3 Deep Listening, Belonging, and the Pleasures of Brown Jouissance

Untitled Fucking, a 2013 collaboration between Xandra Ibarra and Amber Hawk Swanson, features Ibarra penetrating Hawk Swanson with a Tapatío bottle secured to a harness. After twelve minutes of rhythmic penetration, Ibarra opens the bottle of hot sauce and jerkily empties its contents onto Hawk Swanson’s back in a simulation of ejaculation while she continues to penetrate Hawk Swanson digitally. Throughout the performance, Hawk Swanson repeats the line, “Feminism? That’s deep. I think I need a minute to think about that, so . . . I don’t know.” The utterance connects this collaborative work with Hawk Swanson’s Feminism? Project, a series of videos in which she recontextualizes interviews on feminism with women in Iowa by using a stylized “valley girl” intonation to repeat lines from the interviews while in the middle of various sex acts. Ibarra’s use of the hot sauce strap-on likewise marks a continuity between this performance and her own multifaceted work on Chicana identity as La Chica Boom. In another La Chica Boom project she remakes Tapatío into Tapatía by using her image on the label and describing its particular “spic-y” qualities. Juana María Rodríguez argues that Untitled Fucking “capture[s] feminism’s ambivalent and decidedly sticky relationship to racialized sexual politics,” while Iván Ramos positions it within a form of “gustatory aesthetics.”1

The “gustatory aesthetics” that Ramos refers to are part of a longer tradition of Chicano/a art practices that use the alimentary to unsettle. Ramos argues that Ibarra’s multiple mobilizations of the Tapatío bottle “articulate a visceral anti-assimilationist politics that appropriates and critiques the racist imagery that has defined Latina/o subjects in the United States.”2 In Ramos’s reading, Ibarra’s use of Tapatío makes the “spiciness” attributed to Chicanas vital to her project: “Spiciness functions as a central metaphor that serves to illuminate not only the fear around immigration but also part of an adjacent, if under analyzed, history in which Mexican food has managed to lead the entry of the Mexican body into the United States.”3 Spiciness indexes not only the simultaneous fear of and desire for difference on the part of white normative culture, but also Ibarra’s rejection of assimilation. Ibarra wields power through this hot sauce. She makes her racialization visible and desirable. As Ramos writes, “The desire for the hot Latina that La Chica Boom embodies is returned, but instead she will top the viewer, in her own terms.”4 Further, the gustatory functions as a mode of excess. The viewer cannot help but be reminded of the hot sauce’s taste and texture—“For those of us familiar with the taste and texture of the sauce, this faux cum-shot is exceptionally visceral. Upon each viewing, I can sense the smell, the texture, the taste. The sheer excess of it, the whole bottle in fact, creates a crimson mess that seeps into the very sensorial memory of our own encounters with a bottle of Tapatío” in a mode that suggests a “political aesthetic that dissolves the self in favor of sensorial overload.”5

Rodríguez focuses less on the possibility of excess and more on the feminist conversation that the performance stirs with its centralization of sex and the erotics of race. If one of Hawk Swanson’s aims in her Feminism? Project is to bring conversations on sex into feminist discourse, this collaboration with Ibarra is important for showing the ways that eroticism and race co-mingle. Rodríguez is particularly interested in what it means that Ibarra tops Hawk Swanson, especially since both women embody forms of conventional femininity—Ibarra “dressed in cucaracha pasties, stilettos, and not much else, fucking a bent-over, equally feminine and sultry, Amber,” who, as Ramos writes, is “in full femme regalia, wearing black stockings and high heels; her presence reminiscent of a 1950s pinup, a la Betty Page.”6 When Hawk Swanson begins to forget her lines, Ibarra disciplines her by pulling her hair: “Their exchange functions as a peculiar kind of sexualized race play, where the Chicana femme top seems to run the show, even as her polite Midwestern bottom asks for ‘another finger please.’”7 Rodríguez reads this exchange as one in which white liberal feminism is confronted by racial difference, rendered “unable to speak,” and opened to the possible pleasures of sex as politics in whatever incarnation they appear: “A Latina power-top with cockroach-covered nipples? Feminism taking it from behind, and loving it? Cross-racial feminine erotics as condiments for our consumption? Or a riotous convergence of the delicious pleasures and fiery politics that feminism still has trouble ingesting?”8

We might say, then, that Ibarra and Hawk Swanson’s exchange functions as an extension of the 1981 dialogue between Amber Hollibaugh and Cherrie Moraga, “What We’re Rolling Around in Bed With,” in which the activists discuss feminism’s difficulty grappling with power and sexuality. Hollibaugh and Moraga argue that feminism has struggled to make sense of sexuality apart from a structure of oppression, which has resulted in an ideology where “lesbianism (since it exists outside the institution of heterosexuality) came to be seen as the practice of feminism. It set up a ‘perfect’ vision of egalitarian sexuality, where we could magically leap over our heterosexist conditioning into mutual orgasms, struggle-fee, trouble-free sex.”9 Hollibaugh goes on to argue that not only is this idealization of lesbian sexuality impossible to realize, but it speaks to a repression of people’s desires and fantasies: “I think the reason butch/femme stuff got hidden within lesbian-feminism is because people are profoundly afraid of power in bed. And though everybody doesn’t play out power the way I do, the question of power affects who and how you eroticize your sexual need. And it is absolutely at the bottom of all sexual inquiry”10 From there, the conversation evolves into a discussion of the power of butch/femme role play with both women arguing against an ideology in which femininity is equated with passivity. Hollibaugh says, “Femme is active, not passive. It’s me saying to my partner, ‘Love me enough to let me go where I need to go and take me there. Don’t make me think it through. Give me a way to be so in my body that I don’t have to think: that you can fantasize for the both of us.”11 Moraga adds that as a butch she tries to find the moment with her partner when “she entrusts me to determine where she’ll go sexually. And I honestly feel a power inside me strong enough to heal the deepest wound. . . . My power is that I know how to read her inside of her own passion. I can hear her. It’s like a sexual language.”12

In Hollibaugh and Moraga’s desire to find a space for lesbianism where sex can make a body a body, we find an important space for thinking about penetration and its relationship to power. In this formulation of brown jouissance, the racialized hierarchies that mark appetite are brought into explicit conversation with the pleasure of penetrating another. While Hollibaugh and Moraga play out this tension through a summoning of butch/femme role play, a contentious practice in 1981, Untitled Fucking invites us to reconsider the conversation through the lens of topping and bottoming. This work invites us to see that topping is made legible through Ibarra’s performance of penetration and her guidance of her and Hawk Swanson’s sexual choreography while bottoming connotes the receptive, though not passive—as we see in Hawk Swanson’s request for “more”—partner. In Hawk Swanson and Ibarra’s “conversation” about feminism, power and penetration act as fulcrums for pleasure, and we gain a new language for thinking about brown jouissance. In their artist statement, they emphasize the importance of the “queer sexual vocabulary of topping, bottoming, and ‘bottoming out,’” for “stag[ing] the deep and complicated interplay between the performance of white feminism and the feminisms of color that whiteness excludes. . . . Working the erotic interplay between saying and doing, Hawk Swanson and Ibarra rehearse the queer and feminist contradictions that arise when explicit sex and performance collide, directing us toward the untitled and yet to be articulated horizons of political possibility.”13 While the other iterations of brown jouissance that I discuss in this book gesture toward sex—often incorporating fraught histories of sexualized black and brown people—this chapter takes the performance and form of sex itself as a site to analyze brown jouissance, its relationship to queer frames of belonging, and its production of pleasures—both in the self and in others.

Working around Oedipus: Family Dramas and Multiplications of Jouissance

By now, the description of jouissance during sex that Leo Bersani proffers in “Is the Rectum a Grave?” is ubiquitous. Bersani uses it to articulate the pleasures of anal sex at the height of the AIDS emergency, when sex between men was imagined as a death sentence. He uses jouissance to undermine the homophobic imaginary of “the intolerable image of a grown man, legs high in the air, unable to refuse the suicidal ecstasy of being a woman.”14 The peril that Bersani reports is of punctured masculinity in which approaching femininity or “being a woman” signals both submission and being penetrated. In this, Bersani takes his cue from Michel Foucault’s historical analysis of Greek and Roman sexuality and Catharine Mackinnon’s and Andrea Dworkin’s analysis of patriarchy: “To be penetrated is to abdicate power.”15 The tethering together of anatomy and passivity links sexuality to masochism and invites jouissance as a mode of self-shattering into the picture. In the conclusion to the essay, Bersani writes, “Male homosexuality advertises the risk of the sexual itself as the risk of self-dismissal, of losing sight of the self, and in so doing it proposes and dangerously represents jouissance as a mode of ascesis.”16 Bersani’s essay has been much analyzed, so I will not dwell on its many complexities here, but I am interested in complicating this idea of penetration as self-shattering. As others, including myself, have argued, Bersani is writing from the position where one has a self to shatter, which is to say a position of already inhabiting sovereign subjectivity. This is phallic jouissance.

When we expand the frameworks for thinking with jouissance, we see how deep the alignment is between the sovereign subject and the Oedipus complex. According to the Oedipus complex, the child must repudiate his or her initial love for the mother in order to become a subject and gain recognition from the father. As Judith Butler reminds us, this positions desire for the mother as the antecedent to the processes of gendering because the incest taboo and maternal absence from the erotic scene are the conditions that permit the psychic formations of gender and sexuality.17 The subject is thus constituted by desire and undone by occasional sensations that jar the subject from this matrix. These moments of coming undone constitute phallic jouissance, which is a crisis of self-shattering and the destruction of the imaginary of coherence. For Jacques Lacan, however, there are two other important modes of thinking about jouissance, both of which actually resurrect the mother in some fashion: jouissance of being and feminine jouissance.

Néstor Braunstein describes jouissance of being as something that happens before entry into the symbolic order, when “a mutual fulfillment exists between the infans and the Other, the mother. This ‘moment’ comes prior to lack and desire.”18 Separation from the m/Other launches the subject into the world of desire as s/he longs to fulfill the m/Other’s desire and return to this state. This moment before the inauguration of the subject and before desire positions the m/Other-child relationship as unknowable and separate from the imagined coherence of the subject. Julia Kristeva’s theorization of a primary pre-Oedipal love for the maternal body is emblematic of jouissance of being. In this stage before subjectivity, love for the mother is all encompassing and provides the basis for the possibility of becoming a self. Kristeva describes this as the space before desire (before the subject/object division) and beyond pleasure. Kristeva names this pre-Oedipal space “the semiotic” because it precedes the subject’s entrance into the symbolic. In the space of the semiotic, the subject is unraveled, incoherent, and revels in her corporeality. The semiotic is filled with an alternate language—often poetry. In her reading of Kristeva, Judith Butler writes that “the semiotic, through rhythm, assonance, intonations, sound play and repetition, re-presents or recovers the maternal body in poetic speech. Even the ‘first echolalias of infants’ and the ‘glossalasias in psychotic discourse’ are manifestations of the continuity of the mother-infant relation, a hetereogenous field of impulse prior to the separation/ individuation of infant and mother, alike effected by the imposition of the incest taboo.”19 Kristeva’s emphasis on the time before the child can distinguish between itself and its mother as the source of eroticism emphasizes dependence and temporal continuity, rather than the temporality of the event that marks Oedipal narratives. Importantly, this positions jouissance of being as occurring before subjectivity and intimately connected to sensations of corporeal co-dependence.

In this formation of jouissance as occurring “before,” I understand jouissance of being as indicating that this connection and deep relationality with the mother is what must be foreclosed in order to inaugurate subjectivity, desire, and sexuality. When attention has been specifically given to the role of the mother in theorizations of feminine desire, there have been divided sets of responses. On the one hand, some, like Kaja Silverman, argue that this foreclosed love for the mother is the condition that allows female desire to develop. She writes, “The girls’ feelings for her mother classically express themselves through the wish to give her a child, and to receive one in return . . . which sets the wheels of unconscious symbolization in motion and establishes the girl as a full-fledged subject. It is here . . . that female desire begins.”20 On the other hand, for others, the idea that feminine desire can be traced to the mother has been troubling. In addition to the difficulty of thinking through the figuration of incest (despite the relative discursive silence on its mother-daughter formations), there is a fear that articulating a desire for the mother will bleed into theorizations of lesbianism. Teresa de Lauretis, for example, has been more skeptical of this turn toward the maternal as a site of lesbian analytic possibility because it threatens to desexualize lesbianism. De Lauretis writes, “Thus to make desire for, as well as identification with the mother a sine qua non condition of feminism continues to blur the already fraught distinction between heterosexual feminism and lesbian feminism, to say nothing of the far more consequential differences between lesbian sexuality or subjectivity and heterosexual female sexuality or subjectivity.”21 Additionally, de Lauretis points to the uproar over Adrienne Rich’s essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” which opened possibilities to read a number of female-female relationships through the lesbian.22 In some ways, the problem that de Lauretis identifies is that lesbianism is presented as though it enjoys a particular relationship to maternity or desire for the mother that other subjects do not. Further, this form of lesbian exceptionalism threatens to veer toward attaching the lesbian to the specter of the unnatural. In suggesting that we think more broadly about the generative possibilities of queer m/Other love (alongside, but not restricted to the figure of the lesbian), I am interested in its status as excessive relative to the order of sexuality dominated by the phallic and reproductive.

In order to ground this analysis of queer m/Other love in something more tangible, I turn to Cheryl Dunye’s 2012 film, Mommy Is Coming. “Mommy’s coming!” Helen, the titular mother played by Swiss-based sexologist Maggie Tapert, announces cheerily over the telephone. She makes this proclamation to her daughter, Dylan, who has interrupted a taxicab tryst with her girlfriend, Claudia, to take the call. Although Dylan, sex educator and actor Lil Harlow, does actually require romantic counsel—she accuses Claudia of wanting too much from her emotionally while simultaneously accusing her of being withholding because she refuses to be penetrated—mommy’s decision to leave their hometown to visit Berlin is occasioned by Dylan’s noncommunicativeness, as well as by her boredom in her marriage to Dylan’s father and curiosity about Berlin and the potential sexual adventures it offers. From here the film mixes pornography and plot, often situating its actors as talking heads within the movie to explain their characters’ motivations for the actions that we see. Dylan and Claudia separate; Claudia, played by black Boricua genderqueer performer Papi Coxx, dons a mustache, and as Claude, he explores a Berlin sex club, where he finally receives the love and attention that he feels he has been lacking. Helen arrives in Berlin and promptly seduces Claude (not realizing his dual identity as Claudia) in order to have her own Berlin sex adventure. Dylan enjoys a threesome with friends and realizes that she does miss Claudia’s affection after all. The hijinks culminate when Claude/ia attempts to have sex with both mother and daughter in adjoining hotel rooms only to produce a situation in which Helen is blindfolded and unknowingly mounted from behind by her daughter. Once mommy has come, the mistaken identity is revealed, and the trio laugh it off. The film ends with Helen dispensing motherly advice to Dylan to “love who is front of [her]” and Dylan and Claudia cooing lovingly on the train platform.

Dunye’s cheeky title leads us to anticipate Helen’s orgasm, while also giving us a way to understand something of the world of m/Other love and what it is to break the incest taboo. While Kristeva describes the importance of mother love as a psychic formation, she does not grapple with it as a potential physical sex act. In large part this is because of the strength of the incest taboo, which means that a sexual attachment to one’s mother opposes normative ideologies of subject formation. Mommy Is Coming, however, allows us to think the mother and sexual relations with the mother outside the realm of taboo. The discovery that Dylan has fucked her mother does not result in trauma, only laughter. Although properly speaking the vectors of desire emanate from Claude/ia, which means that this desire could be classified as part of a conglomeration attached to the MILF (Mother I’d Like to Fuck, a term popularized through the 1999 film American Pie). The MILF challenges the traditional assumptions about femininity; scholars have argued that within the realm of pornography her appeal stems from “playing against type,” that is, asserting herself sexually and professionally.23 However, more often than not, she isn’t actually anyone’s mommy.24 Yet, Mommy Is Coming does present us with mother-daughter sex, opening the door toward rethinking sensual modes of connecting with the mother, even as it sidesteps the question of daughterly desire.

In the film, we see mother love actualized in Dylan’s penetration of Helen, an act that results in orgasms for both. In showing Helen as penetrated and in pleasure’s thrall, Dunye activates a different type of relation between penetration and jouissance. This is not the “suicidal ecstasy” that Bersani designates as womanly. Helen does not shatter; she comes and in the process understands herself and her desires more fully—one of the film’s subtexts is Helen’s quest for more sexual experience so that she can satisfy herself more expertly. In addition to this, she strengthens her relationship with Dylan—a testament to the intimacies foreclosed by an Oedipal repudiation of the mother. Importantly, all of this action occurs outside the parameters of the paternal: at the film’s close, Helen says, “Well, I won’t be telling your father about this!” This tells us that this jouissance is about connection and belonging rather than individuation. To be sure, there are links between Helen’s orgasmic experiences and the jouissance of self-shattering that Bersani articulates. Just as Bersani’s jouissance is a testament to the here and now, in Mommy Is Coming, Helen’s produces nothing for the future—no baby, only orgasms—but there is no death or shame after its production. What we witness instead is a surplus of pleasure—surplus in that it exceeds the sphere of the reproductive and surplus in that it does not require the paternal. In this way, we can connect the pleasures that Helen experiences to what Maggie Nelson, working through Susan Fraiman, terms sodomitical maternity, which “is . . . meant to indicate the mother with a sexuality that’s in excess of the procreative capacity.”25 In The Argonauts, Nelson sutures sodomitical maternity to her enjoyment of anal sex and her awareness of the swirls of own mother’s desires. This suggestion of anality not only reminds us that Dylan might have penetrated Helen anally, but it also allows us to think about the ways that anality in relation to the maternal body is considered as excess. Anality has generally been considered the province of gay men, but, as Eve Sedgwick argues, its relation to jouissance allows us to more deeply ponder a variety of non-Oedpial possibilities.26 This hole is not a substitute, but rather another space that offers its own deep pleasures and excesses. This anality is about experiencing the body as body in a multitude of ways and permitting connections and sensualities outside the reproductive.

In this tableaux of family intimacy, we see a return to the mother, but this return does not occasion trauma or a denial of the symbolic. Once Claude/ia turns on the lights, both women realize that s/he is not the one with whom they were actually having sex. Helen exclaims, “Claude!” Dylan, unable to see without her glasses, says “Momma?” and their names bounce off each other’s tongues as the situation becomes clearer—“Dylan?” “Mommy!” “Helen,” “Helen?” “Dylan . . . Helen!”—before being interrupted by Dunye as cab driver, who emerges from the background with the final words of the scene, “Excuse me, I’m just here to return her [points to Dylan] wallet.” The film does not end there, however. After an intertitle, “Is this how our fairytale ends?” the film picks up at the train platform with Helen’s parting words to Dylan and the trio’s laughter. Dylan and Claudia walk off together, and Claudia asks, “Now what? You’re sorry? You want to be kind and more loving to me? You figured out that I was the one for you.” Dylan says, “Yes. Now can I fuck you?” Claudia asks, “Now can I trust you?” before playfully slapping her behind while saying, “Sometimes it pays to listen to your mamí!”27 Through these maternal intimacies, then, the film suggests that Dylan now knows how to “have a real life” with Claudia, a life that presumably involves care, sex, and vulnerability—per her earlier conversation with her mother. She is, in other words, deeply invested in co-existence and listening to the Other, a conglomeration that brings us toward feminine joussiance.

Feminine jouissance is related to jouissance of being in that it involves an Other, but it takes place in relation to the unknowability of this Other. It is a jouissance that prioritizes openness regardless of outcome. Braunstein writes: “The Other’s jouissance is an ineffable mystery, beyond words, outside the symbolic, beyond the phallus. Its model is surfeit, a surplus, the supplement to phallic jouissance of which many women speak without being able to say exactly what it consists of, like something felt but unexplainable. The jouissance of the Other is therefore assumed as the jouissance of the Other sex, an other than phallic joussiance, in other words feminine jouissance.”28 Feminine jouissance challenges the primacy of self-shattering in relation to jouissance because there is no coherent self to shatter. Instead, this deep entwinement with the Other leads to the adjective “feminine.” Feminine jouissance is what Jean Luc Nancy describes as “neither the possession nor appropriation of something, but rather openness to an alterity, since the woman is in the position of what Lacan calls ‘the Other,’ the big Other.”29 Reading Nancy and Lacan together, I argue that we treat feminine jouissance as a set of sensations that emerge from a deep relationality with opacity. I understand feminine jouissance as the jouissance of listening and being with the Other, a process that includes dwelling in the opacity of Otherness.

Helen’s jouissance is literally the jouissance of the m/Other, while Dylan’s feminine jouissance is expressed in her ability to produce pleasure for the Other—in this case it is literally her mother, but during the act she imagines it to be Claudia. In their encounter, Dylan enters the dark room wearing Claudia’s strap-on and quickly penetrates Helen. The film then goes through the range of visual tropes indicative of a satisfying sexual encounter. There are moans from both parties; Dylan’s hands grab Helen’s shoulders. Dylan slaps Helen’s rear. We see close-ups of Dylan’s hands moving rhythmically near the top of Helen’s corset, shadows on the bed, Dylan’s breasts jiggling, furrowed brows, and finally Helen yelling, “I love you,” as Dylan orgasms. After this pronouncement, Claude/ia turns on the lights, and the mix-up is revealed. Aside from the moans, the sex scene does not consist of dialogue until the end, which means that its choreography is one produced through deep listening, which, I argue, is what characterizes this form of feminine jouissance. Dylan gets pleasure from attending to the m/Other’s body and learning its rhythms. She is open to the Other’s alterity. In advance of sneaking into what turns out to be her mother’s room, she tells Claudia, “I’m not leaving until I get a piece of you.”

In this scene, it is clear that feminine jouissance emerges from a relational structure that locates pleasure in being a body that is oriented toward an Other and her pleasure, opaque though it must be. Dylan marks this opacity as “a piece of you,” but when we move away from the logic of property—barring mutilation—the only “piece” of Claudia or any Other that is available can be gained, and only temporarily so, through a process of learning, or what I am calling deep listening. This version of listening is distinct from the idea of listening as a loss of self, which Roshanak Kheshti describes in relation to the phenomenon of third-world music.30 In that articulation of listening, Kheshti uses Roland Barthes’s concept of significance to critique the processes of fetishization that occur in relation to difference and produce pleasure through the possibility of knowing and possessing the Other. This type of listening imagines a loss of self through passive receptivity, while Dylan’s performance of listening is one of extension. She extends herself to feel what might produce pleasure for Claudia/her m/Other. This version of listening is more in keeping with that articulated by Nancy, who argues that to listen “is to be straining toward or in an approach to the self.”31 This is to not to say that listening is about defining the self, but that the activity allows contemplation of what the limits to the concept of the self are and what it is to be in relation to others. Nancy describes listening as “enter[ing] that spatiality by which, at the same time, [the I] is penetrated, for it opens up in me as well as around me, and from me as well as toward me . . . To be listening is to be at the same time outside and inside, to be open from without and from within, hence from one to the other and from one in the other.”32 In bringing together topping and listening, then, we can see that topping is about projecting oneself into the world. This movement outward belies the instability and deep relationality of the idea of the self. And, in addition to illustrating the fundamental vulnerability of the self, it highlights the self’s relation to the space and movements of the Other. Feminine jouissance emphasizes moments of connection with the world; it shows the self as a being-toward someone/where else.

We must also think about what it means that this production of pleasure, this feminine jouissance, occurs via a strap-on, a phallus, which when wielded by Dylan becomes an extension of femininity rather than masculinity. The strap-on, as Lynda Hart reminds us, is “a real thing” in that its use requires that the one who wears it think of it as an extension of the body in order to effectively produce motions both subtle and not. Hart argues that this production of the strap-on as real

instigate[s] a representational crisis by producing an imaginary in which the fetishistic/hallucinatory “return” of the penis onto a woman’s body goes beyond the “transferable or plastic property” of the phallus to other body parts by depicting a phallus that has no reference to the “real” of the penis. . . . Lesbian-dicks are the ultimate simulacra. They occupy the ontological status of the model, appropriate the privilege, and refuse to acknowledge an origin outside their own self-reflexivity. They make claims to the real without submitting to “truth.”33

This is to say that this lesbian form of extension disrupts the phallic by not being subservient to a masculine order. Instead, it reveals the plurality of extension and penetration. Additionally, Judith Butler argues that the lesbian phallus is threatening because it unsettles the notion of a subservient woman and it illuminates the non-necessity of masculinity within an economy of pleasure. She writes:

Consider that “having” the phallus can be symbolized by an arm, a tongue, a hand (or two), a knee, a thigh, a pelvic bone, an array of purposefully instrumentalized body-like things. And that this “having” exists in relation to a “being the phallus” which is both part of its own signifying effect (the phallic lesbian is potentially castrating) and that which it encounters in the woman who is desired (as the one who, offering or withdrawing the specular guarantee, wields the power to castrate).34

Though the strap-on is one form of bodily extension, there are others—hands, tongues, and so on—that illustrate the multitude of sensualities that exceed the paternal and its economy of singularity.

While mother and daughter imagine that they are having sex with Claude/ia, both have different motivations underlying their desire—Helen, that Claude will penetrate her with something other than his hands, and Dylan, that she will finally penetrate Claudia. Although neither of these actions come to fruition, I am interested in what these divergent fantasies about Claude/ia can tell us about the location of blackness in the semiotic. In many ways Helen’s wish to be penetrated by Claude hews more closely to the imaginary of hypersexual black masculinity in that she wants to be pleasured with what she thinks will be a black penis. Although she has already orgasmed with Claude in previous encounters, this form of penetration’s appeal, I argue, stems from Claude’s blackness and Helen’s understanding that he possesses a form of sexual mastery. Conversely, Dylan’s desire to penetrate Claudia is about stripping her of power and making her vulnerable—a project of emasculation that also has to do with blackness. Indeed, we might see these fantasies as trafficking in multiple important tropes having to do with blackness—that of rape (of both the white and black woman) and that of castration.35 Each of these dueling fantasies produces different genders and embodiments for Claude/ia, and while Claude/ia doesn’t actualize either fantasy, they illustrate the difficulty of thinking blackness outside of a hierarchy of mastery and abjection. While Helen and Dylan’s feminine jouissance occurs in a different métier from these hierarchies, Claude/ia’s relationship to pleasure cannot be thought separately from his/her racialization.

Here, I turn to Dareick Scott’s discussion of abjection, which he articulates as related to the excess that blackness produces vis-à-vis normative family structures. Scott writes: “the break between family (and concomitantly, all that family structures shape, most notably gender positions and sexuality) and nation that characterizes . . . blackness . . .—the break that is made by what conquest, enslavement, and domination has broken . . . of traditional life, and that is abjection—restarts sociogenic processes and makes possible new nations, different families, different gender positions and sexualities.”36 Scott emphasizes the potential for alternate sensualities and genders that emerge from blackness’s estrangement from white normativity. While I will explore the pleasures in abjection later, here, I am interested in abjection’s difference from jouissance. As such, I use the phrase “Claude/ia’s relationship to pleasure” because it reminds us that Claude/ia ends up outside of this scene’s sexual economy with his/her participation occurring at the level of fantasy and through spectatorship. We do not, however, see his/her pleasure. No, instead, we see his/her shock at seeing this moment of mother-daughter sexual contact and horror at being its inadvertent cause. S/he and Dunye (playing the voyeuristic taxi driver) are witnesses, aware of what is happening, but also unable to stop it until they flick on the lights at the last minute. In this way, the exteriority of blackness to the scene works to secure white familial intimacy by acting as a fantastical and real mediator.

The place where we do see Claude/ia approach jouissance (or orgasm at the very least) is during Claude’s encounter with two leather daddies at the queer sex club. After taking a tour of the club and the myriad pleasures it provides, Claude allows himself to be bound, suspended, and penetrated by both men. The scene begins with an introduction, “This is my boyfriend, Tory,” followed by a question, “Feeling superior?” The couple secure a collar to his neck and tell him that he’ll have to “suck both of ours.” He complies, is asked to remove his clothing, then the penetration and whipping begins. Throughout, both bark orders at him and he responds by saying “yes, sir.” Eventually, both of them fist him simultaneously until he is left exhausted on the floor of the club. They all kiss, and he says, “thank you, sir.”

Claude’s explicit submissiveness and his willingness to be penetrated is central to his pleasures. When we read for race, it is not incidental that this moment of jouissance, when he experiences himself as a body, occurs in relation to BDSM and its economy of humiliation and pain. In her analysis of this scene, Jennifer Declue describes the significance of Claude/ia’s simultaneous embrace of masculinity, penetration, and submission: “Claude’s relenting to S/M seduction and his submission to Tory’s deep German fist unsettles limiting homonormative gender separation and mixes in the complexity of gender, the corporeal cooperation of woman and man, and the mystification of gender.”37 Race, however, is unremarked upon in the film, but as viewers we cannot help but graft this gender play onto a racialized schema of violence in which being black and being a bottom is to engage in race play. Declue writes, “The erotics of the bottom for Claude are a complex of gender subversion as a top and a foray in unnamed race play that is left up to the viewer to tap into. Through the intensity of moving beyond a resistance to penetration into an oasis of titillation and release, the trauma of historic racial violence is embarked upon and passed through in this scene.”38 Although, Declue argues that this mixture of pleasure and submission might enable ways to read black queer pleasure anew—“Claude’s erotic abandon in the queer sex club carries histories of sexual exploitation and the politics of silence into ecstatic pleasure. Claude’s sexual agency as well as the experience of pleasure and satisfaction visualized in the scene adds some building blocks of cinematic grammar to the lexicon of black queer sexuality, but not without being routed through trauma”—I am interested in what happens when we stick with the messiness of BDSM.39 On the one hand, we might relate Claude’s performance of submission to bottomhood, the term that Nyguen Tan Hoang employs for embracing less valorized sides of multiple sociocultural formations including femininity and being anally penetrated. Hoang argues that receptivity, a key aspect of bottomhood, is “an active engagement that accounts for the senses of vulnerability, intimacy, and shame that one necessarily risks in assuming the bottom position.”40 In another passage, he writes that receptivity “engages openness, vulnerability, and receptivity to others: other looks, bodies, agencies.”41 Hoang rewrites the anus as active and finds power in the act and imaginary of submitting to the other and their desires. This is a complex dance, however. Hoang writes, “I use descriptions of the physical sensations of bottoming to affirm some of the ideological meanings assigned to anal eroticism, for example, feelings of exposure and defenselessness. At other times, I complicate cultural assumptions, for example, the idea that bottoming is necessarily passive and feminizing.”42 While aspects of feminine jouissance are filtered through this lens, especially in relation to the attachment to the desires of the other, there is a key difference—that of being in charge of producing that pleasure. Feminine jouissance registers the feeling of surplus embodiment through the control and incitement of the other’s pleasure, while bottomhood offers the joys of submission and abjection. It is notable, however, that Hoang analyzes bottomhood in relation to Asian American masculinity and its stereotyped effeminacy, while Claude has actually moved farther away from femininity, which we see through his stick-on mustache, thereby shifting the charge of submission. What does the perceived violation of masculinity tell us about the types of power relations that are being worked through, especially since Claude’s gender play might be read in relation to the status of blackness as external to the social order? And, how do we make meaning from the family that Claude forms with his two leather daddies?

We have several modes of thinking about Claude’s desire for family. On the one hand, we can read his attachment to the leather daddies as an attachment to whiteness. As Juana María Rodríguez writes, “Queers love Daddy. The idea of intimate familial power serving as a source of erotic pleasure has wide rhizomatic reach in queer communities.”43 Rodríguez is referring to the outpouring of erotica such as Pat Califia’s collection, Doing It For Daddy—the vibrant scenes of daddy-boy or daddy-femme play in queer communities where Daddy may not be a biological father (or indeed even identify as a man), but he occupies a particular fantasy space where narratives of “ownership and submission, a belonging to and belonging for another” can comingle with affection, guidance, and support.44 Importantly, this desire for submission, for paternalism, also functions as racialized desire for the protections of whiteness. Rodríguez argues:

In the metaphoric collapsing of the state as Daddy who is authorized to dispense “fatherly discipline,” the power, privilege, and authority of both roles is unmasked as aligned not just with masculinity but also with whiteness. In this sense, because economic and social power is so firmly attached to white masculinity, the very ability to be Daddy becomes racialized, whether that is imagined as a source of material support and benevolence or as a source of corporeal discipline. And Daddy’s citizen-children are regarded and punished in accordance with their proximity to the white masculine ideal of the state.45

Through Rodríguez we can see how these fantasies shore up particular ideologies of white masculinity. And, Claude’s enthusiastic bottoming for daddies (in juxtaposition with his refusal to be penetrated by Dylan) allows us to see the ways that these forms of masculinity and whiteness produce family through disciplining and protection. In these scenarios, the bosom of the (white) family offers privilege and power. Excluded from intimacy with Dylan, Claude is offered a place in this masculine whiteness—a place, it should be noted, that is as/at the bottom, pleasurable though that may be.

Yet the queerness of these daddies, both in the film and within the queer worlds that Rodríguez analyzes, also undoes some of patriarchy’s potency because this ad hoc family formation traffics in fantasy, a space where agency can be grasped in all sorts of positions. Rodríguez argues that fantasy when mobilized in relation to queer daddies can “rewrit[e] these scripts [of white heteronormative national hegemony] through an assertion of [the queer’s] own agency, even as that agency is understood as constituted by previous disciplinary formulations.”46 This process of rewriting is one that we might understand in relation to Scott’s discussion of the pleasures in abjection, which include the representation of pleasure for the enslaved, whose: “imagination of these scene creates a way for them and their readers to identify with being violated or having been violated—and, in the manner of a willed (as opposed to developmental) identification, to do so from a position of power, relative to the real, historical, or present beings they might refer to, and thus to do so from a position better able to occupy or to utilize those otherwise hidden or overwhelmed powers that reside in the experience of black abjection.”47 Scott and Rodríguez both stress the importance of thinking agency in concert with this space outside of the real. For Rodríguez, in particular, these familial fantasies work to produce an insistence on belonging rather than social exclusion: “for those racialized queers who are written out of nation and often out of family itself, there is an urgency in engaging directly with the cultural taboos that have produced us as abject sexual subjects. . . . Eroticizing the familial enacts a simultaneous insistence on belonging through imagined familial relations, and not belonging through fantasized abuse and rejection of familial (and national) norms of protection and care.”48 As fantasy, then, we can register Claude’s daddy play as giving him a family to belong to. That this family is queer is also important. It sets this family apart from the Oedipal triad by showing us two daddies, both of whom claim the power of the father through performance within the confines of the dungeon where permission is solicited for each act. In this case, Claude’s gender play works to solidify his agency within this scenario’s familial fantasy.

Scott, by contrast, is less invested in resuturing the family and more interested in accessing the power of thinking with this space of bottoming. In mining abjection for potentiality, Scott argues that humiliation and pain might in themselves be sources of pleasure: “The transformation of the elements of humiliation and pain, and the like, into a form of pleasure, the taking of pleasure out of the maw of humiliation and pain, and the utilization of that pain that windows into pleasure and back again for an experience of the self that, though abject, is politically salient, potentially politically effective or powerful.”49 Some of this pleasure is produced through the processes of fantasy and imagination, but other aspects of this pleasure stem from disarticulating pleasure from the concept of the sovereign subject and his or her relationship to desire and sexuality, which are legacies of our Oedipal fixation. This space outside of sovereignty puts us in the territory of jouissance, though like feminine joussiance, this excess is not created from either the shattering of the self or the loss of mastery.

While we can theorize feminine jouissance as occurring in proximity to the Other’s opacity, abjection’s pleasures emerge from the excess sensations (their own form of sensuous opacity) that come from the violence of objectification and social exclusion. Since abjection is so intimately related to the sensation of being a body, albeit one excluded from the social, I see Kristeva’s theorization of jouissance of being as sitting the closest to its pleasures. Kristeva herself notes the kinship between abjection and jouissance, writing in The Powers of Horror that jouissance is found “out of such straying on excluded ground.”50 This is to say that jouissance exists in relation to the foreclosed mother, while abjection itself is a condition of foreclosure in relation to subjectivity.

Although Kristeva does not present abjection as a racialized term, Scott writes powerfully about the relationship between blackness and abjection. In Extravagant Abjection, Scott works to claim a form of black power in abjection. He writes, “I argue that abjection in/of blackness endows its inheritors with a form of counterintuitive power. . . . This power (which is also a way of speaking freedom) is found at the point of the apparent erasure of ego-protections, at the point at which the constellation of tropes that we call identity, body, race, nation seem to reveal themselves as utterly penetrated and compromised, without defensible boundary.”51 For Scott, abjection offers a space outside of subjectivity and outside of forms of belonging, including the aforementioned identity, body, race, and nation. This nonbelonging is a potentiality because it enables a consideration of blackness’s excesses, especially in relation to discourses of sexuality. Much as feminine jouissance and jouissance of being challenge Oedipality, abjection as a form of black power reveals the sensualities that reside outside of blackness’s sexualization through the pornotrope. Scott writes, “The twinning of blackness and the sexual—the relentless, repetitive sexualization of black bodies, the blackening of sexualized bodies—also fails always to fully contain the forces that articulation works to control: eruptions occur or can be provoked.”52 The question of abjection haunts that of enfleshment, revealing the ways that abjection sits alongside jouissance’s feeling of being a body.

Perhaps a form of brown jouissance can be found in this understanding of the body as object and abject? This version of brown jouissance carries a notably different valence than feminine jouissance, which privileges the pleasure and opacity of the Other. It explores and revels in the affects and opacity that accompany objectification. It is a space without subjectivity (as traditionally defined), but it is a space where there is pleasure in embodiment and the radical possibilities that being an object provides. In Embodied Avatars, Uri McMillan uses the term “objecthood” to think through the potential agency within objectification. McMillan argues that

objecthood provides a means for black subjects to become art objects. Wielding their bodies as pliable matter, the black women performers . . . repeatedly become objects. . . . Becoming objects, in what follows, proves to be a powerful tool for performing one’s body, a “stylized repetition of acts” that rescripts how black female bodies move and are perceived by others. Put differently, performing objecthood becomes an adroit method of circumventing prescribed limitations on black women in the public sphere while staging art and alterity in unforeseen places.53

Performing one’s objecthood relies on the abjection inherent in being an object, but it manipulates that abjection into agency: “I argue for rescrambling the dichotomy between objectified bodies or embodied subjects by reimagining objecthood as a performance-based method that disrupts presumptive knowledges of black subjectivity,” writes McMillan. “What happens, I ask, if we reimagine black objecthood as a way toward agency rather than its antithesis, as a strategy rather than a primal site of injury.”54 It is in this call for embracing objecthood, the agency of the Thing, and the space of the self that we find some of the stakes of brown jouissance. Brown jouissance is about pleasure, abjection, and embracing alterity—either one’s own or that of the Other. When we see the ways that brown jouissance is related to both feminine jouissance and abjection, we see that it can reveal modes of pleasure that can attach to experiencing the body as body, to the opacity of self and Other, and toward producing the self as plural rather than singular. These pleasures of brown jouissance inhere in the body’s fleshiness and opacity.

“Feminism? That’s Deep”

Although Untitled Fucking does not foreground familial intimacies, the performance highlights brown jouissance’s complexification of belonging and being with the other. Sex, here, is a place where speech may be lost—witness both parties’ difficulty with language as the performance goes on—but politics is not. Ibarra’s performance is shot through with critiques of racism and US imperialism as she works to top whiteness in some form, and Hawk Swanson’s enjoyment in being penetrated and her parroting of white feminist discourse could be imagined as a residual form of white guilt that perpetually seeks punishment for its racist past/present. When we read for brown jouissance, however, we go toward the borderlands where inclusion and exclusion are always in process and always contentious.

The opening shot of Untitled Fucking shows Hawk Swanson kneeling before Ibarra’s Tapatío strap-on in order to cover it with multiple condoms. Ibarra prepares for their encounter by climbing onto the bed behind Hawk Swanson, donning black latex gloves, and applying lubricant to the bottle. From this point onward, Ibarra’s gloved hands might appear to be superfluous, but they are actually in charge of the action. Her left hand rests on Hawk Swanson’s rear where it helps to pull their hips together; her right hand guides the Tapatío bottle into Hawk Swanson’s vagina. From its position atop a tripod, the camera permits us to see only Hawk Swanson being mounted from behind; penetration must be inferred from the position of hands, the movement of bodies, and Hawk Swanson’s moans. As the performance continues and Hawk Swanson lowers herself onto the bed, Ibarra’s left hand occasionally grabs her by the hair so that she can face the camera and utter her line again. Once Hawk Swanson tires of penetration, the hands become even more of a focal point. One is used to “ejaculate” the Tapatío sauce, while the other penetrates Hawk Swanson until she cannot orgasm anymore and the video concludes.

Through her performance of topping as responsiveness and anticipation, Ibarra performs the pleasure of listening to Hawk Swanson’s words as well as the rhythms of her body. She disciplines and reassures her in order to facilitate her inhabitation of orgasm and in that way becomes body herself. She might be leading, but this is far from a fantasy of absolute domination over the Other or a flattening of the Other into a predetermined decipherable shape. This version of topping is about using her body as an instrument of pleasure. This, too, is being a body, but it is being a body in deep relation to another’s body. We can see this performance as a form of sexual exchange, in which, as Rodríguez argues, “attempts to understand bodily signs occur through a sensing of the attitude and mood that hover over movements and words.”55 Ibarra strives not for recognition as an individual, but for an embodied being with.

By suturing her labors of pleasure to the Tapatío bottle, Ibarra also shows us the ways that racialization exceeds the parameters of feminine jouissance. This is to say that we must also think about the ways that her own body acts as a racial signifier in relation to scripts of legibility and performance. This residue of racialization is part of the “sexual archives flavored by attachments and memory” that Rodríguez describes.56 Specifically, Ibarra’s performance underscores that she understands that her Latina body is already read as pure body, a situation that doubles its instrumentality and links her to abjection. As Ramos argues, Ibarra “make[s] the audience aware that Latina labor is always already erotic in its abject physicality.”57 This “abject physicality” is more than the objectification that occurs through racialization. It is a product of pornotroping and the specific histories of Mexican labor in the agricultural industry, the increasingly global demand for Tapatío hot sauce, and the imaginary of the hot-tempered and sexually available Latina. Ibarra’s performative allusions to the spread of Chicanidad (via the cucaracha pasties and hot sauce) work against the propping up of white state supremacy. This brings the difference between Claude’s bottoming and Hawk Swanson’s receptivity into sharp relief. Hawk Swanson shows us femme receptivity, which, following Ann Cvetkovich’s analysis of Joan Nestle, we can understand as “both an openness to one’s own pleasure and a willingness to give someone else pleasure, although the former is foregrounded in femme discourse.”58 Cvetkovich argues that Nestle imagines receptivity as a form of power play rather than self-shattering: “The femme thus both gives and takes in a process of being penetrated that allows her to ‘match her [lover’s] demanding with my giving, her hand with my insides.’ In this act of simultaneous giving and taking, Nestle claims that the butch’s ‘power’ to take gives ‘me myself’ quite a different conception of power and exchange from that implied by the construction of penetration as an act that destroys the selfhood of the person being penetrated.”59 In Hawk Swanson’s performance of bottoming, we see this form of receptivity at work—she takes the Tapatío bottle willingly, all the while communicating her pleasures and needs with Ibarra. Noticeably absent from this is the sense that she is abjected by the action of penetration or that she is threatened by Ibarra’s brownness.

Although the Tapatío bottle carries the symbolic weight of Ibarra’s racial difference—we may profitably put it in conversation with Nao Bustamante’s Indigurrito (1992) performance in which she uses a burrito as a strap-on and invites audience members who wish to atone for colonialism to bite from her burrito—Ibarra’s use of gloves suggests that she understands her physicality in relation to abjection and care.60 These sheathed hands are the locus of Ibarra’s sexual expertise. While she listens with her entire body, it is her hands that provide pleasure: the Tapatío bottle requires a guiding hand and Hawk Swanson’s orgasm ultimately arrives as a result of Ibarra’s dexterous manipulation. Both strap-on and fingers work as forms of a lesbian phallus in that they gesture toward a sensual economy outside of the penile and Oedipal. As such, this handiwork, I want to suggest, might be construed as belonging to a particularly queer and possibly feminine form of practice and expertise, one that encapsulates brown jouissance in relation to opacity, abjection, and care. While we can interpret the condom as a necessary prophylactic against potential injury from the hot sauce, or more symbolically as a barrier against spiciness, the latex gloves serve a different function. They block Ibarra’s hands from coming into direct contact with Hawk Swanson’s genitals. On the one hand, this barrier allows viewers to imagine that there might be another possible layer of intimacy—one in which Ibarra’s hands would be unsheathed—that we are not privy to, thereby facilitating our understanding of this as a performance. On the other hand, the presence of gloves positions this encounter within a repertoire of safer sex that flourished in the era and aftermath of the AIDS emergency. This double reference to safer sex—through condoms and latex gloves—cannot help but bring the specters of abjection and care to the fore. This happens because we cannot think these items without linking them to the AIDS emergency, but also because their purpose is to prevent contamination. Within the context of intimacies with strangers (or outside the frame of monogamy), we can think about safer sex as an important part of a regime of care.

In this mélange of feminine jouissance, abjection, and care, I see brown jouissance, which, in turn, brings us back to thinking about the conversation that Untitled Fucking stages between “white feminism and feminisms of color that whiteness excludes.” Ibarra and Hawk Swanson’s performance shows us topping and bottoming as a dialogue in which rhythms, movement, and words constitute their own language—something that comes from the crossings of Chicanidad and whiteness, a combination of white feminism and feminisms of color, something that belongs to both. Their performances move beyond the fantasy of queer mother or father love toward a performance of belonging itself as queer. This is a form of belonging that brings us toward to the borderlands—that geography of porosity where inclusion and exclusion cannot be thought as discrete categories. The fear of contamination that Ibarra plays with and Hawk Swanson’s openness to penetration speak to the flexibility of the border.

Gloria Anzaldúa’s meditation on la frontera and its production of a hybrid tongue subtends this conversation. Against the demands to conform to respectable and appropriate whiteness, Anzaldúa positions her wild tongue:

I remember being sent to the corner of the classroom for “talking back” to the Anglo teacher when all I was trying to do was tell her how to pronounce my name. “If you want to be American, speak ‘American.’ If you don’t like it, go back to Mexico where you belong.” . . . Attacks on one’s form of expression with the intent to censor are a violation of the First Amendment. El Anglo con cara de inocente nos arrancó la lengua. Wild tongues can’t be tamed, they can only be cut out. . . .

But Chicano Spanish is a border tongue which developed naturally. Change, evolución, enriquecimiento de palabras nuevas por invención o adopción have created variants of Chicano Spanish, un nuevo lenguaje. Un lenguaje que corresponde a un modo de vivir. Chicano Spanish is not incorrect, it is a living language.61

Anzaldúa argues for a mestiza consciousness to accommodate this space that is penetrated by histories of Mexican indigeneity, colonialism, and Anglo imperialism. For the purposes of this chapter, I see this admixture as gesturing toward a form of belonging that is explicitly non-Oedipal in that it revolves around multiplicity (against the demand for one white paternal figure) and the ambiguities afforded by sensuality. Anzaldúa writes, “Indigenous like corn, like corn, the mestiza is a product of crossbreeding, designed for preservation under a variety of conditions. Like an ear of corn—a female seed-bearing organ—the mestiza is tenacious, tightly wrapped in the husks of her culture. Like kernals she clings to the cob; with thick stalks and strong brace roots, she holds tight to the earth—she will survive the crossroads.”62 Reading Untitled Fucking through Anzaldúa, we see continuities in the discourse of survival, which can also become legible as threat—corn, cucarachas—and an insistence that penetration either through food or strap-on reveals an already complex set of imbrications and forms of belonging—even if disavowed.

I also can’t help but think about the Tapatío ejaculate on Hawk Swanson’s back. Might we read this as a sign that white feminism cannot actually be rid of women of color feminism, that it spreads its insights on the flesh and through its eroticism? Tellingly, Ibarra describes Tapatía as “Spic Jouissance.” Although it is modeled after the Tapatío label, Tapatía features a photograph of Ibarra in a smile/grimace and lists among its ingredients “armargura, commodified negation, deadicated invader subjectivity, toilet water, Las 3 lupes, and Alternity, Cucharacha logic as a preservative.”63 Foregrounding bitterness, the affective labor of brownness, as well as eroticism—the bottle also reads “Es Una Puta . . . Bien Jota” (which translates roughly to “a very queer whore”)—Ibarra foregrounds the stain of difference, abjection, and appetite. Most saliently this dollop of spice shows us that objectification is not just about a simple oscillation between activity and passivity, but that in the space between saying and doing, there are multiple histories, multiple possibilities for pleasure, and multiple axes for penetration.64 Importantly, this multiplicity also points us toward thinking with the distortions of normative kinship that can produce brown jouissance: racialization refigures mommy and daddy and what it might mean to take pleasure in “belonging.” What has been called incestuous by an Oedpial and phallic order might be mined for alternate forms of belonging and sensuous pleasures. Instead of exclusion, these performances insist on critique, as well as the intimate proximity of difference and the multivalent delights that that produces.