Race and desire in the porno-tropics: Ethnographic perspectives from the post-colony

Expat sexuality – from discourse to practice

Both sets of images – the calendar and the porn site – need to be understood in their specific context: that is, the expat quarters situated next to ‘black’ labor camps belonging to a contemporary logging company in the midst of the Congolese rainforest. These ‘white’ zones were inhabited by five European men leading a single and often lonely life in colonial style bungalows built by the company. For the purpose of this essay I will refer to the men in this small and isolated expat community by fictive names: Jens, the Danish site manager in his early 70s, Julien, the French mechanic in his early 60s, Roger, the French constructor in his late 50s, Michel, the French forest overseer in his early 60s, and Pablo, the Spanish forest engineer in his early 30s. The four older expats were all experienced men near the end of a long ‘Africa career’ who had left Europe in the 1960s in search of adventure, freedom and money. Coming from working-class or lower-middle-class backgrounds, they ended up in Africa, often through a military career. The fifth expat – the latest newcomer – had a degree in tropical forestry from Madrid and was realizing his professional dream of actually working in the rainforest. Three of these men were married or had a stable relationship in Europe, but – during my stay – only one of them was visited by his wife for a very brief time. Most of them only saw each other during the three week holiday periods they got after three to six months of work in the rainforest. The other two expatriates used to have long-term relationships with African women at previous job sites and one of them even had children who sometimes came to visit him, but – during my fieldwork – these men remained single most of the time.

From interviews, informal chats and participant observation, I came to understand how the rainforest, and the actual logging concession, was a profoundly ‘heterotopian’ place (Foucault, 1984), a site to live one’s dreams of freedom and remake one’s life ab novo. Despite the age, class, professional and personal differences between them, they all shared a largely similar ‘expat’ lifestyle. The constraints of the isolated environment, the difficulties on the work floor, their positions of power and control in the concession, the particularities of ‘whiteness’ in the midst of an apparently threatening ‘blackness’, the practices of nostalgically remembering a European home, the fears associated with living in unpredictable, unstable and sometimes dangerous conditions and the all too obvious effect of just being together produced largely similar motivations, frustrations, fears and desires amongst them.

It should be of no surprise that these men also shared rather similar discourses on ‘race’ and ‘sex’ which were fuelled by ever more examples given during everyday chitchat. The following is an extract from a conversation three of them once had in my presence, some days after a European Greenpeace team had organized a meeting in a nearby town, accusing the logging company of ‘irresponsible practices’:

Julien: So… Those Greenpeace people finally left us…

Roger: What fools these guys are! They come here as tourists… But we, we are in shit every day… Did you see that sissy who came along with them? I think it’s the first time he ever came to a place like this! Julien: No, I haven’t seen him. It doesn’t interest me. Jens: And those girls were so ugly. If they weren’t, I would have invited them at our place to spend a nice evening together… [Roger and Julien snigger] Roger: Hmm… But the little one had a nice figure all the same, hadn’t she? Jens: Pff… Roger: Yes she did! You won’t be able to find something like that in the shitty villages over here! Jens: You know you have to go to [town] for that. You find really beautiful girls over there. Roger: But those girls are morons! They are just there with their mouth open and it’s only eee, eee, eee. No, it’s not worth the trouble. If I want to fuck, it’s easier to give 2000 francs to a slut in one of these villages and it’s over. All the rest is not worth the trouble. [a long silence] Julien: What do you think of that one over there? [He points to a young girl selling food to the company workers a little further down the road] What do you think Thomas? You have to get ‘integrated’ right? Jens: He is still thinking about his wife in Belgium…

I remember how I mumbled something like ‘What? I don’t really know’ and then avoided the subject. In conversations like this, the expats presented themselves as tough ‘no bullshit’ guys, doing what needs to be done to make money and bring development to the country. They, thereby, clearly opposed themselves to the ‘sentimental’ and ‘effeminate’ environmentalists who – so they supposed – were cowardly on the lookout to harm their reputation. As strong, independent and adventurous men, living their isolated lives without their wives and family, they regularly engaged in this kind of sex talk so as to give proof of their own masculinity.

In such discourses, three recurring tropes emerged: (1) the black woman as a ‘mute’, ‘stinking’ lump of flesh, whose sexuality was reduced to her sheer ‘reception’ of white male frustrated energy looking for a way out and with no ‘better options’ available; (2) the black woman as a sexually ‘insatiable’ creature, capable of offering delightful erotic pleasures; and (3) the counterpoint of the aesthetic and sexual superiority of white women, explicitly opposed to the first stereotype and functioning alongside the second as a more civilized version of erotics next to the unbridled pleasures of ‘wild’ sex. These stereotypes are in fact quite old and date back to past (colonial) ethnosexual encounters. Therefore, their surprising recurrence in contemporary expat discourse seems to confirm the endurance of the so-called porno-tropic tradition. At the same time, however, they were sufficiently reversible and internally contradictory to allow for a considerable degree of play in daily narratives, thereby undermining the concept of the ‘porno-tropics’ as a determining and a-historical discourse.

The presence of such boastful discourses dealing with race and sex does not, however, allow for easy conclusions in terms of actual sexual practices. As far as I was able to get a reliable picture of ‘what went on behind closed doors’, there was more talking about sex than there was actual sex going on between ‘black’ and ‘white’. Based on frequent discussions I had with the expats and their Congolese workers, sexual relations varied; some expats were known for their sexual appetite amongst the women and girls of the labor camp while others were infamous for their apparent sexual abstinence. Who amongst the expats preferred what was often talked about within the black worker community. Moreover, offering a female relative to increase one’s chances of getting a job was also a quite common practice, not just towards the expats but – even more so – towards Congolese company staff. Other girls – inhabitants from the labor camp or, more often, students from a nearby town – managed to enter the expat circle on their own account looking for multiple sources of financial support. Their bodies were often intensively discussed by the expats and sometimes even shared amongst them.

Nevertheless, on the whole, sex was a lot more about talking than it was about acting. As I will explain further in this article, white men’s sex lives were more marked by porn movies and internet sites than by actual body contact and, despite all the boasting and showing off, their ethnosexual desires usually remained stuck at fantasy level. However, notwithstanding the rather infrequent nature of interracial sex, there certainly was a ‘porno-tropic’ dimension in everyday conversations. Or, to put it the other way round, a porno-tropic dynamics was at work, even when there was no actual sex at all. At the same time, although this so-called porno-tropics apparently fed on a long-standing ‘erotics of ravishment’ (McClintock, 1995: 22), it was not a mere replica of a past colonial structure of desire. Black women and girls indeed had a peculiar and fetishized erotic attraction for white expats, but the fantasized and constructed (sexual) paradise generally turned out to be less idyllic than imagined because, as Jan Nederveen Pieterse has put it (1992: 183), exoticism ‘often does not survive proximity’: From the expats’ perspective, women and girls always turned out to be ‘uglier’ than hoped for, their ‘breasts hanging even lower’ than they imagined and their sweat was even more ‘nauseating’ than feared. As a result, in everyday expat discourse, the trope of the ‘black beauty’ quite easily turned into the trope of the ‘stinking Negro’. Therefore, holding on to western aesthetic standards became a common expat ‘survival’ strategy in the midst of blackness, and the white woman reappeared in the very porno-tropic structure of feeling that had put her under erasure in the first place. With the desired black women firmly within reach, white expats often started to dream about the absent white woman, thereby demonstrating how desire often tends to pick the ‘unattainable’ object, as if to keep itself alive.

On white women and chainsaws

So, despite their absence from the expat bungalows in the logging concession, white women played a significant role in the local economy of desire. Their (imagined) bodies thereby shift McClintock’s interpretation of the ‘porno-tropics’ from predominantly an affair between white men and black women to a more complex erotic triangle. I thus argue that white women do occupy a position in the porno-tropics, even when they are physically absent from the actual tropics. As the foregoing extract illustrates, white women were obviously talked about by the expats themselves. But their bodies were also materially present as softly eroticized images on a particular calendar which was produced by the STIHL company and adorned the living rooms and bedrooms of expat bungalows. In themselves, these images were nothing unusual in the male world of industrial logging, but the anxiety with which they were ‘protected’ by the expats reveals the importance of white female sexuality in understanding the economy of desire in the logging concession. Indeed, these calendars were so jealously protected because black workers, who were supposedly particularly attracted by their appeal, were said to try to steal them from white houses.

Andreas Stihl AG & Company is a well-known producer of chainsaws that are widely used in the industrial logging sector in Central Africa. Each year this German company produces and distributes a particular calendar amongst its clients as part of its marketing strategy. This calendar ends up in forestry-related businesses all over the world and, thus, also arrives at the site of my fieldwork. Its erotic photographs are very popular and have attained a kind of a ‘cult’ status in Germany. The STIHL company made its first calendar in 1969 and started to use the combination of erotics and machinery in 1973, following the example of the more glamorous Pirelli calendar distributed by the Italian tire manufacturer since 1964. Despite early protests over the ‘pornographic’ nature of these calendars, their erotics have remained an essential part of the company’s marketing strategy: young blond 1970s girls posing with chainsaws in South German forests, 1980s models having fun with machinery in ‘traditional’ villages in the Alps, 1990s girls going on holiday in southern Europe with their gear, and finally contemporary urban fashion shoots of the 21st century. Throughout the years the calendar’s popularity only grew: from 45,000 copies in the 1970s, the production almost reached a million in 2010 (Anon, 2009; Belser, 2009). The expats at the logging concession eagerly looked forward to each new issue and talked in great detail about the women in its photographs. When Jens used them as ‘business gifts’ to local state agents, Pablo hid his copy in a locked drawer in his bedroom or when Roger cut out pictures from earlier calendars to decorate his house, these erotic photographs of white women (re)entered the field of race and desire in the logging concession. They thereby visualized the ‘absent presence’ of white women as a third node in the porno-tropic structure of desire and, through the rumors of ‘black theft’, also announced yet another node – black men – which I discuss in the last parts of this essay.

The STIHL pictures themselves play with stereotyped images of (white) masculinity and femininity and reconfirm the image of the logger as the paradigmatic masculine male and the chainsaw as the ultimate phallic object. The particular calendar that arrived in the concession during my fieldwork was the 2010 edition produced by the German fashion photographer Esther Haase. Using a kind of ‘paparazzi style’ in order to ‘obtain a spontaneous impression’ in her pictures (Anon, 2009), she produced images of ‘strong women’ using STIHL machines as tools in their games of domination and submission. The January 2010 page, for instance, shows a woman in black underwear kneeling down and pointing the tube of a leaf vacuum machine in the direction of a second woman whose Marilyn Monroe white dress is lifted up. Other photographs depict women holding chainsaws between their legs or passionately adoring them. Some also depict a girl as dominatrix in a position of power, sometimes in an explicitly ‘lesbian’ setting. Scantily dressed women playing with ‘boy toys’ are a successful image for marketing products in a predominantly male market. As a staged (female) celebration of the phallus, signified by chainsaws and other gear, it also somehow ‘heterosexualizes’ male fascinations with their own masculinities. But, five months out of twelve in the 2010 edition also depict male models, often as half-naked lean bodies of iconic working-class youth in the background looking at the female models in the foreground. They thereby repeat the scopophilic pleasures of the male viewer, an aspect that I will discuss in further detail in the second part of this essay.

For the expats at the concession, however, these photographs were first and foremost about ‘sexy white girls’ whose beauty strongly contrasted with locally ‘available’ women. Making remarks about their buttocks and breasts, their mouths and naughty looks, the European loggers discussed these pictures in the starkest phallocentric terms, notwithstanding the so-called feminist politics of representation deployed by Esther Haase. These STIHL calendars thus materialized the ‘absent presence’ of white women in the actual porno-tropics. No longer the colonial guardian of sexual morality undone from her own sexuality (Stoler, 2002: 71), the white woman appears as an explicitly eroticized object in itself, arousing fantasies of white-to-white sex that strongly contrasted with the interracial dialectics of desire and disgust. As a ‘sex object’, and no longer a ‘wife’ or a ‘mother’, the white woman played an important role in the work of the imagination of the expat loggers at the concession. The STIHL calendar illustrates how the porno-tropics was indeed more about fantasy than about actual body contact. But it also indicates that what appears to be exclusively about women might in fact also be about men. On the one hand, the same iconography that produced the white-woman-as-sexual-object also reinforced the image of the logger-as-ultimate-male. On the other hand, the real fear of black men trying to steal these calendars from the expat bungalows not only reproduced old colonial anxieties about the ‘Black Peril’ (e.g. Anderson, 2010; McCulloch, 2000), but also revealed the complexities of interracial male competition behind and beyond the woman as object of male desire. It is to these aspects that I now turn my attention.

Mimetic desire visualized

The STIHL photographs were not the only ‘erotic’ images present in the expat quarters of the logging concession. The white loggers also had access to satellite television and internet through which they could find more explicit pornographic images, although the internet connection was often unpredictable and frustratingly slow. In the second part of this article I, therefore, look at more explicit forms of pornography and particularly at one specific porn site, brought to my attention by the expats themselves, which clearly visualized the ambiguities of porno-tropic dynamics in the actual post-colony. Watching porn was, however, usually a private activity and therefore generally off-limits to participant observation. But, at the same time, expats talked about it, made jokes and suggestions, shared downloads and links or even accessed websites together. As a shared (homo)social practice, watching porn could thus be studied ‘ethnographically’. During a particular evening, after dinner in his bungalow, one of the men showed me his favorite website that had been suggested to him by an old friend in Kinshasa. The website, called Watching My Daughter Go Black (DogfartNetwork, n.d.), contained very explicit movies of ‘white’ girls having sex with ‘black’ men. In itself, this website did not seem very different from others in the quickly growing field of ‘interracial porn’, but what immediately captured my attention was the presence of white men during scenes of so-called interracial sex, who represented ‘fathers’ watching their ‘daughters go black’. These images explicitly illustrated and confirmed the dialectics of competition and desire I had come across in other spheres of life in the logging concession. I argue that this commercial porn site, created for a worldwide audience of presumably white men, resonated strongly with the economy of desire in the actual logging concession, while, at the same time, further destabilizing the concept of an a-historical ‘porno-tropics’.

In the following paragraphs I present an ethnographically informed reading of the images and texts on this particular website in order to illustrate certain aspects of expat masculinity and sexuality, which I have already hinted at in the previous discussion on the STIHL calendar. However, I am not implying that all expat desire is completely ‘determined’ or ‘explained’ by this example, nor do I claim that all the expat loggers regularly watched these kinds of images – although sharing porn movies was frequent between some of them. All I want to explain is how this very particular illustration of ethnosexual acts was one of the sources of erotic pleasure for some expats and how it indicates an important aspect of the porno-tropics, which often remains underexposed. I thereby follow insights from the academic field of ‘porn studies’, which takes pornography seriously as an object of analysis (e.g. Albury, 2009; Attwood, 2002; Boyle, 2010; Church Gibson and Gibson, 1993; Kipnis, 1996; Lehman, 2006; McNair, 1996; Williams, 1989, 2004a). While some scholars in this field, taking pornography as the new ‘royal road to cultural psyche’ (Kipnis, 2006: 118), may rely on all too essentialized ideas on ‘culture’ (as an almost collective unconscious made out of quasi-Jungian archetypes), porn studies quite rightly point to the central importance of transgressions of policed borders and frontiers in the making and unmaking of desire. In this sense, several scholars have argued that one of the most common transgressions illustrated by pornography is ‘racial’, but they often disagree on the relative extent of inherent racism and/or racial subversion behind these forms of commercialized interracial porn (Miller-Young, 2010; Shimazu, 2007; Williams, 2004b). Daniel Bernardi (2006) for instance, in his analysis of racial representations on porn sites, reproaches radical sex feminists like Linda Williams for ignoring the persistence of racism in pornography in their political battle against censorship. A closer look at the particular website I was shown during my fieldwork contributes to a contextualized understanding of the complexity of these matters.

Watching My Daughter Go Black (DogfartNetwork, n.d.) opens with the obligatory warning about its ‘explicit adult material’ and describes its pictures and movies as situations where ‘fathers watch in horror as their young daughters get defiled by huge black cocks’. The night I was shown this website for the first time, the expats made comments on the sizes of the black penises depicted and on the ‘hunger’ of white girls for ‘this kind of sex’, but the overall reaction was one of laughter and general amusement. A few days later, one of the expats once again mentioned this porn site to me, but the enjoyment of its imagery largely remained a private affair. In the following paragraphs, I therefore ‘read’ this website from my own perspective, which has been thoroughly informed by my understanding of white expat masculinities in the logging concession.

The website is part of the DogfartNetwork that comprises 20 ‘interracial’ porn sites – such as Interracial BlowBang, Interracial Pickups, Blacks on Blondes, Barb Cummings and Cum Bang – of which 13 are about sexual intercourse between black men and white women in different ‘varieties’. On the main web page, viewers are invited to take a ‘tour’ of the available videos depicting the ‘anguished heartbroken fathers’ who see ‘their precious daughters defiled by a black man right before their eyes’ and the ‘spoiled suburban white girls’ who ‘can’t get enough thick meaty black cock to satisfy’. Each video, introduced by a short description, can be previewed for a few seconds and paying Dogfart members can rate them and post comments. The descriptions under each video are written from the fictive perspective of one of the three protagonists in this ‘theatrics of transgression’: the white father, the white girl and the black man. These descriptions, therefore, offer a path into the scripted narratives presented around these images.

The descriptions from the perspective of the ‘white father’ feed on the latter’s assumed ethno-sexual fears that ground the transgressive desires which sustain the website’s iconography. The father is scripted as a decent, hard-working, lower-middle-class man who, notwithstanding how much he cares for his daughter, does not feel respected for his hard work. From his point of view, all his daughter seems to be interested in is ‘messing around’ with black guys. The father is also depicted as the ‘victim’ of his daughter who makes him watch, apparently to intensify her own transgressive sexual pleasures. Scared of the black man ‘kicking his ass’, he has no choice but to obey his daughter as she gets ‘violated’ all over ‘his furniture’, thereby revealing the inner essence of white femininity as a ‘black cock slut’. Descriptions from the perspective of the daughter stress how she firmly stands in today’s ‘multi-racial’ US society and strives for ‘romantic’ relationships with black men. But despite all the ‘romance’, she seems first and foremost attracted to their ‘black mammoth dicks’ and fucking them is a way to belittle her own father for his backward racial prejudices. Finally, from the black man’s perspective, the white girl’s romance is often recoded as a ‘casual’ relationship ‘on the side’, implicitly referring to his assumed black promiscuity. While perfectly aware of the uncontrollable attraction of his ‘big black dick’, the black man is also afraid of the father’s possible angry reaction, echoing memories of lynching and racial violence.

The iconography of Watching My Daughter Go Black thus feeds on the racial ‘drama’ of taboo and transgression in today’s US society, where two protagonists are being led by ‘bigger forces’ – the father’s racist fears and his daughter’s dark desires – while the black man just remains an object, a prop on the stage, on which the forces of repulsion and attraction focus. It is of course no coincidence that in ‘interracial’ porn, it is predominantly black men who are staged to perform these simultaneously feared and desired transgressions. Indeed, these images are first and foremost about the black penis, which is consistently visualized in such ways as to stress its size, which signifies, according to Kobena Mercer, ‘a threat to the secure identity of the white male ego and the position of power whiteness entails’ (1994: 134). The white teen daughter, despite her innocent schoolgirl looks, is then staged as a ‘slut’ or a ‘bitch’ because of her dark desires for the exaggerated black penis. This script apparently confirms Bernardi’s observation that the ‘ideological role’ of such scenes is ‘to promise the punishment of naughty white teens and their overprotective fathers’, even if the latter remain ‘absent from the mise-en-scene’ (2006: 233). Punishment of the white father is indeed at the center of the website’s erotic structure, but my analysis differs from Bernardi’s observation on two points: (1) the white father does not remain off-scene, but is clearly visible; and (2) the white teen is not so much punished, as herself punishing her father for his alleged racism. She is definitely not the victim of interracial rape, but the conscious solicitor of transgressive sex. She stands in a position of power: she makes her father look. While it could be argued that punishing their daughters’ transgression functions as a more subconscious source of sexual pleasure for white men watching these scenes, the texts on the website suggest that this punishment is not so much directed at the daughter, but rather an implicit form of self-castigation for the father’s own transgressive desires.

In the website, the fathers always strike explicitly ‘horrified’ poses to show their ‘disgust’ towards their daughters’ behavior. The object of such theatrical disgust does not seem to be black sexuality as such, but the sheer existence of white pleasure and satisfaction within interracial sex. However, because of the exaggerated nature of their poses and expressions, such ‘disgust’ tends to become parodied and functions as a cover-up for the fathers’ own transgressive desires. Their daughters equally excel in exaggerated performances. But their overacting is not a parody of their own desire, but a staged and excessive provocation towards their fathers and, by extension, towards the racist assumptions of the consumer of ‘interracial’ porn. By explicitly acting out ‘dark’ interracial desires to shock and to mock, they can be qualified as ‘grotesque bodies’ which, according to Mikhail Bakhtin (1965), ridicule official ideology by showing its arbitrariness. Thus, to put it quite bluntly, through over-acting the father subverts his own staged disgust and the daughter practically makes a cultural critique of racism. Obviously, over-acting and exaggeration are common stock-in-trade in pornography, but what matters here is not so much the over-acted sexual act as such, but the exaggerated re-enactment of watching it. It is in the father’s overacted look of disgust and the daughter’s exaggerated provocation to have her father watch that the iconography almost parodies itself.

This play of parody and the grotesque in these pornographic scripts bordering on self-mockery, partially refutes the common observation that humor is usually conspicuously absent in porn, as it would ‘undermine radically the conventions that sustain porn’s emphasis on phallic superiority and control’ (Martin, 2006: 193). The generalized ‘seriousness’ of most pornography seems inherently based on the ‘awesome’ representations of the size and hardness of the penis. In the website under discussion, this ‘serious’ side of pornography functions through the frantic obsession with the black man, but, at the same time, comic effects of white overacting are equally central to its overall iconography. At least for the expats in the logging concession, this overacting clearly had comical effects: their reaction to the website was mainly one of laughter and derision, mixed with comments on the size of black penises and sexual remarks on the bodies, postures and behaviors of the white girls. Such a reaction partially averts the threat of homoerotic titillation in a ‘straight’ homosocial context, but I suspect that their laughing was also, perhaps implicitly, directed at the white father figure, whose excessively performed disgust was indeed bordering on the ridiculous. If so, such laughter and derision equally broke down the white father’s authority, thus widening the gap between his own ridiculed masculinity and the awesomeness of the black penis. Laughter further emphasizes the contrast between the clothed (and often rather fat) white father and the naked black athlete that sets the binary opposition on which the whole pornographic dramatic structure is based. In contrast to the white father, the black man was indeed nothing to be laughed about: his presence was taken very seriously, his masculinity taken for granted.

Just as the white ‘daughter’ and ‘father’ figures are embedded in a particularly US cultural history, so is the image of the black man. His gangsta clothes signaling his da hood origins, his use of language, postures and behaviors, and his carefully staged genitality, reproduce long-standing racial stereotypes that circulate ‘a rigid set of racial roles and identities which rehearse scenarios of desire [and] trace the cultural legacies of slavery, empire and imperialism [which are] still in existence’ (Mercer, 1994: 133–134). But, notwithstanding the explicitly North-American context of the website’s iconography, its images were looked at by European men in the middle of the Congolese rainforest. For some reason, this set of images must have been considered interesting enough to be shown to others in the concession. And, indeed, in everyday expat life in this isolated part of the post-colony the appearance of exactly this type of porn is not a mere coincidence. On the one hand, the expats’ ideas on ‘whiteness’ and ‘blackness’ were as informed by hegemonic western media products as their compatriots’ ideas in Europe. On the other hand, and perhaps more importantly, the website’s iconography resonated with personal experiences and emotions on the work floor dealing with the daily construction of racialized masculinities.

In the logging concession, as a place of everyday interracial encounters, black and white masculinities were indeed not constructed as two separate and opposed identities; they were intimately related and mutually reconstructed through a dialectics of competition and desire. First of all, there was an aesthetic of skin color that worked both ways: white skin came to represent an unattainable ideal of beauty for black men (and black women) and black skin constituted a source of fascination for white men. The desire for black skin in the construction of white masculinities often betrayed a fascination for the black male body as the ultimate form of virility. At several occasions during my fieldwork, I have heard expats talk about and comment on the strength and beauty of black male bodies, thereby implicitly recognizing the comparative ‘undesirability’ of their own bodies for the (imagined) white woman. Just as their black workers, white expats cared a great deal about their bodies and tried to keep them in good shape through bodybuilding or jogging. I often heard them complain how their work for the logging company and their life at the concession made them lose their physique, sometimes explicitly comparing their own bodies with those of the ‘athletic’ black men they were confronted with every day. Their physical exercises in the tropical heat surely demonstrated a determination to stay in equally good shape. Through such bodily practices, issues of pride and status were at stake and expat authority was reconfirmed in the midst of a ‘threatening’ blackness. This often underexposed aspect further modifies McClintock’s concept of the porno-tropics, as not just a field of sexual opportunities to live out one’s hidden desires, but also a space of frustration and even imagined emasculation that can profoundly destabilize established masculinities.

This everyday game of competition and emasculation between white expats and black laborers in the logging concession is, indeed, reflected in the iconography of the Watching My Daughter Go Black website. It (re)visualizes the white woman, who was so ‘absently present’ in the STIHL photographs, as a white ‘daughter’ who needs, just as the calendars, to be protected from a threatening black sexuality. At the same time, the website also feeds on underlying anxieties by revealing the true nature of white female sexuality – in other words its inescapable craving for the black penis – and the emasculation of white masculinities in an interracial context. However, in contrast to the old colonial fears of interracial rape and the Black Peril, these anxieties are explicitly eroticized in the website. It thereby shows how the black male body is indeed ‘a phobogenic object, a stimulus to anxiety’ (Fanon, 1967: 117), but, at the same time, an object of white male mimetic desire. It is because of this schizophrenic ambiguity that this specific website helps understand the everyday dialectics of male competition and desire along the racial frontier.

Conclusion

I started this article with an analysis of expat sexual discourses and practices in a particular logging concession in the Congolese rainforest. I then turned towards two sets of erotic images in order to further understand its economy of desire. I have demonstrated how, while sex was a lot more about talking than it was about acting, everyday fantasies and images made clear that a porno-tropic dynamics was at work, even where there was no ‘real’ sex at all. Indeed, as the porno-tropic utopia turned out to be less paradisiacal than imagined, the royal road to fantasy was wide open.

But alongside the exotic and eroticized black female body, one of the figures mobilized in such white male fantasies was the white woman, whose bodily absence from the concession was partly compensated for by the STIHL calendars. These images revealed the presence of the white woman as a sex-object in porno-tropic imaginations, but also reinforced the stereotype of the logger-as-ultimate-masculine-male and laid bare old Black Peril anxieties. The presence of white women, whose erotic pictures were said to be so coveted by black workers that they would try to steal them from expat bungalows, expounds and contextualizes McClintock’s concept of the ‘porno-tropics’ as more than a ‘magic lantern’ of the white male mind onto which seducing images of black women can be projected. Moreover, the white woman as object of interracial exchange, theft and competition further highlights a threatening black male sexuality, thereby giving rise to an interracial version of the ‘erotic triangles’ conceptualized by René Girard (1966) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1985). In their view, such erotic triangles account for ‘mimetic desires’, where a subject – say, a white man – desires the object – a white woman – of another subject – a black man – and, through the same movement, effectively expresses a desire for the black man (by way of the desired woman).

Such an erotic triangle was explicitly visualized in the particular porn site watched, discussed and laughed about by the expat loggers during my fieldwork. The explicit eroticization of the black male body and the presence of the ‘awesome’ black penis as a central fetish in its iconography, reconfirmed the dialectics of competition and desire behind the reproduction of racialized masculinities in the logging concession. Through this contextualization and particularization of the ‘porno-tropics’, two figures thus emerged who remained largely absent in McClintock’s original exploration of the porno-tropics as simply a structure of desire between white men and black women. The white woman – as a returned but absent object of desire and theft – and the black man – as both an emasculating presence and a resource in the construction of white masculinities – were necessary for understanding the porno-tropics as more than an a-historical structure of the white mind.

It should be clear, however, that neither the expat fascination for the black phallus nor the mimetic desire suggested by the website, imply the existence of so-called closeted ‘homosexual’ desires. Such a conclusion would completely misrepresent the economy of desire on which such interracial pornography is built (Jenkins, 2006; Waugh, 2001). On the contrary, the heterosexual identity assumed publicly by the white expats at the concession is the necessary point of departure from which such interracial pornography is fully experienced. A certain male–male desire spontaneously arises at the very center of what is assumed to be heterosexuality. The previous readings thus confirm Sedgwick’s insight that there is always a potential for a homoerotic outgrowth of ‘male homosocial desire’ in even the most homophobic of contexts. This homo-erotics at work in the phallocentric institutions of hegemonic heterosexuality, she argues, ‘is not most importantly an expression of the psychic origin of these institutions in a repressed or sublimated homosexual genitality [but] the coming to visibility of the normally implicit terms of a coercive double bind’ (1985: 89). It is out of such a ‘coercive double bind’ between homophobic heterosexuality and homoerotic transgressions that male–male desire in ‘straight’ pornography arises.

One might expect that the possibility for such ‘homoerotic transgressions’ – or, more generally speaking, the white male fascination with the black male body – at least mitigates the vehemence of everyday racism. But, from daily comments and remarks made by the expat loggers on the work floor and in private, one must conclude that racist stereotypes retain their violent power. While the website indeed allows for considerable ambiguity and play and brings into the open the schizophrenic contradictions between racist stereotypes, it by no means diminishes their strength. Despite Linda Williams’s (2004b) assertion that the very transgression of interracial sexual taboos and the flirtation with ethnosexual stereotypes in interracial porn makes its imagery ‘subversive’, I tend to agree with Bernardi when he rightly asks ‘what exactly absolves the articulation of ambivalence of the potential to perpetuate racist ideologies’ (2006: 227).