ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates the ways in which girls put the pornographic field to work, a field structured by race and gender, within which white bodies/women dominate the representational economy as the esteemed objects of desire. Porn’s pernicious effects, as the girls illustrate in this chapter, are far removed from concerns about the loss of childhood sexual innocence and harm, and hinge on binaried and unequal conceptions of race whereby pleasure is terroritorialised. The chapter addresses how race surfaces within the sexuality-assemblage as girls make connections with racialised and sexualised bodies and the intensities that are produced as they draw attention to relational patterns. How the girls’ articulate race is thus not simply invented within the assemblage, but it is intensified by the affective flows that circulate and materialise within the broader local and global context. In South Africa, this body is made intelligible through historical discourses that produced the white, heterosexual, able-bodied (and not diseased) body as a powerful marker of just the right kind of body. In the context of porn, the operation of these racialised stereotypes has effects for both visibility and invisibility around race, pleasure, and gender.
