Surface-becoming: Lyle Ashton Harris and brown jouissance

Abstract

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, performativity, and brown jouissance – that mysterious fleshiness that resists legibility but hovers on the surface.

Keywords:

• Jouissance
• black femininity
• Lyle Ashton Harris
• Polaroid
• citation
• becoming-woman

Note on contributor

Amber Jamilla Musser is Associate Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St Louis. She is the author of Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism.

Notes

1 Alice Jardine (1984) also criticizes Deleuze for his appropriation of the feminine position in his concept of becoming-woman. In her seminal essay “Woman in Limbo: Deleuze and His Br(others),” Jardine argues that the feminine is posited as a step towards freedom, but its materiality is never considered as a thing unto itself.

2 Jennifer Nash (2014) and José Esteban Muñoz (2009) both use the term ecstasy in reference to feeling beyond the self. For more on a genealogy of ecstasy see Jennifer Nash (2014), The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography and José Esteban Muñoz (2009), Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity.