Thinking through Dr. Mireille Miller-Young’s ‘A Taste for Brown Sugar’ (a thread for new readers of Black Porn/Sex Work Studies)

As a feminist methodology within the fields of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies and African Diaspora Studies, Mireille Miller-Young necessitates the use of oral history.

‘A Taste for Brown Sugar’ is the first oral historical and ethnographic project that focuses on Black women, as erotic performers, as opposed to the porn industry. This text discusses the economies of desire, iconicity, representation, erotic desire and the competing gaze.

Miller-Young introduces the text by postulating that that she is an “academic pornographer,” which is a term that Sander Gilman coined after receiving backlash from his work on Saartjie Baartman and the racial-scientific inquiry of Black women’s...

... sexuality during the early nineteenth-century.

Gilman rightfully receives skepticism as he is a white male who analyzes the physicality and perceived deviance of the Black female body.

Miller-Young embraces this title to critique the accusations made against scholars who reproduce sexualized imagery of Black women as pornographers, and briefly does a historical walk through of Black culture’s fear of exposing “injurious” images of Black women...

...due to a racist and violent past.

She does not say this to bash the history, but rather as a way to demonstrate the various ways Black women and people sought to protect themselves whether it be through what Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham calls “respectability politics”...

...or what Darlene Clark Hine refers to as the “culture of dissemblance.”

Respectability was an African American woman’s late nineteenth century post-emancipation Christian politic, that aimed to...

“counter the racist stereotype of the lascivious and deviant black woman by upholding and embodying an image of gender and sexual normativity evocative of a patriarchal ideal of feminine virtue.” (Miller-Young, ix)

In the wake of the patriarchal logic of American social life, Black women were thought to be deserving of rape, abuse and other violences, which is why a “culture of dissemblance” was understandably implemented.

Hine describes it as “tactics of masking, secrecy, and disavowal of sexuality that allow black women to shield themselves from sexual exploitation.” (ix)

I think it is necessary to recognize that Miller-Young identifies who seeks to subvert these imageries by exposing Black sexuality through visual representation.

“Brown sugar” in this text is a metaphor that addresses the “popular imaginary of African American women,” Black women’s sexuality and sexual labor’s historical influence on culture and the global economy,...

... the labor of enslaved Africans in the American South and the Caribbean and their violent cultivation of sugar, and the sexuality and desirability of Black women that is publicly demonized, but privately enjoyed. (4)

Miller-Young’s discussion of sugar, is something that I am able to place in conversation with Kara Walker’s ‘A Subtlety’ (2014).

Miller-Young terms the concepts “illicit eroticism,” “activist production,” “facial stunting,” and “ho theory.”

Jeannie Pepper, an erotic performer and porn artist, is one of the many subjects that Miller-Young interviews.

For over three decades she has starred in over two hundred films and was able to open the doors for other women of color in the erotic/porn industry.

I am interested in the ways in which her image and her performances have been distributed throughout the years.

She has been circulated via video, DVD and the internet. Pepper demonstrates how Black women, but sex workers in particular operationalize “illicit eroticism” in adult entertainment’s sexual economy.

Miller-Young states that “illicit eroticism” shows how Black women’s erotic work “manipulates and re-presents racialized sexuality—including hypersexuality—in order to assert the value of their erotic capital.”

In the chapter, “Sepia Scenes: Spectacles of Difference in Race Porn” Miller-Young studies the work of an unknown light-skinned Black actress who appears in two 1930’s 16 mm stag films, ‘The Golden Shower’ and ‘The Hypnotist.’

In the first she portrays a maid and the second she portrays Madam Cyprian, a hypnotist for hire. She does a séance on the wife and husband who invite her, and as three possessed bodies partake in a ménage à trois.

Madam Cyprian is clearly the racial other who restores the white family through her sexual supernatural abilities. However, Miller-Young discusses strong moments when the camera focuses on her face.

She smiles back at the viewer, mischieviously winks, rolls her eyes and sticks out her tongue- Miller-Young refers to these facial performances as “facial stunting.” (24)

“Stag-film actresses inserted a complex performance of Black subjectivity into the film text,” states Miller-Young.

“These gestures are important because they highlight how black women’s performances in pornography simultaneously conformed to and challenged the representational and physical conditions of their labor.”

In these gestural interventions, I argue, there are clues as to how Black women in early pornographies experienced their sex work and deployed creative, embodied repertoires of performance to negotiate the representations they were called to inhabit.” (25)

In Chapter 4, “Ho Theory: Black Female Sexuality at the Convergence of Hip Hop and Pornography,” A Taste for Brown Sugar introduces the topic by discussing how erotic entertainment crossed over into the mainstream, but hip hop specifically.

(“Tip Drill” by Nelly still)

As pornography influenced hip hop, hip hop also influenced pornography- these factors created subgenres for Black women’s sexual representations in the 1990s and 2000s.

To further understand the phenomena Miller-Young terms “ho theory,” which is “an analytic for black illicit erotic performance aesthetics, identity formations, and labor tactics from the point of view of the purported ho.”

Not only is ‘A Taste for Brown Sugar a brilliant excavation of Black women’s erotic performance and labor, it is aesthetically beautiful- this demonstrates the care that she takes in presenting the visual image of her subjects.’

I challenge us to consider how Miller-Young represents the Black woman’s body within her text.

Citations:

Miller-Young, Mireille. A taste for brown sugar: Black women in pornography. Duke University Press, 2014.

As for my words, please cite as Zalika U. Ibaorimi