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Jennifer Nash

Jennifer
Nash
Fellowship: 
Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow
Term in Residence: 
Full Year Fellow
Title / Appointment: 
Ph.D. Candidate
Location: 
Harvard University

Contact Information

Address: 
104 Mt. Auburn Street, Floor 3R
Telephone: 
617-496-6573
E-Mail: 
nash@fas.harvard.edu

Biography Information

Jennifer Christine Nash is a doctoral candidate in African and African American Studies at Harvard University, where she is completing a dissertation entitled “The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography.”   She received an A.B. in Women’s Studies from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.  Her work has been published in Her work has been published in Cardozo Women’s Law Journal (2005), Wisconsin Women’s Law Journal (2006), Feminist Review (forthcoming), and Social Text (forthcoming). 

Project Description

The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography

Feminist scholarship on racialized pornography assumes that pornographic images of black women’s bodies titillate the white male spectator with “proof” of black women’s imagined sexual differences. This dominant reading envisions racialized pornography as a fundamentally racist endeavor which degrades the black female body. 

My project challenges this dominant interpretation by examining pornography’s racialized, but not necessarily racist, uses of black women’s bodies. In place of a normative assessment of racialized pornography, my dissertation offers a new analytical practice for reading pornography: a method I call racial iconography.  Racial iconography is a critical hermeneutic attentive to the socio-historical specificity of race as a pornographic trope, and to the multiplicity of ways that race produces meaning in pornography.

 My project uses racial iconography to read significant Golden and Silver Age pornographic films. Racial iconography allows me to ask new questions about the viewing positions and pleasures of black spectators, pornography’s use of race-humor, and pornography’s inability to provide “evidence” of difference. 

Racial iconography makes an important contribution to feminist scholarship on pornography, and racial progressive scholarship on visual culture. By pushing beyond normative evaluations of racialized pornography, racial iconography foregrounds new questions about the intersections of race, gender, collective fantasy, and pleasure.