Copying Cosby: Pornmimicries of Race, Sexuality, and Gender

This essay employs pornography to explore the politics of race, gender, and sexuality at play in mimetic performances of Bill Cosby’s The Cosby Show. Focusing on Not the Cosbys XXX (2009), a pornographic parody of the sitcom, pornography is shown to be a venue that lays bare the politics of race, sexuality, and gender that energize cultural practices of mimesis. In mimicking The Cosby Show, Not the Cosbys XXX reveals the racial, sexual, and class politics of authenticity critical to mimesis as a salient technology for the (re)production of blackness in visual culture. Pornography’s spectacular multiplex mimetic performance, which the author terms pornmimicry, brings the quotidian dynamics of mimicry into focus as a primary mode of identificatory performance. More than a frame to elucidate racial sexual performance in pornography, pornmimicry helps us to understand the concomitant pleasure (and violence) bound with the broader cultural repetition of blackness as itself a mimetic practice.