Mediating Migration

Abstract

of Kink presents readers with an interdisciplinary, disruptive method to decode black female performance in a way that honors the agency in interpretation yet recognizes the structural constraints that limit such an interpretation. Additionally, her genealogy of discursive construction(s) around black female sexuality within kink—or “critical kink” (14)—offers theories, terminology, and perspectives that have the capacity to strengthen the work of scholarship beyond porn studies, including (but not limited to) practitioners of feminist media studies, critical race theory, and queer theory. In this way, Cruz offers us a critical lens with which to confidently consider the pleasure in taboo sexual performance, to contemplate the ways that BDSM performers “play” with race, to recognize the ways that commercial pornography “stabilizes” difference, and to honor the ways that the repetitive visibility of historical trauma has emancipatory potential.