abandonment: in Billie #21 (Harris), 1
abjection, 22; into agency (via objecthood), 88; bottoming and the joys of, 84–86; and care, 91–92; and consumption, 36; and the excess that blackness produces (Scott), 82, 87; and labor, 90, 162; in The Onion (Abramovic), 137
Abramovic, Marina: The Onion (1995), 137
abuse, 34–35
acting: vs. authenticity, 120–21
Afropessimism, 6–7; and “yes, and,” 9
Agassiz, Louis, 95, 102, 105, 108, 111–12. See From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (Weems)
agency: as an activity of maintenance (Berlant), 5; and blackness, 6; and the loop, 126–27; through mediation, 148–49; of mothering, 110, 168; and objectification (“objecthood”), 87–88; and one’s sexuality, 38, 85–86; stomping as a form of feminine, 151; of Thomas in Origin of the Universe 1, 48
aggression: and familiarity, 159–60; and mimesis, 162–63; and misery, 150, 153; and the model minority, 160; and waste, 164. See also Crush (Catbagan)
Ahmed, Sara: on feminist killjoys, 149; on orientation, 29; on racialized anger, 159
Alexander, Jeffrey: on assimilation, 133–34
Amin, Kadji: on racial fetishism, 200n32; on relation and sensuality, 16
anal sex: Hoang on, 83–84; and jouissance (Bersani), 72; and the maternal body, 77. See also bottoming
Ang, Ien: on melodrama and everyday life, 132
Anker, Elizabeth: on melodrama as a form of national rhetoric, 131, 198n36
Anzaldúa, Gloria: on la frontera and a hybrid tongue, 92–93
apostrophe: Weems’s use of, 100, 107
appetite, 29–30; for black performance, 43; for black sweetness, 32; and colonialism, 41; femininity with, 176; for Ibarra, 93; and penetration, 71; and Walker’s A Subtlety, 36–37, 40–45
Apter, Emily: on Freud’s fetishist and the realm of the simulacrum, 154
assimilation, 92–93, 133–35, 140–41, 160, 163, 171
Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman (1958), 145–46, 149, 152
audience: affecting Walker’s Sugar Baby, 43–44; and Billie Holiday (for Moten), 1–2, 9, 102
Aunt Hester: scream of, 165
Aunt Jemima, 188n17, 189n20. See also mammy
authenticity: vs. acting, 120–21; in Billie #21 (Harris), 2; and lesbians, 60–61; and surface, 49; of tears, 121, 137–38; and the voice, 116
automaticity, 120–43
Baartman, Saartjie, 59
Bacon, Francis, 136
Balance, Christine Bacareza: on Asian American rage, 160; on viral videos, 163–64
Barrett, Lindon: on violence and value, 161
Barthes, Roland, 79; grain of the voice, 102, 116; photography and the mother, 109; punctum, 106
BDSM, 83
becoming-atomic, 165–66
becoming-material: and becoming-maternal (photography), 110
becoming-molecular, 42–45
becoming-object, 155
becoming-spectacle, 35
being-with, 177
Bentham, Jeremy: panopticon, 97
Berlant, Lauren: on agency, 5; on elliptical thinking, 143; on the loop in Neapolitan (Bustamante), 126–27
Bernstein, Robin: on black bodies and pain tolerance, 98
Bersani, Leo: impersonal narcissism, 65–66; jouissance and anal sex, 72–73; suicidal ecstasy, 72, 77
Billie #21 (Harris), x, 1–5, 9, 15, 18–19
black hypervisuality, 48
blackness: and abjection, 87; and brownness, 7–8; and enfleshment, 97; fungibility of (Hartman), 107; as (un)hidden witness, 105; and humanity, 6, 39, 96, 100; and pain, 35–36, 98–99; penetrated, 33; and the semiotic, 81; visual manifestation of, 97
black women: and abjection, 10; angry, 159; and consent, 34–37; as the fleshy limit of theory, 9; and gynecological experimentation, 46; as hyperfecund and hypersexual, 127–28; lesbian feminism, 22, 55–56, 61; and pain/pleasure, 2–3, 20
bling(-bling). See shine
Bluest Eye, The (Morrison), 139
body: and abjection, 87; as body, 77, 89; and breath, 166; and excess, 176; vs. flesh, 5–6, 97, 170; and food (Mexican), 70; and hygiene, 23; as ideal, 136; as an instrument of pleasure, 90; materiality of, 95; as mechanical, 120–21; of the mother, 169; and pain, 35–36, 98; as racial signifier, 90; and sensuality, 6, 9; strap-on as extension of, 81; as subject and object, 39, 48; and theory/knowledge, 9, 11, 17, 176–77
bottoming, 83–84; Chong’s, 134; in Mommy is Coming (Dunye), 83–86, 90; in Untitled Fucking (Hawk Swanson / Ibarra), 72, 91–92. See also topping
Bradley, Rizvana: on the haptic, 16, 52
Braunstein, Néstor: on jouissance, 13, 73, 78, 95, 115
Brewer Ball, Katherine: on the voice, 116
Briggs, Laura: on race and sexuality, 127–28
Brintnall, Kent: on tableaux of masculine suffering, 136
Browne, Simone: on blackness and surveillance, 97
brown femininity, 24, 26, 120, 176; as flesh, 137
brown jouissance, 3–5, 9, 16; and abjection, 88; and the aesthetic, 15–16; and belonging, 23; and Billie #21 (Harris), 18–19; and the body as object/abject, 87; and “brown feeling” (Muñoz), 119; via citation, 15; and the commodity’s scream, 165–66; in Crush (Catbagan), 144–45; in From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (Weems), 24, 115; and grief/joy, 115; in In Love (Chang), 140–41, 143; and kinship, 94; and (black and brown) labor, 158–59; and liquidity, 117; and the mobilization of flesh’s liquidity, 60; in Neapolitan (Bustamante), 141, 143; and opacity, 102; and Origin of the Universe 1 (Thomas), 22, 48, 51, 53; and penetration, 71–72; as political, 11, 17; and queer femininity, 178; and selfhood, 13–14; and tactility, 52; and temporality, 127, 143; and voice, 95–96, 102; and witnessing, 95–96
brown paranoia, 122
burrito: as strap-on in Indigurrito (Bustamente), 91
Buse, Peter: on the Polaroid image, 18
Bush, Sandra, 54
Bustamante, Nao: Indigurrito (1992), 91; Neapolitan (2003), 23–24, 119–32, 141–43
butch/femme dynamic, 71–72, 90–91, 151
Butler, Judith: on desire for the mother, 171; on drag, 147; on gender, 73, 108; on lesbian femmes and subversion, 151; on the lesbian phallus, 81; on the libido-as-masculine, 148; on the semiotic, 74
Cacho, Lisa Marie: on value, 161
Caldwell, Molly, 144–45, 150–53, 156, 159–62. See Crush (Catbagan)
Califia, Pat: Doing It for Daddy, 84
Callahan, Yesha: on the black woman’s body and Walker’s Sugar Baby, 34
camp: as “a certain mode of aestheticism” (Sontag), 146; and femininity/gender, 147, 153; Ibarra’s performances as, 11; as a strategy for minoritarian survival (Muñoz), 150; and upper middle-class gay male life, 150. See also pulp
Campt, Tina: on the conditional tense to speak of black feminist futurity, 174; on quiet, 106
cannibalism: in slave culture in the United States, 36
capitalism, global: and black and brown maternal absences, 170; and Crush (Catbagan), 156–166; and A Subtlety (Walker), 40
care: and the mammy, 32, 187n15, 188n17–18; and the mother, 168–69, 177; in Neapolitan (Bustamante), 128; self-care and pleasure, 63; in Untitled Fucking (Hawk Swanson / Ibarra), 22, 91–92; in Weems’s work, 110, 114–16
castration: of the black man, 194; of the mother (fetish), 154
Catbagan, Maureen: Crush (2010–2012), 24–26, 144–45, 150–66
Chambers-Letson, Joshua: on black female flesh and possibility, 176; on black women and the name “mother,” 170
Chang, Patty: In Love (2001), 23–24, 119–21, 133–43, 163
Chen, Mel, 14
Cheng, Anne Anlin, 22; on assimilation, 134, 171; on fetishism, 155; on the surface, 48–49, 51
Chicago, Judy: The Dinner Party (1979), 21, 27–31, 186n1
Chinn, Sarah: on Lorde, 62, 175
Chow, Ray: on Foucault’s History of Sexuality, 178
citation: and aggression, 163; and femme-ness, 152; of Holiday by Harris, 2–5, 9, 15, 18–19
Clinton, George, 50
clitoris, 57–61; genital cutting, 191n50; myth of the black enlarged, 59–60
Color Purple, The (Walker), 139
commodities: commodification of black pain, 33; commodity fetishism (Marx), 156; the commodity’s scream (Moten), 165; people reduced to, 6, 107, 157; photographs from the Agassiz archive as, 111
consent, 34–36
consumption: in The Dinner Party (Chicago), 27–31; and mimesis, 164; in A Subtlety (Walker), 33–44
copyright: in Harvard’s threatened suit against Weems, 111–12
Corregidora (Jones), 139
Courbet, Gustave: The Origin of the World (1866), 21
Coxx, Papi, 75. See also Mommy is Coming (Dunye)
crafting: 129–30
Crawley, Ashon: on voice and religion, 117
Crush (Catbagan), 24–26, 144–45, 150–66
crying. See weeping
Cuvier, Georges, 59
daddies, leather, 82–86; and whiteness, 84–85
Dailey, Meghan: on rhinestones in the work of Thomas, 49
Daly, Mary, 112
da Silva, Denise Ferreira: on the body as Thing, 158–59; on Irigaray’s female lover, 176; on the subject and the Other, 13, 120
Davis, Betty, 50
Davis, Madeline: on femmes and subversion, 151
Deavere Smith, Anna: on Billie #21 (Harris), 4; on Harris, 3
Declue, Jennifer: on the erotics of the bottom in Mommy is Coming (Dunye), 83
de Lauretis, Teresa: on lesbianism and the mother, 75
Deleuze, Gilles, 178: becoming-woman, 3; criticism of, 185n9
depression: as a strategy of minoritarian critique, 122
desire: and accumulation and exchange, 164; for black men, 36; diaspora as a queer horizon produced by (Ellis), 114; female, 74; and the fetish, 154; to hear the self, to hear the other, and to be heard as the other hears us, 107; for the mother, 73–75, 171; “repetition of suffocated desire” in Billie Holiday’s singing (Moten), 1, 102; scopic, 10; space before, 74; and subjectivity, 7, 23; and Thingness (da Silva), 158
De Veaux, Alexis: on the spiritual voyages of Lorde, 112
deviance: and large clitorises, 59–60
Diderot, Denis: on acting and authenticity, 121
Dinner Party, The (Chicago), 21, 27–31, 186n1
diversity: as a tool to discipline subjects, 25
Doane, Mary Ann: on masquerade, 148
dolls: as eliciting racialized performances of violence, 98
domestic, the, 128–31; in Attack of the Fifty-Foot Woman, 146; in Crush (Catbagan), 152–58; in pulp, 146
Douglass, Frederick: Aunt Hester’s scream, 165
Doyle, Jennifer: on From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (Weems), 99; on Neapolitan (Bustamante), 128–32; on The Onion (Abramovic), 137; on the sensuous relationship between artist, art, and viewer, 16–17
drag, 147, 199n6: temporal, 55
dualism: Cartesian, 11–12
Duggan, Lisa: on femme identity, 152
Dunye, Cheryl: Mommy is Coming (2012), 22, 75–89
Dworkin, Andrea: on penetration, 73
Dyer, Richard, 160
eating, 14; of an onion in In Love (Chang), 138–40; of an onion in The Onion (Abramovic), 137–38; Tompkins’s analysis of, 28, 42
ecstasy: in Billie #21 (Harris), 1; and subjectivity, 7; suicidal (Bersani), 72, 77
Ellington, Duke, 100
Ellis, Nadia: on diaspora as a queer horizon, 114
endurance, 135–139
Eng, David, 22; on assimilation, 134; on diaspora, 113
erotic, the: for Doyle, 16; for Foucault, 11–12; and funk, 11; for Horton-Stallings, 12; and the labia, 28; Latina labor and, 90; for Lorde, 63; and the photographs of From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (Weems), 114
excess: affective, 124, 159, 164; anality in relation to the maternal body as, 77; in Billie Holiday’s voice, 1–2; that blackness produces (Scott), 82, 87; of a brown female body, 143; emotion, 123–24; flesh, 10; forms of embodiment, 3; and the gustatory, 70; of lack, 166; an open mouth suggesting, 1; ornamental, 128–29; parental affection, 133; of pleasure, 77; and the pornotrope, 9; productive, 24; responsiveness, 119, 125; sensation (jouissance), 13; the sensual as the space of, 16; sonic, 165; the spiritual and, 116; surface, 46–51; tears, 132; and the voice, 1–2, 115–16
family, 23; African American familial pathology, 139; fantasies of, 84–86; “reconfiguring the very notion of” (Johnson), 170; slavery’s violation of the norms of the psychoanalytic, 108; values, 138
Fanon, Frantz, 22; on black masculinity, 142; on stereotype and phobia, 155; on subjectivity, 106; on white women’s fantasies, 149–50
fantasy: and “excess flesh,” 10; of home, 110; of mother (for Lorde), 174; rape, 149–50; of the surface, 51; and the “weepie,” 132
feminine jouissance, 22, 73, 78–81, 87
feminine labor, 157–58
feminism: black, 32, 63; and The Dinner Party (Chicago), 186n1; feminist killjoys, 149; Gut Feminism (Wilson), 150; Hawk Swanson on, 69–70, 72; lesbian, 54–58, 61, 71, 75, 191n32, 193n22; orgasm and, 57–58; second wave, 56–57; and sexuality (Hollibaugh and Moraga), 71; white, 70–71, 92–93. See also womanism
femme, 150–53; and citation, 152; as “the queerest of queers” (Davis), 151. See also butch/femme dynamic
Ferguson, Roderick: on diversity, 25; on racialized labor, 7–8
fetishism: and black men, 155; and boundaries, 161; commodity (Marx), 156; and Crush (Catbagan), 25, 145, 153–56, 160–66; of desire, 166; and difference, 79; fetish videos, 153–55, 163–64; for Freud, 154; and ontological insecurity, 155; and the present, 124; racial (Amin), 200n32; and the “return” of the penis onto a woman’s body, 80, 154; and surface, 51–52; and transparency, 48; and white feminine misery, 25, 160
fingering: and the lesbian phallus, 91; as “a technique of knowing in art and performance” (Bradley), 16; in Untitled Fucking (Hawk Swanson / Ibarra), 70
Firestone, Shulamith: on motherhood, 167–68
fisting: in Mommy is Coming (Dunye), 82–83
Fleetwood, Nicole: on opacity and “excess flesh,” 10; on the visual manifestation of blackness, 97
flesh: excess, 10, 17; liquidity of, 29; location in space of, 38; mutability of, 14; regrowth of, 177; as the territory of the marginalized, 5; and time, 19; the transformation of black bodies into (Spillers), 5–6, 97
fleshiness: and the aesthetic, 16; of black bodies (and the materiality of the decorative), 50; and black femininity, 3; and brown jouissance, 3, 51; of chemistry, 44; of the instant, 18; of labor, 158–59; of materiality, 159; of the parental bond, 139; and pornotroping, 6–7, 9–12; and processes of objectification, 4, 7; and the production of selfhood, 4; and queer femininity, 178; of the surface, 55; and theorizing, 11; of the voice, 109, 115; Weems’s, 115; and witnessing, 103
Foucault, Michel: “bodies and pleasures,” 62; theorization of sexuality, 11–12, 23, 72–73, 178
Fraiman, Susan, 77
freedom: and fetishism, 155
Freeman, Elizabeth: on a fantasized original, 152; temporal drag, 55
Fresa y Chocolate (Gutiérrez Alea / Tabío), 24, 119, 122–25, 131–32, 141
Freud, Sigmund: on fetishism, 154, 156; and race, 22
friction: and the clitoris (tribbing), 57, 60–62; within feminism, 54–57; as a form of relationality and narcissism as a necessary form of self-creation, 22; frictional engagement and self-love, 64; and the vulva’s materiality, 48
From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (Weems), 23–24, 95–118
funk: erotics of (Horton-Stallings), 11–12, 44, 50–51; and rhinestones, 50; and tribbing, 62
Galison, Peter: “machine ideal,” 126
Garber, Linda: on the lesbian feminist, 56
gaze: and the black female body, 10, 46; male, 148; of the other, 34; scientific, 48
gentrification, 41
geopolitics, 38–39
Gerhard, Jane: on pleasure and liberation, 57–58; on the representation of Sojourner Truth in The Dinner Party (Chicago), 30; on the success of The Dinner Party (Chicago), 186n1
Getsy, David: on the sensuous relationship between artist, art, and viewer, 16–17
Gibson, Mel, 136
Gill, Lyndon: on the spiritual in the erotic, 197n58
Glissant, Édouard: on opacity, 14
God: Lacan’s belief (?) in, 95; Seboulisa (goddess), 113; and spiritual excess, 117
Gopinath, Gayatri: on queer diaspora, 113–14
Gopnik, Blake: on the work of Kara Walker, 32–33, 44
grief: in The Onion (Abramovic), 137; and racialization, 23–24; and sexuality, 119–20
Griffin, Farah Jasmine: on Billie Holiday as a circulating public figure, 2; If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery, 10
Guattari, Félix: becoming-woman, 3
guilt: and black bodies in pain, 35–36; in From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (Weems), 97–99, 105; and misery, 149; white, 89, 98
Gumbs, Alexis P.: on mothering as queer, 114–15
Gutiérrez Alea, Tomás. See Fresa y Chocolate (Gutiérrez Alea / Tabío)
Halberstam, Jack: on tribbing and female masculinity, 60
Halperin, David: How to Be Gay, 150
Harkins, Gillian: on incest memoirs, 138; on incest vs. natality, 178
Harlow, Lil, 75. See also Mommy is Coming (Dunye)
Harris, Lyle Ashton: Billie #21 (2002), 1–5, 9, 15, 18–19
Hart, Lynda: strap-on as “a real thing,” 80
Hartman, Saidiya: on the fungibility of blackness, 107; on the lost mother, 170
Hawk Swanson, Amber: Untitled Fucking (2013), 22, 69–72, 88–94
Hayes, Allison: 145
Hayot, Eric: on the coolie stereotype, 135–36
Heath, Stephen: on femininity’s relationship to artifice, 147
heels, high: in Crush (Catbagan), 24–25, 144, 152–55, 157, 165; in Untitled Fucking (Hawk Swanson / Ibarra), 70
Hemmings, Clare: on the lesbian feminist, 56
Hoang, Nyguen Tan: on bottoming, 83–84, 172
Holiday, Billie, 10, 15, 100; as signifier (in Billie #21), 4–5, 18–19; voice of, 1–2, 100–102, 109
Holland, Sharon Patricia: on the erotic, 197n58; on viscera and waste, 16
Hollibaugh, Amber, and Cherrie Moraga: on feminism and lesbianism, 71
Hong, Grace: on racial capital, 161; on workers of the global South, 162
Horton-Stallings, LaMonda: erotics of funk, 11–12; on sex work, 12
Hottentot Venus. See Baartman, Saartjie
Huffer, Lynne: on the catachrestic lips, 29; on motherhood, 167
hunger, 4–5, 9, 15, 40; as a form of brown jouissance, 18–19; and quiet, 106. See also appetite
“I”: affectable, 13, 120, 158; as core of mother-father-child triangle, 55, 173; “as other to itself” (Jones), 2; stable (evacuated), 29; in the title of From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (Weems), 102–3
Ibarra, Xandra: and camp, 11; Untitled Fucking (2013), 22, 69–72, 88–94
iconicity: of Billie Holiday, 2, 18
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Angelou), 138
imperialism, 89, 93, 160–61, 163
impermanence, 11
impossibility: of assimilation, 141; of a border between self and Other, 21, 29; and the coolie’s body, 135–36; and fetishism, 154; of gendered and raced neutrality, 3; of grappling with blackness in tandem with gender and agency, 6; of individuality, 169; and intimacy (in the Bataillean sense), 18; of mother and father as positions for the enslaved, 108; of remaining only on the surface (Stockton), 52; of the singular subject, 28; of sovereign subjectivity, 9; the Thing as a space of, 13; of thinking Oedipality in relation to blackness and brownness, 174
incest, 73–74, 76, 138–39, 143, 174, 178. See also Oedipus complex
In Love (Chang), 23–24, 119–21, 133–43, 163
instant, the, 18–19
interiority: and black intellectuals (for Spillers), 106; and drag, 147; and the labia, 28–29; and listening, 80; and opacity, 10, 13, 24, 102; restored, 108; and the subject, 120; and the surface, 49–53; and the voice, 95, 100–102, 106–7
intimacy, 7, 10, 18–19, 41–42, 68, 173; family, 77; and Neapolitan (Bustamante), 131; of the nose, 44
invisibility: and assimilation, 141; in Crush (Catbagan), 26, 145, 165–66; and femme identity, 151–52; and the mother, 167
Irigaray, Luce: and the denigration of the feminine, 39; on the feminist language of lips, 28–29, 37, 53; and the phallic economy, 38, 176; on spiritual excess, 117
Jagose, Annemarie: on Irigaray’s lips essay, 28
Jardine, Alice: criticism of Deleuze, 185n9
jazz: Harris’s series of self-portraits as (Deavere Smith), 3
Johnson, Barbara: on women and self-denial, 168
Johnson, E. Patrick: on “quare” vs. “queer,” 176–77; on queer kinship, 170
Johnson, Jessica Marie: on Walker’s Sugar Baby, 39–40
Johnson, Virginia. See Masters, William, and Virginia Johnson
Jones, Amelia: on performative self-portraits, 2
jouissance, 12–13; and anal sex, 72–73, 77; of being, 73–74, 87; beyond the word (Braunstein), 95; and the foreclosed mother, 87; and penetration, 77; of existing in the now, 127; and the voice (Barthes), 102, 116. See brown jouissance; feminine jouissance; phallic jouissance; “Spic Jouissance”
Keeling, Kara, 172
Keller, Yvonne: on lesbian pulp, 152
Kheshti, Roshanak: on listening as a loss of self, 79
Kim, Ju Yon: on Asian and Asian American performances of racialization, 135, 140
King, Tiffany Lethabo: on the relationship between slavery and white-settler colonialism, 8
kinship, 112–15, 173–74: and food, 138; and photography, 107–12
kissing: parents in In Love (Chang), 24, 119, 133, 141–43; and reading, 52–53
Klein, Melanie: on otherness and the infant, 168–69
knowledge: and the body, 11; new, 179; and possession, 59
Koedt, Anne: on sexuality and dissemination of physiological data, 57; on the vaginal orgasm, 58
Kristeva, Julia: on abjection, 87; on love for the mother and “the semiotic,” 73–74, 76
LA riots, 135
labial, the: 28–29; and materiality, 29, 48; and proprioception, 38; and vulnerability, 21, 28–29, 37. See also lips; vulva
Lacan, Jacques, 78; and belief in God, 95; on invocatory drive, 107; jouissance, 12–13, 73, 95; as one-time owner of The Origin of the World (Courbet), 46
La Chica Boom. See Ibarra, Xandra
Landers, Sean, 53–54
latex gloves: in Untitled Fucking (Hawk Swanson / Ibarra), 22, 89, 91–92
laughter: and guilt, 35; as a result of accidental mother-fucking, 76, 78; and suffering, 34
Lee, Rachel: on Hayot’s analysis of the coolie stereotype, 136
León, Christina: on the failure of some audiences to register Xandra Ibarra’s performances as camp, 11
Likierman, Meira: on introjection and projection in children, 168
Lindsey, Treva B.: on Walker’s Sugar Baby, 39–40
lips: in Billie #21 (Harris), 2, 4; feminist language of (Irigaray), 28–29, 37, 53; meaning of, 187n7. See also labial, the
liquidity, 14, 109; and brown jouissance, 117; and the face, 105; the labia as a marker of flesh’s, 29
listening: feminine jouissance as the jouissance of, 78–80; to photographs, 103, 114, 118; and topping, 22, 80, 89
loop, the, 24, 119, 121, 124–27, 137, 141–43
Lorde, Audre: on abuse, 34–35; on the erotic, 63, 66, 175; on kinship, 112–15, 173–74; and lesbian feminism, 55–56, 62, 176–77; on masturbation as a healing practice, 65; on political black lesbianism, 175; and womanism, 22, 53, 57; Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, 55, 112, 173–74, 177
Lowe, Lisa: on intimacy, 41–43
Luciano, Dana: on affect and sexuality, 23, 119–20; on sensation and the present, 124
MacKinnon, Catharine: on penetration, 73
Malone, Gloria: on patrons who posed with Walker’s Sugar Baby in a sexually suggestive manner, 34
mammy, 170, 187n15, 188nn17–19, 189n20; Walker’s Sugar Baby as, 31–33
Manalasan, Martin: on olfaction, 44
Mapplethorpe, Robert, 136
Marder, Elissa: maternal function, 109, 168, 201n4
Marriot, David: on fetishism, 154–55
Marx, Karl, 160, 165–66; commodity fetishism, 156
masochism: female, 137, 149–50; and masculinity, 136
masquerade, 146–49, 151, 154–55, 157
Masters, William, and Virginia Johnson, 57, 125–26
masturbation, 64–65; and Bustamante’s Neapolitan, 132, 143; as a healing practice (Lorde), 65; recorded by Masters and Johnson, 125–26
McElya, Micki: on the mammy, 32; on the myth of the faithful slave, 188n16
McHugh, Kathleen: on femme identity, 152
McMillan, Uri, 14; “objecthood,” 87–88
melancholy: of assimilation, 22, 134, 171; and gender incorporation (Butler), 147; and the maternal, 170–71; and misery, 147, 150
melodrama, 128, 131–32, 141, 198n36
melting: of the sugary blackamoors in Walker’s A Subtlety, 42–45
Memmi, Albert, 22
mimesis, 145, 162–64; and brown jouissance, 25
Mintz, Sidney: on appetite as a driving force in colonialism, 40
misery: into aggression, 153; and melancholy, 147, 150; white feminine, 25, 149–50, 153, 160
Modleski, Tania: on melodrama’s temporality, 132
Mommy Is Coming (Dunye), 22, 75–89
Moraga, Cherrie. See Hollibaugh, Amber, and Cherrie Moraga
Morgenson, Scott: settler sexuality, 8
Moten, Fred: on Billie Holiday’s voice, 1–2, 100–102, 109; on the commodity, 165; on the material and the maternal, 166, 170, 172; on photographs bearing “phonic substance,” 103, 172; on photography, 110, 114; on the resistance of the object, 171
mother, the, 167–79, 193n24: as absence, 170; “castrated,” 154; desire for, 73; as impossible, 108; and jouissance, 87; maternal breast, 168; maternal/material, 110; 166; maternal function (Marder), 109, 168, 201n4; MILF, 105, 193n23; m/Other, 73–76, 79, 169, 172; mothering (in From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried [Weems]), 24, 107–10, 114; motherland, 110; mother tongue, 102; photography as a silencing of the (Moten), 114; as a place, 172–73; and queer black sexuality, 55; and queer femininity, 167–68; and race, 170; “sodomitical maternity” (Nelson), 77; spatial relationship with (Lorde), 113. See also Oedipus complex
mourning: at the history of slavery and racism, 99; interrupted, 33; and the mother, 26, 109; Neapolitan (Bustamante) as Chicana, 121–22
mouth, the: in Billie #21 (Harris), 1; and consumption, 28, of the mother (Lorde), 174; and the voice, 116, 109, 116. See also lips
Mulvey, Laura: on “weepies,” 132
Muñoz, José Esteban, 114: on “brown feeling,” 10, 119, 123; on brown paranoia, 122; “Latino camp,” 128, 150; on Latinx affect, 124; melodrama in Neapolitan (Bustamante), 131; on queerness, 173; on subject/object oscillation, 127; whiteness as lack, 134
Murray, Yxta: on ownership and rights, 111–12
Nancy, Jean Luc: on feminine jouissance, 78; on listening, 80
narcissism: impersonal (Bersani and Phillips), 65–66; as self-creation, 22; the vulva’s materiality and, 48
Nash, Jennifer: on the black female body as an injured site, 98; on ethnography and pornography, 59; on love within black feminist thought, 63–64
Neapolitan (Bustamante), 23–24, 119–32, 141–43
Nelson, Maggie: “sodomitical maternity,” 77
Newton, Esther: on drag, 147, 199n6
Nixon, Angelique: on Lorde’s exploration of her identity and home through the maternal line, 174
nostalgia: in Thomas’s paintings, 53
Nyong’o, Tavia: on A Subtlety (Walker), 40–41, 43–44
Ochoa, Marcía: on viscera and waste, 16
Oedipus complex, 77, 171, 174: and the enslaved, 108; and the sovereign subject, 73; as a technology of domination, 8, 22–23
opacity, 10–16, 20–24, 29; and depression, 122; and excess surface, 46–51, 61; and the mother’s body, 169; of otherness, 29, 79; perverse, 143; of perversion, 139; of the photographic form, 114; of the present, 141; of sound, 100; and topping, 22; and tribbing, 62; and vulnerability, 51; of Weems, 103; of white femininity, 155
Origin of the Universe 1 (Thomas), 21–22, 46–68
Origin of the Universe 2 (Thomas), 66–68
Origin of the World, The (Courbet), 21, 46–48, 54, 57, 63
ornamentation, 48–49
otherness: and feminine jouissance, 78; hovering around Holiday and Harris, 15; lips and, 29; and the maternal breast, 168; opacity of, 29, 79; physical and biological radical openness toward, 5
Our Bodies, Ourselves, 64–65
Page, Betty, 70
panopticon, 97
Parisi, Luciana: on sex in the age of cybernetics, 125
Parreñas, Rhacel Salazar: on Filipino women as “the quintessential service workers of globalization,” 157–58
Parreñas Shimizu, Celine: on perversity and the bottoming of Annabel Chong, 134
part objects, 51
Pellegrini, Ann: on Riviere’s patient, 149–50
Pérez, Hiram: on the performing brown body, 36
Pérez, Roy: on relation and sensuality, 16
perversion: in In Love (Chang), 119, 133–43; in The Onion (Abramovic), 137; racialized perversity, 8, 24, 138; and segregation, 60
Pethes, Nicholas: on spirit photography, 118
phallic jouissance, 13, 22, 73, 78
phallocentrism, 38–39, 176, 178
phallus: lesbian, 81, 91; surrogate, 154. See strap-on
Phillips, Adam: impersonal narcissism, 65–66
photograph, the: as material instantiation of the instant, 18–19; spirit photography, 117–18; as a technology of embodiment (Jones), 2; as a technology of reproduction and mothering, 107–10; and violence, 97
pleasure: “bodies and pleasures” (Foucault), 62; body as an instrument of, 90; excess of, 77; of intimate familial power, 84–86; and jouissance, 13; and liberation, 57–58; and pain of black women, 2–3, 20; self-care and, 63; and slavery, 39, 85
Polaroid: as material instantiation of the instant, 18–19
pornography: as emphasizing anti-sociality and inauthentic feelings (Lorde), 56; and ethnography, 59; vs. fine art, 46–47
pornotroping, 5–13, 178; and abjection, 87; and femininity, 167; and grief, 23; and mothers/mothering, 170
possession: and desire, 7; and hunger, 15; of the Other, 79
power: in bed, 71, 90–91; and the female body, 158; through hot sauce, 70; and the individual (Schuller), 42; and penetration, 71–73
powerlessness: in being consumed, 37; and gender, 108; and pornotroping, 6
Powers, Nicholas: rage at the commodification of black pain, 33–34
prick. See phallus; punctum (Barthes)
proprioception, 27, 29–30, 36–38, 45
psychoanalysis: and gender, 108; and intersubjectivity, 23; and the maternal, 170–71; and race, 22. See also fetishism; Freud, Sigmund; Oedipus complex
Puar, Jasbir: on race and geopolitics, 38–39
pulp, 146, 163–64; lesbian, 152–53. See also camp
punctum (Barthes), 106
puncture: of Billie Holiday’s head with a gardenia’d hatpin, 1; of masculinity in submission and penetration, 72; punctum (Barthes), 106
Quashie, Kevin: on quiet, 106
queer: diaspora, 113–14; femininity, 26, 167–68, 176–78; sex, 60–61, 69–72, 82–83; value, 164
quiet, 106–7
Quiroga, José: on Fresa y Chocolate (Gutiérrez Alea / Tabío), 131
Ramos, Iván: on Untitled Fucking (Hawk Swanson / Ibarra), 69–70, 90
reading: empathetic, 17–18; and kissing, 52–53
repetition: and camp, 150; comfort of, 143; and gender, 108; in the semiotic, 74; “of suffocated desire” in Billie Holiday’s singing (Moten), 1; of violation of the black woman’s body, 34. See also loop, the
reproduction: affective (Weems), 164; and photography, 107–10; self-replication, 109
residue: national, 132; of the past within the present, 200n32; or race/racialization, 56, 90, 133; of self-determination, 58; Thomas’s emphasis on, 54–55, 61, 63
rhinestones: and funk, 50; as a record of a practice of self-love, 62; as vulvic embellishment, 21, 46–54, 190n12
Rich, Adrienne: de Lauretis on “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” 75
Riskin, Jessica: on the defecating duck, 120
Riviere, Joan: “Womanliness as Masquerade” (1929), 146–50, 157
Roach, Joseph: on acting and authenticity, 121
Roberts, Lacey Jane: on the queerness of crafting, 130
Rodríguez, Juana María: on queers and the erotic pleasure of intimate familial power, 84–86; on Untitled Fucking (Hawk Swanson / Ibarra), 69–70, 90
Rooney, Kara: on Walker’s Sugar Baby and black feminism, 32
Rusert, Britt: on fugitive science, 178–79
sacrifice: in Harris’s citation of Holiday, 4; and motherhood, 168
safer sex: as referenced in Untitled Fucking (Hawk Swanson / Ibarra), 91–92
San Pablo Burns, Lucy Mae: on mimesis and Filipinos, 162
Schuller, Kyla: on brown bodies as atavistic, 142; on power, 42; on women’s “hyperimpressibility,” 123
scissoring. See tribbing
Scott, Dareick: on abjection, 82, 85–86
scream, the, 165–66
Seboulisa, in “Dahomey” (Lorde), 113
Sedgwick, Eve: on anality and jouissance, 77
See, Sarita: on Filipino America, 160, 163
self-denial: and the mother, 168
selfhood: brown jouissance and the production of, 13; as collective and diasporic, 107; and consumption, 28; exceeding the “I,” 172; and gender (for Harris), 3; and hunger, 5; matrilineal, 54–55; permeable, 28, 37; plural self, 2–3, 5, 15, 17; strategic possibilities of, 2
self-love, 62–68
semiotic, the: for Kristeva, 74; location of blackness in, 81
sensuality, 20–21: and the aesthetic, 16–17; ambiguities afforded by, 93; and Billie #21 (Harris), 15; and blackness, 82, 87; and the captive body, 6, 9; and fleshiness, 178; and knowledge, 179; and the labial, 29; in Lorde’s work, 174–75, 177; and the maternal/reproductive, 76–77, 169–78; and Origin of the Universe 1 (Thomas), 55–57; outside of the penile and Oedipal, 91; and the paternal, 81; and perversion, 134; as political, 176; and relation, 16; sensual knowledge production, 65; of surface, 68; and Walker’s Sugar Baby, 37–44
Shimikawa, Karen: on foreignness and assimilation, 140–41
shine: in Billie #21 (Harris), 2–3; and the rhinestone, 48–50; the use of shine by black diasporic artists (Thompson), 50
Silver, Leigh: on the smell of the melting blackamoors in Walker’s A Subtlety, 44
Silverman, Kaja: on the mother and female desire, 74; on photography, 18
simulacrum: fetishist as operating within the realm of the, 154; lesbian-dicks as the ultimate, 80
Sly and the Family Stone, 50
smell: in A Subtlety (Walker), 21, 44; Lorde’s memory of, 173
Smith, Roberta: on Thomas’s use of quotation, 47; on Walker’s Sugar Baby as agential, 33
Society for Psychical Research (SPR), 118
Somerville, Siobhan: on large clitorises and deviance, 59
Sontag, Susan: on camp, 146, 150
spectatorship: and femininity, 148; and race, 23; and Walker’s A Subtlety installation, 33–36
speech: and interiority (Spillers), 106–7; poetic, 74; and sex, 89; the voice as that which exceeds mere, 95. See also voice
spiciness: stereotype of the “hot ’n’ spicy spic,” 124; in Untitled Fucking (Hawk Swanson / Ibarra), 69–70
“Spic Jouissance” (Ibarra): Tapatía as, 93
Spillers, Hortense, 168: on (the failures of) The Dinner Party (Chicago), 30–31; on interiority and speech, 106–7; on the native, 8; on pornotroping, 5–6, 97, 108, 167, 170; on psychoanalysis, 23, 108
spiritual, the: and the Black Pentecostal Church (Crawley), 117; and the diasporic, 117; spirit photography, 117–18; and tears, 118; and the voice, 115–18
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, 164; on the work of the infant as translation, 169
Stephens, Michelle: on desires to hear and be heard, 107
Stockton, Kathryn Bond: on kissing, 52–53
stomping: as an act of creation, 165–66; as a form of feminine agency, 151; as a rejection of domesticity, 152
strap-on: burrito in Indigurrito (Bustamente) as, 91; in Mommy is Coming (Dunye), 79; as “a real thing” (Hart), 80; Tapatío bottle in Untitled Fucking (Hawk Swanson / Ibarra) as, 22, 69, 89–93; as threatening (Butler), 81
subjectivity: and becoming flesh, 6; and desire, 23; and gender, 108; interiority as a balm against, 106; and masquerade, 148; sovereign, 5–6, 9, 12–15, 36–38, 45, 73; subject/object oscillation, 127, 142, 165
Subtlety, A (Walker), 21, 31–45, 146
Tabío, Juan Carlos. See Fresa y Chocolate (Gutiérrez Alea / Tabío)
Tadiar, Neferti X. M.: on mimesis and consumption, 164; on whiteness, 160–62
Takagi, Dana: on the visibility of racial identity, 38
Tapatía, 69; as “Spic Jouissance,” 93
Tapatío bottle: as strap-on in Untitled Fucking (Hawk Swanson / Ibarra), 22, 69, 89–93
Tapert, Maggie, 75. See also Mommy is Coming (Dunye)
teeth: in Billie #21 (Harris), 1–2
theory: and the body, 9, 11, 17, 176–77
Thingness: 13; and agency, 88; of black and brown flesh, 158–59; of Harris’s flesh, 15; as a space of impossibility, 13; strap-on as “a real thing,” 80–81; and surface, 49–50
Thomas, Mickalene: Origin of the Universe 1 (2012), 21–22, 46–68; Origin of the Universe 2 (2012), 66–68
Thompson, Krista: on the use of shine by black diasporic artists, 50
Thompson, Malik: on Walker’s A Subtlety and becoming-spectacle, 35–36
Thompson, Nato: on Walker’s A Subtlety, 40
time: being in, 19; and decay, 42–45; fetishization of the moment, 124; and melodrama, 132; reverse temporality in Chang’s In Love, 138–43. See also loop, the
Tompkins, Kyla Wazana, 14; analysis of eating, 42; on “quare” and materiality, 177; on viscera and waste, 16
topping: as deep listening, 22, 80, 89; in Untitled Fucking (Hawk Swanson / Ibarra), 70, 72, 89–92. See also bottoming
toys: and noise, 165; and waste, 156, 162
translation, 38; the work of the infant as (Spivak), 169
Traub, Valerie: on tribbing, 60
tribbing, 60–62
trinkets, plastic: used in Crush (Catbagan), 156; used in A Subtlety (Walker), 42–43. See also toys
Truth, Sojourner: as represented in The Dinner Party (Chicago), 30
Ulysses (technologically enhanced dildo), 125–26
Untitled Fucking (Hawk Swanson / Ibarra), 22, 69–72, 88–94
Vaccaro, Jeanne: on crafting, 130
vagina: as void (in Courbet’s The Origin of the World), 57
vajazzling, 190n12
value: queer, 164; violence and, 161
Venus Hottentot. See Baartman, Saartjie
vibrator, 125–28, 198n22; emotional, 124, 132
Viego, Antonio: on the untranslatability of traditional Latino maladies, 124
violence: individuality as the product of, 169; and photography, 97; and pornotroping, 6; and the self, 68; and sexuality, 7; and value, 161
virality: and brown jouissance, 25; and value, 164; viral videos, 163–64
visual: manifestation of blackness, 97; primacy of the, 38; quotation, 47
voice: of Billie Holiday, 1–2, 100–102, 109; excess and the, 1–2, 115–16; grain of the, 102, 109, 116; and interiority, 95, 100–102, 106–7; and the spiritual, 115–18
vulnerability: and anal sex, 83; and Billie #21 (Harris), 5; of bodies within racist and patriarchal hierarchies, 61; and the breath, 166; emasculation, 81; and the labial, 21, 28–29, 37; and opacity, 51; as part of “a real life,” 78; and the Polaroid, 19; and quiet, 106; and suffering, 136; the underside of fantasies of omnipotence, 169; and YouTube virality, 163–64
vulva: the black, 20–21, 27, 33, 46–48, 51; and The Dinner Party, 30; that eats / is eaten, 28; and tribbing, 61; of Walker’s Sugar Baby, 33
Walker, Alice, 32, 58; The Color Purple, 139; on womanism, 55–56, 64, 68
Walker, Kara: A Subtlety (2014), 21, 31–45, 146
Wallis, Brian: on Weems’s From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, 105
Walton, Jean: on Riviere’s patient, 149–50
waste, 16; plastic as, 43, 156; production of, 161–62, 164–66
Watts, Stephanye: on being enraged by certain other attendees at Walker’s A Subtlety installation, 33–34
Weeks, Kathi: on feminine labor, 157
Weems, Carrie Mae: From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995–1996), 23–24, 95–118
weeping: on cue, 121; from emotional impact, 34; in In Love (Chang), 110, 136–42; invoked by Weems’s From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, 99; in Neapolitan (Bustamante), 110–28, 131–32; in The Onion (Abramovic), 137; as performance, 24, 121; and photography, 103; out of rage, 33; as referenced in the title of Weems’s From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, 98–99, 103–5
Weheliye, Alex: on desire and pornotropic enfleshment, 7; on hunger, 4–5, 40; on violence and the pornotrope, 9
Wesling, Meg: on “queer value,” 164
Westbrook, Lindsey: on Neapolitan (Bustamante) as Chicana mourning, 121–23
white supremacy: and the production of blackness and brownness, 8; and the production of flesh, 6
Williams, Linda: on tribbing, 60; on visibility and female sexuality, 46–47
Wilson, Elizabeth: on feminine aggression, 150
Wilson, Jackie Napolean: Hidden Witness, 96, 102
Wilson Bryan, Julia: on craft, 130
Wittig, Monique: on lesbians vs. women, 58
“Womanliness as Masquerade” (Riviere), 146–50, 157
Woodward, Vincent: on cannibalism in slave culture in the United States, 36
World’s Biggest Gangbang, The, 134, 137
Worley, Jennifer: on lesbian pulp, 152
woundedness, 23–24, spectacularization of,
Wright, Michelle: on Lorde’s deployment of diaspora, 113
“yes, and”: and Afropessimism, 9
“you”: devoured through the mouth (in Lorde’s “Meet”), 175; use of in Weems’s From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, 99–100, 108
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Lorde), 55, 112, 173–74, 177