In Ariane Cruz’ excerpt of The Color of Kink, she explores the representation of Black women and the performances within American BDSM and pornography. It revealed numerous ways of how the violence of Black women performers can illustrate the complexity and contradictory dynamics of pleasure, power, and pain. Cruz further explores the two differing opinions of Black queer writers, Audre Lorde and Tina Portillo, on BDSM. Lorde argues that “BDSM perpetuates the inevitability of social domination and subordination” meaning that society has embedded the dominance-submission relationships and power of culture. On the other hand, Portillo is a BDSM practitioner whom believes that “if someone desires a scenario such as plantation slave and master or cowboy and Indian, as long as it is mutual and done in a loving spirit that’s all that matters and all I care about” as long as it is mutually consensual. This brought into a larger debate of the sex wars between SAMOIS, a San Fransisco based, who argued that BDSM is a pleasurable sexual expression critiquing heteropatriarchy and gendered hierarchies of power.
Cruz also detailed what Alice Walker wrote in, “A Letter of the Times, or Should This Sado-Masochism Be Saved?” A teacher asked her students to imagine and write a narrative of their own from the POV of the women. Through fantasy and race play, Walker asserted that “black women do not want to be slaves.”