Erotic critiques of power: Black women, sex work, and erotic modes of resistance

• In Event: Black Feminist Sociology Meets Racial and Ethnic Feminist Theory

Abstract

I was twenty-two when I began graduate school and, uprooted in a strange town, I downloaded Tinder. One evening, half-distracted and lonely, I paused on a profile that offered only a sunset and the bio: “paypig, findom sub.” Curious, I matched. The man’s reply asked to “serve” a Black woman, pleading to be humiliated and paid for it. His words cast me into a role—aggressive, hypersexual, and mapped onto long-standing racialized fantasies. That moment provoked offense, defensiveness, and an unexpected curiosity: why would someone pay for humiliation, and why a Black woman? These questions opened a broader inquiry.

This book chapter examines how Black women navigate and remake racial meaning within a transformed sexual economy. Drawing on sixty-five in-depth interviews, intensive ethnography, and critical self-reflection, it compares experiences across camming, sugaring, professional BDSM, and full-service work. Situated within Black feminist theory and scholarship on commodified intimacy, the project centers pleasure, refusal, and representation without romanticizing constraint.

From these conversations emerges the concept of erotic critiques of power: practices through which Black women strategically deploy sexuality, boundary-setting, and compensation to expose and contest misogynoir, hegemonic masculinity, and controlling images such as the Jezebel, Sapphire, and Strong Black Woman. Erotic critiques blend personal development, political critique, and community accountability—transforming stereotyped expectations into sites of leverage while remaining attentive to precarity, emotional labor, and exploitation.

The analysis complicates binary framings of sex work as either degrading or liberatory. It shows that when erotic labor is bounded, negotiated, and remunerated, it can enable self-authorship and critique; when racialized desire is imposed without consent or reward, it reproduces harm. Ultimately, contemporary erotic economies are contested terrains where Black women actively negotiate identity, pleasure, and power under the pressures of market logics, technological mediation, and enduring racial capitalism.

Author

• Nia Janelle Baker, University of South Carolina