"The Ambivalent Erotics of Hot Pants: Peter de Rome and the Soundtrack of Liberation,” Special Issue: Race-ing Queer Music Studies, Women & Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture 22 (2017), 91–100. [pdf]

Abstract:

This article considers the creation and circulation of Peter de Rome’s 1971 pornographic short film Hot Pants and its use of James Brown’s then recently released track of the same name. De Rome’s film drew from footage of his own sexual and social relationships with black men and were scored with records he had in his own apartment, demonstrating the potential of erotics to create bonds across dominant racial, gendered, and sexual boundaries. In this way, I argue that the film and it soundtrack captures intersectional tensions that emerge from his everyday sexual ethics, presenting what Kobena Mercer calls “the ambivalence of the identifications we actually inhabit in living with difference.”  By exploring the simultaneously liberatory and oppressive power dynamics enabled by the visual design and soundtrack of Hot Pants, I argue that this ambivalence does not lead to a political aloofness on behalf of viewers but instead begs critical interrogation of how de Rome’s specific location and historical moment shape the film’s erotics. I further consider how these compare with contemporary sensibilities and political projects. Key to this comparison is the way that James Brown’s song functions as a soundtrack for both de Rome’s individual erotic encounter and the larger moment of gay and black liberation. Thus my consideration of Hot Pants moves beyond an evaluation of a strictly good or bad representation of black male sexuality or of interracial erotics to question what contemporary audiences can learn about the circulation of racialized power through the film’s connection of image and sound with erotic pleasure. While I maintain that Hot Pants produces an erotics that is ambivalent to the specific demands of equality by black and gay liberation, I assert it is an ambivalence that is critically productive, just as much titillating as it is pedagogical.