Sensual Excess

Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance

Amber Jamilla Musser

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781479886517
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Feminismo y teoría feminista

Reimagines black and brown sensuality to develop new modes of knowledge production In Sensual Excess, Amber Jamilla Musser imagines epistemologies of sensuality that emerge from fleshiness. To do so, she works against the framing of black and brown bodies as sexualized, objectified, and abject, and offers multiple ways of thinking with and through sensation and aesthetics. Each chapter draws our attention to particular aspects of pornotropic capture that black and brown bodies must always negotiate. Though these technologies differ according to the nature of their encounters with white supremacy, together they add to our understanding of the ways that structures of domination produce violence and work to contain bodies and pleasures within certain legible parameters. To do so, Sensual Excess analyzes moments of brown jouissance that exceed these constraints. These ruptures illuminate multiple epistemologies of selfhood and sensuality that offer frameworks for minoritarian knowledge production which is designed to enable one to sit with uncertainty. Through examinations of installations and performances like Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, Kara Walker’s A Subtlety, Patty Chang’s In Love and Nao Bustamante’s Neapolitan, Musser unpacks the relationships between racialized sexuality and consumption to interrogate foundational concepts in psychoanalytic theory, critical race studies, feminism, and queer theory. In so doing, Sensual Excess offers a project of knowledge production focused not on mastery, but on sensing and imagining otherwise, whatever and wherever that might be.

1

Eating Out

The Labial, Consumption, and the Scalar

The black vulva is mired in a complex representational conundrum. On the one hand, its absence, which we see most clearly and poignantly in Judy Chicago’s installation The Dinner Party (1979), illuminates the problematic erasure of black women from schemas of sexuality. On the other hand, its presence—as looming and sugar-coated—in Kara Walker’s A Sublety (2014), has generated its own set of anxieties. This chapter asks how we might begin to think the black vulva by focusing not only on the intimacies and selfhoods produced by the labial, but on the ways that thinking with race and fleshiness through a discourse on proprioception forces us to attend to power asymmetries.

The Dinner Party asks us to dwell on consumption. On permanent display in the Brooklyn Museum, Chicago’s installation imagines a dinner party between important women in history. Each woman has an embroidered runner, gold chalice, utensil, and china-painted porcelain plate. Chicago’s display has earned a prominent place within feminist art; it is noteworthy for recognizing women’s varied contributions to society and for drawing on an intensely collaborative practice—many people worked together on the installation to conduct research, craft the materials, and get the piece displayed again after it stopped being shown in museums in the early 1980s.1 On the one hand, the installation enables us to consume information about these women so that we create a new tapestry of history. On the other, it allows viewers to imagine these women as consumers through its explicit centering of eating.

These alimentary aspects are often subsumed by the plates’ suggestion of the vulval, which Chicago achieves through color and ceramic folds—rendering vaginal lips abstractly enough to reference the individuality of each woman and literally enough so that visitors understand that they also reference vulvas. The installation’s fusion of consumption and genitalia provides an opportunity to meditate on the erotic charge of the labia. Arguing that “eating functions as a metalanguage for genital pleasure itself,” Kyla Wazana Tompkins calls for queer alimentarity to “signal the alignment between oral pleasure and other forms of nonnormative desire.”2 Further, Tompkins encourages us to privilege consumption, which is the work that the mouth performs, so that we can “theorize a flexible and circular relation between the self and the social world in order to imagine a dialogic in which we—reader and text, self and other, animal and human—recognize our bodies as vulnerable to each other in ways that are terrible—that is full of terror—and, at other times, politically productive.”3 The consumptive pleasures that The Dinner Party brings forth—that of a vulva that eats, eating a vulva, or having one’s vulva eaten—require that we pay attention to the porous relation between self and other that consumption produces. Specifically, it requires that we pay heed to the labia and its role in producing a porous boundary between interior and exterior and self and other. Instead of possession, an economy of the labial speaks to mutuality, receptivity, and vulnerability.

Most explicitly, this labial economy invites us to think with Luce Irigaray’s feminist language of lips, which act as an ambiguous beacon for a nonphallocentric position. “When Our Lips Speak Together,” a stream-of-conscious dialogue between lips, waivers between the you/ I/we positions in order to produce a discourse (perhaps an ethics) on receptivity and mutual vulnerability. One of the main themes of the essay is the impossibility of the singular subject: “Between our lips, yours and mine, several voices, several ways of speaking resound endlessly, back and forth. One is never separable from the other. You/I: we are always several at once.”4 This plurality—what I call permeable selfhood—in turn, enables pleasure and mobility through its valorization of porosity: “We shall pass imperceptibly through every barrier, unharmed, to find each other. . . . For a long time now they have appreciated what our suppleness is worth for their own embraces and impressions. Why not enjoy it ourselves?”5 As Annemarie Jagose notes, Irigaray’s essay waivers between “an autoeroticism, a pre-Oedipal, and therefore precultural and prediscursive, undifferentiation from the mother, and, finally, a female homosexuality.”6 I suggest that we interpret Irigaray’s essay as a performance of the refusal of fixity, a performance of dialogism in excess.7 In the ambiguity that Irigaray announces we can see the possibility of jouissance in the way that the labia mobilize oscillations between interiority and exteriority and subject and object. This is to say that the labia function as a marker of flesh’s liquidity—formulated here through conversational excess—because they call attention to the movement and materiality of the body while also evacuating a stable “I.” Lynne Huffer argues that this refusal of stability offers the basis for an ethics: “The catachrestic lips . . . articulate an ethics of relation that differentiates them from the pure negativity of queer antisociality. For it is in their catachrestic, heterotopian attempt to speak otherwise that the lips are simultaneously here and elsewhere, now and not now: not a pinned-down figure of the Other of the Same, but a hovering, catachrestic Other’s Other.”8 What Huffer stresses is that the lips exist only and always as relation. In and of themselves, they do not index anything particular, but they stand for the Other, its opacity, and the importance of this difference in thinking ethics and pleasure. Irigaray, Huffer argues, inscribes alterity as “a nonprocreative, sensible transcendental ethics of eros.”9 Read through Huffer, Irigaray gives us a way to think about the labial as a relationship of sensuality, vulnerability, difference, and indifference—since the permeable self makes it impossible to truly separate self and Other.

However, there is more to the labial than dialogical excess, vulnerability, and relation; there is also materiality. While the labial is something that exists in the space between bodies, this labial economy emphasizes a dialogic formation of self that operates in and through proprioception. Proprioception, the feeling of being oriented in space, brings together Sara Ahmed’s discussion of orientation as a turn toward something with a spatial mode of thinking fleshiness.10 It allows us to ask what it means to mobilize the oscillation between touching/not touching in conjunction with categories of social difference. Emphasizing the labial in relation to proprioception means thinking with the array of sensations that embed the lips within social dynamics. When we configure this in relation to Irigaray’s lips touching, the swell and heat of arousal, a turn toward perhaps, might amplify certain forms of touch while making others painful. Likewise, a turning away might reduce the space between lips, impacting porosity. This is to say that these questions of psyche, which I will discuss in relation to appetite rather than desire, have material consequences. They illustrate that not all conversations are the same, nor do they take place on equal footing. To truly consider the dialogic self, one must attend to the asymmetries of appetite and power. Here, turning to one of the failures of Chicago’s The Dinner Party is instructive because we can see what happens when proprioception is left out of the picture.

While Chicago’s installation helps us grapple with the concept of relation and mutual vulnerability, it has surprisingly little to say about differing access to consumption and the fleshiness of turning toward consumption. In part this is because despite its emphasis on the formal dimensions of eating, we must extrapolate appetite from absent mouths. But, much of this, I think, has to do with the installation’s difficulty grappling with race. It is telling, I think, that Chicago’s installation elides the representational conundrum of black female sexuality. The only black woman at the table, Sojourner Truth, is represented by one of only two plates without vulval imagery. In a now defunct FAQ section of her website, Chicago describes the plates: “‘Sojourner Truth’ . . . is based upon African masks to honor her African-American heritage and ‘Ethel Smyth’ . . . is a piano whose lid threatens to compress the form.”11 Importantly, Chicago uses the existence of these plates to argue that The Dinner Party does not collapse every woman it features into a vulva. In historicizing Chicago’s choice, Jane Gerhard writes, “Chicago’s (naïve) assertion is, nonetheless, her heartfelt attempt to bridge differences among women by emphasizing the discrimination they face because of their shared female bodies. This reading of history, however, depends on viewers not seeing the reality of Truth’s racialized body. Given the symbolism of the vulva as representing unity among women, Truth’s lack of a central core image translates poorly. If central cores represent real selves, what or where is the truth of Truth?”12 Gerhard’s assertion that The Dinner Party uses vulval imagery to suture a feminist relation between self, sexuality, and agency allows us to see how Chicago’s choice of alternate imagery for Sojourner Truth’s plate is a manifestation of the lack of discourse, feminist and otherwise, around black woman as sexual agents—the continued relevance of Truth’s plaintive declaration “Ain’t I a Woman” is poignantly on display here. By being left out of the vulval representational schema, Truth becomes a public self, a representative of her race rather than a body in possession of appetites and pleasures. We cannot even begin to imagine how Truth might orient herself, what she might hunger for, or what might bring her pleasure. Hortense Spillers takes Chicago’s omission as symptomatic of mis-seen and unvoiced black women, writing, “By effacing the genitals, Chicago not only abrogates the disturbing sexuality of her subject, but also hopes to suggest that her sexual being did not exist to be denied in the first place.”13 This absence is symptomatic of the paucity of frameworks for grappling with black female sexuality, and it highlights the importance of thinking about the multiple hierarchies at work within the concept of relation and the permeable self. As we see in Chicago’s failure to incorporate Truth’s vulva into The Dinner Party, race—blackness in this case—becomes an unassimilable fleshy difference that disrupts the fantasy of a labial order of egalitarian pleasure, consumption, and mutuality.

The reception of Kara Walker’s 2014 installation, At the behest of Creative Time Kara E. Walker has confected: A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant, offers another case study to think about the fraught relationship between blackness and sexuality. Here, the presence of the black vulva disrupts because it illustrates the difficulty of seeing black women outside the realm of the consumable. Walker was commissioned by Creative Time studio to produce a piece to commemorate the July 2014 demolition of the Domino Sugar factory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Her installation had two main components: the “Sugar Baby,” a thirty-five-foot tall woman-sphinx made out of sugar-coated Styrofoam, positioned at one end of the factory, and her attendants, thirteen five-foot tall boys “confected” from molten sugar, which dotted the factory floor. Walker erected these figures to illuminate the complicated imbrications of sugar, race, and American capitalism. The Domino factory itself has a particularly fraught history in relation to different phases of capitalism. It was built in 1882, refined 50 percent of the sugar in the United States in the 1890s, and was the site of one of the longest labor disputes in New York City in the 2000s.14 The Sugar Baby and her attendants offer a reminder of the black and brown lives lost in the service of making sugar while simultaneously evoking other histories of exploited labor—including the specter of Egyptian slave labor. These bodies and histories circulate through the exhibit, but the controversy focused on the Sugar Baby or Sphinx, whom Walker styled, using a headscarf, as a mammy.

Generally regarded as ideological construct rather than actual historical personage, the mammy has been cast as a loyal worker whose domestic care for the plantation family is symptomatic of a cozy interraciality that erases (or cannot incorporate) racist violence against slaves and other blacks in favor of imagining that her black motherly care brings racial harmony.15 Micki McElya argues that the idea of the mammy’s fidelity to the family that owned her served as a balm against the reality of tense relations between black and white Americans.16 The mammy’s particular role was to be accommodating, affectionate, and servile in order to facilitate white domestic idyll, thereby erasing her role as slave in favor of remembering her as quasi-kin.17 As a maternal surrogate and slave, much of the mammy’s work required tending intimately to the bodies of others.18 As keeper of the hearth and the domestic warmth that it implied, the mammy offered her physical labor in the service of food to produce home.19 This set of crossings registers the reliance of white comfort on black affective labor and the particular commodification of the black body into something edible. In revealing that the white appetite for black sweetness, labor, and sex underlies the production of domesticity, the mammy’s smile cloaks a destructive history. It is this subversive edge that has made the mammy ripe territory for radical reappropriation by Walker and others.20

In keeping with the mammy’s ability to soothe, white critics interpreted Walker’s Sugar Baby as a triumphant model of black womanhood. Kara Rooney hints at this narrative of redemption when she draws connections between the Sugar Baby and black feminism. She asks Walker, “Does this New World sphinx—what sounds like a veritable femme-fatale—relate in any way to the black feminist literature that emerged in the ’70s, initiated by Alice Walker, for example, or is it something more visceral and personal?”21 Behind Rooney’s question is the suggestion that the Sugar Baby may be a mammy, but she behaves as a queen—commanding respect because she appears to channel the pharaohic energy of the Egyptian sphinxes. Writing in the New York Times, Blake Gopnik registers important differences between Walker’s earlier work and the Sugar Baby: “One set of silhouettes is easy to confuse with another, whereas the ‘Marvelous Sugar Baby’ is unlike any of them.”22 Elaborating on this observation, he writes, “With her earlier work, even her supporters conceded that the recurring antihero of Ms. Walker’s work—known as “the Negress”—had never had true control of her fate. But with Ms. Walker’s Negress-as-sphinx, that underdog may have at last become the unbeatable overcat. . . . The figure may be wearing a mammie’s kerchief, but she’ll never be beaten into submission.”23 Roberta Smith’s review of the installation, also for the New York Times, takes similar pleasure in describing the Sugar Baby as agential, especially in relation to the redemptive narrative of the black mother as originary, powerful, and wise.24

This was not the universal narrative, however. When the exhibit opened to the public, some patrons felt that the mammy figure served to represent the violence of consumption and mirrored their own unpleasant experiences of racialized commodification within the installation. Many visitors criticized the work (and the public response to it) as disrespectful and problematic because of Walker’s decision to show the Sugar Baby’s vulva, which, in turn, brought up the specter of violated, which is to say penetrated, blackness.25 Throughout the course of the installation, patrons narrated offense and anger at other patrons’ behavior online. Nicholas Powers’s essay, “Why I Yelled at the Kara Walker Exhibit,” describes feeling “rage” at the commodification of black pain. He writes: “So here it was, an artwork about how Black people’s pain was transformed into money was a tourist attraction for them. A few weeks ago, I had gone to the 9/11 museum and no one, absolutely no one, posed for smiling pictures in front of the wreckage.”26 Stephanye Watts also describes feeling enraged by other people’s responses when her mourning is interrupted: “I obviously didn’t expect to start crying, but it happened and I le...