Summary Of The Black Body In Ecstasy By Jennifer C. Nash

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Jennifer C. Nash is an Associate Professor of African American Studies and Gender & Sexuality Studies at Northwestern University. Her research focuses on black feminism, black sexual politics, race and visual culture, and race and law. In 2014, Nash released The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography, in her work she analyses and revamps black feminism's theory of representation. In her rewriting of black feminism, she considers how traditionally black feminism considers solely pain and recovery rather than how visual culture enables women to name, articulate and experience desires, pleasures and fantasies. Nash argues that this space is created as a place for agency and bodily autonomy. Nash uses the methodology of combing several other works of historical references, …show more content…

Not approaching the traditional look on feminism, but looking at the internal approach of gender and races roles, she crafts an argument to explore pleasure rather than solely pain. In the first chapter of this work, Archives of Pain she utilizes seminal works of Black Feminist to collectively analyze how traditional Black feminist theory sees the dominant representation of Black women. Through the lens of bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins, Janell Hobson, Cox, Carla Williams, and several others Nash presents the common argument amongst these Black Feminist writers is that visually the dominant representation inflicts violence of the Black female body. With a background in sociology, Nash breaks down this chapter in four sections and explains representation as pedagogy, as temporal practice, as metonymy, and as a site for recovery. With pain comes healing and