Desmond Francis Goss - Race and Masculinity in Gay Mens Pornography

This book unpacks the character of pornographic representations of queer Black masculinity and how these representations vary between corporate and noncorporate producers. The author argues that representations of Black men in gay porn rely on stereotypes of Black masculinity to arouse consumers, especially those which characterize Black men as missing links or focus excessively on their dark phalluses. Moreover, these depictions consistently separate gay Black and white mens sexuality into bifurcated discursive spaces, thereby essentializing sexual aspects of racial identity. Lastly, though such depictions are less prevalent in user-submitted videos, overall, both user-submitted and corporate content reify stereotypes about Black masculinity.

This book is written for researchers, lecturers, and graduate courses in the social sciences and humanities, including Sociology, Social Psychology, Sexuality, African American Studies, Women and Gender Studies, LGBTQ Studies, Culture and Art Studies, Porn Studies, Social Media Studies, and Public Health.

Desmond Francis Goss earned a BA in Psychology, an MA in Public Sociology, and a PhD in Sociology from Georgia State University in 2017, where he is now a Lecturer and Founding Director of the Social Justice Certificate Program. He is a theory-driven qualitative scholar, whose research and teaching involves critical analyses of identity, lived experience, and power, at the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality. His work is published in the edited volumes Sex Matters (2018) and Focus on Social Problems (2016/2017).

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Diasporas, Weddings and Trajectories of Ethnicity

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Black Families and Recession in the United States

The Enduring Impact of the Great Recession of 20072009

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Practicing Yoga as Resistance

Voices of Color in Search of Freedom

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Racism and Racial Surveillance

Modernity Matters

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Race and Masculinity in Gay Mens Pornography

Deconstructing the Big Black Beast

Desmond Francis Goss

Making Mixed Race

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School Choice, Race and Social Anxiety

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For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/sociology/series/RRRE

Deconstructing the Big Black Beast

Desmond Francis Goss

10.4324/9781003023517-1

While riding public transportation in uptown Atlanta, I noticed an unusual advertisement displayed in a bus stop kiosk. The poster was facing oncoming traffic and large enough for the text to be read from a good distance away. Most of the advertisement was covered with the chest of a muscular white man, but in the center of the photo was a shirtless, dark-skinned, young Black boy with thin dreadlocks. The advertisement also featured words scripted horizontally in large type across the boys bare chest, reading: Small body. Huge game. I stared at the poster intently I felt uncomfortable with the image yet not completely able to comprehend why. Later, when I returned to photograph the image, I began to understand: I was discomforted by what I experienced as brazen sexual exploitation of Black masculine youth. Interestingly, advertisers and city officials had managed to post this advertisement without arousing the alarm of local community members, many of whom had recently expressed outrage over a state-run childhood obesity campaign they perceived as anti-child in the same area (). Although no genitals are displayed in the image, the photo is clearly suggestive of assumed Black male sexual power so immense it defies the physiological condition of petiteness. Interestingly, the image counters pop culture tradition by disembodying a cis-masculinized white persona to offer up the imaginary of Black hypermasculine sexuality for general consumption. This image was not interpreted as pornographic nor problematic, not only because of ongoing dismissal of Black humanity (particularly, in this context, of Black children) nor due only to the embeddedness of cis-heterosexuality in U.S. popular culture, but because such offerings are integral to the maintenance of white supremacist patriarchy in late capitalism. Sex sells, for sure, but it sells much more than material products.

In 2007, an art exhibit entitled Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now opened in London, celebrating the artistic representation of sexuality throughout human history. Folding under pressure from the community, the Barbican Gallery prohibited visitors under 18 from viewing the show (). Although other art including photographs in the Barbican exhibition featured homoerotic and sadomasochistic portrayals of nude subjects, the racial character of Mapplethorpes series of photographs added insult to the already sexually explicit, and thus problematic, presentation ( Chittenden 2009 ). In a way, the inclusion of non-white bodies pushed Mapplethorpes photos out of the sunny realm of nude art and into the dark underworld of pornography. Such situations illustrate the malleability of definitions of pornography, as they are undoubtedly delineated with intersecting social parameters like age and race. Clearly, though so often dismissed, pornography provides representations of the eroticized body that can offer valuable resources for questioning how historical, social and political conditions function to shape cultural attitudes and identities ( Chittenden 2009 :157).