Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism

268 Pages·2014·2.16 MB·English

by  Amber Jamilla Musser

Sensational Flesh
sexual cultures
General Editors: José Esteban Muñoz and Ann Pellegrini
Times Square Red, Times Square Blue
Samuel R. Delany
Private Affairs: Critical Ventures in the Culture of Social Relations
Phillip Brian Harper
In Your Face: 9 Sexual Studies
Mandy Merck
Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer Latino America
José Quiroga
Murdering Masculinities:
Fantasies of Gender and Violence in the American Crime Novel
Greg Forter
Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest
Edited by Lauren Berlant and Lisa Duggan
Black Gay Man: Essays
Robert Reid Pharr Foreword by Samuel R. Delany
Passing: Identity and Interpretation in Sexuality, Race, and Religion
Edited by María Carla Sánchez and Linda Schlossberg
The Explanation for Everything: Essays on Sexual Subjectivity
Paul Morrison
The Queerest Art: Essays on Lesbian and Gay Theater
Edited by Alisa Solomon and Framji Minwalla
Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism
Edited by Arnaldo Cruz Malavé and Martin F. Manalansan IV
Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces
Juana María Rodríguez
Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance
Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini
Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture
Frances Négron-Muntaner
Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era
Marlon Ross
In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives
Judith Halberstam
Why I Hate Abercrombie and Fitch:
Essays on Race and Sexuality in the U.S.
Dwight A. McBride
God Hates Fags: The Rhetorics of Religious Violence
Michael Cobb
Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual
Robert Reid-Pharr
The Latino Body:
Crisis Identities in American Literary and Cultural Memory
Lázaro Lima
Arranging Grief:
Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America
Dana Luciano
Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity
José Esteban Muñoz
Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism
Scott Herring
Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the
African American Literary Imagination
Darieck Scott
Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries
Karen Tongson
Beyond the Nation: Diasporic Filipino Literature and Queer Reading
Martin Joseph Ponce
Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled
Michael Cobb
Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performance in the Asias
Eng-Beng Lim
Transforming Citizenships: Transgender Articulations of the Law
Isaac West
The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption
and Homoeroticism within US Slave Culture
Vincent Woodard, Edited by Justin A. Joyce and Dwight A. McBride
Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures and Other Latina Longings
Juana María Rodríguez
Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism
Amber Jamilla Musser
Sensational Flesh
Race, Power, and Masochism
Amber Jamilla Musser
a
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York and London
new york university press
New York and London
www.nyupress.org
© 2014 by New York University
All rights reserved
References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing.
Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that
may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Musser, Amber Jamilla.
Sensational flesh : race, power, and masochism / Amber Jamilla Musser.
pages cm. — (Sexual cultures)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4798-9181-8 (cl : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4798-3249-1 (pb : alk. paper)
1. Sadomasochism 2. Sexual dominance and submission. 3. Queer theory. 4. Race.
I. Title.
HQ79.M877 2014
306.77’5—dc23
2013049749
New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials
are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers
and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books.
Manufactured in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Also available as an ebook
A book in the American Literatures Initiative (ALI), a collaborative
publishing project of NYU Press, Fordham University Press, Rutgers
University Press, Temple University Press, and the University of Virginia
Press. The Initiative is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. For
more information, please visit www.americanliteratures.org.
For my parents, who bought me my first leather skirt
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Contents
Acknowledgments xi
1 Introduction: Theory, Flesh, Practice 1
2 Specters of Domination: Patriarchy, Colonialism,
and Masochism 31
3 Objectification, Complicity, and Coldness: The Story of O’s
Narratives of Femininity and Precarity 58
4 Time, Race, and Biology: Fanon, Freud, and the Labors of Race 88
5 Lacerated Breasts: Medicine, Autonomy, Pain 118
Conclusion: Making Flesh Matter 151
Notes 185
Bibliography 211
Index 231
About the Author 255
ix