pornotroping

English

Etymology

Coined by Hortense J. Spillers in her 1987 essay “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book”; porno- +‎ trope +‎ -ing.

Noun

pornotroping (uncountable)

1. (feminism) The process of reducing a person or group of people to mere flesh, stripped of personhood and made into the object of violent and sexual impulses.

Verb

pornotroping

1. present participle and gerund of pornotrope
   • 2000, Stacy Alaimo, Undomesticated Ground: Recasting Nature as Feminist Space, →ISBN:

     Focusing on acts of (sexual) violence directed against the black female body, Harman knows that her attempt to represent the past necessarily "translates into a potential for pornotroping."

   • 2003, Hortense J. Spillers, Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture, →ISBN:

     This profound intimacy of interlocking detail is disrupted, however, by externally imposed meanings and uses: (1) the captive body as the source of an irresistible, destructive sensuality; (2) at the same time -- in stunning contradiction-- it is reduced to a thing, to being for the captor; (3) in this distance from a subject position, the captured sexualities provide a physical and biological expression of “otherness”; (4) as a category of “otherness,” the captive body translates into a potential for pornotroping and embodies sheer physical powerlessness that slides into a more general "powerlessness," resonating through various centers of human and social meaning.

   • 2008, Michael A. Chaney, Fugitive Vision: Slave Image and Black Identity in Antebellum Narrative, →ISBN:

     Unlike Douglass, who turns away from representing the exteriority of black femininity, pornotroping functions as the complex generative source of Brown's identity construction, which rhetorically hovers between maternal fleshiliness and masculine personhood.

   • 2017, Leigh Raiford, Heike Raphael-Hernandez, Migrating the Black Body: The African Diaspora and Visual Culture, →ISBN:

     The offensive typology of blackness offered up in Mam's law seems to set up an impassable barrier to anything like an originary African ethnicity: any proud reclaiming of African origins is always already anticipated by a voracious pornotroping.

Usage notes

This term is used primarily in the context of racial stereotypes.