Kobena Mercer, "Reading Racial Fetishism: the Photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe"

Kobena Mercer in Reading Racial Fetishism: the Photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe argues that Mapplethorpe objectified black men according to the way the dominant "white" culture viewed blackness, the "black male sexuality is perceived as something different, excessive" (Mercer 173). Mercer discusses the photographs Mapplethorpe creates within the male sexuality, which are created in a way to reinforce the stereotypes of how black men are represented in the mainstream. Mapplethorpe photographs black male nudes and uses them as objects within the male gaze. Mercer compared Mapplethorpe's photographs of black male sexuality as a form "within the dominant tradition of the female nude, patriarchal power relations are symbolized by the binary relation in which, to put it crudely, men assume the active role of the looking subject while women are passive objects to be looked at" (Mercer 175). Mercer further argued that Mapplethorpe's photographs of the black male sexuality is a form of the master/slave relationship. In the sense that these photographs are like the form of the reinforcement of the master and slave, Mapplethorpe uses black men as the object, as it is he who instructs the black men in a certain way. These photographs operate under what is considered the "male gaze," which predominantly consists of mainstream middle class white men who often look at nude women in this way. Mercer, however, changes his analysis of the photographs by Mapplethorpe because he tries to encounter these pictures differently. Rather than positioning himself as the subject, Mercer admits, "sharing the same desire to look, I am forced to confront the rather unwelcome fact that I would actually occupy the same position in the fantasy of mastery that I said was that of the white male subject!" (Mercer 193). These photographs of black male sexuality can be very contradictory because one can interpret them as very racist but one can also view them as a "shocking" form of art, resisting the representation of sexuality within the mainstream.