Editors:

Patricia Holland,

Jo Spence

and

Simon Watney
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Our thanks to Terry Dennett and Photography Workshop for keeping
the spark of Photography/Politics:! alive until a new editorial group
emerged. Thanks also to Terry for technical assistance.

Comedia Publishing Group was set up to investigate and monitor the

media in Britain and abroad. The aim of the project is to provide
basic information, investigate problem areas, and to share the
experiences of those working in the field, while encouraging debate
about the future development of the media. The opinions expressed in
the books in the series are those of the authors. and do not necessarily
reflect the views of Comedia.

First published in 1986 by Comedia Publishing Group

9 Poland Street, London WIV 300.

Copyright for the collected essa:ys: Comedia/Photography Workshop

Cop)-right for indil'idual essays rests with the authors.

Co:publication of Comedia and Photography \Vorkshop, 1986

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Photography/Politics
2
1. Photography
I. Photography workshop II. Spence, Jo
III. Holland, Patricia IV. Watney, Simon
770 TRI45
ISBN 0-906890-89-6

Cover: Bo Machnik Layout: Stella Crew/2D Design

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u
 IMAGING THE
BLACK MAN'S SEX
Robert Mapplethorpe's retrospective exhibition at
the ICA in 1983 coincided with a screening of
American Pictures, a tape-slide by Jacob Holdt,
whose documentary images of the private space of
poor blacks in the rural South provoked anger and
protest from black people in the Scala audience who
argued that they were "pornographic". 1 It is one
thing to say that the apartheid regime in South
Africa is "obscene", but to use "pornography" in
this way as a censorious term of moralistic
judgement about what is only, after all, an image is
unhelpful as it leads to a closure, rather than a much
needed opening, of critical debate about the politics
of sex and race in representation.
In a context where both the women's movement and
the moral majorities of the new right have politic-
ised sexual representation the incident highlights
the "structured absence'' of race as an issue in
contemporary cultural critiques of those commod-
ities produced, marketed and consumed as "porno-
graphy". Moreover, the issue of the representation
of sexuality calls into question the static binary
alternative between ''positive and negative'' images
which has dominated black critiques of media
stereotypes. It is interesting, therefore, to note that
no such vocal protest could be heard in the
reception of Mapplethorpe's work, especially as
61
many of his photographs involve a vicarious re-
presentation of "tabooed" sexual imagery usually
found in that regime of representations we call
pornography. Indeed, for the moment, the quiet
enclosure of the ICA gallery was transformed into a
simulacrum of a Soho sex-shop as some pictures
were sectioned off "for over 18s only", thus
reconstructing the "soft porn/hard porn" distinc-
tion institutionalised in the retail of porno-com-
modities.
Mapplethorpe first made his name in the art-world
by taking portraits of patrons and protagonists in
the post-Warholian subculture of celebrity. In turn
he has become something of a "star" himself in the
world of "art-photography" as the discourses of
journalists, critics and gallery curators have woven
a "mystique" around the persona of the artist as
author of "prints of darkness" .2
As he has extended his repertoire to images of gay
S/M rituals, black men and lady body-builders the
fundamental conservatism of Mapplethorpe's aes-
thetic style has become apparent: a revival of the old
modernist tactic of "shock the bourgeoisie" (and
make them pay), given a new "aura" by the imprint
of his characteristic trademark, the pursuit of
perfection in photographic technique. The vaguely
 PHOTOGRAPHY/POLITICS TWO
I
I
I "transgressive" quality of the subject matter is
given allure by the orthodox criteria for a "good"
!
I
photograph: mastery of the technological appara-
tus.
In as much as the image-making technology of the
camera is based on the mechanical reproduction of
unilinear perspective, photographs primarily re-
present a "look" 3 l want to talk about Mapple-
thorpe's pictures of Black Males, not as the product
of the personal intentions of the individual behind
the lens, but as a cultural artefact that says
something about certain ways in which white people
"look" at black people. Certainly, this particular
work must be seen in the context of the artist's
oeuvre: through the blank and deathly silent space
of his camera's "look" each found object -
"flowers, S/M, blacks"' - is brought under the
clinical precision of his master-vision, his complete
control of the photo-technique and aestheticised to
the abject status of "thinghood". But once we
consider the author of these images as no more than
the "projection, in terms more or less psychological,
of our way of handling texts", 5 what is interesting
about these photographs is the way they facilitate
the public projection of certain sexual and racial
fantasies about the black male body. Whatever his
creative pretensions or psychological motivations,
Mapplethorpe's camera-eye opens an aperture onto
aspects of stereotypes - a fixed way of seeing that
freezes the flux of experience - of black men which
circulate in pornography, newspapers, television
ads, film and otber systems of representation.
Approached as a textual system, comprising photos
and preface by novelist Edmund White, Black
Malef> catalogues a series of perspectives, vantage
points and "takes" on the black male body. The
first thing to notice - so obvious, it goes without
saying - is that all the men are nude. Each of the
camera's points of view lead to a singular, unitary,
vanishing point: an aesthetic/erotic objectification
of black men's bodies to a homogenous visual
surface saturated with a totality of sexual predi-
cates. We look through a sequence of individual-
ised, named, Afro-American men, but ~'see" only
sexuality as tbe essential sum total of the text's
articulation of meanings around the signs "black" I
"male": Black + Male = Sexual Object. White's
voice situates this process of eroticisation in the
context of gay sub-culture; but irrespective of the
sexual orientation of either artist or viewer, the
"sense" generated by image and text is that the
"essence" of black masculinity resides in the
domain of sexuality. In other pictures like "Man in
a Polyester Suit" it is the penis and (except for his
hands) the penis alone that identifies the subject in
the photo as a black man. While images of gay S/M
rituals represent a sexuality that consists of"doing"
something, black men are defined, confined and
reduced in their "being" as sexual, and nothing
more or less than sexual, hence super-sexual.
This ontological reduction is worked through by the
specifically visual codes brought to bear on what
White interprets as the movement of sexual desire in
the image. Processed through the artistic genre of

the Nude, the sexualising objectification of the body
in question presents the viewer with a source of
erotic pleasure in the act of looking. As a genre
established by traditions of sculpture, painting,
cinema and photography in Western art the normal
subject of the nude is the (white) woman and, from
one point of view, the history of the nude as a genre
is the story of a masculine reduction of the female
body to the status of an Image that bears the burden
of representing men's sexual desires and fantasies to
other men 7 Substituting the socially inferior sub-
ject, black/man for the conventional ideal of the
(white)/woman, Mappletharpe draws on the codes
of the genre to frame his way of seeing black male
bodies as "beautiful things", erotic and aesthetic
objects, Fixated on the one little thing - phallus:
symbol of desire- his look abstracts this body from
the social, ideological and historical forces that
have sedimented and moulded received meanings
into its shape and appearance, and fixes its
"essence" in the transcendental realm of the
aesthetic ideal. The aesthetic, and thus erotic,
idealisation is totalising in effect: all reference to a
social, historical or political context is ruled out of
frame. This essentialising decontextualisation iso-
lates connotations around the "black/male" in
order to stage the camera-eye's mirror-image
projection of the desires of the "I" who looks,
objectifying black men's bodies into an aesthetic
ideal invested with what the white male subject
wants-to-see.
The erasure of any social interference in the
spectator's erotic enjoyment of the image not only
reifies bodies but effaces the material process
involved in the production of the image, thus
masking and "white-washing" the social relations
of racial power that condition the possibility of a
staging of sexual desire,
63
IMAGING THE BLACK MAN'S SEX
All the black men whose pictures were "taken" are
named in the index: suggesting that some kind of
contractual inter-subjectivity between white photo-
grapher and black model was established as a
precondition of the image. But the exploitative
aspect of an unequal exchange between a well-
known, author-named artist and unknown, socially
anonymous model, a race relation of economic
power and profit, is effaced in the presentation of
the image as a purely aesthetic artefact, in the same
way that labour is said to be "alienated" in the
fetishism of commodity-form. This economic alien-
ation, put into operation by the erotic valorisation
of the body and effaced by aesthetic objectification,
can be detected in the way that the black subject's
name, the proper name of each model, is taken from
a person and given to a "thing", as the name or
caption of the art-object, property of the artist,
owner and author of the look.
Within the Western tradition of the Nude, gender-
based power relations involved in the production of
the image are effaced by patriarchal cultural
associations between femininity and passivity: as
Laura Mulvey suggests, the aesthetic reduction of
woman to the abject status of an erotic object in the
visual culture of cinema is not so much about
sexuality as such but an expression of" male" power
over the apparatus of representation in which an
active, and therefore masculine, subject assumes
imaginary mastery and control over a passive,
feminine object defined by the visibility of her sex as
something to-be-looked-at. 8 This gives rise not only
to a voyeuristi~ way of seeing women's bodies as
sex-objects, but to a narcissistic sexual pleasure in
which men objectify the female body as Other:
paintings in the nude genre abound with self-
servicing scenarios of phallocentric power wherever
male painters paint themselves painting a naked
woman, a mise-en-scene of sexual fantasy in which
PHOTOGRAPHY /POLITICS TWO
woman's body is reduced to a mirror-image of what
men want-to-see, affirming their power over the
means of representation. In this case however, the
fact that both subject and object of the camera-eye
are male sets up a tension between "active" and
"passive", and this frisson of sexual sameness
transfers erotic investment in the power and
pleasure of looking to the site of racial difference.
Richard Dyer observes that it is because this
sameness has the potential to disrupt the imaginary
unity of the ~~I" at the centre of the perspective
projection, the male nude or pin-up has inherent
instabilities as male subjects assume the passive,
"feminine", position of being looked at; thus gay
porn for example constructs various props such as
body-type, pose and narrative in order to stabilise
the "masculine" economy of the libidinallook 9
Here, Mapplethorpe draws on elements of com-
monplace racial stereotypes in order to prop-up,
regulate, organise and fix the photographic re-
duction of the black man's flesh to a flat surface
charged with the task, the "work", of servicing and
staging a white male desire to look. As Homi Bhaba
has suggested, "An important feature of colonial
discourse is its dependence on the concept of'fixity'
in the ideological construction of otherness" . 10
Stereotypes of black men bear witness to the
repetition of a "colonial fantasy", collective and
cultural "fantasies" of power over black bodies, in
which certain myths and fictions about "race"
inscribe and institute idees fixes about the "nature"
of black sexuality and black male sexuality in
particular.
Mapplethorpe artfully engineers absolute authority
over the image of the black man's body by
appropriating the function of the stereotype to
affirm his own identity as the "!" of the look, the
sovereign eye with mastery over the Other: "Eye
64
have the power to tum you into a work of art". Like
the look of a Medusa, each camera angle and "shot"
turns the black male body to stone, frozen and fixed
in space and time: enslaved to the image-reservoir of
the white male imaginary abo:ll the sexuality ofthe
racialised Other. The imprint of a narcissistic, ego-
centred, fantasy of absolute control lies in the
isolation effect of each image whereby it is only ever
one black man that occupies the field of vision at
any one time. This is crucial not only because it
denies a collective black/male body and homogen-
ises the plurality of socialised black/male bodies to
the essence of an ideal-type (young, healthy and
dark complexioned), but because it is the precondit-
ion for an imaginary, unmediated, one-to-one
relation of fantasy, a regular feature and function of
the solo-frame in gay and straight pornography.
Aestheticised as a trap for the gaze, providing a
pabulum on which the imperial appetite of the white
master's eye may feed, each image nourishes the
racial or colonial phantasm of appropriating the
black body as "virgin" territory to be penetrated by
an all-powerful desire, "to probe and explore an
alien body" .U
The superimposition of two modes of seeing -
sexualising and stereotyping inscribes the ambiv-
alence of colonial or racial fantasy, oscillating
between erotic idealisation and anxiety in defence of
the imperial ego. Stuart Hall underlines this
contradictory dynamic of ambivalence in colonial
and racial stereotypes of black men as the slave, the
native, the clown/entertainer and emphasises each
as expressions of: 12
. .. both a nostalgia for an innocence lost
forever to the civilised, and the threat of
civilisation being over-run or undermined by
the recurrence of savagery, which is always
lurking just below the surface; or by an

untutored sexuality, threatening to "break
out".
We can discern three discreet camera-codes de-
ployed around the black/male body through which
Mapplethorpe's images re-enact the ambivalences
of a sexual-racial fantasy that aestheticises the
stereotype into a work of "art".
The most clearly marked could be called the
sculptural as it is a sub-set of the nude genre. As
Phillip pretends to throw the shot-put the idealised
physique of a Greek statue is superimposed on that
most commonplace of media stereotypes of the
black male as athlete and sportsman, endowed
mythologically with a "natural" muscular physique
with a capacity for strength, grace and machine-like
perfection: well hard. As a major public site upon
which the black male body is displayed in motion,
sport provides an arena for the reiteration of white
male ambivalence, fear and fantasy: the spectacle of
black bodies triumphant in rituals of masculine
competition reinforces the fixed idea that black men
are "all brawn and no brains" (socially inferior), yet
because the white man is beaten at his own game
(cricket, football, boxing, track) the Other is
idolised and idealised to the point of envy. This
schism is played out daily in the popular press: on
the front page and in the headlines, black men
become visible as muggers, rapists, guerillas and
terrorists, each stereotype underpinned by the
imago of otherness and negativity in which their
bodies function as a sign for a savage and
unstoppable capacity for violence. Yet, turn to the
back pages, the sports-pages, and the black man's
body is heroised and the threat of physical force
contained by the paternalistic infantilisation of the
Daley Thompsons and Frank Brunos to the status
of national mascots and adopted pets, they are
alright because they are "our boys". The national
"shame" of England's defeat and demise in the
hands of the West Indies in Test cricket is
accompanied by the slavish admiration of Viv
Richard's "awesome" physique: the high-speed
bowler is both a threat and a winner. The
ambivalence cuts deep into the recesses of the white
65
IMAGING THE BLACK MAN'S SEX
male imaginary: recall those newsreel images of
Hitler's reluctant handshake with Jesse Owens in
the 1936 Olympics.
While Mapplethorpe's look is momentarily lost in
admiration for the black man's body, it refinds and
reasserts its control over the Other by "feminising"
it into a passive, decorative, object d'art. When
Phillip is placed on a pedestal his body is literally
reduced to putty in the white man's hands: like
many others within this code, the body is a raw
material to be moulded and sculpted into inert,
abstract, Form. The black/male body becomes
mere plastic matter remade into the ideality of pure
aesthetic form- with the tilt of the pelvis, the black
man's bum becomes a Brancusi. Commenting on
the differences between film and photography,
moving and motionless pictures, Metz suggests
that, "The importance of immobility and silence to
photographic authority" concerns an association
between photography and death, invoking a resi-
dual "death-effect" in which "the person who has
been photographed .. is dead: 'dead for having been
seen' " 13 Under the chilling intensity of Mapple-
thorpe's master-look, in the funereal milieu of the
artist's studio, each black man is made to die if only
to reincarnate their own alienated essence as
aesthetic objects. Each body sacrificed on an
aesthetic, sculptural, ideal to affirm the sovereign
white male subject of the look who has the power of
light and death.
In counterpoint, a subsidiary code of portraiture
"humanises" the hard lines of these "dead",
abstract, art-forms. Embedded in a humanistic
ideology in which the face functions as the "window
on the soul", this code introduces a realist element
into the scene. But any expressivity is withheld by the
PHOTOGRAPHY /POLITICS TWO
black model's direct-look which does not so much
assert an autonomous "self', but like the remote
and aloof looks on models in fashion-magazines,
underlines maximum distance between the viewer
and the unattainable object of desire. The direct-
look mediates the "active/passive" tension of
sexual sameness which is also contained and held in
frame by the sub-textual work of the stereotype.
Thus, in one portrait the profile invokes the
"'primitive" essence of theN egro, the black subject
once more subsumed to sculpture as his face effects
the after-image of an "African" tribal mask: his
cheekbones and matted locks connoting wildness,
danger and exotica. In another, the chiseled
contours of a shaved head, honed by rivulets of
sweat, simulates not only the criminalising "mug-
shot" from police records, but the anthropometric
objectification of the colonised subject, measuring
the cranium so as to "show" - by the "truth" of
photography - the inherent inferiority of the
racialised OtherY The recirculation of the stereo-
type is overlaid with a deeper ambivalenee in the
portrait of Terrel: his grotesque grimace immedi-
ately invokes the "happy/ sad" mask of the nigger
minstrel, the tears of a clown. Humanised by racial
pathos, the child-like figure of Sambo ghosts the
image, inscribing the black man's abject depen-
dence on Massa which in turn affirms his ascribed
inferiority and social "emasculation".
66
Finally two codes together, of cropping and lighting,
interpenetrate the flesh and mortify it into a
racialised sex fetish: a ju-ju doll in the white man's
imaginary. In the first, the body-whole is frag-
mented into microscopophilic details: chest, arm,
torso, buttocks, penis. Like a talisman, each part
invests the power of the look with the magic to
invoke the whole, the "mystique" of black mascul-
inity, the totalised "meaning" of "black/male" in
the sexual mythologies of colonial fantasy. The
camera cuts away, like a knife, to allow the gaze to
scrutinise and inspect "the goods": look, but don't
touch. Such fragmentation is a commonplace in
porn and certain feminists have argued that it
represents a form of"male violence" destroying the
"whole person" into visual bits and pieces for the
pleasure of the man's look; whether such a view is
tenable 15 its effect here is to inscribe a sense of
aggressivity in the act of looking, but not as "racial
violence" or racism-as-hate, but on the contrary,
aggression as the frustration of the ego who finds
that the object of his desires is inaccessible, out of
reach. In this sense the cropping is analogous to
striptease where the exposure of successive parts
distances the object, makes it untouchable, so as to
tantalise and arouse the desire that finds its
denoument in the unveiling of woman's sex. Except
here the unveiling which reduces woman from angel
to whore, is substituted by the exposure of the black
man's private parts, the forbidden totem of colonial
fantasy.
As each fragment invites the eye to ever more
intense scrutiny we can glimpse the dilation of a
libidinous looking that spreads itself across the
surface of black/male skin. Harsh contrasts of
shadow and light focus and fix attention on the
shining, polished sheen of the black man's skin:
unlike the sexual fetish per se which functions as a
"secret",the racialised sex fetish of skin colour and
texture is, "the key signifier of .. racial difference in
the stereotype ... the most visible of fetishes" . 16 The
glossy allure of black/male skin serves several
functions: as in images of sportsmen it suggests
physical exertion, the bodies of black boxers always
glisten like steel and bronze in the illuminated
square of the boxing ring; as in porn, sweat signifies
an intensity of sexual activity just .. before" the
photograph was taken. Here, the spectacular
brilliance of black skin serves as a fixing agent of the
fetishistic structure of the photograph - there is a
semiotic transfer of value between representer and
represented as the shiny texture of black skin is
highlighted by the glossy texture of the print. As
Victor Burgin points out, the aesthetic valorisation
of print texture is an integral aspect of the
fetishisation of economic value and worth in both
art-photography and fashion-photography - the
"glossies". 17 Here, the consubstantiality of skin and
print surface heightens the sexual fetishisation of
racial otherness for the profit and pleasure of the
white male spectator.
To commonsense the very term "fetishism" prob-
ably connotes "kinky" sexual activity and calls up
images of leather and rubber wear as signs of sexual
perversity. Indeed, Freud's theory sought to add-
ress fetishism as a clinical phenomenon of "patho-
 l
IMAGING THE BLACK MAN'S SEX

logical" sexualities, but in as much as it concerns "nature" of black men as his cheap and tacky suit
unconscious fantasy and the splitting of levels of confirms his failure to accede to "culture": even
belief it may illuminate the articulation of "negro- when the Other aims for "respectability" (the
philia", a sort of kinky fascination with black skin, signified ofthe suit), his camouflage fails to conceal
perceived and valorised as a "beautiful" and the fact that he originates essentially, like his dick,
"erotic" thing, which many white people seem to from somewhere anterior to Civilisation. Finally,
share. For Freud, the fetish 18 is a substitute for the the tip of the penis shines: like the patient of Freud's
woman's (the mother's) penis that the little boy for whom a "shine on the nose" functioned as a
once believed in and ... does not want to give up. sexual fetish, the totemic object of racial sex
Because of his auto-erotic investment in his penis, fetishism - skin - is made all the more visible by its
the little boy expected to see a maternal phallus: the shine. Wherever naked black bodies appear they are
perception of the woman's lack or absence of the saturated with sweat, always wet with sex. Leni
phallus, and the subsequent disavowal of this lack, Reifenstahl's ethnographic images ofThe Last of the
is seen by Freud as the staging of a "primal scene" Nuba 21 demonstrate the colonial roots ofthis white
concerning the origins of sexual difference in which fascination with black skin as a sexualised surface of
the boy's fear of the threat of castration symbolises inscription: what is shown has nothing really to do
accession to the law of the father, at the roots of with indigenous beliefs implicated in the African's
Oedipal sexuality. What results is a characteristic body adornment and display, but like a blank page
splitting of belief such that the absence of the penis black skin is a tabula rasa for a white writing that
is denied by the unconscious, but affirmed by the speaks only of its own, European, sexuality.
ego: hence, "I know (the woman has no penis), but Reifenstahl admits that the origin of her interest was
(she has, through this fetish)". 19 not the "culture" of the Nuba, but a photograph of
two male wrestlers by George Rodgers- as with her
Such splitting is captured by "Man in a Polyester other collection, People of the Kau, the anthropo-
Suit" as the singular centrality of the black man's logical rationale for her voyeurism is nothing more
phallus both affirms and denies that most fixed of than a secondary elaboration of the wish to see this
sexual myths in the white man's mind: that all black lost image again and again. That Reifenstahl made
men have got bigger penises than he. The scale of her name as the author of Nazi spectacle suggests
the photo emphasises the size of the black man's not only that the sexual fetishisation of racial
prick which thus symbolises a threat to the secure
identity of the white male ego: not the threat of
racial difference per se, but a sexual threat, a source
of sexual anxiety, that the black man is more potent
and sexually "powerful" than his master. The penis
then is a phobic object, a fixation projected by the
paranoid fantasies of "negrophobia" which Fanon
found in both the abnormal fears of his white
psychiatric patients and in the normal cultural
artefacts of his time: then as now, in front of this
picture, "one is no longer aware of the Negro, but
only of a penis; the Negro is eclipsed. He is turned
into a penis. He is a penis" .20 The big, black prickis
a "bad object", a threat to white womanhood
representing the danger of miscegenation and the
degeneration of Civilisation, to which the white
male responds in rituals of racial aggression
(lynchings of black men in America routinely
involved the literal castration of the Other's strange
fruit). This myth of penis size, which amounts to a
"primal fantasy" in the sense that it is shared and
collective in nature, is so pervasive that modern
science has repeatedly embarked on the task of
measuring empirical pricks to show that it is not
"true".ln the context ofpost-BlackPower America,
under "enlightened" liberal public opinion (doxa),
the black man's penis in Mapplethorpe's picture
enacts the disavowal of this ideological "truth": I
know it's not true that all black men have huge
willies, but in my photo they have.
More importantly still, the racism thus presupposed
is denied and white-washed by the jokey irony of the
contrast between the private part and the clothing
of the body in a "cheap", polyester, three piece suit:
the opposition of hidden and exposed, denuded and
clothed, works around the metaphorical opposition
between Nature/Culture that underpins the binar-
isms of racial discourse. Sex is confirmed as the

67
PHOTOGRAPHY /POLITICS TWO
difference may be operated by white women as well
as men, but a continuity of sensibility with the
aestheticisation of (racial) politics in Mapple-
thorpe's work. But to call Mapplethorpe a fascist
would be pointless, it would only enhance his
reputation as a vaguely "transgressive", and there-
fore "avant-garde", photographer, More useful
perhaps to note that in the fetishistic structure of his
racial sex fantasy about the black male body his
work silently reinscribes that form of disavowal
found in the most commonplace of racist enunc-
iations: "I'm not a racist, but. .. "
We have been looking at some pictures, exploring
processes of economic and sexual objectification, to
talk about a way in which white peoples' "looking"
at black subjects involves a racia/fetishisation of the
body. The ambivalence underscored by Mapple-
thorpe's recuperation of commonplace stereotypes
concerns the strange and uncharted landscape of
the "white" Western imaginary about blackness as
a sign of Otherness.
However, in the current cultural context where the
political interventions of black women have prior-
itised issues at the interface of race, gender and
sexuality, a new wave of black cultural workers are
setting out to map the politics of sexual represent-
ation from a black perspective. Refusing to think of
ourselves as Other, black writers, artists, film
makers and photographers are seeking to untangle
our own ambivalences and the diversity of sexual
desires and identities within black communities. 22
In new films like Territories by Sankofa; the literary
work of Joan Riley and Jackie Kay; black women's
artwork shown in the Thin Black Line exhibition at
the !CAin 1985 organised by Lubaina Himid; and
the collage practices in art and photography by
Keith Piper, Eddie Chambers, David A. Bailey and
68
David Lewis, questions of sex and race in represent-
ation are being raised in new and challenging
waysY Yet these initiatives have found little critical
and theoretical support in the analytic frameworks
that have dominated debates on pornography and
sexual representation in cinema.
In an intellectual conjecture where certain "pro-
gressive" alliances between feminism, sexual politics
and critical theory in film/media studies have gained
momentum in academia, the subject of race is still a
"structured absence" from both cultural debates
and course curricula. What worries me is the way
psychoanalysis has come to function in this situation
as a "master-discourse" of radical cultural theory,
yet the ethnocentrism of classical Freudian theory
goes without question. While the specific concept of
fetishism is useful precisely because it connects both
the economic and sexual contra-flow of ideological
investments, it is also problematic for as Baudrillard
reminds us its roots lie in anthropological discourses
on "primitive" religions. 24 More, the occlusion of
race in the hegemonic discourse of "Screenspeak
circa 1975" is by the same token the instance of the
heterosexism of the "sexual difference" problem-
atic and the uncritical acceptance of the theory of
"castration". It is crucial to remember that the
Greek tragedy of Oedipus, as the grand-narrative
on which the theory of castration or desire as lack is
based, is culture-bound despite the universalistic
claims that the masters of psy-discourse have staked
for it. Other cultures may be patriarchal, but does
that mean they produce an Oedipal sexuality?
Bhaba's attempt to supplement this lack of a per-
spective on race in current theoretical debate has
generated many insights, but to collapse "scopo-
philia" and "surveillance" as he does is not only
inflationary with regard to the explanatory value of

psychoanalysis, but impossible because Foucault's
approach to the construction of sexuality. as a
means of "subjectification" in the 18th and 19th
Centuries suggests that racism in its modern,
biologising and statist forms emerged in Europe's
new "anatomo-politics of the body" not at the level
of individual desire but at the level of the regulation
and governability ofpopulations, 25 Racist practices
like "virginity testing" in British immigration
control involve both processes, but neither are com-
mensurate with the textual analysis of cultural
artefacts and demand another level of analysis.
The utilisation of Lacanian theory by feminist
initiatives to theorise struggles over the image has
been profoundly enabling, but the questions being
raised by cultural struggles over race and racial
signification suggest that universalist pretensions
can be disabling because they pre-empt the develop-
ment of pluralist perspectives on popular political
culture. Metz confesses, with regard to the psycho-
analytic theory of fetishism, "It has helped me .. .(but)
l have also used the theory of fetishism as a
fetish". 26 If psychoanalysis can offer insights into
cultural practices such as photography in a First
World context because it is "the founding myth of
our emotional modernity", then perhaps questions
of race may render visible some of the many
political blindspots of "our" intellectual post-
modernity.
All montages/photographs by Kobena Mercer/Simon Watney
69
IMAGING THE BLACK MAN'S SEX
REFERENCES
1. See, John Akomfrah, City Limits, October, 1983.
2. Dick Tracings, Time Out, November, 1983.
3. See, Victor Burgin, "Photography, Fantasy, Fiction", Screen Vo!21,
n 1, Spring, 1983; on perspective see, Samuel Egerton, The Renaissance
Rediscovery of Linear Persrective, Icon Editions, Harper and Row,
1975.
4. Allan Hollinghurst, in Robert Mapplethorpe, 1970-1983, Institute of
Contemporary Arts, London, 1983, p.13.
5. Michel Foucault, "What is an Author?", in D. Bouchard (ed),
Language, Counter-Memory and Practice, Basil Blackwell, 1977, p.
127.
6. Gallerie Jurka, Amsterdam, 1983; reference is also made in the essay
to the ICA catalogue, op cit.
7. See, Margret Walters, The Male Nude, Paddington Press, 1978.
8. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", Screen, Vol 16, n 3,
Autumn, 1975.
9. ''Don't Look Now - The Male Pin-Up", Screen, Vol 23, n 3-4,
Sept/Oct, 1982.
10. "The Other Question - the Stereotype and Colonial Discourse",
Screen, Vo124, n 4, Nov/Dec 1983, p. 18.
1I. Edmund White in Black Males, op cit.
12. "The Whites of their Eyes: Racist Ideologies and the Media", in G.
Bridges and R. Brunt ( eds.), Silver Linings, Lawrence & Wishart, 1981,
p.41.
13. Christian Metz, "Photography and Fetish", October, n 34, US, 1985
pp, 83-85.
14. Anthropometric photography is discussed by David Green, "Class-
ified Subjects", Ten. 8, n 14, 1984; for a more detailed study of
photography as surveillance see, Frank Mort, "The Domain of the
Sexual" and John Tagg, "Power and Photography", Screen Educ-
ation, n 36, Autumn, 1980.
15. Roslind Coward, "Sexual Violence andSexuality",FeministReview, n
II, Summer 1982, pp, 17-22.
16. Bhaba, op cit, p. 30.
17. Burgin, op cit, p. 54.
18. S. Freud, "Fetishism", On Sexuality (Pelican Freud Library, n 7)
1977' p. 352.
19. Formulated by John Ellis, "On Pornography", Screen, Vol21, n 1,
Spring, 1980, p. 100.
20. F. Fanon, Black Skin, White Mask, Paladin, 1970, p. 120.
21. Collins, London, 1976.
22. Isaac Julien and I have tried to explore such ambivalences in, "True
Confessions: A Discourse on Images of Black Male Sexuality", Ten.8
(Summer, 1986).
23. "Territories" is distributed in 16m from Sankofa, Northington St,
London WC2 and on VHS from Albany Video, Deptford, SE8; See,
The Unbelonging, Joan Riley, TheW omen's Press, 1985 and poems by
Jackie Kay in Feminisr Review, n 18, 1984 and A Dangerous Knowing,
Sheba Press, 1985.
24. Jean Baudrillard, "Fetishism and Ideology", For a Critique of the
Political Economy ofrhe Sign, Telos Press, US, 1981.
25. Michel Foucault, The History ofSexuality: Vol], Allen Lane, 1978, on
racism and bio-politics see, pp. 149-150.
26. Metz, op cit., p. 89.