On the cover of this book and the facing page we see what appears to be a gesture of abandonment—head tilted back, lips, eyes, and collarbone gleaming. This is a posture that belongs to the ecstatic. The closed eyes are signs of a private reverie while the open mouth suggests excess. These are pleasures that cannot be contained; their expression exceeds the frame. Yet, these pleasures are also inscrutable. This is a photograph in media res; we see only this moment; we have no way of discerning or deciphering the source of this pleasure. We can imagine that she is singing for herself even as the light in the distance suggests an unseen crowd. The fur’s fuzz, the sharpness of the teeth, the low haze in the background, and the mouth sighing open all point us toward mystery.
This is Billie #21 (2002), a photograph by Lyle Ashton Harris. It is meant to conjure Billie Holiday, and this changes things. We might, for example, begin to imagine that we understand some of these private pleasures because we know facts about Holiday and her life. We might ask if this is the Holiday of Emerson’s Bar and Grill—high and drunk, stumbling and slurring words and emotions as she remembers a history in the limelight and the various betrayals, arrests, and addictions that altered her relationship to stardom. Is this the Holiday of Carnegie Hall—wounded and rambling and so eager for a comeback that she accidentally punctured her head with a hatpin attached to gardenias? Is this a younger Holiday, just beginning to sing in jazz clubs after a youth spent in brothels? Holiday is iconic. Her voice famously layers pain and yearning; it is seductive in its excesses. In his description of Holiday’s singing, Fred Moten argues that she brings something new to the fore, something extra-linguistic, something that is not about communication, but something that he describes as the “repetition of suffocated desire and lost object, of transference and drive, that would tell the audience what they want to hear and what they already know.”1 This is to say, as Farah Jasmine Griffin reminds us, that the lure of Holiday’s voice and even our attachment to Holiday herself tells us much more about how Holiday circulates as a public figure than anything about Holiday. In particular, Holiday is expected to index—in a formation that Moten describes as what the audience “want[s] to hear and what they already know”—something about the relationship between black women and pain and pleasure.2 Billie #21 elicits these histories of woundedness even as it allows us to imagine an inhabitation that exists in excess of them—an excess in Holiday’s voice, an excess of selfhood that cannot be fully subsumed by her iconicity and public self.
However, Holiday’s voice can never emerge from this photograph—not because of a failure of imagination, but because the self on display is Harris, not Holiday. Even as it recalls one of Holiday’s more iconic images, it is Harris who performs this homage to the famous jazz singer. It is Harris who evokes Holiday’s mid-century style by wearing light flowers pinned to one side over closely cropped hair, a single strand of pearls, and a white fur nestled around his shoulders. It is Harris’s head that tilts back. Through posture, make-up, and props, Harris allows us to conjure Holiday as a mode of dual embodiment, a citation, if you will. The photograph’s foregrounding of gloss—the shimmering accents indicating the fullness of lips, the edges of teeth, the tip of a nose, the crease of an eyelid, and the sheen of pearls—aids in the summoning of Holiday’s iconicity even as this shininess undercuts straightforward notions of authenticity or transparency. This performative self-portrait tells us a lot about the strategic possibilities of selfhood.
Amelia Jones argues that by “exaggerating their performances of themselves, [performative self-portraits] explore the capacity of the self-portrait photograph to foreground the ‘I’ as other to itself.”3 What Jones means by this is that these versions of self-portraiture go beyond mere representation and mark creative forms of expressivity that reveal forms of self that exceed capture. In this way the photograph becomes what Jones describes as a “technology of embodiment, and yet one that paradoxically points to our tenuousness and incoherence as living embodied subjects.”4 The force of Billie #21, then, emerges in our recognition that the photograph is explicitly not revealing Harris’s interiority, but that it instead illuminates the possibility of reading Harris as a plural self both in relation to Holiday through his performance of citation and in relation to the otherness of himself that he summons. These forms of otherness—excess forms of embodiment—are central to what I call brown jouissance. In contrast to an ecstasy that imagines transcending corporeality, brown jouissance is a reveling in fleshiness, its sensuous materiality that brings together pleasure and pain.5
Importantly, to dwell in the territory of the flesh is also to grapple with a complex matrix of gender, race, and sexuality. When we situate Billie #21 within the context of Harris’s series of self-portraits, Billie, Boxers, and Better Days, we see an array of citations. In addition to Holiday, Harris includes photographs of himself in the guise of Josephine Baker, a bloodied boxer, and other early twentieth-century images of blackness that Anna Deavere Smith describes as “an improvisation. As jazz.”6 Deavere Smith argues that this play with gender is central to Harris’s narrative of self: “If you know Lyle, you know that he says a lot of words very quickly. One such string of words was, ‘A sissy by five, a faggot by seven, a bitch by twelve, a cunt by eighteen. These were all called to me.’”7 Though we might understand Harris’s particular movement toward black femininity as a form of what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari describe as becoming-woman, Harris is performing something else.8 His explicit invocation of black femininity and its fleshiness challenges the assumed (and impossible) gendered and raced neutrality upon which becoming-woman relies in addition to illustrating the particular affects that cohere around black femininity.9 This is why it is important that Harris’s transformation exists on the surface—enacted through gloss, make-up, and surgical tape. This is not a performance of becoming. Harris does not become-Holiday; he cites her—positioning his body alongside hers so that we might read the image to understand their mutual investment in black femininity. While becoming-woman seeks to displace traditional humanism through the disruption of patriarchy and the embrace of the disempowered, it does little to think about the transformations of self that can take place in and through fleshiness. In Harris’s explicit manipulation of his body, we see that pleasure and pain emerge from the history of black female fleshiness. This is summoned by the citation of Holiday, as well as the pleasures, pains, and possibilities that lie within his own body. It is these multiple dimensions of fleshiness that shape the possibilities that we can imagine and those that we cannot. Fleshiness is inseparable from processes of objectification and the production of selfhood.
Citing Holiday gives Harris a way to illustrate the particular parameters of race, gender, and sexuality that make his body and his mode of inhabiting the world legible while also providing him with a blueprint for exploring what exceeds this frame. In her description of Billie #21, Deavere Smith focuses on the motivations behind Harris’s citation of Holiday. She frames Harris’s project as a series of experimental inhabitations that center addiction and sacrifice. She writes, “That which entrances him and haunts him about Billie Holiday is that which he longs for: the sacrifice. He is interested in her addictions. He is interested in how far Billie went. He would like to go that far.”10 She concludes: “I know what I think Lyle would have to risk. He would have to risk touching the loss in black life. It’s hard to touch the loss. But Lyle is trying to touch it.”11 Deavere Smith foregrounds Harris’s investment in Holiday’s pain as part of the precarity that surrounds black life. This renders Harris’s act of citation one of exposition—it aims to tell us something about black life, black being. This is a citation that dwells upon Holiday’s meaning for others, Holiday’s position as signifier, and it is an exploration of what addiction and loss mean for thinking about what it is to be black. It shows us the way that the image traffics in woundedness and hovers around the territory of abjection.
If we read for fleshiness, for surface, not depth, however, we come toward thinking about the parameters of selfhood in the image. By positioning himself alongside Holiday, by drawing on her complex history of loss and pain, and putting it in relation to his own, Harris illustrates the ways that citation can alter the boundaries of the self. This does not negate Deavere Smith’s analysis, but it allows us to think about the work that Harris performs in a different light. Instead of asking whether or not this is a commentary on addiction, loss, and blackness, I want to read the parted lips as invoking a self that hungers. In theorizing hunger, Alex Weheliye poses a set of questions asking how we might use the concept to imagine otherwise: “How might we read the scripture of the flesh, which abides among us ‘in every single approach to things,’ but too often lingers in the passing quicksands of indecipherability, otherwise? What does hunger outside the world of Man feel like? Is it a different hunger, or just the same as the famines created by racializing assemblages that render the human isomorphic with Man? How do we describe the sweetness that reclines in the hunger for survival?”12
What Weheliye’s questions reveal is the way hunger combines multiple incoherent states—insatiability, joy, and freedom. Hunger, for Weheliye, is not about the possibility of fulfillment or nurturance; there are no objects, just cravings, and this act of craving is part of survival. We might profitably connect this version of hunger with the forms of lateral agency that Lauren Berlant proposes in Cruel Optimism, where she argues for a “recasting of sovereignty [that] provides an alternative way of talking about phrases like ‘self-medication,’ which we use to imagine what someone is doing when they are becoming dissipated, and not acting in a life-building way. . . . Agency can be an activity of maintenance, not making; fantasy, without grandiosity; sentience without full intentionality; inconsistency, without shattering; and embodying, alongside embodiment.”13 This form of hunger, I argue, is constitutive of a type of selfhood that coalesces—even as it gnaws at the edges—in this state of openness and insatiability. The self that Harris presents, the self who hungers, cannot be understood through the matrix of sovereign subjectivity. This is a self created in and through relationality with Holiday. It is a plural self; it is not Harris performing as Holiday, but Harris using a citation of Holiday to move toward an embodiment of hunger. This, in turn, transforms the photograph into one in which pleasure mingles with want—or, rather, joy and selfhood come together in feeling the limitlessness of insatiability. This tells us nothing of Holiday or Harris, but it reveals a sensuality or mode of being and relating that prioritizes openness, vulnerability, and a willingness to ingest without necessarily choosing what one is taking in. This is not the desire born of subjectivity in which subject wishes to possess object, but an embodied hunger that takes joy and pain in this gesture of radical openness toward otherness. This, this fleshy mixture of self-production, insatiability, joy, and pain, is brown jouissance.
Historically, flesh is the territory of the marginalized. It is the side of the Cartesian dualism connected to the body; it traffics in objectification, abjection, and mindlessness. Hortense Spillers describes the transformation of black bodies into flesh as one of the artifacts of the transatlantic slave trade. Spillers writes, “Before the ‘body’ there is the ‘flesh,’ that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of iconography. . . . Even though the European hegemonies stole bodies . . . we regard this human and social irreparability as high crimes against the flesh, as the person of African females and African males registered the wounding.”14 Since becoming flesh depersonalizes and removes subjectivity, we can understand the production of flesh as one of white supremacy’s tactics of domination. Pornotroping, that which objectifies people in accordance with hierarchized systems of racialization, is one important way that bodies have become flesh. Spillers describes the process of pornotroping thus:
(1) the captive body becomes the source of an irresistible, destructive sensuality; (2) at the same time—in stunning contradiction—the captive body is reduced to a thing, becoming being for the captor; (3) in this absence from a subject position, the captured sexualities provide a physical and biological expression of “otherness”; (4) as a category of “otherness,” the captive body translates into a potential for pornotroping and embodies sheer physical powerlessness that slides into a more general “powerlessness.”15
For Spillers, pornotroping is a process of objectification that violently reduces people into commodities while simultaneously rendering them sexually available. Pornotroping does not just illustrate the materiality of the body, then. Through its discourse of fleshiness it emphasizes the ways that power and projection produce certain bodies as other, thereby granting them a mysterious quality of desirability, which is always already undergirded by violence and the assumption of possession. Drawing on Spillers (and others), a strain of black studies—Afropessimism—has argued that blackness is the foreclosed other to the concept of the sovereign subject and human, thereby revealing the impossibility of grappling with blackness in tandem with gender and agency (among other things).16 These conversations have been useful and rich in their illumination of the implicit universalization of whiteness and the multiple violences that subtend the idea of the subject.
Writing adjacent to Afropessimism, in Habeaus Viscus Weheliye links the processes of pornotropic enfleshment to the mechanism of desire. Both render some subjects and others objects. Bringing the geopolitical to bear on the intimate, he asks, “How does the historical question of violent political domination activate a surplus and excess of sexuality that simultaneously sustains and disfigures said brutality?”17 For Weheliye, the kinship between the processes that underlie the pornotrope—projection and objectification—and those that underlie sexuality—those of possession and desire—illustrate the violence embedded in the concept of sexuality itself. This continuity becomes particularly visible when examining rapture or ecstasy because these states position the abdication of subjectivity as the height of desire. Desire consolidates the subject, even as it privileges its momentary dissolve. However, this investment in subjectivity (even as prison) forgets that there are some for whom subjectivity has never been granted and that these restrictions on the category of the subject are violently produced; for them desiring is not a possible action. In making us explicitly relate the pornotrope to desire, Weheliye brings these contradictions together: “My argument is not about erotics per se but dwells in the juxtaposition of violence as the antithesis of the human(e) (bondage) and ‘normal’ sexuality (rapture) as the apposite property of this figure.”18 Often, the framework of rapture or ecstasy imagines that these moments exist in opposition to harm, that they are personal and occur privately; however, the pornotrope allows us to see that violence toward black and brown people is inextricable from theorizations of sexuality. The violence and projection that produce the pornotrope require at their core a subject who desires and who thereby objectifies and possesses others through this desire.
In this book, I explore the underside of these desires as manifest through various inhabitations of the pornotrope, thereby expanding its parameters beyond blackness to think about the way that the category that we understand as people of color is produced through late capitalism, colonialism, and globalization. This move to link blackness and brownness understands race and gender as produced through affective and sensational exchanges. Although the particulars of inhabiting the pornotrope vary, it always involves labor that occurs in relation to heteronormative whiteness. As Roderick Ferguson reminds us, “Nonwhite populations were racialized such that gender and sexual transgressions were not incidental to the production of nonwhite labor, but constitutive of it.”19 Further, he argues, the residue of this fleshiness is the charge of perversion and the disavowal of this racialized labor: “As capital solicited Mexican, Asian, Asian American, and African American labor, it provided the material conditions that would ultimately disrupt the gender and sexual ideals upon which citizenship depended. The racialization of Mexican, Asian, Asian American, and African American labor as contrary to gender and sexual normativity positioned such labor outside the image of the American citizen.”20 At the heart of this sexual normativity is whiteness which is also connected to settler colonialism. As Scott Morgenson writes, “In the United States, the sexual colonization of Native peoples produced modern sexuality as ‘settler sexuality’: a white and national heteronormativity formed by regulating Native sexuality and gender while appearing to supplant them with the sexual modernity of settlers.”21 Although this project does not explore this relationship explicitly, I want to acknowledge that it serves as the backdrop for understanding that blackness and brownness are produced in encounters with white supremacy. In this I gesture toward Spillers’s explicit inclusion of the category of the Native in regard to the harms of the New World order: “That order, with its human sequence written in blood, represents for its African and indigenous peoples a scene of actual mutilation, dismemberment, and exile,” as well as to Tiffany Lethabo King’s expansive work, which shows “how slavery and white-settler colonialism fundamentally gave one another their structure, form, shape, and even momentum.”22
This expansion of the pornotrope is important for several reasons. First, it moves away from theorizing blackness as the space of negation by positioning it in relation to multiple forms of brownness. This is not a move to de-exceptionalize slavery, but to point to continuities in the forms of violence exerted by white supremacy. Further, this amplification of the parameters of the pornotrope allows us to broaden understandings of what constitutes technologies of sexuality and white supremacy. While we are most familiar with the violences of slavery, colonialism, capitalism, and globalization, this project also includes sexology, photography, and psychoanalytic exaltations of the Oedipus complex as technologies of domination because they have functioned to produce and reify imaginaries of sexualized black and brown others.
To think with pornotroping is to acknowledge that some people circulate as highly charged affective objects, while simultaneously being positioned outside of the parameters of normative sexuality and subjectivity. We see this acutely in the ways that black women are posited as the “fleshy limit of theory.”23 Brown jouissance, I argue, gives us ways to think about the possibilities of resignifying that affective fleshiness, by showing us that which is not encumbered by discourses of sexuality, but that which traffics in sensuality, that amorphous quality of fleshiness that Spillers argues was assigned to “the captive body.” In thinking with the possibilities of the pornotrope, I position my work as occupying the space of yes, and in relation to Afropessimism. I ask what it might be to take the violence of the pornotrope and the accompanying impossibility of sovereign subjectivity seriously while dwelling in the selfhoods, intimacies, and knowledge systems that emerge from thinking with the flesh. For me, the pornotrope offers insight into the affective areas of racialization. In understanding race through the affective and sensational circuits of power and performance, we see that the pornotrope not only names the fleshiness of black and brown people, but also helps us to unpack these relationships to signification, enabling us to read otherwise. As Weheliye argues, turning to the violence of the pornotrope allows us to see the radical potential of excess without flattening the violence at its core. He observes that “alternative modes of life [exist] alongside the violence, subjection, exploitation, and racialization that define the modern human.”24
Harris’s citation of Holiday illustrates both the affective labors of the pornotrope and its excesses. That Holiday’s fleshiness as a black woman mobilizes histories of addiction, sex work, and woundedness and that this is what audiences want to see when they approach Holiday speak to the appeal of black suffering. In donning Holiday’s trademark gardenias, Harris shows us the types of erotic and affective labor that this fleshiness performs while also harnessing it to inhabit something else—a form of radical openness that I describe as hunger. Conceptually, excess disrupts already articulated forms of thought by revealing what cannot begin to be conceived. It is what violence produces and cannot incorporate. This is the yes, and to which I refer. Focusing on excess circumnavigates questions of sovereign subjectivity and desire to show us epistemologies rooted in opacity and sensuality.
In this book, “opacity” refers to many things. On the one hand, it offers a bulwark against the mandate of transparency foisted on minoritarian performers who are imagined to be without subjectivity or interiority. This is the type of opacity that Nicole Fleetwood argues is operationalized in the strategic deployment of “excess flesh” in black female music video performance. As a concept, “excess flesh” emphasizes the faulty notions of a “visual truth” of blackness by representing excess and fantasy.25 Further, Fleetwood argues that this excess is “an enactment of visibility that seizes upon the scopic desires to discipline the black female body through a normative gaze that anticipates its rehearsed performance of abjection.”26 This use of flesh “refus[es] the binary of negative and positive” and operates as “a performative that doubles visibility: to see the codes of visuality operating on the (hyper)visible body that is its object.”27 This is to say that excess flesh actually hides in plain sight—opacity is found in the inability to take it all in and produce coherence. This version of opacity is at work in the title of Farrah Jasmine Griffin’s treatment of Holiday’s appeal, If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery. In both of these examples we see that opacity functions as a minoritarian strategy because it disrupts the assumption that visuality is equivalent to transparency by alluding to something else, a different set of norms or even an interiority inaccessible to others. In this way opacity exists in relation to José Esteban Muñoz’s theorization of “brown feeling,” which “chronicles a certain ethics of the self that is utilized and deployed by people of color and other minoritarian subjects who don’t feel quite right within the protocols of normative affect and comportment.”28 These brown feelings are Muñoz’s mode of describing “the ways in which minoritarian affect is always, no matter what its register, partially illegible in relation to the normative affect performed by normative citizen subjects.”29 When Muñoz argues that these performances “offer comment on a complicated choreography of introjection and projection,” one of the things he is talking about is this play with intimacy and opacity.30 The opacity that Muñoz theorizes is always precarious because it necessitates a willingness to go beyond the over-determined personage produced by projection, which I have been describing as the violent enfleshment of the pornotrope. This precarity can be evidenced, for example, in Christina León’s analysis of the failure of some audiences to register Xandra Ibarra’s performances as camp because they are unable to interpret her work outside the genre of transparent racialized spectacle.31 To think opacity, then, means always and insistently thinking with the possibility, however momentary, of illegibility rather than a stabilized notion of resistance.
Yet, the quality of impermanence does not negate the re-orderings of knowledge that emerge from the opacity of the pornotrope. This knowledge—what I call epistemologies of fleshiness in order to insist on naming fleshiness as a space where ontology and epistemology come together—consists of selfhoods, intimacies, and interactions that are arranged multiply. My insistence on conjoining flesh and knowledge emphasizes theorizing as a fleshy activity, both because theory emerges from flesh—positionality matters—and because theory is enacted by bodies; thought can be located outside of the linguistic, in and through the body and its movements. This rescripting of what counts as knowledge is both a rebuke to the demands of fixity and transparency that have come to characterize various technologies of knowledge and an invitation for us to rethink what counts as minoritarian knowledge production.32
Because this project is focused on the knowledge that emerges in and through the excesses and opacities of the pornotrope, it works around discourses of sexuality and desire to think with epistemologies of sensuality. In this positioning of the body as a site of knowledge-making that stands aslant to conventional understandings of sexuality and desire, I join LaMonda Horton-Stallings who offers, instead, an erotics of funk. She writes, “We can glean funk as a philosophy about kinesthetics and being that critiques capitalism and the pathology of Western morality . . . while also possessing the wisdom to know and understand that the two are linked. Because funk sees the two as linked, it provides innovative strategies about work and sexuality that need to be highlighted.”33 According to Horton-Stallings, funk “produces alternate orders of knowledge about the body and imagination that originate in a sensorium predating empires of knowledge.”34 These epistemologies of funk produce a new imagination of eroticism that, importantly, does away with a mind-body dualism. Referring to Michel Foucault’s differentiation between the sensual eroticism of ars erotica and the impulse toward categorization of scientia sexualis, Horton-Stallings asks, “How do we ignore Foucault’s privileging of Cartesian dualisms and ways of being, in addition to specific social classes, in his proclamation about ars erotica/scientia sexualis as it relates to the history of sexuality?”35 Underlying Horton-Stallings’s ire at Foucault is that this division elides the presence of sex work, which is the term that she assigns to all labors related to the flesh, and that it implies that these labors of the flesh are separable from the labors of the mind. She continues: “Foucault’s refusal to acknowledge other sites of knowledge—fiction, the surreal, and the imagination—maintains a divide between work and labor and leisure and pleasure that we should not accept as fact for societies and cultures that might foster an understanding that truth, pleasure, and knowledge are not mutually exclusive or in opposition to each other.”36 Horton-Stallings works to produce a holistic conceptualization of the erotic that reconnects the mind and body and does away with other dualisms such as work and leisure and truth, knowledge, and pleasure. This is an erotics that confounds categories and prioritizes pleasure.
Like Horton-Stallings’s work, this book seeks to do away with a mind/body division by showing the different orderings of knowledge that emerge when we emphasize flesh and fleshiness. To think with the flesh and to inhabit the pornotrope is to hold violence and possibility in the same frame. It is also, importantly, to reclaim and remake selfhood. While I have already mentioned that this re-thinking the self is part of the opacity and excess of the pornotrope, here, I argue that this claiming of selfhood is necessary and urgent because it allows us to think about brown jouissance as political. In asserting that selfhood—though not a sovereign subject—exists in relation to minoritarian knowledge production and epistemologies of sensuality, we are able to see that flesh becomes something else, a space of possibility, interiority, and creativity. Rather than merely abdicating subjectivity, these reclamations of selfhoods provide a scaffolding for imagining and prioritizing ways of being that center coexisting, caring, and sensuality.
Thinking with the reorientations that brown jouissance enables, then, allows us to return to Jacques Lacan and his formulation of jouissance in order to think more precisely around the politics that surround the sensations of being a body. This sensation of pure embodiment, which I locate alongside the pornotropic production of fleshiness, is central to Lacan’s understanding of jouissance. Néstor Braunstein, elaborating and clarifying Lacan’s versions of jouissance, describes it as “positivity, it is a ‘something’ lived by a body when pleasure stops being pleasure. It is a plus, a sensation that is beyond pleasure.”37 Jouissance, then, can be understood as excess sensation. Often, however, jouissance, especially phallic jouissance, is understood as something that, however, inadvertently, reifies the idea of sovereign subjectivity through an insistence on dwelling in its space of shattering, thereby emphasizing the dichotomy between subject and Thing. In his own description of jouissance, Lacan positions it in relation to Thingness: “jouissance is on the side of the Thing.”38 In explaining why Lacan uses the term “Thing” instead of “object,” Braunstein argues that the Thing is related to jouissance because it possesses a direction separate from the subject, which is to say it is a space of impossibility and illegibility.39 While focusing on Thingness calls attention to the agency inherent in being material, it neglects to grapple with the way that this materiality circulates within the social world. This is to say, it travels separately from discourses of race, ethnicity, and even gender.
In contrast, brown jouissance emphasizes the production of selfhood in relation to the social. While the self-Other relation underlies all formulations of jouissance, the Other is often neglected, which, in turn, removes the social from the scene of jouissance. Foregrounding relations with the Other brings objectification, race, and gender into the mix. The Other, as Denise Ferreira da Silva reminds us, occupies the space of projection and opacity. The subject is assumed to occupy “the stage of interiority, where universal reason plays its sovereign role as universal poesis,” while the Other is assigned to the realm of the external as an “affectable I.”40 This means that the properties of the Other are determined from the outside and are therefore deeply constrained and unknowable. To emphasize the Other in theorizing jouissance, then, is to think with the pornotrope and emphasize the simultaneous projections of racialization and gendering that occur through its particular modes of objectification. Brown jouissance emphasizes the social relations at work in enfleshment and suggests that the pornotropic network of projection and objectification can coexist with Thingness and its opacity. Brown jouissance, I argue, occurs in the moments when Thing, Other, and object converge to form selfhood.
By tethering brown jouissance to the oscillations that occur between Thing, Other, and object, we are no longer within the realm of subjectivity, but in the murkiness of flesh, self, and sense. If brown jouissance is a reveling in fleshiness and its attendant web of meanings and possibilities, it brings us very directly to consider the opacity of the self and the set of relationalities and sensualities that emerges from there. Following Édouard Glissant, I see this opacity as forming the basis of ethical relations because it allows for the possibility of existing with difference without mandating transparency. This ethical opacity undergirds the minoritarian knowledge productions and epistemologies of sensuality that I argue constitute brown jouissance. Glissant writes, “For the time being, perhaps, give up this old obsession with discovering what lies at the bottom of natures. There would be something great and noble about initiating such a movement, referring not to Humanity but to the exultant divergence of humanities. Thought of self and thought of other here become obsolete in their duality.”41 Glissant’s argument that lingering in opacity offers a way around the cleavage between self and Other because it refuses a prioritization of either and forces a reckoning with unknowability is central to the stakes that underlie brown jouissance.
Brown jouissance offers a critical rejoinder to attempts to imagine that theorizations of selfhood can exist without paying heed to fleshiness and its destabilization of subjectivity. Making pornotroping central to the oscillations between Thing, Other, and object also suggests that sensuality’s alternate epistemologies can be found in these movements between abjection and self-creation. This mobility of the flesh and the flesh’s ability to signify multiply is a mark of what I term liquidity. Liquidity indexes flesh’s mutability and asks us to look toward verbs rather than nouns for rewriting sensuality. In making this theoretical shift toward epistemologies that prioritize the instability of the flesh, I position this project alongside recent work in queer theory and new materialisms, which aims to articulate the specificities of fleshiness in terms of race and gender and to find ways to work with difference without falling back into the difficulties of inclusion and wounded subjectivity. Here, I suggest we think Mel Chen’s use of animacy, Uri McMillan’s theorization of avatars, and Kyla Wazana Tompkins’ analytics of eating as pointing us toward incorporating movement into thinking the flesh.42 The series of verbs and adjectives that these theorists offer brings us toward the particular forms of being-with, sensuality, and disruption that brown jouissance allows us to probe. Instead of focusing on ontology, this is a theory that emphasizes the dynamics of the encounter and the ever-shifting possibilities for generating knowledge through diffuse strategies of embodiment.
When we read for movement, which is what permits the oscillations between Thing, Other, object, and self, we see the Thingness of Harris’s flesh, the objectification and Otherness that hovers around Holiday and Harris, and the dual self that emerges from this movement. In his simultaneous movement toward Holiday and his refusal of transparency, Harris highlights the importance of thinking about the production of opacity and rewrites our imaginaries of sensuality. The self that Harris presents—the self who hungers—cannot be understood through the matrix of sovereign subjectivity. This is selfhood created in and through relationality with Holiday. It is a dual self; it is not Harris performing as Holiday, but Harris using a citation of Holiday to move toward an embodiment of hunger. This tells us nothing of Holiday or Harris, but it reveals a sensuality or mode of being and relating that prioritizes an openness, a vulnerability, and a willingness to ingest without necessarily choosing what one is taking in. This is not the desire born of subject wanting to possess object, but an embodied hunger that takes joy and pain in this gesture of radical openness toward otherness. Citation, then, is Harris’s mode of producing brown jouissance.
Thus far, I have focused on the political and epistemological reorientations that brown jouissance offers through its rescripting of selfhood and fleshiness, but here I pause to dwell on the question of the aesthetic and its relationship to brown jouissance. While brown jouissance is not entirely contained by the aesthetic, in this book, I have chosen to analyze its emergence in works of art produced by minoritarian subjects. In many ways I draw on an esoteric aesthetic archive. I analyze and juxtapose singular works of art produced by artists who fall primarily under the category of “people of color,” but I am not invested in positioning the particular works of art within the artists’ larger oeuvre nor am I interested in figuring out what the artist means to say or how the artist diverges or emerges from conversations within various artistic milieu. Instead, I use these works of art to show us moments of brown jouissance. On the one hand, these works of art provide concrete objects for us to think with; we can analyze them in order to register the ways in which they illuminate particular epistemologies of fleshiness, formations of selfhood, and modes of relating. To this end, I have chosen works of art whose politics and epistemologies of selfhood and sensuality compel me, in that they show us how we might acknowledge violence and still think otherwise. However, I have also chosen to think with art because the category of the aesthetic calls upon us to bring our own fleshiness to the table in order to produce knowledge. This is to say that it solicits performative and relational methodologies of meaning-making, which, in keeping with this book’s emphasis on fleshiness, opacity, and sensuality, works to underscore the politics of minoritarian knowledge production that lie at the heart of brown jouissance.
This turn to sensuality prioritizes relationality, feeling, and embodiment. The sensual is the space of excess, as Sharon Patricia Holland, Marcía Ochoa, and Kyla Wazana Tompkins argue in the introduction to On the Visceral, writing that viscera forces one to attend to waste, “the materiality of what must be cast out, and . . . the space of the nonproductive.”43 Rizvana Bradley argues that approaching the aesthetic through the sensual reveals important knowledge not only about these objects but about our social world: “Consider how touching, folding, fingering, or tracing the texture of an object, offer themselves as techniques of knowing in art and performance . . . expand[ing] the critical parameters of what the haptic can mean not simply in diverse contexts of art and art making, but more specifically at the crucial edges of performance and social practice.”44 Further, as Kadji Amin, Roy Pérez, and I argue in our introduction to Queer Form, foregrounding questions of relation and sensuality leads to new modes of critique, “expand[ing] our conceptions of often unacknowledged norms without necessarily staking a claim for the anti-normative.”45 Hence, the circuits of sensuality—how one connects to the aesthetic—are my way of understanding the epistemologies that emerge from these disparate instances of brown jouissance. Just as David Getsy’s and Jennifer Doyle’s arguments that the relationships between artist, work of art, and viewer are sensuous—filled with what Doyle terms the erotic and treats “as a language or a set of affects animating and inhabiting this kind of work, but also as a mode of knowing (or even being known by) the object,” and with what Getsy often describes through the language of tactility—I take this emphasis on embodiment and sensuality to bring forth the question of method since attempts to read the aesthetic without attending to the sensual foreclose moments of embodied connection and meaning-making.46
In turning toward sensuality as method, I return to the analytic practice of empathetic reading that I developed in Sensational Flesh. Empathetic reading works to highlight the work of sensation and empathy within the practice of reading: “Empathetic Reading is a reading practice, a critical hermeneutic, and a methodology. . . . [As] a critical hermeneutic and methodology . . . it highlights how we can discern the structure of sensation in various texts/performances and it works to give those sensations meaning, which in turn allows us to read difference in a sensational mode.”47 In Sensational Flesh, I suggested that readers use empathy to position their body alongside theorists in order to render theory corporeal. Empathy, I argue, could be harnessed to imagine the way that sensation structures thought. In this way, empathetic reading is useful for articulating the felt ways that structures of power impinge on the body and, in turn, how those sensations contour theorizing.
My project in Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance is different. Here, I turn toward sensation in order to imagine epistemologies that emerge from excess. The expressiveness of excess flesh—the aesthetic—makes theory, I argue. Instead of dwelling primarily on the ways that epistemologies shape expressivity, I use empathetic reading to discern the reorderings that brown jouissance enables. This is a performative methodology, and there are, admittedly, ways that this mode of reading itself produces a form of plural selfhood, one that sits alongside the forms of selfhood that I argue are central to brown jouissance. This performativity, however, works to underline the political stakes of brown jouissance and its move away from a subject/object binary. There is no way to parse the distinction between theorist and theory or reader and text or spectator and art object. These epistemologies can be fully discerned only through the experiential. Because it is a methodology rooted in the sensual, I use empathetic reading to probe the contours of the aesthetic, so as to register how (form and content) these oscillations of brown jouissance are produced and what (epistemology) versions of selfhood and relationality emerge.
Billie #21, I argue, shows us brown jouissance in several ways. As I have already discussed, we see brown jouissance in Harris’s/Holiday’s inhabitation of hungering; we also see it in the ghost of Holiday’s performances; and in Harris’s inhabitation of the space alongside Holiday. The citational self that Harris conjures is explicitly produced in relation to Holiday and his use of her iconicity. Citation is Harris’s particular mode of relating to Holiday. Through citation, he links his body to hers in a way that emphasizes gesture as a mode of knowledge transmission and allows us to ponder what exactly one inhabits when one borrows from Holiday—what comes from Harris and what comes from Holiday and what do we do with this trans-temporal merging of corporeality? Importantly, however, we also experience Billie #21 as a material manifestation of brown jouissance itself in that its presence as an art object, as a Polaroid, gives us its own entry point into the relationship between aesthetics and brown jouissance. Thinking with the aesthetic in this case highlights brown jouissance’s refusal of transparency and Billie #21’s particular relationship to the fleshiness of the instant.
When one takes a Polaroid, chemicals wash over paper and the image reveals itself after several minutes (or seconds—depending on the actual camera used). In this way, the Polaroid, like many other technologies of photography, offers a material instantiation of the instant, bringing the instant’s fleshiness to the surface. The Polaroid cannot promise to represent depth; it only skims the surface of the world, making visible through its capture of the instant the infinite uncaptured possibilities of movement and image. This illumination of potential through limitation is what Kaja Silverman describes as a fundamental aspect of photography, which works through analogy, or representation that reveals the abundant materiality of the world.48 More specifically, the Polaroid image, Peter Buse argues, rearranges the relationship between subject and object because it requires proximity, which, in turn, reveals the intimacy of the relationship between photographer and image-subject. Buse writes, “Intimacy in the Bataillean sense, is an impossible immanence, a conjunction of immediacy and proximity. This is what the Polaroid often promises, when it is asked to signify.”49 Buse’s enthusiasm for the Polaroid’s intimacy is important because it emphasizes the specific material dimensions of the form. One must be close to the image-subject, at least briefly.
That this citation of Holiday is articulated through the form of a Polaroid draws our attention to the fleshiness of time. This is to say that we experience time as material in a particular way that allows us to understand it as an infinite set of layers or surfaces. In this way, citationality is an explicit manipulation of the layering of different moments of temporality. The Polaroid, after all, captures just the surface of fleshiness, and citation produces a nonlinear path through these temporalities. Through citation, time becomes legible as surface, material, and flesh. By positioning his fleshiness alongside Holiday’s, by drawing on her complex history of loss and pain, and by attaching himself to it, Harris moves toward the way that citation alters how we understand selfhood. Citation produces plural selfhood in this reference to the past while also illuminating the multiplicity of the present. To be in time, to inhabit a moment, is to be made legible through that which came before.
Billie #21 is a snapshot of a moment; it can never be recreated, but it also exists as an object with its own unstable relationship to temporality in that it is also an artifact. This is to say that in addition to recording a particular intimacy, it is also a unique material object, whose contours are particular to Harris’s manipulation of the Polaroid camera’s process of surface development. We see this manipulation in the black bar that occupies the lower portion of the photograph. Moreover, the same chemicals that enable specificity are also those that produce the Polaroid as an image that it always edging toward fading. To argue, then, that hunger is a form of brown jouissance at work in the sensual excess of the photograph is also to suture the citational self and the Polaroid’s materialization of temporality to insatiability and vulnerability. It enables us to ask whether the oscillations between Thing, object, and Other that speak to hunger and its vulnerability are also structured by impermanence, layered temporality, and the plural, porous self of citation. That the aesthetic allows us to ask these questions and draw these ideas together signals its importance in making sense of the epistemological and political questions that emerge from brown jouissance.
This book, then, offers multiple inroads into thinking with and through brown jouissance and the pornotrope. Each chapter draws our attention to particular aspects of pornotropic capture that black and brown people must negotiate. These technologies differ according to the nature of the encounters with white supremacy, but together, they add to our understanding of the ways that structures of domination produce violence and work to contain bodies and pleasures within certain legible parameters. In relation to parsing the modes and mechanics of objectification, I also identify and analyze moments of brown jouissance that exceed these constraints. These are spaces where I locate epistemologies of selfhood and sensuality that can sit alongside those of white hegemonic normativity and are in conversation with other scholarship by those who also think otherwise in fields such as black feminism, queer studies, queer of color critique, and Asian American, Black, and Latinx studies. Finally, I also make arguments in relation to the possibilities opened by my understanding of each artwork’s particular entanglement with the sensual. This move outward offers a way to think with the ways that aesthetic forms might rearrange knowledge by engaging differently with fleshiness and how we apprehend it. This three-pronged approach is designed to help us understand brown jouissance as robust, political, and fleshy. In addition to containing critiques of normativity and proffering epistemologies of sensuality against those of sexuality, this project of minoritarian knowledge production is designed to enable one to sit with opacity and uncertainty. This is not a project of mastery, but one of sensing and imagining otherwise, wherever and whatever that might be.
The first two chapters, “Eating Out: The Labial, Consumption, and the Scalar” and “Surface Play: Flash, Friction, and Self-Reflection,” theorize forms of brown jouissance that offer sensual reorientations of what it is to be in relation by focusing on representations of the black vulva and the epistemologies we can conjure from its materiality. Recent feminist scholarship has been working through the difficult terrain of agency, violation, and pleasure by attempting to recuperate black female sexuality from its persistent association with pain to read other affects such as pleasure, ecstasy, and indulgence into our frameworks for thinking about representations of black women and their sexuality. Yet, they are also wary of imagining an understanding of black female sexuality completely untethered from these histories of pain.50 These are important modes of resisting dominant narratives that render black women voiceless and without agency, but these strategies still pivot around agency (fugitive though it may be). Clearly, we need new frameworks for imagining intimacies and sensuality under duress. These chapters work toward that project by eschewing sexuality’s emphasis on desire, subjectivity, and agency to dwell, instead, on the materiality of the vulva and the production of intimacies premised on spatiality. These intimacies ask us to rethink the relation between sex and the self in addition to redrawing the boundaries between self and other.
“Eating Out,” focuses on the sculpted vulvas of Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party (1979) and Kara Walker’s A Subtlety (2014) in order to draw out some of the issues that underlie the representational politics that surround the black vulva. Although these installations diverge in many ways, I argue that they enable a meditation on the possibility of permeable, dialogic selfhood—selves that illustrate the impossibility of a border between self and Other—rendering porosity and the labial as important for an ethics of mutual vulnerability. Yet, I caution against forgetting asymmetries of power. Reading across the installations and the controversy over Walker’s installation in particular forces us to acknowledge that the differences between pleasure in vulnerability and the sensation of racial violation are related to the differences between the structures of our epistemologies of gender and race. Dwelling on the sensuality that inheres in A Subtlety, however, offers a way to reorient porosity by thinking with the dimension of smell as one site of the installation’s excess. The scalar, in turn, allows us to imagine formulations of brown jouissance in relation to fleshiness that exceeds the individual in multiple directions.
“Surface Play” delves more deeply into the matter of the black vulva in arguing for a revaluation of narcissism, friction, and superficiality by dwelling on Mickalene Thomas’s use of rhinestones as excessive decorations in Origin of the Universe 1 (2012). Thomas’s work is a reimagining of Gustave Courbet’s infamous headless, nude portrait of a woman, The Origin of the World (1866), in which Thomas positions her rhinestone-embellished genitals in the center of the frame. I argue that Thomas’s painting offers a meditation on Audre Lorde’s matrilineal womanism while also allowing us to think with the idea of surface within the medium of painting. This calling forth of both 1970s and 1980s black lesbian feminism and the textures of the surface bring forth friction as a form of relationality and narcissism as a necessary form of self-creation. Brown jouissance, I argue, inheres in the excesses of surface that the painting presents.
The third chapter, “Deep Listening, Belonging, and the Pleasures of Brown Jouissance,” delves into the specific pleasures that brown jouissance produces by comparing it to feminine jouissance, which differs from the self-shattering of phallic jouissance, and to abjection. The pleasures that emerge from feminine jouissance and abjection are those that come from rethinking psychoanalytic modes of belonging, which I do through an analysis of Cheryl Dunye’s pornographic romantic comedy Mommy Is Coming (2012). Brown jouissance’s pleasures, I argue, emerge in the admixtures of feminine jouissance and abjection, a combination that I analyze in Amber Hawk Swanson and Xandra Ibarra’s collaboration Untitled Fucking (2013) by focusing on the strap-on and latex gloves as aspects of Ibarra’s performance of spic-ness. These elements show us topping as deep listening, which itself is an investment in the opacity of the other’s pleasure, while also illuminating dimensions of racialized abjection and care.
This chapter’s insistence on working through psychoanalysis should be read as an intervention into psychoanalysis’s treatment of race. In its early twentieth-century incarnations, its grappling with racial difference was spotty at best. Freud confined racial difference to the atavistic and primitive in Civilization and its Discontents. Following Freud, other early twentieth-century analysts tended to ignore underlying racial dynamics at work in their theories, which created an assumption of whiteness even as they have since allowed a rich body of contemporary critical work excavating these tensions and explicating normative fantasies about race and racism.51 When the minoritarian subject is addressed, in a lineage that we might trace from Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi to David Eng and Anne Anlin Cheng, we find an emphasis on the trauma and melancholy of racialization, colonialism, and assimilation.52 In both of these threads, we see that psychoanalysis registers the centrality of the Oedipus complex as one of pornotroping’s technologies of domination in that it reifies particular norms around the family, family dynamics, and the formation of subjectivity and desire. Race cannot help but act as a distending force because of the violent familial ruptures produced by enfleshment and the difficulty of accommodating familial formations that differ from the norm. However, as Spillers also points out, to work with psychoanalysis is to interrogate intersubjectivity and one’s place in the symbolic order, situations that must be thought through a minoritarian position because it impacts our understanding of belonging. Furthermore, this chapter works to rethink what constitutes familial dynamics—even and especially in fantasized-about form—as they are shaped by racialization in order to see where brown jouissance might fit within larger narratives about belonging.
The fourth and fifth chapters show us how looking for brown jouissance might allow us to read against narratives of meaning-making that might see only woundedness and pain. We do not necessarily come toward pleasure, but we come to something else. Although these chapters are still concerned with formations of relational selfhood, they dwell less on the intimacies that these selves produce and more on the possibilities of expressivity. In these readings brown jouissance gains more texture as an aesthetic intervention in relation to both the spectators and the artists.
In this way, I read Carrie Mae Weems’s From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995–1996), Nao Bustamante’s Neapolitan (2003), and Patty Chang’s In Love (2001) as working in and against discourses of woundedness and the affective regulations that swirl around race and sexuality. Race, I argue, is a social phenomenon of power, sentiment, and spectatorship. The specter of the black body in pain mobilizes affect, especially grief, which offers another node for thinking about the process of pornotroping. Following Dana Luciano’s argument that affect be thought as part of Foucault’s theorization of sexuality, we can see that grief produces a hierarchy of appropriate expressiveness, which Luciano argues “should be comprehended within the framework of bodily hygiene.”53 In articulating the work that discourses on grief perform in their disciplining of the modern subject’s relationship to sentiment and bodily comportment, Luciano makes an important case for thinking modern sexuality as a mode of affective regulation, and not merely as genitally or reproductively based. Thinking grief in relation to discourses of racialization brings questions of respectability, empathy, and sympathy to the fore. These chapters ask us not only to read for woundedness, however, but to read alongside these affects to find what else is being generated.
The fourth chapter, “Performing Witness: Voice, Interiority, and Diaspora” analyzes Weems’s photographic installation From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried as a performance of witnessing in which Weems restores voice to the archive of portraits that she reprints. While Weems’s installation has been read as trafficking in woundedness, I argue that thinking photography as a technology of reproduction allows us to see her work as enlarging concepts of diaspora and mothering while also insisting on the opacity of interiority. Here, the concept of brown jouissance allows us to reimagine the work that is going on in this piece of art. It enables us to theorize witnessing and photography as fleshy enactments of spiritual resistance and to reimagine possibilities of black gendering.
Chapter 5, “Weeping Machines: Automaticity, Looping, and the Possibilities of Perversion,” juxtaposes Bustamante’s and Chang’s video installations, both of which depict weeping as performances of theatrical excess. Here, brown jouissance opens us toward reading with modes of affective unruliness, so that we can understand the non-normativity of brown feminine domesticity and emotionality in order to locate its productive excesses. Neapolitan, which shows Bustamante crying at the final scene of Fresa y Chocolate, and In Love, which shows Chang passionately kissing her parents while crying, both rely on divergent models of automatic behavior. Bustamante offers a theatrical version of the hysterical Latina, while Chang performs the mechanical coldness that Asian Americans are imagined to inhabit. By toying with these expectations, both Bustamante and Chang veer into the territory of perversion, enabling us to see both the racialized norms of affective comportment and their possibility for subversion via the technology of the loop, which shows us brown jouissance as the multiplication of the present. In this chapter the charge of automaticity becomes fodder for alternate experiences of reality.
The final chapter, “Femme Aggression and the Value of Labor,” makes the question of affective labor explicit as it works through Maureen Catbagan’s video series Crush (2010–2012), which features a woman in high heels crushing plastic toys. Catbagan’s decision to feature a white woman in their critique of domestic labor brings to light the pervasiveness of discourses of white feminine misery and the nature of fetishism while also asking viewers to read for race and sensuality in other modes. Catbagan’s Filipinoness can be discerned through elements of framing and the videos’ mobilization of aggression. This affective labor illuminates the workings of brown jouissance in relation to mimesis and virality, which, in turn, upend questions of value, commodification, and representation.
Catbagan’s work is also important because it gives us a way to ask what it means to think about race without trying to locate racial difference explicitly within the frame. In this way, I see Crush as resisting the pornotropic demands of minoritarian representation even as it illuminates the fetishization and objectification that surrounds white femininity. In this rejection of the norms of representation, Crush activates brown jouissance in its refusal to display the processes that commodify people of color in the name of spectacle (or diversity). This is to say that minority subjects are valued for their difference because visible difference, in our current climate, reflects well on the institution—signaling a particular commitment to “social good.” Roderick Ferguson voices deep criticism of this turn toward diversity because it incorporates difference into existing systems of power. Ferguson writes, “Whereas modes of power once disciplined difference in the universalizing names of canonicity, nationality, or economy, other operations of power were emerging that would discipline through a seemingly alternative regard for difference and through a revision of the canon, national identity, and the market.”54 In becoming something that institutions prize, diversity works as a tool to discipline subjects—making them more aware, as Ferguson argues, of their place within the particular economies of minority difference and making that difference matter in ways that do not disrupt the prevailing system. He further observes: “This new interdisciplinary biopower placed social differences in the realm of calculation and recalibrated power/knowledge as an agent of social life. For the American academy, the American state, and an Americanized capital in the sixties and seventies, the question would then become one of incorporating difference for the good rather than disruption of hegemony.”55 This is to say that the presence of minorities signals a particular investment in the project of diversity even as representation is not equivalent to an actual epistemological shift.56 Race as representation is its own form of affective labor, which Catbagan subverts by displacing their own body from the frame and mobilizing the power of invisibility.
I end the book with a meditation on the brown and black mother and her role in producing brown jouissance. Rather than a working through of any particular work of art, “Elsewhere, Is the Mother a Place?” is a theoretical meditation on her estrangement from the familial. While this distention might (and does) result in mourning, we might also locate non-Oedipal possibilities for relationality that center a queer (and black and brown) femininity. This orientation around the mother and her economies of care, coexistence, and possibility is the elsewhere promised throughout the text.