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

In his 2002 self-portrait, the queer Black artist Lyle Ashton Harris conjures Billie Holiday, enacting the singer's iconic seduction while dwelling in multiple dimensions of black femininity. The performative self-portrait is featured on the cover of Amber Jamilla Musser's most recent book, Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance, which begins with Harris to distill the relationship among selfhood, racialized femininity, and fleshiness. For Musser, flesh is the site where knowledge is formed and where radical modes of existence are made possible. Turning to the work of twentieth- and twenty-first century artists of color, Musser forms an "esoteric aesthetic archive" (15), deftly examining a wide array of aesthetic forms to imagine how people of color endure pain and become flesh. In doing so, the author contends with queerness as she links blackness to brownness, demonstrating the vast nature of white supremacist violence while expanding Hortense Spiller's notion of pornotroping—the violent process of objectification which at once renders the racialized body sexually available and reduces them to the flesh. "To think with the flesh and to inhabit the pornotrope," Musser argues, "is to hold violence and possibility in the same frame" (12). Repositioning blackness alongside brownness, and with a methodology grounded in the senses, Musser persuasively demonstrates how aesthetic abstraction solicits a form of corporeality that contains a repository of excess. Led by what the author terms "epistemologies of fleshiness," the project invites a sustained and critical "opacity" that revels in pleasure and pain. Through the text's poetics of sex and sense emerges one of its most valuable offerings: brown jouissance, which describes excess as the "fleshy mixture of self-production, insatiability, joy, and pain" (5). That flesh, through brown jouissance, becomes a space of creation signals not only a necessary and embodied encounter with the self, but points towards the book's urgent political contribution: a proposal that self-reclamation grounds the possibility for envisioning and enacting more caring and less uneven relations with others.

The first two chapters guide readers through what it means to pursue pleasure while under duress by lingering on representations of the black vulva. Chapter 1 analyzes Judy Chicago's The Dinner Table (1979) and Kara Walker's A Subtlety (2014), well-known but divergent installations that illustrate the sensorial dimensions of Black women's racialized negation. Musser directs her analysis to the installations' invocation of consumption, lips, and scent, tracing the excess that lingers whether the black vulva is erased or made spectacle. Here we see Musser at her most convincing, engaging the porosity of the labial to show how the framework of "hunger" nurtures sensual excess in a way desire cannot. In doing so, she extends a necessary intervention into the subject/object binary, showing us how fleshy excess traffics "through the intimacy of the nose" (44). Chapter 2 turns to Mickalene Thomas's Origin of the Universe (2012), a reimagining of Gustave Courbet's Origin of the World (1866) whereby Thomas uses rhinestones to adorn Black flesh and embellish the labia and nipples. Musser invokes 1970s and 1980s Black lesbian feminism to show how shine and friction adhere to the surface dimensions of Thomas's nude portrait of a Black queer body. Writing adjacent to Afropessimism, Musser deliberately avoids sexuality's stressing on desire and agency, and instead weighs in on the materiality of the black vulva, inciting a new framework of hunger that attends to Black women's sexuality.

Although the entire book works with psychoanalytic thought, the third chapter offers an incisive intervention into the field's treatment of race. The author considers brown jouissance against feminine jouissance and abjection in her analysis of Cheryl Dunye's romantic sex comedy Mommy is Coming (2012) and Xandra Ibarra and Amber Hawk Swanson's collaborative performance video Untitled Fucking (2013). Where Dunye disrupts the normative family structure, Ibarra and Swanson provoke an understanding of sexual topping as a...