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Our really stellar panel: My Body, All Over Your Body: Desire, Collaboration, and the Doing of Pleasure

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Pleasures of the Proximal

Calls for pleasure in queer theory are energizing, but they can often feel like hounding injunctions: feel hope, make worlds, have sex.  We know that pleasure is not ever-present, waiting for us to know it and activate it.  In fact, much of the doing of pleasure, as our session title invokes, is about reaching endlessly for it and sometimes only approximating it.  With my comments today I want to reify the proximal— the nearby, the outside, the almost, the barely there, and the good enough.

Martin Wong, “Rapture” (1988). Acrylic on canvas. Printed in Scholder, Sweet Oblivion, 15.

In my book on racial proximity in Latino cultural production, I read "Rapture," a painting by Martin Wong, as an allegory for his position in relation to the Lower East Side and to the Nuyorican arts movement. "Rapture" is a painting of a brick wall stretched in a triptych frame comprised of three baroque, floral, highly gilt overlapping ovals.  These carefully rendered, photorealist bricks are ubiquitous in Wong’s urban landscapes, but they usually constitute a part of a fully represented building, or a wall against which graffiti or a figure appears. Here the bricks are the whole work, unless you give critical attention to the frame, whose ornate details in contrast to the dusty bricks plead for attention. 

To experience rapture is to be seized.  It signals flight from mortal coil.  But first and foremost rapture is a sensual experience of seeing, looking up when the sky finally parts one day and bodies float to heaven, triggering rapture’s attendant affects: ecstasy, bliss, euphoria, pleasure.  Wong’s own rapture with the Lower East Side and with Puerto Rican men defines this period of his work, much of which features male figures set against graffiti-covered buildings, on crowded fire escapes, and on moonlit rooftops.  The gilt frame, its gay curls and flourishes in contrast to the gritty geometry of the bricks, brings attention to Wong’s artistic vantage point on the periphery of Nuyorican life as its queer lover. I do not mean to write Wong out of the material history of Nuyorican life by placing him at the periphery, something Latino cultural history has already achieved. More nearly, I want to theorize Wong’s position on the edge of Nuyorico as an aesthetic technology guided by voyeuristic pleasure.  The frame brings attention not only to its contents, but to the way in which we see.  We view the lowbrow through the high, the realist through the fanciful, the geometric through the baroque, the secular through the sacred.  What I call Wong’s queer advances, his erotic proximity to a Nuyorico defined by its hetero-masculinist veneer, is captured here in the formal proximity of typically divergent aesthetic modes. 

Mark Aguhar, “EVEN IF UR STR8 I STILL WANT 2 FUCK U 2” (2010).  Watercolor and ink on paper. 

Anatomists use the term “proximal” to identify those parts of our extremities that are situated nearest to the center of the body or the point of attachment.  I want to square the queer brown body in pleasure, to echo Jennifer Nash’s work, at the center of a field of ambivalent attachments.  Rather than the advent of pleasure itself, I want to examine the joint that keeps desired bodies proximal to the brown subject, for the brown subject’s pleasure.  Much of Mark Aguhar’s work, for example, deals with the treacheries of white desirability.  Much of her writing, painting, and video performances confess, deconstruct, avow and disavow her attraction to white men in the face of their routine abjection of her fat, gender-shifting, Filipina body.  Rather than jumping and resting on anti-racist salvos, Aguhar explores the dimensions of our proximity to whiteness.  The regime of white desirability is learned, but that desire is no less pleasing for being learned; it's renounceable, but no less over-determining for being renounced.

“EVEN IF UR STR8 I STILL WANT 2 FUCK U 2” is an ink and watercolor grid of predominantly white, male-presenting figures arranged in a kind of hound’s-tooth on top of Aguhar’s own recumbent body.  Here the desirable “straight” bodies become proximal extensions of Aguhar’s queer, desiring body, figured larger and gazing upward at a volley of white briefs.  The painting closes the gap between Aguhar and the unreachable.  What happens to these bodies in their proximity to Aguhar’s?  What would it mean to understand the unreachable, idealized other not as a lack but as a prosthetic extension of the desiring brown subject?  Rather than appealing for inclusion, Aguhar’s aesthetics of racial proximity shore up the reciprocal work of desire.  By bringing the “straight” body closer to her own, Aguhar internalizes the white object that wishes for distance; simultaneously, by pulling apart the knots of white desirability and laying them bare, she externalizes the dear, white object that wishes to stay secretly lodged in the brown psyche.  Aguhar doesn’t simply upturn the white gaze, but takes possession of it, like a tractor beam, fixing the white body in a brown matrix of pleasure.  

Roy Pérez

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Sexual Politics, Sexual Poetics fall meeting (2014)

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Sexual Politics, Sexual Poetics fall meeting (2014)

[queernow]

the pleasure principle

Chile...

Over the past few months I have been thinking about the ways that black women bodies are still interpreted--after all of Deborah Willis' books, black visual culture symposiums, and special issues- as aesthetic problems. Put another way, that the 'problem' with the embodiment of black women is so often posed in ways that are profoundly aesthetic.

I first thought about this when I was getting cross-country dispatches from multiple friends this summer who were in New York visiting the infamous Kara Walker installation at the Domino Sugar factory in Brooklyn and the stream of deplorable selfies that showed up on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Like many, I was most disturbed by how a clever critique of the role that enslaved black labor had in producing sugar, framed as art, quickly became something flattened, cheapened, and spectacularized .as images of people seemingly squeezing the sugar sphinx's nipples or cupping her labia showed up everywhere. Granted, several of us discussed whether, in part, Walker's work gave permission for exactly this spectacle, if it, in fact, enabled this toxic profusion. And, alongside this--remembering Ricardo Montez posting on facebook having to tell someone in line to see the exhibit that they were racist---if the installation ended up buttressing the desire to avert one's gaze from such histories, especially for those whose ancestors may be implicated in such fleshy trades.

But I have also been thinking about this in relation to what I like to call the other black feminist crisis of 2014: perennial provocateur Nicki Minaj and the eruption of discourse in relation to her Anaconda video, a video that broke a Vevo record for the amount of views it received in 24 hours (a whopping 19.6 million).  I remember being in Blessings Cafe on Flatbush the day it came out, sitting with two people, as we watched it again, in part enraptured by its frenetic imagery while, simultaneously, perplexed by what to do with its palimpsestic meanings. But recently, bell hooks--who has seemingly had a perplexing resurgence, with her  critiques of 'Beasts of the Southern Wild,' Beyonce Knowles (though caught dancing to her music) and now Minaj --said she found the video "boring," remarking that she would rather look at photographs by Carrie Mae Weems.

This, of course, references how the pursuit of sexual pleasure seems to be the dividing line in the sand for black feminists, which Jennifer focuses on in her The Black Body in Ecstasy. hooks crudely referred to this in relation to the song 'Partition' when she remarked that sucking someone's dick, and letting them cum in your mouth seems problematic when framed as an agentic position.

But I have also been thinking lately of the inability of black aesthetics to free itself from the good imagery/bad imagery that is a hallmark of Ed Guerrero-type film criticism, and the need for new key words in black aesthetic discourse, a focus of my second project.

But, in line with our current thinking for this conversation, pleasure...

Thinking of Grace Hong and Roderick Ferguson's call for a comparative analytics--one centered on difference, rather than equivalency, and that takes into account valuation/devaluation, life/death--I am interested in pondering the differently abled access some of us have to pleasures, fleshy and otherwise

And, as others have pointed out, how the pursuit of pleasure, as we get older and move up through the academic ranks, has become more elusive and tentative, something I have been thinking about lately as the various requests from the profession have exponentially increased this year, as the wear and tear to my bodily appendages from all this sitting continue to make their presence known, and as I ponder the "so now what?" of what after tenure will look like. (Do I get to have a boo now? Can I afford to go on vacation so I can get my groove back?) The rose colored lens I had when I applied for graduate school are increasingly wearing off and I am wondering about a pursuit of the pleasure principle now that has a more asymmetrical relationship to the university now while also recognizing, as a black male, that the university is also, I admit, a haven in a United States that seems intent, as recent events have shown, on murdering black men in the streets and leaving their bodies for all to see. Perhaps I'm rambling, but I say all this to say that I am intrigued about these conversations around the doing of pleasure for selfish reasons, because it may indeed save my life, our lives.

Uri McMillan is Assistant Professor of English, African-American Studies, and Gender Studies at UCLA.

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Uncomfortable Images

I’ve recently been thinking about what it means to take pleasure in making students uncomfortable. By this I mean introducing them to ideas, scenarios, and cultural texts that are confrontational, ecstatic, intense, or visceral. This is not the same as seeking to traumatize students or intentionally confront them with materials they are unable to affectively cope with; rather, it is a kind of wager I make on a weekly basis that my students will be able to harness their most visceral responses to challenging material for the purpose of fomenting ethical questions about encounters with aesthetic, political, and social difficulty (to use Jennifer Doyle’s useful formulation). I seem to have a particular knack at this, and among many of the people I’ve taught and studied alongside, there is a general consensus that I often get away with juxtaposing texts, images, ideas in my classes that many others would be lambasted by their students for presenting. I think part of this has to do with my own willingness to risk contentious debate and my own affective orientation towards what I teach – my students see that I take what I present them utterly seriously intellectually, but that I also feel deep affective attachments and conflicts over that which we are studying. I admit openly at the beginning of my classes that a central component of our course will be engaging with difficult ideas and images, and that the very nature of our classroom interaction will be about negotiating our conflicting but generative feelings about these encounters.

I think the pay-off of this kind of work is huge because it models a form of intellectual and affective generosity whereby we treat students like actual thinkers who can handle complexity in and through difficult forms of visual and popular culture. Rather than pre-suppose the need to recuse themselves because of a potential “trigger” in one of our course texts, my students seem willing to engage and voice their discomfort or disagreement when it emerges in response to particular things they are seeing: forms of pleasure that disturb yet intrigue them, forms of violence that horrify or numb them, forms of resistance that do not conform to their notions of liberal progress. That is, they seem to be adept at transforming what the concept of “trigger warnings” identifies as personal trauma into an object of collective/public debate and dialogue.

The pleasure I get out of organizing such encounters has little to do with any sense of omnipotence or control over the scene of a classroom (though one shouldn’t underestimate the egoistic drive underlying the desire to produce that exceptionally dynamic syllabus that gains us student followers and colleague admiration). Instead, it lies in the excitement I feel about the unpredictable effects of setting that scene in the first place. I am increasingly convinced that the carefully conceived organization of “uncomfortable images,” a concept I have recently begun to theorize as a pedagogical tactic and mode of knowledge production, can have ethical outcomes that exceed any specific aim of a lesson plan. This, of course, also becomes an immense source of pleasure for students who feel empowered by their own skill in navigating complex ideas, without ever gaining some sort of mastery over the emotional range they might experience interacting with texts and ideas that push at the limits of their thinking. Essentially, what I am interested in is the question of how making students uncomfortable can be understood as part of a larger pedagogical practice within the humanities that is invested in developing skills for facilitating an expanded range of affective possibilities in students – if one of the central activities of the humanities classroom is to impart knowledge of key terms, analytical frameworks, and intellectual genealogies to students, is it possible that the ethical component of that work is lost when we fail to address the affective dimensions underlying exposure to those analytical concepts? I am less and less convinced, for instance, that teaching students about ideology, can make them any more compelled to critique it or push back against its limits without a concurrent expansion of their affective experiences that could make it possible for them to feel a visceral response to its workings. The intention is not to produce a single affective outcome or have students feel in a particular way, but to activate feeling states more broadly as a valuable component of humanistic pedagogy. How does one curate a syllabus, a given week of a class, or a single conversation, so as to maximize the potential for developing students’ ability to experience new kinds of affective states, talk about those feelings, and make them an object of ethical concern? This is a question I have been asking myself for the last two years of my teaching, particularly as I have seen radically new kinds of results in how sophisticated my students can be when I give them the opportunity to respond to texts that are, for lack of a better term, scary (though equally thrilling). To my mind this remains a largely overlooked value of humanistic pedagogy, that in another context, I’ve argued runs up against neoliberal notions of skill-based value.  To value the capacity of humanistic pedagogy to incite new forms of affective engagement with the world is, in one sense, to overturn the presumed value of “concrete” skill based learning and to elevate the value of a pedagogy of affective possibility. 

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Questions

These thoughts are scattered, but center on the questions that my colleagues’ thoughts have provoked for me.  I hope some of these can be taken up when we all convene in LA.

First, it seems to me that it is worth us thinking about the relationship between pleasure and the confessional mode. I have been curious about how many of our responses here have taken the form of confessing -- boldly speaking against a certain kind of silence -- and it might be worth us considering how and why speaking and naming pleasure seems to require this confessional form.

Second, it is of interest to me that many of or responses have focused on the pursuit of pleasure in response to (or as opposed to) something that we now call, as a shorthand, the corporate university: pleasures in work, working on pleasure, pleasures in academic friendship, pleasures in politics, and possibilities for destabilizing the work/pleasure binary.  

I wonder to what extent “pleasure” has replaced a word that has fallen out of favor – resistance – and now stands in as a way of thinking about resisting (and I feel so passé even writing this word – what does it mean to feel passé, something else we might discuss) the logics of the contemporary university.  What might it reveal to us about pleasure that this is the way it gets talked about? 

Third, and related to the question of the “corporate university.”  It is interesting to me that the pleasures we describe rarely circle around perhaps taboo or unnameable pleasures– the pleasures of dominance, power, authority, and hierarchy. I think of my own academic location – I am half in women’s studies, half in American Studies – and, in women’s studies, we often take joy in institutionalization.  What would be better, we often think, than to have departmental status rather than program status, to have a doctoral program rather than just an MA program, and so on.   And, hey, we all pursued tenure track jobs (a position which often distinguishes us from our precarious colleagues- adjuncts), and though we are opposed to hierarchy (perhaps?), we also invested enough in it to go down this road, and likely take all kinds of pleasures in what it has conferred upon us (perhaps?).  I would like to see us take up some of those pleasures as well, and to read them in ways beyond, say, complicity, or as something we must simply dismantle. 

Finally, in all this talk of fun and pleasure and play – topics that are near-and-dear to my intellectual and political heart – I also wonder how we hold on to our commitment to theorizing pain.  There was a part of me that was elated by this year’s ASA call and another part that was terrified. Is there a way to make space in our intellectual and political hearts for black grief and black pleasures – and to name both simultaneously? This seems particularly urgent during this long season of black pain.

-- Jennifer Nash

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Still Watching TV...

            Now that new semester is upon us, my mind is moving toward other a new incarnation of pleasure. Sadly, unlike Shanté, I’m not talking about sex. In keeping with my commitment to television—not having a car and living in St. Louis makes it a particular important avenue for entertainment and connection—I want to explore the pleasures of racial non-identification. Part of this comes from an attempt to understand why I feel so compelled by Pretty Little Liars. In my previous post, I described the appeal of the actors’ woodeness and ability to just keep going, but here I’m attempting to parse another form of attachment that comes through in the guise of fantasy. It’s not that I want these women—they are pretty, but they aren’t my type, but that’s not to say that desire doesn’t circulate.

            This week I made space in my schedule to watch the season premiere of Scandal and the series premiere of How to Get Away With Murder. Seeing Kerry Washington’s unleashed curls (sadly only briefly) and familiar white coat were exciting; Viola Davis’ leather jacket, intense eyes, and sexy swagger, thrilling. I’m already excited about next week’s episodes, but the pleasure is different. One of the things reasons that people get excited about these shows (aside from their sexiness, narrative audacity and awesome fashion) is their commitment to showing the world as it is, which is to say the worlds have people of many different sexual orientations and racial backgrounds who are portrayed as complex individuals--RIP Harrison. This is excellent and much needed and yet…

            These nighttime dramas/soaps are not about escape. While the protagonists of Pretty Little Liars are objectionable in their own ways, it is the difficulty—I want to say impossibility, but that might be too much—of identifying with them that provides a certain degree of pleasure. Their mode of escape through non-affect can become a cocoon in which I can wrap myself and block out the rest of the world. Though my life bears no resemblance to Olivia Pope’s, I do have an understanding of what it is to be a black woman in America. While Shonda Rimes does not make race the centerpiece of the shows, it colors many of its aspects. This is the way it works in life, too. There are particular moments when the show’s subtle illumination of the structuring inequalities of race are particularly dynamic and complex.  And I feel, but it also hurts. The underside of identification can be pain. Knowing that although you may not share a circumstance, there are certain realities that aren’t going anywhere.

            I’m not sure if it is because I am writing this from St. Louis where the stakes of racial identification are particularly charged right now. In this particular moment, being black means following all of the news on Ferguson, engaging with difficult conversations, and (in the context of the academy), trying to make people understand what the underlying issues of the Michael Brown shooting might be. It means organizing (or responding to) school wide events and lots of conversations in the hall. As Jennifer pointed out in her post, these injuries are mobilizing discourses of friendship as a mode of producing information, justice or simply registering hurt. This is a lot—it fills the air such that escape is not possible. It weights pleasures, too. Olivia’s journey back to DC is not just about burying a fallen comrade, but about acknowledging that one cannot escape.

            In contrast, Pretty Little Liars tempts me with the possibility of life lived another way, where the affective labor of race isn’t at issue, where pain is caused by one bad person and not structurally endemic. I know that it’s a false world that I cannot inhabit (it doesn’t exist anywhere), but as a concept, it does bring some pleasure, mainly in the form of release and absence. I know the danger of this type of escapism, but when my daily world is structured around the work of being a minoritarian subject, sometimes I just want 44 minutes where I can suspend some of that and not feel and not even be. I’m nowhere on that screen and that feels good.    

Amber Jamilla Musser is assistant professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. 

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Sex and This City

After reading my colleagues' brilliant, introspective tumblr posts *and* starting to read both Jennifer's and Amber's books, I think I want to talk about sex as an intersection of fun and fury. I mean this essay to be somewhat personal, though revealing in ways I won't intend. But this is, after all, the risk and reward one is granted with public writing.

Last time, I posted about the ways that intellectual and artistic exchange can sustain and aid geographical or institutional isolation. Now I'm thinking of the all the pleasures I enjoy in Brooklyn, the place I've called home (even when in exile) for a long time. I am privy to many pleasures here: coffee with friends, meals at fantastic establishments, beach days, family (one elder, four adults, three children, and two dogs) squeezing into my one-room apartment for a raucous three hours of fast food Chinese, traveling to the Bronx to see my brother and his partner and kids, Afro-Punk, films, live performances, concerts, friends visiting town, reading new scholarly books, yoga class, walks in the park with the dogs, my comics obsession, hitting the gym, endless television shows, and ridiculous internet and social media memes, taking my 15-year-old nephew to Marvel events, binging on Netflix...my life is so full.

As I approach a certain age, I begin to wonder and worry about certain things: the weight that seems to appear out of nowhere, sleep patterns, and the most baffling of all--sex, relationships, and love. I will say my love life has certainly perked up considerably since moving back to NYC. Both the people I am usually attracted to and those that are usually attracted to me are in abundance here, but I do tend to fret about meaning a whole lot for a performance studies scholar. Like a perpetual teenager, I am adept at the fraught art of deciphering texts, emails, voicemail message intonations, body language, often to oblique ends.

For most of my life, I've been taken in by physical beauty (traits of both a Libra and a narcissist). As I aged, I started to lose my ability to ignore annoyances or plain meanness in that good-looking person I dated. By no means was this virtuous: I was dragged kicking and screaming into unflattering realizations about myself. I could be shallow, callow, superior, and overly-concerned with appearances. I learned a good-looking person is not necessarily hot in the sack and being hot in the sack didn't make me want to spend more time with a person. But this is all so opaque.

I am at this moment, especially as the academy enters a ferocious period of neoliberal management of faculty and student bodies, thoughts, and actions (particularly on social media), finding myself pondering the possibilities of a neo-sexual revolution, both individual and collective. I've been considering my seasons and cycles of desire. Presently, I seem to be attracted to a wide range of human bodies and gender expressions, much to the chagrin of my own investment in a "stable" queer identity. That's already an ironic paradox, yet I find myself shocked at my desire for femme trans men, effeminate gay cis men, butch transwomen, butch cis queer women, and butch cis het men. I don't mind that some people  (usually "open-minded" cis het folks) seem to be most comfortable with locating my attraction solely on other "lesbians," even though I haven't identified as such since I was maybe 19 or 20. Certainly, my gender presentation shapes how some people manage their desire toward me and for others (except for Black and Latinx men over the age of 50!! who seem to not care a whit about how I present gender).

So what's a genderqueer female-identified queer to do? Get laid, obviously. Despite the nature of this post, I tend to rather circumspect about my sex and romantic life, but I'm trying to push myself to publicly talk about how easy it is for me to sublimate sexual desire and consummation into work. Am I a Puritan at heart? The pleasure of writing or researching or teaching needs must work alongside other pleasures of the flesh, body, mind, and spirit. I don't want to be on of those scholars who talks and writes around (never about) sex and never has it. I don't need to return to the fantastic but often selfish (meaning hurtful to others) hedonism of my teens and twenties. Rather, I'm learning to inhabit the sexiness of a body I'd never though I'd posses: still heavy with muscle, but also softer in the middle, weighing more, and frankly, much more sexually prolific than the younger, cocksure version of my self.

So there you have it, no answers, and surely not enough prurient sex talk, but it's the beginning I'd like to make.

--SPS

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toward an aesthetics of pleasure, or being our own muses

On a short break from writing a few days in my little-used office on campus, I pulled a book off my shelf called How Do I Look?: Queer Art and Film, a a symposium that was eventually published by a queer working group akin to ours called Bad Object Choices. As I started flipping through the intro (and remembering the Post-Stonewall Queer lit class in winter I will have to order books for soon...) I started thinking...

First, how so often reading groups, collectives, haphazard alliances, and erotic contingencies positioned below and outside of state protocols and academic censorship have often been the lifeblood of queer, feminist, and POC organizing. Secondly, how so often the works, art, and poetry published by these same queer collectivities--often with support from grants from the now-defunct NEA, etc)-- have often gone out of print, a fact I recall whenever I teach the aforementioned class and look up books on Amazon--Brother to Brother, Ceremonies, This Bridge Called My Back, Did We Come All the Way From Cuba, so You Could Dress Like That?--that are increasingly becoming harder to obtain.

On the occasion of our panel's key words--pleasure, friendship, fun, and collaboration, I have also been thinking, like others, of a paradox: that many of the most self-sustaining pursuits are not "counted" in the theories of value that structure academic life. In my case, this is the pleasure I derive from art. While the amount of art writings and peer-reviewed publications on my c.v. are roughly equal, the former will likely be counted as the equivalent of one peer-reviewed publication when I go up for tenure. What this relationship ignores, ironically, is that my looser, more experimental writings on black contemporary art are actually what sustains my more formal writing, in my book, on objecthood, avatars, and black performance art. There is no either/or, at least in my mind, of which is more valuable. And it is also in these pursuits, that I often enact a politics of collaboration with the artist's work that I engage with and a freedom, and autonomy, that is an incredibly important safety-valve for academics in the 21st century corporate university. This Tumblr series of posts, to me, feels like an extension of that freedom, an opportunity for us collectively to vent, imagine, complain, desire, and, hopefully, transform. 

In this vein, earlier this summer, my friend Carlos Sandoval de Leon asked me to write for his upcoming show at the Cindy Rucker Gallery in the Lower East Side in New York. Understanding that I was in the throes of the book, we agreed on me writing just two paragraphs for the catalog, which he was self-producing himself. Of course, I waited till the day of to write it. The words, literally, had to be forced out....Obdurate...

You see, Carlos' work defies categorization. Obdurate and mysterious, his objects do not adhere to art historical allusion or movements and he, as artist, is not easily labeled (Is he a "Mexican artist," a "queer artist," a "sculptor," and/or"outsider artist"?"). His works are all titled "Untitled," he refuses market imperatives (he lives with his art and, as far as I know, didn't have a price list available at his recent show), and he, in his own humorous way, refutes easy comparisons (example: U: "So do you think of yourself as a Minimalist?" C: "You see Uri, those white guys had no soul...").

He is interested in materiality, specifically the histories of the materials he uses in his work (did I mention he also does construction work?). The historical ways, for instance, that plexiglass has been used, a material that frames jarring juxtapositions in his work, such as used Latex condoms and Chiclets. The mere rock that, on first glance, appears innocuous, but is actually a volcanic rock he picked up in travels in Mexico. The ribbon of yellowed paper, in a zig-zag pattern, that he made in a train on his way to Rome. The bricks, the melted coins, the found books he has defaced in black felt marker on the spines with playful new titles ("You Can't Afford This Shit" or "The Things I Hate by CE Sandoval").

In an academic world steeped in competition and canons, my ongoing collaboration with Carlos and his work causes me to slow down and ponder his objects hidden meanings (if any at all) and to appreciate the lack of sanction the academy has on our free-flowing conversations and projects. This is true, even as we continue to imaginatively devise ways to make the academy pay for our pursuit of pleasures, aesthetic or otherwise (U: "how bout trinidad?"; C: "yes ma'am!), especially now that Carlos has joined the "dark side" and added professor to his resume (he now teaches in the Sculpture department at York College (CUNY), a job he started last Thursday).

Earlier this summer, when I was visiting New York, Carlos took me to the Cindy Rucker Gallery on the Lower East Side, keys in hand, to see his show, to see in person some of the works I wrote about. The fan-that- blows-itself. The 3-D police watchtower. As I asked him about his work, and he unleashed streams of ideas, one thing that stuck with me is this: "I am my own muse." What if, in the academy, we practiced something similar to this? A pursuit of pleasure that funnels back into our writing and thinking, or if it does not, at least helps in sustaining it?

___

Uri McMillan (umcmillan@ucla.edu) is Assistant Professor of English, African-American Studies, and Gender Studies at UCLA where he teaches courses on contemporary African-American literature(s), queer of color critique, disability narrative, and queer lit and culture.

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Getting it Done while Getting it On

This past summer, I decided to use my research funds to travel to San Francisco for a five week research and writing trip. I wanted to begin preliminary research on a chapter of my new book, which explores serialized gay fiction in 1970s San Francisco, and take time to finish revisions on my first project. Whenever I would tell colleagues, friends, or acquaintances about my upcoming travel plans, the response was always the same: a self-righteous grin following by the statement, “yeah right, how much work can you get done while you’re playing in SF?” The implicit assumption behind these claims was that traveling somewhere “fun” was necessarily antithetical to accomplishing serious work; more to the point, in saying that to a single gay man, they were also calling me out in advance for proposing to complete important research and writing in a place where I was bound to have lots of sex.

It so happens this was the most productive research trip of my career. I finished my book and had lots of fun. In fact, it was the prospect that San Francisco held any number of pleasures – sex, dancing, shopping, touring, eating – that made me make sure to get a day’s work in by 3 PM, so I could take advantage of this West Coast playground. Moreover, in proposing to develop a chapter of my project on the pleasures of serialized gay fiction in San Francisco, living in the rhythms of the city’s nightlife and pleasure centers could not have been a better preparation for my research. Needless to say, many of those same skeptics were forced to eat their words when I returned bearing news that my book was finished.

Yet it strikes me that the skepticism I received about my intent to work and play, to write and get down on the dance floor, is symptomatic of a much larger problem in the humanities: it is now assumed that the playful, imaginative, experiential, and inventive qualities of humanistic study must be routinized and reduced to a legible working rhythm, or else repackaged as a method with immediate value and purpose to whomever pays for us to travel, write, and complete substantive research.The public seems to think that funding writing and research retreats means that they are paying for faculty to go on vacation, a perception that fundamentally misunderstands the way that travel, archival research, and writing works (i.e. its rhythms allow for time to think, relax, and absorb materials as much as conducting concrete writing with visible outcomes, a balance we all dream about but seldom get to have). It did not cross any of my interlocuters’ minds that for me to stay at home in the Midwest, isolated to my kitchen writing everyday with limited possibility of getting laid or seeing old friends or going out to any number of gay events, might actually hinder my ability to produce good writing. This logic assumes that austerity will make for better scholarship. It seems that what we commonly call neoliberal austerity measures – political and economic policies intended to rescind public services and reduce labor benefits in the interest of galvanizing more productive and independent workers and entrepreneurs – have also trickled down to our students.

Even as I am asked repeatedly to recruit new majors to my department and to excite students with new interdisciplinary methods and objects of study, they are being told by their parents, by career counselors and mentors that undergraduate work is not for “fun” but for gaining much needed skill sets. My students are shocked when I inform them that they should pursue a field they love and can’t stop thinking about. UW Madison students are notorious partiers as much as scholastic achievers, and our school has a reputation of being both a bastion of world-renowned scholasticism and undergraduate fun. Yet I can’t help think why it has become acceptable that our students can find their fun in drinking, attending football games, and playing sports, but not in what they study; why should the classroom be drudgery? As a queer studies scholar at UW, I find myself in an odd position: I teach students about the history of sexuality, alternative sex cultures, and gay and lesbian literary and cultural life, all topics that are pleasurable in and of them selves and that also make pleasure itself a topic of conversation. Yet so many of my brightest students feel torn about admitting their love of this subject when they are “supposed” to pursue so-called serious fields of study like business, political science, or engineering. The fact that being unhappy in these fields makes many students depressed, less able to complete their work, and ultimately unmotivated to pursue careers they excel in seems less important to the public than the fact that they appear respectable in their academic choices. Moreover, when these students do suffer emotionally, it is often those working in the humanities and the counseling offices of a university who bear the brunt of that affective dissonance, as the hard sciences often wash their hands of the mental or emotional fallout of their methods of scholastic training.

In light of this conundrum, my new work has become interested in the ways that pleasure – emotional, sexual, intellectual and otherwise – becomes a vehicle for social transformations at multiple scales of experience, from the most intimate and personal to the broadest levels of collective life. In exploring serialized gay fiction in the 70s, particularly Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City series, I am attempting to unpack how the pleasure of reading a sexy, fun, outrageous soap opera about queer and straight friends “coming out” (both as gay and as SF residents) in the post-Stonewall era might have provided a generation of readers a liberatory narrative rhythm for their own social journeys through an unfamiliar cityscape. To read a fiction that discussed the pleasures of San Francisco queer social life the same afternoon before one hit the town, and to know that others were reading it alongside you, could make the experience of the unknown world of a gay city electrifying. I believe this is part of what I try to offer my students in teaching them about the array of queer cultural products of the 20th century: to show them how the texts, stories, images, and fantasies that electrified other people’s lives in different contexts might do the same for them, and might provide the tools by which to articulate their own pleasures, their own dreams, their own power. 

[queernow]

pleasure on the edge

I’ve been thinking about the pleasurable stuff we do alongside our work that makes our work sustainable.  Some might take issue with the distinction I’m making between work and pleasure, but to them I can only offer congratulations.  To get through scholarly work that feels like work, whether it’s an eighth revision of the same manuscript or a tedious but inescapable administrative report, you might find yourself intermittently clicking away to a second screen where you’re working on a new sonnet cycle about your last break-up or a blog post for a conference roundtable.  One could even argue that a NetFlix binge is a work-like occupation inasmuch as getting through the worst episodes feels like an injunction from the Fandom, and completing a season feels remarkably like is an achievement.  Many of us translate this distraction into work by finding ways to teach or write about the stuff we do on the side (do we do this for repentance, or was it the plan all along?) Often when I’ve found myself feeling most disheartened by my scholarly work the feeling is accompanied by an absence of parerga.

Parerga is the stuff—why not pleasurable?—that happens around the work, and maybe then also the stuff that seeps into the process of working, maybe even making the work itself pleasurable.  I write “maybe” because I want to disrupt a certain imperiousness with which we sometimes read theory—feel hope, make worlds, experience pleasure. One might feel a special kind of post-political queer shame when we can’t make our minds and bodies perform the utopic, when we forget that the road toward the utopic is jagged, with unforeseen impasses, missed exits, and depressive detours.  I also don’t want to evoke any buoyant, capitalist liberal axioms like “enjoy your work!”  Your parerga might give you pleasure, but for some of us pleasure, like hope, is not intuitive.  You track it down when energy and boredom align and allow, and through that process, maybe, your parerga become a spirited part of the work itself.

Derrida is laying out a deconstructive orientation to painting when he writes of parerga as

neither work (ergon) nor outside the work, neither inside nor outside, neither above nor below, it disconcerts any opposition but does not remain indeterminate and it gives rise to the work.  It is no longer merely around the work.  That which puts it in place—the instances of the frame, the title, the signature, the legend, etc.—does not stop disturbing the internal order of discourse on painting, its works, its commerce, its evaluations, its surplus values, its speculation, its law, and its hierarchies. (The Truth in Painting 9)

The “frame, the title, the signature, the legend, etc.” provide clues about modes of production, ideological networks, historical possibilities, realms of signification without which a reading of the work “itself,” which we typically locate at the center of the frame, may become too closely bound to its literal content.  Similarly different kinds of queer historicism have assigned special value to rumor, double and triple entendre, affective clues, sexual proximities, and the side piece.  In my work I often turn to break-ups, hook-ups, allegations, and shade, because I have to in order to draw out and tell the story of queer practices that inform aesthetic effects but get paved over in the political rush to “transform and tame,” as our panel description declaims.  

But in addition to a field or margin of analysis, I’ve also come to think about our own work and our own parerga in the midst of the hyper-productivity demanded by the profession.  Such un-work might include solitary exercises like getting laid, listening to music and absorbing other kinds of cultural media, gossiping with other itinerant friends in group text messages, and making zines and hosting venues for creative gathering, making, and exchanging.  In my own experience, one a lot of folks share, a move from New York City where I went to grad school to the Pacific Northwest where I was lucky enough to find my first job came with a sudden falling away of a constant flow of almost involuntary, compulsory, thrilling queer parerga.  It’s easy to abandon yourself to the ergon when distractions require careful cultivation and your partners in this pursuit have been sent to their own corners of the world out of a desire to work at this particular kind of work, and not another, because we love it or can’t imagine otherwise or just can’t.  

Given the ways in which pleasure is tied to the social, and often to domains that exist outside and around our work, and given the ways in which practices of pleasure are often hidden beyond the frames of productivity and the image of productivity, I'd like to think more about the intentional cultivation of pleasure and slightly rattle the idea that pleasure is ever-present and waiting for us to know it and reach for it.   

--

Roy Pérez is Assistant Professor of English and American Ethnic Studies at Willamette University.

[queernow]

On pleasures and violence

This year's ASA asks us to think seriously about pleasure, fun, and feeling good.  Our session takes up that question through the lens of friendship and collaboration, examining the  "social connections [that are] bulwarks against self-annihilation as a response to attacks based on racial, political, sexual, gender, and social justice work within academe."   This summer, I have been preoccupied with Professor Ersula Ore (see http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/30/justice/arizona-jaywalking-arrest/ ).   I have been interested both in the tremendous mobilization of support for her on social media ( http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/justice-for-professor ) and also by the relative silence of institutions to this kind of violence (one notable exception is the Rhetoric Society of America's statement : see http://rhetoricsociety.org/aws/RSA/pt/sd/news_article/91420/_PARENT/layout_details/false).  In other words, I have been moved by people I know - and people I don't - who have kept Ore's name in my Facebook and Twitter feeds, and connected her experience of racial and gendered violence to quotidian forms of violence experienced on college campuses on a daily basis.  But I have also been disheartened that this labor has been ours (again), frustrated by the general institutional silence surrounding Ore's case and its obvious connections to the daily forms of violence so many of us experience on campus. To put it in the terms of the prompt, I am disheartened by the fact that our social connections, friendships, coalitions, affiliations, alliances, Skype dates, and so on, often become survival exercises, practices of self-care, and strategies for making our way through something.   And I worry that the institutionalization of the language of friendship-as-survival, self-care as practice of survival, and so on simply allows quotidian and spectacular violence to flourish.  I worry that our institutions borrow the language of friendship and self-care as strategies for appearing to respond to violence -- as in "It must be really hard to teach courses on race and justice. You should really take care!" -- without ever engaging in meaningful institutional responses to violence itself. Like many others, I have survived in academia thanks to my friends who are interlocutors and generous spirits who have shared time, insight, feedback, meals, scrabble games, late night texts, and so on.  But I feel that if institutions were compelled to take over some of the labor that friends -- queer friends, friends of color, feminist friends -- perform for each other in the academy, our friendships would have space and potential to be something else.

How might we get our professional organizations to be our friends, to have our backs, to affirmatively speak out when these regular practices of violence occur?  What kinds of radical coalitions, collaborations, intimacies, pleasures and so on would we have the time, space, and energy to produce and form?

__

Jennifer Christine Nash (jennash@gwu.edu) is Assistant Professor of American Studies and Women's Studies at George Washington University.

[queernow]

Pretty Little Liars: On Wooden-ness

Sometime in early July when I finished binge-watching the new season of “Orange is the New Black” and “Orphan Black,” I decided to branch out. I remembered hearing some buzz about “Pretty Little Liars.” Buzz might be the wrong word, what I remembered was seeing a friend who is up LGBTQ media post about it on Facebook. Based on that, it seemed to have enough queer content and drama to tide me over the evening.

 And so, I started watching this TV show about a group of four friends bound by the disappearance (then death then reappearance) of their fifth friend, Alison. Each episode the girls are tormented by an anonymous person, who blackmails them into divulging their secrets and occasionally attempts to murder them. It is a ridiculous show with a ridiculous premise and yet…

 I’m not sure how to describe the appeal of the show. I’ve tried several times over the past few weeks. I always start with an embarrassed preface, but slowly I’ve worked out some threads. Sometimes I get intellectual about it. But here are the caveats: unlike Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I cannot say that the horrors of Rosewood High are parables for the awfulness of growing up. I cannot even say that I am part of community (online or in real life) that has sprung up around the show. I only discuss it with the uninitiated and while I occasionally check Pretty Little Liars annotations, it is generally to know that even though I watch alone, I’m not totally alone. In my last possible gasp at explanation, I cannot even reach for melodrama, the “feminine” genre that trades on emotion and feelings because the show does not make me feel. Or rather, I feel slight embarrassment, but no sadness, fear, or horror, for the characters. This is no emotional roller coaster.

Sometimes, I tell myself that the show is about experiencing an alternate world—the world of pretty mostly white young women. Maybe this is what being a teenager could have been like. Sometimes, I say that the show’s portrayal of a college town, is offering a window into another setting that I don’t have experience in. Sometimes, I think it showcases the normalization of homosexuality. One of the girls—Emily—a mixed race woman is also gay (because otherness might diminish if spread out).

But let’s be real, the actual draw of the show is its unreality. As terrible (and offensive) as some of the plots are—romance with a high school teacher, who turns out to be a stalker, a first black girlfriend who also happens to be a pothead--they work to cement the distance between me and the show. I cannot (nor would I want to) imagine myself in their position. Sometimes these characters are terrible people, not that they are even aware of that, and they make many bad choices, the consequences of which drive the plot forward. But, I can’t even say that I am watching with schadenfreude. It is something else. I’m not invested enough in the characters to feel for them emotionally. It is about the ordinary, the terrible, and the solicitation of apathy.

This collection of events could not plausibly occur. The plot has arched and swooped this way and that way so many times that it is difficult to keep track of what the central mystery even is. Alison is dead, nay alive. A is unmasked several times and yet returns again and again. Knowing that the show was just renewed for two more seasons beyond this one pushes these plots twists even further because there is no way that A will be revealed until the last season, so the viewers know that we are in for more of the same.  And more of what? Some of plots lines are typical of teenage soaps—pedophillic boyfriends (a high school teacher), succumbing to various addictions (medication for ADHD and alcohol), shoplifting, coming out; others less so—a sister’s faked pregnancy, a covered up murder at a mental institution, a haunted costume party in a freaky neighboring town. It is all ordinary and terrible without enough good acting to help us decipher the difference.

The wooden acting, which I have grown fond of, because it is good enough for me to discern personality differences among the girls, prevents me from investing more deeply in their story as does the fact that I know this story will keep going and going and going with shrill and low notes and everything in between. Still, there is something comforting about the generic. Every episode I know that Spencer, Aria, Emily, and Hannah will don their best teen gear—selected to represent their personalities to the fullest—and march smiling into danger. They may break down, they may break nails, but life keeps going on. They characters keep naming the ridiculousness, but they no longer react. There’s something about this draining of affective response that is comforting. In the wake of endless cycles of truly horrific news, I sort of wish that the terrible was not becoming the everyday. I long for certain types of the mundane and I wish that I could face each day with a smile.

So, even though I watch this show alone and before now have not publicly declared my interest in it. I want to think about it as a space for conceptualizing the importance of the faked and the wooden for building community. Yes, genuine emotion is important, but a lot has already been said about that. Woodness or what I want to think about as the draining as affect generates its own space for coming together—a space where emotions are suspended and plots are irrelevant—but time keeps going and we still look good. It might just be a stopgap or minor note in the litany for survival, but sometimes embracing the wooden and the ridiculous is what we’ve got.

<

Amber Jamilla Musser, Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Washington University in St. Louis

[queernow]

My Body: A Narrative

ABSTRACT:

Ramzi Fawaz (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Amber Jamilla Musser (Washington University, St. Louis), Uri McMillan (UCLA), Jennifer Christine Nash (George Washington University), Roy Pérez (Willamette University), Shanté Paradigm Smalls (St. John's University)

Dialogue Format (Roundtable) Keywords: queerness, erotic, friendship, collaboration, corporeal, sexuality, intellectual desire, pleasure

"This roundtable brings together intellectually diverse scholars who are invested in the power of queerness, the corporeal body, bodies of work, and pleasure in scholarly and interpersonal collaboration. In this neoliberal moment, as the queer outlaw is transformed and tamed into a gay or trans* citizen through homogenization, the rhetoric of equality and gentrification, and obedience to the law, we explore the possibility of flourishing queer lives that are connected through the corporeal sensorium and through the sensate pleasure related to scholarly works.

The purpose of this roundtable is two-fold: the first is to explore the deep enjoyment and erotic pleasure of friendship and intellectual collaboration between scholars and academics. Although this is not a monetized benefit of higher education, these relationships help to sustain and fortify scholars who are spread across the nation and globe, particularly when they are intellectually, geographically, affectively, or otherwise isolated inside of their institution. These social connections are bulwarks against self-annihilation as a response to attacks based on racial, political, sexual, gender, and social justice work within academe. Our second related purpose is to explore how areas of study and interest, in this case the wide fields of sexual politics and sexual poetics, generate new affective and intellectual bonds, expose scholars to new writers and thinkers, and form new perspectives on approaches to intellectual work, aesthetics, philosophy, history, and politics.

We aim for this roundtable to serve as an example of intellectual collaboration in contrast to the prominent scarcity model in contemporary academia that pits scholars against one another for grants, jobs, tenure, intellectual fame, and allegiances of others. Instead, we wish to call forth a utopian ideal of plenty in which ideas, discussions, disagreements, and inquiry are not disposable quick sprints exchangeable for goods doled out by the corporate institution, but rather pursuits that can be fun, pleasurable, infuriating, game-changing, vital, and sustaining marathons that yield both expected and unexpected results: friendship, job security, manuscripts, sexual partners, articles, media fame, and so forth.

The roundtable participants will conduct and archive this discussion starting April 2014 and the discussion will culminate at the ASA convention in Los Angeles in November 2014. We will make our archived discussions public starting a month before the ASA convention and welcome comments, criticism, and collaboration from our audience."

  COMMENTS:

August 4, 2014

The idea for this ASA roundtable came to me as a result of three converging events: a. My move from the southeast US to the southwest US for a new academic position. b. Conversations with other junior faculty friends starting or early on the tenure-track. c. The isolation that often accompanies academic appointments for queer/POC/trans/international young academics, especially if they are single.

Let me first start with the roundtable's title. The first portion of the title is from a Ciara song, "Body Party," which chronicles the deliciousness of meeting an attractive potential lover at a party and the fantasies that arise from such an encounter. I found myself listening to this song a great deal last summer, firstly because it used a through-line interpolation of one of my favorite 90's hip hop/R&B "booty bass" songs, Ghost Town DJ's "My Boo." Other than the sensory memories Ciara's song evoked, her slowed down (but not chopped and screwed) use of "My Boo" comforted me as I adjusted to the quite strange and lonely land in which this native Northeasterner (and die-hard Brooklynite) had found herself. I had a predisposed sonic and affective like for the song because of its connection to "My Boo" even though I had previously found Ciara to be sort of light in her voice. I really enjoyed what she did with the song and was keenly interested in sonically, bodily, and affectively revisiting "My Boo" through her interpolation. Part of the intellectual interest came from my own regional displacement when I was living in New Mexico. I thought of "My Boo" as a regional song as it so clearly referenced Miami "booty bass" as interpreted by Atlanta's premier producer, at the time, Jermaine Dupri. So hearing “My Body” helped to situate and ground me in a place where black bodies were far and few between, but anti-blackness and anti-Nativeness were palpable.

As I obsessively listened to “My Body” I began to think more about how my sense-experience of my own body and flesh changed; or rather, how aware I was of being a black body in Albuquerque. The song indexed a sonic safe space wherein when I played it, I would almost always stop what I was doing to dance. In that dancing, I felt freedom and real joy. That experience was mirrored in conversations I had with other scholars, artists, family members and friends located elsewhere. The inquires beginning with “have you seen…?” or “have you heard…?” worked as balm to the bone-deep loneliness and alienation I experienced.  These human connections—some new and untested, others deep and abiding—provided me with the tools to expand out of my own narrow sensory experience. Suggestions for books, comics, talks, television shows, films, journal entries, magazine/blog/newspaper articles, songs, artists, and places to visit fired my imagination and connected me to a wider digital, virtual, and “meat space” world. These interactions with people who loved me saved my sanity and my life.

When the call went out for this year’s ASA theme “The Fun and the Fury,” I knew this was something I wanted to publicly discuss with other critical thinkers. This is partly how the situation came together. My co-panelists will talk share their thoughts about this topic and we’ll go from there. Our roundtable in November will be a culmination of this tumblr discussion.

We invite your questions and comments!

    --Shanté Paradigm Smalls, PhD Assistant Professor of African American Literature & Culture St. John’s University SmallsS AT StJohns DOT edu