Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance

by Amber Jamilla Musser

Reimagines black and brown sensuality to develop new modes of knowledge production In Sensual Excess, Amber Jamilla Musser imagines epistemologies of sensuality that emerge from fleshiness. To do so, she works against the framing of black and brown bodies as sexualized, objectified, and abject, and offers multiple ways of thinking with and through sensation and aesthetics. Each chapter draws our attention to particular aspects of pornotropic capture that black and brown bodies must always negotiate. Though these technologies differ according to the nature of their encounters with white supremacy, 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. To do so, Sensual Excess analyzes moments of brown jouissance that exceed these constraints. These ruptures illuminate multiple epistemologies of selfhood and sensuality that offer frameworks for minoritarian knowledge production which is designed to enable one to sit with uncertainty. Through examinations of installations and performances like Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party, Kara Walker's A Subtlety, Patty Chang's In Love and Nao Bustamante's Neapolitan, Musser unpacks the relationships between racialized sexuality and consumption to interrogate foundational concepts in psychoanalytic theory, critical race studies, feminism, and queer theory. In so doing, Sensual Excess offers a project of knowledge production focused not on mastery, but on sensing and imagining otherwise, whatever and wherever that might be.

Genres: Theory, Race, Sexuality, Gender Studies, Nonfiction, LGBT, Gender

240 pages, Paperback

Published November 6, 2018

About the author

Amber Jamilla Musser is Associate Professor of American Studies at George Washington University and the author of Sensual Excess (2018).

Reviews

[Diego Alanis Resendiz · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was absolutely wonderful!

I, a cisgender Mexican male, took lots from Amber Jamilla Musser’s close inspection of Queer, Feminist art. Through the analysis of art I was taken on a journey that allowed me to re-analyze my corporeal self, my ideas of sex, and the transcendence from commodification and violence done onto the self.

I have to admit, it was difficult for me to read at first. There were references to a lot of literature and terms I hadn’t had the chance to encounter. However, that only allowed me to understand what more I need to learn in order to fully understand brown jouissance.

[Adrianne Ackroyd · Rating 5 out of 5]

A truly deep, thought-provoking, and sexy book of theory on what selves can emerge within, beside, and beyond the oppression that forms the current reality of life. Although it deals with many painful and traumatizing images and histories, it never loses sight of utopia's horizon.

[Emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dr Musser's writing is so clean and precise, her interpretations and analyses are so keen and incisive. I learn so much from her research. I adore her books. This book was an exploration of the feminine and of the erotic. She took the objectified and made them whole again, with feelings and interior lives. It was healing to read. It was empowering. It is most definitely thought provoking. The connections between camp and queerness and how they radicalize and revolutionize labor and capitalism are areas of research I am going to have to dive deeper into after this book. I always leave her texts wanting to make more connections. It's magical.

[el · Rating 3 out of 5]

"In both of these examples we see that opacity functions as a minoritarian strategy because it disrupts the assumption that visuality is equivalent to transparency by alluding to something else, a different set of norms or even an interiority inaccessible to others." (10)

"To think opacity, then, means always and insistently thinking with the possibility, however momentary, of illegibility rather than a stabilized notion of resistance." (11)

[aerialxav · Rating 3 out of 5]

Introduction and chapter 2