Throughout this book, I have examined works of art and asked us to feel for the epistemological, to feel for brown jouissance’s relational selfhoods, sensuality, and politics, but, here, at the book’s very end, I address the idea that hovers below the surface—the feminine. Femininity, I argue, has become a disappearing horizon—unable to be imagined without collapsing under the weight of materiality. However, by foregrounding relationality in content and form, this book offers an alternative narration of femininity, one that opens us toward a suturing of queerness and femininity while keeping us attentive to the flesh. I come to this queer femininity, because thinking processes of racialization in relation to femininity, as this book has done, stretches its boundaries in particular ways. This occurs because femininity produced within the sphere of pornotropic capture must already be thought outside of the bounds of traditional femininity. Remembering Hortense Spillers’s discussion of the pornotrope, we see that black and brown women become estranged from femininity on multiple levels: “In this play of paradox, only the female stands in the flesh, both mother and mother-dispossessed. This problematizing of gender places her, in my view, out of the traditional symbolics of female gender, and it is our task to make a place for this different social subject.”1 This queer femininity, then, exists outside of the symbolic—tied not to the father and recognition, but to the mother.
To invoke the mother is to set off waves of existential panic. Motherhood, in particular, has been understood as a limitation for women. Shulamith Firestone famously wrote that “the heart of woman’s oppression is her child-bearing and child-rearing role.”2 Likewise Lynne Huffer writes, “The mother . . . is, in fact, the most extreme expression of the construction of the feminine as negativity: absence, invisibility, meaninglessness, silence, loss.”3 In becoming a mother, then, a woman is transformed from subject (or proto-subject) into a void, a being that exists to sacrifice. In order to give to her offspring, she denies herself. To combat this existential and cultural space of negation, Firestone offers a dream of artificial reproduction, which would distribute the maternal function (to use Elissa Marder’s phrase) among the population and effectively destroy the mother as a cultural object.4 In these analyses the mother is read as an absence, a lack, an obstacle to both female transcendence and feminist progress. Motherhood is femininity gone wrong—too far. What is grafted onto the idea of motherhood is the idea of self-denial and lack of agency. A mother is someone for whom others come first, or at least she is someone for whom others should come first. As Barbara Johnson points out, this association with self-denial is a way to discipline women whose ambitions are seen as too heady: “She may be a CEO, but she’s childless.”5 In Johnson’s example, this woman is too selfish, too self-realized, and motherhood would be a way to temper that.
But, thinking with Spillers and brown jouissance, I argue that queer femininity is not necessarily attached to motherhood or self-denial, but it emerges through an insistence on keeping the mother at the center of projects of selfhood and intimacy. This model displaces the Oedipal in its prioritization of the oscillations between Other, object, and Thing. The mother is the first provider of care (regardless of gender), who introduces the child into sociality. For Melanie Klein, these encounters with otherness occur first at the maternal breast. The infant, she argues, divides the world into what she terms the “good (gratifying) and bad (frustrating) breast”: the infant introjects the good breast, which offers sustenance, and expels the bad breast.6 This divides the world into interior and exterior, establishing the parameters for selfhood and marking the world spatially and affectively. Meira Likierman describes this process of projection as the child’s “displacement of instinctual forces from the interior arena of his psyche outwards, [which] invest[s] the world with a qualitative variety of affect” and argues that it happens in tandem with introjection, a process in which “aspects of the external world are taken into the self and incorporated by the mind.”7 Introjection and projection create an imagined division between the self and the rest of the world over which one does not have agency. The task of the infant is to work through this division in order to understand the m/Other as separate, but whole (good and bad) and to achieve a depressive position, which involves “an awareness of vulnerability, dependence, and guilt.”8 The mother, but more precisely those who provide care, then, is the first object for one to test the boundaries of self. She is the object on whom one is dependent and from whom separation initiates selfhood.
Klein’s model of object relations is deeply sensual in that the infant uses a variety of strategies to assess the boundaries of the self. After all, what are projection and introjection other than alternate ways of crafting externality through feeling? In bringing the external inward (via introjection) and linking the internal to the outside (via projection), exteriority gains textures and folds. It is this maneuvering that leads Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak to describe the work of the infant as that of translation. She writes, “The human infant grabs on to some one thing and then things. This grabbing (begreifen) of an outside indistinguishable from an inside constitutes an inside, going back and forth and coding everything into a sign-system by the thing(s) grasped. One can call this crude coding a ‘translation.’ In this never-ending weaving, violence translates into conscience and vice versa.”9 For Spivak this shuttling between the interior and the exterior leaves the mother’s body as the unknowable site of difference—what I have described throughout the book as opacity. The infant’s selfhood is formed through this action of producing interiority, but there is no illusion that objects are not part of this affective and corporeal pull nor is there any desire to see the process as anything other than violence. Through this we can see that grappling with the mother produces a rich world where the presumed goals of subjectivity—individuality and omnipotence—are undermined. Not only is individuality revealed to be the product of violence, but it is also shown to be impossible: one is always in a state of coexistence and immersed in violence. Vulnerability is the underside of fantasies of omnipotence, and love and hate must be woven together in order to provide a path toward existing ethically as a self in the world. Opacity and sensuality come together in this work of producing a self in relation to the mother.
These opaque and sensual relationships with the mother are evident in thinking about the dynamics at work in the pieces of art that I examine—some of which explicitly summon the mother or perform various modes of reproduction—but when we dwell on race in relation to the mother, these relationships become even more complicated. To be a pornotrope is to already exist in a process of violent enfleshment that shapes the possibilities of being. Further, pornotroping has historically also been accompanied by a violent erasure of mothers and mothering. In the brutal separation of kin that accompanied the transformation of people into flesh through slavery, Spillers argues, the paternal became synonymous with whiteness while the maternal was often experienced as an absence—“mother-dispossessed.”10 Building on this, Fred Moten argues that this inability to be a mother and to be mothered produces an impossible distinction between maternity and reproduction. He describes this convergence as “a being maternal that is indistinguishable from a being material.”11 This is to say that the black mother cannot be thought outside the parameters of commodification—an equivalence that allows us to see the ways that the specter of the lost mother haunts blackness. The brown mother, too, has been disappeared. Thought in tandem, these black and brown maternal absences occur in relation to global capitalism, specifically in relation to the movement of bodies and the effect that this has on kinship. We know that the unequal flow of global capital requires some forms of migration that break families apart, which we can imagine as an extension of slavery’s violent wrenching of mothers from their offspring. This is to say that that the specter of the lost mother haunts black and brown fleshiness in ways that Saidiya Hartman describes as the “gendered afterlife of slavery and global capitalism.”12 In these contexts, capitalism relies on black and brown flesh to be material (and maternal), while denying access to maternal labor to black and brown children. Joshua Chambers-Letson describes this paradox succinctly: “As a result of the commodification of black women’s reproductive labor, their singularity and subjectivity is often occluded behind the (misnomer) of ‘the mother.’ That is, they disappear behind the name ‘mother,’ ‘maid,’ or, worse, ‘mammy.’”13
While the absence of the black and brown mother might produce generative forms of queer kinship, which E. Patrick Johnson describes as “reconfiguring of the very notion of ‘family,’” thinking with the psychoanalytic, I am interested in the ways that this complication of kinship introduces melancholy into the maternal dynamic.14 Importantly, this is a very different form of melancholy than that produced by the foreclosure of the mother, which the Oedipal complex enacts. In Judith Butler’s description of the mother as the original site of the subject’s desire, we see the work of taboo and melancholy. She writes: “If the mother is the original desire, and that may well be true for a range of late-capitalist household dwellers, then that is a desire both produced and prohibited within the terms of that cultural context.”15 This forbidden desire, in turn, constitutes the subject through its quest for what can never be fulfilled. However, desire, in these terms—threaded through with the (im)possibility of omnipotence and subjectivity—is not the form of attachment to the mother that is at work in brown jouissance.
Grappling with this missing black and brown maternal as a “person of color” offers a unique set of challenges because one must also contend with whiteness, which produces its own psychic distortions. Anne Anlin Cheng argues that having to assimilate to a white culture produces melancholy at the unattainability of whiteness for black and brown subjects, while the simultaneous repression of the necessity of racial otherness (to sustain white dominance) manifests itself as melancholy as well. Cheng writes:
The terms thus denote a complex process of racial rejection and desire on the parts of whites and nonwhites that expresses itself in abject and manic forms. On the one side, white American identity and its authority is secured through the melancholic introjections of racial others that it can neither fully relinquish nor accommodate and whose ghostly presence nonetheless guarantees its centrality. On the other side, the racial other . . . also suffers from racial melancholia whereby his or her racial identity is imaginatively reinforced through the introjections of a lost, never-possible perfection, an inarticulable loss that comes to inform the individual’s sense of his or her own subjectivity.16
In these formations of melancholy, whiteness (unsurprisingly) takes the place of the father, and the mother (again) becomes coded as the racial other. Through this we can read the black and brown mother as doubly repressed.
This form of motherlessness does not revolve around taboo but on reconciling with one’s fleshiness and the mutability of selfhood. The resistance of the object, as Moten describes it, is also the space of attachment to absent brown and black mothers and the arena of brown jouissance. Here, we remember Moten’s discussion of the maternal trace on the commodity. Moten writes, “This presence of the commodity within the individual is an effect of reproduction, a trace of maternity. Of equal importance is the containment of a certain personhood within the commodity that can be seen as the commodity’s animation by the material trace of the maternal—a palpable hit or touch, a bodily and visible phonographic inscription.”17 What Moten’s suggestion about the relationship between animation and materiality tells us is that these maternal traces, embodied in various formations of selfhood and expressed through aesthetic excesses, can be apprehended by paying attention to the sensual. Here, we can find black and brown maternal absence and the traces of attachment that emerge from this lacuna in the multiple permutations of relational selfhood that we find in brown jouissance. Thinking the black and brown m/Other requires that we attend to sensuality, aesthetics, and embodiment. Brown jouissance, then, could also be read as a project of recovery and survival. In finding permutations of selfhood that exceed the “I,” we come close to the missing matter of these black and brown mothers.
This space of difference and coexistence, I argue, resides in thinking about the black and brown mother as a place, an elsewhere that is always adjacent to black and brownness and accessible through the sensual.18 This elsewhere registers the black and brown mother as a figure akin to Kara Keeling’s black femme and Nguyen Tan Hoang’s Asian male bottom, who Hoang writes, “cannot be accommodated or made to make sense within commonsense regimes of sexuality [and] sociality. . . . This failure of intelligibility is due to her status . . . that exceeds conventional organizations of subjecthood based on the requirements of compulsory heterosexuality.”19 To think the mother as a place, not a void, works toward a framework of generativity, fleshiness, and sensuality. Black and brown mothers have haunted the pages of this book, sometimes appearing and sometimes absent, but always hovering. Here, in lieu of trying to discern who a mother might be, I focus on what it might mean to locate her as an elsewhere, a formulation that enables us to think of her as simultaneously present (at least psychically) and not. This move away from Oedipus is also a move away from an ethos of recognition and a temporality of development. Instead, I move toward thinking space and time together to produce geographies of intimacy. This is not about producing the maternal as homeland, but about reaching toward the black and brown maternal as horizon. We might think of this maternal elsewhere in relation to José Esteban Muñoz’s description of queerness: “Queerness is a longing that propels us onward, beyond romances of the negative and toiling in the present. Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing.”20
I see an articulation of this maternal horizon, this elsewhere, in Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, which registers mother not as lack, but as place. The book’s prologue begins with an explicit move away from the Oedipal toward the matrilineal: “I have felt the age-old triangle of mother father child, with the ‘I’ at its eternal core, elongate and flatten out into the elegantly strong triad of grandmother mother daughter, with the ‘I’ moving back and forth flowing in either or both directions as needed.”21 Lorde is also quick to connect this mutable “I” to place, writing, “Woman forever. My body, a living representation of other life older longer wiser. The mountains and valleys, trees, rocks. Sand and flowers and water and stone. Made in earth.”22 While Zami tells the story of a black lesbian in New York in the 1950s, these moments of reflection are peppered with musings on the mother and her place in the schema of love, hate, and selfhood. The narrative itself begins with Audre (Lorde’s eponymous heroine) traveling to her mother’s homeland: “When I visited Grenada I saw the root of my mother’s powers walking through the streets. I thought, this is the country of my foremothers, my forebearing mothers, those Black island women who defined themselves by what they did.”23 This displacement does not last long, but it sets the stage for the recollection of Audre’s early years as she comes to terms with the world that her mother has created for her. In the biomythography, Audre’s mother’s omnipotence melds together with an eroticism that becomes Audre’s lesbianism, creating a sensuous brew of tactile mother love, lesbian desire, and diasporic yearning. Some of Audre’s memories of her mother take the form of erotic fantasy: “Years afterward when I was grown, whenever I thought about the way I smelled that day, I would have a fantasy of my mother, her hand wiped dry from the washing, and her apron untied and laid neatly away, looking down upon me lying on the couch, and then, slowly, thoroughly, our touching and caressing each other’s most secret places.”24 The epilogue, in particular, is explicit about the fusion of the maternal, the erotic, and the spatial:
Once home was a long way off, a place I had never been to but knew out of my mother’s mouth. I only discovered its latitudes when Carriacou was no longer my home.
There it is said that the desire to lie with other women is a drive from the mother’s blood.25
Throughout, Lorde speaks not of recognition, but of relating, and not of progress, but of ancestors and children. The mother, here, is more than psychic space of loss, however; she is flesh and possibility; more precisely, she is a condition of possibility—here we might recall Tina Campt’s invocation of the conditional tense to speak of black feminist futurity.26 Restoring the spatiality of the mother gives flesh, material, to this possibility.
Lorde’s approach to the mother, who is both actual and fantasy, both there and not, is explicitly sensual. She marks this love as erotic in ways that illuminate the impotence of any possible Oedipal narrative. This is to say this mother love illustrates the impossibility of thinking Oedipality—and its resultant structuring of subjectivity and desire—in relation to blackness and brownness while showing us familial dynamics and sensuality (explicitly not sexuality) outside of that frame.27 One could stop at this suggestion of incest, but that would be to insist on a regime of sexuality, a regime that cannot find orientation outside of possession or desire. Lorde, herself, offers clues toward this different place by mobilizing the figure of the woman loving woman. Toward the end of Zami, she writes, “But that is why to this day I believe that there have always been Black dykes around—in the sense of powerful and woman-oriented women—who would rather have died than use that name for themselves. And that includes my momma.”28 Angelique Nixon describes Lorde’s choice to “explore her identity and her home through her maternal line and the stories of women in Carriacou . . . as the foundation of her identity as a black lesbian warrior poet.”29 And, the term Zami, as Lorde and Nixon remind us, “is a Carriacou word for women who worked together as friends and lovers,” which is to say as participants in an economy that did not revolve around men.30
Into the vacuum of theorization on black female sexuality that Evelynn Hammonds and Hortense Spillers decry, Lorde describes a sensual, political black lesbianism.31 Interspersed between poems about the agony of slow black death in The Black Unicorn, Lorde dwells on different forms of touch between women. In “Woman” Lorde writes,
I dream of a place between your breasts
to build my house like a haven
where I plant crops
in your body32
In “Woman,” the “I” desires touch, to sow it desires to make “you” productive. In another poem, “Meet,” Lorde writes, “Tasting your ruff down to sweetness” and “Or the taste of each other’s skin as it hung / From our childhood mouths.”33 Here, the “you” is devoured through the mouth. In these moments when Lorde calls up hands and tongues and textures and tastes, she is calling forth an embodied and active sensuality.
Sarah Chinn argues that Lorde’s explicit descriptions of lesbian sex are a direct manifestation of what Lorde describes in “Uses of the Erotic” in that they are “about a sensory connection with others, ‘the sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual,’ that embraces the entire body, that ‘flows through and colors . . . life with a kind of energy that heightens and sensitizes and strengthens all . . . experience.’ The erotic infuses and intensifies the experience of the body, linking the sensory with the spiritual.”34 These spaces suggest alternative ways to consider how to approach the mother and the lesbian. In “Meet,” for example, Lorde interrupts descriptions of sex to reference children—
as our hands touch and learn
from each others hurt.
Taste my milk in the ditches of Chile and Ouagadougou . . . now you are my child and my mother
—and thereby brings together the mother and the black lesbian in an unexpected way.35 Lorde’s insistence on having sensuality, desire, woman loving, and politics meet in the same space is deliberate. The radicality of insisting on a language of sex for queer black female bodies rescripts the ways that coalition might be enacted; it renders the sensual political in large part, because this queer feminine—here, it is the mother, the lesbian, and the woman-loving woman—offers a challenge to epistemologies of sexuality.
In their estrangement from a phallocentric economy, the mother, the lesbian, and the woman-loving woman sit alongside each other, each providing versions of what I read, using Denise Ferreira da Silva, as Luce Irigaray’s female lover. Da Silva describes this site as one of radical potential: “Irigaray’s ‘female lover’ is a productive critical tool because she is also in her flesh . . . her uncomprehensible desire, that sexual which is the female’s unresolvable (undeterminable, unpredictable, unmeasurable) power. What can she allow us to say that has not been said before?”36 Da Silva draws on Irigaray because her critique of phallocentrism insists on positioning the body as the site of excess and theory. Instead of a linguistic rejoinder to masculinity, she offers the power of the body and its materiality through a reordered sensorium and sensuality. In Zami, this emphasis on a femininity with appetites occurs through economies that are outside of a white and phallocentric order—through the diasporic mother and the lesbian: remember the way that Lorde explicitly brings mother into a lineage of queer femininity. This set of crossings is important because it illustrates the force of the critiques that blackness, brownness, and queerness offer while also gesturing toward epistemologies that center these feminine figurations. This disruption is a mode of insurgence. As Joshua Chambers-Letson reminds us: “To stand in the flesh, in this capacity, is to transform (and perform) the ungendering of black (female) flesh into a condition of possibility, thus opening up new ways of doing gender, being a being, being black, being in the body, and being together.”37
The queer feminine is an expansive idea. On the one hand, I use it to describe black and brown femininities that are estranged from normative modes of white femininity. On the other hand, I am also arguing that the queer feminine is what is activated when we look to the mother as horizon, as elsewhere. The queerness of the queer feminine is in some ways akin to E. Patrick Johnson’s description of “quare” in relation to “queer”:
On the one hand, my grandmother uses “quare” to denote something or someone who is odd, irregular, or slightly off kilter—definitions in keeping with traditional understandings and uses of “queer.” On the other hand, she also deploys “quare” to connote something excessive—something that might philosophically translate into an excess of discursive and epistemological meanings grounded in African American cultural rituals and lived experience.38
Johnson’s attention to both the non-normative and the excessive as well as his attention to quare as a “theory in the flesh” speak directly to the queer feminine as born from sensual excess.
Kyla Wazana Tompkins reads quare as a call for a methodological shift toward materiality. Tompkins writes, “Such a methodology, I argue, necessarily shifts us away from a focus on representation, linked as it is to visuality and textuality, and toward what [Johnson] terms materiality, understood here as the tense and ongoing work of living within the thickened experiences and sensory orders of daily life.”39 In thinking with method, we see that tarrying with the queer feminine is part of the work of prioritizing the sensual because queer femininity signals a shift away from an economy of recognition toward multiple embodied modes of being-with. This is a “thickening” of the relation to the mother—an enfleshment of sorts. Middle English offers a term for this regrowth of flesh—regendre—and, indeed, a regendering is what is at stake here.40
Returning to Lorde, we feel this regendering and sensual knowledge production in her description of her mother combing her hair in Zami:
I remember the warm mother smell caught between her legs, and the intimacy of our physical touching nestled inside of the anxiety/pain like a nutmeg nestled inside its covering of mace.
The radio, the scratching comb, the smell of petroleum jelly, the grip of her knees and my stinging scalp all fall into—the rhythms of a litany, the rituals of Black women combing their daughters’ hair.41
This embodied move toward her mother—as a recollection of care, ritual, and pedagogy—is the space of the queer feminine. Lorde fills this memory with a whirl of smells, sounds, and touches. She marks herself and her mother as part of a multigenerational, diasporic selfhood and illuminates the contours of an intimacy that insists on the material. The queer feminine inheres in this fleshy mode of knowledge-making and self-production, and this transmission of knowledge is endless—perpetually inviting people to feel with this experience and insert themselves into this lineage.
I ask us to dwell on queer femininity in order to highlight what comes from thinking with sensuality, fleshiness. This order of knowledge, I argue, is spatial because it resists the mandate of depth even as it traffics in self-creation. This is a spatiality of possibility, of the always-already, of not-quite-return or homeland, of embrace, plurality, spirituality, and sensuality. This transformation enables contemplation of femininity in relation to possibility and violence. It is an elsewhere to sexuality, to phallocentrism, to white supremacy. It is what emerges from and yet exceeds the pornotrope.
What this reimaged dynamic especially shows us is that race disrupts attempts to think sexuality as the primary frame of difference.42 This modification is not just about inclusion, but a question of epistemology. The epistemological whiteness of sexuality is what separates discourses of incest from those of natality, according to Gillian Harkins. Race becomes appended to the discourse of the population, which keeps sexuality implicitly coded as white and relegates black and brownness to its excesses.43 Foucault’s History of Sexuality, then, becomes, as Rey Chow points out, a history of the ascendancy of whiteness.44 These histories, in turn, offer insight into why the black and brown mother and queer femininity disrupt sexuality with sensuality and shift us away from a discourse of desire and individuality toward plural, porous selves and multiple modes of being-with. A queer femininity underlies brown jouissance’s movement toward epistemologies of fleshiness. They are epistemologies that operate within the arena of the spatial, mobilizing opacity in lieu of transparency, sensuality instead of recognition, and regendre-ing instead of incest. This movement, I argue, following Britt Rusert’s reading of Deleuze, we might read as a form of minor science. She writes:
As a method that depends on sense perception, continual observations, and a mobile, searching orientation toward the world, there is indeed something fugitive about empiricism itself. Fugitive science makes good on the active experimentalism of experience that lies at the heart of empiricism: it reanimates the Latin sense of experiment, experior: to test or to try. Instead of hardening observations and trials into theorems and facts, it tarries in the multitude of experience, continually poses problems (for the state and the state of slavery), and transforms the passivity of knowledge production into the activity of invention.45
An invitation to think with the flesh, with the sensual, then, is an invitation to make new knowledges and new politics.