Books by Amber Jamilla Musser
"A lively and enlightening contribution to queer studies, investigating affect and embodiment as ... more "A lively and enlightening contribution to queer studies, investigating affect and embodiment as avenues for the radical reinvigoration of how we experience and think about raced, gendered, and sexualized subjectivities. Masterful in her engagement with queer, feminist, and psychoanalytic theory and their historical contexts, Musser provides incisive analyses that make for exhilarating and highly informative reading."
—Darieck Scott, author of Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary
Part of the Sexual Cultures Series
E-book also available.
In everyday language, masochism is usually understood as the desire to abdicate control in exchange for sensation—pleasure, pain, or a combination thereof. Yet at its core, masochism is a site where power, bodies, and society come together. Sensational Flesh uses masochism as a lens to examine how power structures race, gender, and embodiment in different contexts.
Drawing on rich and varied sources—from 19th century sexology, psychoanalysis, and critical theory to literary texts and performance art—Amber Jamilla Musser employs masochism as a powerful diagnostic tool for probing relationships between power and subjectivity. Engaging with a range of debates about lesbian S&M, racialization, femininity, and disability, as well as key texts such as Sacher-Masoch’sVenus in Furs, Pauline Réage’s The Story of O, and Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality, Musser renders legible the complex ways that masochism has been taken up by queer, feminist, and critical race theories. Furthering queer theory’s investment in affect and materiality, she proposes “sensation” as an analytical tool for illustrating what it feels like to be embedded in structures of domination such as patriarchy, colonialism, and racism and what it means to embody femininity, blackness, and pain. Sensational Flesh is ultimately about the ways in which difference is made material through race, gender, and sexuality and how that materiality is experienced.
Amber Jamilla Musser is Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality studies at Washington University in St. Louis.
Papers by Amber Jamilla Musser
Cultural Critique, Mar 1, 2022
None Like Us begins with a story of familial cleavage. Though he does not explicitly delve into i... more None Like Us begins with a story of familial cleavage. Though he does not explicitly delve into its contours, Stephen Best describes a graduation dinner that reveals (to him) a distance between him and his father. Another attendee describes this separation (on the part of father) as having been born from a conflict between pride and disgust— the father is proud of his son’s success, but it also announces an unassimilable difference between the two. Best likens this to an injunction to community within Black studies, which he describes as not only uncomfortable but problematic: “the feeling that I am being invited to long for the return of a sociality that I never had, one from which I suspect (had I ever shown up) I might have been excluded” (1). This narrative is meant to explain Best’s project, which is to decouple Black studies’ relationship between the archive and community. However, this is not just any archive but that of the transatlantic slave trade, which has traditionally undergirded the idea of a Black diaspora, a term that itself has been understood to refer not only to a shared history but to common cultural, aesthetic, and religious practices. Best bristles not only at the mandate to think with slavery when thinking about Blackness but also the assumption that this history provides a useful form of commonality. Ultimately, Best aims to uncover and work with a productive version of negation: “This coveted alienation would entail a gesture best parsed as a kind of doubled movement: away from the ‘clenched little
Differences, May 1, 2023
Written in 1987 in response to the aids emergency unfolding in the United States, Leo Bersani’s “... more Written in 1987 in response to the aids emergency unfolding in the United States, Leo Bersani’s “Is the Rectum a Grave?” is often described as an early entry into the strain of queer theory that offers queerness as tarrying in abjection, failure, and antisociality. This essay, however, is much more interested in thinking about the ways Bersani mobilizes connections to femininity in “Is the Rectum a Grave?” As Bersani moves from “women and gay men” to “average, law-abiding family” to “being a woman,” femininity haunts, each of these individual nodes further illuminating an insight about femininity with and without women.
New York University Press eBooks, Nov 21, 2021
New York University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2020
<p>This chapter delves more deeply into the matter of the black vulva in arguing for a reva... more <p>This chapter delves more deeply into the matter of the black vulva in arguing for a revaluation of narcissism, friction, and superficiality by dwelling on Mickalene Thomas's use of rhinestones as excessive decorations in <italic>The Origin of the Universe</italic> (2012). A reimagining of Gustave Courbet's infamous headless, nude portrait of a woman, <italic>Origin of the World</italic> (1866), Thomas's work positions rhinestone-embellished genitals in the center of the frame. This chapter argues that Thomas's painting offers a meditation on Audre Lorde's matrilineal womanism while also allowing us to think with the idea of surface within the medium of painting. Both this calling forth of 1970s- 1980s black lesbian feminism and the textures of the surface bring forth friction as a form of relationality and narcissism as a necessary form of self-creation. Brown jouissance, this chapter argues, inheres in the excesses of surface that the painting presents.</p>
Duke University Press eBooks, Nov 19, 2016
Intellect Books, Mar 8, 2020
New York University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2020
New York University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2020
New York University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2020
<p>This chapter focuses on the sculpted vulvas of Judy Chicago's <italic>The Dinn... more <p>This chapter focuses on the sculpted vulvas of Judy Chicago's <italic>The Dinner Party</italic> (1979) and Kara Walker's <italic>A Subtlety</italic> (2014) in order to draw out some of the issues that underlie the representational politics that surround the black vulva. Though these installations diverge in many ways, this chapter argues that they enable a meditation on the possibility of Luce Irigaray's permeable, dialogic selfhood—selves that illustrate the impossibility of a border between self and Other—rendering porosity and the labial as important for an ethics of mutual vulnerability. Yet this chapter also cautions against forgetting asymmetries of power. Reading across the installations and the controversy over Walker's installation in particular forces us to acknowledge that the differences between pleasure in vulnerability and the sensation of racial violation are related to the differences between the structures of our epistemologies of gender and race. Dwelling on the sensuality that inheres in <italic>A Subtlety</italic>, however, offers a way to reorient porosity by thinking with the dimension of smell as one site of the installation's excess. The scalar, in turn, allows us to imagine formulations of brown jouissance in relation to fleshiness that exceeds the individual in multiple directions.</p>
New York University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2020
New York University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2020
New York University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2020
Social Text, Jun 1, 2023
This article performs a close reading of an advertisement of Fenty Beauty's Body Lava featuri... more This article performs a close reading of an advertisement of Fenty Beauty's Body Lava featuring Rihanna in order to tease apart the imbrications of celebrity, sexuality, blackness, and labor by using an analytic of sweat. Since sweat is secreted by the body, this article is particularly interested in its relationship to enfleshment and what it tells us about the material aspects of black ecologies. Working through how and where sweat surfaces and doesn't in this image of Rihanna offers a way to unpack the utility of sweat as an analytic. Sweat offers insight into why shine connotes both work and sex while also giving us a way move beyond shine and toward sweating and the intimacies offered by porosity.
What is so dangerous about black female sexuality? Through an examination of the !gure of the bla... more What is so dangerous about black female sexuality? Through an examination of the !gure of the black female masochist, this talk probes the particular historical feelings that act as a barrier to considerations of black female sexual agency. Beyond this diagnostic moment, the talk also asks how Kara Walker’s controversial sugar sphinx deepens our understanding of these a"ective connections and how might it open new paths toward queerness.
Feminist Media Histories, 2021
This essay analyzes two African artifacts—a nkisi and a bieri—in order to parse the utility of li... more This essay analyzes two African artifacts—a nkisi and a bieri—in order to parse the utility of liquidity as a Black feminist analytic. Enlarging the concept of media to incorporate these artifacts, the text links diaspora, blackness, and affect to the violence of colonial rupture, while also using an analytic of sweat to explore forms of expressivity that escape capture. Sweat becomes a way to think between two axes within Black feminist thought: the pornographification of the racialized body that Hortense Spillers and others have described, and the joy and critique embedded in Audre Lorde’s erotic, especially in relation to formations of diaspora and spirituality.
Journal of Popular Music Studies, Mar 1, 2022
Sensual Excess
This chapter analyzes Carrie Mae Weems’s photographic installation From Here I Saw What Happened ... more This chapter analyzes Carrie Mae Weems’s photographic installation From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995–1996) as a performance of witnessing in which Weems restores voice to the archive of portraits that she reprints. While Weems’s installation has been read as trafficking in woundedness, this chapter argues that thinking photography as a technology of reproduction allows us to see Weems’s work as enlarging concepts of diaspora and mothering while also insisting on the opacity of interiority. This chapter positions this form of the maternal in conversation with Audre Lorde’s expansive concept of diaspora. Here, the concept of brown jouissance allows us to reimagine the work that is going on in this piece of art. It enables us to theorize witnessing and photography as fleshy enactments of spiritual resistance and to re-imagine possibilities of black gendering.
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Books by Amber Jamilla Musser
—Darieck Scott, author of Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary
Part of the Sexual Cultures Series
E-book also available.
In everyday language, masochism is usually understood as the desire to abdicate control in exchange for sensation—pleasure, pain, or a combination thereof. Yet at its core, masochism is a site where power, bodies, and society come together. Sensational Flesh uses masochism as a lens to examine how power structures race, gender, and embodiment in different contexts.
Drawing on rich and varied sources—from 19th century sexology, psychoanalysis, and critical theory to literary texts and performance art—Amber Jamilla Musser employs masochism as a powerful diagnostic tool for probing relationships between power and subjectivity. Engaging with a range of debates about lesbian S&M, racialization, femininity, and disability, as well as key texts such as Sacher-Masoch’sVenus in Furs, Pauline Réage’s The Story of O, and Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality, Musser renders legible the complex ways that masochism has been taken up by queer, feminist, and critical race theories. Furthering queer theory’s investment in affect and materiality, she proposes “sensation” as an analytical tool for illustrating what it feels like to be embedded in structures of domination such as patriarchy, colonialism, and racism and what it means to embody femininity, blackness, and pain. Sensational Flesh is ultimately about the ways in which difference is made material through race, gender, and sexuality and how that materiality is experienced.
Amber Jamilla Musser is Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality studies at Washington University in St. Louis.
Papers by Amber Jamilla Musser
—Darieck Scott, author of Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary
Part of the Sexual Cultures Series
E-book also available.
In everyday language, masochism is usually understood as the desire to abdicate control in exchange for sensation—pleasure, pain, or a combination thereof. Yet at its core, masochism is a site where power, bodies, and society come together. Sensational Flesh uses masochism as a lens to examine how power structures race, gender, and embodiment in different contexts.
Drawing on rich and varied sources—from 19th century sexology, psychoanalysis, and critical theory to literary texts and performance art—Amber Jamilla Musser employs masochism as a powerful diagnostic tool for probing relationships between power and subjectivity. Engaging with a range of debates about lesbian S&M, racialization, femininity, and disability, as well as key texts such as Sacher-Masoch’sVenus in Furs, Pauline Réage’s The Story of O, and Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality, Musser renders legible the complex ways that masochism has been taken up by queer, feminist, and critical race theories. Furthering queer theory’s investment in affect and materiality, she proposes “sensation” as an analytical tool for illustrating what it feels like to be embedded in structures of domination such as patriarchy, colonialism, and racism and what it means to embody femininity, blackness, and pain. Sensational Flesh is ultimately about the ways in which difference is made material through race, gender, and sexuality and how that materiality is experienced.
Amber Jamilla Musser is Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality studies at Washington University in St. Louis.