Amber Jamilla Musser
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 3596792 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Amber Jamilla Musser |
| PRENOMES | Amber Jamilla |
| SOBRENOME | Musser |
| ASSINATURA | MUSSER A J |
| AFILIAÇÕES | The Graduate Center, CUNY |
| ORCID | 0009-0006-8413-8462 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 35 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 30 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 35 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2008 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 4 |
Transformation, Pedagogy, and Repair
Personal criticism has long been a staple of feminist inquiry and this group of contemporary writers and thinkers offer new engagements with this method of critique by engaging forcefully and impactfully with the corporeality of the “I,” using it to offer nuanced perspectives on power and situatedness. More specifically, in the worlds offered by Scarred: A Feminist Journey Through Pain (L. Ayu Saraswati), Mendings (Megan Sweeney), An Archive of T…
Femme interiorities
In the lead-up to Le Tigre's 2023 reunion tour, I was determined to get tickets. I had been a fan of their music since I was introduced to it in the early 2000s, and hearing it reminded me of feeling young, independent, and carefree—all things I wanted to embody now. My girlfriend, however, was slightly taken aback by the fervor with which I pursued tickets. The venue could be uncomfortable, she said. Also, she reasoned, they weren’t a band that …
Against Repair
Tiffany Barber. Undesirability and Her Sisters: Black Women’s Visual Work and the Ethics of Representation. NYU Press, 2025. 320 pp; 24 color ills., 34 b/w ills.; $89 clothWe find ourselves in a mo
Excess and Formlessness
This essay foregrounds multiple modes of formlessness in Abang-guard’s emphasis on making the unrecognized labor of museum guarding tangible. Nestled within their hope that greater recognition might help change the political landscape is an invitation to think complexly about how questions of representation are related to those of form. This is because their work shows how the ability to perceive form often relies on submerging something else—a c…
Felt Pleasures
Featuring an array of Black people of a range of skin tones and gender orientations, Janelle Monáe’s “Lipstick Lover” video registers as a celebration of black queerness; it asserts that freedom comes with orienting toward pleasure. In this article, Musser argues that what distinguishes “Lipstick Lover” is the way that it is haunted by the lesbian. Lesbian appears not necessarily as identity, but as a specific orientation toward pleasure and bein…
Learning to Listen
Blackness, pleasure, and agency in porn studies
Limited Accounts
This essay reflects on the difficulties of situating recognition as a basis for ethics by putting end (2018), a paper, wood, and staple assemblage by Philadelphia- and Brooklyn-based conceptual artist Wilmer Wilson IV, in conversation with Judith Butler's Giving an Account of Oneself. Analyzing end, which offers a meditation on representation, racial capitalism, and intimacy, reveals how visual art can be both the scene and mode of address. This …
Black, Queer, and Sick
The unresolved problematic at the center of Evelynn Hammonds's "Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality" is that of representation. The importance of representation, she argues, lies in its ability to highlight alternative modes of being and thinking. Though Hammonds is ambivalent about queer studies, it is the queerness of black lesbian sexualities that might offer the representational fullness and disruption to norms that she …
Between Shine and Porosity
This article performs a close reading of an advertisement of Fenty Beauty's Body Lava featuring Rihanna in order to tease apart the imbrications of celebrity, sexuality, blackness, and labor by using an analytic of sweat. Since sweat is secreted by the body, this article is particularly interested in its relationship to enfleshment and what it tells us about the material aspects of black ecologies. Working through how and where sweat surfaces and…
Femininity
Written in 1987 in response to the aids emergency unfolding in the United States, Leo Bersani's "Is the Rectum a Grave?" is often described as an early entry into the strain of queer theory that offers queerness as tarrying in abjection, failure, and antisociality. This essay, however, is much more interested in thinking about the ways Bersani mobilizes connections to femininity in "Is the Rectum a Grave?" As Bersani moves from "women and gay men…
Introduction
This introduction situates our special issue’s focus on care, as concept and practice, within several lineages of feminist scholarship to grapple with the difficulties of the present moment. Over the past four decades of feminist scholarship and practice, notions of care and caring, as noun and verb, have had great traction across disciplinary divides, spurring debates about power and positionality while challenging binaries of equality and diffe…
Sensing Brownness
Maureen Catbagan’s Dark Matter (2020) photography series invites us into sensing brownness. In these images of museum passages and stairwells, silhouettes of museum guards, and evocative shadows, Catbagan presents the landscape of the museum. However, this may not be immediately recognizable because the photographs draw focus to the parts of museums to which we rarely pay attention. In particular, Catbagan’s attention to the presence of guards al…
Sweat, Display, and Blackness
This essay analyzes two African artifacts—a nkisi and a bieri—in order to parse the utility of liquidity as a Black feminist analytic. Enlarging the concept of media to incorporate these artifacts, the text links diaspora, blackness, and affect to the violence of colonial rupture, while also using an analytic of sweat to explore forms of expressivity that escape capture. Sweat becomes a way to think between two axes within Black feminist thought:…
Race and the Integrity of the Line
It is rare to find visual representations of female sexual pleasure in sexological treatises. Robert Latou Dickinson's Atlas of Human Sex Anatomy (1932) uses illustrations of sexual response to avoid making his text sensuous or pornographic. Like the charts in William Masters and Virginia Johnson's Human Sexual Response (1966), these drawings are carefully nestled between statistics and physiological summaries to embed them within the realm of th…
On Pins and Needles
This chapter examines the figure of the self-made man as expressed through two 2013 costume exhibits—the Rhode Island School of Design Museum’s exhibit on the dandy and the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibit on punk. These exhibits forge a line of continuity between the punk and dandy that hinges on likening the safety pin to the straight pin. This chapter analyzes the differing epistemologies produced by each object in the context of men’s fas…
Sensual Excess
This book offers multiple inroads into thinking with and through the dominant tropes of sexuality. By analyzing particular works of art, each chapter draws our attention to specific aspects of pornotropic (violent and exoticizing) capture that black and brown people must negotiate. These technologies differ, but together, they add to our understanding of the ways that structures of domination produce violence and work to contain bodies and pleasu…
The Limits of Desire
In the middle of the gallery, on a platform and in the center of a bright spotlight surrounded by fog, a lithe figure wearing a black-and-white outfit decorated with hanging straps begins to dance
A chromatic presence
Since the 1970s, Barbara Hammer has been known for her photographs and experimental films chronicling and exploring lesbian experience. Since her 2006 diagnosis of ovarian cancer, she has ventured into an unflinching depiction of her own illness, aging, and dying. In “What You Are Not Supposed to Look At,” a 2014 collage series collaboration with Ingrid Christie, Hammer and Christie illuminate new modes of thinking about life, illness, and what w…
Toward Mythic Feminist Theorizing
Simone Leigh's eponymous show at the Luhring Augustine gallery in New York from September 6 to October 20, 2018 features a sculptural gathering of vessels, which themselves are a mode of black feminist theorizing. Working through the sculptural, this essay uses the materiality of the vessels to illuminate multiple possibilities of thinking with race and aesthetics to remake feminist theory. This turn toward form, assemblage, and sensation, in tur…
Mammy's Milk and Absent Black Children
Through an incisive and delicate reading of the figure of the Black mammy in Melanie Klein, Emily Green suggests that we imagine Klein’s processes of reparation as interracial, in that they offer a way toward making sense of racial violence and the ways in which its contours haunt the contemporary. This reading provides a way for psychoanalysis to acknowledge its Whiteness and begin to grapple with Blackness. This response, however, explores what…
Surface-becoming
This essay analyzes Lyle Ashton Harris's large-format Polaroid, Billie #21, as a site to think about the epistemological transformations that surface thinking or thinking with the flesh enables. It does so by focusing on the surface aesthetics of shine, Harris's citation of Holiday, and the politics of engaging with black femininity. These surface tensions, the essay argues, show us ways to think about the relationship between self, performativit…
Black Women, Pornography, and Economies of Desire
Book Review| January 01 2017 Black Women, Pornography, and Economies of Desire A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography. Miller-Young, Mireille. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. xxi + 368 pp. Amber Jamilla Musser Amber Jamilla Musser Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google GLQ (2017) 23 (1): 160–162. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-3672503 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Perm…
Sensational Flesh
Race, Pornography, and Desire
These four black feminist scholars come together here despite (and also, perhaps, as a result of) centuries of silencing and censoring of black female and queer sexualities in the name of respectab
Queering Sugar
This essay analyzes the controversy surrounding artist Kara Walker’s 2014 installation, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, to unpack the pleasures and dangers that subtend discussions of black female sexuality. What Walker announced as a tribute to the labor of brown and black bodies produced myriad conversations about pleasure, danger, and black female sexuality. Most art critics argued that the piece reclaimed black female agency; many vi…
Race, Pornography, and Desire
These four black feminist scholars come together here despite (and also, perhaps, as a result of) centuries of silencing and censoring of black female and queer sexualities in the name of respectab
Lesbians, tea, and the vernacular of fluids
In Go Fish, Rose Troche and Guinevere Turner's seminal lesbian film from 1994, one of the protagonists complains that the woman who her friends want to set her up with has cupboards of herbal tea and no sex appeal. In the course of the film, the women end up together, but the joke/not-joke about lesbians and their fondness for herbal tea remains. What can we make of this conjunction? What does the linkage of tea and lesbianism connote and how doe…
Anti-Oedipus, Kinship, and the Subject of Affect
This essay reads Frantz Fanon and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari together based on their critiques of an Oedipal model of kinship. Though they have divergent reasons for rejecting this structure, merging these discourses brings into relief their overlapping interest in non-Oedipal relations. It also allows us to reconsider the theoretical implications of their work. On the one hand, it allows us to look more carefully at the affective implicat…
BDSM and the boundaries of criticism
In 2011, Fifty Shades of Grey, an erotic novel by British author E.L. James, took the publishing world by storm. This article examines the lack of a feminist backlash to the book by comparing it to The Story of O (1954) and the backlash that that book engendered. In addition to parsing the terms of the existentialism that underlies The Story of O, this article unpacks the neoliberal logic of Fifty Shades of Grey
On the Orgasm of the Species
This essay interrogates the assemblage of female sexuality. Drawing on an analysis of Masters and Johnson's anatomical research and primatological research on monkeys, I argue that the female sexuality was the product of encounters between women, machines and monkeys. Orgasm's extra-species life produced a conception of female sexuality as natural in evolutionary and anatomical terms. The set of assumptions that follow this naturalisation of fema…
Blackness, pleasure, and agency in porn studies
Toward Mythic Feminist Theorizing
Simone Leigh's eponymous show at the Luhring Augustine gallery in New York from September 6 to October 20, 2018 features a sculptural gathering of vessels, which themselves are a mode of black feminist theorizing. Working through the sculptural, this essay uses the materiality of the vessels to illuminate multiple possibilities of thinking with race and aesthetics to remake feminist theory. This turn toward form, assemblage, and sensation, in tur…
Mammy's Milk and Absent Black Children
Through an incisive and delicate reading of the figure of the Black mammy in Melanie Klein, Emily Green suggests that we imagine Klein’s processes of reparation as interracial, in that they offer a way toward making sense of racial violence and the ways in which its contours haunt the contemporary. This reading provides a way for psychoanalysis to acknowledge its Whiteness and begin to grapple with Blackness. This response, however, explores what…
Surface-becoming
This essay analyzes Lyle Ashton Harris's large-format Polaroid, Billie #21, as a site to think about the epistemological transformations that surface thinking or thinking with the flesh enables. It does so by focusing on the surface aesthetics of shine, Harris's citation of Holiday, and the politics of engaging with black femininity. These surface tensions, the essay argues, show us ways to think about the relationship between self, performativit…
Queering the Pinup
In 2006 a group of women decided to launch the "I Heart Brooklyn Girls" calendar, a celebration of queer femininity. Their initial concept-twelve months, twelve decades of pinup-gave way to a focus on 1950s pulp aesthetic in later calendars, but the link between Brooklyn and femme agency remains consistent. Yet the ways in which time, place, gender, and race meet are not straightforward. Through the various iterations of the calendar, we can see …
Reading, Writing, and Masochism
Through the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, reading and writing can begin to be thought of as processes of transformation. When one reads or writes, one plugs into impersonal flows and affects and becomes something else. Likewise, Deleuze theorizes masochism as an embodied practice that produces transformation on a multitude of levels. Beginning with Deleuze's analysis of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, from whom he developed a concept of masochism as a p…
Reading, Writing, and the Whip
Reading masochism as a literary phenomenon means exploring several layers of relationships—of literature and performance, of textuality and subjectivity—and the relationships among various practices of reading. I start with Krafft-Ebing and his practices of reading, examine the relationship between literature and practice, and end with an exploration of diagnosis and writing. Rousseau's Confessions exemplifies these rich layers, as a text with a …
Racial Camouflage
This article uses Adrienne Harris's (this issue) “The House of Difference, or White Silence” as a jumping-off point to think about the overlap between a queer of color critique and the poststructuralist methodology of relational psychoanalysis that Harris proposes. Although queer of color critiques have not tended to draw on psychoanalysis, they do provide ways to understand the epistemological construction of race. As such, reading Harris in con…
On the Orgasm of the Species
This essay interrogates the assemblage of female sexuality. Drawing on an analysis of Masters and Johnson's anatomical research and primatological research on monkeys, I argue that the female sexuality was the product of encounters between women, machines and monkeys. Orgasm's extra-species life produced a conception of female sexuality as natural in evolutionary and anatomical terms. The set of assumptions that follow this naturalisation of fema…
Reading, Writing, and Masochism
Through the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, reading and writing can begin to be thought of as processes of transformation. When one reads or writes, one plugs into impersonal flows and affects and becomes something else. Likewise, Deleuze theorizes masochism as an embodied practice that produces transformation on a multitude of levels. Beginning with Deleuze's analysis of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, from whom he developed a concept of masochism as a p…
Anti-Oedipus, Kinship, and the Subject of Affect
This essay reads Frantz Fanon and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari together based on their critiques of an Oedipal model of kinship. Though they have divergent reasons for rejecting this structure, merging these discourses brings into relief their overlapping interest in non-Oedipal relations. It also allows us to reconsider the theoretical implications of their work. On the one hand, it allows us to look more carefully at the affective implicat…
Breathing Race into the Machine
Reviewed by: Breathing Race into the Machine: The Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Plantation to Genetics by Lundy Braun Amber Jamilla Musser Lundy Braun. Breathing Race into the Machine: The Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Plantation to Genetics. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2014. 304 pp. $24.95. Braun’s book, a history of the spirometer, begins with an investigation into the charges of racial bias in an asbestos lawsuit. The …
BDSM and the boundaries of criticism
In 2011, Fifty Shades of Grey, an erotic novel by British author E.L. James, took the publishing world by storm. This article examines the lack of a feminist backlash to the book by comparing it to The Story of O (1954) and the backlash that that book engendered. In addition to parsing the terms of the existentialism that underlies The Story of O, this article unpacks the neoliberal logic of Fifty Shades of Grey
Lesbians, tea, and the vernacular of fluids
In Go Fish, Rose Troche and Guinevere Turner's seminal lesbian film from 1994, one of the protagonists complains that the woman who her friends want to set her up with has cupboards of herbal tea and no sex appeal. In the course of the film, the women end up together, but the joke/not-joke about lesbians and their fondness for herbal tea remains. What can we make of this conjunction? What does the linkage of tea and lesbianism connote and how doe…
Sensational Flesh
Race, Pornography, and Desire
These four black feminist scholars come together here despite (and also, perhaps, as a result of) centuries of silencing and censoring of black female and queer sexualities in the name of respectab
Queering the Pinup
In 2006 a group of women decided to launch the "I Heart Brooklyn Girls" calendar, a celebration of queer femininity. Their initial concept-twelve months, twelve decades of pinup-gave way to a focus on 1950s pulp aesthetic in later calendars, but the link between Brooklyn and femme agency remains consistent. Yet the ways in which time, place, gender, and race meet are not straightforward. Through the various iterations of the calendar, we can see …
Queering Sugar
This essay analyzes the controversy surrounding artist Kara Walker’s 2014 installation, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, to unpack the pleasures and dangers that subtend discussions of black female sexuality. What Walker announced as a tribute to the labor of brown and black bodies produced myriad conversations about pleasure, danger, and black female sexuality. Most art critics argued that the piece reclaimed black female agency; many vi…
Black Women, Pornography, and Economies of Desire
Book Review| January 01 2017 Black Women, Pornography, and Economies of Desire A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography. Miller-Young, Mireille. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015. xxi + 368 pp. Amber Jamilla Musser Amber Jamilla Musser Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google GLQ (2017) 23 (1): 160–162. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-3672503 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Perm…
Mammy's Milk and Absent Black Children
Through an incisive and delicate reading of the figure of the Black mammy in Melanie Klein, Emily Green suggests that we imagine Klein’s processes of reparation as interracial, in that they offer a way toward making sense of racial violence and the ways in which its contours haunt the contemporary. This reading provides a way for psychoanalysis to acknowledge its Whiteness and begin to grapple with Blackness. This response, however, explores what…
Surface-becoming
This essay analyzes Lyle Ashton Harris's large-format Polaroid, Billie #21, as a site to think about the epistemological transformations that surface thinking or thinking with the flesh enables. It does so by focusing on the surface aesthetics of shine, Harris's citation of Holiday, and the politics of engaging with black femininity. These surface tensions, the essay argues, show us ways to think about the relationship between self, performativit…
A chromatic presence
Since the 1970s, Barbara Hammer has been known for her photographs and experimental films chronicling and exploring lesbian experience. Since her 2006 diagnosis of ovarian cancer, she has ventured into an unflinching depiction of her own illness, aging, and dying. In “What You Are Not Supposed to Look At,” a 2014 collage series collaboration with Ingrid Christie, Hammer and Christie illuminate new modes of thinking about life, illness, and what w…
Toward Mythic Feminist Theorizing
Simone Leigh's eponymous show at the Luhring Augustine gallery in New York from September 6 to October 20, 2018 features a sculptural gathering of vessels, which themselves are a mode of black feminist theorizing. Working through the sculptural, this essay uses the materiality of the vessels to illuminate multiple possibilities of thinking with race and aesthetics to remake feminist theory. This turn toward form, assemblage, and sensation, in tur…
On Pins and Needles
This chapter examines the figure of the self-made man as expressed through two 2013 costume exhibits—the Rhode Island School of Design Museum’s exhibit on the dandy and the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibit on punk. These exhibits forge a line of continuity between the punk and dandy that hinges on likening the safety pin to the straight pin. This chapter analyzes the differing epistemologies produced by each object in the context of men’s fas…
Sensual Excess
This book offers multiple inroads into thinking with and through the dominant tropes of sexuality. By analyzing particular works of art, each chapter draws our attention to specific aspects of pornotropic (violent and exoticizing) capture that black and brown people must negotiate. These technologies differ, but together, they add to our understanding of the ways that structures of domination produce violence and work to contain bodies and pleasu…
The Limits of Desire
In the middle of the gallery, on a platform and in the center of a bright spotlight surrounded by fog, a lithe figure wearing a black-and-white outfit decorated with hanging straps begins to dance
Sweat, Display, and Blackness
This essay analyzes two African artifacts—a nkisi and a bieri—in order to parse the utility of liquidity as a Black feminist analytic. Enlarging the concept of media to incorporate these artifacts, the text links diaspora, blackness, and affect to the violence of colonial rupture, while also using an analytic of sweat to explore forms of expressivity that escape capture. Sweat becomes a way to think between two axes within Black feminist thought:…
Race and the Integrity of the Line
It is rare to find visual representations of female sexual pleasure in sexological treatises. Robert Latou Dickinson's Atlas of Human Sex Anatomy (1932) uses illustrations of sexual response to avoid making his text sensuous or pornographic. Like the charts in William Masters and Virginia Johnson's Human Sexual Response (1966), these drawings are carefully nestled between statistics and physiological summaries to embed them within the realm of th…
Sensing Brownness
Maureen Catbagan’s Dark Matter (2020) photography series invites us into sensing brownness. In these images of museum passages and stairwells, silhouettes of museum guards, and evocative shadows, Catbagan presents the landscape of the museum. However, this may not be immediately recognizable because the photographs draw focus to the parts of museums to which we rarely pay attention. In particular, Catbagan’s attention to the presence of guards al…
Between Shine and Porosity
This article performs a close reading of an advertisement of Fenty Beauty's Body Lava featuring Rihanna in order to tease apart the imbrications of celebrity, sexuality, blackness, and labor by using an analytic of sweat. Since sweat is secreted by the body, this article is particularly interested in its relationship to enfleshment and what it tells us about the material aspects of black ecologies. Working through how and where sweat surfaces and…
Femininity
Written in 1987 in response to the aids emergency unfolding in the United States, Leo Bersani's "Is the Rectum a Grave?" is often described as an early entry into the strain of queer theory that offers queerness as tarrying in abjection, failure, and antisociality. This essay, however, is much more interested in thinking about the ways Bersani mobilizes connections to femininity in "Is the Rectum a Grave?" As Bersani moves from "women and gay men…
Art (20 obras) · Sociology (19 obras) · Gender Studies (16 obras) · Psychology (16 obras) · Aesthetics (15 obras) · Philosophy (12 obras) · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism (9 obras) · Psychoanalysis (9 obras) · History (8 obras) · Law (7 obras)