Ariane Cruz - The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM, and Pornography

Sexual Cultures

General Editors: Ann Pellegrini, Tavia Nyongo, and Joshua Chambers-Letson

Founding Editors: Jos Esteban Muoz and Ann Pellegrini

Titles in the series include:

Times Square Red, Times Square Blue

Samuel R. Delany

Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism

Edited by Arnaldo Cruz Malav and Martin F. Manalansan IV

Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces

Juana Mara Rodrguez

Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance

Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini

Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture

Frances Ngron-Muntaner

Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era

Marlon Ross

In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives

J. Jack Halberstam

Why I Hate Abercrombie and Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality in the U.S.

Dwight A. McBride

God Hates Fags: The Rhetorics of Religious Violence

Michael Cobb

Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual

Robert Reid-Pharr

The Latino Body: Crisis Identities in American Literary and Cultural Memory

Lzaro Lima

Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America

Dana Luciano

Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity

Jos Esteban Muoz

Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism

Scott Herring

Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination

Darieck Scott

Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries

Karen Tongson

Beyond the Nation: Diasporic Filipino Literature and Queer Reading

Martin Joseph Ponce

Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled

Michael Cobb

Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performance in the Asias

Eng-Beng Lim

Transforming Citizenships: Transgender Articulations of the Law

Isaac West

The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within US Slave Culture

Vincent Woodard, Edited by Justin A. Joyce and Dwight A. McBride

Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings

Juana Mara Rodrguez

Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism

Amber Jamilla Musser

The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies

Rachel C. Lee

Not Gay: Sex between Straight White Men

Jane Ward

Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance

Uri McMillan

A Taste for Brown Bodies: Gay Modernity and Cosmopolitan Desire

Hiram Prez

Wedlocked: The Perils of Marriage Equality

Katherine Franke

The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM, and Pornography

Ariane Cruz

For a complete list of books in the series, see www.nyupress.org.

Ariane Cruz

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

www.nyupress.org

2016 by New York University

All rights reserved

References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing.

Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Cruz, Ariane, author.

Title: The color of kink : black women, BDSM, and pornography / Ariane Cruz.

Description: New York : New York University Press, 2016. | Series: Sexual cultures | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016017049| ISBN 978-1-4798-0928-8 (hbk : alk. paper) | ISBN 978-1-4798-2746-6 (pbk : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Bondage (Sexual behavior) | Sadomasochism. | Pornography. | Women, BlackSexual behavior.

Classification: LCC HQ79 .C78 2016 | DDC 306.77/5dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016017049

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For Florence, Bertie, and especially for Derek

This project materialized with the support and encouragement of many people. Over many years and through multiple and meandering routes, it has received funding from sources such as the Ford Foundation, the UC Berkeley Center for the Study of Sexual Culture, and the Penn State Institute for the Arts and Humanities. This book was partially funded by a fellowship and grant from the Africana Research Center at the Pennsylvania State University. I thank these institutions for their support. I would also like to thank the University of California, Berkeley and the Pennsylvania State University for providing institutional homes for this project and for enabling me to meet a number of wonderful colleagues and friends. From my time at UC Berkeley, I would like to thank Percy Hintzen, Patricia Penn Hilden, Leigh Raiford, and a host of other individuals, including Ula Taylor, Robert Allen, Paola Bacchetta, Lindsey Herbert, and, last but not least, the late, great VV Amasasa Clark, an awesome mentor and an early voice of honesty and confidence.

The incredible faculty and staff of the Department of Womens, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Penn State is a beacon of support and a rich intellectual community. I am especially thankful to a number of colleagues and friends at Penn State for their support for this manuscript, including Gabeba Baderoon, Robert Bernasconi, Lovalerie King, Carolyn Sachs, Nancy Tuana, Melissa Wright, The Doctor Sisters, and my Homegirls writing (and more) group. I would also like to thank Irina Aristarkhova for her conversations and continued support through this journey.

I am grateful to the light numerous scholars have shed in the field of racialized sexuality, a few of whom have especially offered their support: Matt Richardson, L. H. Stallings, Marlon Bailey, Jennifer Nash, and in particular Mireille Miller-Young, whose trailblazing work on black women in pornography has carved the space for this manuscript.

New York University Press has been instrumental in the materialization of this project. I am thankful to Eric Zinner and Alicia Nadkarni for their labor and support. I am especially thankful to the Sexual Cultures series editors, Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson, Tavia Nyongo, and Ann Pellegrini, for their encouragement, guidance, and vision. I am honored to be a part of such a wonderful series. Two anonymous readers have strengthened this work with their keen critique and encouragement. I am also thankful to Cecelia Cancellaro for her careful editing of select chapters of this book. I would be remiss if I did not thank the black women on and from whom this project draws. These women generously offered their knowledge, time, and stories and continue to teach me so much.

I express my deepest gratitude to my friends and family. Christine DeHarts off the mat pedagogy breathed energy, strength, flow, and balance into the body, mind, and spirit of this book. Elizabeth Adam, Alyssa Garcia, Deirdre Conroy, Malene Welch, and Jasmine Cobb continue to listen in profound ways. I thank Rob Ferguson, an enthusiastic, tireless, and patient supporter whose perpetual optimism and faith matters. Finally my treasures of the heart, Barbara, John, and Justin Cruz and Donna Snow, have blessed me with a level of love and support I do not have words for. I cannot thank them enough.