Review of Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance by Amber Jamilla Musser (NYU Press)

Abstract

In <i>Sensual Excess,</i> Amber Jamilla Musser develops an epistemological project that calls into question modes of producing knowledge around black and brown bodies, especially in relationship to femininity and queerness. In doing so, she interrogates the kind of racialized understandings of femininity produced by what Hortense Spillers has called "pornotroping" in order to draw a contrast to something Musser calls "brown jouissance." She is looking for those places where fleshly experience exceeds the ideological constraints of the pornotropic image, developing an epistemology based not on the visual, but on the affective experiences of the flesh. In doing so she analyzes Lyle Ashton Harris’s <i>Billie #21</i> (2002), Judy Chicago’s <i>The Dinner Party</i> (1979), Kara Walker’s <i>A Subtlety</i> (2014), Mickalene Thomas’s <i>Origin of the Universe 1</i> (2012), Cheryl Dunye’s <i>Mommy is Coming</i> (2012), Amber Hawk Swanson and Sandra Ibarra’s <i>Untitled Fucking</i> (2013), Carrie Mae Weems’s <i>From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried</i> (1995–1996), Nao Bustamantes’s <i>Neapolitan</i> (2003), and Maureen Catabagan’s <i>Crush</i> (2010–2012).