L.H. Stallings - Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures

Funk the Erotic

THE NEW BLACK STUDIES SERIES

Edited by Darlene Clark Hine

and Dwight A. McBride

A list of books in the series

appears at the end of this book.

Funk the Erotic

Transaesthetics

and Black Sexual Cultures

L. H. STALLINGS

Support for this research was received from the Institute for

Advanced Study at Indiana University, a research

center for the Office of the Vice Provost for Research.

2015 by the Board of Trustees

of the University of Illinois

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

1 2 3 4 5 C P 5 4 3 2 1

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Horton-Stallings, LaMonda.

Funk the erotic : transaesthetics and black sexual cultures / L.H. Stallings.

pages cm. (The new Black studies series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-252-03959-1 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-252-08110-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-252-09768-3 (e-book)

1. African Americans. 2. African AmericansSexual behavior. 3. SexUnited StatesCross-cultural studies. 4. American literatureAfrican American authorsHistory and criticism.

I. Title.

E185.86.H775 2015

306.708996073dc23 2015004611

For Paulette and Aaron Jr.

Children of Production/Clones of Dr. Funkenstein

But in the hold, in the undercommons of a new feel,

another kind of feeling became common.

Stefano Harney and Fred Moten

Very often, however, the Negros masking is motivated not so much by fear as by a profound rejection of the image created to usurp his identity. Sometimes it is for the sheer joy of the joke; sometimes to challenge those who presume, across the psychological distance created by race manners, to know his identity. America is a land of joking maskers the motives hidden behind the mask are as numerous as the ambiguities the mask conceals.

Ralph Ellison, Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke

I never did anything where I wasnt in on it. Even if it was something I had to do, I would always find a way to be in on it.

Vanessa del Rio, Fifty Years of Slightly Slutty Behavior

Moral judgments about public sexual expression, as well as the art and culture divide, makes some people bristle at the idea that novelist Ralph Ellison and porn actress Vanessa del Rio perhaps shared similar philosophies about their creative writing and performances. Ellison wishes to legitimate the black novel as a form that should not be reduced to folklore alone, while del Rio intends that her performances in sex industries not be read as melodramatic narratives of coercion. Moreover, we have become accustomed to legitimating the trope of masking in matters of race and minstrelsy in ways that seldom pertain in studies on gender, sexuality, or desire. evocative. Del Rios comment about being in on the joke or con echoes Ellisons ideas about America and masks. Both refuse pacifist or patently violent strategies against oppressive establishments but rather inform us of guerilla tactics that can be employed in personal and political liberation struggles.

Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures presents sexual expressivity or explicitness in black literature and culture as a rejection of the Western will to truth, or the quest to produce a truth about sexuality, and underscores such truth as a con and joke. It demonstrates how some black cultural producers have strategized against the sexual con of white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy outside of politics. In lieu of singular truths about eroticism and sexuality, the writers, directors, and performers in this text offer multiple fictions of sex to slip the yoke of sexual terrorism, violence, and colonization. This book is not about pornography and women of color. I leave that in the capable hands of Mireille Miller-Young, Jennifer Nash, and Ariane Cruz. They are all scholars who have produced formidable work to fill in the gaps about black women and porn. Funk the Erotic is about what exists before, after, in the interim, and in the future of what has been called sexuality, eroticism, the pornographic, and sex work in black America. It intends to lay new foundations upon which we should think about how sexual cultures, including pornography, translate, produce, and reproduce black pleasure, pain, intimacy, relationality, individuality, and communality in the face of historical and ever-changing sexual terror and violence from white capitalist patriarchy and supremacist institutions that can neither comprehend nor regulate the diverse affective resistance of black bodies.

I reference Ellison and del Rio to underscore lineages that have been ignored or silenced in the quest for a sexual politics that includes pleasure and exhausting questions about agency: preexisting, affective, and personal genealogies of imagination that are themselves movements that cannot be made to do the work of political movements. How do these narratives, which may or may not include moralizing tendencies or sexual pathologies, recognize black womens and mens exchanges and consumption of sexual expressivity and strategies for dealing with pain and everyday survival among each other and outside of black communities? As we will see throughout Funk the Erotic, the question needs to be considered for black women, men, children, and transgender folk. And it needs to begin in home fictions, rather than home truths. When we go in search of our mothers profane porn stashes, as well as their sacred gardens, we critique the very ways in which what is profane and obscene has been gendered as masculine and made violent and excessive in the West. We recover sacred-profane androgynies, or what I term funky erotixxx, that create identity and subjectivity anew and alter political and artistic movements.

Throughout that interview she colloquially captures the change the joke and slip the yoke sentiment of what it means to be a young Puerto Rican woman in the white, capitalist, heteropatriarchal society of the 1970s. Additionally, reading del Rios interview with Hanson, as well as her interviews with others, in a transatlantic frame certainly links her with current ways that scholars such as Kamala Kempadoo and Mireille Miller-Young have asked us to reconsider sexual labor. Nonetheless, the implicit importance of imagination or ulterior play in del Rios statement remains the central element that makes her a cultural theorist for the purpose of this preface. Del Rio is similar to the early woman writer or scholar, the female blues singer, the woman rapper, or the comedienne, but del Rio differs from those other cultural producers in that her field of interest and expression is sex.

Casting herself as a type of grifter, del Rio understands that the con or joke that means to ensure masculine privilege and power is not one she is meant to be a part of, be it in a career, job, or domestic pursuit. Del Rios words corroborate that personal familial influences and popular culture representations influence who she becomes in the world. She accounts for her gaze upon her mothers normalized domestic situation as good wife and mother, neither tragic nor violent, but ordinarily unhappy. Feminists seldom turn to this type of gaze in feminist academic scholarship on porn. Were we ever able to correlate del Rios individual performances of submission, dissatisfaction, anger, hostility, dejection, or dysphoria within her films to an emulation of her mothers affect throughout married life, would we admit that the basis of her exploitation or performance might as readily be the institution of marriage as it would be porn industries? If we were ever able to trace del Rios individual performances of happiness, contentment, hunger, or pleasure in her many films to any of the campy performances of the Argentine actress she purports to emulateIsabel Sarli, who starred in Argentine films dubbed sexploitation flicks by Western criticswould proporn and antiporn scholarship collapse into each other? In Sarlis films, sexual images and nudity derive from a cultural tradition with very different views about eros and sexuality than in the United States, one in which we might have to think of performances within sexual cultures as something other than pornographic or exploitative.