ON IMAGING "INTERRACIAL"

This work is located in, influenced, and driven by pornography itself as an important entry point for thinking about racialized desire, intended to complicate the conversation beyond simply whether “interracial” porn is racist or not (it is). Looking at how the representation of sex between Black men and white women is fashioned in hardcore pornography can allow us to think about how issues of gender and race are key elements in the construction of desire and taboo in America. I don’t set out to explain the complex social, historical, and psychological constructions that undergird “interracial” pornography. I do endeavor, however, to provide some context. I am interested in exploring how racism and misogyny infiltrate and structure the pornographic media landscape – questioning how these power systems are performed, re-performed, re-articulated, and re-imagined within this circulated visual economy. As I tease out some of these critical concerns through my artmaking, I also begin placing them in dialogue with my own desires, consumption, and relationships. I often use my own body to better understand my subject matter, with the intent of building a visual structure that engages the audience in conversations about pornography that are nuanced and rooted in questioning power.  

This project begins in pornography, on Pornhub specifically, in my bedroom, in the dark, while I masturbate. It comes from thinking about the kind of porn I consume, what my partners are consuming, and what we consume together as part of our sexual practice. It turns out, “interracial” pornography, a term that implicitly denotes sex between Black men and white women, is at the heart of all three – a category that “looks like” my partners and me. Before I began making this work in late 2019, I had never thought too deeply or critically about this pornographic classification -- much less about how it functions, how it affects and reflects my relationships. Since beginning this project, all I do is think about it. Currently in 2021, having made this work through a pandemic, a white supremacist insurrection, a summer of protests against anti-black violence, and the national conversations that followed — thinking critically about how I engage in and consume racialized pornographic imagery is on my mind now more than ever.  

I am enthusiastically pro-porn. However, to be pro-anything does not mean to blindly consume or hold up that thing as perfect. For me, it is to look at it with care, to critique it when need be, to question it, to imagine the possibilities within and outside of it. My artmaking is rooted in experimental video installation, photography, and performance. I approach porn tube sites like Pornhub, X-videos, etc as complex cultural sites, as living consumer-driven archives deserving of intense and nuanced critical exploration through artmaking. My practice is not one of linear creation, but rather one of reaction to and digestion of pornographic material as I move through these online spaces.

I live on these sites, constantly consuming pornography, searching for something I can’t name. I tease out portions of the pornographic visual landscape and rub them up against the “real world” - a world of mainstream media, of continual stimulation, of normative sexuality, of shame, and of whiteness/anti-blackness. Reappropriating, recontextualizing, and manipulating found footage within my work has become an important tool in questioning agency and subjectivity within this space, as well as embracing the multiplicity that exists within this and many other forms of representational visual media. 

This work is exploratory and experimental. In it, my perspective surrounding the ethics of my own engagement often shifts; the more I unpeel, the more I am destabilized within this pornographic space. This work lingers, it sits in the discomfort of the problematics of this subject matter, in the conversations associated with it – because to react simply to the (subjective) bodily sensations that this content provokes means to ignore the complexities it veils. As a white (ostensibly straight) female, this project is as much about sitting in feelings of ambivalence as anything else – working through feelings, material, and sensations that are often at odds with each other. Desire is messy, and like sexuality, it is not linear. In sharing my own pornographic engagement, I am asking others to engage with these illicit impulses with me. Rather than saying ‘don’t look,’ I am asking people to look in a different way.