San
Francisco State University Cinema Studies Graduate Student Conference
October 3rd and 4th, 2003
October 3rd and 4th, 2003
Keynote Speaker
1:00pm Saturday, October 4
Linda Williams
Director of Film Studies, UC Berkeley
Skin Flicks on the Racial Border: Pornography, Exploitation and Interracial Lust
What happens when racialized bodies become the subject of pornography's unique brand of confessing the "truths" of sex? In a genre that suspends narrative to scrutinze the sights and sounds of sexual acts that are all about the interpenetration of bodies--tongue into mouth, mouth around penis, penis in vagina or anus, etc. what does it mean when the interpenetrating bodies are differently raced? Finally, what does it mean when taboos enforcing the racial border are systematically violated and "black cock" penetrates "white pussy"? In many parts of American culture recognizing racial differences can seem to be, and sometimes is, synonymous with racism itself. Yet, in a culture that has become determined to be officially color blind, it can be refreshing, not to mention exciting, to find an arena in which skin tone, ass shape, body contour becomes a source of erotic pleasure. Racial stereotypes once used to elicit fear and revulsion are now used to cultivate a specialized desire in a brand of videos called "interracial." This essay explores the role of fear and desire in selected examples of interracial lust in both contemporary and classic pornography and in the exploitation film Mandingo. It argues that commodified forms of interracial lust have evolved out of taboos initially imposed by the white master's imposition of a racial border but which now serve to eroticize an entire field of sexualty that is no longer the sole province of the white master. For the function of these sexual fantasies is no longer, like the more purely phobic representations of the past, to keep white women and black men in their place. Rather, eroto-pornographic tales are now propped upon older racial stereotypes with the aim of transgressing their enforcement of the racial border. Since the seventies, the excitement of interracial lust has depended upon viewers, white and black, knowing the white racist scenario that viewed the black man as a purely phobic form of sexuality. But knowing is not the same as believing and it can be argued that pornographic pleasure works best when knowledge belief are most disparate.
Professor Williams teaches courses in Rhetoric and Film at UC Berkeley where she is also director of the Film Studies Program. She has written on genres such as melodrama and pornography and, more specifically, "body genres." According to Williams this includes a variety of films in which visual and narrative pleasure is structured through both an excessive display of bodies and the visceral effects they elicit from the audience. She is author of Figures of Desire: A Theory and Analysis of Surrealist Film, Hardcore: Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible", a landmark study of pornography, and most recently Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson.
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