Race and Kink

Recently, I have interviewed for a position where race is perhaps the salient category of analysis.  As an anthropologist, the party line is that we don't believe in race but we believe in racism.  Race as a biological construct doesn't hold water.  There is more variation within a given "race" than between different ones.  Deconstructing the concept of race by disarticulating it from naturalizing rhetoric is supposed to be empowering, at least for people oppressed by racism.  Instead, as a discipline, we rely on ethnicity to account for cultural differences.  Often, this is simply a one-to-one swap, using ethnicity to indicate the same things race does in other settings.  I appreciate the focus on cultural transmission of identity and think it is imperative to avoid biological determinism, but "race" exists as an emic category, especially as pertains to the African-American/white divide.  It is almost impossible to address some of the structural inequalities that exist in the United States without taking account of race.

That being said, race has not always been my go-to point.  In my PhD work, the kinky community in my part of Texas is overwhelmingly white.  When I worked in Belize, the community was truly multi-ethnic.  Ideas of race played out on a global field but on a local level concern was on cultural groups.  Ancestry was important but fluid in a way that is not recognized in the US.  In my current work with LGBTQ population, I have gone out of my way to include people of color in my interviews.  But in all of this work, I took race (or ethnicity) to be a congruent relationship to gender or sexual orientation, not as a primary category on its own.  Interviewing for this job has led me to question how my work would be different if framed in terms of race.  All of a sudden, realms of exclusion function differently.  Many times in Texas, especially in my own progressive burg, I have been confronted with the belief we live in a post-racial society (always by white people), the reasoning being something along the lines of  "well, the president is black..."  People of color do not share this perception.

This leads me to the experience of race in the kinky community.  One African-American woman I interviewed said this:

I find that some people in the scene that do approach me, do so because they have a fetish for black women, which is not really my thing.  I don’t want my race to be fetishized.  I want to be seen as attractive, of course.  I don’t know who wouldn’t but I don’t want someone to say, I like you because your skin is dark.  That doesn’t really work for me.  I have a couple of other things working for me and if they can’t see that, I’m not wasting my time.  There are a couple of people who their big thing is race play and that’s a huge trigger for me.  It may just be some of my personal experiences bleeding into that.  I know that they probably see what they do as incredibly hardcore and edgy, and it is, way too hardcore and edgy for me.  I’m not at all interested.  I run into a lot of people who fetishize race or ignore it.  Like it’s not really an issue, we treat everyone the same, and they don’t really. 

Race play involves using stereotypes of race to create a scene.  This can involve the "plantation slave girl" or "the black stallion."  It calls on the history of African-Americans as slaves or the hyper-sexuality of African American masculinity.  Many white people see this as another form of exoticism, disconnected from material and social reality of racism in the United States.  It is forbidden, therefore sexy.  The woman I quoted went on to say,

 It would feel very progressive and edgy, if it wasn’t like these people had come full circle, at all.  It’s like this is how they see, this is truly how they feel about black men, that their goal is to find all of the vulnerable white women and rape them.  It perpetuates this idea of what black men are.  The same thing is true of black women being depicted as dominatrixes or slave girls, very plantation slave girls.  It irritates me.

In a community that prides itself on being extreme, race play is one of a few things that press people's buttons.  But it seems as if any time African-Americans play with people of another race in public, there is always an undercurrent of race play.  Part of the allure of kink is the idea of exchanging power.  Race always has aspects of power.  The reality of racism makes it harder to maintain the illusion that power is something derived from oneself, making that play uncomfortable for many people watching (or participating).  Part of this woman's frustration is that she is cast into one of these roles on a regular basis without the opportunity to represent positively what it means to have different experiences.  This shifts in groups where she knows people personally, but not entirely.

Racism, both ideological and structural, still shapes the experience of many people in the United States.  I believe the kinky community is a microcosm of wider American society, perhaps confronting (but not alleviating) hegemonic ideals of race.  I wish I had pursued this line of inquiry more deeply in my time in the field.  The idea of a man beating a woman squicks many people.  Things get even more complicated when you picture any combination involving an African-American and a white person.  In an analysis of sexuality (radical or otherwise), ideas about race have to be accounted for.