For class

1. A Taste for Brown Sugar
Themes, Theory, and Methodology
Themes
Miller-Young’s primary
focus throughout her
book is the strategic
attempts at agency and
empowerment through
mediums of
representation (in this
particular work
representation within
pornography).
Theory
‘Brown Sugar’ has shaped
black women’s sexuality. It
has historically and presently
been the invisible labor of
black women’s sexuality that
enables systems of capitalism
and exploitation to function-
without the subjection of
‘brown sugar’ the system
ceases to exist, and wealth
cannot be created. However,
far from a totalizing system of
abjection, ‘brown sugar’
embodies “dual valences”
where “some black women
choose to perform brown
sugar” (p. 5), and thus stake a
claim over representation
and form.
Methodology
Miller-Young employs a
range of methodology,
including extensive
interviews with porn
actresses, “reading”
performances in
pornographic imagery,
ethnographic research with
directors, producers,
distributors, agents, crews,
and actors, and research
through black feminist
scholarship.

2. The Golden Shower and The Hypnotist
• Miller-Young’s reading of two 1930’s “stag films” illustrate the ways in which pornography can both work
with racialized tropes and societal discourses as well as challenge, or confront, such normalized systems.
Miller-Young points out that “interracial sex in the context of Jim Crow race relations were extremely
charged scenes that tended to denigrate black sexualities.” (p. 58). She also notes that a common form of
protection for black women during Jim Crow was to embrace “conservative moral values to counter
discourses of black sexual deviance.” (p. 28) By appearing in The Golden Shower and The Hypnotist, the
unknown black porn actress defiantly grates against mainstream culture and mainstream modes of
resistance, while at the same time is constrained by such systems. Her performance is a complicated dance
between racialized tropes as both a stereotypical maid character and the holder of sexual magic capable of
hypnotizing impotent men and sexually barren women. But, as Miller-Young exposes, the actress also
challenges such modes of representation by making a series of “gestural interventions” (p. 25) in which she
“winks” and smiles candidly into the camera and shatters the illusion of a fourth wall.

3. KKK Night Riders
• While quickly appearing to be a repugnant film of dramatized rape (and still for myself a troubling film to
consider), KKK Night Riders very explicitly calls the audience’s attention to systems of white supremacy and
racist violence against black women. This film also taps into the fantasy of rape, that is embedded within
patriarchal society. However, though it cannot be argued that the film is problematic in many respects,
instances of agency are viewed by Miller-Young when the black female actress (theatrically compliant)
“seems so bothered by the KKK hood that she looks away and then appears to reach up as if to take it off the
man,” (p. 62) during their sex scene where the male actor is fully clothed as a Klansmen, and when the black
actress demonstrates defiance at the scenes climax, to which Miller-Young explains: “eating the actor’s
ejaculate was not labor [the actress] would take on.” (p. 63). Miller-Young further elaborates that to view
this scene through a “black feminist pornographic gaze” we must consider the methods employed by the
black actress to “navigate appropriation and assert some agency, however circumscribed.” (p. 63).

4. Let Me Tell You About Black Chicks
• Miller-Young states that this film “emphatically exploited extreme myths about black women’s sexuality,
creating black women as illicit erotic objects in a white supremacist fantasy.” (p. 131). This film was also
produced during an era where pornography became much more commercially successful and socially
accepted, so much so that this period (dating from the 80s to the 90s) saw an explosion of new
pornographic features. But even in the face of Black Chicks troubling components, black porn actress Jeannie
Pepper viewed the film as an “important opportunity for black actresses” where she made a “tactical
choice” to be featured in the film so that she could “infus[e] it with her own creative styling.” (p. 131).
Therefore, Jeannie Pepper very clearly recognized the racist tropes of the film, but consciously decided to
perform in it so that she could infiltrate and challenge the stereotypes to be featured– directly approaching
her role as one of attempting to insert agency and empowerment.

5. Questions
1. In regards to KKK Night Riders, does there appear to be any connection
between the white male actor’s remaining masked throughout his scene
and what Janell Hobson identified as the “myth of white innocence”?
2. How might Miller-Young’s views of black women asserting agency within
“circumscribed” conditions run parallel Gopinath’s views on diasporic
populations re-appropriating racialized tropes for purposes of
empowerment– such as drag performers reinterpreting Madonna’s
racialized music?
3. Does Miller-Young’s assertion that “brown sugar exposes how
representations shape the world in which black women come to know
themselves” connect in any way to Hobson’s view that the consumption
of black women is central to mass media, or to Gopinath’s view that thus
far only queer male bodies have been identified as belong to the
diaspora?