The black vulva is mired in a complex representational conundrum. On the one hand, its absence, which we see most clearly and poignantly in Judy Chicago’s installation The Dinner Party (1979), illuminates the problematic erasure of black women from schemas of sexuality. On the other hand, its presence—as looming and sugar-coated—in Kara Walker’s A Sublety (2014), has generated its own set of anxieties. This chapter asks how we might begin to think the black vulva by focusing not only on the intimacies and selfhoods produced by the labial, but on the ways that thinking with race and fleshiness through a discourse on proprioception forces us to attend to power asymmetries.
The Dinner Party asks us to dwell on consumption. On permanent display in the Brooklyn Museum, Chicago’s installation imagines a dinner party between important women in history. Each woman has an embroidered runner, gold chalice, utensil, and china-painted porcelain plate. Chicago’s display has earned a prominent place within feminist art; it is noteworthy for recognizing women’s varied contributions to society and for drawing on an intensely collaborative practice—many people worked together on the installation to conduct research, craft the materials, and get the piece displayed again after it stopped being shown in museums in the early 1980s.1 On the one hand, the installation enables us to consume information about these women so that we create a new tapestry of history. On the other, it allows viewers to imagine these women as consumers through its explicit centering of eating.
These alimentary aspects are often subsumed by the plates’ suggestion of the vulval, which Chicago achieves through color and ceramic folds—rendering vaginal lips abstractly enough to reference the individuality of each woman and literally enough so that visitors understand that they also reference vulvas. The installation’s fusion of consumption and genitalia provides an opportunity to meditate on the erotic charge of the labia. Arguing that “eating functions as a metalanguage for genital pleasure itself,” Kyla Wazana Tompkins calls for queer alimentarity to “signal the alignment between oral pleasure and other forms of nonnormative desire.”2 Further, Tompkins encourages us to privilege consumption, which is the work that the mouth performs, so that we can “theorize a flexible and circular relation between the self and the social world in order to imagine a dialogic in which we—reader and text, self and other, animal and human—recognize our bodies as vulnerable to each other in ways that are terrible—that is full of terror—and, at other times, politically productive.”3 The consumptive pleasures that The Dinner Party brings forth—that of a vulva that eats, eating a vulva, or having one’s vulva eaten—require that we pay attention to the porous relation between self and other that consumption produces. Specifically, it requires that we pay heed to the labia and its role in producing a porous boundary between interior and exterior and self and other. Instead of possession, an economy of the labial speaks to mutuality, receptivity, and vulnerability.
Most explicitly, this labial economy invites us to think with Luce Irigaray’s feminist language of lips, which act as an ambiguous beacon for a nonphallocentric position. “When Our Lips Speak Together,” a stream-of-conscious dialogue between lips, waivers between the you/ I/we positions in order to produce a discourse (perhaps an ethics) on receptivity and mutual vulnerability. One of the main themes of the essay is the impossibility of the singular subject: “Between our lips, yours and mine, several voices, several ways of speaking resound endlessly, back and forth. One is never separable from the other. You/I: we are always several at once.”4 This plurality—what I call permeable selfhood—in turn, enables pleasure and mobility through its valorization of porosity: “We shall pass imperceptibly through every barrier, unharmed, to find each other. . . . For a long time now they have appreciated what our suppleness is worth for their own embraces and impressions. Why not enjoy it ourselves?”5 As Annemarie Jagose notes, Irigaray’s essay waivers between “an autoeroticism, a pre-Oedipal, and therefore precultural and prediscursive, undifferentiation from the mother, and, finally, a female homosexuality.”6 I suggest that we interpret Irigaray’s essay as a performance of the refusal of fixity, a performance of dialogism in excess.7 In the ambiguity that Irigaray announces we can see the possibility of jouissance in the way that the labia mobilize oscillations between interiority and exteriority and subject and object. This is to say that the labia function as a marker of flesh’s liquidity—formulated here through conversational excess—because they call attention to the movement and materiality of the body while also evacuating a stable “I.” Lynne Huffer argues that this refusal of stability offers the basis for an ethics: “The catachrestic lips . . . articulate an ethics of relation that differentiates them from the pure negativity of queer antisociality. For it is in their catachrestic, heterotopian attempt to speak otherwise that the lips are simultaneously here and elsewhere, now and not now: not a pinned-down figure of the Other of the Same, but a hovering, catachrestic Other’s Other.”8 What Huffer stresses is that the lips exist only and always as relation. In and of themselves, they do not index anything particular, but they stand for the Other, its opacity, and the importance of this difference in thinking ethics and pleasure. Irigaray, Huffer argues, inscribes alterity as “a nonprocreative, sensible transcendental ethics of eros.”9 Read through Huffer, Irigaray gives us a way to think about the labial as a relationship of sensuality, vulnerability, difference, and indifference—since the permeable self makes it impossible to truly separate self and Other.
However, there is more to the labial than dialogical excess, vulnerability, and relation; there is also materiality. While the labial is something that exists in the space between bodies, this labial economy emphasizes a dialogic formation of self that operates in and through proprioception. Proprioception, the feeling of being oriented in space, brings together Sara Ahmed’s discussion of orientation as a turn toward something with a spatial mode of thinking fleshiness.10 It allows us to ask what it means to mobilize the oscillation between touching/not touching in conjunction with categories of social difference. Emphasizing the labial in relation to proprioception means thinking with the array of sensations that embed the lips within social dynamics. When we configure this in relation to Irigaray’s lips touching, the swell and heat of arousal, a turn toward perhaps, might amplify certain forms of touch while making others painful. Likewise, a turning away might reduce the space between lips, impacting porosity. This is to say that these questions of psyche, which I will discuss in relation to appetite rather than desire, have material consequences. They illustrate that not all conversations are the same, nor do they take place on equal footing. To truly consider the dialogic self, one must attend to the asymmetries of appetite and power. Here, turning to one of the failures of Chicago’s The Dinner Party is instructive because we can see what happens when proprioception is left out of the picture.
While Chicago’s installation helps us grapple with the concept of relation and mutual vulnerability, it has surprisingly little to say about differing access to consumption and the fleshiness of turning toward consumption. In part this is because despite its emphasis on the formal dimensions of eating, we must extrapolate appetite from absent mouths. But, much of this, I think, has to do with the installation’s difficulty grappling with race. It is telling, I think, that Chicago’s installation elides the representational conundrum of black female sexuality. The only black woman at the table, Sojourner Truth, is represented by one of only two plates without vulval imagery. In a now defunct FAQ section of her website, Chicago describes the plates: “‘Sojourner Truth’ . . . is based upon African masks to honor her African-American heritage and ‘Ethel Smyth’ . . . is a piano whose lid threatens to compress the form.”11 Importantly, Chicago uses the existence of these plates to argue that The Dinner Party does not collapse every woman it features into a vulva. In historicizing Chicago’s choice, Jane Gerhard writes, “Chicago’s (naïve) assertion is, nonetheless, her heartfelt attempt to bridge differences among women by emphasizing the discrimination they face because of their shared female bodies. This reading of history, however, depends on viewers not seeing the reality of Truth’s racialized body. Given the symbolism of the vulva as representing unity among women, Truth’s lack of a central core image translates poorly. If central cores represent real selves, what or where is the truth of Truth?”12 Gerhard’s assertion that The Dinner Party uses vulval imagery to suture a feminist relation between self, sexuality, and agency allows us to see how Chicago’s choice of alternate imagery for Sojourner Truth’s plate is a manifestation of the lack of discourse, feminist and otherwise, around black woman as sexual agents—the continued relevance of Truth’s plaintive declaration “Ain’t I a Woman” is poignantly on display here. By being left out of the vulval representational schema, Truth becomes a public self, a representative of her race rather than a body in possession of appetites and pleasures. We cannot even begin to imagine how Truth might orient herself, what she might hunger for, or what might bring her pleasure. Hortense Spillers takes Chicago’s omission as symptomatic of mis-seen and unvoiced black women, writing, “By effacing the genitals, Chicago not only abrogates the disturbing sexuality of her subject, but also hopes to suggest that her sexual being did not exist to be denied in the first place.”13 This absence is symptomatic of the paucity of frameworks for grappling with black female sexuality, and it highlights the importance of thinking about the multiple hierarchies at work within the concept of relation and the permeable self. As we see in Chicago’s failure to incorporate Truth’s vulva into The Dinner Party, race—blackness in this case—becomes an unassimilable fleshy difference that disrupts the fantasy of a labial order of egalitarian pleasure, consumption, and mutuality.
The reception of Kara Walker’s 2014 installation, At the behest of Creative Time Kara E. Walker has confected: A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant, offers another case study to think about the fraught relationship between blackness and sexuality. Here, the presence of the black vulva disrupts because it illustrates the difficulty of seeing black women outside the realm of the consumable. Walker was commissioned by Creative Time studio to produce a piece to commemorate the July 2014 demolition of the Domino Sugar factory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Her installation had two main components: the “Sugar Baby,” a thirty-five-foot tall woman-sphinx made out of sugar-coated Styrofoam, positioned at one end of the factory, and her attendants, thirteen five-foot tall boys “confected” from molten sugar, which dotted the factory floor. Walker erected these figures to illuminate the complicated imbrications of sugar, race, and American capitalism. The Domino factory itself has a particularly fraught history in relation to different phases of capitalism. It was built in 1882, refined 50 percent of the sugar in the United States in the 1890s, and was the site of one of the longest labor disputes in New York City in the 2000s.14 The Sugar Baby and her attendants offer a reminder of the black and brown lives lost in the service of making sugar while simultaneously evoking other histories of exploited labor—including the specter of Egyptian slave labor. These bodies and histories circulate through the exhibit, but the controversy focused on the Sugar Baby or Sphinx, whom Walker styled, using a headscarf, as a mammy.
Generally regarded as ideological construct rather than actual historical personage, the mammy has been cast as a loyal worker whose domestic care for the plantation family is symptomatic of a cozy interraciality that erases (or cannot incorporate) racist violence against slaves and other blacks in favor of imagining that her black motherly care brings racial harmony.15 Micki McElya argues that the idea of the mammy’s fidelity to the family that owned her served as a balm against the reality of tense relations between black and white Americans.16 The mammy’s particular role was to be accommodating, affectionate, and servile in order to facilitate white domestic idyll, thereby erasing her role as slave in favor of remembering her as quasi-kin.17 As a maternal surrogate and slave, much of the mammy’s work required tending intimately to the bodies of others.18 As keeper of the hearth and the domestic warmth that it implied, the mammy offered her physical labor in the service of food to produce home.19 This set of crossings registers the reliance of white comfort on black affective labor and the particular commodification of the black body into something edible. In revealing that the white appetite for black sweetness, labor, and sex underlies the production of domesticity, the mammy’s smile cloaks a destructive history. It is this subversive edge that has made the mammy ripe territory for radical reappropriation by Walker and others.20
In keeping with the mammy’s ability to soothe, white critics interpreted Walker’s Sugar Baby as a triumphant model of black womanhood. Kara Rooney hints at this narrative of redemption when she draws connections between the Sugar Baby and black feminism. She asks Walker, “Does this New World sphinx—what sounds like a veritable femme-fatale—relate in any way to the black feminist literature that emerged in the ’70s, initiated by Alice Walker, for example, or is it something more visceral and personal?”21 Behind Rooney’s question is the suggestion that the Sugar Baby may be a mammy, but she behaves as a queen—commanding respect because she appears to channel the pharaohic energy of the Egyptian sphinxes. Writing in the New York Times, Blake Gopnik registers important differences between Walker’s earlier work and the Sugar Baby: “One set of silhouettes is easy to confuse with another, whereas the ‘Marvelous Sugar Baby’ is unlike any of them.”22 Elaborating on this observation, he writes, “With her earlier work, even her supporters conceded that the recurring antihero of Ms. Walker’s work—known as “the Negress”—had never had true control of her fate. But with Ms. Walker’s Negress-as-sphinx, that underdog may have at last become the unbeatable overcat. . . . The figure may be wearing a mammie’s kerchief, but she’ll never be beaten into submission.”23 Roberta Smith’s review of the installation, also for the New York Times, takes similar pleasure in describing the Sugar Baby as agential, especially in relation to the redemptive narrative of the black mother as originary, powerful, and wise.24
This was not the universal narrative, however. When the exhibit opened to the public, some patrons felt that the mammy figure served to represent the violence of consumption and mirrored their own unpleasant experiences of racialized commodification within the installation. Many visitors criticized the work (and the public response to it) as disrespectful and problematic because of Walker’s decision to show the Sugar Baby’s vulva, which, in turn, brought up the specter of violated, which is to say penetrated, blackness.25 Throughout the course of the installation, patrons narrated offense and anger at other patrons’ behavior online. Nicholas Powers’s essay, “Why I Yelled at the Kara Walker Exhibit,” describes feeling “rage” at the commodification of black pain. He writes: “So here it was, an artwork about how Black people’s pain was transformed into money was a tourist attraction for them. A few weeks ago, I had gone to the 9/11 museum and no one, absolutely no one, posed for smiling pictures in front of the wreckage.”26 Stephanye Watts also describes feeling enraged by other people’s responses when her mourning is interrupted: “I obviously didn’t expect to start crying, but it happened and I let those tears run free. I was snapped out of my sob by a white guy yelling, ‘This is boring!’ Tears for my ancestors turned into hot, angry tears. It took everything in me to not walk over and clobber him to death.”27 Watts and Powers both use rage as a framework for unpacking their responses to other people’s behavior in the installation. Having come to the installation expecting to recall the long history of anti-blackness, they understood the installation as a space to commemorate various forms of black pain. Responses to the Sugar Baby that were not intelligible as commemoration were upsetting and seemed to signal a lack of respect, thereby repeating anti-black violence. In voicing their disdain at other patrons’ behavior, those visitors imply that there are appropriate and inappropriate sets of behaviors in the installation.
Inappropriate behavior—specifically taking selfies in front of the Sugar Baby in a way that suggested a sexual interaction with her—was read as a violation, a sign of disrespect to the legacy of slavery and an assault on the black people viewing the exhibit. Other black patrons felt as though they were being watched for their emotional responses to the piece, which felt like a different form of violation. Gloria Malone, for example, writes, “And so I ask: How could those spectators visit an exhibit and pose in a sexually suggestive manner with artwork paying homage to women who are exploited and often working in the shadows of society and show little regard for the artwork and the other women in the room, especially the Black women, some of whom were moved to tears because of the emotional impact the installation had on them?”28 In arguing that patrons are violating the Sugar Baby by taking photographs of her in sexually compromised positions, Malone points to the way that the wound of black women’s long history of being unable to consent is displayed. Yesha Callahan at the Root writes, “History has shown us time and time again how a black woman’s body was (and sometimes still is) objectified. From the days of the slave trade to even having black butts on display in music videos, the black woman’s body seems to easily garner laughs and mockery, even if it’s made out of sugar.”29 Even as the Sugar Baby can be read as a monument that speaks to these historic violations, some viewers experience the imagined repetition of violation through photography as new, not just for the Sugar Baby, but for all black women.
In some ways this sexualized version of violation is one of the most expected responses to the Sugar Baby because it is in keeping with seeing black women as always already violated and always already available for consumption. What is more difficult to parse, though it also belongs to the realm of consent, is the feeling of emotional abuse, of experiencing suffering while others laugh. In this experience, which provokes rage in Watts and Powers, what is at issue is not a corporeal violation (though we might argue that its ghost remains), but an affective one. We might link this feeling of violation to Audre Lorde’s description of abuse in “Uses of the Erotic:” “To share the power of each other’s feeling is different from using another’s feelings as we would use a Kleenex. When we look the other way from our experience, erotic or otherwise, we use rather than share the feelings of those others who participate in the experience with us. And use without consent of the used is abuse.”30 The violation that these patrons experience is that of becoming a spectacle, of being made consumable, without having consented to that. Malik Thompson gives voice to this feeling in his description of visiting the installation:
In the muted light of the sugar factory, her very blue-eyes glowed as they searched my very pained face; they glowed with a mixture of pity, guilt, and confusion—perhaps these are the components of the ever toxic sentimentality? Then, at that moment, I became uncomfortable, realized that even though this was obviously a cemetery, a place of remembrance and mourning for how Blackness has been distorted and destroyed throughout history, the pain I felt would always take a backseat to the comfort white people seek in lies. In that moment, I began remembering what violation felt like.31
The becoming-spectacle that Thompson narrates is inextricable from race. His response becomes more visible to other patrons because he is read as black. In registering this difference, other patrons might also imagine that his response to the piece would be different from their own and watch him in order to come into contact with a “black” experience of viewing the piece. The visibility of Thompson’s affective response is also in keeping with discourses that suture animatedness with blackness and blackness with pain.32
The specter of the black body in pain is related to the violations that patrons might imagine have been visited on the Sugar Baby (or her flesh and blood counterparts), but it belongs to its own genre of racialized violence. Importantly, the specter of the black body in pain subtends discourses on liberal subjectivity through analogy. The feelings that these black bodies generate lead to guilt, which is a problem of not acting when one had the opportunity. While black bodies in pain might generate sympathy or empathy, these feelings ultimately become guilt and passivity, which manifest in performances of laughter, discomfort, and a certain type of willed ignorance. In describing the affective labor that the specter of the suffering black body performs, I argue that white innocence “is constructed through a focus on the suffering that guilt produces, which, in turn, manifests itself as empathy and analogizes the white body’s current guilt to the black body’s past (and present) trauma. Through empathy, the substitution of the white body for the black body, current guilt or suffering distracts from the choice of inaction and produces color blindness.”33 In other words, while patrons might imagine that they are extending sympathy or empathizing with Thompson and the collective suffering of black people, what is really at stake is the potential to erase the specificity of black pain and the black body. Where black emotions function to privilege white pain or guilt, black bodies are again used without consent and are thereby further distanced from the parameters of sovereign subjectivity.
What links these patrons’ experiences is not simply violation, but the danger of consumption. Each anecdote illuminates the powerful recoil at the idea that black (or brown) bodies are performing for white bodies. These performances are sexual or affective, but they all illustrate the difficulty of being perceived as a consumable commodity. As Hiram Pérez writes when exploring the dynamic of brown people performing for whites, the brown body acts “as a repository for the disowned, projected desires of a cosmopolitan subject, it is alternately (or simultaneously) primitive, exotic, savage, pansexual, and abject.”34 Vincent Woodward centralizes and literalizes consumption in The Delectable Negro, his history of cannibalism and homoeroticism in slave culture in the United States. Woodward argues that consumption was often hidden behind a rhetoric of objectification and abjection, but it worked to solidify the bonds of whiteness as it cloaked desire for blackness: “For white men, sex with and sexual attraction to black men was a natural by-product of their physical, emotional, and spiritual hunger for the same.”35 Further, Woodward positions this desire for black men as the basis for the existential question of what it is to be black: “Long before the poignant questions of the color line and the Negro problem registered in the black imagination, it seems that a more pressing problematic confronted the black citizen. In the form of a question, it might have registered as: ‘How does it feel to be an edible, consumed object?’ In other words, how does it feel to be an energy source and foodstuff, to be consumed on the levels of body, sex, psyche, and soul?”36
What Walker’s installation makes clear is the importance of thinking about appetite as the manifestation of one’s location within multiple circuits of power. Appetite belongs to the realm of the proprioceptive because it shows how power orients desire. The Sugar Baby and her fraught reception bring our attention to the powerlessness that can be experienced in being consumed. Walker’s installation allows us to ask what it feels like to be constituted not only as desirable, but also consumable—a process akin to Irigaray’s dialogic conversation in that it disassembles subject and object, but which is often experienced as loss, rather than pleasure. This sensation is one of being overwhelmed, taken in by the Other, regardless of whether one wants to participate in this dynamic or not. As we see in these descriptions of their experiences at A Subtlety, these participants felt violation rather than a pleasurable indistinguishability from the Other. Despite these difficult experiences, I do want to think what it might mean for us to stay with the proprioceptive and imagine pleasure in a permeable selfhood despite structural inequalities. In moving toward this possibility, we must reorient ourselves so that we remain attentive to the fact that the Sugar Baby acts as a reminder of the violent nature of the desire for sugar, for sweetness, for disposable (“free”) labor, for forgiveness, for brown women, for accessible vulvas, but also remember that she is still a participant in her own economy of sensuality and appetite. Being overwhelmed does not mean that she has been annihilated, even as we may have to move beyond the individual and toward other registers of agency in order to see the ways that she activates a pleasurable porosity.
***
Working through the differences between the feeling of violation in Walker’s installation and the pleasures of vulnerability in Irigaray’s language of lips touching means thinking further with proprioception because it engages with the body’s fleshiness and its relationship to the world (that is, how it touches and is touched). The challenge of thinking economies of racial violation in conjunction with those of gendered vulnerability is emblematic of several key issues. First, there is the difficulty scholars have had in imagining black female sexuality outside of a framework of violation, which stems not only from the historic atrocities of slavery, but also from the still tenuous relationship between blackness and agency. When sexuality is kept tethered to agency and sovereign subjectivity, it becomes easy to see that its organization flows hierarchically, so that some subjects are perpetually given tenuous (at best) sexual citizenship. Second, despite the discourse of intersectionality, gender and race are still often imagined separately, so that Irigaray’s reorientation of the phallic economy does not always register as a critique of whiteness, and the problem of the animated, black consumable body is not framed as being applicable to the problem of phallocentrism. The difficulty reading these issues together is not a matter of compiling different identities, however. It is a question of epistemology and translation—how can we make these critiques of white phallocentrism speak to each other?
With regard to the issue of language and translation, one of the main difficulties has to do with the primacy of the visual, which assigns differential levels of agency to race, gender, and sexuality. In “Maiden Voyage” Dana Takagi argues that the assumption that race is always visible poses particular difficulties for thinking about the intersections of racial identity and sexual identity. Takagi writes, “There are numerous ways that being ‘gay’ is not like being ‘Asian.’ . . . There is a quality of voluntarism in being gay/lesbian that is usually not possible as an Asian American. One has the option to present oneself as ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian,’ or alternatively, to attempt to ‘pass,’ or to stay in ‘the closet,’ that is, to hide one’s sexual preference. However, these same options are not available to most racial minorities in face-to-face interactions with others.”37 Whereas making one’s sexuality visible is assumed to be a matter of agency, one’s racial identity is understood as a matter of external perception. Jasbir Puar argues that understanding race through visuality is emblematic of the discourse’s embeddedness within disciplinary society. Moving toward a new theory of race, she argues, entails paying attention to geopolitics, space, and becoming. She writes:
Resuturing the foundational function of race within biopolitics to the production of ontologically irreducible entities in control societies, the geopolitics of racial ontology marks the manifestation of different spatializing regimes of the body, and its particles, such that the biological caesura that demarcates the cut of or for racism is now not just a question of visible racial difference or of the taxonomic and eugenic science of phrenology and the scientific racism of the eighteenth through early twentieth centuries. . . . The emphasis on geopolitics amends what might otherwise be a location-less notion of ontology, an unmarked locational investment of recent work on ontology, much of it neither accounting for the productive force of geopolitics within its scholarly purview nor acknowledging the geopolitical forces that enable theorizing.38
Puar’s turn to a geopolitical ontology resonates with my focus on the proprioceptive dimensions of the labial. Both projects require us to think about the specifics of flesh’s location in space as a way to understand how intimacies embedded in asymmetrical relations of power might work. Specifically, race orients by emphasizing the danger that exists in being consumed while also offering the possibility of thinking with the pleasures of consumption. When thinking with race, relation must be thought in conjunction with the perils and possibilities that inhere in inequality.
In order to imagine the Sugar Baby’s orbit of sensuality, then, we must bring critiques of whiteness into conversation with critiques of phallocentrism in order to move toward a more embodied understanding of racial difference. It is not that differences should not matter, but they should be understood in a register separate from the sovereign subject and its possession of agency. An over-focus on agency as the pivot point for who constitutes a subject is the logic that undergirds the denigration of the feminine that Irigaray critiques and the racialized hierarchies that render blackness the edge of what it means to be a human.39 In Irigaray’s disruption of this logic of choice and agency, we see receptivity and relation, but we need to expand our understanding of what these heterotopias might consist.
Treva B. Lindsey and Jessica Marie Johnson write toward this form of heterotopia in their analysis of the possibility of theorizing pleasure during slavery. Walker’s Sugar Baby, they suggest, “compels the viewer to encounter the black female body as subject and object, as laborer, desired, and commodified; as desiring, erotic, and violated; as visible but illegible; as mysterious, unknowable but knowing; as ambivalent and as powerful. The virility of the Sugar Sphinx is palpable, but her desires and intimate longings remain mysterious, though not unknowable or unspeakable.”40 Further, they write, “If we approach the history of enslavement as though orgasms, wetness, and writhing, pulsating, aroused bodies existed, our understanding of enslaved and free women of color’s lives will begin to defy slaveowners’ conceptions of black sexuality. Instead of depicting enslaved and free women of color as once again becoming the property of someone else, scholars must challenge themselves to write fully actualized, erotic, historical subjects.”41
In a similar vein, Alex Weheliye argues that desire be re-thought through the matrix of hunger. By bringing together a longing for freedom and the experience of captive bodies, hunger is crucial for thinking about pleasure and enfleshment: “Partaking of the flesh, albeit the habeaus viscus kind rather than the pure abjection varietal tenders flavors and textures found in lives of imprisoned freedom, desires for survival, and viscous dreams of life that awaken future anterior humanities, which exceed Man’s inesculent culinary laws.”42 Reading with Lindsey and Johnson’s plea to imagine black women as desiring, even under conditions of duress, as well as with Weheliye’s argument that hunger is vital to the possibility of freedom, gives us a way to approach the question of relation anew. In particular it announces spatiality and orientation as aspects of fleshiness, which operate on multiple scales and which produce differing intimacies as a result.
When we think beyond the individual, we can grasp the fleshiness, sensuality, and pleasure of A Subtlety on multiple registers. First, we can position the installation in relation to a critique of global capitalism. Nato Thompson, the head curator of Creative Time, describes Walker’s intervention in his curatorial statement:
Walker’s gigantic temporary sugar-sculpture speaks of power, race, bodies, women, sexuality, slavery, sugar refining, sugar consumption, wealth inequity, and industrial might that uses the human body to get what it needs no matter the cost to life and limb. Looming over a plant whose entire history was one of sweetening tastes and aggregating wealth, of refining sweetness from dark to white, she stands mute, a riddle so wrapped up in the history of power and its sensual appeal that one can only stare stupefied, unable to answer.43
Further, Walker’s use of sugar, itself a commodity central to the establishment of capitalism per Sidney Mintz’s argument, centralizes the role of appetite as a driving force in colonialism.44 Indeed, Walker’s installation plays with the imbrication of capitalism, labor, and race in ways that are not only representational but also site-specific. Tavia Nyong’o notes that the project was financed by the owners of the Domino Sugar factory who, in addition to exploiting brown and black workers, profited from closing the factory and selling the land to condo developers as part of Williamburg’s gentrification. Nyong’o writes:
The combined and uneven development of global capitalism was rarely more clearly on view than here, in a public art project that worked simultaneously as reputation laundering for the Fanjul brothers, corporate barons whose blood money (extracted from the cane fields in the Dominican Republic, where Haitian migrants labor in post-slavery conditions) bankrolled the exhibit. The piece cannot begin to make sense without accounting for the manner in which Fanjul Corp., owners of Domino Sugar, stand to profit off the deindustrialization of their former factory, and the reimagining of its extended footprint as a further extension of their creative capital.45
From this perspective we might argue that the decision to create public art at the site of the Domino Factory is an attempt to negate the violence that occurred (or, is occurring via gentrification) in this space. However, Walker’s Sugar Baby consolidates these appetites onto one figure and thereby becomes a memorial to exploitation. Reading Walker in relation to Lisa Lowe’s emphasis on reinvigorating the relations between “the emergence of European liberalism, settler colonialism in the Americas, the transatlantic African slave trade, and the East Indies and China trades in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries” reveals the complex global intimacies that are attached to these forces and desires.46 In The Intimacies of Four Continents, Lowe argues for moving intimacy away from its conventional mooring to the framework of sovereign subjectivity toward a broader perspective that privileges relation. In place of the subject, interiority, and personal property, Lowe prioritizes “a ‘political economy’ of intimacies, by which I mean a particular calculus governing the production, distribution, and possession of intimacy.”47 For Lowe, intimacy is about a set of relations occurring on the global stage, which gives some subjects access to personhood and keeps others in the shadows. By revealing the shadow processes, people, and geographies that produce subjectivity and sexuality, Lowe displaces the sovereign subject and the subject/object binary. This is another mode of thinking with the dialogic self. Lowe’s work expands our critique of white phallocentrism and moves us toward a reconceptualization of the sensorial registers by which we should apprehend intimacy.
In displacing the primacy of subjectivity, we move toward the space around the individual—and, incidentally, around the vulval. This space includes both those forces that exceed the subject such as capitalism and colonialism, which Lowe’s analysis describes, and those forces that occur “before the individual,” which Kyla Schuller positions in relation to Tompkins’s analysis of eating.48 Power, Schuller writes, “materializes in the form of force that circulates and aggregates below and before the level of the individual. Power transpires through a field of the consumable, penetrant, dispersible, and absorbable, coordinating life well beyond the human, beyond the nominally alive, even as it forms the shifting parameters of embodied difference.”49 This is to say that the smaller, ingestible, molecular aspects of the consumable also reorient appetite. I locate this reorientation within the parameters of the labial, however, because the molecular also relies on porosity and produces permeable selfhood—even if the chief organ for this is not necessarily the vulva or the mouth. We see this mobilization of the molecular in the grains of sugar and Styrofoam that make up the Sugar Baby as well as in the smells that waft from the installation courtesy of the melting five-foot tall boys that dotted the factory floor. Through the course of the installation these figures become molecular, filling visitors’ nostrils with an increasingly pungent smell.
Though less controversial than the Sugar Baby, these youthful attendants are ripe for our analytic gaze. Confecting them from a mixture of molten sugar and covered with molasses, Walker modeled these boys on plastic trinkets depicting blackamoors, which she purchased online.50 Throughout the installation the heat in the factory caused the figures to melt into the floor. Some lost limbs; others became coated with brown sugar. Most began to smell after a few weeks. Unlike the Sugar Baby, whose Styrofoam base ensures that she will remain erect, the attendants visibly suffer the ravages of time and show the costs of laboring.
These servants, already part of racist iconography, are perpetually at work; they carry empty baskets or bunches of bananas. Their efforts are part of multiple circuits of history and migration. As early modern sculptural objects, the blackamoors served as bejeweled decorations for rich European households, offering reminders of the wealth and power amassed by conquests in Africa. In this way, they provide a glimpse of the colonial consumption of black servant bodies. Walker, however, encounters these objects not in museums, but as plastic trinkets made in China. This contemporary locus touches on the globalization of an appetite for black performance while also indexing the exploitation of Chinese workers and an economy that privileges plastic’s disposable pleasures—exempting, of course, its endurance as waste.
As monuments in Walker’s installation, the blackamoors bring together disparate histories of labor, but they also resist commodification through the act of melting. Melting not only signals these objects’ ephemerality—even as many of them circulate after the installation as preserved museum objects—but also illuminates the power of becoming-molecular. As molecules they permeate the atmosphere, becoming unassimilable to an economy of racialized consumption in which their bodies give other people pleasure. They cease to become recognizable bodies, and their molecularization means that they permeate the viewer intensely and perhaps more intimately. In Lowe’s reframing of intimacy she offers disintegration and decay as possible sites of theorization, naming them “those processes that are forgotten, cast as failed or irrelevant because they do not produce ‘value’ legible within modern classifications.”51 Melting also functions as a manifestation of liquidity, which offers an escape from the totalizing grasp of consumption and brings the blackamoor (or rather the puddle that was part of the blackamoor) into a separate economy of sensuality and appetite. In the blackamoors’ becoming-molecular, they show us the alternate ecologies at play in the installation. Nyong’o describes their performance as one of disintegration:
The fragile sugar sculptures (each baby constructed according to a different method of assembling sugar crystal, molasses and wire) retained their shape if only for a particular duration before melting and falling apart at different rates. . . . And the child sticking eager hands in pools of red goo on the final day of their installation was but the most direct evidence of the manner in which mass audience affected the material objects: on at least some days the collective temperature, respiration and perspiration of the audience would have subtly interacted with the state of the molasses sculpture, accelerating their decay into liquid pools without even a physical touching.52
As Nyong’o notes, porosity is part of the point. The fragility of these objects illuminates the influence of humans, vermin, and weather on the processes of consumption. Most saliently, these forces are part of how audiences perceived the installation through the sense of smell. This is because we register this spectacle of decay on the level of the olfactory. Becoming-molecular, in this case, is becoming pungent.
As the boys melted and the temperatures inside the warehouse soared, the molasses on the walls and on the boys began to smell. Blake Gopnik writes, “The smell hits you first: sweet but with an acrid edge like a thousand burned marshmallows.”53 Leigh Silver describes it as “the smell of rot. It’s the smell of decay.”54 Into this landscape, we gain another way to think about the ways that bodies might mingle outside of subject/object binaries—through the floating particles of smell and through the intimacy of the nose. Smell in Walker’s installation offers a reminder of what the factory used to do, but it also offers a connection to the diasporic in Martin Manalasan’s argument that “olfaction is a marker of the marginal stranger/foreigner and the ways that such sensorial markers become part of grids that speak to issues of hygiene, disgust, and aspirations.”55 Here, we see the way that smell speaks to the molecular component of appetite. Attraction and repulsion are propelled by these chemical interactions. LaMonda Horton-Stallings frames the alternate epistemology of smell—particularly that of the malodorous variety—within a genealogy of black funk. She writes, “The etymology of black funk emphasizes that funk is a rewriting of smell and scene away from a nineteenth-century ordering and socialization of corporeal power that represses what stinks, but that does not mean it does mean it lacks intelligence or spirituality; rather, it provides other paradigms of intellect and spirit.”56 When we keep the stench of A Subtlety with us, not only does it offer a chance to experience the repulsive side of appetite, it changes the scale of relationality and receptivity. Smell is, after all, insistently spatial. It offers a way to orient to another without necessarily working through the visual. This form of becoming-molecular shows us the porosity of the individual and the fleshiness of chemistry; bonds form and break in the service of intimate sensuality. Here, we might also think about the Sugar Baby’s granularity, which breaks apart at the touch, as also enacting its own form of molecular mixing.
Through the lens of proprioception, we see that appetite operates “beyond” the individual and the sovereign subject such that it inheres in either the global or the chemical. Both scalar shifts allow us to see how thinking with the movement toward eclipses the question of agency. Instead, relations emerge from everywhere—dynamics within the nostril and forces of global capital. The field of the labial is expansive because everything is porous; but we must think simultaneously with the pleasures and dangers of fleshiness—that space of brown jouissance—in order to understand the stakes of inhabiting a dialogic, permeable self.