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In Between Shadows and Noise Amber Jamilla Musser theorizes sensation as a Black feminist method for aesthetic interpretation and criticism that uses the knowledges held by the body to access the unrepresentable. Thinking through Blackness, empire, and colonialism, Musser examines artworks ranging from Ming Smith's Flamingo Fandango, Jordan Peele's Us, and Katherine Dunham's Shango to Samita Sinha's This ember state, Titus Kaphar's A Pillow for Fragile Fictions, and Teresita Fernández's Puerto Rico (Burned) 6. She engages with these works from an embodied situatedness to grapple with the questions and sensations of racialization and difference that the works produce. Throughout, Musser rethinks how we consider the relationships between race, representation, and politics by dwelling in those spaces and concepts that elude Western norms of representation, objectivity, and logic. In so doing, she explores ways of being and knowing that exceed overdetermined parameters while offering a blueprint for sensing, imagining, and living otherwise

Introduction: Brown jouissance and inhabitations of the pornotrope -- Eating out : the labial, consumption, and the scalar -- Surface play : flash, friction, and self-reflection -- Deep listening, belonging, and the pleasures of brown jouissance -- Performing witness: voice, interiority, and diaspora -- Weeping machines : automaticity, looping, and the possibilities of perversion -- Femme aggression and the value of labor -- Coda: elsewhere, is the mother a place? -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Bibliography -- About the author -- Index

In everyday language, masochism is usually understood as the desire to abdicate control in exchange for sensation-pleasure, pain, or a combination thereof. Yet at its core, masochism is a site where power, bodies, and society come together. Sensational Flesh uses masochism as a lens to examine how power structures race, gender, and embodiment in different contexts. Drawing on rich and varied sources-from 19th century sexology, psychoanalysis, and critical theory to literary texts and performance art-Amber Jamilla Musser employs masochism as a powerful diagnostic tool for probing relationships.

AbstractThis 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 doesn't in this image of Rihanna offers a way to unpack the utility of sweat as an analytic. Sweat offers insight into why shine connotes both work and sex while also giving us a way move beyond shine and toward sweating and the intimacies offered by porosity.

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" to "average, law-abiding family" to "being a woman," femininity haunts, each of these individual nodes further illuminating an insight about femininity with and without women.

Abstract
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 the scientific and pedagogical. However, both are presumed to be racially unmarked. This article shows how blackness disrupts visual representations of pleasure and femininity while theorizing how the line functions as a way to maintain a norm. Against this, the potential of brown jouissance emerges via the zigzag style of contemporary Filipino artist Jevijoe Vitug. In his portrait, a glimpse of racialized, sensual excess emerges.

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: the pornographification of the racialized body that Hortense Spillers and others have described, and the joy and critique embedded in Audre Lorde's erotic, especially in relation to formations of diaspora and spirituality.

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 turn, critiques notions of subjectivity that revolve around desire. Studying these vessels refracts feminist theorizing through multiple lenses of black feminism, bringing us toward a new story—a myth of feminist theory.

Identity politics within the institution and within sexuality studies conspire to produce me, a queer Black woman, as a specimen—that is to say, a commodity, static and rare. That this feeling comes from two sources that are often assumed to speak opposing languages—one of liberation and the other of the corporation—is no longer surprising, given incisive critiques of the university and identity politics. Rather than rehearse these arguments, this article teases out the affective currents that underlie these overlapping forms of objectification. Using critical autobiography, it maps out the emotional and physical work that I perform in three different loci: university rhetoric on diversity and inclusion, women's studies' insistence on intersectionality and visible difference, and the dynamics of the classroom.