefore
require balanced, thoughtful discussion and consideration of the
relationship of sexual
media to sexual health. Indeed, critical media and cultural
scholars have been engaged
in this work for decades. Sophisticated qualitative methods for
understanding how
youth negotiate their media viewing and integrate it with their
sexual becoming is
easily accessible but still poorly integrated even by public
health scholars who contest

the anti-porn arguments. Research on sexting (Burkett 2015;
Albury 2017), online com-
munication (De Ridder and Van Bauwel 2013; Keller 2015;
Naezer 2017), media sexualiza-
tion (McRobbie 2008; Attwood 2010; McKee 2010; Smith 2010;
Duits and van Zoonen
PORN STUDIES 193
2011), and porn consumption (Attwood 2005; McKee 2007;
Smith 2007; Paasonen et al.
2015) that assemble multifaceted analytical frameworks serves
to locate pornography
within a complex matrix of sexual media production,
distribution, and consumption. Fur-
thermore, it provides opportunities to integrate sexual media
into debates on media lit-
eracy and digital citizenship as something other than a risky
behaviour to avoid (Keller
and Brown 2002; Jones and Mitchell 2016). Frameworks already
exist to educate children
and youth on healthy media usage, rights and responsibilities of
social media engage-
ment, critical meaning-making, and identity self-construction.
As these issues spill over
into sexual education curricula, it becomes more urgent that we
talk about ethical pro-
duction and consumption of sexual media. Yet educational,
medical, religious, and
other social systems (not to mention families) still revert to
hand-wringing over media
access rather than considering the wider economic,
sociocultural, and historical contexts
in which sexual media are embedded. Without these contexts,

we cannot have important
conversations about the realities of porn’s pervasiveness in
society – what Brian McNair
calls ‘the pornosphere’ (2002, 35) – and how porn can
contribute to broadening, rather
than narrowing, the possibilities for safe and fulfilling sexual
lives.
The appropriation of public health legislation by anti-porn
advocates also illustrates the
importance of public health ethics. Any interventions on private
sexual practices must
balance individual rights and security with the public good. It
was a hard lesson learned
in the early stages of the HIV/AIDS epidemic – a true public
health crisis, but also one
riddled with stigma and discrimination. As concern over the
disease mounted, many
health practitioners, decision-makers, and activists campaigning
in the name of public
health considered drastic violations of people’s privacy and
autonomy as necessary and
justified. This included interventions such as mandatory testing,
reporting, and quarantine,
as well as the closure of community sexual spaces such as
bathhouses (Herek 1999;
Disman 2003). It continues today in the form of mandatory
testing and reporting
(Webber, Bartlett, and Brunger 2016), blood bans for men who
have sex with men
(Cascio and Yomtovian 2013; Arora 2017; Crath and Rangel
2017), and the criminalization
of non-disclosure of one’s HIV status to sexual partners
(Mykhalovskiy 2011; O’Byrne,
Bryan, and Woodyatt 2013). HIV is an interesting comparative
case study to the current

porn panic because it demonstrates how interventions ostensibly
intended to protect
the health of the ‘public’ deliberately privilege specific forms
of sexual and relational prac-
tice. Public sexual health campaigns and policies based upon
weak evidence are danger-
ous because they conflate moral judgment with health
intervention, further ostracizing
sexually non-normative populations while failing to result in
any measurable improve-
ments to public health.
As the example of HIV illustrates, it is imperative that public
health always first and fore-
most considers the ethical implications of its own practice, in
order to balance ‘the need to
exercise power to ensure the health of populations and, at the
same time, to avoid abuses
of such power’ (Thomas et al. 2002, 1057). Public health ethics
hinges upon defining the
boundaries of the public/private divide. Sexuality, especially
with regards to its relation-
ship with pornography, tends to incite chaotic interpretations of
ethics because of the
many ways in which it brings ‘the public’ and ‘the private’ into
complicated collision
with one another. How the public/private divide is drawn – how
the private is perceived
to ooze out and corrupt the public – is an important factor in
determining when and how
the collective should be entitled to compel the individual
towards ‘healthy’ decisions.
194 V. WEBBER AND R. SULLIVAN

Tragically, the history of public health interventions on
people’s sexuality is rife with
abuse: forced sterilizations, false mental health diagnoses,
criminalization and incarcera-
tion, dangerous and untested therapeutic interventions, medical
incompetence, and
human rights violations. The examples are too long to
exhaustively list, but some that
stand out include the Puerto Rican birth control pill trials
(1956), the Tuskegee syphilis
experiments conducted on African American men (1932–1972),
and the incarceration of
‘promiscuous’ women in Magdalene Laundries (which lasted
until the 1990s in some
countries). Abuses like these have disproportionately impacted
racialized communities,
sex workers, and sexually non-normative folks. The claims in
favour of labelling porn a
public health crisis promise nothing different.
Our reasons for drawing attention to dark chapters in the history
of public regulation of
sexuality is not to say that sex should be off-limits to public
health officials and experts, but
to insist that we learn from past errors and abuses. People of
marginalized genders and
sexualities who have historically encountered stigma and
discrimination due to previous
sexual health policies must be consulted and their experiences
prioritized. In our own
work, as a public health scholar and a media studies scholar, we
seek out sex workers,
LGBTQ2IA+, HIV+ people, and racialized groups unjustly
labelled as ‘hypersexual’ as
those who must be heard first and loudest (Webber 2017;

Sullivan 2014; Sullivan and
McKee 2015). They were all but absent in recent hearings in
Canada, which had substan-
tially more submissions from evangelical leaders and anti-porn
organizations than they did
from public health scientists or sexual health harm reduction
agencies.
Health can be too easily portrayed as value-free and easily
understood. Similarly,
healthy sexuality is often narrowly defined to conform to
heteronormative, middle-class,
nuclear family-oriented ideals. When a public health debate that
could potentially result
in legislation begins from weak frameworks and over-simplified
definitions, the conse-
quences can be catastrophic. As Thomas et al. (2002, 1058)
state, the fundamental
ethical principle of public health is that ‘programs and policies
should incorporate a
variety of approaches that anticipate and respect diverse values,
beliefs, and cultures in
the community’. Porn is a factor of public sexual health, on that
point we heartily
concur. However, it is not necessarily intoxicating our youth or
decaying social values. It
is also sometimes a path to sexual self-discovery, a vehicle for
safer and consensual sex
practices, and a window into the spectrum of gender and sexual
diversity. Thus, we can
perhaps express some gratitude to those who began this debate –
as deceptively as
they did – so that we can begin to develop public health policies
and programmes that
support more expressive, diverse, and inclusive sexualities. The
pieces in this forum are

offered as a beginning of a new debate, thoughtfully framed and
ethically accountable.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
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https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-017-9490-2
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-017-9490-2Disclosure

statementReferences
Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at
Code=rprn20
Porn Studies
ISSN: 2326-8743 (Print) 2326-8751 (Online) Journal homepage:
A sex worker perspective
Filippa Fox
To cite this article: Filippa Fox (2018) A sex worker
perspective, Porn Studies, 5:2, 197-199, DOI:
10.1080/23268743.2018.1434111
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https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2018.1434111
FORUM
A sex worker perspective
Filippa Foxa,b
aSex worker, Australia; bMelbourne School of Population and
Global Health, University of Melbourne, Australia
I write this article as a femme academic who works both in the
public health sector and in
the sex industry. Due to anti-sex work stigma in both academia
and public health, I have
chosen to author this article under a pseudonym. This act of
self-erasure speaks to the
epistemic injustice sex workers face in scholarly and policy
dialogues about our health.
My own understanding of epistemic injustice is drawn from the
work of José Medina
and Gaile Pohlhaus Jr, as well as Miranda Fricker (Fricker
2009; Medina 2011; Pohlhaus
Jr 2012). The notion of epistemic injustice marks those ways in
which we can be
harmed in our capacity as knowers when communicating with

others (Fricker 2009).
Medina amends Fricker’s original account by arguing for a
temporal understanding of
durable epistemic injustices, using the term ‘dominant social
imaginary’ to refer to the
mainstream understanding of particular aspects of the world and
the limits of that under-
standing. Durable epistemic injustices are those which occur
when groups of marginalized
persons fail to be recognized in the dominant social imaginary
for long historical periods
as subjects who can speak for themselves (Medina 2011).
Pohlhaus Jr uses the term ‘wilful
hermeneutical ignorance’ to describe how, despite epistemic
resistance and knowledge
production by marginally situated knowers, ‘dominantly
situated knowers nonetheless
continue to misunderstand and misinterpret the world’ (2012,
716).
I am wearily familiar with the longstanding ideological
coalition between the religious
right and sex worker exclusionary radical feminism in the
United States. Aziza Ahmed
(2011) has written an excellent article on the history of this
coalition and its impact on
HIV/AIDS prevention and policy around the world. The current
public health policies pro-
posed by this coalition – exemplified by the longstanding anti-
prostitution pledge pre-
venting foreign non-governmental organizations from receiving
US HIV/AIDS funding if
they do not oppose ‘prostitution’ – make life considerably
harder for those of us involved
in the sex industry. At every turn, we are made invisible from
dialogues about our own

health and well-being.
One of the most longstanding strategies of sex worker
exclusionary radical feminism
has been to insist on a causal relationship between pornography
and violence against
women, exemplified by Robin Morgan’s (1980) ‘Theory and
Practice: Pornography and
Rape’ and Andrea Dworkin’s (1980) ‘Beaver and Male Power in
Pornography’. The small
number of articles that serve as an evidence base for this myth
have been discredited
time and time again, and yet the myth itself endures as an all-
too-effective discursive strat-
egy for justifying the erasure of sex worker voices from public
discourse.
© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
CONTACT Filippa Fox [email protected] Sex worker, Australia;
Melbourne School of Population and Global
Health, University of Melbourne, Australia
PORN STUDIES
2018, VOL. 5, NO. 2, 197–199
https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2018.1434111
18.1434111&domain=pdf
mailto:[email protected]l.com
http://www.tandfonline.com
We are understood as victims of violence whose knowledge is
coerced and therefore
untrustworthy. Those of us who refuse to be victims are seen

instead as threats to the
social order – illegitimate, criminal subjects unable to be
assimilated into polite society.
Our bodies are understood reductively as vectors of disease;
either literally through unsub-
stantiated claims of heightened STI rates, or figuratively as
agents of moral decay. To
engage the services of sex workers or to consume the
pornography we produce is seen
as morally reprehensible. It is assumed that we are all cisgender
women who exist in con-
trast to good wives and good mothers in monogamous,
reproductive sexual relationships.
We are seen as a threat to these relationships. Just as our bodies
are believed to be infec-
tious, we are believed to pollute the social environment,
encouraging violence and under-
mining the heteronormative family unit. We are constructed
both as helpless victims and
as powerful manipulators of the social order.
This construction of the sex worker subject did not arise with
the coalition between the
religious right and sex worker exclusionary radical feminism. It
has been with us since at
least the earliest stages of British imperialism exemplified by
the 1864 Contagious Diseases
Act in British-occupied India. In the dominant social imaginary,
we have been understood
for a long historical period as subjects unable to speak or reason
for ourselves.
It is because of this durable epistemic injustice that it does not
occur to many non-sex
workers that we have uniquely useful, nuanced, and plural
perspectives on our own health

and work. Although we actively resist, most non-sex workers
continue to dismiss the epis-
temic resources we develop. They maintain their ignorance
about our lives while simul-
taneously claiming to have expertise over them. For sex workers
who experience
compounding historical injustices, such as transfemme workers,
Indigenous and First
Nations workers, or Black workers, this ongoing exclusion from
the dominant social ima-
ginary is even more thorough and violent.
The coalition between the religious right and sex worker
exclusionary radical feminism
in the United States is effective precisely because it can
comfortably expect non-sex
workers not to have access to sex worker perspectives. Non-sex
workers who may not
share the political orientation of the religious right may
nevertheless find it easier to
believe what the dominant social imaginary says about
pornography than to seek out
the epistemic resources developed by porn workers.
Sex workers remain stigmatized and hidden from the dominant
social imaginary in
ways which make it hard for others to understand us as potential
conversational partners
with expert knowledge about our own lives. The social
epistemological perspective I have
traced here clarifies how the marginalization of sex workers
makes possible the endurance
of myths which are at odds with our lived experience. This
perspective also clarifies the
wilful failure of dominantly situated persons to use the
epistemic resources we develop.

Furthermore, the erasure of porn and other sex workers from the
ongoing public dialo-
gue about pornography and health prevents us from addressing
the very real health crises
which we do face. At present, I live and work in Australia in a
jurisdiction where sex work is
legalized and licensed. Unlicensed and non-compliant workers
continue to face criminaliza-
tion and punitive interference by the police. The Australian
healthcare system provides ade-
quate care to a greater proportion of marginalized people,
including sex workers;
nonetheless, sex work stigma regularly affects the quality of the
care we receive.
Mikey Way, Australian porn worker and activist, noted to me in
conversation:
198 F. FOX
Medical practitioners here have no knowledge of the standard
practices in the porn industry
and often need to be taught them during medical appointments,
effectively requiring us to
out ourselves and place ourselves at risk of discriminatory
behaviour. On top of that, many
of the things we rely on as porn performers are under-
researched – e.g., the effects of men-
strual sponges on physical health, the impact of anal douches
and enemas on health, harm
minimization for [consensual] bareback sexual contact, and the
success or lack thereof of a
testing-based [STI] transmission prevention method.

Much of what Mikey brought up has parallels in my own
experience with other sectors
of sex work: discriminatory behaviour on the part of health
professionals, the requirement
to educate doctors, incorrect diagnoses based on false
assumptions about risk, and a
dearth of evidence related to my needs and health practices as a
worker.
Many of us face even greater barriers accessing mental health
care and finding provi-
ders who respect our occupation and do not assume, for
example, that we are sex workers
because we have experienced trauma, or that our work is the
sole cause of our ill-health.
American porn worker Andre Shakti (2017) addresses a number
of similar points related
to sex worker health in her excellent Rewire commentary ‘No
One in the Porn Industry Likes
a Broken Vagina’, including the lack of workplace protections,
the difficulty of accessing
private insurance in the United States as a sex worker, and the
potential legal ramifications
of disclosing sex worker status to health professionals.
As a scholar, activist, and worker dedicated to improving sex
worker access to appropriate
and adequate healthcare, I find the language of pornography as
a ‘public health crisis’ to be
deeply and deliberately disingenuous. It is the latest strategy in
a long history of epistemic
injustice committed against sex workers. Because of the
persistent erasure of porn and other
sex workers from the public dialogue on pornography and

health, it is difficult for us to join
this conversation and use it is as a platform to improve our own
occupational health and
safety. I call this an erasure because I want to be clear that we
are having ongoing conversa-
tions about our health. It is the responsibility of health
professionals and policy-makers to
listen to us. It is the responsibility of non-sex workers to exhibit
epistemic humility and
make an effort to understand and use the epistemic resources we
create.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
References
Ahmed, Aziza. 2011. ‘Feminism, Power, and Sex Work in the
Context of HIV/AIDS: Consequences for
Women’s Health.’ Harvard Journal of Law and Gender 34: 226–
258.
Dworkin, Andrea. 1980. ‘Beaver and Male Power in
Pornography.’ New Political Science 1 (4): 37–41.
Fricker, Miranda. 2009. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the
Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Medina, José. 2011. ‘The Relevance of Credibility Excess in a
Proportional View of Epistemic Injustice:
Differential Epistemic Authority and the Social Imaginary.’
Social Epistemology 25 (1): 15–35.
Morgan, Robin. 1980. ‘Theory and Practice: Pornography and
Rape.’ In Take Back the Night: Women on

Pornography, edited by Laura Lederer, 134–140. New York:
William Morrow.
Pohlhaus Jr, Gaile. 2012. ‘Relational Knowing and Epistemic
Injustice: Toward a Theory of Willful
Hermeneutical Ignorance.’ Hypatia 27 (4): 715–735.
Shakti, Andre. 2017. ‘No One in the Porn Industry Likes a
Broken Vagina.’ Rewire. February 17. Accessed
August 1, 2017. https://rewire.news/article/2017/02/17/no-one-
porn-industry-likes-broken-vagina/.
PORN STUDIES 199
https://rewire.news/article/2017/02/17/no-one-porn-industry-
likes-broken-vagina/Disclosure statementReferences
The Feminist Porn Book is the first collection to bring together
writ-ings by feminist porn producers and feminist porn scholars
to engage, challenge, and re-imagine pornography. As
collaborating
editors of this volume, we are three porn professors and one
porn direc-
tor who have had an energetic dialogue about feminist politics
and por-
nography for years. In their criticism, feminist opponents of
porn cast
pornography as a monolithic medium and industry and make
sweep-
ing generalizations about its production, its workers, its
consumers, and
its effects on society. These antiporn feminists respond to
feminist por-

nographers and feminist porn professors in several ways. They
accuse
us of deceiving ourselves and others about the nature of
pornography;
they claim we fail to look critically at any porn and hold up all
porn as
empowering. More typically, they simply dismiss out of hand
our abil-
ity or authority to make it or study it. But The Feminist Porn
Book offers
arguments, facts, and histories that cannot be summarily
rejected, by
providing on-the-ground and well-researched accounts of the
politics
of producing pleasure. Our agenda is twofold: to explore the
emergence
and significance of a thriving feminist porn movement, and to
gather
some of the best new feminist scholarship on pornography. By
putting
our voices into conversation, this book sparks new thinking
about the
richness and complexity of porn as a genre and an industry in a
way that
helps us to appreciate the work that feminists in the porn
industry are
doing, both in the mainstream and on its countercultural edges.
So to begin, we offer a broad definition of feminist porn, which
will
be fleshed out, debated, and examined in the pieces that follow.
As both
an established and emerging genre of pornography, feminist
porn uses
sexually explicit imagery to contest and complicate dominant
represen-

tations of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, ability, age,
body type,
and other identity markers. It explores concepts of desire,
agency, power,
beauty, and pleasure at their most confounding and difficult,
including
pleasure within and across inequality, in the face of injustice,
and against
the limits of gender hierarchy and both heteronormativity and
homo-
Introduction: The Politics of Producing Pleasure
CONSTANCE PENLEY, CELINE PARREÑAS SHIMIZU,
MIREILLE MILLER-YOUNG, and TRISTAN TAORMINO
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 9 11/14/12 2:24 PM
normativity. It seeks to unsettle conventional definitions of sex,
and
expand the language of sex as an erotic activity, an expression
of identity,
a power exchange, a cultural commodity, and even a new
politics.
Feminist porn creates alternative images and develops its own
aes-
thetics and iconography to expand established sexual norms and
dis-
courses. It evolved out of and incorporates elements from the
genres of
“porn for women,” “couples porn,” and lesbian porn as well as
feminist
photography, performance art, and experimental filmmaking. It

does
not assume a singular female viewer, but acknowledges multiple
female
(and other) viewers with many different preferences. Feminist
porn
makers emphasize the importance of their labor practices in
production
and their treatment of performers/sex workers; in contrast to
norms in
the mainstream sectors of the adult entertainment industry, they
strive
to create a fair, safe, ethical, consensual work environment and
often cre-
ate imagery through collaboration with their subjects.
Ultimately, femi-
nist porn considers sexual representation—and its production—a
site
for resistance, intervention, and change.
The concept of feminist porn is rooted in the 1980s—the height
of the
feminist porn wars in the United States. The porn wars (also
known as
the sex wars) emerged out of a debate between feminists about
the role of
sexualized representation in society and grew into a full-scale
divide that
has lasted over three decades. In the heyday of the women’s
movement
in the United States, a broad-based, grassroots activist struggle
over the
proliferation of misogynistic and violent representations in
corporate
media was superceded by an effort focused specifically on
legally ban-
ning the most explicit, and seemingly most sexist, media:

pornography.
Employing Robin Morgan’s slogan, “Porn is the theory, rape is
the prac-
tice,” antipornography feminists argued that pornography
amounted to
the commodification of rape. As a group called Women Against
Pornog-
raphy (WAP) began to organize in earnest to ban obscenity
across the
nation, other feminists, such as Lisa Duggan, Nan D. Hunter,
Kate Ellis,
and Carol Vance became vocal critics of what they viewed as
WAP’s ill-
conceived collusion with a sexually conservative Reagan
administration
and Christian Right, and their warping of feminist activism into
a moral
hygiene or public decency movement. Regarding antiporn
feminism as
a huge setback for the feminist struggle to empower women and
sexual
minorities, an energetic community of sex worker and sex-
radical activ-
ists joined anticensorship and sex-positive feminists to build the
founda-
tion for the feminist porn movement.1
The years that led up to the feminist porn wars are often
referred to as
the “golden age of porn,” a period from the early 1970s to the
early 1980s,
INTRODUCTION10

marked by large budget, high-production-value feature films
that were
theatrically released. A group of female porn performers who
worked
during the golden age—including Annie Sprinkle, Veronica
Vera, Can-
dida Royalle, Gloria Leonard, and Veronica Hart—formed a
support
group (the first of its kind) called Club 90 in New York City. In
1984, the
feminist arts collective Carnival Knowledge asked Club 90 to
participate
in a festival called The Second Coming, and explore the
question, “Is
there a feminist pornography?”2 It is one of the first
documented times
when feminists publicly posed and examined this critical query.
That same year, Club 90 member Candida Royalle founded
Femme
Productions to create a new genre: porn from a woman’s point
of view.3
Her films focused on storylines, high production values, female
plea-
sure, and romance. In San Francisco, publishers Myrna Elana
and Debo-
rah Sundahl, along with Nan Kinney and Susie Bright, co-
founded On
Our Backs, the first porn magazine by and for lesbians. A year
later, Kin-
ney and Sundahl started Fatale Video to produce and distribute
lesbian
porn movies that expanded the mission that On Our Backs
began.4 In the

mainstream adult industry, performer and registered nurse Nina
Hartley
began producing and starring in a line of sex education videos
for Adam
and Eve, with her first two titles released in 1984. A parallel
movement
began to emerge throughout Europe in the 1980s and 90s.5
By the 1990s, Royalle and Hartley’s success had made an
impact on
the mainstream adult industry. Major studios, including Vivid,
VCA, and
Wicked, began producing their own lines of couples porn that
reflected
Royalle’s vision and generally followed a formula of softer,
gentler, more
romantic porn with storylines and high production values. The
growth
of the “couples porn” genre signified a shift in the industry:
female desire
and viewership were finally acknowledged, if narrowly defined.
This
provided more selection for female viewers and more
opportunities
for women to direct mainstream heterosexual films, including
Veron-
ica Hart and Kelly Holland (aka Toni English). Independent,
lesbian-
produced lesbian porn grew at a slower pace, but Fatale Video
(which
continued to produce new films until the mid-1990s) finally had
some
company in its micro-genre with work by Annie Sprinkle, Maria
Beatty,
and Shar Rednour and Jackie Strano. Sprinkle also made the
first porn

film to feature a trans man, and Christopher Lee followed with a
film
starring an entire cast of trans men.6
In the early 2000s, feminist porn began to take hold in the
United
States with the emergence of filmmakers who specifically
identified
themselves and/or their work as feminist including Buck Angel,
Dana
Dane, Shine Louise Houston, Courtney Trouble, Madison
Young, and
11INTRODUCTION
Tristan Taormino. Simultaneously, feminist filmmakers in
Europe began
to gain notoriety for their porn and sexually explicit
independent films,
including Erika Lust in Spain; Anna Span and Petra Joy in the
UK; Emi-
lie Jouvet, Virginie Despentes, and Taiwan-born Shu Lea
Cheang in
France; and Mia Engberg, who created a compilation of feminist
porn
shorts that was famously funded by the Swedish government.
The modern feminist porn movement gained tremendous ground
in
2006 with the creation of The Feminist Porn Awards (FPAs).
Chanelle
Gallant and other staffers at sex-positive sex toy shop Good for

Her in
Toronto created the awards, which were open to films that met
one or
more of the following criteria:
(1) A woman had a hand in the production, writing, direction,
etc.
of the work; (2) It depicts genuine female pleasure; and/or (3) It
expands the boundaries of sexual representation on film and
chal-
lenges stereotypes that are often found in mainstream porn. And
of
course, it has to be hot! Overall, Feminist Porn Award winners
tend
to show movies that consider a female viewer from start to
finish.
This means that you are more likely to see active desire and
consent,
real orgasms, and women taking control of their own fantasies
(even
when that fantasy is to hand over that control).7
These criteria simultaneously assumed and announced a
viewership, an
authorship, an industry, and a collective consciousness.
Embedded in the
description is a female viewer and what she likely wants to
see—active
desire, consent, real orgasms, power, and agency—and doesn’t
want to
see: passivity, stereotypes, coercion, or fake orgasms. The
language is
broad enough so as not to be prescriptive, yet it places value on
agency
and authenticity, with a parenthetical nod to the possibility that
not

every woman’s fantasy is to be “in control.” While the
guidelines nota-
bly focus on a woman’s involvement in production, honored
filmmakers
run the gamut from self-identified feminist pornographers to
indepen-
dent female directors to mainstream porn producers; the broad
criteria
achieve a certain level of inclusiveness and acknowledge that a
range of
work can be read by audiences, critics, and academics as
feminist. The
FPA ceremony attracts and honors filmmakers from around the
world,
and each year since its inception, every aspect of the event has
grown,
from the number of films submitted to the number of attendees.
The
FPAs have raised awareness about feminist porn among a wider
audi-
ence and helped coalesce a community of filmmakers,
performers, and
fans; they highlight an industry within an industry, and, in the
process,
nurture this growing movement. In 2009, Dr. Laura Méritt
(Berlin) cre-
INTRODUCTION12
ated the PorYes campaign and the European Feminist Porn
Award mod-
eled on the FPAs. Because the movement has had the most

momentum
in Europe and North America, this volume concentrates on the
scholar-
ship and films of Western nations. We acknowledge this
limitation: for
feminist porn to be a global project, more would need to be
done to
include non-Western scholars and pornographers in the
conversation.
The work we do now, as scholars and producers, could not exist
without early examinations of the history and context of
pornogra-
phy, including Caught Looking: Feminism, Pornography and
Censorship
by FACT, the Feminist Anti-Censorship Task Force. Linda
Williams’s
groundbreaking 1989 Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the
“Frenzy of the
Visible” opened the door for feminist scholars to productively
examine
pornography as film and popular culture, as a genre and
industry, tex-
tually, historically, and sociologically. Laura Kipnis’s 1996
Bound and
Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America
made the
strongest possible case that “the differences between
pornography and
other forms of culture are less meaningful than their
similarities.”8 Jane
Juffer’s 1996 At Home with Pornography: Women, Sex, and
Everyday
Life urged us to pay close attention not just to the hardcore porn
typi-
cally consumed by men but to the uses of pornography in the

daily lives
of ordinary women. Since 1974 the film magazine Jump Cut has
pub-
lished more original scholarship on porn from a pro-sex,
anticensorship
perspective than any other media journal and by leading figures
in the
field, including Chuck Kleinhans, Linda Williams, Laura
Kipnis, Rich-
ard Dyer, Thomas Waugh, Eithne Johnson, Eric Schaefer, Peter
Lehman,
Robert Eberwein, and Joanna Russ. More recently, Drucilla
Cornell’s
Feminism and Pornography, Linda Williams’s Porn Studies, and
Pamela
Church Gibson’s More Dirty Looks: Gender, Pornography and
Power
cemented the value of porn scholarship.9 The Feminist Porn
Book seeks
to further that scholarship by adding a significant, valuable
component:
feminists creating pornography.
In this book, we identify a forty-year-long movement of
thinkers,
viewers, and makers, grounded in their desire to use
pornography to
explore new sexualities in representation. The work we have
collected
here defies other feminist conceptions of sexuality on screen as
forever
marked by a threat. That threat is the specter of violence against
women,
which is the primary way that pornography has come to be seen.
Claim-
ing that explicit sexual representations are nothing but gender

oppres-
sion means that pornography’s portrayal of explicit sex acts is a
form
of absolute discipline and subjugation for women. Within this
frame,
women who watch, study, or work in pornography bear the mark
of
13INTRODUCTION
false consciousness—as if they dabble in fire while ignoring the
risk of
burning.
The overwhelming popularity of women’s erotic literature,
illustrated
by the recent worldwide best seller, Fifty Shades of Grey by EL
James, and
the flourishing women’s fan fiction community from which it
emerged,
proves that there is great demand among women for explicit
sexual rep-
resentations. Millions of female readers embraced the Fifty
Shades of
Grey trilogy—which follows a young woman who becomes the
submis-
sive sexual partner to a dominant man—not for its depiction of
oppres-
sion, but for its exploration of erotic freedom. Women-authored
erotica
and pornography speaks to fantasies women actually have,
fantasies that

are located in a world where women must negotiate power
constantly,
including in their imaginations and desires. As with the criteria
for win-
ning a Feminist Porn Award, these books and the feminist porn
move-
ment show that “women are taking control of their own
fantasies (even
when that fantasy is to hand over control).”
With the emergence of new technologies that allow more people
than
ever to both create and consume pornography, the moral panic-
driven
fears of porn are ratcheted up once again. Society’s dread of
women who
own their desire, and use it in ways that confound expectations
of proper
female sexuality, persists. As Gayle Rubin shows, “Modern
Western
societies appraise sex acts according to a hierarchical system of
sexual
value.”10 Rubin maps this system as one where “the charmed
circle” is
perpetually threatened by the “outer limits” or those who fall
out of the
bounds of the acceptable. On the bottom of this hierarchy are
sexual acts
and identities outside heterosexuality, marriage, monogamy, and
repro-
duction. She argues that this hierarchy exists so as to justify the
privi-
leging of normative and constricted sexualities and the
denigration and
punishment of the “sexual rabble.”11 The Feminist Porn Book
showcases

precisely these punishable sex acts and identities that are
outside of the
charmed circle and proudly sides with the sexual rabble.
Spotlighting the
numerous ways people confront the power of sexuality, this
book paves
the way for exploring the varieties of what were previously
dismissed as
perversities. At the same time, feminist porn can also expose
what passes
for “normal” sexuality at the center of that charmed circle.
One of the unfortunate results of the porn wars was the fixing of
an antiporn camp versus a sex-positive/pro-porn camp. On one
side, a
capital P “Pornography” was a visual embodiment of the
patriarchy and
violence against women. On the other, Porn was defended as
“speech,”
or as a form that should not be foreclosed because it might some
day be
transformed into a vehicle for women’s erotic expression. The
nuances
INTRODUCTION14
and complexities of actual lowercase “pornographies” were lost
in the
middle. For example, sex-positive thinking does not always
accom-
modate the ways in which women are constrained by sexuality.
But

the problem with antipornography’s assumption that sex is
inherently
oppressive to women—that women are debased when they have
sex on
camera—ignores and represses the sexuality of women. Hence,
for us,
sex-positive feminist porn does not mean that sex is always a
ribbon-tied
box of happiness and joy. Instead, feminist porn captures the
struggle to
define, understand, and locate one’s sexuality. It recognizes the
impor-
tance of deferring judgment about the significance of sex in
intimate and
social relations, and of not presuming what sex means for
specific peo-
ple. Feminist porn explores sexual ideas and acts that may be
fraught,
confounding, and deeply disturbing to some, and liberating and
empow-
ering to others. What we see at work here are competing
definitions of
sexuality that expose the power of sexuality in all of its
unruliness.
Because feminist porn acknowledges that identities are socially
situ-
ated and that sexuality has the power to discipline, punish, and
subju-
gate, that unruliness may involve producing images that seem
oppressive,
degrading, or violent. Feminist porn does not shy away from the
darker
shades of women’s fantasies. It creates a space for realizing the
contradic-
tory ways in which our fantasies do not always line up with our

politics
or ideas of who we think we are. As Tom Waugh argues,
participation in
pornography, in his case as spectator, can be a “process of
social identity
formation.”12 Indeed, social identities and ideas are formed in
the act of
viewing porn, but also in making and writing about it.
Strongly influenced by other social movements in the realm of
sexu-
ality, like the sex-positive, LGBT rights, and sex workers’
rights move-
ments, feminist porn aims to build community, to expand liberal
views
on gender and sexuality, and to educate and empower
performers and
audiences. It favors fair, ethical working conditions for sex
workers and
the inclusion of underrepresented identities and practices.
Feminist porn
vigorously challenges the hegemonic depictions of gender, sex
roles, and
the pleasure and power of mainstream porn. It also challenges
the anti-
porn feminist interpretive framework for pornography as
bankrupt of
progressive sexual politics. As a budding movement, it
promotes aes-
thetic and ethical practices that intervene in dominant sexual
represen-
tation and mobilize a collective vision for change. This erotic
activism,
while in no way homogeneous or consistent, works within and
against
the marketplace to imagine new ways to envision gender and

sexuality
in our culture.
But feminist porn is not only an emergent social movement and
an
15INTRODUCTION
alternative cultural production: it is a genre of media made for
profit. Part
of a multibillion dollar business in adult entertainment media,
feminist
porn is an industry within an industry. Some feminist porn is
produced
independently, often created and marketed by and for
underrepresented
minorities like lesbians, transgender folks, and people of color.
But femi-
nist porn is also produced within the mainstream adult industry
by fem-
inists whose work is funded and distributed by large companies
such
as Vivid Entertainment, Adam and Eve, and Evil Angel
Productions.
As outliers or insiders (or both) to the mainstream industry,
feminists
have adapted different strategies for subverting dominant
pornographic
norms and tropes. Some reject nearly all elements of a typical
adult film,
from structure to aesthetics, while others tweak the standard
formula

(from “foreplay” to “come shot”) to reposition and prioritize
female sex-
ual agency. Although feminist porn makers define their work as
distinct
from mainstream porn, it is nonetheless viewed by a range of
people,
including people who identify as feminist and specifically seek
it out, as
well as other viewers who don’t. Feminist porn is gaining
momentum
and visibility as a market and a movement. This movement is
made up of
performers turned directors, independent queer producers,
politicized
sex workers, porn geeks and bloggers, and radical sex
educators. These
are the voices found here. This is the perfect time for The
Feminist Porn
Book.
In this book, we place academics alongside and in conversation
with
sex industry workers to bridge the divide between rigorous
research and
critique, and real world challenges and interventions. In Jill
Nagle’s semi-
nal work Whores and Other Feminists, she announced, “This
time . . .
sex worker feminists speak not as guests, nor as disgruntled
exiles, but
as insiders to feminism.”13 As in Nagle’s collection, here those
working in
the porn industry speak for themselves, and their narratives
illuminate
their complicated experiences, contradict one another, and
expose the

damaging one-dimensional rhetoric of the antiporn feminist
resurgence.
Like feminist porn itself, the diverse voices in this collection
challenge
entrenched, divisive dichotomies of academic and popular,
scholar and
sex worker, pornographer and feminist.
In the first section of the book, Making Porn, Debating Porn,
feminist
porn pioneers Betty Dodson, Candida Royalle, and Susie Bright
give a
grounded history of feminist porn as it emerged in the 1980s in
response
to the limiting sexual imagination of both mainstream porn and
anti-
porn feminism. Providing a window into the generative and
deeply con-
tested period of the sex wars, these feminist pornographers
highlight the
stakes and energies surrounding the birth of feminist porn
activism in
INTRODUCTION16
the face of an antiporn feminism that ignored, misunderstood, or
vilified
them and their efforts. Bright’s account of watching her first
porn film,
sitting among suspicious men in a dark adult theater, sets the
stage for
how the invention of the VHS player shifted women’s

consumption of
porn and dramatically changed the marketplace.
In the last decade, a new war on porn has been resurrected and
rede-
fined by Gail Dines, Sheila Jeffries, Karen Boyle, Pamela Paul,
Robert
Jensen, and others. Feona Attwood and Clarissa Smith show
how this
resurgent antiporn movement resists theory and evidence, and
tenden-
tiously reframes the production and consumption of porn as a
mode of
sex trafficking, a form of addiction, or a public health problem
of epi-
demic proportions. Attwood and Smith’s work powerfully
exposes how
feminist porn remains challenged and often censored in
contemporary
popular discourse. Lynn Comella focuses on the consequences
of por-
nography going public. She examines one of the most
significant ele-
ments of the emergence of feminist porn: the growth of sex-
positive,
women-owned-and-run sex shops and a grassroots sex education
move-
ment that create space for women to produce, find, and consume
new
kinds of pornography.
Watching and Being Watched examines how desire and agency
inform pornographic performance, representation, and
spectatorship.
Sinnamon Love and Mireille Miller-Young explore the complex
position

of African American women as they watch, critique, and create
repre-
sentations of black women’s sexuality. Dylan Ryan and Jane
Ward take up
the concept of authenticity in porn: what it means, how it’s
read, and why
it is (or is not) crucial to feminist porn performance and
spectatorship.
Ingrid Ryberg looks at how public screenings of queer, feminist,
and les-
bian porn can create spaces for sexual empowerment. Tobi Hill-
Meyer
complicates Ryberg’s analysis by documenting who, until very
recently,
was left out of these spaces: trans women. Keiko Lane echoes
Ryberg’s
argument of the radical potential of queer and feminist porn and
offers
it as a tool for understanding and expressing desire among
marginalized
communities.
The intersection of feminist porn as pedagogy and feminist
pedago-
gies of porn is highlighted in Doing It In School. As porn
scholars, Con-
stance Penley and Ariane Cruz grapple with teaching and
studying porn
from two very different perspectives. Kevin Heffernan offers a
history of
sex instruction in film and contrasts it with work from Nina
Hartley and
Tristan Taormino in educational porn movies. Hartley discusses
how
she has used porn to teach throughout her twenty-five-plus
years in the

industry, and Taormino outlines her practice as a feminist
pornographer
17INTRODUCTION
offering organic, fair-trade porn that takes into account the
labor of its
workers. Performer Danny Wylde documents his personal
experiences
with power, consent, and exploitation against a backdrop of
antiporn
rhetoric. Lorelei Lee offers a powerful manifesto that demands
we all
become better students in order to achieve a more nuanced,
discerning,
and thoughtful discourse about porn and sex.
Now Playing: Feminist Porn takes up questions of hyper-
corporeality, genderqueerness, transfemininity, feminized
masculinity,
transgressive racial performance, and disability. Jiz Lee
discusses how
they14 use their transgressive female body and genderqueer
identity to
defy categories. April Flores describes herself as “a fat Latina
with pale
skin, tattoos, and fire engine red hair,” and gives her unique
take on
being (and not being) a Big Beautiful Woman (BBW) performer.
Bobby
Noble explores the role of trans men and the interrogation of
mascu-

linities in feminist porn, while renowned trans male performer
Buck
Angel explodes sex/gender dichotomies by embodying his
identity of
a man with a vagina. Also concerned with the complex
representation
and performance of manhood in feminist pornography, Celine
Parreñas
Shimizu asks how race shapes the work of straight Asian male
performer
Keni Styles. Loree Erickson, a feminist pornographer and PhD
candi-
date, represents not only a convergence of scholarship and sex
work, but
one of the most overlooked subjects in pornography and one de-
erot-
icized in society: “queer femmegimp.” Emerging to speak from
group
identities previously missing or misnamed, the pieces in this
section are
by people who show the beauty of their desires, give shape to
their reali-
ties, reject and reclaim attributions made by others, and
describe how
they create sexual worlds that denounce inequality.
Throughout the book, we explore the multiple definitions of
feminist
porn, but we refuse to fix its boundaries. Feminist porn is a
genre and a
political vision. And like other genres of film and media,
feminist porn
shares common themes, aesthetics, and goals even though its
parameters
are not clearly demarcated. Because it is born out of a feminism
that is

not one thing but a living, breathing, moving creation, it is
necessar-
ily contested—an argument, a polemic, and a debate. Because it
is both
genre and practice, we must engage it as both: by reading and
analyzing
its cultural texts and examining the ideals, intentions, and
experiences
of its producers. In doing so, we offer an alternative to
unsubstantiated
oversimplifications and patronizing rhetoric. We acknowledge
the com-
plexities of watching, creating, and analyzing pornographies.
And we
believe in the radical potential of feminist porn to transform
sexual rep-
resentation and the way we live our sexualities.
INTRODUCTION18
Notes
1. Robin Morgan, “Theory and Practice: Pornography and
Rape,” in Take Back the
Night, ed. Laura Lederer (New York: William Morrow, 1980),
139. On the porn wars
or sex wars, see Carolyn Bronstein, Battling Pornography: The
American Feminist
Antipornography Movement, 1976–1986 (Cambridge, MA:
Cambridge University
Press, 2011); Lisa Duggan and Nan D. Hunter, Sex Wars:
Sexual Dissent and Politi-

cal Culture (New York: Routledge, 1995); Carole Vance, ed.
Pleasure and Danger:
Exploring Female Sexuality (Boston and London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1984);
Pamela Church Gibson and Roma Gibson, eds., Dirty Looks:
Women, Pornography
and Power …
Introduction Brown Sugar
Theorizing Black Women’s Sexual Labor in Pornography
You are not supposed to talk about liking sex because you are
already
assumed to be a whore.—J E A N N I E PE PPE R
In a private gathering following the East Coast Video Show in
Atlantic City
in 2002, legendary performer Jeannie Pepper received a special
achievement
award for twenty years in the porn industry, the longest career
for any black
adult actress. “It’s been a long, hard road,” she said to the
audience of adult
entertainment performers, insiders, and fans as she accepted the
award from
popular adult film actor Ron Jeremy. “There weren’t many
black women in
the business when I started.”1 In 1982, when Jeannie Pepper
began her career
as an actress in X- rated films, there were few black women in
the adult film
industry. Performing in more than two hundred films over three
decades,
Jeannie broke barriers to achieve porn star status and opened

doors for other
women of color to follow.2 She played iconic roles as the
naughty maid, the
erotically possessed “voodoo girl,” and the incestuous sister in
films like Guess
Who Came at Dinner?, Let Me Tell Ya ’Bout Black Chicks, and
Black Taboo. She
traveled abroad as a celebrity, working and living in Germany
for seven years.
In a career that spanned the rise of video, DVD, and the
Internet, Jeannie
watched the pornography business transform from a quasi- licit
cottage in-
dustry into a sophisticated, transnational, and corporate-
dominated industry.
In 1997 Jeannie was the first African American porn actress to
be inducted
into the honored Adult Video News (AVN) Hall of Fame. By all
accounts,
Jeannie had an exceptionally long and successful career for an
adult actress:
she was well liked by her colleagues, and was a mentor to
young women new
to the porn business. Yet, as her acceptance speech reveals, her
experience of
being a black woman in the porn industry was shaped by
formidable chal-
lenges. As in other occupations in the United States, black
women in the adult
FIGURE I. 1. Jeannie Pepper during her tour of Europe, Cannes,
France, 1986.
Courtesy of JohnDragon.com.

B ROW N SU G A R 3
film industry are devalued workers who confront systemic
marginalization
and discrimination.
Jeannie became a nude model and adult film actress in her
twenties be-
cause she enjoyed watching pornography and having sex, and
she was keen
to become a path- maker in an industry with few black female
stars: “I just
wanted to show the world. Look, I’m black and I’m beautiful.
How come
there are not more black women doing this?”3 She felt
especially beautiful
when in 1986 she did a photo shoot with her photographer
husband, a Ger-
man expatriate known as John Dragon, on the streets of Paris.
Dressed only
in a white fur coat and heels, Jeannie walked around, posing in
front of the
Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe, cafés, luxury cars, and shops.
Coyly allowing
her coat to drape open (or off altogether) at opportune moments,
she drew
the attention of tourists and residents alike. She imagined
herself as Josephine
Baker, admired in a strange new city for her beauty, class, and
grace. Finding
esteem and fearlessness in showing the world her blackness and
beauty, even
in the cityscapes of Paris, Hamburg, or Rome, Jeannie felt she

embodied an
emancipated black female sexuality.
Still, she remained conscious of the dual pressures of needing to
fight for
recognition and opportunity in the adult business, especially in
the United
States, and having to defend her choice to pursue sex work as a
black woman.4
FIGURE I.2. Jeannie Pepper poses in the nude before onlookers
outside of the Carlton
Hotel, Cannes, France, 1986. Courtesy of JohnDragon.com.
4 I N T RO D U C T I O N
As Jeannie asserts in the epigraph, she perceived that part of the
difficulty of
being a professional “whore”—in photographs and films—was
the expec-
tation that she was not supposed to talk about or inhabit her
sexuality in
ways that would seem to exacerbate harmful stereotypes about
black women,
namely their alleged hypersexuality. Black women sexual
performers and
workers have had to confront a prevailing stigma: if all black
women are con-
sidered to be sexually deviant, then those who use sex to make a
living are the
greatest threat to any form of respectable black womanhood.
“Brown sugar,” this popular imaginary of African American
women, satu-

rates popular culture. In songs, films, music videos, and
everyday life, the dis-
course of brown sugar references the supposed essence of black
female sexu-
ality. It exposes historical mythologies about the desirable yet
deviant sexual
nature of black women. Publicly scorned and privately enjoyed,
the alluring,
transformative, and supposedly perverse sexuality of black
women is thor-
oughly cemented in the popular imaginary. Seen as particularly
sexual, black
women continue to be fetishized as the very embodiment of
excessive or non-
normative sexuality. What is most problematic about this sticky
fetishism—in
addition to the fact that it spreads hurtful and potentially
dangerous stereo-
types with very real material effects—is that the desire for
black women’s
sexuality, while so prevalent, is unacknowledged and seen as
illegitimate in
most popular discourse.
As a metaphor, brown sugar exposes how black women’s
sexuality, or more
precisely their sexual labor, has been historically embedded in
culture and
the global economy. Now a key component of the profitable
industries of
entertainment and sex in the United States, brown sugar played
a central
role in the emergence of Western nation- states and the
capitalist economies.
Across the American South and the Caribbean, black slaves
cultivated and

manufactured sugar that sweetened food, changed tastes, and
energized fac-
tory workers in the Industrial Revolution.5 In addition to
physical labor, their
sexual labor was used to “give birth to white wealth,”6 and was
thus the key
mechanism for reproducing the entire plantation complex.
“Sugar was a mur-
derous commodity,” explains Vincent Brown, “a catastrophe for
workers that
grew it.”7 The grinding violence and danger that attended
sugar’s cultivation
in colonial plantations literally consumed black women’s labor
and bodies.8
Brown sugar, as a trope, illuminates circuits of domination over
black
women’s bodies and exposes black women’s often ignored
contributions to
the economy, politics, and social life. Like sugar that has
dissolved without a
trace, but has nonetheless sweetened a cup of tea, black
women’s labor and the
mechanisms that manage and produce it are invisible but
nonetheless there.
B ROW N SU G A R 5
To take the metaphor a bit further, the process of refining cane
sugar from its
natural brown state into the more popular white, everyday
sweetener reflects
how black women, like brown sugar, represent a raw body in
need of refine-

ment and prone to manipulation. The lewdness and raw quality
associated
with brown sugar in popular discourse today thus shows how
ideas about
black women as naturally savage, supersexual beings have
flavored popular
tastes even as they have driven a global appetite for (their)
sweetness. While
processed white sugar is held up as the ideal, there remains a
powerful desire,
indeed a taste, for the real thing.
The metaphor of brown sugar exposes how representations
shape the world
in which black women come to know themselves. But
stereotypes usually
have dual valences: they may also be taken up by the oppressed
and refash-
ioned to mean something quite different. Although brown sugar
has been
used as a phrase to talk about black women as lecherous,
prurient sex ob-
jects, unlike other tropes such as the Mammy, Jezebel, or
Sapphire, it conveys
sweetness, affection, and respect. In African American
vernacular speech and
song, brown sugar often expresses adoration, loveliness, and
intimacy even
as it articulates lust, sensuality, and sex (along with other
illicit, pleasure-
giving materials like heroin or marijuana).9 As in the saying,
“the blacker the
berry, the sweeter the juice,” brown sugar is sometimes used by
black people
to speak to the complex pleasures they derive from their own
eroticism. In

this book brown sugar references a trope that black women must
always bro-
ker. Sometimes they refashion this trope to fit their needs. As
Jeannie Pepper
shows, some black women choose to perform brown sugar—the
perverse,
pleasurable imago projected onto black women’s bodies—in an
effort to ex-
press themselves as desired and desiring subjects. Given the
brutal history
of sexual expropriation and objectification of black bodies,
these attempts
by black women to reappropriate a sexualized image can be seen
as a bid to
reshape the terms assigned to black womanhood. In this case,
brown sugar
might be a realm for intervention in their sexualization.
Some black women might view Jeannie Pepper, the porn star, as
a menace
to the hard- fought image of respectable womanhood they have
sought to cre-
ate for more than one hundred years.10 Nevertheless, even
though black sex
workers know that their labor is seen to constitute a betrayal of
respectable
black womanhood, some pursue it. Their reasons may be purely
economic:
it’s a job, and they must survive and take care of their families,
after all. Or, in
Jeannie Pepper’s case, their motivations could be to take
pleasure in “show-
[ing] the world” a beautiful and sexually self- possessed black
woman. While
such a move to represent oneself may be viewed, especially by
many in the

African American community, as perpetuating historical and
ongoing stereo-
types born out of horrible abuse, it is a powerful statement
about how some
black women redefine what respectable womanhood means for
them. For
Jeannie, more important than respectability, is respect.11
Respect means being
acknowledged and valued for her performative sexual labor and
treated as a
star. Jeannie Pepper’s story illustrates how the perception of
black women as
hypersexual, which has persisted since the slave trade, has made
it extremely
difficult to acknowledge that some black women have an
interest in leverag-
ing hypersexuality. But it is possible to leverage this
treacherous discourse and
the black women who speak to us in A Taste for Brown Sugar
explain how.
They use the seductive power of brown sugar to intervene in
representation,
to assert their varied sexual subjectivities, and to make a living.
In the process
of making tough choices about how and when to commodify
their sexualities,
these women offer more complex readings of black gender and
sexual identity
than now prevail in the academy and popular culture. Porn is an
important
terrain in which this alternative sexual politics can emerge.

Pornography as Culture and Industry
Pornography is a highly controversial category, not just for its
content but
because it sparks heated debates about its role in society. Most
often por-
nography is defined as a genre of mass- produced written or
visual materials
designed to arouse or titillate the reader or viewer. A facet of
entertainment
culture and a domain of the commercial sex industry since its
modern cir-
culation in literature, photography, and film in the nineteenth
century, por-
nography has been powerfully regulated as the explicit, obscene
edge of ac-
ceptable forms of sexuality. It is also more than a kind of object
or media;
pornography is an idiom that communicates potent, blunt, and
transgres-
sive sexuality operating at the boundaries of licit and illicit,
sacred and pro-
fane, private and public, and underground and mainstream
culture. Hence, as
Walter Kendrick argues, “ ‘pornography’ names an argument,
not a thing.”12
Pornography becomes a map of a culture’s borders, a “detailed
blueprint of
the culture’s anxieties, investments, contradictions,”13 and a
site of cultural
contest about social access and social prohibition.14 Focusing
on pornogra-
phy since the rise of the modern adult film industry in the
1970s, A Taste for
Brown Sugar analyzes the operation of black women’s

sexuality—its condi-
tions of production, modes of representation, and strategic
performances—
in both the industry and idiom of pornography. This book traces
the work of
B ROW N SU G A R 7
the black female body in pornography as a material object, but
it also delves
into pornography’s function as a cultural discourse about
racialized sexuality.
Does pornography really make much of an impact on how we
view sex,
race, and gender? One argument about porn’s relevance is that it
is big busi-
ness with big cultural effects. Many critics have cited the broad
impact of por-
nography on American life since its legalization during the
sexual revolution
of the 1960s and ’70s.15 With revenues of nearly $8–$10 billion
a year, the adult
entertainment industry is one of the largest entertainment
industries in the
United States.16 Pornographic films, videos, and websites are
one part of this
larger industry that includes exotic dance clubs, phone sex,
magazines, peep
booths, and sex toys. While Hollywood makes nearly four
hundred films each
year, the adult industry makes more than ten thousand.17
This book focuses on photographic film and digital media from

the turn of
the twentieth century to the early twenty- first, a period during
which pornog-
raphy became a “phenomenon of media culture and a question
of mass pro-
duction.”18 Indeed, mechanisms of mass production and
consumption have
become central to the growing convergence of sexual aesthetics
and media
industries, and their prominent role in defining private fantasies
and pub-
lic spaces. In recent years we have seen this convergence
happening within
popular culture, from “porno chic” fashion, to reality TV shows
such as The
Girls Next Door, to mainstream films like Zack and Miri Make a
Porno and
Boogie Nights, to adult actress and entrepreneur Jenna Jameson
being inter-
viewed on Oprah. Porn as an entrance into everyday consumer
life can be seen
as producing what many critics have termed the “pornification”
or “porne-
tration” of culture.19 Previously illicit subcultures,
communities, and sexual
practices have been brought into the public eye through
pornography, and in
the process they have made their way into other modes of
culture, including
fashion, art, mainstream film, music, and television. Celebrity
sex tapes, po-
litical sex scandals, and popular sex panics around issues like
youth “sexting”
have popularized the idea of public sex as a symptom of a
pornographic main-
stream media; they ignite worry that what is being projected and

amplified is
the worst of American sexual experience in terms of taste,
values, and poli-
tics. Indeed, based on documentaries such as Chyng Sun’s The
Price of Plea-
sure, one would imagine that the biggest threat to society is not
war, torture,
poverty, or environmental degradation, but the proliferation of
pornography
and its representation of “bad sex.”20 Rather than an act of
romance, intimacy,
or love, bad sex is seen as the product of the narcissistic, self-
interested char-
acter of our culture. This unfeeling, vulgar kind of sex rubs up
against expec-
tations of personal morality and rational social values rooted in
traditional,
bourgeois views of sex for the reproduction of proper families
and citizens.
Thus, fears of bad sex expose powerful anxieties about how
changing mean-
ings and practices around sex might lead to a downward spiral,
a debasing of
social life and the nation.21 More than a debate about how sex
is represented
in our culture, porn is a site of moral panic about sex itself.
As an act of speech that speaks the unspeakable, pornography
has been
defined by what the state has tried to suppress.22 In the process
of pushing

against censorship and obscenity regulation, porn presses and
redefines the
limits of the culture of sex. Media technologies have played a
leading role
in making porn increasingly accessible and part of the public
domain. With
so many genres and subgenres of erotic fascination making up
pornogra-
phy’s “kaleidoscopic variorum” we might even think of it in a
plural sense:
as pornographies.23 Yet despite its vast proliferation, increased
pluralism, and
rich potential for the reimagining of allowable forms of desire,
pornography’s
commodification of sex has produced what Richard Fung notes
as a “limited
vision of what constitutes the erotic.”24 That porn reproduces
predictable,
indeed stereotypical, representations of sexuality for an
increasingly niche-
oriented marketplace is not surprising given its profit motive.
This limited
erotic vision may also be the result of sexually conservative
regulatory sys-
tems, such as obscenity laws, which have defined what may or
may not be
broadcast via media technologies like television or the Internet
or sold in
stores, whether locally or across state lines.25 In addition to
affecting media
policy, the regulation of sexual culture has reinforced severely
narrow repre-
sentations of gender, desire, and sexuality that make it difficult
to construct
alternative imaginaries, even in supposedly transgressive spaces
like pornog-

raphy.26 Nevertheless, pornography reliably takes up the
challenge of subvert-
ing norms, even as it catalyzes and perpetuates them. The
fantasies it produces
offer fertile spaces to read how eroticism, proliferation,
commodification, and
regulation get played out at the very heart of our public
consciousness.
In many ways porn is a political theater where—in addition to
gender, sex,
and class—racial distinctions and barriers are reiterated even as
they may
also be manipulated or transformed.27 Race, or more properly
racialization,
the process by which meanings are made and power is
structured around
racial differences, informs the production side of commercial
pornography
in at least two important ways: in the titillating images
themselves and in the
behind- the- scenes dynamics where sex workers are hired to
perform in the
production of those images.28 Black women, and other people
of color, have
historically been included in pornography to the extent that its
producers
B ROW N SU G A R 9
seek to commoditize, circulate, and enable the consumption of
their images.
Their bodies represent stereotypes of racial, gender, and sexual
difference and

the fantasies or deeper meanings behind them.29 Until recently,
when black
women and men started to produce and circulate their own
pornographies,
those fantasies were seldom authored by black people.
Black women’s images in hardcore porn show that the titillation
of por-
nography is inseparable from the racial stories it tells. A central
narrative is
that black women are both desirable and undesirable objects:
desirable for
their supposed difference, exoticism, and sexual potency, and
undesirable be-
cause these very same factors threaten or compromise governing
notions of
feminine sexuality, heterosexual relations, and racial hierarchy.
Pornography
did not create these racial stories, these fraught imaginings of
black being and
taboo interactions across racial difference, but it uses them.
What interests
me is the work of racial fantasy, particularly fantasy involving
black women.
Given our racial past and present, what is the labor of the black
female body
in pornography? As my informants show, the players of
pornography’s racial
imaginarium are the ones who can best discern the crucial
implications of
these fantasies for black women’s sexual identities and
experiences. They
reveal how some black porn actresses tactically employ the
performative
labor of hypersexuality to intervene in their representation,
“contest it from

within,”30 and provide a deeper, more complex reading of their
erotic lives.
Working On, Within, and Against
Historically, enslaved black women were marked as undesirable
objects for
white men due to their primitive sexuality. These women, as the
myth went,
were so supersexual that they virtually forced white men into
sex they os-
tensibly did not want to have.31 Enslaved black women needed
their sexual
powers because otherwise these unwitting white men would
never desire
them. This myth concealed, denied, and suppressed the plain
sexual exploi-
tation of enslaved and emancipated African American women by
casting the
demand for their sexuality, both in images and as labor, as
impossible. Chief
to the racial fetishism of black women in pornography, then, is
a double focus:
a voyeurism that looks but also does not look, that obsessively
enjoys, lingers
over, and takes pleasure in the black female body even while it
declares that
body as strange, Other, and abject.32
Black women are of course aware of this regime of racial
fetishism in rep-
resentation (and the social and legal apparatus that sustains it),
which li-
censes the voyeuristic consumption of their bodies as forbidden
sex objects.

As Jeannie Pepper noted, black women are always “already
assumed to be”
whores. She, then, uses this insistent myth in her own work.
That is, Jeannie
Pepper employs her own illicit desirability in a kind of sexual
repertoire. By
precisely staging her sexuality so as to acknowledge and evoke
the taboo
desire for it, she shows that racial fetishism can actually be
taken up by its ob-
jects and used differently. Standing nude on the beach in the
South of France
as throngs of tourists look on, Jeannie takes pleasure in
presenting herself as
irresistibly captivating and attractive in the face of the denial of
those very
capacities. In this way, Jeannie Pepper exposes the disgust for
black female
sexuality as a facade for what is really forbidden desire. It is a
myth that can
be reworked and redeployed for one’s own purposes.
Jeannie Pepper shows us how black women—particularly sex
workers—
mobilize what I term “illicit eroticism” to advance themselves
in adult enter-
tainment’s sexual economy.33 Actively confronting the taboo
nature and
fraught history of black female sexuality, black sex workers
choose to pur-
sue a prohibited terrain of labor and performance. Illicit
eroticism provides

a framework to understand the ways in which black women put
hypersexu-
ality to use. They do so in an industry that is highly stratified
with numerous
structures of desire and “tiers of desirability.”34 Black women’s
illicit erotic
work manipulates and represents racialized sexuality—
including hyper-
sexuality—in order to assert the value of their erotic capital.35
In an industry where they are marginal to the most lucrative
produc-
tions, and where the quality of productions are largely based on
demand,
black women, along with Latinas and Asian women, face a lack
of opportu-
nities, pay disparities, and racially biased treatment in
comparison to white
women.36 Black women are devalued in terms of their erotic
worth, and they
are critical of how they are made lesser players in
pornography’s theater of
fantasy. These women seek to mobilize their bodies to position
themselves to
the greatest advantage. This mobilization requires a complex
knowledge of
what it means to “play the game” and to “play up” race by
moving and per-
forming strategically. However, because not everyone is able to
increase their
status in the established hierarchies of desire, black women
employing illicit
erotic labor face a complicated dilemma: lacking erotic capital,
how can they
produce more, and in the process enhance their erotic power,
social signifi-

cance, and economic position?
One strategy for black women in pornography is to work
extremely hard to
carve out space and fabricate themselves as marketable and
desirable actors.
Their appearance is important to them; they invest a great deal
of time and
money on self- fashioning and taking care of their bodies in
order to achieve
FIGURE I. 3. Jeannie Pepper standing before the Eiffel Tower
in Paris, France, during
her European tour in 1986. Courtesy of JohnDragon.com.
competitiveness. Performance is critical; most performers
attempt to portray
seductive eroticism and sexual skill, which may give them an
edge with con-
sumers and added appreciation by other actors and producers. In
addition to
appearing in adult videos, they actively cultivate themselves as
“porn stars,”
which includes creating a captivating persona and becoming a
savvy finan-
cial manager and entrepreneur. Selling themselves as brands or
commodities
means spending a great deal of time on promotion, including at
photo shoots,
appearances at trade conventions and entertainment- industry

events, and on
their websites, social networks, and chat rooms, to foster a fan
base. All these
spaces are spaces of work and contestation where black women
must fight
for their worth. Even more important, these primarily young,
working- class
black women do all this while also acting as mothers, aunts,
daughters, sisters,
and partners called upon to play important caretaking roles in
their families.
They are women who use their bodies as resources and their
determined intel-
lect as tools to make a living, and sometimes make a name too.
Marginalized and exploited in the labor market, many young,
working-
class black women today identify the sex industries as preferred
spaces to
make a living for themselves and their families.37 This is not
new. As the his-
tory of black sexual labor attests, this choice has been recorded
as part of
their negotiations of the labor market since slavery and through
the Great
Depression.38 Black sex workers make a living when they take
sex, which is
associated with leisure and play, and turn it into what Robin D.
G. Kelley calls
“play- labor.”39 In commodifying sexuality, play- labor does
not necessarily re-
sist or overturn hegemonic institutions of power like patriarchy
and racial
capitalism. That is not its purpose. Play- labor is one strategy
by which black
women (and others) try to negotiate the existing political

economy by using
their corporeal resources, which are some of the only resources
many black
working- class women may in fact possess. Given that the other
options open
to working- class black women appear in service, care work, or
other contin-
gent labor industries, the “choice” to pursue sex work is of
course constrained
within a modern capitalist system where all work is exploited
work, and black
women’s work is super exploited.40
Part of a continuum of sex work—including streetwalking,
private es-
corting, erotic dancing, modeling, phone sex, and S/M role
play—and part
of a history of black women working in underground or gray
economies as
“mojo women . . . bootleggers, numbers backers and bawdy
house operators,”
black women’s work in pornography maneuvers within illicit
and licit sexual
economies to pursue what Sharon Harley describes as “personal
and commu-
B ROW N SU G A R 13
nity survival.”41 Their maneuvers are generally prompted by
market concerns,
like porn’s relatively flexible and high- income work, but also
by nonmarket
motives, such as sexual pleasure and the enjoyment of erotic
performance.

Analyzing 1880s Political Views

Analyzing 1880s Political Views

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