On paper, it’s a study of race and pornography.

However, this book in practice interrogates how Blackness is read, consumed, and structured through desire, spectacle, and theory itself. It doesn’t simply condemn or reclaim. Instead, it moves through contradictions that accompany pleasure and violence, agency and objectification, and never submits to the binary. Reading is a sort of test to see how you personally read bodies under systems that already pre-code meaning.

It also sits in that useful zone where academic work still feels alive. You can feel the dialogue with Black feminist theory, visual culture, and media studies, but it’s not trapped in citation performance.

2014 Duke University Press. Clean paperback. Minimal visible wear, no obvious damage. Very good condition.