thot: subverting white power thru alternative sexual performances
consider this a rough draft
This past spring I shot a tiny film called “THOT” for a digital art course I took. The theme was power. At its inception I ruminated on the effect it could have — showing myself, a black woman, as a sex worker, to a class full of young white students. I wanted to play with color. (If you go to my tumblr portfolio you’ll see that I kind of have a theme going.) Strobe lights, patterns that remind me of carnivals, of circuses, of play parachutes and throwaway tissue paper. Platform heels, glitter, strip clubs that smell like perfumed liquor, dungeons, white boogeymen unmasked. Power, prejudice, preferences. Bluntly enforced hierarchies and honeyed misogynoir. The filth and risk and glamorousness of it all.
I shot a lot of A roll and B roll for this film, but most didn’t make it in. It was edited in Adobe Premiere and After Effects, and shot with a Canon Rebel T5i DSLR.
The class ate it up. My professor, a white man, loved it as well. And this, my friends, is part of the danger of being in white run liberal-ish institutions. I absolutely know I can do better than this film, but was told that it was perfect the way it was. Maybe my professor was being genuine. I am not sure. But I do know that often I have had white teachers, especially men, assume that everything I submit is my best. It is not. Much of the time I create things on the fly. I have always been a good bullshitter. I have finished A papers the morning of. I know when I have given my best.
As a black woman I am very wary of white people convincing me that something I have created is my best when I repeatedly state it is not. This is not just me being overly critical. I told this teacher that I really wanted to reshoot it. He said, “You should submit it [to film festivals].” I don’t want to. I don’t think it’s there yet. It does not fully capture what I want it to: the essence of black power juxtaposed with white power. Racial and sexual power plays are evident throughout the entire realm of sex work. I am constantly asked for race play by white customers. I guarantee white women rarely encounter this issue when faced with black male customers. Why? Because of the different hierarchies and because white women’s sexuality is constructed differently than Black women, or Asian women. The way in which Black and Asian women are fetishized is very different. But all of us are performing for the white cis-male gaze to a certain extent. I wanted my film to be about breaking from that in small ways. How can we as cammodels and amatuer porn actors, harness our own power, ignore and/or subvert the white gaze on our black and brown bodies? (Domming is one way.)
Femininity is either fetishized or denigrated [by men] in porn and camming, but black women and femmes can and are taking our sexual power into our own hands, even if that just means booting racists and misogynists from our room. I want to further explore that in a reshoot of this, and in future yet-to-be-planned creative endeavors. Even how I and other Black sex workers wear our hair is a source of fascination. One’s hairstyle can determine income. In this film I wore a wig. I change my hair a lot, and note the difference in my income. These days I am wearing box braids. Next year I’ll be making the switch back to wearing my Natural out, and I worry about how that will impact my pockets. Black sex workers face misogynoir on a daily basis, and it can be a lot trying to figure out how or if we should tailor ourselves to cater to the whims of white men, or to please our own eyes. Serving face is disrupted by the question: who are we serving?
You don’t just see the effects of misogynoir and cisheteronormativity in heterosexual porn. Black queer porn is also somewhat performed for both white male and “traditional” masculine male viewing pleasure. Caricatures of black male sexuality and stereotypes are very present. Most of the black actors have low cuts. Femme queer bottoms tend to have slender, svelte physiques, while tops tend to be muscular and vocally dominant — emulating the beauty standards and cisheterosexual binary of feminine/masculine pairings. Lesbian porn is usually two gorgeous, slender or slim-thick women with long hair. Maybe one might appear to be what I call “model butch” — androgynous but still feminine enough so that men who peruse the catalogue know that this is actually about them (the men). (I am aware of many different porn producers and actors who are making work that is non-traditional, by the way. But this is what I typically see when EYE search for porn to watch.)
This film doesn’t quite capture this theme of power adequately but consider it a rough draft, and forgive me for this long introduction.
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