Superimposing Sex-Politics in Melvin Van Peebles's Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song

Abstract:Literature centering on Melvin Van Peebles's influential, and controversial, independent film Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song (1971) has focused on the hermeneutics of reception, the timeliness and appropriateness of a talkback by an oppressed race, and the role of the sexual numbers within a film advertised as more of a politically charged product than of a pornographic one. None of the scholarship research incorporates the three crucial parts of the film, showcased visibly in the title itself, into the issues of reception, of critical race strategism, and of sexual politics—what is missing is precisely a productive mode of reading into being and meaning the sweet back, the bad ass, and the background songs. This essay attempts to insert the back side of sex, including the back itself and the ass, both of which I will subsume under the term "back," into the matrix of sex and politics. I argue that back sex directs the audience toward an inescapable engagement between sexual politics and racial politics, that sex serves—is made to serve—within not just the consciousness formation of the individual but also the consciousness formation of the individual within the community. Back sex therefore is revolutionary and constantly in crisis because it changes instead of repeating itself: unlike penile sex characterized by frontal/confrontational penetration, the back gestures a communitarian plurality of sex that escapes classic understanding of monogamous sex within the neoliberal family structure, and the ass emphasizes constant movement, sidewise, back and forth, that oscillates between a vulnerable position that requires backing and a determined democratic demand to be allowed to move counter-progressively. I emphasize the need to read the back as an instance of sex-politics into a more immediate consciousness of the audience, who in turn will benefit not from a total abandonment of penile sexual politics but rather from a novel engagement with the politically charged sexuality of a new zone named the back.