Book Excerpt #2: Fetish

“Linda Williams proposes that there is a certain “racialized sexuality” that is a common theme within both interracial and non-interracial pornography featuring Black actors (2004). Black men are depicted as less intimate, and their sexual dominance is often prominently featured. Yet it is important to understand who creates these films.

With pornographic films being created and produced overwhelmingly by White men these depictions are evidence of both racial fear and desire. As Williams notes, Franz Fanon states, “the deepest cause of this fear is the reduction of the black man to a penis which is ultimately a pathological projection on the part of the white man of his own repressed homosexuality,” (Williams, 2004: 277).

This is consistent with evidence produced by Dines (2006) and Cleo Manago (Nagle, 2000), as well as corroborates film analysis studies showing the historical perseverance and range of these tropes (Cowan & Campbell, 1994).”