The Erotic Travelogue: The Scopophilic Pleasure of Race vs. Gender

TLDR: In this article, the authors describe a journey in one of the Parisian brothels desciibed by Ana'is Nin in the Delta of Venus, where they watch and understand the desire for power implicit in our scopophilia.

Abstract: Let me commence with an overview of our trip. We begin our journey in one of the Parisian brothels desciibed by Ana'is Nin in the Delta of Venus. The brothel is just like home, the safe place of norisk exotic simulation; it is a secure theatre where one pays to watch the burlesque, the striptease, the parade of the deformed, and the humiliation, cruelty, and death of others.1 The point of homogeneity and imagined difference, the btothel is the control center of our excess like the \"house of illusions\" in Genet's The Balcony. Like Madame Irma, we watch and understand the desire for power implicit in our scopophilia. Continuing our journey with Nin's erotica and the film Emmanuelle, we will next arrive at exotic ports where, with the ptivilege accorded camera-laden tourists, we will continue out hazaidless confrontation with racial, ethnic, and sexual difference. In the threatening illusion of heterogeneity produced by our voluntaiy but controlled immersion in foreign cultures, we will ask why erotica often takes the form of a travelogue, why stories of travel are erotic, and how travel, like the brothel, is a form of safe scopophilia that neatly distances, objectifies, and colonizes the multiple sexual, racial, and ethnic differences regularly constructed as the sexual other in soft-core pornography. On the next leg of out journey, we will withdraw from immediate contact with indigenous cultures to the brothel-like safety of our colonizer's homes where we can enjoy watching the erotics of the exotic as they, under our direction and scrutiny, vigorously reassert our own no-