Beautifully Incomplete, Abject Objects: Studies of Racialized Gender, Desire, and the Power of the Aesthetic

Abstract

Building on the methodology of critical fabulation that she developed in “Venus in Two Acts,” Hartman eschews the voice of the knowing analyst and embraces instead an inspired prose that emerges from an intoxication with and love for the misfits who appear in the diary entries of white women researchers and landlords, newspaper accounts, and the studies of figures like the sociologist W E B Du Bois as problems to be solved 1 Rather than attempt to fill in the gaps to theorize the absence of Black women and queers, or to “correct” these framings, she instead conjures the fullness of their lives through evocative storytelling and artistic, conceptual use of newspaper clippings and photographs The book lovingly follows the movements of nameless women and girls whose traces emerge in sociological graphs and voyeuristic photos, and engages the lives of public figures and entertainers such as Bentley and Edna Thomas The rhinestones that bedazzle Thomas’s splayed vulva, positioned centrally in the frame, at once amplify the ascribed sexual otherness of Black women while generating opacity by screening the body with ornament and arousing a tactile relationship to the representation that complicates racialized gendered visuality Musser reads Thomas’s Origin of the Universe 1 (2012) as “a continuation of feminist projects to use tactile explorations of one’s body as a technology for subverting the scientific/pornographic gaze’s will to know and empowering the self” (65)