Sensational Flesh. Amber Jamilla Musser
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3. Objectification, Complicity, and Coldness: The Story of O’s Narratives of Femininity and Precarity
4. Time, Race, and Biology: Fanon, Freud, and the Labors of Race
5. Lacerated Breasts: Medicine, Autonomy, Pain
Conclusion: Making Flesh Matter
Notes
Bibliography
About the Author
Acknowledgments
this book has had many incarnations and benefited from input of many kinds, from many people along the way. It began as a stubbornly fascinating idea that I discussed over many cups of tea with my fellow polymorphous perverts—Stephanie Clare, Niamh Duggan, Joanna Cupano Bowling, Marcie Bianco, and Irene Revell—on High Street in Oxford. It then grew into a dissertation completed in the History of Science Department at Harvard University under the guidance of Anne Harrington, Afsaneh Najmabadi, Katy Park, and Marwa Elshakry. Alongside these excellent readers and kind mentors, I found colleagues in the program for women, gender, and sexuality studies and was able to make this not-quite history of science project my own. Thanks also to Margot Minardi and Laura Murphy, who were willing to listen to my theory babble. However, the project truly gained flesh during my three wonderful years at New York University’s Draper Program. Within this luminous community, I was blessed with excellent students and wonderful colleagues—John Andrews, Rebecca Colesworthy, Robert Dimit Nina Hien, Larissa Kyzer, Georgia Lowe, Theresa Macphail, Steve Moga, Robin Nagle, Ann Pellegrini, and Maia Ramnath—who offered cocktails, invaluable feedback, and friendship. Ultimately, the book was completed thanks to a generous fellowship at the Pembroke Center at Brown University. I thank my colleagues, most especially Meredith Bak, Timothy Bewes, Fannie Bialek, Nadine Boljkovac, Michelle Cho, and Debbie Weinstein for stimulating conversation and help in reorienting my thoughts on perception. Special Thanks to Washington University in St. Louis and the Program for Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies for their intellectual and financial generosity in this project’s final stages.
Throughout these years, I have also been incredibly fortunate to call Stephanie Clare, Jennifer Nash, and Nasser Zakariya dear friends. They tirelessly read multiple drafts, provided encouragement and advice, asked hard questions, and surrounded me with an abundance of care and support. I also owe a large debt of gratitude to Ankur Ghosh, Emily Bolton, Danny Fox, Larissa Chernock, Ann Weissman, Joseph Cooper, Chitra Ramalingam, and Isaac Nakhimovksy, who are closer to family than friends. I am grateful to them for meeting my angst with adventure, laughter, sharp wit, intellect, and generosity.
I owe the largest debt of gratitude to my family, who have consistently provided me with love, support, and imagination. They have taught me that life shouldn’t be taken too seriously and that celebration and gratitude are the nectar of life. Much love to Camille, John, and Thomas Musser.
NYU Press has been excellent to work with. I thank Ciara McLaughlin, Alicia Nadkarni, Tim Roberts, and Eric Zinner for their work in making all of this come to fruition. I especially thank Eric for his insight into the real stakes of this book, which were buried somewhere between words 1 and 80,000. Darieck Scott’s and an anonymous reviewer’s keen readings helped the manuscript gain its wings. I have also benefited enormously from Ann Pellegrini’s and José Muñoz’s incisive feedback, gentle shepherding of the project, and generous invitation to be part of the Sexual Cultures series. José even came up with the title this book. It is strange and sad to be writing these acknowledgments in the wake of José’s untimely and unimaginable passing. I remain awestruck at their enormous generosity as scholars and friends.
Audiences at Occidental College, Bucknell University, Emory University, Brown University, Oxford University, and Washington University in St. Louis have provided thoughtful and helpful engagement with this project. Thanks to Sikkema Jenkins & Co and Kara Walker for permission to reproduce The End of Uncle Tom and the Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven. Thanks also to Luhring Augustine and Glenn Ligon for permission to reproduce Untitled (I Feel Most Colored When I Am Thrown against a Sharp White Background). Portions of chapters 2, 3, 4, and 5 were developed in earlier essays: “Anti-Oedipus, Kinship, and the Subject of Affect,” Social Text 30, no. 3 (2012): 77–95; “Reading, Writing, Masochism: The Arts of Becoming,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 23, no. 1 (2012): 131–50; and “Reading, Writing, and the Whip,” Literature and Medicine 27, no. 2 (2009): 204–22.
1. Introduction: Theory, Flesh, Practice
Masochism is a powerful diagnostic tool. Usually understood as the desire to abdicate control in exchange for sensation—pleasure, pain, or a combination thereof—it is a site where bodies, power, and society come together in multiple ways. It can signal powerlessness, domination, or ambivalence depending on one’s point of view. As such, masochism allows us to probe different ways of experiencing power. Masochism’s rich analytic possibilities stem from its ability to speak across theory and practice, disciplines, and identities. Indeed, masochism’s plasticity is my jumping-off point for this book. Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism brings together a divergent set of debates, historical actors, and theorists under the sign of masochism to reveal the sensations that become attached to difference.
Sensations are fundamentally subjective; they are a condition of existing in a body and are present in more permutations than there are living beings. They are the embodiments of difference. Yet sensations are also the tools that we have for making sense of the world; in this way sensation has an external dimension. Sensation resides at the border of reality and consciousness. It marks the body’s existence as a perceiving subject and the world’s existence as an object to be perceived, and it serves as the basis for experience. Thus I suggest that sensation is an important critical term because it undercuts the identitarian dimensions of experience. If we conceive of experience as the narrative that consciousness imposes on a collection of sensations, sensation provides a way for us to explore corporeality without reifying identity. Here, however, an immediate question arises: If sensation is such an individual concept, how can it be useful as an analytic term? Though sensation can be fully understood individually, we can think of it as occupying certain forms because of its externality. This externality allows us to think about sensation as inhabiting particular forms with a shared (and some might say learned) assumption of the boundaries of each particular category.1 Though the sensations that I describe in this book are more complex than this, I will use the color blue as an example of what I am talking about. While you and I may perceive the color differently, the fact that we assume that we are experiencing a shared referent allows us to imagine that the color occupies a particular form that is both multiple (we each experience it differently) and singular (we both also experience it as distinct from other colors). This structural aspect of sensation is what gives it its analytic purchase. Sensation is then both individual and impersonal; it occupies a sphere of multiplicity without being tethered to identity.
Given that masochism is about the relationship between sensation and power, it offers a distinct lens for theorizing the ways that difference is embodied. Further, masochism is compelling because it always seems to be in the midst of a critical moment. It was an important term for fin de siècle sexologists, early twentieth-century psychoanalysts, mid-twentieth-century theorists of decolonization, existential philosophers, feminists in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and queer theorists of the 1990s. Masochism means different things to different people at different times and in different disciplines. I take masochism to be a mobile entity; its meaning is always local and contingent, dependent on the speaker and his or her philosophy and worldview. What emerges from thinking about masochism this way is not a portrait of power or sexuality in the modern age but rather a continued fascination with questions of agency, subjectivity, and difference.
Sensational Flesh’s reach extends from fin de siècle Austria to midcentury France and concludes in the early twenty-first-century United States. In that space, I will examine various notions of masochism at work. What begins as a literarily influenced sexual practice morphs into a universal aspect of subjectivity, a way to describe a type of relationship between self and other, a subversive mode of desubjectification or resistance to dominant forms of power, and finally a privileged mode of