Felt Pleasures

Abstract

Featuring an array of Black people of a range of skin tones and gender orientations, Janelle Monáe’s “Lipstick Lover” video registers as a celebration of black queerness; it asserts that freedom comes with orienting toward pleasure. In this article, Musser argues that what distinguishes “Lipstick Lover” is the way that it is haunted by the lesbian. Lesbian appears not necessarily as identity, but as a specific orientation toward pleasure and being in the world that emphasizes the tactile and collective. And notably, in contrast to Monáe’s previous explorations of the future, here the lesbian is grounded in the past—1970s Jamaica, to be precise.