This panel has its conceptual roots in works such as Jennifer Nash’s The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography (2014), Mireille Miller-Younger’s A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography (2014), Juana María Rodríguez’s Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings (2014), Tan Hoang Nguyen’s A View From the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation (2014), and Ariane Cruz’s The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM, and Pornography (2016). In these works, emblematic of queer of color contributions to pornography studies in the 2010s, race and racial fantasies come to stand at the center of a field originally grounded in cultural studies of Victorian-era English literature. Following them, our papers question the relationship between sexual fantasy and social reality, attempting to understand pornographic media as emerging from broader discourses of racialized sexuality. In this panel, we answer their call to look beyond narratives of oppression and find moments of pleasure, power, and erotic autonomy within pornography.

Drawing on recent archival research at the Kinsey Institute, Fiona Bell traces how U.S. media from the 1950s-1980s, such as Playboy Magazine, imagined the Soviet Union as a destination for sex tourism. Particularly, this presentation calls attention to how Slavic, Caucasian (from the Caucasus region), and Romani women are collapsed into the figure of the “Russian woman,” refracting and reinforcing Soviet nationality policies, as well as ideologies of ethnic difference and assimilation. This presentation sketches the international market for erotic media about Russianness, a concept that is usually meant to inhere in whiteness, that is focalized on the shifting figure of the “Russian woman,” often but not exclusively constructed by models from East Europe living in the west. Attending to the racialization of models and implied readers, this presentation proposes that Cold-War-era pornography manufactured ideas about racial difference and global whiteness in tandem with biologizing accounts of state socialism and its practitioners.

In his presentation, H. Manuel Acevedo-Reyes analyzes the production and consumption of “thug pornography” and how Latino sexualities become intelligible to white consumers. He studies the photographs, magazines, calendars, filmography, and hiring practices of the Latino Fan Club (1985-2008), a studio that specializes in gay Latino pornography owned by Brian Brennan, a white man, to show the racial fantasies promoted in Latino pornography made by white pornographers. He claims that these fantasies, which often involve rape, violence, and domination of the white models by the Latino performers, are deeply embedded within racist discourses that seek to criminalize Latino men.

Mark Lockwood explores Enrique Cruz, founder of LaMancha Productions, and his influential role in the emergence of blatino porn in the mid-1990s and early 2000s. Unlike the earlier works of Brian Brennan’s Latino Fan Club, and other white-dominated production companies, Cruz’s films challenged conventional depictions of Black and Latino men in gay porn by elevating hip-hop and blatino sexual culture as central themes. LaMancha’s work embraced hypermasculinity as a focal point while also challenging (and at times buying into) traditional racial and sexual stereotypes through its visual storytelling. In this paper, he performs close readings of his 1999 film, Off Da Hook 2, to explore how Cruz’s porn work intersected with the broader cultural shifts, particularly with the rise of hip-hop’s influence in pornography. By focusing on Cruz’s cultural production, he argues that LaMancha Production redefined how blatino men were represented on screen, but also how their erotic resistance was contested, negotiated, and ultimately celebrated within the industry and the public.

This panel aims to provide a space for scholars invested in studying racialized sexualities who attend MLA to engage with one another. The first part of the session will include three 18-minute presentations by H. Manuel Acevedo-Reyes, Fiona Bell, and Mark R. Lockwood. The second part will be a conversation between the panelists and the audience.