1 Moten, In the Break, 104.
2 Griffin, If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery.
3 Jones, “The ‘Eternal Return,’” 950.
4 Ibid.
5 Jennifer Nash and José Esteban Muñoz both use the term “ecstasy” in reference to feeling beyond the self. For a genealogy of ecstasy see Nash, The Black Body in Ecstasy, and Muñoz, Cruising Utopia.
6 Deavere Smith, Lyle Ashton Harris, 1.
7 Ibid., 2.
8 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.
9 Alice Jardine criticizes Deleuze for his appropriation of the feminine position in his concept of becoming-woman. In “Woman in Limbo: Deleuze and His Br(others),” Jardine argues that the feminine is posited as a step toward freedom, but its materiality is never considered as a thing unto itself. Further, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak addresses the Eurocentric nature of Deleuze’s project in her essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?”
10 Deavere Smith, Lyle Ashton Harris, 7.
11 Ibid.
12 Weheliye, Habeaus Viscus, 113.
13 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 100.
14 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 227. Here and elsewhere, emphasis in original unless otherwise noted.
15 Ibid., 206.
16 An initial inquiry into work in Afro-pessimism would include Sexton, “The Social Life of Social Death,” and Wilderson, Red, White, and Black, which are widely hailed as some of the inaugural texts of the movement.
17 Weheliye, Habeaus Viscus, 91.
18 Ibid., 91.
19 Ferguson, Aberrations in Black, 13.
20 Ibid., 14.
21 Morgensen, Spaces between Us, 31.
22 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 206; King, “Interview with Dr. Tiffany Lethabo King.”
23 Musser, Sensational Flesh.
24 Weheliye, Habeaus Viscus, 2.
25 Fleetwood, Troubling Vision, 29.
26 Ibid., 112.
27 Ibid.
28 Muñoz, “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down,” 676.
29 Ibid., 679.
30 Ibid., 684.
31 León, “Forms of Opacity.”
32 Britt Rusert’s Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture offers another recent example of how one might begin to approach this process.
33 Stallings, Funk the Erotic, 3.
34 Ibid., 6.
35 Ibid., 7.
36 Ibid., 7/8.
37 Braunstein, “Desire and Jouissance in the Teachings of Lacan,” 104.
38 Jacques Lacan, quoted in ibid., 107, fn. 8.
39 Braunstein, “Desire and Jouissance,” 107.
40 Da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race, 31.
41 Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 190.
42 Chen, Animacies; Tompkins, Racial Indigestion; McMillan, Embodied Avatars.
43 Holland, Ochoa, and Tompkins, “On the Visceral,” 392.
44 Bradley, “Other Sensualities,” 130.
45 Amin, Musser, and Pérez, “Queer Form,” 234.
46 Doyle and Getsy, “Queer Formalisms.”
47 Musser, Sensational Flesh, 21–2.
48 Silverman, The Miracle of Analogy.
49 Buse, “Photography Degree Zero,” 42.
50 Among others in this constellation I am thinking here of Nash, The Black Body in Ecstasy; Horton-Stallings, Funk the Erotic; Rodríguez, Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, and Other Latina Longings; and Cruz, The Color of Kink.
51 See, for example, Boyarin, “What Does the Jew Want?”: Fuss, Identification Papers; Pellegrini, Performance Anxieties; and Walton, Fair Sex, Savage Dreams.
52 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks; Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized; Cheng, The Melancholy of Race; Eng, Kazanjian, and Butler, Loss.
53 Luciano, Arranging Grief, 12.
54 Ferguson, The Reorder of Things, 6.
55 Ibid., 34.
56 Musser, “Specimen Days: Diversity, Labor, and the University.”
1 The Dinner Party, which had been in the making since 1974, was bankrolled largely by Chicago and various feminist fundraising efforts, which asked contributors to “give the world women’s history for the new year.” It opened on March 14, 1979, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Despite being a popular attraction, other museums were unwilling to host the installation, so feminist community organizations stepped in to organize a grassroots tour. As Jane Gerhard writes in her history of the installation, “The unexpected success of its non-museum tour spoke unmistakably of the appeal of The Dinner Party and its feminist messages to audiences. One explanation for The Dinner Party’s success despite its across-the-board rejection by elite cultural institutions can be attributed to its translation of feminism—specifically, women’s right to a heroic past—into an engaging message that spoke to a range of women not typically found under the banner of feminism” (The Dinner Party, 181).
2 Tompkins, Racial Indigestion, 5.
3 Ibid., 3.
4 Irigaray, “When Our Lips Speak Together,” 209.
5 Ibid., 215–216.
6 Jagose, Lesbian Utopics, 30.
7 In “Irigaray’s Body Symbolic,” Margaret Whitford outlines the different stances on Irigaray’s essay. Irigaray has been critiqued for morphological essentialism because the lips suggest that she is “positing a real body, unmediated by the symbolic order, which women might recognize as their own” (99). Elizabeth Grosz, however, argues that Irigaray is creating a new form of language: “She is creating a discourse to contest or combat other, prevailing discourses” (quoted in Whitford, 9). Taking both of these stances into account, Whitford writes that it is precisely this indecipherability that gives the essay its power: “What is important about the two lips is not only their literalness, but, above all, the fact that no one can agree on exactly what they mean” (98).
8 Huffer, Are the Lips a Grave?, 43.
9 Ibid., 45.
10 Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology.
11 “Frequently Asked Questions.”
12 Gerhard, The Dinner Party, 174.
13 Spillers, “Interstices,” 78.
14 Rooney and Walker, “A Sonorous Subtlety.”
15 In taking on the task of feeding and nurturing children, mammies are like mothers, but owing to racial difference and the dynamics of slavery, there is no fear that a mammy could actually replace or be mistaken for the white mother. Instead, the mammy presents an altogether different version of the mother, especially since her servitude often rendered her unavailable to actually care for her own children. Christina Sharpe describes the contradiction of having the mammy serve as a mother figure while also being embedded within a legal circuit of black motherlessness since mammies were property of the white family: “In relation to the ‘big black mammy of old’ the parental function is repeatedly displaced as the fate of the black child is legally bound to the condition of the enslaved mother, as the ability to mother that child is denied her, or can always be denied her, and as the woman legally denied the rights and functions of mother is made to do with the mothering of the white children” (Monstrous Intimacies, 165).
16 Micki McElya writes, “The myth of the faithful slave lingers because so many white Americans have wished to live in a world in which African Americans are not angry over past and present injustices, a world in which white people were and are not complicit, in which the injustices themselves—of slavery, Jim Crow, and ongoing structural racism—seem not to exist at all” (Clinging to Mammy, 3).
17 In her analysis of the interviews with former slaves conducted by the Federal Writers’ Project of the Works Progress Administration, Cheryl Thurber discusses the absence of mammies and the actual dynamics of care-giving in the antebellum South:
Very few former slaves mentioned any older relatives who had the role of mammy in antebellum times. In fact, they more commonly mentioned former slaves as having been raised by the white mistress as opposed to the adult black women who took care of the white children. The few references to mammy by former slaves usually include a story about the special protection the role provided, or the continued concern shown by the white folks toward their former mammy. . . . It is likely, however, that mammies did exist in the antebellum period, but in much smaller numbers than the mythology would indicate. (“The Development of the Mammy Image and Mythology,” 91–92)
Patricia Turner describes this fictional selflessness as enabling an imagined form of happiness in slavery: “Like Aunt Jemima and her turn-of-the-century literary counterparts, these mammies were happily ensconced in the households of white employers. Implicit in each rendition was the notion that these thick-waisted black women were happy with their lot, honored to spend their days and nights caring for white benefactors” (Ceramic Uncles & Celluloid Mammies, 51).
18 This frames the affective work that mammies perform for white children as a form of mothering while triangulating the relationship between black mothers and their children with slavery. McElya describes the legacy of this division of naturalizing black maternal labor as love rather than work, writing: “The system of slavery placed a monetary and labor value on black women’s production of more laboring black bodies. When black women’s work was appropriated by the white household, their care-giving labor was reframed as motherly instinct and love in the figure of the mammy, thus not as work at all” (Clinging to Mammy, 82).
19 In her analysis of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which contains one of the first literary representations of the mammy, Kyla Wazana Tompkins argues that the kitchen is central to understanding the forms of interracial intimacy encoded into the figure of the mammy. The kitchen symbolizes the “material life of the body as it is represented in food culture, where, as Gillian Brown has argued, the affective life (the woman’s ‘domestic sphere’) is most closely integrated with economic life (where the slave labor of producing and processing food occurs)” (Racial Indigestion, 107).
20 In addition to Walker, the figure of the mammy has a long history within black feminist art. Kimberly Wallace-Sanders describes her uptake in the 1960s as a type of subversive icon, writing that “the Aunt Jemima image signaled a particular kind of insult for African Americans during the 1960s, one that inspired artists to juxtapose the trademark from the 1890s with the new attitudes and agenda of the 1960s. . . . Essentially they were challenging people to reconsider what might be behind or beneath Aunt Jemima’s smile”(Mammy, 142).
21 Rooney and Walker, “Sonorous Subtlety.”
22 Gopnik “Rarely One for Sugarcoating.”
23 Ibid.
24 Smith, “Sugar? Sure, but Salted with Meaning.”
25 For an in-depth analysis of the controversy stirred up by the sugar sphinx, see Musser “Queering Sugar.”
26 Powers, “Why I Yelled at the Kara Walker Exhibit.”
27 Watts, “The Audacity of No Chill.”
28 Malone, “What Kara Walker’s ‘Sugar Baby’ Showed Us.”
29 Callahan, “Reactions to Kara Walker’s A Subtlety.”
30 Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic,” 58.
31 Thompson, “Kara Walker’s Desecrated Cemetery for Blackness”; emphasis in original.
32 Sianne Ngai discusses the relationship between animatedness and blackness in Ugly Feelings.
33 Musser, Sensational Flesh, 102.
34 Pérez, A Taste for Brown Bodies, 104.
35 Woodward, The Delectable Negro, 9.
36 Ibid., 14.
37 Takagi, “Maiden Voyage,” 98.
38 Puar, “Bodies with New Organs,” 62.
39 We should note that there are many different arguments about what constitutes the limit of the human. Some position blackness, gender, indigeneity, disability. My point is that this limit is defined in terms of the capacity to choose.
40 Lindsey and Johnson, “Searching for Climax,” 185.
41 Ibid., 190.
42 Weheliye, Habeaus Viscus, 124.
43 Thompson, “Curatorial Statement.”
44 Mintz, Sweetness and Power.
45 Nyong’o, “Subtleties of Resistance,” 114. For a further critique, see Diehl, “Walker’s Dubious Alliance with Domino.”
46 Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents, 1.
47 Ibid.
48 Schuller, “Biopower below and before the Individual.”
49 Ibid., 636.
50 Walker and Abumrad, “Live Stream Kara Walker and Jad Abumrad’s NYPL Talk.”
51 Lowe, Intimacy of Four Continents, 18.
52 Nyong’o, “Subtleties of Resistance.”
53 Gopnik, “Rarely One for Sugarcoating.”
54 Silver, “Kara Walker’s ‘A Sublety’ Proves that Sugar Isn’t Always Sweet.”
55 Manalasan, “Field Notes.”
56 Stallings, Funk the Erotic, 6; emphasis in original.
1 Jennifer Tyburczy has an extended discussion of the history and controversy surrounding Courbet’s The Origin of the World in Sex Museums.
2 Ibid.
3 Williams, Hardcore, 49.
4 Smith, “Loud, Proud, and Painted.”
5 Cheng, Second Skin, 1.
6 Ibid., 11.
7 Ibid., 29.
8 Dailey, “Mickalene Thomas.”
9 Thompson, Shine.
10 Ibid., 24.
11 Ibid., 33.
12 One might also profitably, but perhaps controversially, discuss the relationship between Thomas’s deployment of rhinestones and the early 2000s trend of vajazzling, in which crystals or glitter are affixed to the vulval area for decoration. This trend is more in keeping with particular consumerist ideologists of celebrating particular forms of female sexuality and differs from my reading of Thomas’s use of rhinestones as critique, but further work could be done to analyze the differences between the instantiations of bejeweled vulvas.
13 Stallings, Funk the Erotic, xii.
14 Ibid., xv.
15 Cheng, Second Skin, 13.
16 Ibid., 166.
17 Bradley, “Introduction,” 129.
18 For more on surface reading, see Best and Marcus, “Surface Reading.”
19 Stockton, “Surfacing (in the Heat of Reading),” 8.
20 Stockton, “Reading as Kissing, Sex with Ideas.” Here and elsewhere, emphasis in original unless otherwise noted.
21 Ibid.
22 Walker, “Mickalene Thomas.”
23 From Dailey, “Mickalene Thomas.”
24 Ibid.
25 Thomas, “A Different Type of Beauty.”
26 Rosenberg, “Mickalene Thomas Rediscovers Her Mother—and Her Muse.”
27 Ibid.
28 Landers, Interviews Mickalene Thomas.
29 Lorde, Zami, 7.
30 Freeman, Time Binds, 62.
31 Ibid., 64.
32 Garber describes her as “a pivotal character connecting lesbian feminism and queer theory; in her multiple self-positioning as ‘Black lesbian feminist warrior poet mother,’ she stands historically and rhetorically at the crux of the so-called generation gap between lesbian-feminist and queer theoretical notions of identity” (Identity Poetics, 97). See also Musser, “Re-Membering Lorde.”
33 Alice Walker’s definition of a “Womanist” from In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, xi.
34 Hemmings, Why Stories Matter, 39.
35 Ibid., 54.
36 Holland, The Erotic Life of Racism, 59.
37 For more on the confounding history of the female orgasm, see Lloyd, The Case of the Female Orgasm.
38 Koedt, “Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm,” 424.
39 Gerhard, Desiring Revolution, 2.
40 Koedt, “Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm,” 423.
41 Gerhard, Desiring Revolution, 99.
42 Wittig, “The Straight Mind,” 32. For a more in-depth elaboration of the construction of female sexual difference vis-à-vis orgasm, see Musser “On the Orgasm of the Species.” Some of the material from that essay is reprinted here.
43 Walker, “Coming Apart.”
44 Nash, The Black Body in Ecstasy, 131.
45 Sharpley-Whiting, Black Venus; Somerville Queering the Color Line.
46 Gibson “Clitoral Corruption.”
47 Somerville, “Scientific Racism,” 253–254.
48 Ibid., 256.
49 Ibid., 262. Somerville expands on this in Queering the Color Line.
50 We can also think about the history of black and brown clitorises as the object of debates within anthropological circles in relation to rituals of genital cutting. Those in opposition to the practice argue that it should be considered a mutilation of the female body and an attempt by patriarchal societies to control female sexuality. Others, however, argue that criticisms of the practice are not actually manifestations of concern for women, but attempts to further portray countries where this takes place as barbaric and backward. Though these discussions foreground the difficulty of understanding “universal” rights and norms while also bringing attention to the epistemological violences of colonialism, they also persist in objectifying black and brown women’s sexuality. They are objects of study, rather than agents of action. See Hayes, “Female Genital Mutilation”: Kirby, “Out of Africa.”
51 Traub, “Psychomorphology of the Clitoris,” and Halberstam, Female Masculinity.
52 Halberstam, Female Masculinity, 59.
53 Williams, “Cinema’s Sex Acts,” 10.
54 Chinn, “Feeling Her Way,” 181.
55 Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic.”
56 Lorde “Eye to Eye,” 174.
57 Nash, “Practicing Love.”
58 Ibid., 3.
59 Ibid., 10.
60 Ibid., 10, 11.
61 This is from Our Bodies, Ourselves, quoted in Musser “From Our Body to Your Selves,” 95.
62 Lorde, The Cancer Journals, 25.
63 Bersani and Phillips, Intimacies.
64 Ibid., 85.
65 Ibid., 86.
66 Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic,” 55.
67 Ibid., 56.
68 Ibid., 55.
69 Landers, Interview.
70 Wyma, “Mickalene Thomas.”
71 Walker, “Womanism.”
72 Nash, “Practicing Love,” 9.
1 Rodríguez, “Viscous Pleasures and Unruly Feminisms,” 10; Ramos, “Spic(y) Appropriations.”
2 Ramos, “Spic(y) Appropriations,” 2.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid., 5.
5 Ibid., 17.
6 Rodríguez,” Viscous Pleasures,” 10; Ramos, “Spic(y) Appropriations,” 15.
7 Rodríguez, “Viscous Pleasures,” 10.
8 Ibid., 11.
9 Hollibaugh and Moraga, “What We’re Rolling Around in Bed With,” 58.
10 Ibid., 59.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid., 60.
13 Swanson and Ibarra, artist’s statement for Untitled Fucking.
14 Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” 212.
15 Ibid., 212. Here and elsewhere, emphasis in original unless otherwise noted.
16 Ibid., 222.
17 Butler, Gender Trouble, 97.
18 Braunstein, “Desire and Jouissance in the Teachings of Lacan,” 110.
19 Butler, “The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva,” 108.
20 Silverman, “Girl Love,” 8.
21 De Lauretis, The Practice of Love, 190.
22 The fervor over Rich’s essay led to a move to separate lesbianism from feminism in deep ways. We see this desire for separation in both Butler’s and Sedgwick’s work. In her later reflections, Butler situates the text as part of a tradition of critique—a critique of the heterosexist assumptions of feminist theory and an attempt to reconcile gay and lesbian studies with feminism. In “Against Proper Objects,” Butler writes that the text was “the acerbic culmination of that history of unease and anger within feminism” (2). Feminism, according to Butler, was most concerned with elaborating the binary between “men” and “women.” This binary, which was presented as irreversible, rested on “the implicit and compulsory presumption of heterosexuality,” and it “posited relations of complementarity or asymmetry between its terms in ways that only shored up, without marking, the heterosexist assumptions of the paradigm” (2). On the other hand, Eve Sedgwick’s introduction to Between Men describes the book as an intervention into feminist scholarship, a “feminist restructuring of a whole range of disciplines according to a relatively small number of powerful axioms. . . . I found oppressive the hygienic way in which a variety of different institutional, conceptual, political, ethical, and emotional contingencies promised (threatened?) to line up together so neatly in the development of a femiocentric field of women’s studies in which subjects, paradigms, and political thrust of research, as well as the researchers themselves, might all be identified with the female” (vii).
23 Vannier, Currie, and O’Sullivan write:
Part of the popularity of MILF videos is the appeal of female actors who demonstrate more sexual confidence and agency. As women in MILF videos are older than women in Teen videos and likely more sexually experienced, it is possible that they engage in more dominant or powerful behavior in relation to men than do their younger counterparts. By contrast, female actors in the Teen videos may be more likely to be portrayed as naïve, hesitant, and sexually passive as a result of their inexperience, and thus are depicted as having less power in a sexual encounter than their male partners and compared to female actors in the MILF category. (“Schoolgirls and Soccer Moms,” 265)
24 Taormino writes:
In theory, Mommy may have different qualities and a unique history compared to Daddy, but she’s just as significant a figure (if not actually more significant) in everyone’s life. No matter what your sexual orientation is, Mommy is every child’s first love, first object of devotion, and the center of its universe. We are often at our most vulnerable and needy with our mothers. . . . So why do so many choose to do all that with Daddy? It can’t be that we’ve resolved all our issues with Mommy. Is she too intimate, too strong, too powerful an archetype to play with, to embody, to desire? (“The Rise of MILFs and Mommies in Sexual Fantasy Material,” n.p.)
Taormino goes on to hypothesize that misogyny might be underlying our generally collective rejection of the mother. If the father represents power and the state, what does the mother represent? Taormino ends her essay with a suggestion that we think the mommy in multiple forms: “That’s the great thing about a mommy: She can be a gentle, loving mentor or a stern spank-you-over-her-knee disciplinarian. Mommy’s complex like that. So isn’t it about time that Mommy got her moment in the spotlight?”
25 Doerr, “Making Space around the Beloved.”
26 Sedgwick, “Anality: Notes from the Front.”
27 We might think about Coxx’s use of mamí in relation to Rodríguez’s discussion of “sexual archives flavored by attachments and memory” (Sexual Futures, 131).
28 Braunstein, “Desire and Jouissance,” 111.
29 Nancy, Coming, 21.
30 Kheshti, Modernity’s Ear, 66.
31 Nancy, Listening, 9.
32 Ibid., 14.
33 Hart, “That Was Then.”
34 Butler, Bodies that Matter, 88.
35 Scott articulates this as the rape of the black woman and the castration of the black man, but I think that we can position the rape of the white woman within this lexicon (Extravagant Abjection, 131). Following Fanon, we see that the idea of a black man raping a white woman is the frequent motivator for castration and lynching.
36 Ibid., 129.
37 Declue, “Let’s Play,” 224.
38 Ibid.
39 Ibid., 228.
40 Hoang, View from the Bottom, 17.
41 Ibid., 113.
42 Ibid., 9.
43 Rodríguez, Sexual Futures, 54.
44 Ibid., 55.
45 Ibid., 59.
46 Ibid., 56.
47 Scott, Extravagant Abjection, 166.
48 Rodríguez, Sexual Futures, 60.
49 Scott, Extravagant Abjection, 163.
50 Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 8.
51 Scott, Extravagant Abjection, 9.
52 Ibid., 8.
53 McMillan, Embodied Avatars, 7.
54 Ibid. 9.
55 Rodríguez, Sexual Futures, 131.
56 Rodríguez, Sexual Futures, 131.
57 Ramos, “Spic(y) Appropriations,” 12.
58 Cvetkovich, “Recasting Receptivity,” 134.
59 Ibid., 140.
60 For more on Bustamante’s performance, see Arrizón, Latina Performance.
61 Anzaldúa, “Borderlands / La Frontera,” 75.
62 Ibid., 81.
63 Ibarra, “Tapatío Cock and Strap-On.”
64 In her reading of Ibarra’s oeuvre in “Forms of Opacity,” Christina Léon highlights moments when these performances “fail,” which is to say that they register as imagined forms of transparency, rather than transgression. Despite Ibarra’s play with opacity, the physical presence of her body has prevented some from reading her otherwise.
1 Weems’s use of these images was very controversial. Harvard gave Weems permission to use the archive, but did not want the images displayed without permission. They threatened to sue Weems, but settled on getting a fee each time the images are displayed. We might, however, also think about the ways in which this question about the images of black people is a further instantiation of the problem of commodification. See Murray, “From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried.”
2 Braunstein, “Desire and Jouissance,” 112.
3 Wilson, Hidden Witness, 2.
4 Fleetwood, Troubling Vision, 7.
5 Ibid., 13.
6 Browne, Dark Matters.
7 Thinking expansively about this, we might position this representational conundrum of blackness in relation to slavery as explored in Colbert, Patterson, and Levy-Hussen, The Psychic Hold of Slavery, and Tillet, Sites of Slavery.
8 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 67.
9 Musser, Sensational Flesh.
10 Bernstein, Racial Innocence, 188.
11 Nash, The Black Body in Ecstasy, 25.
12 In The Suffering Will Not Be Televised Rebecca Wanzo discusses these narratives of racial sentimentality to show whose suffering holds cultural weight and whose does not.
13 Doyle, Hold It against Me, 120.
14 Ibid., 116.
15 Weems, audio interview.
16 Moten, In the Break, 104.
17 Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice,” 182, 183.
18 Moten, In the Break, 103.
19 Ibid., 197.
20 Wallis, “Black Bodies, White Science,” 59.
21 See Sharpe, In the Wake, for an analysis of the expressiveness and opacity of the eyes in these portraits in relation to her discussion of redaction.
22 Barthes, Camera Lucida.
23 Campt, Listening to Images, 4.
24 Ibid.
25 Quashie, The Sovereignty of Quiet, 6.
26 Spillers, “All the Things You Could Be by Now,” 383.
27 Ibid., 400. Here and elsewhere, emphasis in original unless otherwise noted.
28 Campt, Listening to Images, 6.
29 Stephens, Skin Acts, 162.
30 I am thinking here of Richard Powell’s work in Cutting a Figure, where he argues for a history of black portraiture that centers on various modes of self-fashioning. While this is a profitable line of inquiry, I am interested in how Weems’s work differs in its investment in thinking collectively.
31 Hartman, Scenes of Subjection.
32 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 66.
33 Ibid., 67.
34 Butler, Gender Trouble, 96.
35 Moten, In the Break, 104.
36 Marder, The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 2.
37 Ibid., 7.
38 Murray, “From Here I Saw,” 7.
39 Lorde, “Open Letter to Mary Daly,” 95; my emphasis.
40 For an extended discussion of Zami in relation to Lorde’s theorization of the maternal, see Musser, “Re-Membering Lorde” and “Reading Lorde after Queer.”
41 De Veaux, Warrior Poet, 151.
42 Lorde, “Dahomey,” 10.
43 Wright, Becoming Black, 142.
44 Eng, The Feeling of Kinship, 13–14.
45 Gopinath, Impossible Desires, 11.
46 Ellis, Territories of the Soul, 4.
47 Moten, In the Break, 203.
48 Ibid., 205.
49 Gumbs, “We Can Learn to Mother Ourselves,” 51.
50 Campt, Listening to Images, 17; emphases in original.
51 Brewer Ball, “The Veering Escapology of Sharon Hayes and Patty Hearst,” 39.
52 Barthes, “Grain of the Voice,” 183.
53 Ibid.
54 Moten, In the Break, 13.
55 Irigaray, “The Mechanics of Fluids,” 109.
56 Crawley, Blackpentecostal Breath.
57 Josef Sorrett provides a useful exploration of the presumed relationship between blackness and spirituality in Spirit in the Dark.
58 This spirituality also brings us back to Lorde and the erotic. In his theorization of erotic subjectivity, Lyndon Gill draws on the spiritual dimensions of the erotic to argue for an analytic frame that “encourages a recognition of the fact that systems of colonial (as well as neocolonial/imperial) domination depend partly on a tripartite strategy of coercion based on a politics of ontological racial difference, a hierarchy of spiritual rectitude, and a Victorian sense of (sexual) respectability—erotic subjugation, as it were. Erotic subjectivity is tasked with providing a postcolonial theoretical response to this mechanism of subjugation” (“Chatting Back an Epidemic,” 280). Gill argues that we think the spiritual as a form of critique of prevailing epistemologies. In this way it cannot be reduced to a formation of religion or religiosity. In this I take my cue from Gill, but move away from thinking about individual attachments to spirituality to thinking through spirituality as a connective tissue that brings people together. In parsing Lorde’s understanding of the erotic, Sharon Holland writes, “The erotic, to echo Lorde, refers to women’s power—a power located not just in an aroused body, but through a body made whole in connection with physical, spiritual, and discursive selves” (“To Touch the Mother’s C(o)untry,” 212).
59 Pethes, “Psychicones.”
1 Muñoz, “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down,” 676.
2 Ibid., 679.
3 Luciano, Arranging Grief, 11.
4 Da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race, 31.
5 Riskin, “The Defecating Duck,” 604.
6 Roach, The Player’s Passion, 130.
7 Ibid., 133.
8 Westbrook, “Review,” 14.
9 Muñoz, “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down,” 687.
10 Schuller, “Taxonomies of Feeling,” 292. Here and elsewhere, emphasis in original unless otherwise noted.
11 Muñoz, “Feeling Brown: Ethnicity and Affect,” 70.
12 Viego, “The Unconscious of Latino/a Studies.”
13 Luciano, Arranging Grief, 20.
14 For more on pathologies of temporality, see Musser, “Consent, Capacity, and the Non-Narrative.”
15 Bustamante, Neapolitan.
16 Ibid.
17 Parisi, “Introduction: Abstract Sex,” 1.
18 Galison, “Judgment against Objectivity,” 332.
19 Masters and Johnson, Human Sexual Response, 21–22.
20 Berlant, “On Persistence,” 35.
21 Ibid.
22 Rachel Maines argues in The Technology of Orgasm that physicians invented the vibrator in order to facilitate the production of orgasm in hysterical women, since orgasm was believed to be one of the ways to calm hysteria.
23 Through this discourse of hysteria, however, we also see a moment of fracturing in the discourses of the brown female body as existing within the realm of sensation. Hysteria produced the black and brown female body as “insensate,” which is to say not reactive to pain. Briggs writes, “This ideology had material effects, rendering the ostensibly insensate ‘savage’ woman fit material for medical experimentation. Hence, African American, immigrant, and poor women played a role in the professional consolidation of obstetrics and gynecology” (“The Race of Hysteria,” 262).
24 Ibid., 249.
25 Ibid., 250.
26 Micale, Approaching Hysteria.
27 Doyle, Hold It against Me, 86.
28 Ibid., 86.
29 Muñoz, Disidentifications.
30 Vaccaro, “Handmade,” 96–97.
31 Roberts, “Put Your Thing Down,” 183.
32 Wilson Bryan, “What’s Contemporary about Craft,” 8.
33 Vaccaro, “Handmade.”
34 Muñoz, “Feeling Brown, Feeling Down,” 684.
35 Quiroga, Tropics of Desire.
36 Anker writes:
What I call melodramatic political discourse casts politics, policies, and practices of citizenship within a moral economy that identifies the nation state as a virtuous and innocent victim of villainous action. It locates goodness in the suffering of the nation, evil in its antagonists, and heroism in sovereign acts of war and global control coded as expressions of virtue. By evoking intense visceral responses to wrenching injustices imposed upon the nation-state, melodramatic discourse solicits affective states of astonishment, sorrow, and pathos through the scenes it shows of persecuted citizens. It suggests that the redemption of virtue obligates state power to exercise heroic retribution on the forces responsible for national injury. Melodrama depicts the United States as both the feminized, virginal victim and the aggressive, masculinized hero in the story of freedom, as the victim-hero of geopolitics. (Orgies of Feeling, 2–3)
37 Doyle, Hold It against Me, 86.
38 Mulvey, “Notes on Sirk and Melodrama,” 43.
39 Ang, Watching Dallas, 79–80.
40 Modleski, “Time and Desire,” 24.
41 Alexander, “Modes of Incorporation,” 243.
42 Cheng, The Melancholy of Race; Eng, Kazanjian, and Butler, Loss.
43 Shimizu, The Hypersexuality of Race, 18.
44 Ibid., 6.
45 Ibid.
46 Kim, The Racial Mundane, 4.
47 Ibid., 179.
48 Hayot, “Chinese Bodies, Chinese Futures,” 102–103.
49 Lee, The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America, 13.
50 Brintnall, Ecco Homo, 36.
51 Doyle, Hold It against Me, 85.
52 Ibid., 86.
53 Oishi, “Interview with Patty Chang,” 125.
54 Harkins, Everybody’s Family Romance, 69.
55 Ibid., 8.
56 Ibid., 74.
57 Chang, In Love, 2001.
58 Kim, The Racial Mundane, 31.
59 Shimikawa, National Abjection, 3.
60 Ibid.
61 Berlant, “Lauren Berlant Discusses ‘Reading With.’”
1 For more on the cinema of distraction, see Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment.”
2 Sontag, “Notes on Camp,” 54.
3 Riviere, “Womanliness as Masquerade,” 305.
4 Heath, Joan Riviere and the Masquerade.
5 Butler, Gender Trouble, 174.
6 In her ethnography of drag performers completed in the 1960s, Mother Camp, Esther Newton writes, “At the most complex, [drag] is a double inversion that says, ‘appearance is an illusion.’ Drag says “my ‘outside’ appearance is feminine, but my essence ‘inside’ [the body] is masculine.” At the same time it symbolizes the opposite inversion; “my appearance ‘outside’ [my body, my gender] is masculine but my essence ‘inside’ [myself] is feminine” (103).
7 Ibid., 175. Here and elsewhere, emphasis in original unless otherwise noted.
8 Ibid., 64.
9 Riviere, “Womanliness as Masquerade,” 303.
10 Ibid., 306.
11 Ibid.
12 Butler, Gender Trouble, 68.
13 Doane, “Masquerade Reconsidered,” 33.
14 Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, 66.
15 Pellegrini, Performance Anxieties; Walton, Fair Sex, Savage Dreams.
16 Wilson, Gut Feminism.
17 Halperin, How to Be Gay; Muñoz, Disidentifications.
18 Muñoz, Disidentifications, 128.
19 Butler, Gender Trouble, 157.
20 Davis, “Epilogue, Nine Years Later,” 270.
21 Duggan and McHugh, “A Fem(me)inist Manifesto,” 155.
22 Freeman, Time Binds, 63.
23 Keller, “‘Was It Right to Love Her Brother’s Wife So Passionately?,’” 402.
24 Ibid., 393.
25 Worley, “The Mid-Century Pulp Novel,” 120.
26 Catbagan, “Crush.”
27 Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.
28 Freud, “Fetishism,” 152–153.
29 Marriot, “On Racial Fetishism,” 215.
30 Apter, Feminizing the Fetish, 13.
31 Ibid., 14.
32 One could imagine thinking profitably with Kadji Amin’s discussion of racial fetishism in relation to temporality, specifically vis-à-vis the multiple temporalities that race entails. Amin writes, “Racial fetishism is always a form of what Elizabeth Freeman has termed erotohistoriography, a method of using bodily pleasure to access residues of the past within the present. . . . Racial fetishism demonstrates that the history into which the erotic throws us is as likely to be predictably oppressive as surprisingly counternormative” (Disturbing Attachments, 101).
33 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks.
34 Marriot, “On Racial Fetishism,” 218.
35 Cheng, “Skin Deep,” 39.
36 Marx, Capital, 1:163.
37 Ibid., 187.
38 Weeks, The Problem with Work, 24.
39 Parreñas, Servants of Globalization, 1.
40 Ibid., 61.
41 Ibid., 62.
42 Parreñas uses this term as a framework for her analysis, citing four primary axes of dislocation: partial citizenship, pain of family separation, contradictory class mobility, and non-belonging.
43 Da Silva, “To Be Announced,” 49–50.
44 Ibid., 47.
45 Ibid., 53.
46 Ahmed, “Creating Disturbance,” 36.
47 See, The Decolonized Eye, 116.
48 Balance, “How It Feels to Be Viral Me,” 147.
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid, 148.
51 Tadiar, Things Fall Away, 234.
52 Ibid.
53 Hong, “Existentially Surplus Women of Color Feminism,” 90.
54 Cacho, Slow Death, 13.
55 Barrett, Blackness and Value, 5.
56 Hong, “Existentially Surplus,” 92.
57 San Pablo Burns, Puro Arte, 119.
58 Ibid., 119.
59 See, Decolonized Eye, xv.
60 Balance, “How It Feels to Be Viral Me,” 143.
61 Ibid., 145–146.
62 Ibid., 145.
63 Tadiar, “Remaindered Life,” 484.
64 Wesling, “Queer Value,” 107.
65 Gayatri Chokravorty Spivak writes, “I say above that ‘the full implications of the question of Value posed within the “materialist” predication of the subject cannot yet be realized.’ I must now admit what many Marxist theoreticians admit today: that in any theoretical formulation, the horizon of full realization must be indefinitely and irreducibly postponed” (“Scattered Speculations,” 92).
66 Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, 9.
67 Ibid., 12.
1 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 229.
2 Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, 65.
3 Huffer, Maternal Pasts, Feminist Futures, 10.
4 Elissa Marder writes, “Although the physical act of bearing children may be construed (and experienced) as a ‘natural act,’ the place accorded to the mother in culture and history, and the philosophical, political, and psychological meaning of what I shall call ‘the maternal function’ is anything but natural. . . . I have chosen to use the term ‘maternal function’ here in order to highlight the technological, and non-anthropomorphic aspects that are often latently inscribed within the concept of birth” (The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 2).
5 Johnson, Mother Tongues, 4–5.
6 Klein, “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms,” 99.
7 Likierman, Melanie Klein, 65.
8 Zaretsky, “‘One Large Secure, Solid Background,’” 143.
9 Spivak, “Translation as Culture,” 13.
10 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 229.
11 Moten, In the Break, 16; emphasis in original.
12 Hartman, “Belly of the World,” 167. See also Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe”; Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women; Weinbaum, Wayward Reproductions; Tadiar, Things Fall Away.
13 Chambers-Letson, “The Queer of Color’s Mother,” 49.
14 Johnson, Appropriating Blackness, 77.
15 Butler, Gender Trouble, 97.
16 Cheng, The Melancholy of Race, xi.
17 Moten, In the Break, 18.
18 I am indebted to Jacqueline Feldman for pointing out the resonances of thinking with the formation of elsewhere in relation to queerness.
19 Hoang, A View from the Bottom, 28.
20 Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 1.
21 Lorde, Zami, 7.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid., 9.
24 Ibid., 78.
25 Ibid., 256.
26 Campt, Listening to Images.
27 Though I do not dwell on it in here. We might also think about Cherríe Moraga’s writings in the 1980s, collected in both A Bridge Called My Back and Loving in the War Years, which illustrate the difficulties of being a daughter. Growing up in 1950s and 1960s California as the daughter of a white man and Chicana woman, Moraga narrates an early estrangement from her mother’s Mexican heritage and her mother, an estrangement that she comes to recognize through her feminism and lesbianism. Loving in the War Years, published in 1983, becomes a love letter to her mother, to Chicanidad, and to lesbianism. In this text, Moraga gives us a way to nuance our understanding of the reparative and its importance to theorizing the mother and difference.
28 Lorde, Zami, 15.
29 Nixon, Resisting Paradise, 76.
30 Ibid., 77.
31 Hammonds, “Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Sexual Difference”; Spillers, “Interstices.”
32 Lorde, “Woman,” 82.
33 Lorde, “Meet,” 33–34.
34 Chinn, “Feeling Her Way,” 188.
35 Lorde, “Meet,” 33.
36 Da Silva, “To Be Announced,” 55–56.
37 Chambers-Letson, After the Party, 71.
38 Johnson, “Quare Studies,” 2.
39 Tompkins, “You Make Me Feel Right Quare,” 61.
40 I am indebted to Maureen Catbagan for pointing this out to me.
41 Lorde, Zami, 33.
42 This is an argument that scholars working within queer of color critique have been making for years. See, for example, Eng, The Feeling of Kinship; Ferguson, Aberrations in Black; Musser, Sensational Flesh; Puar, Terrorist Assemblages; Reddy, Freedom with Violence.
43 Harkins, Everybody’s Family Romance.
44 Chow, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism.
45 Rusert, Fugitive Science, 20.