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WEEK 2 / WITH  AMBER JAMILLA MUSSER︎︎︎

Black Origins of the Universe




SEMINAR LEADER

Photograph by Maureen Catbagan

[ IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A professor sits contentedly on a red couch against a brick exposed wall within a brightly lit room. She is looking forward in the direction of the camera. She is a Black light-skinned woman with short dark curly hair that is cropped at the sides of the head. She is wearing a light grey blazer over a black turtleneck and patterned pants. Her legs are crossed and her hands rest on her right thigh. She is wearing tortoise patterned glasses and wears a silver and black watch on her left wrist.  ︎︎ heart symbol ]

Dr. Amber Jamilla Musser has published widely on race and critical theory, queer femininities and race, race and sexuality, and queer of color critique. She has an MSt in Women's Studies from Oxford University and received her PhD in History of Science from Harvard University. She has held fellowships at New York University's Draper Program in Gender Studies and Brown University's Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women. Her research has been supported by grants from the Ruth Landes Memorial Fellowship and the Arts Writers’ Grant from the Warhol Foundation. She previously taught gender studies at New York University and Washington University in St. Louis. She also writes art criticism for The Brooklyn Rail. 

Her first monograph, Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism (NYU Press, 2014) uses masochism as a lens to theorize different felt relationships to power. The book beings together debates on masochism within feminism, discussions of masochism from psychoanalysis and critiques of colonialism, literary presentations of masochism, and performance and visual art that draws on masochism's repertoire in order to make an argument about the relationship between sensation and knowledge production and the racialization of our current episteme of sexuality. 

Working against the framing of black and brown bodies as sexualized, objectified, and abject, her second monograph, Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance (NYU Press, 2018) turns toward sensation and aesthetics in order to imagine epistemologies of sensuality that emerge from fleshiness. The book offers multiple inroads into thinking with and through brown jouissance and the pornotrope. Using analyses of particular works of art, each chapter draws attention to specific aspects of pornotropic capture that black and brown bodies must negotiate. These technologies differ according to the nature of the encounters with white supremacy, but 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. In relation to this, the book also identifies and analyzes moments of brown jouissance that exceed these constraints. This move outward offers a way to think with the ways that aesthetic forms might rearrange knowledge by engaging differently with fleshiness and how we apprehend it. This is a three-pronged approach designed to help us understand brown jouissance as robust, political, and fleshy. In addition to containing critiques of normativity and proffering epistemologies of sensuality against those of sexuality, this project of minoritarian knowledge production is designed to enable one to sit with opacity and uncertainty. 

She is currently beginning a research project on noise.



[ IMAGE DESCRIPTION: a purple line illustration of a sound tornado.  ︎ heart symbol ]



[ IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A video screenshot appears in the video player above. An image description of the screenshot can be found on page two of the transcription file here.  ︎ heart symbol ]

READING



[ IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A rectangular book cover with Lyle Ashton Harris’s photograph “Billie 21” taking up the entire composition. In the words of author Amber Jamilla Musser, whose name is written in white capital letters at the bottom: “As if by magic, flecks of white slowly emerge, they become shimmering accents indicating the fullness of lips, the edges of teeth, the tip of a nose, the crease of an eyelid, or the sheen of pearls in image that resolves into that of a head tilted slightly back with eyes close and mouth side open. The shallow focus foregrounds shine while the rest of the image, shoulders back lit and covered with the fur stole is hazy.” Over the right shoulder is the book’s title in white text, “Sensual Excess : Queer Femmininity and Brown Jouissance.” ︎ heart symbol ]

ASSIGNMENT

Reading
  • Musser, Amber Jamilla. “Surface Play: Flash, Friction, and Self-Reflection.” Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance, 46-68. Sexual Cultures 51. New York: New York University Press, 2018.
    Please read pages 46-68.


SHOW NOTES

  • An excerpt of the Introduction to Amber Jamilla Musser’s Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance assigned by Xiomara Sebastián Castro Niculescu for Week One.︎
  • More information on Dollstock and Dollpile (mentioned around 1:07:00) can be found here.
  • Terminology in the iDollator community is fluid and contested. At The Harmony Show, we use the language Davecat prefers. He is the author of the definition provided below.
    Dollstock is an informal gathering of iDollators affiliated with the online forum ODC (Our Doll Community) that lasts between three to four days. It differs from other get-togethers in that Dolls are usually brought to the venue, which is in a remote location in either Pennsylvania or Maryland so as not to attract unwanted attention. Dollstock is an opportunity not only for iDollators to meet and gather in person, but also to see each others' Dolls, as well as photograph them someplace outside the usual location, i.e, at home. A big family-style dinner occurs, and two photos are usually taken: one is of all the Dolls together, wearing themed uniforms or matching dresses, and the other is of 'the Dollpile,’ in which Dolls are posed together on the floor in states of undress, sensually enjoying each other's company.

Black Origins of the Universe was recorded on February 27, 2021.