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ABSTRACT
This essay explores how considering the treatment and location of black bodies in the American figurative and literal imagination forces us to reconsider the place of eros as a mechanism for archival ethics. Through an examination the commentary provided by Lynne Huffer’s essay “Strange Eros” (2016) and consideration of Michel Foucault’s treatment of the historical a priori, I reveal how eros, while powerful in its potential as a political possibility, is also a strange consideration for black people. With the #BlackLivesMatter movement as a contemporary site of black futurity, I contend that the intersection of eros, political possibility, and black existence point to opportunities for systemic change that will free black bodies – whether gendered, sexed, and/or queered – from the rigid constructions of embodiment upon which they were initially framed.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
LeRhonda S. Manigault-Bryant is associate professor of Africana Studies at Williams College. A proud native of Moncks Corner, South Carolina, she navigates the academy as a scholar-artist, and merges her life as a musician with her interdisciplinary scholarship in black studies, religious studies, gender studies, media studies, and fat studies. She is the author of Talking to the Dead: Religion, Music, and Lived Memory among Gullah/Geechee Women (Duke University Press, 2014), and co-author of Womanist and Black Feminist Responses to Tyler Perry’s Productions (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) with Tamura A. Lomax and Carol B. Duncan. Occasionally, you can find her adding colorful, critical, commentary to the digital universe via Twitter @DoctorRMB.
Notes
1. Bakare-Yusuf, “The Economy of Violence,” 312–13. Bakare-Yusuf cites Carter, The Sadeian Woman and Spillers, “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe.”
2. My citation of Huffer derives from remarks during her keynote address “Strange Eros” delivered at “ReligionInterruptus: The Affects of Sex, Politics, and Bodies,” Syracuse University Graduate Student Conference, February 27, 2015.
3. Manigault-Bryant, “African and African Diaspora Traditions,” 186.
4. Bordo, “Feminism, Fouault, and the Politics of the Body,” 248. See also Bordo, Unberable Weight, which has informed my thinking here.
5. See Pinn and Hopkins, Loving the Body and Brooten and Hazelton, Beyond Slavery. Relatedly, Collins Black Sexual Politics characterizes black sexual politics as the lasting practices and ideas that, while informed by race, gender, and sexuality, inform how black women and men engage each other, and are engaged by others.
6. anon, Black Skin, White Masks.
7. Roberts, “The Paradox of Silence and Display.”
8. Sneed, “Dark Matter.” See also Quashie, Black Women, Identity, and Cultural Theory and Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens.”
9. Foucault, Disciplne and Punish. See especially part three “Discipline.”
10. Bakare-Yusuf, “The Economy of Violence,” 311.
11. Ibid., 321.
13. Rickford, “Black Lives Matter,”; Wellington, “Black Lives Matter”; Camp and Heatherton, Policing the Planet; and Taylor, “Race and Racism in Foucault's Collège Lectures.”
14. Other principles include embracing of the value of diversity and collective difference in sexual identification, ability, religion and nationality; long term, courageous commitment to restorative justice and globalism; the simultaneous cultivation of spaces that are friendly for black families while disrupting the Western concept of the nuclear family, practicing empathy and loving engagement, and fostering an intergenerational and communal networks. See http://blacklivesmatter.com/guiding-principles/ for a fuller description.
15. Manigault-Bryant, “A ‘Club’ No Black Woman Wants to Join.”
16. Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, 163.
17. For more on Foucault's “silences” surrounding race, genocide, and colonialism, see Young, “Foucault on Race and Colonialism”; Hirsch, The Destruction of Literature; Foucault, Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics; Foucault, Power/Knowledge; and Milchman and Rosenberg, “Michel Foucault, Auschwitz and Modernity.”
18. Taylor, “Race and Racism in Foucault's Collège de France Lectures,” and Rasmussen, “Foucault's Genealogy of Racism.”
19. Foucault, Discipline and Punish.
20. Foucault, Abnormal, 145.
21. Sneed, “Dark Matter.”
22. Muñoz, Cruising Utopia.
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