Femme Aggression and the Value of Labor

This chapter makes the question of affective labor explicit as it works through Maureen Catbagan’s video series Crush (2010–2012), which features a woman in high heels crushing plastic toys. Catbagan’s decision to feature a white woman in this critique of domestic labor brings to light the pervasiveness of discourses of white feminine misery as read through Joan Riviere’s “Womanliness as Masquerade,” while also highlighting the object-centered nature of fetishism. Catbagan’s project asks viewers to read for race and sensuality in other modes because their Filipino identity is rendered invisible. This reorientation of representation produces brown jouissance in relation to mimesis and virality, thereby upending questions of value and commodification.

Surface Play

This chapter delves more deeply into the matter of the black vulva in arguing for a revaluation of narcissism, friction, and superficiality by dwelling on Mickalene Thomas’s use of rhinestones as excessive decorations in The Origin of the Universe (2012). A reimagining of Gustave Courbet’s infamous headless, nude portrait of a woman, Origin of the World (1866), Thomas’s work positions rhinestone-embellished genitals in the center of the frame. This chapter argues that Thomas’s painting offers a meditation on Audre Lorde’s matrilineal womanism while also allowing us to think with the idea of surface within the medium of painting. Both this calling forth of 1970s- 1980s black lesbian feminism and the textures of the surface bring forth friction as a form of relationality and narcissism as a necessary form of self-creation. Brown jouissance, this chapter argues, inheres in the excesses of surface that the painting presents.

Introduction

This chapter analyzes Lyle Ashton Harris’s performative self-portrait of himself citing Billie Holiday—Billie #21 (2002)—as an entry point into illustrating the ways that thinking with the pornotrope challenges understandings of sexuality by pointing to the presence of violence in relation to black and brown bodies. The chapter then introduces the concept of brown jouissance as a way to think about race in concert with psychoanalysis and in order to think about projects of selfhood in relation to fleshiness. Ultimately, the chapter argues that Billie #21 illuminates brown jouissance through its aesthetics of citation and its form as a Polaroid.

Eating Out

This chapter focuses on the sculpted vulvas of Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party (1979) and Kara Walker’s A Subtlety (2014) in order to draw out some of the issues that underlie the representational politics that surround the black vulva. Though these installations diverge in many ways, this chapter argues that they enable a meditation on the possibility of Luce Irigaray’s permeable, dialogic selfhood—selves that illustrate the impossibility of a border between self and Other—rendering porosity and the labial as important for an ethics of mutual vulnerability. Yet this chapter also cautions against forgetting asymmetries of power. Reading across the installations and the controversy over Walker’s installation in particular forces us to acknowledge that the differences between pleasure in vulnerability and the sensation of racial violation are related to the differences between the structures of our epistemologies of gender and race. Dwelling on the sensuality that inheres in A Subtlety, however, offers a way to reorient porosity by thinking with the dimension of smell as one site of the installation’s excess. The scalar, in turn, allows us to imagine formulations of brown jouissance in relation to fleshiness that exceeds the individual in multiple directions.

Coda

This coda provides a meditation on the brown and black mother and her role in producing brown jouissance. Rather than a working through of any particular work of art, the discussion here involves a theoretical meditation on her estrangement from the familial. While this distention might result in mourning, we might also locate non-Oedipal possibilities for relationality that center a queer (and black and brown) femininity. This chapter orients that conversation around Audre Lorde’s Zami and her discussion of the mother in relation to geography and her own identity as a black lesbian.

Performing Witness

This chapter analyzes Carrie Mae Weems’s photographic installation From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995–1996) as a performance of witnessing in which Weems restores voice to the archive of portraits that she reprints. While Weems’s installation has been read as trafficking in woundedness, this chapter argues that thinking photography as a technology of reproduction allows us to see Weems’s work as enlarging concepts of diaspora and mothering while also insisting on the opacity of interiority. This chapter positions this form of the maternal in conversation with Audre Lorde’s expansive concept of diaspora. Here, the concept of brown jouissance allows us to reimagine the work that is going on in this piece of art. It enables us to theorize witnessing and photography as fleshy enactments of spiritual resistance and to re-imagine possibilities of black gendering.

Weeping Machines

This chapter juxtaposes Nao Bustamante’s and Patty Chang’s video installations, both of which depict weeping as performances of theatrical excess. Here, brown jouissance opens us toward reading with modes of affective unruliness, so that we can understand the non-normativity of brown feminine domesticity and emotionality and locate its productive excesses. Neapolitan (2003), which shows Bustamente crying at the final scene of Fresa y Chocolate, and In Love (2001), which shows Chang passionately kissing her parents while crying, both rely on divergent models of automatic behavior. Bustamente offers a theatrical version of the hysterical Latina, while Chang performs the mechanical coldness and racial melancholy that Asian Americans are imagined to inhabit. By toying with these expectations, both Bustamente and Chang veer into the territory of perversion, enabling us to see both the racialized norms of affective comportment and their possibility for subversion via the technology of the loop, which shows us brown jouissance as the multiplication of the present. In this chapter the charge of automaticity becomes fodder for alternate experiences of reality.

Deep Listening, Belonging, and the Pleasures of Brown Jouissance

This chapter analyzes the dynamics that undergird brown jouissance by relating the concept to feminine jouissance and abjection through an analysis of Amber Hawk Swanson and Xandra Ibarra’s collaboration Untitled Fucking (2013) and Cheryl Dunye’s pornographic romantic comedy Mommy’s Coming (2012). Hawk Swanson and Ibarra’s performances illustrates the pleasures related to theorizing topping as a form of deep listening, which centralizes feminine jouissance in its investment in the opacity of the other’s pleasure. Feminine jouissance, in this case, is an extension of selfhood through the strap-on. The specter of racialized abjection complicates things, however, when we focus on the pleasures that emerge from Ibarra’s performance of spiciness and the way that Claude/ia’s blackness circulates within Dunye’s film. The pleasures of abjection, here, stem from fantasies of kinship. Brown jouissance, this chapter argues, emerges in the admixtures of feminine jouissance and abjection.