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The Black Body in Ecstasy
Jennifer Christine Nash, PhD
Jennifer C. Nash rewrites black feminism's theory of representation. Her analysis moves beyond black feminism's preoccupation with injury and recovery to consider how racial fictions can create a space of agency and even pleasure for black female subjects. Nash's innovative readings of hardcore pornographic films from the 1970s and 1980s develop a new method of analyzing racialized pornography focused on black women's pleasures in blackness: delights in toying with and subverting blackness, moments of racialized excitement, deliberate enactments of hyperbolic blackness, and humorous performances of blackness that poke fun at the fantastical project of race. Drawing on feminist and queer theory, critical race theory, and media studies, Nash creates a new black feminist interpretative practice, one attentive to the messy contradictions—between delight and discomfort, between desire and degradation—at the heart of black pleasures.
Jennifer Christine Nash, PhD is an Assistant Professor of America Studies at George Washington University. Nash’s work focuses on black feminism, black sexual politics, race and visual culture, and race and law. Her research has centered on two related areas, representations of black bodies in visual culture, with a particular interest in sexualized images of black female bodies. She has written about black feminism as an intellectual and political transition, focusing on intersectionality and, more recently, on black feminism’s love-politics. She held fellowships at the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African and African American Research and at Columbia University’s Society of Fellows. Her research has also been supported by the Woodrow Wilson Felllowship in Women’s Studies.***
