Abstract:
This thesis undertakes a close examination of moving-image, pornographic material produced and released in North America between 1972 and 1987. It focuses on the representations of race in heterosexually-themed, hard-core film and video. Of particular interest are the constructions of black and white sexuality in such interracial pornography. In recent decades, pornography has received considerable academic attention from scholars working in various fields and disciplines. Analyses have expanded to include the function of racial imagery in American, pornographic, visual culture. However, most of this research is primarily concerned with representations of black bodies and manifestations of whiteness have remained neglected. My thesis takes whiteness seriously, providing a sustained analysis of both blackness and whiteness through the exploration of the various facets of representation that work to construct specific notions of raced bodies and sexualities. This project is motivated by a series of questions: What are the discursive strategies that have shaped racial representations? What rhetorical tools have been utilised in the construction of imagery that has come to represent blackness and whiteness in the pornographic visual oeuvre? If we are to accept that both race and gender are performative accomplishments, how can we analyse the enactments of gender that are implicated by race in numerous hard-core films and videos? In what ways have the concepts of race, gender, and class impacted the visual representations of black and white bodies? Drawing on examples of black/white themed, hard-core film and video my thesis addresses these queries shedding light on the illustrations of interracial desire. It is argued that interracial pornography comprises an important source from which to observe the ways in which blackness and whiteness have been constructed on screen.