Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance

248 Pages·2018·3.363 MB·English

by  Amber Jamilla Musser

Sensual Excess
SEXUAL CULTURES
General Editors: Ann Pellegrini, Tavia Nyong’o, and Joshua Chambers- Letson
Founding Editors: José Esteban Muñoz and Ann Pellegrini
Titles in the series include:
Times Square Red, Times Square Blue Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discur-
Samuel R. Delany sive Spaces
Juana María Rodríguez
Private Affairs: Critical Ventures in the
Culture of Social Relations Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the
Phillip Brian Harper Limits of Religious Tolerance
Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini
In Your Face: 9 Sexual Studies
Many Merck Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latini-
zation of American Culture
Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer
Frances Négron- Muntaner
Latino America
Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in
José A. Quiroga
the Jim Crow Era
Murdering Masculinities: Fantasies of Gender Marlon Ross
and Violence in the American Crime Novel
In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender
Gregory Forter
Bodies, Subcultural Lives
Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair J. Jack Halberstam
and the National Interest
Why I Hate Abercrombie and Fitch: Essays
Edited by Lauren Berlant and Lisa A.
on Race and Sexuality
Duggan
Dwight A. McBride
Black Gay Man: Essays
God Hates Fags: The Rhetorics of Religious
Robert F. Reid- Pharr
Violence
Passing: Identity and Interpretation in Michael Cobb
Sexuality, Race, and Religion Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the
Edited by Maria C. Sanchez and Linda Black American Intellectual
Schlossberg Robert Reid- Pharr
The Explanation for Everything: Essays on The Latino Body: Crisis Identities in
Sexual Subjectivity American Literary and Cultural Memory
Paul Morrison Lázaro Lima
The Queerest Art: Essays on Lesbian and Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body
Gay Theater in Nineteenth- Century America
Edited by Alisa Solomon and Framji Dana Luciano
Minwalla Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of
Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Queer Futurity
Afterlife of Colonialism José Esteban Muñoz
Edited by Arnaldo Cruz Malavé and Mar- Another Country: Queer Anti- Urbanism
tin F. Manalansan IV Scott Herring
Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black
and Sexuality in the African American Feminist Art and Performance
Literary Imagination Uri McMillan
Darieck Scott
A Taste for Brown Bodies: Gay Modernity
Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries and Cosmopolitan Desire
Karen Tongson Hiram Pérez
Beyond the Nation: Diasporic Filipino Wedlocked: The Perils of Marriage Equality
Literature and Queer Reading Katherine Franke
Martin Joseph Ponce
The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM,
Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled and Pornography
Michael Cobb Ariane Cruz
Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain,
Performance in the Asias and Post- Humanist Critique
Eng- Beng Lim Robert F. Reid- Pharr
Transforming Citizenships: Transgender Black Performance on the Outskirts of the
Articulations of the Law Left: A History of the Impossible
Isaac West Malik Gaines
The Delectable Negro: Human Consump- A Body, Undone: Living on After Great
tion and Homoeroticism within US Slave Pain
Culture Christina Crosby
Vincent Woodard, Edited by Justin A.
The Life and Death of Latisha King: A
Joyce and Dwight A. McBride
Critical Phenomenlogy of Transphobia
Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures and Other Gayle Salamon
Latina Longings
Queer Nuns: Religion, Activism, and Seri-
Juana María Rodríguez
ous Parody
Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Melissa M. Wilcox
Masochism
After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of
Amber Jamilla Musser
Color Life
The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Joshua Chambers- Letson
Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman
Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and
Ecologies
Brown Jouissance
Rachel C. Lee
Amber Jamilla Musser
Not Gay: Sex between Straight White Men
For a complete list of books in the series,
Jane Ward
see www.nyupress.org

Sensual Excess
Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance
Amber Jamilla Musser
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
www.nyupress.org
© 2018 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
Names: Musser, Amber Jamilla, author.
Title: Sensual excess : queer femininity and brown jouissance / Amber Jamilla Musser.
Description: New York : New York University, [2018] | Series: Sexual cultures |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018011913 | ISBN 9781479807031 (cl : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9781479830954 (pb : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Lesbianism. | Sexual excitement.
Classification: LCC HQ75.5 .M87 2018 | DDC 306.76/63—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018011913
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 suppli-
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Manufactured in the United States of America
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Also available as an ebook
This book is dedicated to dialogue, plurality, being- with,
and most especially, MA.

Contents
Introduction: Brown Jouissance and Inhabitations
of the Pornotrope 1
1. Eating Out: The Labial, Consumption, and the Scalar 27
2. Surface Play: Flash, Friction, and Self- Reflection 46
3. Deep Listening, Belonging, and the Pleasures
of Brown Jouissance 69
4. Performing Witness: Voice, Interiority, and Diaspora 95
5. Weeping Machines: Automaticity, Looping, and the
Possibilities of Perversion 119
6. Femme Aggression and the Value of Labor 144
Coda: Elsewhere, Is the Mother a Place? 167
Acknowledgments 181
Notes 185
Bibliography 205
Index 221
About the Author 237
ix