Amber Jamilla Musser - Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance

SEXUAL CULTURES

General Editors: Ann Pellegrini, Tavia Nyongo, and Joshua Chambers-Letson

Founding Editors: Jos Esteban Muoz and Ann Pellegrini

Titles in the series include:

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

Many Merck

Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer Latino America

Jos A. Quiroga

Murdering Masculinities: Fantasies of Gender and Violence in the American Crime Novel

Gregory Forter

Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest

Edited by Lauren Berlant and Lisa A. Duggan

Black Gay Man: Essays

Robert F. Reid-Pharr

Passing: Identity and Interpretation in Sexuality, Race, and Religion

Edited by Maria C. Sanchez 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 Malav and Martin F. Manalansan IV

Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces

Juana Mara Rodrguez

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 Ngron-Muntaner

Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era

Marlon Ross

In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives

J. Jack Halberstam

Why I Hate Abercrombie and Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality

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

Lzaro Lima

Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America

Dana Luciano

Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity

Jos Esteban Muoz

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 Mara Rodrguez

Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism

Amber Jamilla Musser

The Exquisite Corpse of Asian America: Biopolitics, Biosociality, and Posthuman Ecologies

Rachel C. Lee

Not Gay: Sex between Straight White Men

Jane Ward

Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance

Uri McMillan

A Taste for Brown Bodies: Gay Modernity and Cosmopolitan Desire

Hiram Prez

Wedlocked: The Perils of Marriage Equality

Katherine Franke

The Color of Kink: Black Women, BDSM, and Pornography

Ariane Cruz

Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post-Humanist Critique

Robert F. Reid-Pharr

Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left: A History of the Impossible

Malik Gaines

A Body, Undone: Living on After Great Pain

Christina Crosby

The Life and Death of Latisha King: A Critical Phenomenlogy of Transphobia

Gayle Salamon

Queer Nuns: Religion, Activism, and Serious Parody

Melissa M. Wilcox

After the Party: A Manifesto for Queer of Color Life

Joshua Chambers-Letson

Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance

Amber Jamilla Musser

For a complete list of books in the series, see www.nyupress.org

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 | ISBN 9781479807031 (cl : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781479830954 (pb : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Lesbianism. | Sexual excitement.

Classification: LCC HQ75.5 .M87 2018 | DDC 306.76/63dc23

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 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

This book is dedicated to dialogue, plurality, being-with, and most especially, MA.

Lyle Ashton Harris, Billie #21, 2002.

On the cover of this book and the facing page we see what appears to be a gesture of abandonmenthead tilted back, lips, eyes, and collarbone gleaming. This is a posture that belongs to the ecstatic. The closed eyes are signs of a private reverie while the open mouth suggests excess. These are pleasures that cannot be contained; their expression exceeds the frame. Yet, these pleasures are also inscrutable. This is a photograph in media res; we see only this moment; we have no way of discerning or deciphering the source of this pleasure. We can imagine that she is singing for herself even as the light in the distance suggests an unseen crowd. The furs fuzz, the sharpness of the teeth, the low haze in the background, and the mouth sighing open all point us toward mystery.

This is Billie #21 (2002), a photograph by Lyle Ashton Harris. It is meant to conjure Billie Holiday, and this changes things. We might, for example, begin to imagine that we understand some of these private pleasures because we know facts about Holiday and her life. We might ask if this is the Holiday of Emersons Bar and Grillhigh and drunk, stumbling and slurring words and emotions as she remembers a history in the limelight and the various betrayals, arrests, and addictions that altered her relationship to stardom. Is this the Holiday of Carnegie Hallwounded and rambling and so eager for a comeback that she accidentally punctured her head with a hatpin attached to gardenias? Is this a younger Holiday, just beginning to sing in jazz clubs after a youth spent in brothels? Holiday is iconic. Her voice famously layers pain and yearning; it is seductive in its excesses. In his description of Holidays singing, Fred Moten argues that she brings something new to the fore, something extra-linguistic, something that is not about communication, but something that he describes as the repetition of suffocated desire and lost object, of transference and drive, that would tell the audience