Shakespeare’s (Into) Race Play

[print edition page number: 155]

Perhaps one of the most remarkable things about sex is our ability to find pleasure in the unlikeliest places, including from the negation or destruction of the self. The ability of sex to transform suffering into pleasure is at the heart of many kinks; this presents serious problems for theorists who see even relatively vanilla expressions of sexuality as the shackles of a system that demands we constantly reenact our trauma. Think of Andrea Dworkin’s argument that pornography inevitably dehumanizes and eroticizes violence against women, and that women cannot meaningfully consent to participate in pornography because of an oppressive sex/gender system that always already demands women’s subjugation.^[1] Or we can think of Catharine MacKinnon’s 2021 op-ed in the New York Times attacking “the media’s increasing insistence on referring to people used in prostitution and pornography as ‘sex workers’” and revisiting her arguments against pornography from the 1980s, updated for the digital age. In the article, MacKinnon rehashes her belief in “pornography’s power to make our world,”^[2] an argument fundamentally [156] rooted in mimesis: unable to distinguish between fantasy/fiction and reality, we inevitably imitate that which we see in media, to the harm of ourselves and others. This argument springs up hydra-like in response to virtually any form of newly popularized media: in the 1950s, it was comic books; in the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, it was heavy metal, Dungeons & Dragons, and Tipper Gore’s quest against porn rock; in the 1990s, it was violent video games. For theorists like MacKinnon and Dworkin, pornography — especially BDSM porn — is not only a reflection of misogyny but also a driver of it: there can be, this argument goes, no ethical participation in a system of pornographic production that is built entirely on the objectification of women. As Amia Srinivasan puts it, “To say that it is porn’s function to effectuate its message is to see porn as a mechanism not just for depicting the world, but for making it. Porn, for MacKinnon and other anti-porn feminists, was a machine for the production and reproduction of an ideology which, by eroticizing women’s subordination, thereby made it real.”^[3] To participate is to have the illusion of consent because women’s consent is both always assumed and already taken for granted.

We can say much the same about kinks like race play. As defined by Kyla Robinson, “Race play is a type of consensual erotic roleplay that focuses on playing with a societal taboo; perpetuating historically situated racial, ethnic, and religious power dynamics for pleasure.”^[4] It can be difficult to think about kink — especially inconvenient and disagreeable kinks like race play — as positive, generative, or pleasurable. If the argumentative environment posits that sex is an inherently violent and unequal violation of the self, then there can be no ethical praxis that allow us to, in the words of BDSM educator Mollena Williams,[157] “play with real, structural inequalities in safe and pleasurable ways: in ways that make such play play.”^[5] This discourse asks us to see kinksters as merely victims of a false consciousness that has tricked them into finding certain activities pleasurable, a position that allows no room for self-generated pleasure. The fact remains that people can, and definitively do, derive pleasure from things like submission, humiliation, and power exchange. Denying people the right to discover and practice their own consensual sexual pleasures, even if those desires have been discursively generated (as are any and all of the things we enjoy), strikes me as a denial of individual agency and an unwarranted attempt to police the sexual expression of others. In short, we do not get to tell others that they are doing sex wrong.

Even if we adopt this principle, we still run into the problem that bodies are discursively invested with meanings that are beyond the control of any individual. Hortense Spillers, focusing on the trauma embedded in Black bodies, explains that “before the ‘body’ there is the ‘flesh,’ that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of iconography.” Discourse cannot, Spillers argues, paper over the “point of convergence [where] biological, sexual, social, cultural, linguistic, ritualistic, and psychological fortunes join” and the extent to which these elements of biopolitical existence assign certain significations to specific bodies.^[6] But if these associations are discursively generated, it is then possible to rewrite them. Citing Cathy Cohen’s notion that deviance is where we can locate “the radical potential of queer politics,” Ariane Cruz argues in The Color of Kink that we need to “shift our critical gaze away from the conventionally [158] respectable to read deviance as a kind of black political strategy.”^[7] Cruz encourages us to adopt a “politics of perversion” that enables us to directly interrogate the problem of power at the heart of the anti-porn feminist argument that sexual encounters are inherently tied to the inequality of our sex-gender system; so too, it would seem, is race inextricable from sexual encounters because race is indelibly linked to a White-supremacist racial hierarchy.^[8] To play with racial taboos in sex [159] is to make the invisible visible in the most uncomfortable ways, but the solution cannot be to simply ban pornography or to lock away the kinks.

Race play often overlaps with and intersects with BDSM, a field which Cruz recognizes “is deeply informed by racialized sexual politics. Race is marginalized in both the scholarly literature and popular media about BDSM, contributing to the impression that it is not something black people do, or should do, and/or that race is not a salient factor in the power dynamics so essential to the practice.” Yet for Cruz as for Williams, this erasure of participation and pleasure bars us from thinking about BDSM as “a productive space from which to consider the complexity and diverseness of black women’s sexual practice and the mutability of black female sexuality.”^[9] Race play, according to this line of thinking, may then provide a productive space not just for encountering racism and racist practices but for analyzing their power as cultural narratives and the application of those narratives to individual bodies. To apply what Jesus G. Smith and Aurolyn Luykx write about interracial porn to race play, kink can “reproduce racist tropes, sexist language and heteronormative behaviours in order to counter the oppression they face from the White supremacists and to access their own erotic pleasure in the racialized space where they reside.”^[10] But what race play offers to participants, I will argue, does not necessarily match what outside observers might see: what observers understand as a reproduction or reinforcement of the racial order can, to the players themselves, be a source of erotic pleasure precisely because of the kink’s ability to interrogate the racial order and call it into question. Race play thus presents a serious challenge for individuals and populations as biopolitical actors [160] while also exposing the unspoken (or unspeakable) power dynamics that White supremacy uses to try to convince us that racial categories are fixed rather than socially constructed.

Using Tamora and Aaron from Titus Andronicus as a test case, showing how Shakespeare has anticipated the outlines of a much later kink and highlighted some of the components of how racism is being constructed alongside the creation of the notion of race, I will argue for the importance of thinking about kink as a set of practices that are valuable precisely because they violate normative boundaries (statistical and/or ethical), and that critical practice can learn to incorporate those things that strike us as biopolitically non-expedient — or that strike us as just downright icky — through a focus on the conjoined principles of intent, consent, and pleasure. Turning our attention to this case within the context of the premodern creation of our contemporary notions of race and White supremacy, we can see how Shakespeare represents Tamora and Aaron’s sexual relationship as both a violation of the “natural” order and as ars erotica, pleasures which need no justification. This seeming contradiction depends entirely on the observer’s gaze: Shakespeare shows us that it is outsiders who police the social construction of race and raced bodies, and in so doing, demonstrates how outsiders can rewrite the signification of a sexual act. What Tamora and Aaron experience as a way of playing with and playing within systems of racial signification, the Romans read as a reinforcement of old stereotypes and boundaries, and as a degradation of a White body tarnished by its sexual association with Blackness. This contradiction in signification then illustrates the need to create space for kink/sex that is pleasurable for its consenting participants, even if it violates external ethical norms. In short, pleasure does not need to be a means to an end: pleasure is a valid end unto itself. [161]

I. “Let her joy her raven-colored love”

The argument that Shakespeare presents us with contradictory views of Tamora and Aaron’s relationship starts with a straightforward question: what race are the Goths in Titus Andronicus? An answer should begin with acknowledging how reductive it is to think of race in an early modern context as simply a manifestation of skin color. Instead, as Matthieu Chapman frames the challenge of defining the concept of race in the early modern era, “Even among scholars of race in the period, very few, if any, consensuses are reached. Everything from how race was defined in Early Modern England to who was considered a racialized being is up for debate. Whether race was defined by color, nationality, bloodlines, gender, religion, as a commodity, through culture, through encounters, or all or none of the above have all been questions with no real resolution.”^[11] While this multiplicity of signifiers creates a problem for the question of what we mean when we talk about race, Chapman’s framing also throws open the possibilities for analyzing entire networks of signification and the ways they overlap and slide into one another. As Margo Hendricks explains, “Pre-1700 representations of race and nation were part of a systemic effort to foster social and political cohesion in England. What is more evident is that absolutes do not entirely work when reading Shakespeare’s plays. We realize that sometimes race references a biological identity, whereas at other times it signifies national identity or social status.”^[12] These “overlapping ideological paths” are marked by “an elaborate system of linking metaphors whose rhetorical and interpretive strength lay in their fluidity.”^[13] These overlapping and fluid systems of signification and representation are precisely what have enabled critics [162] to think of the Goths less as a group tied to Roman history and more as stand-ins for the various national enemies of England.^[14] There is no single agreement about what race “meant” or on what signifiers it was constructed, and this gives us license to observe how overlapping categories like nationality, religion, and color form the lacework of categorical differences Shakespeare employs to construct the Romans as stand-ins for the White-English and the Goths as racialized Others. This split certainly does not result in the Romans coming off well; if anything, Titus’s Rome is a place of chaos, idle luxury, tyranny born of a succession crisis, and inflexibility of law and religion. This self-laceration has the effect of critiquing both the Romans/English and their opponents, but still insisting that while both sides might have their vices, the White side will still come out as the winners. [163]

In this section, then, I will argue that Shakespeare contributes to a White-supremacist reality that insists on the racial alterity of the Goths but also insists that the Goths can become White when it is convenient for the Romans to regard them as such, as we shall see when it comes to the judgment of Tamora and Aaron’s interracial relationship. Much of the recent scholarship on the play’s representations of race has understandably focused on Aaron and on the extent to which the Romans are stand-ins for the English, but less attention has been paid to the ways in which the White-Romans insist on racial differences between themselves and the also approximately White Goths.^[15] And less attention still has been paid to Tamora herself, despite her ability to seemingly function equally as Goth and Roman.^[16] As will become especially important in the next section of the essay, one of the prerogatives claimed by White supremacy is the power to determine not just who is White but when they can be whitened and how Whiteness signifies. Whiteness itself is, according to this argument, a dangerously fluid category that perpetuates itself through granting contingent access to its power. In acting as the gatekeepers for permissible sexual expression, Lavinia and Bassianus — the [164] exemplars of the White-Romans — claim for themselves the ability to frame Tamora and Aaron’s relationship as a violation of the social/racial order. In the process of doing so, they ignore Tamora and Aaron’s own experience of the sexual component of their relationship, overwriting it in a way that denies racialized bodies their own pleasures.

The analysis that follows will be split into two parts that anticipate an important point in the later theorization of race play: so often, there is a difference between what outsiders see and what the participants experience. In the view of Lavinia and Bassianus, Tamora and Aaron’s sexual relationship is simply degrading interracial sex, not race play, specifically because Tamora is capable of registering as White; sex with Aaron taints her Whitened body and marks her as a kind of race traitor. But for Tamora and Aaron themselves, their sex is kinky race play: race itself is a source of sexual energy and power through the eroticization of their racialized features and their play with and within the White-Roman socioracial hierarchy. Even as those around them insist that they are the ones who are able to determine the meaning and value of sex and race, Tamora and Aaron show us how to do race play ethically.^[17]

Perhaps the most salient exploration of the racial identity of the Goths comes from Francesca T. Royster’s compelling argument that in Titus, “Tamora’s whiteness is racially marked, is made visible, and thus it is misleading to simplify the play’s racial landscape into black and white, with black as the ‘other.’ One of the play’s striking features is its othering [165] of a woman who is conspicuously white.”^[18] Royster observes how “through the failed project to incorporate Tamora into the Roman social body, we can see how white supremacy is normalized and patrolled through the bodies of women.”^[19] What is so useful about Royster’s argument is the extent to which she insists that Whiteness is not merely a default or invisible setting but instead a color tied to an identity that asks for participants in the socioracial system to police who is included and who is excluded. Lavinia and Bassianus certainly patrol these borders, insisting on Tamora’s Whiteness as something that is harmed and degraded through her relationship with Aaron. Yet Aaron and Tamora understand her racial identification differently: neither sees Tamora as hyperwhite (as Royster describes her), instead persistently linking her to the liminal racial figure of Semiramis.

To return to our initial question — what race are the Goths? — perhaps the closest we can come to any firm answer is to note that while the critical literature seems to want a clear answer, perhaps the most we can say the Goths belong to an ethnic group with cultural and religious practices that depart from Roman customs but without necessarily drawing clear racial divisions along color lines. Chapman’s interrogation of the differences among Moors “posit[s] that color difference was a primary constituent element of subjectivity. While texts from the Early Modern period do use overlapping terms to refer to varying darker-skinned peoples, they also allow for reading distinctions between peoples of color that aligns them structurally as human or inhuman.”^[20] Given Tamora’s position of power as empress, the Romans have a vested interest in making sure she is read as human — as a direct contrast with a dehumanized and humiliated Aaron. Tamora is certainly capable of being humanized, [166] since she seems to be of the same color as the Romans, or at least the same color as Lavinia. Immediately after announcing that he will marry Lavinia, his brother’s betrothed, emperor Saturninus takes possession of Tamora and recognizes her as

a goodly lady, trust me, of the hue
That I would choose, were I to choose anew.
(1.1.264–65)^[21]

The ambiguity here — is Tamora White like Lavinia (because Saturninus will always choose a woman of the same color), or is she recognizably a racial other (because Saturninus would prefer a non-White partner)? — is not so simple to resolve. In Henry Peachum’s famous drawing of the play, Tamora and the rest of the Romans are not marked off as phenotypically different; only Aaron appears with dark skin. Aaron himself, in his rhapsodic monologue that opens act two, tells of his desire

to wanton with queen,
this goddess, this Semiramis, this nymph,
this siren.
(2.1.21–23)

It is notable that he chooses Semiramis, the Assyrian queen of Babylon, as the one human(ish) mythological figure to reach for. Semiramis is described in critical literature as a kind of in-between figure: Alison L. Beringer shows that Semiramis defies gender roles, appearing as male, female, or androgynous sometimes even within the same text.^[22] Even more important here is Alice Mikal Craven’s claim that Semiramis often represents an Other that draws on the “cultural projections of the black woman [167] … present in the period leading up to the writing of the play, but were almost exclusively fantasies rather than descriptions based on actual encounters with black women.”^[23] To describe Tamora as akin to Semiramis presents few easy answers; if anything, it wildly complicates any attempt to make a definitive claim about the race of the Goths. The identification makes Tamora a liminal figure residing somewhere in the vast middle of representations of gender, sexuality, and skin color. This liminality then allows Tamora to register as either White or non-White, depending on political circumstance and contextual need.

It is Tamora’s racial fluidity that enables Lavinia and Bassianus to frame the sexual encounter as a dangerously transgressive violation of the social order (that is, not as race play) at the same moment that Tamora and Aaron understand the kinky pleasure potential of their meeting. Thinking they have the upper hand upon finding Tamora and Aaron together in the hunting wood, Lavinia and Bassianus mock Tamora for her “unnatural” desires in ways that her transgression is not simply cuckolding her husband but doing it with a Black man. Yet this contrast only exists if Tamora is herself White; if she is a racially Othered Goth, it is quite difficult to understand why Lavinia and Bassianus would focus so heavily on the racial nature of her trespass. Aaron’s Blackness can stain and shame Tamora only within a racial hierarchy that places Whiteness on top but which regularly conflates and equates various forms of racial alterity. Lavinia states,

Tis thought you have goodly gift in horning,
And to be doubted that your Moor and you
Are brought forth to try thy experiments.
(2.3.67–69) [168]

Bassianus doubles down on this insult — experiments suggests that the pair are thinking of interracial sex as an error, an unnatural act^[24] — by telling Tamora that her “swarthy Cimmerian / Doth make your honor of his body’s hue, / Spotted, detested, and abominable” (2.3.72–74), as if Aaron’s Blackness is an infection whose effects will be written on her honor and by implication her body — as if race is an STI whose chief symptom is to darken her Whiteness.^[25] He further asks why she is

dismounted from your snow-white goodly steed,
and wandered hither to an obscure plot,
Accompanied but with a barbarous Moor,
If foul desire had not conducted you?
(2.3.76–79).

Along with Lavinia’s exhortation that Tamora should “joy her raven-colored love” (2.3.83), this scene makes it clear that, in the eyes and through the language of the Romans, Tamora can be made White: she may remain a racial outsider as Queen of Goths, yet she is also “incorporate in Rome, / A Roman now adopted happily” (1.1.464–65), determined as racially identical to the Romans because it makes her violation of the sexual/racial [169] order all the more transgressive. It is important to note that Aaron is not present for any of this, but his Blackness cannot be erased from the scene; as David Sterling Brown puts it, this discussion “reinforces just how necessary Aaron’s absent presence is for assessing the value of blackness.”^[26] In this case, for Lavinia and Bassianus — who remain thoroughly convinced that race is ontological rather than discursive — it is Aaron’s Blackness that determines and fixes Tamora’s Whiteness for Lavinia and Bassianus, but in so doing, they erase the prospect that Blackness may possess an erotics of its own, separate from or outside of Whiteness.

Right after Bassianus is murdered in front of her, Lavinia momentarily switches registers, referring to Tamora as “Semiramis — nay, barbarous Tamora, / For no other name fits thy nature but thy own” (2.3.118–19), throwing together a liminally racial figure with the liminally racialized barbarous since the racial valences of barbarian are complicated.^[27] Lavinia first identifies Tamora as a racial other, keeping with her steadfast insistence on reading Tamora as a threat to the social order, but quickly switches tactics: shifting away from her racial identification with Semiramis, instead Lavinia moves Tamora into the register of a barbarian, a White body who is merely a “cultural alien,”^[28] perhaps as a way of insisting on a shared Whiteness that will save her life now that it is threatened. Lavinia, importantly, takes for granted her own ability to dictate the terms on which Tamora should understand herself and in so doing illustrates Ian Smith’s argument that “race signifies not an abstract essence but a doing, a verbal performance — in both senses, grammatical and rhetorical — a continuous pursuit of subjection.”^[29] [170]

And Lavinia is by no means the only character in the play to insist on Tamora’s Whiteness as a way of framing her relationship with Aaron as a cross-racial violation of Rome’s moral/color order. In the play’s fly-killing scene, present in the play’s 1623 Folio version but in none of the previous quartos, Marcus strikes at a fly with his knife, an act for which Titus chastises him. But Marcus defends himself by explaining that

it was a black ill-favored fly,
Like to the empress’ Moor; therefore I killed him.
(3.2.67–68)

Marcus’s use of the possessive in referring to Aaron seems significant: Aaron is not identified by name but instead as a racial Other who belongs to the empress, a way of figuring the relationship that invokes the racialized ownership practices of the transatlantic slave trade. Marcus’s use of the possessive here works to frame that relationship as one between White master and Black slave, reminding us of the Roman understanding of the “correct” power dynamics of racial ownership. Later in the play, a Nurse arrives bearing from Tamora “a blackamoor child” (4.2.51.sd) to Aaron, the child’s father. She exclaims that she “would hide from heaver’s eye, / Our empress’ shame and stately Rome’s disgrace” (4.2.60–61), declaring the child to be

a joyless, dismal, black, and sorrowful issue.
Here is the babe, as loathsome as a toad
Amongst the fair-faced breeders of our clime.
(4.2.68–70)

The Nurse, like Marcus, insists on a racial difference between Tamora and Aaron: only if Tamora is White could her child with Saturninus fit in among the fair-faced breeders. It is because the father is Black that the recognizably Black child cannot be incorporated into Rome, emphasizing [171] the extent to which other White-Roman characters in the play insist on understanding Tamora and Aaron’s sexual relationship as a violation of the socioracial order.

But if Lavinia and the other Romans claim the prerogative to fix the race of Tamora’s body, and with it the signification of her sexual relationship with Aaron as one that violates the moral/natural/color order, it is also necessary to consider what sex, and what sex in the context of racial identification, means to Tamora and Aaron. Despite their centrality to the plot, the two spend remarkably little time interacting; though they are present on stage together a few times, this scene of the thwarted encounter is their only conversation in the whole play. When apart, though, the two express considerable desire for one another along lines that emphasize the erotic delights intrinsic to race play. In Aaron’s entrance monologue, apart from referring to Tamora as Semiramis, he casts their relationship as one marked by a power exchange charged by racial erotics:

Then, Aaron, arm thy heart and fit thy thoughts
To mount aloft with thy imperial mistress,
And mount her pitch whom thou in triumph long
Hast prisoner held, fettered in amorous chains
And faster bound to Aaron’s charming eyes
Than is Prometheus tied to Caucasus.
Away with slavish weeds and servile thoughts!
I will be bright, and shine in pearl and gold
To wait upon this new-made empress.
To wait, said I? to wanton with this queen,
This goddess, this Semiramis, this nymph,
This siren, that will charm Rome’s Saturnine
And see his shipwreck and his commonweal’s.
(2.1.12–24) [172]

Aaron’s soliloquy is a remarkably complicated exploration of the power exchanges that fuel his sexual relationship with Tamora and the racial positions to which those power exchanges are attached. Aaron at first reverses the master-slave dynamic that the others have emphasized: Aaron is now the one who has held Tamora his erotic prisoner; he holds the amorous chains that bind her; and he insists on throwing off his slavish weeds in exchange for the pearl and gold riches of the Roman court. Aaron also adopts the language of the Roman practice of holding prisoners in triumph, reversing the expected racial dynamics to place himself as part of the Roman power structure.

But as the speech proceeds, even as he casts aside his slavish weeds, Aaron reverses his position to present himself as the adorned servant of the empress, subserviently placing himself back under her power and control. He may not be her slave, but he certainly seems willing to temporarily play the part for her. Yet Aaron will not be content merely to wait upon Tamora; waiting on her quickly turns to the verbal wanton with, a shift that signals if not equality, playing with power exchange with a woman who is a political superior, a racial other, and even a trans-human deity. And it is this wantoning that Aaron sees as the thing that will destroy the state, just as the Romans have feared. Yet this oncoming shipwreck is not going to happen, as the Romans have believed, simply because Tamora has debased herself. Instead, Aaron grants Tamora a kind of agency the Romans do not, recognizing that power comes through an ability to see the system for what it is and subversively to play with and within its conventions. Aaron later declares that the two must wait to have sex until after they have pulled off the plot to murder Lavinia and Bassianus — as he puts it, his silence and melancholy, along with his “fleece of wooly hair that now uncurls” are no “venereal signs; / Vengeance is in my heart, death in my hand” (2.2.34, 37–38). Tamora responds by calling Aaron “my sweet Moor” (2.2.51), recognizing his Black body and his wooly hair as elements of his erotic appeal. [173] After she leaves her sons to rape and murder Lavinia, she declares, “Now I will hence to seek my lovely Moor” (2.2.190), again insisting on connecting his racial identity to his sexual appeal and their sexual play.

Tamora and Aaron’s relationship reveals useful principles when it comes to thinking about how Shakespeare is outlining race play long before the term existed. Of the points that I will take up in the theorization that follows, perhaps the most important is that outsiders rarely have a clear view of what goes on between two consenting adults, and yet it is outsiders who insist that they possess the power to understand the meaning of sex. Tamora and Aaron revel in their erotic play, aware of the power and racial differences between them; they violate the social order in ways that generate pleasure for them. Yet it is Lavinia and Bassianus who, along with the rest of the White-Romans, choose to whiten Tamora to emphasize the depths of her depravity. What Tamora and Aaron experience as an erotic act becomes a serious violation of the social order in a White-supremacist structure that grants itself the power to determine the signification of the acts by relying on a “generative script from which the ideological premises of racial difference can be materialized.”^[30] The very same act, race play, is thus made to mean two different things depending on the stance of the observers. Though what they do looks for all the world to outsiders as an unthinkable violation and a despicable form of sex — and to be sure the pursuit of murder violates the principle of consent — Tamora and Aaron are, above all else, having fun in a way that fosters their sexual connection and erotically plays with the meaning of racial difference within a White-supremacist regime.

II. “Now I will hence to seek my lovely Moor”

Race play can, and should, cause discomfort: “A bitchy white woman belittling her black maid. A Latino man being tied up and called racial [174] slurs. A black woman being offered for sale at a slave auction. All of these are awful in reality, but for people who are into race-play — or racialized sexual situations — they can be extremely hot.”^[31] Margot Weiss has argued that because Whiteness is the privileged norm, racial minority participation in BDSM is inevitably difficult because these scenes inevitably reinforce White supremacy and marginalize minorities. “Black–white pairing in domination/submission fantasies,” Weiss writes, “cannot avoid the historical underpinning of such scenes”; as such, we must recognize “that it is this very history that is the source of erotic fantasy.”^[32] Weiss’s limitation here is important: while these structures may indeed be inevitable within BDSM play, not every sexual encounter is kinky, and not all forms of contact between individuals of different races are inevitably forms of race play, even if any individual sexual encounter feels like it could arrive at kink with the faintest push.^[33] What I do not want to argue (or even imply) in this section is that it is impossible for interracial sex and sexualities to exist outside the framework of race play. Following Weiss, my argument will be limited to participation in a specific form of kink that relies on violating racial systems in ways that “can be both repressive and freeing in the same instance, offering opportunities for excitement and titillation that may reify systemic oppression while also empowering marginalized subjects to disrupt these systems in [175] unique ways.”^[34] Race play relies on active participation in (either through reinforcing or violating) existing racial systems. This does not mean that all forms of interracial sex are necessarily race play; there is absolutely room for non-kink sexual activity that does not engage with those systems and structures. We cannot, however, overlook the Lavinia/Bassianus problem: racists, or racist pockets of the world, are likely to read even the most vanilla interracial sexual contact as destructive or demeaning simply because to a racist, any interracial sexual act is always already a violation. It has become something of a truism in anti-racist spaces that action matters more than intent, but race play may be one of the significant exceptions to this rule. When the action is a problem for non-participants, when the play is inevitably going to look racist (and will involve active invocations of racism and racist language and practice), it is up to the participants to determine whether the play violates their own boundaries and limits. Violation can feel violating, but with intent and consent, it can also create intense pleasure.

Even within BDSM communities, there is considerable discomfort around race play — “How anyone could indulge in behaviors that don’t just glorify but actively eroticize this oppression is baffling to some”^[35] — especially when it comes to what might be pleasurable or acceptable in private but cannot be performed or even acknowledged in public. Yet as some participants make clear, this type of play has the potential to explore race in a cathartic way. Renowned leather mother Viola Johnson spoke openly of her taboo attractions: “I can’t help the fact that nice Black Jewish girls shouldn’t have Nazi fantasies. I DO! Not only do I have politically incorrect fantasies, I’ve acted many of them out. Even worse, I’ve enjoyed them. They have tripped my trigger, gotten my rocks off, made me cum.”^[36] Johnson goes on to castigate participants in the scene [176] who refuse to acknowledge the racialized dynamics of their relationships when such dynamics are baked into the scene, reminding us that BDSM players recognized the challenges facing non-White kinksters long before academics got around to studying the issue. Indirectly building on Johnson and directly on Weiss, Kyla Robinson argues that this refusal to acknowledge visible or present racial dynamics ends up making it difficult for people of color to even participate in kink: “By framing race play as the ultimate taboo and off-limits act, the BDSM community is feeding into neoliberal whiteness, and by refusing to acknowledge or speak about how deeply entrenched many aspects of erotic practices in general are inescapably tied to historically situated racial, ethnic, and religious traumas, there is no way forward, and no space for minorities.”^[37] Given the various traumas that inevitably structure race play scenes, it should come as no surprise that much of the available discourse about race play — to the extent that there even is a discourse, given the discomfort that it causes for so many — focuses on carefully negotiating scenes in advance so as to not trigger participants (or observers) and on the need for considerable aftercare and processing once the scene ends.^[38] In the review that follows, I want to recognize the biopolitical problems that race play presents both for individuals and for collectives and in doing so, to set up the final turn of this essay: that while we so often analyze a kink through the biopolitical apparatus that generates it — and then tries to control or suppress it — pleasure does not always follow the rules. If critical engagement with kink teaches nothing else, it is that pleasure can emerge out of virtually anything, however unthinkable it might be to most people.

Part of the problem with discussing race play, one which gives rise to the problem of exclusion that Robinson discusses, is that we are conditioned [177] by biopolitics. Susanne Schotanus writes, to “think of people first and foremost as representatives of a collective identity and only secondly as individual people with their own thoughts and convictions[,] … a person’s personal decision to engage in race play then, becomes a collective problem, threatening the perceptions about the collective as well as the personal well-being of other people in this group.”^[39] Like Johnson and Robinson, what Schotanus recognizes is that, when it comes to kink, individual actions are likely to be read as indictments of entire communities or as ways in which individuals fail to live up to their supposed responsibilities to be good citizens of their communities. Tamora, even after becoming Empress of Rome, still remains Queen of Goths, and the play’s characters insist that she violates not just herself but the White-Roman collective through her affair with Aaron, stubbornly referred to not by his own name but simply as a Moor. Along these lines, Mollena Williams has written about her frustrations with people who are unwilling to recognize that they cannot exempt themselves from the snares of sexual racism simply by not thinking about the problem: “Whenever I hear POC … insist that race ‘is not an issue’ and that they have no conflict or second-thoughts about engaging in kink as it pertains to Blackness, I am absolutely gobsmacked. From the stories I hear of unsolicited skin fetishism, to the ‘Big Black Cock’ obsession, to the incredibly inappropriate assumptions about people’s roles in the dungeon or bedroom based on race, this shit is rampant.”^[40] For Williams, race is such a vividly obvious part of kink that ignoring it is impossible; doing so enables Whiteness to operate invisibly in ways that continue to dominate kink spaces and exclude people of color from full participation. The only option then [178] becomes to make race an openly acknowledged part of BDSM practices: to do otherwise allows White supremacy to remain uninterrogated and fester away.

Tamora’s conditional Whiteness offers us insight into the dynamics of race play specifically because of how slippery it is: as my analysis of Titus has argued, the logic of White supremacy grants Whiteness a corrosive control over non-White sexualities to the extent that it has the power to make racial determinations over individuals, and to the extent that it denies the pleasurable possibilities of these sexualities except outside its own framework. Yet as Tamora and Aaron demonstrate, it is possible to reappropriate sexual racism and use it for pleasure. But to what extent they are fully in control of their own sexual experiences is something that we can reasonably question, especially if Tamora’s identification as Semiramis makes her relationship with Aaron one that exists between two non-White bodies. In The Erotic Life of Racism, Sharon Holland makes a provocative claim: “Blackness, at least as it is understood in visual culture, not only produces ‘erotic value’ for whiteness, but it holds the very impossibility of its own pleasure through becoming the sexualized surrogate of another. In another sense, blackness can never possess its own erotic life.”^[41] And there is an abundance of evidence for this position. In a delightfully termed pornoethnography, Jerry Yung-Ching Chang explores “Fire Island’s race and class hierarchies” in the classic gay porn Boys in the Sand, explaining that “porn films are part and parcel of the modern biopolitical apparatus,”^[42] and it is this engagement that enables us to use the wild popularity of interracial porn as a means of reflecting cultural attitudes toward race and sexuality. Cruz also rolls pornography into the biopolitical apparatus of race and racism, explicitly connecting [179] it to race play: “In making visible the race-play fantasy, pornography is a critical venue of and for race-play performance. It is an important site of race-play analysis because of the dynamic ways it highlights both the fantasy/reality tension and the interracial dynamics that are so salient to the practice. It also brings into relief the perverse pleasures of race play.”^[43] In light of Cruz’s analysis, it is worth another reminder that race play is a distinct phenomenon and not consubstantial with interracial sex or interracial pornography. While interracial pornography can mediate and repackage race play into a widely consumable product, interracial sexual activity requires intent, consent, and pleasure to become race play.

According to PornHub’s statistics for 2021, at least six of the top twenty searched terms were explicitly racial and just as popular with women and men.^[44]  Men’s top five favorite categories include Japanese (ranked first), ebony, and hentai; for women, they include Japanese (ranked second) and hentai. Breaking down the data by country, in the United States, half of the top search terms are explicitly racial: Hentai, Ebony, Asian, Latina, BBC, Anime, and Black.^[45] Within interracial porn, we can see Holland’s claim vividly on display, and even expanded on through the consistent fetishization of Black and Asian bodies. Interracial porn can involve bodies of any combination of races but with an important [180] caveat anticipated by the conflict between Tamora/Aaron and Lavinia/Bassianus: to be legible as race play, the races involved must have a history built on racism and not merely on observed racial difference. It is not really possible to engage in race play, that is, without engaging in racist and/or colonial tropes because those are the constituent parts of the discursive formation of race in the first place. As a result, anything that is legible as race play must be invested in perpetuating and/or perverting an existing racial hierarchy or power dynamic.

While not all interracial porn is legible as race play, certainly it is the case that much interracial porn directly engages in the language of sexual racism.^[46] In a study on race and aggression in porn, Eran Shor and Golshan Golriz show that Black men were “most likely to appear in videos with titles that suggest aggression,” while Asian men were “the most likely to appear in videos depicting aggression (more than two-thirds of the videos including Asian men exhibited visible aggression)” and “the most likely to appear in videos where nonconsensual aggression occurred.” In the same study, it was found that “more than half of the videos containing Latina women depicted visible aggression,” while “videos featuring Asian women were also more likely to include nonconsensual violence.”^[47] Shor and Golriz write later, “Still, one may wonder why the videos containing the Black male performer with a White woman performer were especially aggressive,”^[48] but this [181] hardly seems like cause for surprise or wonder given how often interracial porn “specifically entails sex between a Black man and a white woman — and which often deliberately portrays Black men as racial stereotypes,”^[49] often as thugs, insatiable predators on the hunt for White women, or as working-class trade. Thinking of pornography in this way is crucial for helping to explore/expand Holland’s idea that non-White bodies do not possess their own erotic life. Interracial pornography and race play both exist in a world of “ethnosexual frontiers” made up of “erotic intersections that are heavily patrolled, policed, and protected, yet regularly are penetrated by individuals forging sexual links with ethnic ‘others.’”^[50] These patrolled borders inevitably impact individuals; research consistently shows that “racial stereotypes, societal beauty standards, and sexual racism can significantly affect [our] sexual and romantic lives.”^[51] Sexual stereotypes and racism, as well as the tendency to think of individuals as representatives of their race, make it all but impossible for Blackness to have its own erotic life because Blackness is always enmeshed in the tight nets of White supremacy.

Holland’s move in response to this problem is to lean on Elizabeth Freeman’s term erotohistoriography from Time Binds, which Freeman explains “is distinct from the desire for a fully present past, a restoration of bygone times. Erotohistoriography does not write the lost object into the present so much as encounter it already in the present, by treating the present itself as hybrid.”^[52] For Freeman, erotohistoriography does not seek to make the past present; it assumes that the past is always [182] limned onto the present, a tangle of temporalities that demand to remain entangled. For Holland, the erotohistoriography of racism constantly tried to pull us back into the past, yet it still opens up opportunities to reconfigure desire wherein we no longer have to “view them as static representations, iconographically and inextricably linked to acts that they once signified.”^[53] The case of Tamora and Aaron helps to illustrate this later theorization, especially through the split between the signification of their race play. For Lavinia and Bassianus, Tamora and Aaron are static representations of the past; it may be that, as Saturninus says, “lovely Tamora, queen of Goths, / … dost outshine the gallant’st games of Rome” (1.1.320–22), but she remains Queen of Goths even after marriage — and Lavinia and Bassianus will not let her forget her place, keeping her linked to the past through their reminders that they, and not she, can determine the meaning of her body. Yet Tamora and Aaron’s connection to their racial past also enables them to reconfigure those structures for themselves and for their own pleasure.

We can, in short, resist the seeming-timelessness of the history of race: even if it is the case that Blackness can never possess its own erotic life, we can at least recognize that “it’s time to write a new chapter of our relation(s) as truly interdisciplinary, where the dangerous work of the everyday has some transformative (phenomenological?) agency.”^[54] Even as much of Holland’s argument resists the easy move into an embrace of futurity — that everything will be better, someday, if only we can uncouple the past from the present, if only we can rewrite race only this time without racism — it positively embraces a kind of future-looking transformation that is founded on genuinely reckoning with the past and recognizing just how close to the present it really is. [183]

III. Ars Erotica

Ultimately, the problem with race play as a kink, and the reason it remains a marginal practice even within kink communities, is the problem of futurity. Race play is so firmly planted in a past that is thoroughly imbricated in the present, always inflected by the history of racism and race relations, that it seemingly presents no opportunity for positivist growth. Every individual act of race play always reiterates and reinscribes history. Kadji Amin quotes from the French “Manifesto of the 343 Sluts” to illustrate this point: “We want to emphasize that in France, it’s our Arab friends who fuck us and never the other way around. Impossible not to understand this as revenge, to which we consent, against the colonizing Occident.”^[55] As such, race play is an essentially unacceptable, nearly unthinkable kink: the murky ethics of actively engaging with, participating in, and newly recreating racist language, practices, and power dynamics offers nothing for the future. We can locate at least some degree of an investment in futurity in other kinks: as queer critics since Gayle Rubin and Pat Califa have argued, BDSM offers ways to reconfigure power and gender that point toward a more sex-positive and egalitarian future.^[56] In cuckoldry we can see how to break free of the restrictive heteronormativity to reconfigure a future that is not built on monogamous marriage. Race play offers nothing to the future because of its persistent insistence on history, a linkage that can only embarrass by reminding us of the genuine horrors and traumas associated with racism, colorism, and colonialism.

What race play does offer, however, is what Tamora and Aaron so ably illustrate: sex does not have to be comprehensible to anyone outside the acts. It simply needs to provide pleasure. Yet the provision of pleasure above all raises thorny ethical objections: it is possible to misunderstand [184] the argument as one that defends racism, or at least one that excuses participating in potentially offensive and hurtful language and practices; at worst, it could seem to enable people to defend their racism as simply a kink. Within an oppressive system of White supremacy, is there such a thing as ethical race play? As Tamora and Aaron illustrate, and as I hope my argument in this essay has made clear, consent between all participants is critical, as is some degree of reflection on the practice. There is real value, I believe, in perversion: as Cruz puts it, “The politics of perversion works to queer ‘normal,’ to unveil its kinks, disclose its ethical foundation, and destabilize its privileged zenith on a hierarchy of sexuality.”^[57] Race play can perform all of this biopolitical work, even though it does so through the most unsavory of methods; this line of argument reminds us that sometimes the only way out is through.

Amin offers another way out of the tangle, arguing that what queer theory needs now is to “cultivate a wider set of methods and tactics with which to negotiate what disturbs and disappoints and a wider range of scholarly moods than utopian hope, on the one hand, and critique on the other. Scholars might inhabit unease, rather than seeking to quickly rid themselves of it to restore the mastery of the critic [and] the unassailability of her politics.”^[58] What queer theorists need to recognize, Amin argues, is that “the alternative and the nonnormative — the terms most valued within Queer studies — need not be politically desirable or affectively pleasurable; at times they might be experienced as barely tolerable, or more likely, as nauseating.”^[59] Building off Amin’s process of deidealization, of allowing unsavory sexual practices to simply be sexual practices walled off (to some degree) from biopolitics, would see us return to the idea that kink is a Foucauldian ars erotica rather than a scientia sexualis. As a scientia sexualis, kink must “correspond to the functional requirements [185] of a discourse,” but as an ars erotica, “truth is drawn from pleasure itself, understood as a practice and accumulated as experience; pleasure is not considered in relation to an absolute law of the permitted and the forbidden, nor by reference to a criterion of utility, but first and foremost in relation to itself.”^[60] For Foucault, there is necessarily some degree of secrecy and mystery around an ars erotica: it is something understood by the participants, passed down to new initiates, in ways that resist the regime of confessional sexuality under which we live. Maybe, Foucault suggests, not everything needs to be rigorously theorized to be considered a valid sexual practice. Maybe the point is that pleasure is a valid end unto itself,  that thinking about sex as play enables us to explore and discover what we enjoy, and what provides pleasure can remain the private domain of the participants in the acts. Above all else, it reminds us that kink is fun. Sex is fun: have more of it.

I am grateful for the insights, suggestions, and contributions made by Benjamin Brennan, John Dixon, Mario DiGangi, Amy Guenther, Ben A. Johnson, Peter Murray, and Steven Wooley, and for the extraordinary (and extraordinarily patient) shepherding of Gillian Knoll and Joseph Gamble.