Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures by LaMonda Horton-Stallings (review)

LaMonda Horton-Stallings's Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures explores how the multiple meanings of funk—sensory (sound, smell, and taste), embodied movement (dance and sex), and force (mood and will)—provide new ways of theorizing sexuality, labor, and Black cultural production both within and outside of the academy. The text "presents sexual expressivity or explicitness in black literature and culture as a rejection of the Western will to truth," instead finding the very desire to produce a truth about sexuality a "con or joke" (xii). Stallings challenges the "colonial appropriation of bodies and cultures" by arguing that funk both creates new knowledge and draws on the acquisition of knowledge developed in and through the body (5). Thus, she considers how sexual cultures "translate, produce, and reproduce black pleasure, pain, intimacy, relationality, individuality, and communality in the face of historical and ever-changing sexual terror and violence" (xii). Her brilliantly funky archive, which includes "street parties, drama/theater, strippers and strip clubs, pornography, and self-published fiction" (24), helps Horton-Stallings answer the main question that animates her text: How might we read and reread narratives that foreground funk as refusing sexual politics and instead recognize Black peoples' sexual expression as a strategy for survival? In other words, she asks how the quest for sexual politics that centers pleasure and agency simultaneously silences or ignores the "personal genealogies of imagination" that exist outside of political movements, and interrogates what these narratives might offer to Black women, men, children, and transgender folk (xii).

The text is organized in two parts that each address different aspects of that question. Part 1, "Freaks, Sacred Subjectivity, and Public Spheres," explores Paschal Beverly Randolph's occult manuscripts, conjoined twins Christine and Millie McKoy's autobiography, erotica, f ictional representations of BDSM, and the work of Octavia Butler. Together these "offer an ambivalent feminist reading of black sexual cultures" that interrogates the human, rejects the sex-determination of biology in certain strands of feminism, and reads from multiple perspectives (27). She hopes that this ambivalence will "throw sex-positivity and sex-negativity into disarray for some readers" (26). Part 2, "Superfreaks and Sites of Memory," explores partying, literature, performance, dance, and Toni Newman and Red Jordan Arobateau's writing on sex work to insist "that like the erotic, the profane must be better contextualized within the histories and trajectories of the nonhuman and the ethereal" (28). To this end, Horton-Stallings is committed to exploring "what stinks and the forms of social power to cover up that stank," and thus provides "pungency to memory" (28).

Horton-Stallings refuses traditional disciplinary paradigms and instead posits her text as one in a field of "funk studies" that includes the works of Anthony Bolden, Francesca Royster, Anne Danielsen, Herukhuti, Susan Willis, Toni Morrison, Robert Farris Thompson, and Rickey Vincent. For Horton-Stallings, both sound and smell challenge the visuality of race and provide new ways of considering how "black people inhabit their bodies outside the designs of ocularity" (14). However, she also challenges discourses that fail to engage funk outside of the sonic or the musical and builds upon the work of Alain Corbin to consider how smells produce social power. Prioritizing smell allows Horton-Stallings to emphasize that funk "is a rewriting of smell and scent away from nineteenth-century ordering and socialization of corporeal power that represses what stinks" (6). In short, funk provides "other possibilities and configurations of bodies, psychically and affectively determined by how senses are ordered" (14). Attending to funk's various sensory and affective resonances allows Horton-Stallings to bring together popular music studies and affect theory.

Horton-Stallings contributes to funk studies by using Susan Stryker's concept of transing to construct an alternative methodology for studying funk. "Transing the study of sex work with literary theory, black vernacular traditions, and African diasporic philosophies about sexuality" provides a...