Brown Jouissance Research Articles

Contributors’ Notes

Contributors’ Notes

We Flesh: Musser, Spillers, and Beyond the Phenomenological Body

Not all homo sapiens are human subjects. This paper explores the lived experience of homo sapiens but not human that I call “lived flesh.” A lived experience/distinction that shouldn’t be possible on Merleau-Ponty’s account of human subjectivity in Phenomenology of Perception and “The Intertwining – The Chiasm.” The use of flesh is deliberate and emerges from my engagement with Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception and “The Intertwining – The Chiasm” through Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Hortense Spillers’ “Interstices: A Small Drama of Words” and “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Amber Musser’s Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance, and Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. The affective, experiential, and ethical practices of american Blackwomxn in these texts problematize Merleau-Ponty’s account of human subjectivity and his account of the generality of Being (“The Intertwining – The Chiasm”). Merleau-Ponty’s effacement of raced, sexed, and gendered difference results in a construct of the human subject that cannot include all homo sapiens.

Editors’ Note: Sound and Affect in Times of Crisis ★ ★ ★

Editors’ Note: Sound and Affect in Times of Crisis ★ ★ ★

Race and the Integrity of the Line

Abstract It is rare to find visual representations of female sexual pleasure in sexological treatises. Robert Latou Dickinson's Atlas of Human Sex Anatomy (1932) uses illustrations of sexual response to avoid making his text sensuous or pornographic. Like the charts in William Masters and Virginia Johnson's Human Sexual Response (1966), these drawings are carefully nestled between statistics and physiological summaries to embed them within the realm of the scientific and pedagogical. However, both are presumed to be racially unmarked. This article shows how blackness disrupts visual representations of pleasure and femininity while theorizing how the line functions as a way to maintain a norm. Against this, the potential of brown jouissance emerges via the zigzag style of contemporary Filipino artist Jevijoe Vitug. In his portrait, a glimpse of racialized, sensual excess emerges.

Upheavals in Black Thought

Upheavals in Black Thought

Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance

Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance

Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance by Amber Jamilla Musser

Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance by Amber Jamilla Musser

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

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).

Surface-becoming: Lyle Ashton Harris and brown jouissance

This essay analyzes Lyle Ashton Harris's large-format Polaroid, Billie #21, as a site to think about the epistemological transformations that surface thinking or thinking with the flesh enables. It does so by focusing on the surface aesthetics of shine, Harris's citation of Holiday, and the politics of engaging with black femininity. These surface tensions, the essay argues, show us ways to think about the relationship between self, performativity, and brown jouissance – that mysterious fleshiness that resists legibility but hovers on the surface.

The “Eternal Return”: Self‐Portrait Photography as a Technology of Embodiment

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe “Eternal Return”: Self‐Portrait Photography as a Technology of EmbodimentAmelia JonesAmelia JonesDepartment of Art History University of California, Riverside Search for more articles by this author Department of Art History University of California, RiversidePDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Signs Volume 27, Number 4Summer 2002 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/339641 Views: 3868Total views on this site Citations: 37Citations are reported from Crossref © 2002 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 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