“A Kind of Truth”: Black Women's Queer Desires in Post-Civil Rights

Touching History to Find “a Kind of Truth”:

Black Women’s Queer Desires in Post-Civil Rights Literature, Film, and Music

Dissertation

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

John Brendan Shaw

Graduate Program in English

The Ohio State University

2016

Dissertation Committee:

Martin Joseph Ponce, PhD (Adviser)

Andrèa N. Williams, PhD (Committee Member)

Debra Moddelmog, PhD (Committee Member)

Copyrighted by

J. Brendan Shaw

2016

Abstract

Drawing on Black feminist thought, queer theory, and queer of color critique,

Touching History argues that Black women in the Post-Civil Rights era have employed diverse technologies in order to produce fictionalized narratives which counter the neoliberal imperative to forget the past. Black feminist and queer theorists have described the potential for artistic imaginings to address gaps in the historical record and Touching

History follows this line of theory. Touching History examines an archive of Black women’s cultural productions since the 1970s which includes novels, short stories, essays, experimental video film, digital music videos and visual albums. Reading across these diverse media and genres, this project considers how Black women have made use of the affordances of specific technologies in order to tell stories which may be fictional yet reveal “a kind of truth” about the embodied and affective experiences of the past.

These mediated images and narratives serve as extensions of their bodies that push against static ideas of the Black female body. Whether it’s the image in a film or video, or the digital avatar presented through social media, Touching History argues these representations are intimately linked to the corporeal presence of the Black female artist.

Alongside technologies of the video camera and the digital camera, this project also considers other embodied technologies of expression including sadomasochism and the book and considers how these also provide a means for Black women to touch history.

Examining the novels of Thulani Davis and Marci Blackman, the short fiction of

Alice Walker, the experimental films of Cheryl Dunye, and music videos created by singers Erykah Badu and Beyoncé, this project examines the expression of queer desires by Black women. In this project “queer” is not synonymous with gay and lesbian or same-sex desires, although it may at times be used to describe them. Queer desires in this project also include the desire to excavate and speak to the past in a society that prizes forward looking progress narratives, the desire to speak to the dead and not let them lapse into oblivion, the desire to center one’s marginalized self in a work of art, and the desire to resist labels (including that of “lesbian”). When this project describes Black women as touching history (a phrase taken up explicitly in chapter 1) this describes a queer relationship to personal and historical time. Black women’s queer relationship to time in these texts denies this normative desire to bury the past or claim it is something we have moved beyond (as in narratives of progress after the freedom struggles of the 1960s and

1970s).

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To my family

(Mary, Michael, Chris, Kate, Mickey, Riddhi) for teaching me how to imagine and love in a queer future

Acknowledgments

This dissertation would not have been possible without the constant support and guidance of my dissertation adviser Joe Ponce. Joe pushed me to make my political and academic commitments clear and urgent. He provided incisive edits, a kind ear to my frustrations and writing ennui, and has a wicked wit. Universities may be bureaucratic neoliberal tools but Joe helped me navigate the business of the PhD without every sugarcoating it. My other committee members Andréa

Williams and Debra Moddelmog inspired me through their teaching, departmental service, and academic rigor, and serve as models for my own academic future. During my time in the English

Department I had the good fortune to also learn from Molly Farrell, Koritha Mitchell, Jared

Gardener and other exceptional professors. Lynn Mie Itagaki’s publication seminar was responsible for my first publication; Lynn’s willingness to help me shepherd my article through the academic publication process and her transparency about her own writing progress have been instrumental in my development as a scholar. The English Department administrative staff, especially Kathleen Griffin, helped make my five years working on this project move smoothly.

Kathleen’s broad knowledge of the university’s workings, paired with her kindness and warmth, helped me survive many a bureaucratic headache. The English Department also provided me with a Two Chapter fellowship for Spring 2016 which helped me complete this project.

The seeds for this project were sown long ago during my undergraduate work at the University of

Kansas where I worked with exceptional faculty who turned me on to critical race studies, feminist thought and queer theory. Marta Caminero-Santangelo, Katie Conrad, Giselle Anatol, v and Anna Neill all helped me figure out how exactly theory worked. Mary Klayder was my adviser at KU and she is responsible for guiding me on the path to graduate school. She knew my future long before I did. During my Master’s in OSU’s Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program I had the privilege to be advised by Rebecca Wanzo. Rebecca is not only an exceptional scholar in Black feminist cultural studies, she’s also been a no-nonsense champion for me and I continue to value her input and ideas on everything, including Serena Williams. While in the

Women’s Studies program, I also worked with other phenomenal faculty including Shannon

Winnubst, Linda Mizejewksi, and Judy Tzu-Chun Wu. Shannon’s courses brought queer theory and theories of difference to life in ways that dance across this project. Dr. Elaine Richardson offered me constant love and support both in her class and in her expert work with the Hip Hop

Literacies Conference.

Throughout my graduate school career, I have had strong support networks – especially my MA cohort who helped me survive my crash course in how to be a graduate student. Taneem Husain,

Andrea Breau, Nicole Engel, Tracey Hurt Fox, Skylar Brez, Jessica Winck, Lindsay Robertson and Varsha Chitnis were allies in the process of navigating academia and finding a balance between our political feminist selves and our academic futures. Taneem has been with me – as a roommate, as a study date, as a confidante, as a digital presence, as an editor, as another kind of sister – from the beginning to the end. She’s the one who tells me I can do this and she’s the one who supports me with laughter, Long Island iced tea, and dance parties. Completing this dissertation brings us closer to our plan to have offices next to each other someday.

During my PhD I have also found queer family inside and beyond the English department. Cyrus

Hampton, Sonnet Gabbard (and her menagerie), John Slefinger, Pritha Prasad, Alex Harlig,

Raena Shirali, Tyler Adams, Josh Kertzer, and Branden “Breezy” Ballard have in their various ways been there for me when I needed to jabber on wildly about theory or needed a hug or needed someone to take me out for a wild time. Tiffany Salter is my rock within the English

Department – someone whose chill and levelheadedness and ability to call shenanigans on the world warms my heart. Daniel T. O’Brien (and his poetry), Paige Quiñones (and her husband),

Ayendy Bonifacio, Nina Yun, Gwenyth Cullen, Kate Norris, Rebecca Turkewitz, Lauren Barett,

Beth Avila, Indya Jackson, Jacinta Yanders, Joey Kim, Beth Avila, and all of the #onlyin461 crew and so many others helped me survive and thrive in graduate school. Toni Calbert and

Krupal Amin responded to my work and kept me on task (or helped me avoid work). Even time zones away my Linguistics crew (Cindy Johnson, Katie Carmichael, Marivic Lesho) keeps me sane, answers my random queries, and has the perfect sticker ready. Brandon Manning, Anne

Mitchell, Anne Jansen, Meg LeMay, Colleen Kennedy, Julia Istomina, and Christopher Lewis have provided mentorship in how to be academics (and how to be not academics and happy with it) and also are just complete badasses.

Megan Reid told me to listen Nicki Minaj seven years ago and for that I thank her. She also sent me an advance copy of Grace Jones’s memoir (which opens this whole dissertation). Once six years ago she took me out for tea and told me to get excited about something (because I was in a deep funk about not doing what made me happy) and so I did. She’s the real MVP.

Lastly, thanks to all the Black women artists, singers, writers, thinkers who made this possible.

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Vita

2004 ...... Milwaukee High School of the Arts

2008...... B.A. English, University of Kansas

2010 …………………………………………M.A. Women’s Studies, The Ohio State

University

2011-Present ...... Graduate Teaching Associate, Department

of English, The Ohio State University

Publications

“‘I don’t wanna time travel no mo’: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Replacement in

Erykah Badu’s ‘Window Seat.’” Feminist Formations 27.2 (2015): 49-69.

Fields of Study

Major Field: English

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Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii

Acknowledgments ...... v

Vita ...... viii

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

CHAPTER 1: Traveling to Dark Places: Race, Touch, and Sadomasochism in Marci

Blackman’s Po Man’s Child ...... 20

CHAPTER 2: “What else is a video for?” Black Women and the Visual Archive on the

Page in Thulani Davis’s Maker of Saints ...... 88

CHAPTER 3: Cheryl Dunye’s “Dunyementary” Style and Queer Negotiations of

Identity, Fiction, and Truths ...... 152

CHAPTER 4: “I don’t wanna time travel no mo”: Race, Gender, and the Politics of

Replacement in Erykah Badu’s “Window Seat” ...... 213

CONCLUSION ...... 252

References ...... 265

INTRODUCTION

“I was born,” Grace Jones writes at the beginning of her ironically titled memoir

I’ll Never Write My Memoirs (2015). She continues, “It happened one day, when I least expected it” (1). From the first pages, the Black Caribbean performer establishes that her memoir documents her life, “it’s what I remember, or choose not to remember” (x). The book is a space of her own creation where she has free rein over the narrative. She explains, “A book is intimate, which is why it has covers. And if I am going to do a book,

I will be very intimate. It’s like sex – I’m doing it under the covers. … If you do go under the covers, don’t be outraged at what you find. It’s your fault for lifting the covers” (x).

In mingling sexual pleasure and the act of reading, Jones describes engagement with art as a material and embodied experience. She articulates a vision of the reading process as one in which she dominates the reader sexually and provokes unexpected responses. Her idea of intimacy echoes Shaka McGlotten’s argument that “you don’t have to be close to feel connected or feel close to be connected” (15); intimacy I would argue, following

McGlotten’s work, can be felt not just between two or more bodies occupying a shared space but also between a reader/listener/viewer and a piece of art, music, or literature.

Jones’s idea of going “under the covers” reminds readers that engaging with art is never a passive experience, but always felt in the body and linked to a text that may stand in for the artist’s body.

Writing about her age, Jones says, “They say I’m a lot older than I actually am. In the press, on the Internet, they add about four years to my actual age” (3). Rather than clarify her actual age, Jones prefers to “keep the mystery” (3), opting to convey her version of events, starting with her impossible memory of her birth. In the dissertation that follows I examine Black women’s literature, film, and music since the Civil Rights

Movement which, like Jones’s memoir, argues for the right to use art to tell a version of history which may not align with the official record. My project draws on Black feminist thought, queer of color critique, and Black queer studies to produce an account of the ways in which Black women craft fictional narratives which tell truths about the embodied, material experiences of pleasure and pain found by touching the past. I argue that Black women have employed a diverse array of expressive technologies to engage with histories which are frequently absent, forgotten, disavowed, buried, or straightened out to form a more palatable and streamlined narrative. These mediated images and narratives serve as extensions of their bodies that push against static ideas of the Black female body. Whether it is the image in a film or Grace Jones’s self representation on the page, I see these representations as intimately linked to the corporeal presence of the

Black female artist. Scholars joining studies of affect and emotion with Black feminist cultural analysis offer an important direction in thinking about how cultural artifacts circulate raced and gendered conceptions of desire, pleasure, and pain (see Nash The

Black Body; Wanzo; Musser). Building on this work, I consider the ways in which tools of expression – the video camera, for example – can serve as not simply a way to share stories of embodied pleasure but also become an extension of the bodies and their

2 feelings. This analysis broadens ideas about the potential of the body and adds a material dimension to Black feminist cultural studies.1

The Post Civil Rights Era and Neoliberalism

My dissertation focuses on the Post-Civil Rights era, specifically works crafted from the 1970s to the present day. I read these texts within the context of the shifting political and cultural terrain many scholars describe as neoliberalism. In spite of the legislative strides made in the 1960s for racial equality, the “post” “identifies the afterlife following a moment of intense political action and cultural change, but not the end of the social problems that inspired the social movement” (Wanzo 30). Neoliberalism has been widely theorized by scholars of feminist theory and political thoughts (see Duggan;

Winnubst Way Too Cool; Melamed); for my analysis I follow Grace Kyungwon Hong and Chandra Mohanty in understanding neoliberalism as a historical response to the liberation movements of the post-World War II era “characterized by the privatization of the social justice commitments of the post-1960s radical social movements and their attendant insurgent knowledges” (Mohanty 971). The 1970s and 1980s erosion of social welfare programming was part of the shift to an increasingly centralized government run through an economic logic. These shifts created a system in which the government protects “those who are valuable to capital” while rendering vulnerable “those who are

1 I use the term “Black” to reference both African Americans and those peoples of the African Diaspora born elsewhere, reflecting the fact that not all of artists or figures I examine are born in the United States. I am not attempting to produce a homogenous account of Black experience across the diaspora but rather to reflect a broadly shared experiences of Blackness while also noting the specificity of each site examined. For more on the tensions between “black,” “queer,” and “diaspora,” see Jafari S. Allen’s discussion (“Black/Queer/Diaspora”). 3 not valuable within circuits of capital” (Melamed xxi). Hong argues that the selective protection of “certain racialized, gendered, and sexualized subjects actually further obfuscates this mutually constitutive relationship between protectable life and ungrievable death” (12).

For Black Americans, Hong notes, access to care and protection relies on performances of respectability and requires countering categories such as “Welfare queen,” a trope used against Black women in the 1980s as a means of demonizing their desire for state aid (12, 19-20). Erica Edwards’s recent essay “Sex After the Black

Normal” argues that representations of Black women’s sexuality and sex are central to the myth of racial inclusion into the American nation-state while simultaneously

“embodying the state’s most profound exclusions” (142). In her account, Black women have been employed strategically as part of the growing apparatus of state and economic powers under neoliberalism simultaneously championed as proof of its success yet they also reveal the system’s instabilities.

The 1960s brought about an increased integration of popular art forms and the

1970s and 1980s saw a flowering of Black-authored films, novels, television, and music crossing over to a broader audience (Royster 19; Iton 101-103). This visibility is consistently leveraged as proof of Black success instead of a reflection of the market’s interest in treating Black people, especially Black women, as simply a commercial object.

At the same the increasingly accessible technologies of the last four decades – including the video camera, the digital camera, the rise of alternative publishing houses, the ability to mix music on personal computers, the self-publishing potential of the Internet – have

4 opened up avenues for Black women to speak back to the neoliberal narratives which seek to silence any but the most normative stories. Both Richard Iton and Lyn Mie

Itagaki draw attention to the ways in which literature, film, and other cultural productions

“sustain oppositional thought through the darkest, most repressive moments of the post- civil rights era” (Itagaki 33; Iton 1-27). As Roderick Ferguson and Barbara Smith argue, the 1970s and 1980s saw the flowering of insurgent Black feminist and lesbian writing and artistic production which consistently countered regulatory narratives of Black womanhood (Ferguson 110-137; Smith “Some Home Truths”).

Black queer theorist Francesca T. Royster argues that even in academic discussions of Black cultural production since the 1960s “questions about gender and sexual subjectivity” are “relegated to the margins in a quest to create a linear narrative,” a narrative that is heteronormative and masculinist (23). My project follows Royster’s call for an attention to gender and sexuality alongside racialization in the artistic work of post-integration America. The willful remixing of the past demonstrated by the artists examined in this project follows a broader project by Post-Civil Rights or Post-Soul artists who dialogue with the often traumatic past. Salamishah Tillet writes that Post-Soul artists “often return to the past of slavery and segregation, as well as the civil rights and

Black Power movements, to redefine the very terms and tropes of blackness” (181n39).

As I argue below, this turning towards the past reflects a queer understanding of temporality. Before elaborating this, however, I want to articulate my theoretical grounding in Black feminist and queer theory, schools of theory which gained visibility in the same Post-Civil Rights Era.

Queer and Black Feminist Thought

My project draws from the rich theoretical work of scholars in Black feminist thought, queer theory, and queer of color critique. I anchor my work in the foundational scholarship of Black feminist thinkers including Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, Valerie

Smith, and Patricia Hill Collins who articulate Black feminism as a valuation of Black women’s specific standpoint in society that accounts for both the shared knowledges of

Black womanhood and the multiplicity of Black women’s experiences. Black feminist thought cannot be theorized at a separation from lived experience, and “affirms, rearticulates, and provides a vehicle for expressing in public a consciousness that quite often already exists” (Collins Black Feminist 36). Collins writes, “As long as Black women’s subordination within intersecting oppressions of race, class, gender, sexuality, and nation persists, Black feminism as an activist response to that oppression will remain needed” (Black Feminist 25). Simultaneity of oppressions and privileges, articulated here by Collins, and most well-known by Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality is another key element of Black feminist theorizing and one that informs my readings across this dissertation.

In using Black feminist theory, I am cautious about my own positionality as a white queer-identified man working within academia and attempt to theorize in conversation with and alongside Black women’s work instead of simply using them to raise up my own concerns. I do not want to feed into the fetishization of Black feminist theory that Ann DuCille calls the “occult of true black womanhood” (81-119). I remain

6 conscious too of Barbara Christian’s classic call to remember that theory by marginalized peoples has long been crafted outside of the academy. I understand the writers, filmmakers and performers I engage with in this project as theorists crafting arguments about the world, even while also pursuing aims of entertainment or capital gain. All of these artists have engaged directly with conversations around Black feminisms and critical theory more broadly: writer Thulani Davis and filmmaker Cheryl Dunye are both professors; writer Marci Blackman enagages in public conversations about race and sexuality; singer Erykah Badu describes herself as a theorist and sociologist; singer

Beyoncè has adopted the language of feminism in both her music and her public call for pay equity.

In drawing on queer theory and queer of color critique, I do not want to suggest a narrative of theoretical “progress” as some have previously, with Black women’s theory serving as an additive or a footnote in work by queer theorists. In a recent overview of

Black feminist theory, Brittney C. Cooper expresses her concern for theories which position Black feminism on a “pedestal-as-foundation.” This move frames Black feminism as “the building block of a new mode of critical analysis” (13) instead of a rich and vibrant ongoing site that continues to be fertile for asking complex theoretical questions. At the same time, Cooper acknowledges that many Black feminist theorists are also working in the fields of queer and queer of color critique and celebrates these overlapping aims. She writes, “Continuing to prioritize an explicitly queer framework in future Black feminist inquiry acknowledges that radical Black feminism is a queer enterprise. It does not exist without the intellectual and political labor of Black lesbians

7 and Black gender nonconforming people” (17). Queer theory, then, is inherently linked with Black feminist theory from its inception. While some Black feminist and queer of color theorists employ “queers” as a noun, in this project I employ it as an adjective and verb, acknowledging that for some “queer” carries with it attachments to white gay and lesbian culture.

My use of “queer” follows Cathy Cohen’s 1997 essay “Punks, Bulldaggers, and

Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” Since the 1990s Black lesbian and feminist thinkers have expressed their ambivalence about the ascendancy of queer theory and the use of “queer” as an identity marker, especially its links to white masculinist academic projects and a whitewashed mainstream gay and lesbian political agenda (Smith “Where’s”; Hammonds 1994; Cohen “Punks”). Cohen argues for a broader understanding of queerness based on Black feminist intersectional analysis (25) and considers how marginalized and socially “expendable” groups of people, such as poor women of color reliant on the welfare state, might also be considered “queer” because of their relationship to dominant power structures (43). Alternatively, some members of the LGBT community enjoy considerable privilege based on class, race, or other identity markers. For Cohen, queerness describes “all those who stand outside of the dominant constructed norm of state-sanctioned white middle- and upper-class heterosexuality” (“Punks” 25). In a more recent 2004 essay, Cohen extends her argument to call for a “queering of Black studies” (42) and the development of an analytic that considers “deviance, defiance and resistance” (30) of those everyday acts that contest dominant mainstream White societal norms while also “contradict[ing] members of Black

8 communities who are committed to mirroring perceived respectable behaviors and hierarchal structures” (33).

Working from Cohen’s understanding of queerness, I use queer in this dissertation to describe those acts or desires which resist “stand outside” of normative narratives of how to move through the world. The “queer desires” of my title include alternative or stigmatized erotic acts, as in my attention to interracial sadomasochism in chapter 1, but also include other actions which push against the normative systems that shape our modern society. In this project “queer” is not synonymous with gay and lesbian or same-sex desires, although it may at times be used to describe them. Queer desires in this project than also include the desire to excavate and speak to the past in a society that prizes forward looking progress narratives, the desire to speak to the dead and not let them lapse into oblivion, the desire to center one’s marginalized self in a work of art, and the desire to resist labels (including that of “lesbian”).

When I describe Black women as touching history (a phrase I take up explicitly in chapter 1) I am describing a queer relationship to personal and historical time. I use the verb “touching” the highlight Black women’s engagement with history as embodied and intimate. Black women’s queer relationship to time in these texts denies this normative desire to bury the past or claim it is something we have moved beyond (as in narratives of progress after the freedom struggles of the 1960s and 1970s). Neoliberalism’s continued power relies on “an epistemological structure of disavowal, a means of claiming that racial and gendered violence are things of the past” (Hong 7). In describing a temporal logic wherein past moments, events, and figures return or are in conversation with the

9 present, I am in dialogue with queer theories of temporality (Halberstam; Freeman Time

Binds; Rohy; Dean). In her memoir, Grace Jones writes, “The present can seem as distant as the past, which can seem as close as the present. The most exciting thing is what happens next, even if it has already happened” (3). Her disordered understanding of time stands against a chrononormative society in which “the state and other institutions, including representational apparatuses, link properly temporalized bodies to narratives of movement and change” (Freeman Time Binds 4). Jones resists these strictures in her refusal to inhabit the present as a specific experience distinct from the past (which is finished) and the future (which is already decreed by normative logics). Elizabeth

Freeman describes the “stubborn lingering of pastness” as a “hallmark of queer affect”

(Time Binds 8).

This lingering pastness is not simply marked by queerness but also by intersecting experiences of race, gender, sexuality, and bodily ability. Jennifer James writes about her

Black students’ inability to do the work expected by a neoliberal society and “accept a boundary between some notion of a ‘historical’ past that can be roughly delineated from the present” (216). In their failure to compartmentalize in the face of state violence against Black men and women, her students “remind us that these boundaries are porous; their grief is indeed seeping through” (216). Across this dissertation, I examine those places where temporal boundaries are revealed to be fabrications intended to abet narratives of a nation which has solved its problems. These queer temporalities and their raced implications are mirrored in the forms of the texts I examine: the novels present memories out of chronological order, Cheryl Dunye’s films work through a fractured

10 serialization wherein characters recur with their names changed, and Erykah Badu restages President Kennedy’s assassination to demonstrate the continued life of racist practices. In all of these texts, Black women create fictional narratives as a means to respond to silences in the archives, silences which are reinforced by normative temporalities.

Black Feminist and Queer Incursions into the Archive

Black feminist thought has consistently decried the silences of the archive and official histories when it comes to the rich experiences of Black women in the United

States. Part of the project of Black feminist thought has been a project of drawing attention to those women forgotten or considered unnecessary to the narrative of historical progress. Alexis Pauline Gumbs argues “documenting Black feminism is activism” (“Eternal Summer” 59). She describes the physical and affective experience of reading through the Audre Lorde’s letters at Spelman College, writing, “It’s a queer thing

(and by queer I mean unlikely, magical, and against the current of the reproduction of oppression) that the work of a Black lesbian teacher mother warrior poet [Lorde] is even preserved in an archive on a college campus, so I take the event seriously” (“Seek the

Roots” 17). Gumbs understands this queer act of archiving Black women’s lives as a response to concerns like those voiced by Black lesbians Beverly and Barbara Smith in

1978 who wrote there was “no guarantee that we or our movement will survive long enough to become safely historical. We must document ourselves now” (qtd. in Gumbs

“Seek” 17).

The understanding of a Black feminist/queer archive that Gumbs suggests in her work is one that moves between the materiality of the actual archive (Lorde’s journal,

Lucille Clifton’s notes on a talk by Jordan, June Jordan’s syllabi for various courses) and the affective work of these artifacts and more ephemeral ones (Gumbs “Seek” 19). In the digital age, Gumbs understands the use of blogs by Black feminists as creating an

“experiential archive” of Black feminist practice that follows in the tradition of past

“Black feminists who were not content to wait for the reliability of historicity or institutionally validated importance” (“Seek” 19). Gumbs’s work sits alongside broader conversations in queer theory about the archive. Ann Cvetkovich’s notion of an “archive of feelings” has shaped much of this literature; she describes her project as “an exploration of cultural texts as repositories of feelings and emotions, which are encoded not only in the content of the texts themselves but in the practices that surround their production and reception” (An Archive 7). Cvetkovich, Gumbs, and others move between the archives as an official site of sanctioned documents and a broader circulation of ephemeral and intimate artifacts (see also Kumbier; Muñoz Cruising; Rawson; Marshall et al). My dissertation follows this queer impulse to consider alternative sites for telling the stories and experiences of Black women.

My analysis of Black women’s engagement with historical memory and various forms of the archive follows a persistent Black feminist and queer investment in the potential for artistic production to answer the gaps in the historical record. Elizabeth

Alexander writes that while historians may lament absences in the official record of

Black American experience, “the author can offer deeply informed imagining that, while

12 not empirically verifiable, offers one of the only routes we may have to imagine a past whose records have not been kept precious” (x). Novelist Toni Morrison’s fictional work offers a clear example of artistic imaginings that seek to offer readers a glimpse of a forgotten or unseen past. In describing her writing process, Morrison distinguishes between facts, which can exist without “human intelligence” and truth, which she describes as revealing unrecorded interior lives (“Sites” 93). Morrison describes her process in writing Beloved as a form of “literary archaeology” in which she engages in an

“imaginative act” to “yield up a kind of truth” (92). My title draws from Morrison’s phrasing to emphasize an investment in understanding types of truth which can be found in the fictional texts discussed herein.

Searching for this “kind of truth” marks Saidiya V. Hartman’s series of imagined narratives about a murdered African woman mentioned briefly in the archival accounts of a captain tried for the death of 21 slaves on board the ship Recovery in 1792. She focuses on the death of an enslaved African woman. She tries to “salvage an existence from a handful of words: the supposed murder of a Negro girl” (Lose 137) and ends up imagining multiple narratives of what could have happened, lapsing from personal narrative and academic discourse into narrative prose. Hartman describes her desire to tell the lost story of Venus, the other Black girl mentioned in the official documents about the deaths aboard the Recovery. She wants to write a “romance” that would exceed “the fictions of history,” the fantasies that “constitute the archive and determine what can be said about the past.” She attempts to tell an “impossible story” in the hopeful and wishful subjunctive aware that her story is “unable to exceed the limits of the sayable dictated by

13 the archive” (“Venus” 12). Ultimately her desire to tell this story is as much about the present as about the past. Narratives of the past, she argues, hold ethical and political implications which “rebound in the present” (Lose 133). My project follows Morrison,

Alexander, and Hartman in considering the affective and embodied truths which can be found through a reading of Black women’s cultural texts that are not presented as factual accounts but instead fictional creations.

Matt Richardson’s study The Queer Limit of Black Memory: Black Lesbian

Memory and Irresolution (2013) turns to Black lesbian literature which produces a counternarrative to the pervasiveness of a rendering of Black history as entirely heteronormative. He describes the authors’ use of what he terms expansive historiographic literature “meaning texts which comment on and reimagine the past, but without concern for historical verisimilitude” (12). This dissertation does not exclusively focus on lesbian-authored texts or characters, although both chapters 1 and 3 do consider the negotiations of Black lesbian identities. I share Richardson’s investment in considering how Black cultural texts might talk back to normativizing impulses within mainstream white and Black historical narratives. Unlike Richardson, I focus mostly on historically situated texts which aim to provide a window into a specific moment without the jarring anachronism he reads as linked to a critique of the disappearance of the lesbian or queer figure from history.

My analysis also sits alongside Grace Kyungwon Hong’s reading of Black feminist and queer novels and films about jazz and blues culture. In reading these texts,

Hong identifies a mode of futurity which reproduces social formations “through fraught

14 and fragmented attempts to grasp at erased histories, the labor of creating community, and the act of improvising into existence a past and a future that is always fleeting, ephemeral, and without guarantees” (109). She describes how artists “seeking some sign of the past” end up “creating it” (124). This dissertation focuses on texts positioned within specific historical moments – stretching from the early 1980s to the present

#BlackLivesMatter moment – with the authors and performers demonstrating the intersection of “erased histories” with potential futures. The Black women discussed herein are arguing for their continued presence, whether it be through Cheryl Dunye’s films which present the Black lesbian as worthy of the documentary gaze or Marci

Blackman’s Po Man’s Child (1999) which centers the pleasure and pain of Black women’s desires.

Embodying the Past

In examining these imaginings of the past, I also draw on the emphasis on materiality and embodiment which emerges in Black feminist and queer of color work.

Queer of color critique, as described by Roderick Ferguson, “approaches culture as one site that compels identifications with and antagaonisms to the normative ideals promoted by state and capital” (3). Culture, in this analysis, “becomes a site of material struggle,”

(Ferguson 3), echoing Cohen’s discussion of the ways in which Black individuals may resist normative strictures through everyday practices. In focusing on technologies of expression and how Black women use them to extend their bodies into the past and future, I understand these practices as resistant practices with real and felt consequences.

The metaphor of “touching history” seeks to encompass these moves by the artists under discussion. As with Jones’s description of her book as an intimate practice, my analysis throughout this dissertation focuses on how Black women engage with various tools to push back against a static idea of historical time. The different technologies used demonstrate the falseness of ongoing discourses that position Blackness and Black bodies as diametrically opposed to what sociologist Alondra Nelson calls “technologically driven chronicles of progress” (1).

Canonical queer theory’s reliance on the Black female queered subject as an object of the past that is imagined without a present moment reflects this social understanding of Blackness as hopelessly trapped in the past. Sharon Patricia Holland calls on queer and feminist theory to “break the cycle of our critical attachments by breaking with the tradition of producing black.female.(queer) in a historical register that matters only to her” (93). Holland argues that queer theory consistently forgets the Black body or produces it as a static object trapped in the past. Like Cooper, Holland contends that Black women are frequently the foundation for theoretical arguments but they are never rendered as active participants in history and the present moment. Instead of being presented as actors, they are relegated to serving simply as example before moving on to another area of discussion.

While my project attends to the past, I am invested in reading Black women’s art as a result of specific historical moments in which they act out their queer desires through technological means. Holland calls for a return to the materiality of the body and I understand that as bound up in the queer temporalities of memory experienced by Black

16 women. Elizabeth Alexander writes, “If any one aphorism can characterize the experience of black people in this country, it might be that the white-authored national narrative deliberately contradicts the histories our bodies know” (179). Similarly, M.

Jacqui Alexander argues, “So much of how we remember is embodied” (277). For both theorists memory and history are accessed through bodies, disruptive bodies which push back against narratives of progress and forgetting and clamor to tell tales of pleasure and pain.

Dissertation Overview

The dissertation that follows moves across multiple media and genres; I employ literary close-reading alongside feminist film theory, studies of Black visual culture, and

Black cultural studies in order to read for the moments of embodied engagement with history. My first chapter engages with the controversial practice of interracial sadomasochism, considering how this might be read as an expressive technology of pleasure and a mode of shared touch which allows Black women to “travel” into the past.

In this chapter I continue my discussion of the 1980s writing of Black feminist writers and consider their vehement dismissal of sadomasochism as a practice which moves against a progress narrative. The central portion of the chapter contrasts these thinkers with Marci Blackman’s novel Po Man’s Child (1999) and considers how a novel can attempt to produce the embodied sensation of touch as a practice of difference and a way to touch history.

My second chapter turns to Thulani Davis’s novel Maker of Saints (1998) which examines the close bond between two Black women artists even after one’s tragic death.

In attempting to find the truth about her friend’s death, the surviving woman uncovers a cache of videotape diaries which allows the two women to speak beyond the barrier of death. My analysis of the novel considers the ways in which videotape technologies and other forms of visual art offer these two Black women a means of surviving in the neoliberal art world of the 1980s. I argue that Davis’s novel thematizes the archive both in the videotapes represented in her fictional world and in her insistence on attempting to reproduce visual archives through a written medium.

In the second half of my dissertation I turn from written to visual texts. My third chapter examines short films made by Black lesbian filmmaker Cheryl Dunye in the early

1990s. Dunye’s trademark blending of fact and fiction undoes normative ideas about the role of the documentary and argues for a vision of the truth which centers Black lesbian desires. By playing with the boundaries between audience and viewer, Dunye toys with static notions of the image as fixed and, by extension, notions of the identity “lesbian” as fixed. I shift forward in time in my fourth chapter and consider singer Erykah Badu’s use of digital filmmaking in order to film a single-take music video in 2010. This music video stages what I call a politics of replacement, an early twenty-first century tactic by Black female singers; these women disrupt the supposedly settled business of racial politics by taking on the place of iconic white figures in digital texts.

I continue considering music videos and digital filmmaking in my conclusion where I briefly discuss pop singer Beyoncé’s visual album Lemonade (2016). In bringing

18 my project to a close I turn my gaze from the past to the future as I consider how

Lemonade imagines a Black queer feminist utopia grounded in quotidian gestures and the knowledge of the past. My reading of Lemonade considers how the text echoes the women examined across the dissertation and shows that Black feminist and queer work is never finished.

At the close of her memoir, Grace Jones writes, “If you are reading this, then I did finish this book. Or at least, I pretended to. Ultimately, you never really want to be finished” (376). While my project examines each text within specific historical moments, the broader questions I consider here are still part of ongoing questions about Black women’s place in historical memory, the ability of Black women to tell their own stories, and the power of artistic production to reveal affective truths. Writing about popular culture risks always arriving at your conclusions late or seeming out of date and thus even the theorizing sits in a kind of queer temporality. Following Jones then, I never want to be truly “finished” and I understand discussions around Black feminist thought and queer theory as ongoing.

CHAPTER 1: Traveling to Dark Places: Race, Touch, and Sadomasochism in Marci

Blackman’s Po Man’s Child

“If BDSM might not heal a historical wound and/or allow for some kind of redress, actual or symbolic, for Black women, it might serve as a stage or better yet a ring to replay and to reimagine scenes of Black/white sexual intimacy and the imbrications of pleasure, power, race, and sex. Perhaps such narratives of Black/white interracial sexual aggression in BDSM speak not about the psychic past but the present tense of felt (in the now) Blackness – the sentience of the Black body itself” – Ariane Cruz (435)

“As an aside to those who would plead that there is but one race, the human race, skip this chapter. That isn’t the world about which I’m speaking – because in this world, that sure as hell ain’t the case. In spite of what science and genetics may tell us, prejudice, racism, bigotry, and hatred persists because of perceived differences in skin color, heritage, and country of origin. In that world, race is an issue. It’s that world in which I play, and that world which I address here” – Mollena Williams from Playing with Taboo (70-71 original emphasis)

In an impassioned letter to the editors of Gay Community News in 1980, Black lesbian feminist poet Audre Lorde responds to the use of her words in an article on sadomasochistic practices in the gay community. The earlier article “Learning to Love the Body” by Michael Bronski closes with a quotation from Lorde’s now-classic, then- recently published essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” Lorde argues Bronski misunderstands her essay because otherwise:

he would have seen that [“Uses of the Erotic”] specifically speaks to the exact opposite of

what he espouses, for the expression of the truly erotic encourages the most creative

relationships between us, not the most destructive. SM is not the sharing of power, it is

merely a depressing replay of the old and destructive dominant/subordinate mode of

human relating and one-sided power, which is even now grinding our earth and our

human consciousness into dust. (“On the Erotic” 4)

The indictment of Bronski’s poor reading practices highlights the intensely contested terrain of sadomasochism within gay and lesbian communities in the 1980s. For Lorde,

SM amounts to a regressive sexual practice which lacks reciprocation and instead reinforces systems of domination operating in society. Lorde enters the conversation “as a black lesbian feminist” and from this position notes, “I am all too aware that in this distorted society even the play-acting of destructive power is only a run-through …. for the real thing, a way of familiarizing the participants [with] these roles when the real thing comes along” (“On the Erotic” 4). These comments strike against the common pro-

SM claim that the enactments of fantasy in the bedroom are separate from those they may mirror that are transacted in daily life, linking this knowledge to Lorde’s specific standpoint.2 In an interview two years later, Lorde notes, “As a minority woman, I know dominance and subordination are not bedroom issues” and contends that power and sexuality are part of “living” and not just physical encounter (“Interview” Lorde and Star

70). For Lorde and other Black feminist writers of the 1980s, SM cannot be delinked from the long shadow of American chattel slavery, especially when Black women actively chose to eroticize these histories.

2 Unless quoting another author, I use the acronym “SM” throughout this chapter to refer to sadomasochism. Others write this acronym out as either SM or S/M or employ the longer acronym BDSM which stands for Bondage and domination, Dominance and submission, and Sadism and Masochism. 21

In this chapter I examine fictional treatments of the possibilities for Black women of exploring the queer pleasures of submission and race play.3 Alice Walker’s short story

“A Letter of the Times, or Should This Sado-masochism Be Saved?” (1981) and Marci

Blackman’s novel Po Man’s Child (1999) take up the figure of the sexually submissive

African American woman to divergent ends and reveal the complexities of arguing for the erotic potential of choosing to mine the historical record of Black female subjection in/through enslavement. While the bulk of this chapter examines Blackman’s more recent novel, I begin with a discussion of Lorde, Walker’s short story, and other 1980s feminists in order to ensure that my reading of SM does not overlook the contentious nature of these pleasures and their public presentation. Further, as I demonstrate, in the 1980s the racial dimensions of pleasure were more frequently discussed by those arguing against

SM while pro-SM theorists frequently overlooked the ways in which difference might be central to the erotic frame.

In the broader theoretical orientation of my project, with its investments in Black feminism, Black queer studies, and queer of color critique, Alice Walker and Audre

Lorde stand as foundational figures. My project’s interest in the often overlooked archive of Black women’s creative potential draws on Alice Walker’s important work reviving the work of Zora Neale Hurston and other forgotten authors; in the next chapter I draw on her essay “In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens” which offers a foundational discussion of

Black women’s potential for artistic production in spite of social limitations. Lorde’s

3 Black SM blogger and public speaker Mollena Williams defines race play as any type of play that openly embraces and explores the (either ‘real’ or assumed) racial identity of the players within the context of a BDSM scene. The prime motive in a ‘race play’ scene is to underscore and investigate the challenges or racial or cultural differences” (70). 22 work serves as a touchstone for those working in feminist and queer theories which center racial difference; her articulation of the “erotic” in “Uses of the Erotic”

“reimagines the erotic away from Western designs, spiritually affirming it for women and people color especially” (Stallings Funk 9). Recent work in queer of color and feminist scholarship has endeavored to situate Lorde as “a starting point for a queer theory emerging out of a materialist critique of racial capitalism” (Hong 74). Many of the theorists I draw on in this project either draw directly on Lorde’s path breaking work or her influence undergirds their work.

The echoes of Lorde and Walker reverberate across this chapter and I see their work as informing the more recent cohort of Black feminist and queer of color scholars who form the basis for my analysis of race play and SM. One of the elements that feminists opposed to SM find most unsettling is, as I have noted, the idea that a Black woman would enjoy the experience of adopting a submissive role in scene that echoes historical traumas. Jennifer C. Nash calls for a Black feminist consideration of “the fundamental importance of fantasy” as a possible site of freedom and play (The Black

Body 151). Interracial SM play is not the place of socially acceptable fantasies, but instead, as Juana María Rodríguez writes these are “soiled, messy encounters brimming with social and psychic abjection, domination, and pain, even as they open a space for ecstasy and possibility” (“Queer Sociality” 341). Rodríguez argues that denying these fantasies or attempting to censor them “constitutes an insidious violence” that limits the imagination of those engaged in these queer erotic experiments (“Queer Sociality” 343).

This chapter should not be read as an argument for SM radically undoing the social fabric

23 of racism and heteropatriarchy; rather, I contend that for many practitioners these scenes may be personally pleasurable through what Nash calls “pleasures in blackness” which she notes “are not manifestations of false consciousness or elaborate acts of self- delusion” (151 original emphasis) for African American women who speak their desires through their embodied racialization. Nash’s work examining Black women in pornography joins other recent scholars examining these highly contested spaces of fantasies by women of color, especially Black women, which move against notions of propriety and even denote pleasure in scenes of subjection. Along with Nash, I draw on

Amber Jamilla Musser’s work on Black women and masochism in literature, L. H.

Stallings’s examination of BDSM in Chester Himes’s work (Funk 88-121), Juana María

Rodríguez’s interest in the pleasures of the Latina femme across cultural texts (Sexual

Futures, “Queer Sociality”), and Ariane Cruz’s examination of Black women in SM pornography (“Beyond Black and Blue”).

Unlike recent ethnographic studies of SM communities by Margot Weiss and

Staci Newmahr, Cruz’s work focuses specifically on Black women’s personal experiences as practitioners of sadomasochism, blending analysis of pornographic films with interviews with Black women who perform professionally as dominatrixes. I consider my work in concert with Cruz’s project. She argues:

While the antebellum legacy of sexual violence on Black women is substantive, what has

not been effectively considered is how Black women deliberately employ the shadows of

slavery in the deliverance and/or receiving of sexual pleasure. That is, how the ‘slime’ – a

staining sludge of pain and violence- becomes a type of lubricant to stimulate sexual

fantasies, access sexual pleasure, and heighten sexual desire. (410) 24

Through her analysis of Black women’s experiences, Cruz exposes “how the rich historical symbolic capital of the BDSM ‘slave’ fantasy maintains not just a deeply erotic currency, but also the power to induce disgust” (415). The disgust or slime that these women consent to play with catalyzes their pleasure. Instead of recourse to the idea of a

“play frame,” an “alibi” that covers over the reification of existing social structures and hierarchies, Margot Weiss argues that effective and “hot” SM scenes of cultural trauma play draw intentionally on national imaginaries and affective registers structured by racial and gender inequality (15-17, 151, 189, 214-216).4

Given SM’s continued marginal status within mainstream LGBT communities, and continued ambivalence or discomfort by many Black feminist writers towards interracial SM, I consider SM a queer sexual practice. As I articulate below, SM has historically been considered counter to the aims of inclusion sought by many within gay and lesbian communities and at odds with the feminist emphasis on consent. For many

Black women, interracial SM play, especially the choice to inhabit the submissive role, continues to be understood as antithetical to Black freedom struggles. In calling these practices queer, I am marking them as marginal or othered even within some queer/lesbian/feminist communities; this does not mean that these practices are de facto politically radical, even if they may be linked to progressive political aims.

4 The idea of SM as a space of play or the use of metaphors of theater/stage performance is part of the defenses of SM penned by many pro-SM feminists. For example, Patrick Califia writes, “The S/M subculture is a theater in which sexual dramas can be acted out and appreciated” (“Feminism and Sadomasochism” 172). In her examination of sadomasochistic play within the context of imperialism, Anne McClintock writes, “S/M is a theater of signs” (146) and describes SM paraphernalia as “décor, props, and costumery” (Imperial Leather 143). 25

This current chapter focuses on two fictional texts centering on the choices made by Black women acting in the sexually submissive role within race play. I follow Nash,

Cruz, and others in valuing the importance of Black women’s sexual fantasy and the frisson of engaging directly with structures of race and historical trauma. My central claim is that SM operates as an example of hapticality, a form of shared touch and sensation which exceeds corporeal boundaries allowing for individuals to feel through another person’s body or through inorganic extensions of their body (including SM props such as whips and black leather clothing). The haptic as I use it here draws on Stefano

Harney and Fred Moten’s formulation along with recent writing by Rizvana Bradley and

Hypatia Vourloumis. In a dissertation focused on technologies of expression employed by Black women, this chapter employs the broadest application of the idea of technology;

I understand the bodily experiences of SM as shared between bodies - or bodies and various inorganic props - as a form of technology which allows for the expression of various pleasures and queer desires.

Reading Blackman’s novel I develop an idea of traveling to dark places (drawing on a phrase used by the narrator) which describes the ways in which engaging with histories of racial trauma as a part of sexual play leads to an intimate and shared experience of touching the past. Feminists arguing against interracial SM frequently level charges that race play will undo forward social progress, assuming a linear progression which, as I argued in the introduction, is countered by notions of queer temporality. SM operates as a mode of engaging the past through sensation, following Musser’s argument that sensations are “embodiments of difference” (1) and thus, I argue, sensations must

26 always be informed by the histories which crafted these differences. Po argues for the necessity of listening to the psychic truths found in the raced and gendered body and thinking about the ways affective experiences of historical trauma are larger than one individual body. Sadomasochism operates as a way to enact both sexual and psychic satisfaction in the face of historical injustice; the use of pain to fight pain relies on the very historical significance Walker and the anti-SM feminists decry in their arguments against sadomasochism and especially the participation of Black women in interracial lesbian/same-sex encounters. Ultimately, I argue, Blackman’s novel shows how an engagement with embodied experience can allow Black women to see past the distortions of racist, sexist, and heteronormative representations.

This chapter moves in a somewhat chronological order: I start the chapter by examining the 1980s debate over sadomasochism within lesbian and feminist communities to demonstrate ways in which Black feminist critics opposed to SM and race-play understand playing with racialized histories as working against progress.

Walker’s short story demonstrates this view and highlights the way in which representational technologies are understood to disperse these views which are seen as corrupting. Where Walker writes from the spectator, Blackman’s later novel considers the internal life of a Black woman who uses historical racial role-play as a means of chasing physical sensations she cannot otherwise feel.

Race and the 1980s Debates over SM

In the contentious 1980s and early 1990s debate over sadomasochistic practice within lesbian communities, issues of race and interracial desire were frequently used by writers arguing against SM. Sadomasochism became “a lightning rod of sexual censorship” (Hart 57) within the broader “sex wars” among radical feminists; for many lesbian feminists SM was “the border over which one could not pass and remain a feminist” (Hart 57). From its inception the feminist antipornography movement treated pornography and SM as” facets of the same ostensibly malign phenomena” that oppressed women in a patriarchal system (Rubin “Blood Under the Bridge” 207).

Strategic use of violent sexual imagery served an important and persuasive element in the battle against pornographic representation (see Rubin “Blood” 200-215). Many lesbian feminists feared SM visibility would jeopardize the image of lesbian identity naturalized by liberal feminists in the 1970s, one that desexualized lesbianism and countered a century of discourse that represented the “lesbian” as dangerous, violent, and pathological (Hart 38-52). Both Patrick Califia and Gayle Rubin, in her classic essay

“Thinking Sex” (1984), describe the efforts of lesbians and gay men in the 1980s to distance themselves from various sexual expressions that might jeopardize integration into mainstream society (Califia “A Secret Side; Califia “Feminism and

Sadomasochism”; Rubin “Thinking Sex”).5

5 Pat Califia identified as a woman, a lesbian, and a leatherdyke at the time of writing the essays I discuss in this chapter. He has since transitioned to a male identity and a more genderqueer sexual identification. I employ male pronouns throughout and use his current chosen name Patrick, but all of the essays under discussion were published under the name Pat Califia. 28

The essays by Califia and Rubin’s “Leather Menace” (1981) were among a proliferation of texts in the 1980s that celebrated the growing visibility of sadomasochism in the overlapping communities of lesbians, feminists, and those with queer sexual desires. Feminist presses and the rise of feminist and queer/gay/lesbian publications allowed spaces for both sides of this issue to share their personal narratives, their broader political arguments, and their creative responses to the topic of sadomasochism. In these debates, discussions of race and writing by women of color tended to appear only in opposition to SM, while work supporting SM often ignored issues of difference. One example of the absence of race can be seen in Coming to Power: Writings and Graphics on Lesbian SM, a 1981 collection edited by San Francisco-based lesbian SM organization

Samois. Dubbed an “outrageous book” by its editors (Davis 7), Coming to Power filled a need for many women seeking affirmation of their sadomasochistic pleasures, yet lacked any texts by women of color. This absence along with the lack of discussion about disability among SM practitioners is noted in the introduction in a rhetorical move that both stages awareness of the intersecting identities of those presumably “represented” by the text yet elides their importance, especially after a lengthy discussion of the laborious selection process for what was featured in the volume (Davis 10-12). The unsigned or anonymous erotica presented in the anthology, especially those without clear identity markers used in describing the characters, do offer a space for readers to imagine racial difference into the texts.6 Still, the essays and stories lack a clear discussion of racial

6 This point develops from Marie Franco’s presentation on Dorothy Allison’s short erotica at the Queer Places, Practices and Lives II Conference, 2014. Franco argues that Allison’s pieces lack the contextual or identity markers that would mark the participants in each sexual scene with fixed roles of race or class.

29 politics among sadomasochistic practitioners or a way to consider the ways racialized desires inform the pleasures under discussion.

The role of race in sexual play takes precedence in the 1982 anthology Against

Sadomasochism: A Radical Feminist Analysis. Although not a direct response to Coming to Power, this collection sought to respond to the growing presence of SM in lesbian communities and developed in part from a forum on lesbian SM held in 1980 by the organization Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media (WAVPM) (Rubin

“Blood” 211). Margot Weiss argues that the anthology remains “the major radical feminist critique of SM” (148). Against Sadomasochism marshals multiple histories of racial and ethnic violence as a way to demonstrate what is seen as either the inability to

“consent” to sadomasochistic sexual play or as the ways in which these erotic exchanges are continuous with past systemic oppression and traditions of gendered/racialized torture.

In her introduction to Against, Robin Ruth Linden rejects the possibility of a truly consensual SM encounter within a community she depicts as pressuring participants into specific roles and identities, thus rendering “the ritual of consent … empirically irrelevant” (9). Linden’s comments about consent invoke the infamous Stanford prison experiment, employing an extreme and somewhat incompatible example of loss of control and ambiguous consent. Cheri Lesh’s essay in the anthology goes farther comparing SM participants to the Jews walking into the showers at Auschwitz, the

Chinese practice of foot-binding, the Muslim practice of purdah, and ritual clitoridetctomy (202-204). Racialized imagery works here to intensify harms and thus

30 intensify the weight of the perceived damages from these sexual choices; this follows the move by antipornography feminists who relied on the “basic fungibility” of racialized tropes to represent women of color as the most exploited women (Nash The Black Body

11).

While the examples used by Lesh, Linden, and others can seem preposterous and even insulting to historical experiences of oppression and traumas, they do gesture towards the ways in which histories of race and sexuality always inform consensual SM.

Elizabeth Freeman notes that “second wave and Third World feminists” were the ones who “in their very condemnations actually confronted the way that sadomasochistic fantasies and/or practices index national and imperial pasts,” crucial elements often overlooked by white queer and lesbian theorists (Time Binds 143). In this chapter, I argue that SM and sexual practices more broadly cannot be imagined as somehow outside of ongoing narratives of difference. SM culture’s use of the “master/slave” dynamic brings with it the overtones of America’s history of African enslavement, one made bare in race- play that mines these dark experiences from the past for erotic potential.

At the same time, much of the discussion surrounding SM in relationship to race in these 1980s texts use the historical past to claim a lack of consent in the contemporary movement, effectively denying Black women the ability to choose these sexual practices.

In a conversation between Karen Sims and Rose Mason in Against Sadomasochism, the two black lesbians respond to the image of the Black submissive woman and the white dominant partner by reiterating the Black feminist point that one cannot forget “total power that white men on plantations had over Black women. There was no doubt that the

31 woman wasn’t exploring her sexual feelings” (104). The two women describe the white slave owner as “taking his power” while the Black woman survives but not by her own choice. Sims says, “It wasn’t a choice, and that’s where I resent any kind of comparison to exploring our sexual selves and calling it master and slave” (104). Sims and Mason articulate the Black feminist position put forward by Angela Davis, Hortense Spillers, and other theorists writing about American chattel slavery: the conditions of enslavement in the New World produced a cultural context in which sexual intercourse between white and black partners was not about pleasure but about the performance of racialized dominance. In her groundbreaking essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” Spillers considers the impossibility of considering pleasure for those enslaved in America (203-

229). She writes, “Whether or not the captive female and/or her sexual oppressor derived

“pleasure” from their seductions and couplings is not a question we can politely ask”

(221). In Spillers’ account, consent evaporates under conditions of slavery unsettling categories (desire, pleasure) often linked with feminist understandings of sexual choice.

The notion of consent in communities of SM relies on a liberal subject “who knows its own desires, acts with autonomy, and freely consents” within the constraints of neoliberalism (Weiss 18).7 As Saidiya V. Hartman artfully demonstrates, these notions of consent were not accessible to enslaved women denied humanity and legal subjecthood

(Scenes 79-112). She writes how the law’s “selective recognition of slave humanity nullified the captive’s ability to consent or act as agent” (Scenes 80).

7 Weiss elaborates throughout her study how this rhetoric of consent and choice displays the privilege of certain SM participants understood as universal (white, male, heterosexual/pansexual) and “allows people with privilege (of race, class, or gender) to sidestep the fact that they are beneficiaries of that privilege, to position themselves as lone individuals, outside of the material relations of power that give form to both privilege and oppression, opportunity and constraint” (163). 32

Spillers’ choice to bracket “pleasure” and leave it the unasked question does not entirely foreclose the experience of pleasure; rather it calls into question whether or not erotic pleasure is necessarily linked to personhood or freedom. What I read as a tart comment about our ability to “politely ask,” suggests that this space for both parties

(slave and slave master) is a dark space that cannot be imagined from our twenty-first century vantage point, especially when as Hartman reminds us, often the rape of slave women was obfuscated through a narrative of “seduction” (79-112). I will return to this dark space in my reading of the novel Po Man’s Child, but I want to consider here how

Spillers exemplifies, as Jennifer C. Nash notes, “a black feminist interpretive tradition which insists on the long shadow of history, a shadow which renders all dominant representation fundamentally structured by racial logics of the past” (The Black Body 42-

43). In their linking of sadomasochism with slavery, Sims and Mason similarly demonstrate the long shadow that slavery is felt to cast on the present moment. The two women are concerned for the ways that representative technologies – in this case a television documentary about SM that includes Black lesbians consenting to master/slave play – may inform how they are read as Black lesbians in the world and how this may overshadow the lesbian-feminist movement (99-100, 104). Rose and Sims’ anger at being misread due to the sexual choices of others is echoed in Alice Walker’s short story “A

Letter of the Times, or Should This Sado-masochism Be Saved?” which I examine in the next section.

Can This Sadomasochism Be Saved?

Walker’s short story, first published in her 1981 collection You Can’t Keep a

Good Woman Down and reprinted as the final selection in Against Sadomasochism, has been taken up in recent scholarship considering Black women’s pleasure and the seeming incongruity of Black women actively engaging in SM. Theorists take up the story as an archetypal representation of a Black feminist theoretical tradition which ties “the black female body to the inevitability of slavery’s abusive sexual terrain” so that “every time we think of black women and sex we think pain, not pleasure” (Holland 56; see also

Musser; Cruz “Beyond”).8 Walker’s story crystallizes a viewpoint frequently problematized by the recent turn in Black feminist studies towards engaging with messy and complicated desires. I turn to Walker’s story as a representation of the ways in which

SM’s use of African American history has been seen as retrograde and dangerous; further, I read Walker’s choice to silence the Black submissive woman as exemplary of a certain impulse to avoid difficult and dark desires.

As with many of the stories in You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down, “A Letter of the Times” uses fiction as means to make a pointed argument about issues of female sexual representation and power in the midst of the “sex wars.” The story employs an epistolary style to tell two interlocking narratives: the Black female narrator’s anger at seeing a white colleague dressed as Scarlett O’Hara at a feminist-themed costume ball and the impact of a television documentary about SM upon a class the narrator is

8 In his essay “Rethinking Sadomasochism,” Patrick Hopkins engages both Walker’s short story and Lorde’s writings on SM without ever addressing the role of race and racialized histories; he reads both women’s chief concern as being about the way that SM would undo feminist projects (131-132). While this is partially correct, his failure to engage at all with race in his analysis severely weakens his argument. 34 teaching about feminist theology and American slavery. The fictional addressee Lucy’s choice to dress as O’Hara conjures up the fictional slaves, specifically the Mammy figures, in the 1939 film version of Gone with the Wind, a movie that the narrator Susan

Marie describes hurting her as a child (205). Susan Marie’s anger is informed by the students she has just finished teaching – a diverse group of women that she pushed to consider the relationship between African slave women and the inner divine sense of self that enabled the enslaved to survive and resist (205-206).

Walker’s story demonstrates a belief in the power of representation to continuously wound and disservice Black women; further the mere existence of sadomasochism in the world operates as a contagion that cannot be simply confined to the bodies consenting to the SM encounter. Susan Marie’s mandate in teaching her course is to ensure that the students understand the experiences of both the enslaved and the slavers. Her students should no longer accept exotic tropes of slave women as “desiring of enslavement. I wanted them to be able to repudiate all the racist stereotypes about black women who were enslaved: that they were content, that they somehow ‘chose’ their servitude, that they did not resist” (206). In order to undo these cultural myths about

Black women under slavery, Susan Marie calls on her students to write imaginative fictional narratives form the perspectives of slave and mistress or master, “to come to terms, in imagination and feeling, with what that meant” (206).

Susan Marie sees all of this work undone by the television special which airs the night before the final class. In the TV special, the only interracial couple are two lesbians enacting master/slave roles: “The white woman, who did all the talking, was mistress

(wearing a ring in the shape of a key that she said fit the lock on the chain around the black woman’s neck), and the black woman, who stood smiling and silent, was – the white woman said – her slave” (207). This striking image – a silent complacent Black woman with a chain around her neck consenting to enslavement at the hands of a white female lover – arrests Susan Marie’s entire pedagogical approach: “All I had been teaching was subverted by that one image . . . the actual enslaved condition of literally millions of our mothers trivialized – because two ignorant women insisted on their right to act out publicly a ‘fantasy’ that still strikes terror in black women’s hearts” (207).

Susan Marie reads this image as insulting to Black women’s history and she enacts a clear division between “our mothers” and these “two ignorant women.” The silent black woman is not included in this collective vision of black family and instead classed with her white partner; both are dismissed as “ignorant,” the only possible explanation for their choice to engage in such culturally loaded race-play.

The racial divisions in the story are made clearer in a dialogue the following day in Susan Marie’s classroom. A white student linked to a local lesbian SM group argues,

“It is all fantasy … No harm done. Slavery, real slavery, is over after all” (207). The narrator counters with the continuing existence of human trafficking and draws parallels between chattel slavery and the sexual slavery of the pornography industry, as exemplified by the experiences of Linda Lovelace (207-209). A black student responds to the white student saying,

I feel abused. I feel my privacy as a black woman has been invaded. Whoever saw that

television program can now look at me standing on the corner waiting for a bus and not

see me at all, but see instead a slave, a creature who would wear a chain and lock around

my neck for a white person – in 1980! – and accept it. Enjoy it. (208)

Walker uses this character to articulate a belief in the profoundly corrupting influence of representative technologies to disperse harmful images. One black woman’s performance of sex slave is collapsed into the personal experience of another with both overshadowed by the image of the historical slave woman. Walker’s choice to nest these disparate forms of “slavery” inside each other comes to a head in the narrator’s pronouncement: “We understand when an attempt is being made to lead us into captivity, though television is a lot more subtle than slave ships. We will simply resist as we have always done, with ever more accurate weapons of defense” (208). Walker moves from personal viewer discomfort to the larger issue of Black women’s autonomy, positioning television as playing a role similar to slave ships in enslavement.

The rhetoric employed in Walker’s story relies on the reader’s affective relationship to the legacy of slavery but ends up presenting a somewhat simplistic one-to- one ratio instead of considering the nuances of the choice of the interracial couple to perform roles inflected by the resonances of “master/slave” in an American context.

Writing about the use of the “slave metaphor” in contemporary narratives, Rebecca

Wanzo argues “the specificity” of American slave history “makes using the slavery metaphor in the present ethically and politically troubling” (43-44). Comparing other forms of suffering to slavery, Wanzo contends, “gloss[es] over the very specific harms endured by Africans in the diaspora” and may rely on (and reify) a liberal notion of slavery as standing in for “the status of a failed citizen” (44). Lynda Hart notes the

37 frequent use of “analogical thinking” in arguments against sadomasochism (84-85) and writes, “Whatever the choice of the first term in these analogies, the presumption remains that lesbian sadomasochism is a copy, an iconic reproduction of the oppressive model …

[S]pectators assume a resemblance between the model and the copy that presupposes an internal similarity” (85). This assumption of internal similarity between the couple in the television program and the historical figures of master and slave elides the choices made in the present moment by SM practitioners.

I do not mean to suggest that Walker’s brief story should spend extensive time on the figures represented on TV, but I am interested in the choice to evacuate this lesbian couple of any characterization. While “A Letter of the Times” is presented as a letter – and draws on events that those who know Walker or those who viewed the controversial

CBS television “documentary” Gay Power, Gay Politics (1980) might recognize – this is a fictional story and thus the choice to not imagine interiority for the silent black woman on TV is all the more telling.9 The fictional Susan Marie asks her students to imagine their lives as black enslaved women and their white masters or mistresses which stands in contrast to Walker’s own decision to present the couple on TV as merely image, a move which discounts the possibilities of silence as a means of being and resisting frequently courted by many minoritarian subjects.

9 When I taught this short story my students overwhelmingly responded to it as a non-fiction essay – perhaps because of its epistolary form – even with the inclusion of the title page from Walker’s short story collection. Sharon Patricia Holland does not directly refer to this story as an essay, but her use of it in The Erotic Life of Racism suggests that Walker is relaying personal experience and not what is marked as short fiction (54-57). Holland, Amber Jamilla Musser, and Ariane Cruz all read the first-person narrator as a stand-in for Walker’s own voice – my analysis oscillates between an easy alignment between Walker and her character and a bit of creative distance. 38

Whiteness in Walker’s story stands in the place of sadomasochism and an

“ignorant” relationship to history. Instead of speaking to the silent black woman on television, Walker’s narrator directs her anger at her white female colleague whose choice to dress as O’Hara aligns her with the figure of the slave mistress. The staged discussion between the white “sympathizer” and the appalled black student further demonstrates this gap. “A Letter of the Times” echoes Karen Sims’s contention in

Against Sadomasochism that the fight for acceptance and visibility of the SM subculture

“does not speak to my needs … It does not speak about the homophobia in the women’s community – it doesn’t progress us. And I do think it’s a white women’s issue. … It comes out of a luxury that I don’t have” (99). Sims’s critique of the absences in the discourse of the mainstream women’s movement resonates with Walker’s pointed critique of white feminism, represented by Lucy who dresses as Scarlett O’Hara at a ball where guests are instructed to “Come as the feminist you most admire!” (Walker 205).

At the same time, Sims constructs a binary, pairing sadomasochism with whiteness and privilege in opposition to the needs of women of color. The idea of

“luxury” is further elucidated when in their conversation Rose Mason calls out SM practitioners for being able to experience power dynamics solely in their sexual encounter and not in their daily lives in contrast with oppressed peoples. Mason considers the ability to choose submission, to “just to toy around with it to see how it feel” to be

“totally decadent” (102). These notions of luxury and decadence link sadomasochism with concepts of frivolousness and discredit the idea that sexual encounters and fantasies might provide a site for reconsidering subjectivity. I am not suggesting a naïve vision of

39 sexual play as the key to undoing systemic oppression or protesting privilege but I do not want to foreclose the personal needs – erotic or otherwise – consensual SM can offer practitioners. Mason and Walker attack the images of SM for their power and how they may be received in ways which harm Black women without allowing a space for the pleasure of these images for Black women seeking these practices.

Walker’s epistolary form suggests the possibility of dialogue with Susan Marie’s white colleague; indeed, the letter closes with the suggestion that they will be collaborating again soon enough, but her narrator merely scolds the silent black woman choosing to perform submission. Ignorance and decadence leave this woman without a place to speak from since the Black female participant in SM is categorized as both an impossibility (SM being the provenance of privilege and whiteness) and the choice of ignorant African Americans. I am not saying that there is not privilege bound up in the workings of sadomasochism; Margot Weiss’s study of the SM community early 2000s

San Francisco, for example, reveals the way in which “normative subjects” of the community are constructed by an obscuring of their racial and class privileges (173). I am instead concerned about the impossible position constructed for the Black woman who may choose to enter into a consensual submissive position in any sort of sexual play.

Before I leave Walker’s story, it is important to examine her choice to close with a gesture towards a future reconciliation with her white colleague and the hope that the

TV program will not foreclose the possibility for interracial same-sex female desire.

Susan Marie says, “But what of the future? What of the women who will never come together because of what they saw in the relationship between ‘mistress’ and ‘slave’ on

TV? Many black women fear it is as slave white women want them; no doubt many white women think some amount of servitude from black women is their due” (208). Audre

Lorde positions SM as backward and opposed to history, writing “Without a rigorous and consistent evaluation of what kind of a future we wish to create, and a scrupulous examination of the expressions of power we choose to incorporate into all our relationships including our most private ones we are not progressing, but merely recasting our own characters in the same old weary drama” (“On the Erotic”). Both Lorde and Walker, through her fictional narrator, demonstrate an understanding of SM as a throwback to the past that pushes against forward momentum of social change.

Tethering the racist frame of eroticism to SM, as Walker does, masks the quotidian racism often “held as separate and apart from our desiring selves” (Holland 9), producing a vision of sexuality as outside of the racist and sexist trappings of our culture unless it is expressed through the spectacular rituals of SM. The sticking point though is how to own up to the “same old weary drama” as Lorde instructs readers and not pretend it can be placed in the past. Elizabeth Freeman argues that through SM the body

“becomes a way of invoking history – personal pasts, collective sufferings, and quotidian forms of injustice – in an idiom of pleasure” (137). I do not discount the ways in which interracial SM may rely on tired stereotypes with long difficult histories, but within a consensual framework these tropes can be empowering and pleasurable for Black women choosing to play with them. Instead of reading these encounters as simply stopping forward progress, I contend the need for a queerer understanding of time that allows for the shuttling back and forth between the past and present in ways that are not always

41 within an individual’s control but may produce empowering and sensational experience.

My reading of the novel that follows considers how queer temporalities are encountered at the level of the body through sexual play which draws on difficult and dark histories.

In her reading of Walker’s story, Amber Jamilla Musser notes that Walker

“cannot separate the idea of the slave from its history of racism, especially when embodied by a black woman who submits to a white woman” (45). The silencing of the

Black woman reflects a move within the story and more broadly within 1980s feminism of reading Black femininity as “a site of perpetual duress and domination” which precludes “the possibility of reading submission as anything but violent and painful”

(Musser 45). I turn from “A Letter of the Times” to the more recent novel Po Man’s

Child by Marci Blackman (1999) since the later text offers a first person fictional account of the interior life of a Black woman who enters into interracial same-sex sadomasochistic play that directly draws on the frisson of historical traumas of slavery.

Blackman does not deny the links between her protagonist and her enslaved ancestors, instead these are central to her pleasures from the novel’s opening scenes.

Reading Pleasure into the Past

Marci Blackman’s first novel Po Man’s Child imagines the interior life of Po

Childs, a Black woman who employs sadomasochistic play with her white girlfriend

Mary as a means of pushing back an overwhelming physical and emotional numbness. Po retells her family’s troubled history after voluntarily checking herself into a mental institution for a week of mental and physical rest. The voluntary hospitalization comes

42 after a cut given to her by Mary goes too deep and she nearly bleeds out. Po’s accident coincides with her father’s death and her time in the hospital allows a space for returning to memories of her complicated relationship with her family. Blackman’s novel won both the American Library Association’s 2000 GLBT Award for Best New Fiction and the

Firecracker Alternative Book Award for Best New Fiction. Po Man’s Child grew in part out of Blackman’s performances as a founding member of Sister Spit’s Ramblin’ Road

Show, a lesbian performance group that toured the United States in the early 1990s. She co-edited Beyond Definition: New Writing from Gay and Lesbian San Francisco (1996) and her fiction appears in several anthologies, including an earlier version of one of Po

Man’s Child’s chapters featured in the anthology Fetish (1998).

The opening chapter of her novel is excerpted in the expansive anthology Black

Like Us: A Century of Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual African American Literature (2002), which aims to “expand the literary canon of black queer writing” (Carbado et al, xvii).

The editors describe Blackman’s work as being “in the minority of black queer writers” because of its sadomasochistic content, but note that the “barrier-breaking nature” of her work “affirms the reality of alternative lesbian sex” (Carbado et al, 281). The collection situates Po Man’s Child as part of an emerging canon of Black LGBT literature while also considering it squarely on the fringes of even this designation. One of the few academic essays on the novel appears in Contemporary African American Literature: The

Living Canon (2013), an edited collection examining texts poised to become part of the canon of African American literature. In her essay on Po, Carmen Phelps argues that while Blackman engages with seemingly alternative or radical themes, her text should

43 ultimately be understood as part of the longer Black American vernacular tradition (155-

167).10 Blackman’s novel appears at the edges of intersecting traditions of Black, queer and lesbian writing; lauded for the same edgy content which marks its marginal status.11

Po Man’s Child insists on a queer time in which memories often appear out of order or one flashback occurs tucked inside another. Ostensibly the novel’s present action, set in 1991, unfolds over the course of Po’s week in a mental institution but her present moment is frequently invaded by memories, often without the necessary context to completely understand them, or memories return multiple times with differing contexts each time. The novel’s opening sex scene between Po and Mary is densely layered with past moments interwoven into the present scene without the line breaks or chapter divisions that more conventionally serve as visual markers of shifts in time. Further complicating this scene are Po’s musings about her Uncle George and his own pleasure- pain under the conditions of slavery. Blackman drops the reader into this scene without contextual information and she slowly metes this out later in the novel. The novel’s opening scene, excerpted in Black Like Us introduces readers to the sadomasochistic and dangerous game that Po and her girlfriend Mary play: Po tells her lover lies about her familial history and Mary punishes her responses by cutting into Po’s skin. These cuts echo those a younger Po gave herself as she worked to fight off the numbness that is an instantiation of the Curse which afflicts the entire Childs family.

10 I am in agreement with Phelps’s positioning of Blackman’s novel within this longer tradition, but I find her overall argument to rely heavily on a consistent reference to the “deviance” Po’s sexual practice in a move that at times moves from description to a recuperative project. 11 Since publishing Po, Blackman has continued writing and participating in public dialogues about feminist and queer issues, including her recent inclusion in a 2014 public dialogue with Black feminist bell hooks as part of hooks’s residency at the New School in New York City. 44

The novel’s investment in queer temporality mimics the way in which SM pushes against a normative historical progression. Blackman’s decision to read slavery backwards in Po Man’s Child, to read the present into the past through the action of sadomasochism echoes Elizabeth Freeman’s description of SM as “the historicity of bodily response” in which physical sensation “break[s] apart the present into the fragments of times that may not be one’s ‘own’” (Time Binds 141). More broadly the novel reveals the ways in which queer desires, actions and embodiments resist a forward- moving, progress-oriented version of historical events. In their arguments against sadomasochism, and its possible links to historical trauma, anti-SM theorists subscribe to this chromonormative logic in which history begets the present in a progressive manner.

In her analysis of Walker’s short story, Amber Jamilla Musser observes SM becomes linked with “a fear not only of temporal suspension, but of reversion to a prior time” with

“the particular historical suffering of black women” threatening their “contemporary freedom” (171, emphasis added). Those attacking SM see it as a stop against a progressive, liberal narrative in which the present is under siege from the past, a relationship that only moves in one direction; Po emphasizes a queer temporality which shuttles back and forth with pleasures, desires, and even dead loved ones never simply entombed in the past.

Po begins in media res, in the middle of the encounter between Po and Mary and yet from the very first sentence Po’s entire family history informs her erotic life. A picture of her Aunt Florida watches from the mantle and as she enters the scene with

Mary, Po continually imagines her affective and physical experiences as shared by her

45 enslaved ancestor Uncle George. Po reads her pleasures backwards into moments of physical punishment endured by Uncle George, reversing the assumed relationship between present SM encounters that tap into historical trauma. Po wonders, “Did Uncle

George have a safe word? What was running through his head when the whip came down? Stories? Songs of freedom? Anticipation of the end? Did the overseer ever check to see if he was ready?” (16). Her musings mingle death and freedom in the historical situation of chattel slavery with the contemporary staging of sadomasochism (the use of a safe word, discussions between partners before the encounter about boundaries and readiness). Po’s desire to know her ancestor’s interior life comes in the moments of intimacy with her own white partner, suggesting unnerving linkages between her white girlfriend and a white male overseer, linkages Po finds more comfortable than Mary.

Not only does Po make explicit the links between the paraphernalia of sadomasochism and the tools of torture utilized by many slave masters and overseers, but she also fantasizes about the possibilities for dark pleasures in the moments of violence

Uncle George experienced. She never describes his desires, but rather, she asks, “But did you get off on it, Uncle George? Did you feel your knees weaken? Your nipples harden?

Your body go shakin? No longer from the beautiful face of pain, but from the sheer pleasure of its cheek rubbing against your bones? Did you? Ever? Get off?” (17). Asking these questions in a moment of her own physical arousal, Po collapses her body with that of her uncle, suggesting his responses to the pain of a whipping might mirror her experience of being cut by Mary. She maps the moment where pain moves from an external concept (“the beautiful face of pain) to something she chooses to intimately

46 encounter at the level of her body – pain paradoxically becomes a pleasurable presence

“rubbing against” her bones, moving below her skin in a manner much like Mary’s knife.

Pain shifts from something to be gazed upon to something to be felt on and in the body and thus felt instead of seen. The use of the colloquial “shakin” calls on both the shuddering of a body in pain and the concept of “shakin” as dancing or ecstatic/erotic movement in African American religious, R&B, and early rock ‘n roll spaces. These

Black cultural contexts all traditionally mingle the sexual with narratives of pain and embodiment.

The reference to the hardening of nipples suggests the feminization of Uncle

George’s position aligning Po’s feminine performance as the sexual bottom or sub(missive) with the position of enslaved man as victim. Hortense Spillers argues under the conditions of the Middle Passage and African chattel slavery, raced bodies were ungendered and categories of identity were put into a state of flux, altering and shifting these words and their discursive work (xx). Alexander G. Weheliye and Darieck Scott both have taken up Spillers work to consider racialization that occurs through abjection and bodily defacement and how this queering of the Black body might open up new ways of considering gender and sexuality (Weheliye Habeas Viscus 96-112, Scott 129). Scott’s work intercedes in a common reading of slavery and subsequent disenfranchisement of

Black men as producing a feeling of violation and vulnerability that triggers spectacular

Black masculine performances in politics and writing. Underneath these arguments and actions are narratives about the feminization of African Americans that occur when men, like Uncle George, are disallowed ownership over their bodies and actions. The bottom

47 position sexually can draw on the lowered status of bodies historically. Scott notes his use of the “bottom” signifies both “the nadir of a hierarchy (a political position possibly abject) and as a sexual position: the one involving coercion and historical and present realities of conquest, enslavement, domination, cruelty, torture, and the like; the other, consent/play referencing the elements of the former” (164). In following Scott’s examination, I want to consider there might be power found by Po in reading pleasure backwards into the horrific scene of Uncle George’s torture – an enjoyment of a perverse sort suggested by his own choice to self-harm (taken up later in this chapter) and one that returns to the enslaved body the possibility of the erotic in spite of his “unfreedom” (to use Scott’s term). Further, Uncle George’s possible gender trouble through Po’s fantasies can move in the opposite direction as well, troubling the gendered performance of what

Po desires.

The Curse

Whether or not Uncle George existed, the story of his time as a slave explains the curse that lingers over Po’s family – one that denies them each access to both physical and emotional “feeling.” The game Po plays with Mary, where Mary cuts her, seeks to

“draw a line, a foothold in the sand, to hold back an enemy I’ve never been able to see.

Aunt Florida called it a curse. The curse of Uncle George” (17). Po first cuts herself at seven years old: “The act of drawing my own blood with one of my mother’s paring knives was born out of the desire to feel. To prove to myself that I could” (55). She takes

Aunt Florida’s stories about Uncle George as inspiration. Aunt Florida explains:

What made folks look at Uncle George sideways … was that every time he ran and got

caught, the lashing he gave himself was worse than any the overseer could have imagined

… All told, he ran five times through entanglements of birches, poplars, and

chokeberries, looking for something called freedom. And each time, after the overseer

brought him back and made an example of him, Uncle George found some way to

mutilate himself even further. (54)

Uncle George’s ability to imagine masochistic tortures (including swallowing lye, chopping off fingers, and branding himself with his master’s initials) exceeds those of the overseer. Blackman glosses these various forms of self-harm as “lashing” which – paired with the “entanglements” of the ostensibly “free” natural world – suggests the use of whips and chains as the archetypal form of both SM and slave torture. This passage calls into question the abstract notion of “freedom” and the inadequacy of conventional understandings of its meaning within post-Enlightenment political and social thought.

Saidiya V. Hartman argues enslaved Africans could not truly be understood as agential beings in a system that denied them their humanity. Specifically, Hartman examines the ways in which pleasure and pain were performances by enslaved Africans that served the interests of those who owned them (Scenes).

George’s actions pervert an understanding of resistance under enslavement; he claims a measure of choice, albeit the disturbing choice of how to best enact his own physical punishment on his own terms. Alexander G. Weheliye asks of what he calls

“minority discourse,” “Why are formations of the oppressed deemed liberatory only if they resist hegemony and/or exhibit the full agency of the oppressed? What deformations of freedom become possible in the absence of resistance and agency?” (Habeas 2). 49

Stephanie Li answers Weheliye’s query in part by suggesting enslaved African

Americans sought various freedoms even while remaining under what she calls the

“conditions of bondage.” Writing about Black women’s resistance Li notes “Just as freedom cannot be uniformly defined, resistance includes more than an absolute oppositional stance” (3). Attempting to distinguish between something like autonomous personhood and its attendant power and the purchased control of the slave master is a tricky and ethically fraught project. Aunt Florida’s re-telling suggests George was able to pursue a measure of freedom through his own self-harm and in the process possibly accessing a pleasure in self-mastery. He becomes an example of a type of freedom within the Childs family.

The violence done to bodies within and beyond chattel slavery in the United

States forms the space from which the curse upon Po’s family emerges. These affective experiences circulate in a manner that follows Christina Sharpe’s description of

“monstrous intimacies,” which are “a set of known and unknown performances and inhabited horrors, desires and positions produced, reproduced, circulated, and transmitted, that are breathed in like air and often unacknowledged to be monstrous” (3).

The everyday horrors Sharpe examines are part of those violent and/or sexual transactions transmitted between generations of “black and blackened bodies” (3-4). Po’s consistent melding of the sexual and the violence of everyday illuminates Sharpe’s understanding of these as all operating as intimate experiences.

Blackman raises the possibility of an enslaved ancestor as the origination of the

Curse and then dashes this too-easy reading of the relationship between African

American past and present. The numbness is bigger than a simplistic reading of the way slavery casts its shadow on the contemporary moment. Po wonders if “the overseer’s whip” made Uncle George “feel again, and his own further retribution was an attempt to keep that feeling alive. Maybe he wasn’t rushing death at all. . . It was a curse alright, a man-made one even, but Uncle George wasn’t the maker. He just passed it on. At one time or another, it made visits to us all, and now it had found its way to me” (55). The transmission of these intimacies across generations reflects that these affective and bodily experiences are not confined to specific bodies but rather are beyond the limits of any corporeal confines.12

The narrative of the Curse comes to Po through the figure of Aunt Florida, a role model for an alternative approach to love and desire. Blackman establishes Aunt

Florida’s importance in the narrative from the novel’s opening pages and this is made further evident when she is the figure who explains the Curse visited on the Childs family and retells the story of Uncle George. Florida never married and “never intended to …

But despite her intentions, even though the law never recognized it, married was exactly what she’d become” (51). Working as the first Black woman to run the counter at her post office job in the 1950s, Florida meets Gooch Johnson, another headstrong Black woman. The two discover a strong mutual attraction and decide “to share their lives” paying no mind to the verbal abuses they encounter in their neighborhood (52). Already marked as an exceptional woman through her occupation, Florida further ends up queered within her community for her choice to enter into this seemingly inevitable erotic

12 My thinking here is informed by Alison Landsberg’s theory of prosthetic memory and Elizabeth Freeman’s taking up of Landsberg in Time Binds. 51 partnership. When Gooch dies of liver disease in 1968, Florida comes to visit Po’s family and tells seven-year-old Po about the family’s curse. Florida dies of uterine cancer, but

Po’s mother describes the true cause as “plain and simple down-home grief” over watching Gooch die (50). Po cuts herself the first time in the wake of Aunt Florida’s death.

Both Aunt Florida and Uncle George serve as examples of the Black queer ancestor which Matt Richardson describes as “an unimaginable figure in mainstream diasporic memory” (14). Florida’s role as the voice of the Curse and the family’s history follows L. H. Stallings’s argument that the vernacular and folklore are cultural forms which “offer Black women alternative methods to express their sexual desire and expand blackness in the process” (Mutha’ 8). Writing about Po Man’s Child, Carmen Phelps observes, “the black American folk vernacular tradition is often explored in ways that mute the perspectives of LGBTQI writers and their characters, even though these perspectives have progressively shaped our collective black vernacular, aesthetic, and novel traditions” (161). The importance of Florida’s telling of history, family legend, and her advice to Po demonstrate the use of the vernacular as a site of disrupting normative meanings of blackness, gender, and sexuality. Blackman’s mixing of the fantastic/spiritual and the sexual in the form of Po’s physical needs and the erotic tinge of the family’s Curse echoes Stallings’s focus on Black female culture producers who blur the line “between the profane and the sacred” (12). Phelps argues Po’s sexual practices, which mingle the lessons she learned from her aunt and the spectacle of her parents’

52 pleasures, might be read as a site of “black vernacular tradition” through experimentation

(156).

Aunt Florida’s spiritual presence is marked physically by her photograph, which watches over Po. Blackman writes, “Even dead, as she had done in life, Aunt Florida kept watch over the members of the family she thought needed the most looking after. (208).

Writing about Florida and Gooch alongside other older Black lesbians in fiction, Johanna

X. V. Garvey argues “the same-gender-loving older women provide both models and support for the younger Black women” (172). When Po first left her family home trying to assert her independence, she tried to leave behind the photograph but, she says, “every time I turned around it, always founds its way back into my duffel bag” (208) so finally

“I just gave in” since “if Aunt Florida was that bound and determined to watch over me,

I’d better let her” (211). The ability of Aunt Florida’s spirit to speak to Po is never at question in the world of the novel. When she returns to the apartment after checking out of the mental hospital, Po collapses in bed and looks up at the photograph, “waiting for the tar black eyes to speak” (212). As I discuss later in this chapter, Florida’s conversations with Po are key to helping resolve the tension between representation and lived reality which haunt the Childs family. Next, however, I want to consider the ways in which Po’s status as a Black woman impedes her ability to articulate her historically situated state to those supposedly trained to heal her.

Feeling the Weight of History

The novel traces Po’s week in a psychiatric hospital after the initial sex scene with

Mary, but Blackman does not employ scientific or psychological language in describing

Po’s family curse. Blackman instead relies on a more phenomenological language of feeling and not feeling or numbness. Within the logics of Po Man’s Child, Po’s choice to have her partner cut her arm is understood as an emotional necessity, a part of her ancestry, and a component of her sexual desires. The novel insists on undoing conventional narratives of the ways in which traumatic experiences are placed outside of sexuality, or only can lead to unwanted and harmful erotic expressions. Carmen Phelps argues “each member of Po’s family suffers from what can be interpreted as depression”

(156), a reading that understands depression as resulting from the deadening effects of a racist society. The layered nature of Po Man’s Child, its insistence on the historical retelling of Uncle George, and the hints of magic suggest Po’s inability to feel is not simply depression. I say this not to discredit the traumatic effects of slavery and its continuing effects through institutionalized racism, as well as homophobia which the novel shows most clearly in Po’s relationship to her brother; but I also want to be careful about producing a reading that makes Po and her family into simply pawns in the workings of history – they have agency in this novel and Po’s voluntary admission to the mental hospital reveals this.

Po’s time in the mental hospital must be understood within a system which pathologizes both Black women and practitioners of sadomasochism. Black women are frequently institutionalized as dangerous and more likely to be diagnosed with

54 schizophrenia (a condition seen socially as threatening to others) instead of depression (a condition seen as socially threatening self) (Mollow 74). While Po encounters sympathetic treatment, she cannot adequately explain her cutting within a white mental context which already establishes voluntary pain as self harm and fails to account for the cultural experiences of Black women. Cutting has long been understood as a practice of self-harm, a method that those desiring external emotional comfort employ to gain the attention of others. For others, cutting signifies a way of physically manifesting any feeling as a means of combating the deadening effects of depression.13

Po’s interview with Cheryl Foster, her counselor, reveals the dissonance between her need to cut and the world’s inability to understand this desire. Po describes Cheryl as

“a pale and skinny white woman whose young face and eagerness to see me get well told me she was fresh out of graduate school” (55). She sees this “fresh-faced woman was trying her textbook best” (58), but this proves inadequate to understanding Po’s situation.

Cheryl categorically misunderstands Po’s cutting – she refers to the most recent injury as an attempt to “slit your wrist” (56) and the scars from previous cuts as “hesitation cuts”

(57), reading them into a narrative of attempted suicide. When Cheryl asks Po if she tried to slit her wrists, Po replies, “Not exactly.” The counselor asks what this means and Po says, “Means I wasn’t trying to slit my wrist” (56). Cheryl shifts tactics by emphasizing

13 According to the introduction of the excerpt in Black Like Us, Blackman’s novel was inspired by “a news story about teenaged sex workers in Brazil who cut themselves to feel” (Carbado et al. 487). In her study of white lesbian SM practice and fantasy, Lynda Hart observes cutting had recently become “the most controversial practice in SM communities” (232n15). She sees this practice as the outward limits of acceptance since much of the issues surrounding sadomasochism stem from “what some people see as a violation of the boundaries between the inside and the outside of the body,” thus, “it would seem to follow logically that the more this boundary is broken, the more difficult it is for people to accept” (233n15).

55 that no matter the intention, Po still gave herself “a pretty serious laceration” along her forearm and asks, “Did you mean do to do that?” (56). Of course, readers know the cuts are intentional but not for the reasons outlined in this interview. Cheryl’s questions presuppose intentional cuts carry one single explanation – suicidal tendencies – instead of the myriad of reasons intersecting in Po’s desire to be cut by Mary.

Po’s reticence to explain her cutting to Cheryl stands in stark contrast to an intense internal monologue in which Po considers the impossibility of explaining her cuts in a culture suffused by white heteropatriarchal ideologies. As in the scene that opens the novel, the sadomasochistic play bleeds into the historical weight of traumas endured as

African Americans in the United States. “I did try to kill myself, I wanted to yell, I was in a heavy scene with my lesbian lover and we got a little carried away, okay!” Po tells us before foreclosing on this confession: “But I can’t tell you that.” She continues:

I can’t tell you that people carve each other up in my world. Shit all over each other and

whip one another until we have trees on our backs just for pleasure. Because it’s beyond

the realm of comprehension in your world, so you and yours have made it illegal. And if I

tell you that, you could send me to jail. Even though you’ve been trained to understand

my need to end it all . . . you will never relate to my need to keep the numbness at bay.

Because understanding that will force you to admit that you’re as dead inside as I am.

(56)

Po imagines telling Cheryl “the truth” and employs the second person pronoun “you,” placing the reader simultaneously in the role of the white woman who can never understand and the ideal addressee who actually knows the significance of the cuts. Po understands her entire world and familial experience as unspeakable to Cheryl. The 56 horrors visited upon African Americans are incomprehensible and thus are pushed out of the mainstream by being made illegal. Pronoun usage becomes slippery as the “we,” understood as African Americans initially, encompasses both the abject position of receiving the excrement of others and the whipping of “one another until we have tress on our backs for pleasure” (56). This specific image of crafting a tree on someone’s back with lashes references both the torture’s experienced by the former slave Sethe in Toni

Morrison’s landmark novel Beloved (1987) and Po’s own desire to replay this fictional slave punishment with her white girlfriend. In the moment with Cheryl, Po partially folds her white sexual partner into a collective first person “we” which endured slavery. I will return to this point in more detail below when I examine the scene between Mary and Po in which Po asks to have the chokecherry tree put on her back. While Po’s monologue may briefly suggest the inclusion of white bodies, she ultimately realizes Cheryl cannot understand due to her role in a society that criminalizes practices considered deviant.

The Difference Race Makes

The racial division between Po and the counselor Cheryl echoes the complex racial binary standing between Po and Mary. Blackman establishes the distance between

Mary and Po in the novel’s opening scene of storytelling coerced by Mary’s knife. Po says while Mary demands “the whole truth” she guesses that her girlfriend only wants what “makes a good story. She can’t comprehend the real truth. My truth. Even I don’t fully understand what’s running through my head as I speak” (15). As I discussed earlier,

Po understands the pain and pleasure she experiences at Mary’s hands in the novel’s first

57 chapter as similar to the torture of Uncle George at the hands of his masters. Sharing her whole truth is both beyond Po’s own conscious ability and would require Mary to travel to a darker place she does not want to experience. Po tells us, Mary “can’t tag along on this quest I’m on, she says. If she does, then she’ll be there with me. It’s a trip she’s just not ready to take. So I go on. On with the story, feeding her the mouthful of truth she’s ready to swallow, the morsel with which I’m willing to part” (15). Mary resists not the infliction of pain, but the fact that accompanying Po to the past would highlight the reality of the racialized framing for their erotic intimacy. In a sadly classic dynamic, Po as the African American woman must moderate her disclosure in a manner that makes it palatable for the sensibility of her white partner.14 The idea of physically traveling suggests a mental time travel through the physical body and all its attendant histories, an idea I return to below in discussing the actual sexual play between the two women.

In the SM scenes in Po Man’s Child, conflict arises not because of Mary’s abuse of her physical power in a scene, but rather her failure to go far enough in servicing the needs of Po as her submissive partner. The submissive position within sexual role-play that involves bondage, cutting, and other uses of physical pain places the bottom in a potentially dangerous position. Patrick Califia writes, “The will to please is a bottom’s source of pleasure, but it is also a source of danger. If the top’s intentions are

14 Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred (1979) is the classic example of a text which makes literal the way that the long shadow of chattel slavery in the United States can encompass the seemingly separate relationship between a Black woman and white man in 1970s America. The narrator Dana’s uncontrolled time travel to the antebellum South where she must endure life as an enslaved woman forces her to see the way that race informs her intimate ties to her white partner when he is also brought to the past and placed in the role of a slave-owner. In her essay on Po, Carmen Phelps considers links between Po and Dana, writing that it is “Dana’s ability to endure the physical trauma of slavery that leads to her heightened sense of consciousness about her place in her family’s past and which motivates her to ensure its preservation. Similarly, Dana’s literary sister and successor, Po, tests her own ability to survive and endure physical pain in the process of realizing her place in her family’s history as well” (163-164). 58 dishonorable (e.g. emotional sabotage), or her skill is faulty, the bottom is not safe when she yields” (“A Secret Side” 165). The bottom’s power in framing and controlling the scene within consensual play is made explicit in Califia’s account as he notes “The bottom must be my superior” (165) and “Playing with a bottom who did not demand my respect and admiration would be like eating rotten fruit” (166).

The differences between Po and Mary are central to their erotic dynamic. As Po explains, Mary is a white “trust fund baby. The kind that feels guilt and embarrassment every time one of her working-class lovers discovers that she has a six-digit bank account” (83). Mary feels the need to “take care” of Po from their first encounter in which Po literally serves Mary as a barista in a coffee shop. While I have been reading

Po’s desires for pain through a sadomasochistic lens, she only adopts this frame upon beginning to play with Mary. Initially Mary seeks to assuage her white liberal guilt by submitting sexually to a Black woman. Po describes Mary’s desire to “[turn] the tables … fulfill my wishes, serve my needs. But my needs demanded that she be dominant. I wasn’t in this for retribution; I got involved with Mary for one reason only: like Uncle

George, I believed I need her to help me feel” (84). Po inveighs against a notion of the submissive sexual role as being linked with submission within a social context when she establishes her adoption of this role is her choice and intended to serve her own affective needs. Mary’s somewhat simplistic fantasy of offering Po a space for retribution seems to rehearse the role of the liberal white woman of means as facilitating the political gains for those “less fortunate.” Lynda Hart notes white lesbians:

often assume all women of color, particularly black women are butch (and top butches at

that), a complicated recognition that, I think, contains elements of social and historical

guilt, which becomes eroticized (hence it is the white lesbian’s historical

legacy/revisionism and her strategy for overcoming it that makes submitting to a woman

of color pleasurable). (93)

While Po and Mary are not placed within an active butch-femme community, Mary’s desire to be topped by a black woman seems to echo this historical guilt that Hart identifies. Hart notes these assumptions further uphold the continuing notion of blackness as unable to access the space of femininity reserved for white women, thus producing black women as always butch and sexually dominant (93; see also Musser 54-56). The complex interplay of race in interracial lesbian relationships is central to the claims I make in chapter 3 about Cheryl Dunye’s short films about Black lesbian cultures; unlike

Blackman’s novel, Dunye specifically engages with women who identify as lesbians and those in their intimate circle.

Po is not herself a member of an active BDSM community, though I employ the language of sadomasochism throughout my discussion of Po Man’s Child. Rather, she plays with risk, pleasure, and pain in ways that reflect broader conversations within lesbian and queer communities about sadomasochism. Po’s ongoing attempts to chase away her numbness through pleasurable pain forms part of what Rodríguez describes as a

“floating archive” of sexual fantasies and practices of “racialized queers” who engage with power play outside of formal sadomasochistic communities (Sexual Futures 20).

Within the novel, SM as a more regimented mode of sexual experimentation is aligned with Mary’s status as a privileged white woman. Mary’s knowledge and implied 60 relationship to a community of SM practitioners follows Margot Weiss’s study of the SM scene in San Francisco in which neoliberal logics operate to obscure the white upper- class privileges of most who participate.

The choice of the submissive role by a Black woman carries complex baggage, as articulated in the writings by Walker, Lorde, and others I examined earlier in this chapter.

Po’s choice of the submissive position can be read through recent work by queer of color theorists which reconsiders the possibilities of pleasure and power found in chosen positions of racialized submission (Scott; Rodríguez Sexual Futures; Hoang). For example, Juana María Rodríguez writes that by occupying the racialized sexually submissive created for society, the Latina femme “is presented with the possibility of inhabiting submission as a means to fulfill her own sexual desires, deftly employing social expectations as a means of seduction and self-fulfillment” (Sexual Futures 133).

While it is tempting to understand Black women in positions of sexual domination as the most empowered, Ariane Cruz argues, “I would encourage a thinking of race play that challenges this notion, as the practice elucidates the experience of a kind of affective agency in (Black) abjection” (“Black and Blue” 433).

In their personal nonfiction accounts of sexual submission, Mollenna Williams and Tina Portillo exemplify Cruz’s notion of affective agency. A Black SM practitioner and public speaker Williams writes of race-play, “The question of WHY someone like me [a Black woman] would play the victim to my own reality is answered simply:

Because I CAN. . . . at the end of the scene, even the most difficult scene, I am, ultimately, in control” (74). Williams follows this assertion by relating a story about one

61 of her first scenes of race-play in which she was restrained, beaten, threatened with a knife, interrogated, and degraded with racial epithets (74-81). The scene sounds nightmarish but Williams argues this scene - an entirely controlled scenario – taught her about her sexual limits and desires. She writes, “Despite many folks’ assumption that a seeming ‘defeat’ or even merely bottoming within a racially-charged scene will lead to emotional damage, I suggest that often the opposite is true” (81). Tina Portillo’s account of her experiences as a “S/M dyke of color” similarly describes “emotional, spiritual, and physiological benefits” and she describes the potential of “healing” within an SM relationship (51).

While I value the therapeutic value Williams and Portillo find in race play, my reading of Po resists a wholly redemptive reading of SM partially since I fear this risks redeeming the practice in ways which may actually remove some of the ambivalence which structures these desires. Ann Cvetkovich argues for allowing a place for trauma within sexuality and maintaining “a place for shame and perversion within public discourses of sexuality rather than purging them of their messiness in order to make them acceptable” (Archive 63). Lynda Hart describes shame as a pervasive element in sadomasochism that can be situational, erotic and argues “there is no reason to conceive of it as ontological” (139). Shame and trauma clearly undergird the desires between Po and Mary but, unlike Johanna X. K. Garvey’s reading of the novel, I do not see this as entirely negative or counterproductive for the women. Garvey draws a hard line between

“healing” and anything potentially “dirty” or shameful (171-172). She sees the sexual relationship as outside of Lorde’s conception of the erotic and simply “sexualized abuses

62 of power that invoke slavery” (169). Garvey’s reading relies on a notion of the erotic as never linked with the choice to play with shame or gritty realities; she reads the novel as a journey from trauma to healing without considering the potentially necessary space of shame itself for Po or other SM practitioners.15 The shame and disgust that attends SM feeds into Po and Mary’s experience of traveling to dark places which I take up in the next section.

Traveling to Dark Places

In reading the sexual encounters between Po and Mary, I employ the notion of traveling to dark places as a way to articulate the shared experience of racial histories the two women experience. Initially the two women transact their transgressive sexual practices without acknowledging them outside the bedroom. Po says, “we were two months into the relationship before we talked openly and called it what it was. We’d wake in the mornings, bruised and confused from the dark places we’d traveled the night before” (84). Sadomasochism figures in their sexual encounters initially as a dark elsewhere which cannot be accessed outside of the erotic frame. As in Mary’s resistance to “travel” with Po to certain racialized and historical contexts, the framing suggests a physical as well as temporal movement occasioned by the meeting of their bodies. I read the play between the two women as using history as a way to share physical touch through the use of SM props and the body itself.

15 Garvey’s reading relies on a notion of the erotic based on Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic.” Her division between the erotic and the sexualization of power follows from Lorde’s division between “the erotic” and “the pornographic.” 63

In examining the scenes of race play between Mary and Po, I understand their shared experience of touching, their shared experience of touching history through traveling to dark places, through the concept of hapticality. Po and Mary’s shared feeling illustrates hapticality, what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten describe as “the capacity to feel through others, for others to feel through you, for you feel them feeling you” (98). In their account, Harney and Moten understand hapticality as the legacy of being shipped across the Atlantic and believe this feeling “is not regulated, at least not successfully, by a state, a religion, a people, an empire, a piece of land, a totem” (98). Following Harney and Moten, Bradley understands hapticality as describing the excess of feeling and sensation which escapes normative systems. This ineffable feeling should be understood

“as an explicitly minoritarian aesthetic and political formation – a figuration of alterity that simultaneously marks the overlap of and break between thought and feeling”

(Bradley 130). Thinking about the haptic as a process engaged with by marginalized subjects illuminates Ariane Cruz’s contention, quoted in one of this chapter’s epigraphs, that interracial SM for Black women speaks to “but the present tense of felt (in the now)

Blackness – the sentience of the Black body itself” (435). The body’s experience of difference at the moment of pleasure and pain triggers the shared sensations which send

Po and Mary to dark places.

I draw on Bradley, Harney and Moten, and Hypatia Vourloumis in considering how Mary and Po’s practice of SM cannot simply be understood as a physical experience but rather a melding of the historical with the personal at the surface of the body. The uses of pleasure and pain found in their play follow the notion of hapticality as a concept

64 which undoes ideas of experience as the provenance of individuated selves and instead reveals “a feel …. there on the skin, soul no longer inside but for there for all to hear, for all to move” (Harney and Moten 98). Hapticality helps explain Po’s need to chase feeling denied due to her familial curse and the need to find sensory experiences through pain and the perverse pleasures she finds in racialized scenes of violence. Mary’s placement of a hood on Po mirrors the grisliest tortures of enslaved men and women in which various macabre masks were used to draw out information or make a visual and corporeal statement about the power of the white power structure. The paraphernalia of sadomasochism have been understood as the refashioning and recontexualizing of what has been called “paraphernalia of state power” (McClintock Imperial Leather, 143) and

“imperialist slave iconography” (Julien 123). These links to the history of slavery show the shared touch encompasses not only Po and Mary, but also their ancestors engaged in these acts with far more disturbing purposes. I understand these inorganic objects – knives, ropes, a hood, a whip – as extending their bodies and following the ways in which examining the haptic includes an attention to “the worlds and imaginations that have both conditioned and surpassed the body in and of performance” (Bradley 130).

The couple’s sex play becomes more explicitly theatrical when they incorporate bondage, a hood, and a knife. Mary ties Po’s wrists to the headboard of their bed and ties her feet to the sides of the bedframe. Mary places a leather hood over Po’s head and fastens it with straps. She then proceeds to draw her knife across Po’s breasts: “Figure eights, in and out and in and out, coming to rest pressing hard against my nipples. I would find out later that she drew blood” (84). Mary mocks Po and her desire to have the knife

65 penetrate her vaginally and makes Po confess, “Yes, I want your knife” (85). Po’s desire for the breaking of the skin with the knife undoes a simple reading of the knife as performing the role of a dildo or another phallic object. The knife functions as an extension of Mary’s hands, touching her lover where one might expect fingers to play across the skin – the nipples, the labia, and the vagina. The knife extends Mary’s capacity to mine Po’s body for sites of vulnerability – the suggestion of drawing blood. This physical encounter relies on both tactility and fantasy facilitated by the inorganic object.

The historical resonance of the whip comes to the fore in Po’s experience of being beaten by Mary for the first time. Instead of cutting into Po, Mary makes her get on knees, still hooded and begins to flog her back. Po describes the whipping: “Soft and fast initially, then hard, slow and rhythmic. At first I thought she had doubled-up one of the extension cords, but I soon realized (when she shoved its handle deep inside me) that it was a whip. A cat-o’-nine-tails” (85). As with the knife, the whip performs multiple functions here – both breaking the surface of Po’s skin and penetrating her body in a more traditional manner (presumably vaginal). Both the whip and the knife can alter the actual surface of the body, following an understanding of sadomasochism as “a practice of skinplay” (Freeman Time Binds 164). The whip, however, carries a loaded historical connotation absent from the knife. Elizabeth Freeman describes the whip in SM as a

“power line connecting historical as well as personal pasts to the present. As a trope it not only links sadomasochism’s power/sex dynamic to slavery but also suggests that historical memories … can be burned into the body through pleasure as well as pain”

(Time Binds 162). The whip as “power line” or exchange of energy across time is seen in

Po’s description of her first whipping. She says:

In the beginning, I felt nothing. But as the whip slowed down, each lash began to feel as

though it were ripping up my skin. And by the end, when the measured strokes of the

rawhide began to soothe, I got off on them. Wanted them. Needed them. I wondered if

this was how it was with Uncle George. If, when the overseer had tired, when there was

no more bare patches of skin to rip open, if Uncle George had begged him not to stop, as

I was begging Mary now. (85)

The lashes allow Po to feel and she experiences the sensation of her skin ripping, even as readers are unsure if it actually happens. As with much of her physical desires, Po has a paradoxical relationship to the whipping – as it continues she experiences soothing and erotic and physical need for them to continue. She is surprised that she enjoyed the whipping and “hadn’t expected anything past beating back the numbness” (85). Sexual gratification adds another layer on top of simply the physical sensation of feeling she must chase throughout her life. The submissive’s plea for continued assault at the hands of their dominant partner is not a new trope, but linking this with the torture of the slave ancestor is an uncomfortable move by Blackman. Mary stops whipping Po because she reads “urgency” inside Po’s begging for more. Mary apologizes for what she believes is going too far (85). Falling asleep afterwards Po experiences the opposite, saying “I could feel my body twitch as it cried out for more” (85).

Po presents her receptive position as having greater physical stamina than Mary who becomes collapsed into and replaced with the fantasmic role of Uncle George’s overseer. Nugyen Tan Hoang describes sexual receptivity as “an active engagement that 67 accounts for the senses of vulnerability, intimacy, and shame that one necessarily risks in assuming the bottom position” (17). Po’s choice to actively become physically and emotionally vulnerable should not be read simply as self-abuse or degradation, but rather as an informed choice. As with Uncle George, Po’s desires require a reevaluation of how we delineate empowering acts or sites of resistance. Darieck Scott’s work asks for a consideration of how chosen powerlessness “encodes a power of its own, in which pain or discomfort are put to multifarious uses” (165). I apply this to Po’s positioning to emphasize her desire for helplessness, especially a loss of control linked to forms of state and racial power. Po’s request to lose control counters Mollena Williams’s framing of

SM as a scene in which the submissive always has power. Further, the physical and psychic needs Po articulates unlock uneasy spaces in which our own academic and political desires to deny “dark places” may lead to a denial of the pleasures of racialized subjects through a mode of “protection” that locks away sexual possibility. This patronizing approach serves also to avoid the investments of whiteness and white- identified subjects in similar dark sexual journeys. While Po aligns her lover with the overseer in her imagining of the whipping scene, it is when she makes these links explicit that Mary sees their play as going “too far.”

“I want you to put a tree on my back”

Throughout the novel, Po attempts to complicate the black body as the site of pain and read pleasure into this “originary” figure of the whipped and enslaved individual, usually through identification with the fabled Uncle George. Po wants to go even further

68 though, asking her girlfriend to recreate on her back the knot of scars on the back of

Sethe, the fictional former slave at the center of Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved (1987).

The whipped black body, according to Rebecca Wanzo, constitutes the “originary, visceral representation of African American pain … This representation captures the relationship between pain and suffering – because the pain event clearly cannot be understood without imagining the broader story of black suffering encapsulated by what the whipped back signifies” (160). Wanzo emphasizes that, while each whipping served as a punishment for a specific infraction, the wounded back “stands not only for that specific pain but also for the continual risk of repeated pain, as the warning to others, and as a marker of general status” (160). These bodily marks serve as a reminder of the system of African chattel slavery, which produced these bodies as property and legally allowed their owners to inflict pain as needed.

Po tells Mary that she wants “a chokecherry [tree], like Sethe’s” (86), treating the fictional character as a real figure within the diegetic world. Sethe is Morrison’s fictional reimagining of the historical figure of Margaret Garner, an escaped slave who killed one of her children to save them from returning to slavery. In Beloved, the murdered child returns as a ghostly female figure who comes to live with Sethe after the Civil War.

Morrison’s novel examines the psychological toll of slavery on former slaves; for Sethe this is bound up in the elaborate scarification across her back. Po glosses this element of the novel for Mary explaining that the sociopathic white overseer School Teacher:

opened up her back with cowhide. Lashed her so long and hard the welts fused together

to form a chokecherry tree: trunk, branches, leaves and all. Killed all the nerves in her

back. That’s why she was so strong, you know, that’s why she survived. The branches on

the tree lightened the burdens forever trying to keep her down. (86).

Following Wanzo, these scars represent not just Sethe’s pain but also the broader pain of slavery’s toll on the slave body and mind – both the individual and the collective. School

Teacher’s choice to lash “open” the back stems as much from punishment as marking

Sethe as a “slave.” Po narrates this moment from the novel as one in which the loss of sensation offers greater strength – the literal loss of the ability to feel brings Sethe strength and the ability to survive. The burdens of the world are thus no longer felt. As someone constantly fighting against numbness, Po’s desire to further reduce her ability to access sensation seems counterintuitive and yet also suggests she sees the inability to feel as necessary for slave survival.16

The desired scene both follows the conventions of a sadomasochistic encounter – there are established roles and expressed intentions – and yet part of Po’s request is to dismantle the frame of safety. “I want you to put the tree on my back,” Po says. “I’ll be

Sethe and you can be School Teacher.” Mary asks, “You mean role play?” and Po answers, “Sort of, only I want you to use a claw whip, a real one. No safe words, stopping only when the nerve endings are gone, dead” (86). In place of the verbal safeguards of the “safe word,” Po positions the physical limit of the body. She seeks to invert the curse of numbness by controlling the loss of feeling in her back. Where Po’s

16 Sandy Alexandre’s essay on the use of tree imagery in Beloved understands the chokcherry tree on Sethe’s back as serving as a palimpsest of the vagaries of slavery as experienced by both men and women. Alexandre writes, “The images of the alleged tree on Sethe’s back (a consequence of her reporting the sexual abuse she suffered) as well as the trees from which the black boys were lynched are interconnected and are significantly images of (gnarled) entanglement because they suggest commonalities between black men and women—the shared experience of oppression” (920). 70 body twitches with the need for further whippings, Mary’s physical response to being asked to tear into her lover’s back is shivering. “It’ll kill you,” Mary says (87). The two argue about the realness of Sethe – Mary refers to Sethe as a character in a “disturbing book” and Po says, “Sethe was based on reality” (87).

Ultimately the argument ends up being about Mary’s discomfort with being aligned with the figure of the overseer more broadly. Mary reveals her true concern about

Po’s request:

“I’m not School Teacher,” she said quietly. “I can’t go there with you.”

“You’re a hell of a lot closer to School Teacher than you think.”

“Fuck you, Po!” she screamed. “Just fuck you! Now I’m some kind of evil overseer? I

never do anything you don’t want me to do.”

“Yeah?” I answered. “Well, now I want you to do this.”

“I can’t,” she murmured. “I won’t.” (87)

As before, the sexual play is imagined as a physical location and this bleeds into our understanding of Mary’s proximity to School Teacher. Po’s contention that her girlfriend is closer to the overseer than she might acknowledge is offered not as an indictment of

Mary’s whiteness; rather I understand this anger as occasioned by Mary’s inability to own her racial privilege and the ways in which historical racial politics inform the contemporary bedroom. Po wants Mary to accept and embody the “evil overseer” but the white woman fears discovering the truth about herself. Mary narrates her feelings as a physical inability opposed to Po’s desires and wants. Where Mary has not had to own her racial privileges, Po’s experiences as a Black woman demonstrate what Ariane Cruz

71 describes as the “always-alreadyness of race play for Black women – the fact that we may be involved in race play whether or not we want to be” (428).

Where their previous play has clearly called upon the iconography of chattel slavery and the current status of Po’s racial and gender identity, the performance of the

Beloved scenario becomes Mary’s limit condition since it would make explicit the ways in which racial hierarchies order their desires. Multiple scholars working in the realm of queer of color critique have argued “we can’t have our erotic life – a desiring life – without involving ourselves in the messy terrain of racist practice” (Holland 46; see also

Rodríguez Sexual Futures, Reid-Pharr “Dinge,” Scott). SM scenes that play with national trauma linked to specific identity categories link individual and social imaginaries

“exposes practitioners and audiences to the vulnerability of play, to the shared responsibility we have for producing unequal social relationships” (Weiss 218). Mary’s anxiety and tears reveal this uneasy space of playing with difference and thus revealing responsibilities. She tells Po, “‘If we go there, I’ll be there with you. Then I really will be

School Teacher.’ She started to cry. ‘I’m just not ready for that’” (88). Mary’s comment reveals that, in spite of her denials, she is on some level aware of her proximity to the figure of School Teacher and what he represents in this narrative.

Central to Mary’s discomfort is a broader failure to understand desiring lives as structured by racialization and its long history unless these are the desires of people of color. Mary conceives of racist practice as entirely about her relationship to Po, instead of seeing it as something that informs her own life as a white woman in the United States.

SM scenes that play with racialized inequality rely on the national construction of race

72 and the prominence of the black/white binary in American culture (Weiss 164). Sharon

Patricia Holland calls on us as scholars to remember that the psychic life of slavery reshaped patterns of belonging for all subjects involved and their descendants (31). All modern subjects are “post-slavery subjects” but “post-slavery subjectivity is largely borne by and readable on the (New World) black subject,” according to Christina Sharpe (3).

Writing about Kara Walker’s provocative silhouettes, Sharpe writes there is “no plantation romance and plantation slavery without white people” (171-172). Po seeks to mine this history of plantation “romance” and its attendant harms as a means of finding sexual and bodily satisfaction.

Mary’s unwillingness to travel with Po into the fantasy and reality of putting a chokecherry on her back ultimately dooms their relationship. After their fight over the

Beloved scenario, the topic is never broached again. Po says, “We both knew we were short on time. With each new sunset, every second of our lovemaking took on a new urgency” (88). The end of their relationship comes when Mary shows her vulnerability in the depth of her concern over Po’s hospitalization. The “foul taste of groveling” sickens

Po and reveals “yet another weak spot in a once thought sturdy countenance. Until this morning, just like her masters before her, Mary could have whipped me silly if she wanted to, then cut off my feet to keep me from running away” (61-62). As long as Po believed Mary was entirely in control of her emotions, she could continue to submit to

Mary sexually and respect her dominance. “But,” Blackman writes, “from the moment she slumped down sobbing against a cold metal door, cupping her head in a par of welted and wrung-out hands seeking absolution, our journey was over” (62). The spectacle of

Mary’s loss of control – sobbing and prostrated in despair – replaces the possibility of

Po’s physical violation and the threat of violent dismemberment.

A later scene further illustrates this reversal with Mary imploring Po to continue the family narrative she was telling in the novel’s opening sexual encounter. No longer is the telling of tales something Mary demands at knifepoint but instead she ends up

“grasping for something similar. Something she knew more intimately than the hospital’s pale green walls” (166). Mary wishes to return to the way things were “before.” Po responds with anger, cynically asking “How far back do you wanna go, Mary?” and suggesting true comfort would only come by undoing the workings of genocide, slavery, and her familial tragedies (165). Ultimately Mary’s inability to cope with the realities of the situation and her lost standing as the dominant player in their relationship – and the one that doles out the necessary pain – leaves Po emotionally and physically numb. Mary collapses in tears while Po views the scene dispassionately feeling nothing when they kiss before Mary leaves (166-167).

Eventually Po expresses more expected feelings “of loss, sadness” because of her realization that their relationship “never had a chance” (219). Po describes her time with

Mary in spatial and physical terms saying:

The road wasn’t always littered with obstacles. In fact, there were months when it was

clear for miles, when you could see forever. And its smooth refuge gave me a comfort

and ease of motion I’ve never known before. Still, it was the wrong way to go and we

both knew it. Knew that as we were gliding atop its slick surface, our eyes combed the

branches of the trees that ran alongside for the cure to a malady that could be healed from

inside. And the more desperate the hunt, the clearer the understanding. As long as we

continued to seek the remedy in the arms of another, we could never find it. (219)

The imagery here draws on common American themes of the “open road” and the fantasy of travel, a very different vision of travel than the more visceral and uncomfortable journeys Mary and Po take to “dark places” in the bedroom. Po marks this as an illusion, simply a “slick surface” both women glide upon while searching the trees alongside the road for solutions to their differing emotional and spiritual needs. The vigilant searching through the trees echoes Uncle George’s five runaway attempts “through entanglements of birches, poplars, and chokeberries, looking for something called freedom” (54). As I argued in discussing this earlier passage, the abstract notion of freedom is imagined as a tangible good or a physical location. Po understands her mistake as searching for salvation in the various forms of physical intimacy she shared with Mary rather than seeking “remedy” by looking inwards and evaluating the way familial histories inflect her own body and life. Mary’s reticence to journey with Po into the complicated terrain of overt race play in the Beloved scenario demonstrated her discomfort with seeing bare the racial underpinnings of erotic life and thus her inability to truly go inward with Po and touch the places that animate her numbness. SM offers pleasures and a way to chase the numbness but not the therapeutic release described by other Black women engaged in race play. At the same time, the relationship between Mary and Po does precipitate some of Po’s initial return to her family. While Po spends much of the novel avoiding her family, Mary’s black leather jacket allows Po to find her way to her father’s funeral. In the next section, I read this as another instance of the haptic with the jacket’s intimacy

75 with Po allowing her to transgress boundaries and begin a process of reuniting with her family.

Queer Skins for the Old Ceremony

The novel continues to toy with the limits of the skin and extensions of the body through Mary’s black leather jacket, another prop in the women’s tactile relationship.

Po’s sadness about losing Mary is prompted by the action of “finger[ing] the lapels” of

Mary’s jacket after checking out of the psychiatric hospital (219). I read the passage of the leather jacket from Mary to Po as signifying the shifting of power between the two women, while also positioning them within the butch-femme milieu and continuing the novel’s motif of objects which extend the sensational experiences of the body. In her eccentric revision of Freud and Lacan to imagine a lesbian feminist psychoanalysis,

Teresa de Lauretis argues that “the lesbian fetish is any object … that marks the difference and the desire between the lovers … It could be the masquerade of masculinity and femininity of the North American butch-femme lesbian subculture” (The Practice of

Love 228-229). While Po Man’s Child never directly engages with queer or lesbian communities (beyond reference to Mary’s “faggot” friends), I do think there are implicit references to the politics of gender presentation which inform the butch-femme paradigm.

Specifically, I am thinking of the ways in which Po’s relationship with Mary relies on a series of power imbalances that structure Mary as the dominant partner (white, upper class, educated, penetrative) and how the failure of their relationship comes from Mary’s inability to remain in control of their erotic interactions. Neither woman is ever physically described, aside from the descriptions of their bodies engaged in 76 sadomasochistic and/or sexual acts, and thus Blackman’s extended attention to Po’s clothing in the final scenes of the novel gathers greater significance. Further, the fact that

Po dons Mary’s black leather jacket, along with a black slip and boots, suggests a complicated play with gender presentation. The black leather jacket – and its movement from Mary to Po – clearly signals the power shift in their failed relationship. The black leather jacket operates as a reference to the butch-femme community absent in the story’s central narrative.

Of course, the black leather jacket also links to the broader discussion around the use of black leather within a sadomasochistic context and the ways this conjures up dark histories of black skins, black bodies, and American chattel slavery. The ways in which the jacket and slip conform to Po’s actual body (after she is caught in the rain) and change how she is read by those around her suggests a kinship with the ways in which certain forms of sadomasochistic play rely on black leather and other clothing as part of play. Kobena Mercer notes that leather fashion within kink communities holds a

“sensuous appeal as a kind of ‘second skin.’ When one considers that such clothes are invariably black . . . such fashion-fetishism suggests a desire to simulate or imitate a black skin” (184). Writing about Robert Mapplethorpe’s infamous photographs of nude

Black men, Mercer describes the “glossy, shining, fetishized surface of black skin” which

“serves and services a white male desire to look at and enjoy the fantasy of mastery”

(176). I am struck by Mercer’s attention to the ways in which black skins and fetish skins are nearly collapsed within his own discussion. Kathryn Bond Stockton similarly mingles flesh and inorganic materials in her distinction between between “nonelective skins” (the

77 physical appearance of racial difference) and “the highly preferred, habitually chosen, strongly valued, almost sewn-to-the-bone cloth skins” (39). Stockton argues the meanings of these two surfaces – skin and cloth – inform each other and both can be “the object of prejudice, violence, attraction and invective” (40).

Mary’s jacket operates as a faulty skin for Po. When she awakens the day of her father’s funeral, she encounters a fantastic scene in which her entire apartment begins shrinking. Acting on impulse, she throws on a black slip, Mary’s jacket and army boots and flees the apartment. She narrates her movements as beyond conscious control: “As soon as I tied the laces on my boots, my feet just started moving. They chose no path. . .

All I knew was that I needed to walk” (220). Her arrival at the cemetery where she finds her mother’s grave next to her father’s newly dug one is described as if in a trance, she says, “Before I knew it I was standing in front of the gate . . .” (220). Po describes both her dressing and her walk to the cemetery as automatic and necessary, even without a clear understanding of why they are occurring. Her somewhat impractical outfit becomes a precondition for her movement out of the apartment and a reunion with her family – both of her siblings, her uncle’s estranged daughter, and the more metaphorical presence of her dead parents. The jacket provides the volition needed to leave her own space and begin the process of reconnecting with her family, a move she began in the mental hospital by reviewing her memories of the past.

Po’s attire immediately marks her as separate from the others at the funeral signifying her queered status within her family as not simply related to her sexual choices but also her physical appearance. When her family arrives, her brother comments “Sure is

78 some dress to be payin your respects to the dead in” (223). The comment reflects the fact that Po came to the funeral not entirely of her own volition, but it also serves as a moment in which Po’s appearance as different is presented to the reader through the commentary of another character instead of through narrative description. The black leather jacket and slip become even more a second skin when Po walks home from the funeral in a downpour. She describes how:

Mary’s jacket was useless. When I finally turned the corner onto my street, I was a

walking puddle. Puddles in my socks, puddles in my boots. My slip was so wet it chafed

my skin. And Mary’s jacket had soaked up so much water, I was sure it had gained three

pounds since I first put it on. (232)

The jacket – always “Mary’s jacket” – fails to protect Po from the elements and becomes even more a second skin along with the slip. She imagines the rain and the clothing together alter her actual bodily shape and weight and the slip rubs against her “nonelective skin.” The jacket is clearly not operating as a source of warmth or a way to keep dry but instead solely as a facet of Po’s corporeal presence. A black slip without anything worn over it simultaneously connotes feminine decorum and a failure to adequately cover up the female form. This combines with the black leather jacket – an iconic signifier of

American masculinity – and the army boots to suggest Po’s resistance to simplistic gender performance. Returning to her apartment building, Po finds her Uncle Ray lying across the front stoop in a drug-induced haze. Po attempts to speak to him about the family’s Curse, realizing in this moment that drugs and suicide attempts have been his ways of chasing the numbness, but when he opens his eyes to look at her, she realizes he cannot recognize her (233). “Ey, li’l man,” he says, before asking for a cigarette, then 79 corrects himself and apologizes and asks, “Got a cigarette for a brother, li’l lady?” (233).

The moment combines Ray’s general failure to process the world as a result of his drug addiction – not recognizing his own niece – and a connected confusion about how to read

Po’s gender, one that is easily tethered to her appearance in the skins of the leather jacket and the slip. While readers are not privy to Po’s physical appearance previously in the novel, this scene might also suggest that she has taken on a more masculine presentation as a result of donning the jacket of her formerly dominant partner.

Mary’s jacket operates in a similar way to the knives Po turns to in order to cut into her own skin – they extend the reach of her body in ways that trouble ideas about the limits of individual corporeality. This reliance on external tools as a means of feeling and/or fighting against the creeping numbness that haunts their family can be seen across the family. In an earlier episode in the novel, after Po’s sister Onya has checked herself out of the hospital and left town without telling the family, Po’s mother asks to see the empty hospital room. Po explains that her mother is searching for “the why of things.

Like Onya needing to lay her hands on my mother’s grave. Like Bobby searching for meaning in needles and Allah. My father looking in the keys of the piano. And me, thinking the answer was in knives and razor blades and carving up my skin” (186). In a novel where the protagonist finds comfort and pleasure in cutting her own skin, it is hard to not see the significance of the attempt to adopt a second skin. Po’s descriptions of cutting frequently suggest a lack of agency with the knives taking on their own life and acting upon her body. Blackman echoes this in the scene where Po dons these new skins in an almost automatic move without any clear understanding of motivation.

The Stories Shadows Tell

In the novel’s final scene, Po realizes the limitations of her understanding of her family’s story – she has accepted representation instead of the felt reality of bodies. A focus on what is projected into the world displaces the importance of the phenomenological life of the bodies in her family’s narrative. Blackman’s ongoing emphasis on the importance of bodily sensation counteracts the stereotyping that can occur in the reception of images. Lying in bed, Po closes her eyes and finds her mind

“heavy” with “images” of her uncle and father. Instead of the recent images of a dead father or a drug-addicted uncle, she sees “the strapping and handsome shadows of the black men of my youth. Muscular silhouettes, whose unwavering belief in a mythical impotence tried to dampen the pages of their memory” (234). Po narrates the image as one of silhouettes acting as agential beings, not simply the result of the “true” figures crossing in front of some light source. These shadows conjure up nationalistic fables that her male relatives attempted to achieve in their work during her childhood to fight the ongoing prejudices of their community. These myths of impotence here are at cross- purposes with “the pages of their memory” – contesting a narrative of Black masculinist politics as essential and effective in spite of its frequent linkages to homophobia and misogyny. The contrasts between these silhouettes and the images her “lifeless” father and her strung out uncle, is not suggesting the latter as a better alternative.

Thinking about these opposing images of the two men, Po comes to a realization about the power of “shadows” saying, “All these years I let the shadows tell my story . . .

I never understood that the shadows’ tales, by nature, were false. Had to be. That the real

81 story, the one worth telling, was buried beneath the fabric of suggestion, the interception of light” (234). Letting “the shadows” tell the story suggests the way in which representations can supersede the lived experience of those represented in terms of the ways our image-based culture relies on texts as a means of meaning-making. Kara

Walker’s visual art “allows us to see how the silhouette works as a device that flattens depth into a two-dimensional shape; complexly racialized bodies are morphed into black shapes that we might think of as skins” (Musser 154). The flatness of the silhouette speaks to the lack of depth and the falseness of stories told without an understanding of the phenomenological or sensational life of the body represented. This is what Po sees as missing from the “shadows’ tales.” Silhouettes are the result of an object blocking a source of light and Po directs us to look not at the shadow but what is casting the shadow.

The actual body moving and feeling is the site of some sort of momentary truth or history distorted in its journey to the shadow. In his discussion of colonialism, Homi Bhabha argues that colonized subjects present themselves to the colonizers in a way that approximates the standards set by those in power, yet never entirely achieving this and in the process producing a space of ambivalence that may offer a site of resistance to normative scripts (Bhabha 85-92). The performance by the colonized subject is “almost the same, but not quite” (Bhabha original emphasis 86) and in that space of slippage is a rupture offering a site of potential resistant against oppressive discourses. Shadows are

“almost the same, but not quite” as the bodies they stand in for and, as Po notes, the real story is hidden by “the interception of light.” Thinking about the Childs’ family as beset by a series of traumas that originate in the racist, sexist and homophobic nature of

American culture since slavery, I think applying Bhabha’s idea of mimicry offers a way to consider the ways their story might be distorted by the normative confines of white supremacist telling and yet this telling always resists and ruptures in places.

This relationship between shadow and body can be seen in an early sign where Po first sees her parents having sex. Blackman positions this scene as a false primal scene; initially it seems this is the moment Po discovers the pleasures of cutting herself, but that actually happened earlier as the novel shows in an episode shared later. Po and her sister spy on their parents engaged in a sadomasochistic scene; their father sexually penetrates their mother whose arms and legs are tied to the headboard. “When my eyes adjusted to the dark,” Po says, “my parents’ bodies didn’t look like bodies at all. More like porous shadows … [Over] and over the shadow of my father slammed itself into my mother’s.

And with every thrust her cries grew louder until finally her shadow went limp” (25).

Terrified her father has killed her mother, Po runs back to her bedroom (25) but the pleasure she finds in the scene leads her to return and spy on her parents on future nights

(32). She describes the dissonance of hearing her father shift from his usually easygoing voice to the disdainful one he uses “under cover of darkness” (33). Po’s inability to see her parents’ bodies as bodies and instead as shadows suggests the ways in which shadows and silhouettes are deceptive sites for comprehension. As a child observer Po lacks the bodily experience needed to understand the feelings of the bodies at play – they are simply “porous shadows.” Her own burgeoning sexual pleasure in the spectacle suggests some measure of understanding, but one that relies on distancing her parents as she knows them from the shadows that transact these pleasures “under cover of darkness.”

Embracing the Whole

Po’s changed understanding of the role “the shadows” play in her conception of her family history and her place within it stems, in part, from her understanding that her familial inheritances are not simply a Curse. In a discussion with her dead Aunt Florida, the two women argue over the role personal agency plays in the power of the Curse.

Florida accuses Po of giving in to the Curse and Po retorts, “There is no curse” (212).

Florida replies, “Ain’t no curse? What was all that stuff bout Uncle George then? You think I was making it up?” (212). If the family was cursed, Po says, “we put it on ourselves,” and admits to the reader, “I was trying to convince myself of that fact more than Aunt Florida” (212). Her aunt counters, asking, “You sayin that Uncle George and his kinfolk kidnapped themselves from Africa, shackled themselves in chains, sold themselves into bondage, then passed the legacy on down to us?” (212). Po makes an important distinction: while she agrees the circumstances of the global slave trade are clearly beyond anyone’s control “we’re the ones letting [the Curse] live. It needs us to believe in it to keep breathing” (213). The conversation draws on Po’s earlier conversation about the Curse with her brother when he drives her home from the hospital.

For Bobby, Allah and faith have offered a means to escape the Curse, replacing his drug addiction. Po disagrees with Bobby’s assessment that Allah (or more broadly any

“superior being”) is the solution to the Curse.

Instead, as she discusses with Aunt Florida, the answer comes in taking a stand against the Curse with its deep roots in the cataclysmic movement of bodies across the

Atlantic and the subsequent system of chattel slavery. The motion of the slave trade is

84 reflected in Po’s use of another travel metaphor in order to explain how the Childs family can choose to resist the Curse: “[We] can stop this train. White man may have put us on it, but we’re the ones who stayed on board. And we’re the ones who can step off, any time we please” (206). Of course, as Aunt Florida reminds Po, “you can’t wipe away four hundred years in a hundred” (213).

Po does not believe her generation can fight the Curse since she is disconnected from her siblings. Aunt Florida argues simply being “here makes you so. And as far as knowin each other goes, patterns torn from the same fabric, no matter how different, can’t help but know each other. Once you remember that, fightin to sew it back together comes real easy” (214). Florida’s metaphor of cutting fabric and sewing it together suggests an inherent connection based on familial ties and the need to take a long view of history and its effects – one that sees the entire piece of fabric and not simply those pieces separated from each other. Sewing them back together does not recreate the exact same piece of fabric, however, but instead suggests quilting, a folk practice Alice Walker, bell hooks and other Black feminist/womanist writers have discussed as a site of artistic expression for Black women unable to access the materials and structural support required for more “high-brow” artistic endeavors (see Walker “In Search,” hooks

Belonging). The art of quilting combines the practicality of using found scraps of fabric to provide warmth for family members and the aesthetic value of combining seemingly disparate elements together to create an art object. Florida’s comment is not quite the same as traditional scrap quilting since she is talking about reassembling pieces torn asunder – the common fabric here seemingly representing the shared familial bonds.

Fabric is, of course, another flat or two-dimensional medium and yet it can wrap around bodies and move across them (as in Mary’s jacket).

Sewing the members of the family together suggests bringing together their bodies and telling the “real story … buried beneath the fabric of suggestion, the interception of light” (234). In the novel’s final lines, Po decides it is “time to let the shadows walk silent and embrace the narrative of the whole” (234). Where her attempts to connect with Mary through the erotic histories that animated their relationship failed because of the limits of comfort, Po sees her family as able to possibly speak the truths needed to work in and through the past. Embracing the narrative of the whole is not about surmounting or surpassing the past, but rather accepting its placement within the present and its workings on the bodies and minds of the Childs family. The past cannot be simply left behind since it is always present and must be touched in order to move in a new direction. Carmen Phelps reads Po’s sadomasochistic desires as part of an attempt to reconnect with her family, arguing “Ultimately, her acts lead to a renewed sense of purpose and investment in her life, and she is compelled to preserve herself and her family’s past” (164). As I have throughout this chapter, I want to resist a therapeutic overcoming narrative and instead honor what I read as Po’s need to travel to dark places as a means of necessary pleasure and pain. These journeys are not simply about preserving the past, as Phelps says, but also about engaging with it and feeling it at the level of the body where temporalities collide. Her connections with her family is not simply about reconnecting with her siblings and extended family, as she does at her father’s funeral, but her engagement with the spirit of Aunt Florida, pushing at the

86 simplistic ideas of the limits of the flesh (as I have argued her cutting and sexual plays does as well). This play with the parameters of the flesh and dualistic epistemologies resonate in the last lines of the novel, given over to Aunt Florida telling her grand-niece

“Goodnight, baby … Sleep tight” (234). Giving the last word over to her dead aunt,

Blackman affirms the importance of a complex and intimate interaction with the past and its space on and alongside Black women’s bodies as a means of making new futures. In the next chapter, I turn from Blackman’s novel – which uses a written text to imagine the tactile experience of SM and touching history – to Thulani Davis’s Maker of Saints – which considers how a written text can operate like a visual archive.

CHAPTER 2: “What else is a video for?” Black Women and the Visual Archive on the

Page in Thulani Davis’s Maker of Saints

“I really am trying to be in the nineties all the time. I feel a little passé, like a retired person, but I am trying to be in the nineties. But when I do think about soul, I am thinking critically about things that were part and parcel of those times, things that we took issue with, and I think it’s okay for us to defend that. But I think at the same time, there is an element of loss to be looked at” – Thulani Davis (Tate et al. 276-277)

In her comments on soul and the 1990s, Black writer and cultural critic Thulani

Davis articulates a queer relationship with the contemporary moment (1998). Her repeated description of the work she undertakes “trying to be in the nineties all the time” implies that she finds it easier to “be” in “those times” of the past moment, the 1960s and

1970s temporality of soul and a robust flowering of Black cultural production linked with rich political activism. Davis describes her right to defend the past while also honoring the profound “loss” which marks the the 1990s; she feels a loss of not simply the time but also who she was in that space.

In a writing career that spans forty years, Davis has consistently engaged with the past, its losses, and its continued presence, across a variety of genres. Her work includes a play about Zora Neale Hurston (Everybody’s Ruby 1999), a libretto for an opera about

Malcolm X (X with Anthony Davis 1986), her first novel 1959 about a young girl growing up during the beginning of the Civil Rights era (1992), and her recent memoir about her white heritage (My Confederate Kinfolk: A Twenty First-Century Freedwoman 88

Discovers Her Roots 2007). In this chapter, I examine Davis’s second novel Maker of

Saints (1996) which centers on the intense connection between Black women artists struggling with their own losses in the social upheaval of 1980s and 1990s New York

City. At the center of the novel is the search for the truth behind the death of conceptual artist Alex Decatur. Her close friend and fellow artist Cynthia “Bird” Kincaid combines traditional detection skills with imaginative artistic creation to find out what happened.

Bird seeks to uncover if Alex’s fatal fall out of her apartment window was suicide, an accident, or if she was murdered by her boyfriend influential white art critic Frank

Burton. Through a close third-person perspective, Davis focuses on Bird’s grief after her friend’s death and her search for the truth. Bird discovers a cache of videotapes made by

Alex and these provide an example of the power of the visual archive to unlock hidden truths about Black women’s life. These technological traces of her dead friend reinvigorate Bird’s own artistic production and allow her to create new multimedia art pieces.

Maker engages with the specific historical moment of the early 1990s while also drawing on the life and death of Cuban artist Ana Mendieta. In 1985, Mendieta fell thirty-four stories to her death outside her Greenwich Village apartment building, the result of either a drunken accident or being pushed by her husband, white minimalist sculptor Carl Andre. In spite of his acquittal, many feminist art activists continue to blame him for Mendieta’s death, linking his freedom to his place as a white male artist in an art world which prizes male creativity and continues to ignore the accomplishments of women, especially women of color. As recently as 2015, activists protested a

89 retrospective of Andre’s work by staging a cry-in inside the exhibit; outside protestors recreated Mendieta’s most well-known works, siluetas or silhouettes of a human body carved out of natural materials including dirt, mud, and grass.17 In imagining the fictional

Alex Decatur, Davis’s novel draws on not simply Mendieta’s spectacular death but also the Cuban artist’s ephemeral natural artworks and her conceptual performance art pieces.

Both José Esteban Muñoz and Leticia Alvarado argue against reducing

Mendieta’s life to simply her tragic death and seek to contextualize her work as a reflection of the experience of a Cuban coming to the United States in the 1960s and as part of a history of women of color feminism organizing and artistic creation. Alvarado describes Mendieta’s shifting sense of racial identification when the artist moved from

Cuba – where she was considered white – to Iowa where she was read as not-white by other children and forced to renegotiate herself as a racialized subject in relation to

Blackness (68). In Maker, Alex moves to the United States from Surinam, not Cuba, moving from a context where she considered herself “Latin” in spite of African ancestry to one in which she was considered Black. Davis writes, “Alex had acquired four hundred years of baggage all of a sudden, when she landed at Kennedy Airport twenty years ago.

It was then that Alex had begun to look colored to everyone she encountered, and it was then that people had told her she was black” (Maker 37). While Muñoz considers

Mendieta as living a life of brownness (“Vitalism’s after-burn”), Davis’s fictional artist instead acquires Blackness as an adult, even in spite of her light skin tone. Unlike Alex,

17 For a discussion of the 2015 protest at Dia:Beacon’s Carl Andre retrospective see Marisa Crawford’s piece “Crying for Ana Mendieta at the Carl Andre Retrospective.” The invitation for the crying protest read: “TEARS of JOY/ TEARS of TERROR/ TEARS for ANA MENDIETA. come celebrate the last day of Carl Andre’s DIA retrospective at a public cry-in/silueta party. bring your own tears.” 90

Bird grew up in the American South, living her whole life as a Black American and early on experiencing the complicated mix of joys and trauma that attend this social formation.

Maker suggests a transnational understanding of Blackness through the strong connection between Alex and Bird, one that lingers even after death.18

Like Davis’s attempt to “be in the nineties” and the activists protesting

Mendieta’s critical invisibility, Maker’s characters struggle with a similar feeling of attempting to anchor their experience in the present moment while haunted by phantoms of loss. Watching the police chase a Black man in her neighborhood, Bird muses how,

“the present was a weird time. It felt to her as if there has only been slavery and then the past twenty years” (213). In this moment, Davis describes an affective experience of the present as both continuous with the historical past and breaking from the recent past.

Across the novel, Davis argues for an understanding of the past as not resolved – the end of slavery or the enactment of civil rights legislation does not end the racial inequalities which structure her characters’ world. In the same scene, Davis writes, “That’s why Bird liked objects, evidence, proof, some sign of fact from the past. She liked objects with a specific time in their making” (213). Bird desires proof of a past she knows happened and specifically objects that encapsulate the interval of their own creation.

While she is discussing various folk art objects in this scene, Davis could as easily be discussing the videotapes which are the crux of her narrative and central to my argument in this chapter. Unlike earlier modes of visual recording (still photography and

18 Davis’s own history as a performance artist, including her collaborations with Jessica Hagedorn and Ntozake Shange, including their 1977 choreopoem Where The Mississippi Meets the Amazon, surely inform her vision of a rich and complex place in artistic communities for women of color working across differences but carrying a shared experience of marginalization. 91 film), the introduction of the portable video camera in 1965 allowed for immediate feedback and interactivity by the user, opening up a new medium for resistant forms of artistic production (Falkenberg 23). As Merrill Falkenberg notes, “Whereas photography and film require elaborate processing, video’s intrinsic principle was feedback, as users could simultaneously respond to and alter their image onscreen” (23). Alex Juhasz calls videotapes a “duration solution” since they allow for lasting capture of images and sounds, recording the creation of these moments or, to follow Davis above, the “specific time in their making.” Juhasz describes video as “unchanging while also being a mutually verifiable record of things that once were, are no longer, but remain present through the form of its mechanical reproduction” (323). Maker focuses on the value of videotape technology as an accessible means for Black women artists of the 1980s to capture their artistic processes and also give voice to their grievances against an unjust social system.

The materiality of videotapes makes present the voices and bodies captured on them, representing these performances for audiences and keeping them from simply being cast aside.

In this chapter, I argue Davis’s novel imagines the function of the archive as a site for capturing ephemeral and intimate moments of Black women’s experience. Imagining the visual medium of video on the page allows Davis to demonstrate the ways in which

Black women can use expressive technologies to contest dominant narratives about their bodies and resist neoliberal paradigms which seek to bury and silence the dead and disenfranchised. My analysis begins by unpacking the historical setting of Maker – the

1980s and 1990s in New York City – and examining Davis’s depiction of an art scene

92 unfriendly to Black women’s art and a broader social landscape beset by constant crises mediated through television news. I read this historical moment as marked by a series of losses – the loss of the potential of the Civil Rights era, the loss of life domestically with the rise of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and a weakened social welfare system, and, within the novel, Bird’s loss of her close friend. For Bird, the era’s crises lead to a spatial retreat into the space of her apartment away from an increasingly hostile world. I then articulate my understanding of Alex and Bird’s close friendship within a trajectory of Black women’s queer friendships in literature. The intimacy between the two women leads to

Bird’s profound grief which I read as not simply debilitating but also a sign of her intense connection and her positioning as the ideal archivist to uncover the truth encoded in

Alex’s video diaries.

From here, I elaborate my guiding lenses for the chapter’s analysis: the idea of the visual archive in Black women’s writing as an instantiation of a queer temporality which jars the forward movement of a normative neoliberal temporality. I work from Black feminist and queer of color theories of the archive to examine Alex’s video diaries which fall into two categories: straightforward monologues delivered to the camera and recording of Alex as she stages site-specific performance pieces. In reading these videotapes as presented by Davis, I consider how the ephemerality of what they record becomes materialized in the objects left behind – the videotapes come to replace the presence of the lost artist. I use a queer archival approach to read the ways in which the videotapes speak to Bird, revealing the truth about her friend’s murder and also inspiring new artistic creation. In order to bring about justice for Alex, Bird stages an art

93 installation which doubles as a trap for Frank Burton. I argue this climactic scene of battle validates the power of artistic production as a method of reclaiming control for marginalized subjects beset by an unequal social system. Maker posits a mode of reclamation requiring a blending of past and present as well as fact and fiction.

Ultimately, Davis’s novel shows that Black women’s art may not need to present factual truth in order to present the affective realities of Black women’s lives. Expressive visual technologies including video allow a space for Black female artists to leave behind a trace and counter the impulse to bury the past in the pursuit of the present.

The Neoliberal Crises of the 1980s

Maker of Saints offers an examination of the everyday affective life of the large political shifts of the 1980s as felt by Black women trying to make it in the New York art world. I read the novel as following Ann Cvetkovich’s call to examine neoliberalism from the “vantage point of everyday affective life” in lieu of large-scale “master narratives about global conditions” which often fail to address “the lived experience of these systemic transformations” (Depression 12). Within Davis’s novel, Alex and Bird hold precarious positions within the art world which prefers white men’s art and accepts

Black women only if they can fit into narrow and economically legible categories. More broadly, the two women and their circle of friends fall outside of the roles of value prized within a neoliberal system because of their marginalized positions of race, gender, and sexual desire. The role of gender and racial difference under neoliberalism in the art world are illuminated by a reading of Michelle Wallace’s 1991 essay “Why Are There

No Great Black Artists?” Wallace addresses the overwhelming whiteness of institutional artistic production noting that the art world and the art market are intertwined under

“corporate capitalism” in a global system, drawing attention to the fact that artmaking is not simply a labor of love but always is driven by profit margins and the need for material survival (190-191). There have always been prolific Black artists but Wallace distinguishes between fame and greatness, with fame suggesting “the judgments and trends of the movement - which have always been promiscuous in their instrumentalization of black artists - whereas ‘great’ usually refers to everlasting cultural processes as they have been codified in art history and museums for centuries” (187). The fleeting trendiness of certain strands of Black art is evinced in Alex’s comment that for

Frank’s white friends “Everybody’s passe, except the primitives - these kids from the

South Bronx, that’s what they call them” (175). The half-joking, half-serious use of the

“primitive” label, one that has long been attached to certain kinds of non-representational

Black art, serves to celebrate a simplified notion of Blackness in a way that, to follow

Wallace, clearly treats the artists as childlike accents that can be used and dispensed with as needed by the (white) artistic establishment in a drive for newness.

Success for Alex and Bird within the New York art scene relies on talents and creative desires as well as the infrastructure overwhelmingly controlled by gatekeeping white men like Frank Burton. Uri McMillan describes the “laborious task of being a black woman artist in New York” in the 1970s and 1980s, including the constant need to

“debunk the perception that ‘artist’ and ‘black woman’ were not incompatible terms”

(193). On top of the broader racism of the art world, Black women artists frequently

95 found themselves excluded from a white dominated feminist art movement and a male- dominated Black Arts movement (McMillan 116). Several of Alex’s videotapes presented in the novel address head on the unmarked whiteness of the art world. Davis presents all of the videotape sections in italics setting them apart from the rest of the text.

Describing Frank Burton’s white artist friends, Alex tells the camera:

None of these art guys ever just happen to mention what some artist of color might be

doing. If we’re working in a new area, the area doesn’t exist, or it’s not real terrain. If

one of us does something new, we die in obscurity. If we don’t die in obscurity, we were

doing something someone else did first. Did you ever hear a white artist admit they got

something from a black artist? (175)

Alex describes an art world in which Black artists are invisible, considered unimportant, and yet constantly the source of white artistic innovation. She tells the camera how

Frank’s friends talk down to her, treating her as “just some little whore he’s taken up with who does art” and advising her to follow his advice (ibid). Alex’s sexual relationship with Frank further invalidates her position as a serious artist, allowing a conveniently gendered reason for the white art world to dismiss her artistic merits and suggest her success is simply the result of white male intervention.

In discussing a recent exhibit of Black women’s film art since the 1970s, the curators note, “black women artists historically have been rendered invisible and continue in the twenty first century to be underdiscussed and underexhibited” (Brownlee and

Oliver 12). Alex’s videotaped monologues attacking the whiteness and maleness of

“these art guys” draw on a rich history of Black women employing video as an insurgent strategy in the 1980s. Howardena Pindell’s video Free, White and 21 (1980) has become 96 iconic for its depiction of the artist linking the racism of the art world with generations of racist practice experienced by her family. Black conceptual artist Adrian Piper’s video

Cornered (1988) features the light-skinned artist haranguing the viewer for their assumptions about racial purity and simplistic racial binaries. Both of these artists and other Black women working in video art inform Maker and serve as clear models for the fictional work Alex leaves behind after her death.19 Merill Falkenberg describes the way in which “black female video-filmmaker derives authority by promoting a desire, first and foremost, for self-revelation” (34). Video technologies use as a democratizing mode of self-expression and revelation for Black women resonates in my examination of

Cheryl Dunye’s film work in chapter 3 and the broader ascendancy of a New Queer

Cinema which took advantage of the affordances of video.

Davis’s novel begins after Alex’s death and after Bird has ceased making art; these twin events are tied to the power of Frank Burton and the broader social shifts felt in the 1980s. Bird’s inability to make artwork, on the heels of a vicious review by Frank

Burton, “made her question her right to make something of the world in her head. And in a weird way, it was if it happened to everyone, not just her” (157). Davis describes the end of Bird’s artistic production as a process of feeling she no longer “has [the] right” to remake the world in her work (157). Bird experiences this loss of control of the narrative of the world around her as coterminous with broader social changes. She feels the 1980s as a moment in which “disasters” are constantly happening globally and the rise of

19 For more on Pindell and Piper see the chapters on each in Uri McMillan’s Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance; for Black women in video art more broadly see Cinema Remixed and Reloaded: Black Women Artists and the Moving Image Since 1970, edited by Brownlee and Oliver. 97 twenty-four hour news cycles means a constant affective need to track these narratives.

She describes 1980s events, including the invasion of Grenada, the Iran-Contra hearings, and the 1987 stock market crash, as driving people inside unable to leave their televisions

(157-158). Maker of Saints presents the sense of crisis in the late 1980s as almost exclusively mediated through visual and audio technologies. Bird wants to escape “the soundtrack” of ongoing national and international crises (156-157). “Regular programming,” Davis writes, “was now seemingly permanently interrupted” (158).

Shannon Winnubst describes crisis time as a dramatic temporality different from

“everyday banal life” in which “everything accelerates” and viewers “are expected to suspend all regular activity to meet these extra-ordinary demands” (Way Too Cool 15).

The constant feed of news events Davis describes are echoed in Winnubst’s description of crises “now fed to us serially by our multiple media screens in the developed world”

(ibid). Bird’s world shrinks to her apartment and the constant feed of news; Winnubst’s idea of a suspension of everyday time can be seen in Bird’s feeling of being stuck and unable to move past the onslaught of bad news.

Davis uses spatial relationships to show Bird’s profound depression after Alex’s death and her alienation from artistic production and the broader world. The novel’s opening scene introduces Bird at work as a radio engineer for a New York City public radio station. Bird works at a remove from the subjects of the radio interviews; Davis writes, “The glass booth was safe. No engagement” and compares Bird to women living in the protective space of an Orientalist vision of a harem (19). Viewing the actual interviews at a distance, Bird sees all of the subjects as “more or less the same – great and

98 small, famous and petit famous” (18). The sound booth allows her a retreat after giving up painting. She is both in control of the news – running the technology that captures voices – and at a remove from it in this physical zone of comfort.

As a radio engineer, Bird’s work involves crafting crisis into digestible news and this provides her with a measure of control in a seemingly chaotic world. Winnubst describes crises as coming to viewers with a “clear narrative arc of beginning, middle and end” (Way Too Cool 15) and Bird’s editing produces this story for listeners. Davis describes how viewers, “were desperate for news to go with the pictures of the [student protests in Beijing’s] Tienanmen Square, thirteen hours ahead of New York time, and

[Bird] worked day and night making tape from news that came over a fax machine they’d just installed at the job” (158). Her labor in “making tape from news” that comes in from around the world, via the fax machine, presents a moment of bringing order to the confusion of a complicated sociopolitical event, yet she cannot fully tame the event simply by shaping the story. She serves as a literal agent of history but also feeds the machinery that creates a sense of catastrophic disenfranchisement.

Bird’s feelings of safety in the recording booth are mirrored in her retreat to her apartment. Davis writes that Bird “spent nearly all of the eighties indoors, working sequestered in her studio, or her apartment, living through the windows, as if hidden behind the ornately carved screens that obscured women on balconies in an Arab quarter somewhere” (31). The motif of the harem returns here, but unlike the women in a harem

Bird does not hide because of custom but “from some bleakness, some contagious despair in the street. Hiding perhaps because she’d already caught it. Too many people dying, for

99 one thing. She knew lots of people who were now cloistered indoors as if there they could hide from an airborne virus. She’d spent a decade not being seen except in intimate moments” (31). Davis invokes another vivid Orientalist image in describing Bird’s conception of her life before the 1980s, writing that until this decade “Bird had thought life was like one of the ornate mazelike gaming palaces of Shanghai” where there was a never ending array of possible experiences to be had (134). This space of potential changes in the 1980s when, continuing the metaphor, troops “occupied Bird’s glittering pleasure mall and turned it into the setting for ‘The Masque of the Red Death’” (135).20

Davis’s reference follows the fear of “contagious despair” circulating like an “airborne virus” that drives Bird inside for the 1980s.

The invocation of a “plague” in relationship to the decade of course draws on the

AIDS crisis that unfolded throughout the decade. In her memoir of the AIDS crisis in

New York City, Sarah Schulman uses the term “the Plague” to describe 1981-1996

“when there was a mass death experience of young people” (45). Mayor Ed Koch struggled to address the city’s epidemic in the face of a presidential administration that refused to acknowledge the crisis, vocal criticism from the city’s gay community, and pushback from conservative citizens and religious bodies (for more see Soffer 305-316).

Schulman argues that the virus’s swift erasure of a generation of gay and queer men aided in the gentrification of the city and a radical shift towards a more conservative and less community-based artistic scene. This devastation can be clearly seen in the depiction

20 In Edgar Allen Poe’s classic 1842 short story, the richer residents of a town beset by the Plague barricade themselves away from the poor and have a party while the town perishes. For their hubris, the partygoers end up perishing when the Red Death invades the party as another guest. 100 of death that stalks the creative community that included Alex and Bird in the novel. One example is their friend Randall, the “glam guru” who chose fame over money and met numerous famous Black entertainers. He died “backstage in his own life, listening to

Aretha . . . weighing ninety-eight pounds, on liquid morphine, incontinent, in pain down to his bones . . .” (164).

The deaths among their circle are not just AIDS, although that clearly is a central factor, but the escalating crime of New York City in the late 1970s and 1980s and the results of adventuresome living in a society swiftly removing a social welfare safety net.

Bird wants to reach out to friends about her grief, but doesn’t because:

It was hard to talk to them, not just because Alex was dead but because so many people

were dead. At any time any one of them might go off the deep end because this was the

last death he or she could stand. Alex’s was the last one she could stand … They were

burying thirty-year-olds, thirty-five-year olds, people just crossing forty. They were

burying people who had lost a lover to AIDS and died a year later. They were burying

people who bled to death after being shot for their purses, strangled in abandoned

buildings over drugs … They were on a roulette wheel that turned red to black and black

to red – knowing the meaning of death but not of survival. (110)

The pervasive nature of death here is, like roulette, random within the confines of a system that ultimately has control. Fatigued by the onslaught of deaths, this generation of what Bird calls “survivors” (51) struggles to cope in a moment that derides the past and its many possibilities. The idea of falling in love “too many times” reflects not just the obvious specter of AIDS and its spread through unprotected sex, but also the queer networks of intimacies outside traditional models of lifelong monogamy that Bird and her

101 friends built up. Davis’s description of the inability to “go back” or to “be in the moment” speaks to the feeling of inevitability that Bird feels as she is constantly deluged by the disasters of the world. This inevitability is not one of knowing where or how chaos will come, but rather that it will. Grace Kyungwon Hong describes neoliberalism as an epistemological framing which “claims that protected life is available to all and that premature death comes only to those whose criminal actions and poor choices make them deserve it” (17). Many of the deaths in Bird’s community are of those who might be considered “responsible” for their own loss of life because of choices deemed deviant or alternative.

The recording booth and Bird’s apartment are both zones of safety and the metaphors she uses to describe the move to the 1980s (the Red Death invading the

Shanghai pleasure palace) reinforces a sense that Bird feels these changes at the level of bodily space. With the shift to a free-market understanding of the commons in a neoliberal climate, public space is privatized into “consumption-oriented spaces” and there is a loss of public space “where noncommercial values and crucial social issues can be discussed, debated, and engaged” (Giroux 67). “She never even saw the gang anymore,” Davis writes about Bird’s friends, adding, “The Crescent closed and everybody went home” (159). The ritual of going out and going home when the bars close stands in for the broader move into the private spaces of homes which, putatively, enjoy protections no longer afforded in public. Davis’s attention to interior spaces – especially the privacy of the domestic – as sites of safety and retreat shifts over the course

102 of the novel as Bird’s artistic resurgence is marked by her staging of a large multimedia installation in her dead friend’s apartment.

Bird finds comfort in the noise and music of the Quarter, her fictitious New York neighborhood, and its diverse population of immigrants, people of color, and those unable to make it in the neoliberal economy. Bird describes her neighbors as “untold children …. all without parents” (32). Alex finds the neighborhood alien to her experiences growing up in Surinam and runs an air conditioning unit to drown out its constant rhythms. Bird thinks Alex runs a fan “because Alex was from someplace else, never grew up with runaway slaves in her head. She had no history of being black” (37).

Davis imagines the Quarter as a physical manifestation of time as a palimpsest with past histories continually present; for Bird the space resonates with her experience as a Black

American for whom historical past is always present. Davis describes the Quarter as

“New York’s black bottom,” a traditional name for Black neighborhoods across the country.21 The Quarter, “resembled a laborers’ camp sitting at the fringe of rich plantation lands. Not much different from the small black side of town where [Bird had] grown up in Carolina, just a lot more crowded … It was a place that looked as if people had fallen there. The good life itself, if there really was one, had fallen elsewhere, maybe downtown” (32). The South and the plantation as an iconographic geography suggest a continuity between the Quarter and the racist past of the United States; on the list of those

21 In Toni Morrison’s novel Sula (1973) the Bottom describes the all Black neighborhood in the town of Medallion, Ohio. The Bottom sits on the top of a hill and its ironic name reflects its apocryphal creation story – that the land was willed to a freed slave by his former master who passed off the difficult hilly land as rich and fertile, calling it the “bottom of heaven” (Sula 5). Over the course of the novel’s forty years, the Bottom moves from a vibrant Black community to its ultimate destruction and reimagining as suburbs for those who live in the valley below. 103 living in the Quarter she includes “carpetbaggers,” using the term given to Northerners who moved to the South in the Reconstruction Period. Katherine McKittrick argues that the plantation “precisely because it housed and historicizes racial violences that demanded innovative resistances—stands as a meaningful conceptual palimpsest to contemporary cityscapes that continue to harbor the lives of the most marginalized”

(“Plantation” 5). The Quarter demonstrates McKittrick’s understanding of the plantation as a blueprint for the ways in which cities of the present moment continue to participate in projects of anti-blackness and various modes of dispossession and imprisonment, yet at the same time, the plantation was also a site of resistance by Black enslaved peoples and this history can invigorate what she calls “plantation futures” which center insurgency

(“Plantation”). In spite of the Quarter’s seemingly lost or failed status, the neighborhood still provides Bird with a place to recover from the twin deaths of her friend and her artistic drive. While neoliberal ideologies governing death prefer to dispose quickly of what Hong calls “deathly subjects” (16), in the Quarter the site of Alex’s death is mourned “along with the rest. [The citizens of the Quarter] accepted Alex’s seemingly undeserved and unpunished death as one of the roll call of ordinary deaths that went down without official markers” (212). Openly mourning this death resists the drive to forgetting central to neoliberal, post-Civil Rights ideologies and denying the imperative to discard and move on from the dead.

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Generational Divides in Art

Bird’s journey to new art and the truth about her dead friend requires consistent incursions into the past and the memories of her life in the 1960s and 1970s, eras she remembers as rich with possibility and potential for true change. A generational gap between Bird – who came of age during the turbulence of the Civil Rights Movement – and those born in the post-Civil Rights era stretches across Maker of Saints. Bird battles with younger reporters at the radio station who consider her an “embittered passé relic of the sixties” while she considers them “spineless little revisionists” who lack political convictions. She muses that everyone in her immediate circle of artists “was always in one battle or another” (156). As discussed above, neoliberal policies rely on a narrative of problems of social inequity as past; the Civil Rights Movement “functions as a finite period in the story told about national progress” (Wanzo 30) and continued racial inequality must be the result of individual failure, masking structural racism and suggesting “people of color are not yet ready for inclusion into the imagined community of the United States because of their alleged civic deficiencies” (Itagaki 12). Under neoliberalism, freedom shifts from the active power of individuals and groups to shape society to “the right of the individual to be free from social constraints” (Giroux 67).

Bird’s distrust of the police stems from both her placement in a lower-income neighborhood of primarily people of color and her experiences with protesting in the late

1960s. For Charles, Bird’s friend and sometimes lover, the failure to contact the police seems inconceivable; he is sheltered by his upper-class status and is markedly younger than Bird. When he asks about her past - “where she’d stopped going years ago” - Bird

105 finds that her retelling sounds “tragic” and “yet she didn’t ever remembering feeling tragic about it really, not then, not till she’d disappeared behind the wall of her place after giving up trying to be even a part-time painter” (157). She presents a version of her past crafted to make her seem “quixotic, emphatic, extreme, a hundred percent there when she was there and a hundred percent gone when she was gone” (156). Bird strategically evades directly addressing an attempted rape and seeing friends beaten during protests in

1968. For Bird, the past was not a tragedy but latent with potential – Davis carefully avoids romanticizing the foment of the 1960s and 1970s as being ideal or perfect, as in a series of hazy anecdotes about Bird’s unnerving almost sexual encounter with Miles

Davis (163-164). The social movements of the 1960s and early 1970s - especially the

Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power Movement, and the anti-war demonstrations - relied on a televisual liveness that begat the later twenty-four news cycle that Bird experiences as pushing against her own ability to act against history.22

One of the differences that Bird experiences between herself and those known alternately as Generation X, the hip-hop generation, and the Post-Soul generation is a different position towards artistic production and its relationship to political activism.23

Where the Black Arts Movement actively saw its output as an expression of the Black

22 I am drawing here on Kara Keeling’s discussion of televisual liveness and the visual rhetoric of the Black Panther Party (The Witch’s Flight 68-94). I am also thinking of Rebecca Wanzo’s argument that the Civil Rights Era relied on photographic and televisual images of the “noble and nonviolent black sufferer” as a means of building sympathy in white viewers who saw these bodies as ideal citizens (28-30). 23 I realize generational lines are somewhat murky and I leave them vague here – others writing about this Post Civil Rights Era generation have erected clear parameters for the cohort under discussion, but, as with any historical movement, these are still inexact and always open to exception. In his history “of the Hip Hop Generation,” Jeff Chang opens with the line “Generations are fictions” and reminds readers that generational distinctions are a function of imposing a narrative on a group of people’s experiences (1). He suggests that strict boundaries on any generation often leaves out those instrumental in our thinking on the nature of that group (1-3). 106

Power Movement (Neal 1968), the 1980s New Black Aesthetic (NBA) saw a divestment from stated political agendas.24 In his seminal 1989 essay on the NBA, Trey Ellis describes young artists who are “the children of Civil Rights workers or black nationalists” and are unafraid to parody or “flout publicly the official, positivist black party line” (236). Ellis crafts a narrative of NBA artists raised by parents who experienced the worst of Jim Crow-segregation and the hard work of the Civil Rights

Movement and thus worked to shield their children from these racist realities. The sentiment that “We're not saying racism doesn't exist; we're just saying it's not an excuse”

(Ellis 240) demonstrates the ways in which African American cultural workers of the

1980s may buy into neoliberal ideologies of self-determination as the means to trump racism, instead of the active protest messages embedded in previous waves of Black art. I am not seeking to romanticize the Black Arts Movement, nor to demonize the New Black

Aesthetic; rather I think that Ellis’s essay encompasses a sentiment that reflects a desire to rebel against the previous generation, the excitement about the increasingly visible position of Black arts in the mainstream media of the 1980s, and a failure to entirely appreciate the class dynamics of those who can afford to be part of the NBA. Ellis does not avoid the class politics in his essay, noting that the increased access to higher education for African Americans allows for a larger group of artists who can speak the language of professionalized education. This narrative draws on the same narrative of past-ness that serves to frame the concerns of the Civil Rights Movement as entirely

24 Bird’s sentiments reflect those of Davis’s own views about the distinctions between her experiences coming of age during the Black Arts Movement and the following generation. In a conversation with M. Jacqui Alexander, Davis writes, “However, one of the things that did happen over the years is that I found a younger generation coming up that often criticized my generation for having politics and for having an agenda that was apparent in our work” (Davis and Alexander 24). 107 resolved - here the resolution is one of increased class access. The relationship between

Bird and Alex draws on their shared investment in the value of art as political and their experiences as the generation before the NBA.

Queering Friendship

Bird’s intimate friendship with Alex threatens Frank Burton’s white heteropatriachal power. When Alex is alive, Bird threatens Frank’s ability to entirely control Alex; in death Bird is the only one that can unravel the coded messages in Alex’s video diaries, making her the ideal archivist for Alex’s archive and a threat to Frank’s freedom. I draw on Black queer and feminist theories of friendship in order to consider the queer nature of the relationship between Alex and Bird; I am not, however, suggesting that their relationship was romantic or that their primary sexual identifications were not with men. I return to Barbara Smith’s foundational essay “Toward a Black

Feminist Criticism” to consider Alex and Bird as part of a long history of Black women’s writing representing complicated and fraught yet generative friendships between women.

Smith examines the passionate friendship of Nel and Sula in Toni Morrison’s Sula and links this to the novel’s “consistently critical stance towards the heterosexual institutions of male/female relationships, marriage, and family.” Smith considers this radical counter to normative ideals to be feminist and lesbian even as she acknowledges that Nel and

Sula are not sexual partners and retain identifications with men. Drawing on Black feminist theory as well as queer theory, I would expand Smith’s reading to consider this passionate friendship as a queer intimacy since it actively resists limiting notions of

108 identity. In reflecting on Sula, Morrison describes her guiding questions as including,

“What is friendship between women when unmediated by men? What choices are available to black women outside their own society’s approval?” (Sula xiii) and describes her interest in “outlaw women” (Sula xvi). Black women’s writing has a long history of complex friendships between outlaw women, friendships which are not sexual but carry a close and complex intimacy. Much has been written about, for example, the competitive and tragic friendship between Clare Kendry and Irene Redfield in Nella Larsen’s novel

Passing with queer theorists long debating whether the connection between the two women should be read as sexual, competition for Irene’s husband, the frisson of racial passing or some combination of these valences.25 In Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes

Were Watching God Janie Crawford returns home to her best friend Phoeby after the death of her third husband; the novel unfolds as Janie’s narrative to Phoeby. The close female friendships in these and other novels in the tradition of Black women’s writing focus on the importance of female friendship over sexual and romantic attachments to men.

Maker of Saints similarly centers a friendship between the two women which fights against normative scripts about relationality; the novel does not suggest the two women were sexually intimate but they do share physical space and are reliant on each other for emotional support. Drawing on Smith’s essay, Jafari S. Allen describes a friend as someone “who shares in this process of knowing and becoming; one who shares in you

25 Classic examples of these queer readings include Deborah McDowell’s “Introduction” to the 1986 reprint of Passing and Judith Butler’s essay “Passing, Queering” in Bodies That Matter. I engage with both of these essays later in this chapter. 109 getting your life” (135) and considers “the practice of loving friendship” as a powerful tool in healing from “the multiple and compounded traumas of race/sex terror” (131).

Allen argues that before Michel Foucault’s famous elaboration of “friendship as a way of life” black feminist theorists and writers had already “imagined erotic friendship among black women” as a source of sustenance and sanity (131).26

The loving queer friendship between Bird and Alex begins when the women meet in Boston in 1976 and bond over their shared desire to create. Bird credits Alex with birthing her as an artist “simply by being the first person to look at her paintings and see them as art” (74-75). While both struggled with the insularity of the white art world and its inability to understand their work, Alex gained notice for being “the most outrageous person” in any group show (61). The two women moved into adjacent apartments two years before the central events of the novel, rationalizing the high costs: “They told their families that they had roommates, and told their lovers that they had autonomy” (34).

Without the approval of their landlord, Bird and Alex have a friend place a door between their apartments “so they’d be connected” (33-34). After Alex’s death, Bird doubts their intimate connection, in part because of the door between them, even though “in her heart, in her body and mind” she knows that the death was neither suicide nor accidental (34).

Davis writes, “Bird and Alex, floating in and out of their rooms, were like two planets revolving around each other, held in each other’s sway by shared gravity. They had loved being connected yet having privacy, having somewhere to go when they fought. When no

26 Allen refers here to Foucault’s famous 1981 essay-interview “Friendship as a Way of Life.” While Foucault does briefly discuss Lillian Faderman’s work on female friendship, the interview focuses chiefly on gay male cultures. 110 one else was there, they slept with the door open and had coffee in the morning in the same kitchen” (35). The language of gravitational pull touches on the physical and reciprocal nature of their friendship, while keeping the door open during sleep demonstrates their comfort in sharing this vulnerable state.

Throughout Maker, Bird frequently returns to the coded language that she shared with Alex as they frankly dissected their erotic encounters. When a lover visits one of the women, “a note he would never see appeared on the inside of the other’s apartment giving his name, description, and relative importance” (36). As Smith writes about female friendship in Sula and The Bluest Eye, the relationship between Bird and Alex is

“essential, yet at the same time the physical sexuality is overtly expressed only between men and women” (“Towards” 165). Over the course of Maker, Bird’s sexual appetite reawakens, yet her friendship with Alex remains of central importance to the novel’s narrative arc and her own emotional recovery.

Frank Burton’s attempts to control all aspects of Alex’s life include cutting off her access to Bird by systematically deriding her work and her company, and, most tellingly, placing a lock on the door connecting their apartments. With the lock on the door, “The two women then could never open the door without [Frank’s] permission, and rarely did”

(199). The triangle between him, Alex, and Bird – with their close friendship standing in the way of his complete control over his girlfriend – carries clear racial valences. Early in his relationship with Alex, Frank takes Bird out to lunch and tells her, “I know you’re very close friends, and I don’t want to get in the middle of that, but I have to have her to myself” (86). Of course his comment is entirely disingenuous but he does clearly

111 understand the power of the connection between Bird and Alex, and the friendship jeopardizes his white masculine authority. While their closeness may cause anxiety about his authority, he is able to use his whiteness to evade police interference in his abusive relationship with Alex. The police “had never taken Burton downtown. He was a white guy who always told them he was a reporter and it would end up in the papers if they did” (199).

Even with a new lock on the connecting door, Bird’s physical proximity means that she has intimate knowledge through what she hears, as when she remembers a fight between Alex and Frank. As with her experience of the tragedies and disasters happening globally, Bird’s experience is at a remove, mediated through the aural. Bird hears screaming and then “A body hit the door, the bookcase, she heard the lamp by the door go down. Bird started screaming. She called Alex’s name. Burton bellowed, ‘I will break down the fucking door, bitch, get away from there. Stay out of it. That your bitch, huh?

That your bitch in there? … That your bitch in there, Alex?’” (198). Frank’s threats and his comments at the earlier lunch reflect his misunderstanding of the nature of the friendship between the two women; he recognizes that Bird stands in opposition to his total conquest of her friend, but he cannot conceive of their close connection in anything less besides the language of heteronormative sexual access. In his shouted threats he oscillates between using “bitch” as an epithet for Bird in the first instance and “bitch” as a misogynist term for sexual ownership; both uses of course rely on the reduction of women to the position of animals, yet the second use also demonstrates a reading of the relationship between Alex and Bird as sexual in a simplistic manner. Frank’s failure to

112 appreciate the bond of friendship means he can only read physical and emotional intimacy through the prescribed limitations of heterosexuality.

Maker is both a mystery novel and an examination of Bird’s attempt to grieve and move forward from the loss of Alex. Already beset by the loss of so many others in her community, Bird finds herself initially paralyzed by the death of Alex. Her close friend was instrumental in Bird’s self-creation as an artist and the primary audience for narrating the daily struggles of her own life, standing in the place where a husband might in a more heteronormative narrative. Bird’s grief is specific to her intimate connections with Alex, a privileged position that allows her to use these ties to ultimately decode the archive Alex has left behind. In grief, Bird’s universe is reduced to the scale of the relational ties between self and the lost loved one. In her essay “Violence, Mourning,

Politics,” Judith Butler argues that our sense of self emerges as a result of our relational ties with others and thus “[w]hen we lose some of those ties by which we are constituted, we do not know who we are or what to do” (22). The loss of relationality, according to

Butler, is not reducible to the self or the lost other, but is rather about losing the tie between, a tie that may only become visible through the process of mourning (“Violence”

21-22). Butler describes mourning as “agreeing to undergo a transformation (perhaps one should say submitting to a transformation) the full result of which one cannot know in advance” since our narrative of self “falters” in the loss of someone instrumental in our own self-narration (“Violence” 22). Maker follows as Bird undergoes this transformation, working through Alex’s effects and uncovering the hidden truths.

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As I discussed previously, in the midst of all the death that attends her friend circle, Alex’s death is “the last one [Bird] could stand” (110) because of the intensity of their bond. A decade of experiencing a “crumbling universe” comes to a breaking point here, especially since the two women are responsible for the mutual constitution of each other as artists, the only creation they experienced in this fraught historical moment.

When Alex “gave birth to Bird the artist . . . Bird felt a connection she would never be able to sever” (74-75). After a hiatus from creating art, the only piece in Bird’s workspace is a Mexican figurine of “a clay woman giving birth to another fully developed being” (35).27

These two clay figures, joined in the distinctly feminine act of childbirth, suggests the ties between the two women are also bodily, a relation exposed in a moment of reflection as Bird cleans out her friend’s apartment. Bird has been musing when she returns to the present moment and realizes she was staring into space:

She caught herself in Alex’s living room mirror. … One spends all this time trying to

deal with one’s self, she thought, all the fucked up shit. But the universe was crumbling

because nothing was really created in her lifetime, nothing was made except themselves.

Nothing was of consequence compared to the love between them, mutually consumed,

inhaled from one another. The air was collapsing. Tiny lungs were imploding like stars.

Bird saw that she’d forgotten to put any earrings on. She remembered that Alex always

slept in hers. (54)

27 This figure is initially described as possibly being “a god giving birth to a god” (35) but in the final scene of the novel is reinterpreted as being two saints, with the image giving the novel its title (250). 114

Bird experiences her return to the present moment as a return to her body “caught” in

Alex’s mirror, suggesting her own work in self-portraiture, yet this image belongs not to her but to her dead friend since the literal frame belongs to Alex. Davis’s description of entrapment suggests the body is beyond Bird’s control and instead controlled by the memory of her friend. Davis moves from the abstract to a corporeal connection between the two women.

Davis’s evocative line “tiny lungs were imploding like stars” suggests the smallness of Bird and Alex against the scope of the universe and yet the gravitational collapse of stars can create black holes or other exceptionally powerful celestial being.

This simile also echoes the image of the two women caught in each other’s gravitational pull that I discussed earlier. Davis moves from this comparison to the mundane detail of earrings; Bird returns to her actual reflection and notices that she has forgotten this bit of bodily adornment. This observation is immediately haunted by the intimate detail of Alex sleeping in her earrings. The movement – of cells, of love, of earrings – between Alex and Bird, even in death, demonstrate the falsity of the two women as “merely bounded beings,” to follow Butler. Their love is “mutually consumed, inhaled from one another” and without this cellular intimacy even breathing becomes difficult for Bird, who experiences the air as “collapsing,” a verb that can mean both destruction and a joining together. Writing about those she has lost, Butler contends, “the primary others who are past for me not only live on in the fiber of the boundary that contains me . . . but they also haunt the way I am, as it were, periodically undone and open to becoming unbounded”

(“Violence” 28). “Caught” in Alex’s mirror, Bird is haunted by her lost friend and the ties

115 that bound them together and extended beyond simple self/other distinctions. This haunting becomes tangible in the form of the videotapes that Bird must decode in order to find the truth about her friend’s death.

In her grief, Bird’s already intense bond with Alex is amplified and becomes a powerful lens for viewing what is left behind. Embodying the grieving process “is not to be resigned to inaction,” Butler argues, but rather to understand that grief can be a resource (“Violence” 30). Achille Mbembe describes the documents archived in an official repository as “fragments of life to be placed in order” to craft a coherent narrative

(21). This understanding can be expanded to the queerer archive suggested in Maker with the videotapes serving as “traces of the deceased, elements that testify that a life did exist, that deeds were enacted, and struggles engaged in or evaded. Archives are born from a desire to reassemble these traces rather than destroy them” (Mbembe 22). Unlike Alex’s archive, however, state archives, as Mbembe writes, attempt to keep “the dead” from

“stirring up disorder in the present” (22). I read Frank Burton’s violent and invasive tactics in Maker acting like state power as he tries to quiet Alex’s haunting voice.

In death, Bird is the one with the knowledge needed to decipher the complex performances that Alex recorded; the stories are told in code with names changed and events rearranged or, in one case, appropriated wholesale from Bird’s own life. The videos threaten Burton’s marriage, his career, and hold the potential to land him in prison

(although he was previously cleared of charges in Alex’s death). In an effort to demonstrate his control over the situation, Burton breaks into Alex’s apartment to watch the tapes, listens to Bird’s answering machine messages, and brutally attacks Bird in an

116 assault staged to appear like an attempted rape, conjuring up the threat of sexual violence as a tool of control. Archives only have meaning to those who can decode them and

Burton sees that Bird wields the intimate knowledge necessary to understand the truth amidst the fabricated narratives on the videotapes. Davis writes, “Bird wasn’t a relative, not even an artist, not anymore. But she was the designated receptacle; she could prove that with the evidence, an entire apartment of unclaimed stuff. Evidence” (65). The police take some of the items but cannot find the truth about Alex’s murder because they also lack the ability to read these texts and understand their contextual and affective importance. Bird believes guardian spirits “had sent Alex like a message to a mailbox.

Bird was the drop for the letter or package or whatever it was in Alex that they were trying to secure. Something inside Alex had driven her to Bird’s door more than a decade ago. That’s how Bird knew she was the designated recipient” (64-65). Bird keeps this idea to herself since she realizes it sounds ridiculous “to say she was somebody’s spiritual mailbox” (65). The various phrases used – “receptacle,” “recipient,” “mailbox,” and mail

“drop” – all suggest Bird was an intended destination for Alex (letters require addresses to be sent), and later for her ephemera which serves an extension of Alex, even after her death. The relational tie that grew between the two women is strengthened and complicated in death.

At the same time, if Bird is the receptacle or depository for Alex this means she contains her in some way – in both senses of containment, both to limit and constrain and to serve as a place of holding. These interconnected idea of containment are types of archival work. The idea that Alex’s messages continue to arrive after her death, in the

117 form of the video diaries and her secret phonebook, reflects Diana Taylor’s idea of archival memory which “works across distance, over time and space; investigators can go back to reexamine an ancient manuscript, letters find their addresses through time and place …” (19). Taylor attacks the myth that the archive is static and instead argues that over time “the value, relevance or meaning of the archive” changes based on “how the items it contains get interpreted, even embodied” (19).28 The repeated motif of Bird as

Alex’s “spiritual mailbox” carries an embodied trace, which might be read in a sexual or erotic manner, but I would argue instead we see in a more expansive sense as an element of the physical intimacy of the women’s friendship. In the next section, I consider how this intimacy informs Bird’s reading of the videotapes and how Davis presents this visual archive in a written text.

The Visual Archive on the Page

Maker follows other Black women’s writing in subverting the limitations of the written word through recourse to the visual, a move that I argue as evincing a queer temporality. Davis’s novel does not include any actual images, but her text emphasizes the importance of the visual archive. By engaging with the visual through writing, Davis both highlights the limitations of the written and suggests that the novel has the capacity to move beyond the literal material confines of the printed text. In Worrying The Line,

Black literary theorist Cheryl Wall examines Black women’s writing where gaps in the written record impede the search for links to the past. She argues that in these moments

28 Taylor contrasts archival memory with the repertoire which I take up later in this chapter. 118 the texts are “most likely to subvert the conventions of literary tradition so that the connection to the past can be forged nevertheless” (9). Wall argues that lost stories are often conjured within the text through the insertion of visual imagery. She writes that,

“For the characters within the texts, the images provoke stories that close the gap between past and present” (9). Wall suggests images are the occasion for stories that work against the distancing between the current moment and the past; I read this subversion of the normative structure of historical narrative as a form of queer temporality.

In his reading of Elizabeth Bishop’s classic poem “One Art,” José Esteban Muñoz argues that a lost watch belonging to the poet’s mother “partially (re)lives in its documentation” (Cruising 71). Muñoz notes that while we cannot “conserve a person or a performance through documentation, we can perhaps begin to summon up through the auspices of memory, the acts and gestures that meant so much to us” (Cruising 71-72).

Both Wall and Muñoz use language – “provoke,” “summon” – that suggests the power of the image invoked in text to resurrect or restore something lodged in the past by the official record, the passage of time, or the seeming impossible barrier of death. Troubling distinctions between the Black women’s texts and the pictures they invoke, Wall argues that these images often “call the written text into being” (17) suggesting that the images precede the written text that captures and delivers them to the reader. This seemingly illogical claim demonstrates the queer temporality of these images; they jar the assumed forward progression of time, a normative progression in which past events and experiences are simply allowed to fade away and be forgotten.

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Toni Morrison’s 1995 lecture “The Site of Memory” (1995) is instructive in this queer understanding of the relationship between text and image. Morrison describes writing as a process of imagining the interior desires of her friends and family, starting from the outside and moving inward. She writes, images “surface first, and they surface so vividly and so compellingly that I acknowledge them as my route to a reconstruction of a world, to an exploration of an interior life that was not written and to the revelation of a kind of truth” (95). Morrison’s approach is about archiving truths by imagining the interior lives of those she – and Americans more broadly – may only know through surface images. Morrison aims in her talk to “track an image from picture to meaning to text” (97) as it travels in her process of writing the novel Beloved. I understand this queer relationship between image and written texts as part of the way in works like Maker work against static notions of Black women’s histories and desires.

Even before the novel proper begins, Davis highlights the supposedly flat terrain of the novel by asking the reader to imagine the physical book as simultaneously operating like the TV and VCR crucial to the solving of the mystery within the diegetic world. The table of contents for Maker divides the book into three sections – “Static,”

“Color Bars,” and “Image” corresponding to the stages of an old television image coming into focus. These section titles designate an understanding of the book as functioning like a TV; the final section is noted as the arrival at an identifiable “image.” The sections instruct readers to see the book as a material object and imagine it through the lens of the technology like that utilized by Alex and Bird. Readers may ignore or forget the initial table of contents, but the breaks between the three sections reinforce the importance of

120 these markers of a specifically visual experience of watching a videotape. These breaks also remind the reader that they are engaging with a material object. In a novel that consistently focuses on the ways in which technology mediates our access to history and our own experiences, drawing attention to the materialization of the text also reminds us that, as Alexander Weheliye notes, alphabetic script is a technology itself, a process of

“motorized mediation” (Phonographies 24).

Davis complicates the cultural assumption that the visual archive serves as the site of factual knowledge. Maker troubles the idea that “seeing is believing” by imagining visual art that mingles fact and fiction and by showing the power of artistic production to reveal truths. Echoing Morrison’s ambivalence about knowing the interior lives of others,

Bird wonders if she ever really knew Alex in spite of their intimacy. Bird questions if their physical closeness and the mirrored nature of their apartments could ever lead them to know the “dreaming inside [each] other” (34). Her evidence for the failure to truly know the interior life of her close friend is understood visually. Davis writes, “Bird and

Alex had different views. Even though their windows were side by side stretching along the front of the building, the two friends saw different sections of the street below. And they could not see each other unless they both leaned out dangerously far past the ledge”

(33). Davis puns on the meanings of view as both the physical act of seeing and the notion of outlook or perspective on the world.

Since Bird heard Alex’s death but only saw the aftermath, her visual understanding of this crucial event melds with the real-life painting The Suicide of

Dorothy Hale (1938) by Frida Kahlo. In a shift from the close third-person following

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Bird, an omniscient narrator tells the reader explicitly that, while the death was rumored to resemble this famous painting, these are “apocryphal rumors” and “this “cannot be said to be a realistic portrayal of what Decatur’s neighbors might have seen” (27). The Suicide of Dorothy Hale “which depicts the headfirst plunge and landing of an elegantly coiffed woman in an evening gown with a corsage of white roses” (Davis Maker 27) was commissioned after the suicide of Hale, a failed Hollywood actress and widow of a socialite. Hale threw herself out of the window of her penthouse apartment after a cocktail party in 1938 (Herrera 289-292). The painting depicts Hale’s death in three stages with blood dripping out from the fallen body, a move to “extend the painting’s space out into the real space of the spectator, bringing the horror of the subject home”

(Hererra 293).

Not all readers of Maker will know this specific painting but most are probably familiar with Kahlo’s distinctive style, blending Mexican folk art with frank self- portraiture emphasizing her hyper-eyebrow and the vulnerability of her female body.

Since her death, Kahlo has become “one of the most popular and commodified mainstream images of Latinidad” (Guzmán and Valdivia 210), circulating across popular and elite spheres, from postage stamps to ongoing museum exhibits (ibid 211). In alluding to Suicide Davis asks the reader to imagine an existing visual text as a means of seeing what is entirely fictional – the death of a character in a novel. While Alex’s death did not actually look like this, Bird is haunted by images that mingle both the actual death and the Kahlo painting. In her imagination Bird falls into the painting:

First her own body was falling, headfirst, never landing. Then the falling belonged to

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Dorothy Hale in Frida Kahlo’s painting: Dorothy Hale in an evening gown . . . Dorothy

on the ground in an evening gown, with a corsage of white roses. Then Bird falling, on

the elevator of the Eiffel Tower. (122)

These nested images reflect the way in which the narrative exceeds the confines of the written through a mix of historical event, artistic creation, and the suggestion of movement conferred on the previously static image of Hale, itself an artistic representation of true events. The inclusion of Kahlo’s painting also draws on the extra- diegetic historical narrative of Hale and the cultural knowledge of Kahlo as a crucial figure in the constellation of feminist art creation, especially self-portraiture.

The reference to Kahlo’s artwork also reinforces the importance role of folk art, especially devotional pieces, to both Alex and Bird. The Suicide of Dorothy Hale, like much of Kahlo’s artwork, draws directly on the Mexican folk art tradition of retablos, votive paintings on sheets of tin, which include: a miraculous or calamitous event, the presence of an intervening holy figure, and a textual explanation of what happened

(Herrera 151; Durand and Massey 6-24). Retablos serve as “a visual receipt, or thank-you note, for the delivery of heavenly mercy, and a hedge against future dangers, the assurance of blessings” (Herrera 151).29 As with any popular artistic form, the generic conventions are not strictly enforced and within Maker Davis follows Suicide in redefining retablos to shift the emphasis from the joy of miraculous recovery to the despair felt by those who have lost loved ones. The novel describes retablos as

29 The term retablo comes from the Latin retro-tabula or “behind the altar.” Originally retablos were altar paintings in Catholic churches in Spain during the Middle Ages, before spreading to Mexico through colonization where they became a popular mass artistic expression of spiritual good fortune (Durand and Massey 6, 11-12). 123 expressing “the penance of survivors. Colorful permanent ceremonies to the survivor’s pain, and one thought, there but for the grace of God go I, Lord, it was my disaster but it was not me” (51). Where traditional retablos stress “the relief of delivery and the unmitigated joy that follow an unbelievable stroke of good luck” (Durand and Massey

27), Davis defines the art form as a site of interaction between those who have died and those who have survived.

In her role as archivist of Alex’s memory, Bird tends to her dead friend’s collection of religious sculptures and folk art from Latin America, including numerous

Mexican retablos (42). Bird describes Alex’s videos as retablos as well calling them

“Moving retablos,” thinking, “Now that Alex was dead, it was easy to see the videos she made as tragic histories” (61). Reading the videotapes as retablos foregrounds the role of

Bird as a survivor deciphering the messages left behind. The framing of them as animated retablos also references the way in which “much of Mexican art” including Kahlo’s paintings and retablos “interweave fact and fantasy as if the two were inseparable and equally real” (Herrera 261). As in the traditional retablos, Alex’s videotapes emphasize emotional honesty and ideas over strict notions of documentary truth.

In spite of the continued reference to Kahlo’s iconic painting, Alex’s fall did not actually look like Suicide but the aftermath forms a “horrifying sculpture” (105) in the concrete that mirrors Alex’s art. Recently poured concrete on the sidewalk below the apartment building “gave under the impact of her falling weight. Two impressions were left by the impact: a blood-stained imprint in the translucent tarp, and a hollowed-out shaped in the concrete resembling a grotesque sarcophagus fitted to a body in motion”

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(Davis 27). Davis’s description – linking the static permanence of a coffin with the motion and vitality of a living body – invokes the central paradox of Alex’s conceptual art – much of which was ephemeral and experiential. Like her real-world inspiration Ana

Mendieta, Alex’s work included pieces in which she used her body to mark a silhouette in dirt, grass, sand, mud and other natural substances. Alex’s videotapes include footage of her making her own earth art in scenes that mimic Mendieta’s most famous pieces.

The earth works produced by Mendieta and Alex are fleeting because of their interaction with natural elements, but the concrete retains the shape of Alex’s body creating what

Bird views as a “sidewalk crypt” (105) and an “urban memorial” (95). Unlike the limited audiences of Mendieta’s earthworks, which often “existed in remote sites for limited periods of time” (Blocker 23), Alex’s impression is available to the whole of the diverse

Quarter neighborhood. Bird does assume that eventually they will replace the sidewalk

(93), but until then this is more a fixed art piece than most of Alex’s ephemeral process art.

The Videotape Archive

Despite the ephemeral nature of many of Alex’s art pieces, her videotapes capture a version of her creative process and function as separate art objects, exceeding their assumed place as simply diaries or a way to record something that only exists for the length of a performance. Diana Taylor contrasts the archive with the repertoire, which she describes as “embodied memory” that cannot be reproduced since it relies on physical “presence” (20). She argues that live performances cannot be captured in the

125 archive; she distinguishes a video of a performance from the actual live performance, yet the video “often comes to replace the performance as a thing in itself” (20). Alexander G.

Weheliye makes a similar claim in discussing the development of sound recording technology, arguing the materiality of the performer “was displaced onto the recording apparatus itself and the practices surrounding it and, as a result, rematerialized the sonic source” (Phonographies 20). Davis describes Alex’s “three years’ worth of tapes” (210) as “a kind of document of a ripe time of life. It was a long performance work that was purposefully rough, that was meant to seem mundane, that used lies and revealed something really true” (210-211). The tapes are not actually the performances themselves, but in attempting to capture their performance the tapes become their own material object of importance. After Alex’s death, her materiality is passed onto the tapes which, to follow Weheliye, rematerialize their initial source in her own bodily performances. Alex references this materiality when in one of her videotapes she says,

“I’m going to try talking on the tape” (177), drawing attention to the fact that her voice is captured on the magnetic strips of videotape. While the original art pieces were intended to be ephemeral, the videotapes are more tangible and become a more lasting artifact that exceeds their function as simply a mode of capture. The interplay between recording and original performance that arises in Alex’s videotapes echoes conversations around Ana

Mendieta’s artistic work.

Critics examining Mendieta’s work consistently discuss the Cuban artist’s work as absent and as performances since they “invoke disappearance, movement, and indeterminacy” (Blocker 24), as in her trademark earth works where she engaged with

126 natural objects in remote settings with often little or no audience. Claire Raymond’s work draws attention to this mode of “capture,” noting critics of Mendieta work from filmic and photographic representations of her work yet fail to comment on this mediation (2).

Raymond argues the materiality of these films, slides and photographs “disappears into the image; the photograph’s facticity becomes the unread, the unseen” (2). Mendieta’s legacy relies on the material fact of the photographs and films that have survived and capture a version of the actual art she made; she is remembered for provocatively placing her naked body into natural settings but what remains are “images marked with the materiality of the photographic and filmic equipment of that time, but very thin in the materiality of earth.... Her photographs are not natural artifacts” (Raymond 6).

Raymond’s analysis lines up with the way that Tayor and Weheliye both emphasize the materiality of how we receive the artwork as a new artifact and often a more tangible entry into the archives. In the earliest videotape that Bird finds, Alex creates an earthwork and Davis’s narration makes it clear how the videotape functions to simultaneously grant access to this ephemeral performance and limit our access to it. As the viewer, Bird’s access to the scene is limited by the framing of the camera and what she can see becomes the entirety of the performance space. In the film, Alex strips naked and lays down in a silhouette she has dug into the dirt. Davis describes how she “takes a deep breath, pushing her rib cage out. She exhales roughly, using the force to press her whole body downward into the soil” (64) and when she gets back up she attempts to cover all traces of her footprints. The goal is to only have her body leave an impression in the oval she laid in, and yet, the film itself bears witness to the entire endeavor.

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Alex’s body serves as part of the earthwork and the videotape, a point made more clear when Bird muses that the mud on Alex’s dirty back runs “in tiny rivers where the rain landed” rendering her back “as much a painting as the ground was a sculpture” (64).

Throughout her viewing, Bird understands Alex’s artwork as simply ephemeral pieces that vanish, like the rain’s erasure of any trace of the human body. At the same time,

Davis draws attention to the constant presence of the technology that delivers this scene to Bird, and by extension the reader. While the natural traces are returned to the land, a version of the performance remains archived in the videotape, which extends the reach of

Alex’s body. As discussed earlier, Taylor emphasizes that the video may function as a separate object in the archive but it is not a replacement for the actual performance. The videos function as what José Esteban Muñoz calls the residue that remains in “the wake of performance” (Cruising Utopia 71). Writing about Mendieta’s silhouettes or siluetas,

Muñoz describes how they “resemble a rough outline of something that was once present and is now absent but nonetheless partially unconcealed and lingering, like a visual echo”

(“Vitalism’s after-burn” 93). This lingering echo or residue stays after the performance ends, the silhouette washes away, and even after the death of the artist.

Alex’s “private reels” videotapes operate as a glimpse into an intimate and supposedly private space - her bedroom - and yet, after her death, they function to invite the viewer into these spaces and into her internal musings. Unlike the earlier tape of Alex creating an art piece, the private reels feature the artist speaking to the camera and sharing personal thoughts on her relationship with Frank, her artistic process, and her everyday experiences of racism. In one of the first of these videotapes, Alex says, “This is

128 really an odd experiment. It goes against the notion of privacy to do it on a video. Can you really expect not to be watched? What else is a video for? Can you talk to a camera and not perform? I don’t think so. No matter what, there is an audience” (179).

Recording the video functions in a similar mode as that of a written diary; both work to simultaneously capture the personal thoughts of the owner and while always predicting a possible future interlocutor that will access these words. As Alex notes, the audiovisual nature of the videotape means that simply the act of recording a video suggests that it will be watched and that one’s interaction with the camera thus always doubles a performance for an imagined future audience. When Alex says that “No matter what, there is an audience” she references both the camera (an observant but inhuman presence) and an always future audience.

Bird’s dialogic relationship to the tapes can be seen throughout the text. Bird engages with videos as if she were “locked in a private conversation with Alex, who had on the mask of Alex the performer” (186). Bird talks back to Alex, laughs and cries in response to her stories, interacting with the images and sounds as if they are another manifestation of her dead friend. Bird comes to understand that some of these videos include false stories intended as a way to goad Frank and respond to his abusive treatment of Alex. This calls into question the truth value of the tapes, but reminds the reader that there is never a self-presentation that is not mediated through technologies of telling. Bird does not “believe that Alex had been this dishonest with herself. That was at the core of her reaction to the tapes. She believed Alex would never have said some of these things to herself. She would only say them in front of an audience.” Davis employs

129 a bit of ambivalence in her phrasing here; it is unclear if these are truths that Alex would never say to herself but would only share in front of a group or if these are falsities that are constructed for the public eye. The notion of studied and performed intimacy calls into question the idea of a clear line between truth and lies. This interplay also echoes the ongoing work Black women must undertake to negotiate their own desires and the public performances they must make in order to survive in American society.

Alex relies on the easiness of video recording to counter her increasingly suffocating and abusive relationship with Frank Burton. In the first of the private reels,

Alex explains she is happy living with Frank, but she cannot work when he is around.

Davis presents the video:

Even if I can’t actually see him, I can’t work. I may have to find another space to work in.

I don’t really have time to myself. Not just for working.’ Then Alex shouts: ‘Yeah, just a

minute. I’m coming. Don’t come in.’ She gets up, goes to the door. A male voice,

Burton’s: ‘What do you mean, don’t come in?’ Alex: ‘It’ll ruin the picture.’ Static.

In this scene, Alex seeks to protect the privacy of her bedroom as art and performance space. Obviously as her lover Frank has spent time in her bedroom, but under the gaze of the camera the space becomes an aesthetic realm that he would disrupt with his physical presence. At this point in the novel, the reader is already aware of the abusive nature of the relationship between Frank and Alex. Annoyance at no longer having time for herself,

“Not just for working” is unnerving as is the notion that his influence over the space can be felt even when he is not actually seen in this space. Alex uses the language of artistic presentation - “You’ll ruin the picture” (ibid) - as a means of claiming the bedroom as performance space for crafting her video diary. 130

When the image reemerges from the static, Alex jokes, “Ruin the picture. That’s a good one. Now he wants to know what I’m doing but I told him I’m working on an idea”

(177). While her comment is framed as joke it also achieves the goal of keeping Frank out of the space of the bedroom and by extension the plane of the camera’s eye. The mystery of the artistic process serves as a wedge against Frank’s intrusion into the physical space of the bedroom and the mental space that Alex needs for her creative process.

The links between racialized narratives of desire and physical confinement are made explicit in a videotape where Alex imagines an art piece based on various retellings of The Thousand and One Nights. Alex’s video parodies the racist and Orientalist tropes employed in British retellings of these Middle Eastern and South Asian folktales, considering the ways that these classic tales offer a way to tell stories about women trapped and held at the mercy of men. Alex uses the video as a means of brainstorming a performance piece inspired by the book which she describes as “all about sex and race.

The sexually aggressive woman gets it for ‘getting it,’ so to speak. Black man [is seen as] as forbidden object of desire” (180). In the story that Alex retells, the queen is caught in a sexual tryst with one of the palace slaves, men that are presented in the British versions as “Negro slaves” described with “all those minstrel images - bugging eyes, and big lips, and all that” (ibid). The initial dalliance between the queen and the slave sets off a ripple effect of cross-racial couplings that are constantly watched by vengeful husbands, concluding with the beginning of the Scheherazade tale of the woman who forestalls murder by the king by promising to finish her enthralling tale the following night.

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Throughout the telling, Alex acts as various characters including Black slaves, the king’s wife and concubines, and uses an impression in dirt on the windowsill (a mini earthwork) to represent a sexual conquest (180-182). Her fluid playacting across genders and races follows the “border crossings” she sees as central to the retellings and reimaginings of the

Arabian Nights as they traveled to the Western world via various retellings, most significantly Richard Burton’s 1880s translation.30

While Alex’s presentation is humorous, she is also working through a new art piece and the video offers a window into her creative process. She talks it out to “see what words and images are most compelling” (181) from her readings of the Arabian

Nights; the images that she is most struck by are those of women enclosed in various storage containers (caskets, footlockers, chests) that are secured by “dozens of locks” with

“men carrying dozens of keys” (ibid). Across these stories men hold the power to contain and release the women and there are repeated moments of “women seeing and being seen” (ibid). Alex’s attention to these motifs of entrapment and sexual surveillance resonate with her own feeling of becoming contained by Frank and his assumption that he is allowed to be sexually promiscuous but she cannot. After watching this tape, a friend of Bird’s argues that Alex is invoking “The storyteller as a captive” (182), through the narrative of Scheherazade.

Along with representing Frank as a disruptive presence in her work life, Alex

30 Richard Burton’s ten-volume translation and an additional six-volume supplement, published between 1885 and 1888, exposed British readers to far bawdier versions of the stories than previously encountered in English translations which had sanitized and toned down the sexual content for a broader audience that included children (Kennedy 206-207, 221-232). Burton’s translation was considered by many to be filthy, immoral, and to demonstrate the moral distance between the Christian purity of English society of the 19th century and “Eastern” culture (Kennedy 227-228). Burton also translated the Kama Sutra which itself has a long popular history of circulating as a marker of the sexually questionable morals of non-white cultures. 132 goes further in one video by demonstrating the power the camera gives her to invert the gaze. Feminist scholars have rightly critiqued static notions of spectatorship that suggest simplistic ideas about who has access to the gaze noting that marginalized groups can engage with visual culture through an oppositional or resistant gaze. At the same time, it would be remiss to ignore the fact that the gaze of white Americans retains material power that cannot be simply reversed. Drawing on W. E. B. Du Bois's writing on “the veil,” Alexander Weheliye notes that “The look of white folks implies power over black subjects that cannot return the look” (Phonographies 42). Weheliye’s comment conjures an ongoing history of Black Americans facing violent reprisal and material consequences for attempting to “return the look.” Obviously, as the novel bears out, Alex’s resistance to

Frank’s incursion into her physical space leads to her violent death.

In one tape she attempts to tape Frank and the text reflects the way in which the apparatus and her gaze are merged. His face appears “in silhouette on the screen,” backlit by the window (190). When“[a]t the sound of Alex’s voice,” he looks at the camera, his hair is disheveled, his face stern and his eyes wary (ibid). Davis writes:

He did not say anything to the camera now scrutinizing him, slowly moving around him,

taking in his long legs in dark corduroys, crossed at the knee, his somewhat battered

leather hiking boots, black turtleneck, the hair siting long on the neck at the back. Frank

Burton in different angles, so aware of the camera he would not move. He did not follow

the camera but waited impassively for Alex to face him again. She said something

teasing, he blinked and looked away towards the window. Took a sip of wine. Alex’s

voice was cajoling him to smile, to look at her. . . Finally he turned, beamed, looked at

her with eyes that found the camera irresistible. Static. (190) 133

Under the camera’s gaze, Frank becomes an object of scrutiny or study with his body and clothing catalogued for the viewer, and by extension the reader. Alex provides an entirely surface view of his “different angles” that lacks the interiority offered in her own solo videos. He is entirely objectified and reduced to a figure for consideration; further his awareness of the camera leaves him unable to move as if its power is arresting.

Describing him as initially in silhouette suggests that he is simply a flat image for the viewer’s consumption, not a person with an interiority or depth.

In the context of the videotape, Alex becomes synonymous with the camera and the technological apparatus functions as an extension of her gaze. Alex is physically absent from the shot, yet her voice comes from off-screen and Frank’s reaction to her are delivered to the camera which sits in her place. The text collapses “the camera” and

“Alex” as in the sentence, “He did not follow the camera but waited impassively for Alex to face him again” (190) where he resists the impulse to follow the lens of the camera which will return to him with/as Alex’s face. The scene suggests a subtle power play, with Frank looking out the window instead of turning towards the camera/Alex and then ultimately capitulating to her “cajoling.” Frank’s performed reticence - the stage business of drinking wine instead of looking at Alex - demonstrate how much the camera takes on the position of his lover. If the tape begins by denying the viewer access to Frank’s interiority since he is in silhouette, the closing moment has his eyes turning towards the camera with desire. When Davis writes that “he turned” and “looked at her with eyes that found the camera irresistible,” she genders the camera, historically considered either neutral or a tool of the male gaze on the female body, by saying that he looked at “her”

134 while simultaneously finding the video camera “irresistible.” Alex’s brief video of her white male lover serves to invert her position as captive black female storyteller and instead captures Frank within a technological framework of her own making. He never speaks as she does in her personal videotapes, but instead performs as her lover and object of her gaze.

The power that Alex taps into when she uses her video camera continues even past her death with her videotapes continuing to talk back to other narratives. Further, her videotapes contain the clues needed to suggest that Frank’s wife may have died at his hands and that Alex was suffering under his abuses. Bird comes to understand that when she was alive Alex’s videotapes also served as a means of trying to maintain a feeling of autonomy within her abusive relationship with Frank, instead of just “being a victim”

(219). She suggests that Alex was “using his curiosity, his jealousy, his insatiable desire to keep finding out more, to keep him from going too far … torment[ing] him with stories instead” (218). When her friend Bernard questions why Alex chose not to simply move away and leave Frank behind, Bird responds that “it was her life, her place, where she did her work” (219), arguing Alex used the videotapes to maintain a feeling of control instead of abandoning the spaces she associated with her career.

Archives That Desire and Inspire

I read Bird’s relationship to the videotapes as evincing K. J. Rawson’s queer historiographic method “based on the ways that researchers feel archives and desire history, and the ways that archives and history feel and desire right back” (556).

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Rawson’s notion of queering ideas about archives and their ability to “desire” aligns with the ways in which Alex’s videotapes allow her to speak to the present moment from the liminal space of her past moment. Rawson calls for a reversal of the assumed relationship between researchers and archives – in which archives serve the desire of those who access them – instead calling for a queer archival approach which “recognizes that collections can have desires and want to be touched, too” (ibid). The attention to the material and embodied encounters with the archives resonate with Maker of Saints where

Alex’s videotapes serve as an extension of Alex’s body and presence into Bird’s domestic space even after her physical body has been interred in death. As I have previously noted, Bird responds to the videos as if Alex is physically present, in a way that suggests her encounter with them is dialogic. Remember also that Bird feels that she serves as Alex’s “spiritual mailbox” (65) meaning that the messages in the videotapes are meant to arrive at Bird.

After her death, Bird’s interactions with the tapes echo Jessica Shumake’s description of her desire to interact with the archive of visual artist David Wojnarowicz.

Shumake writes that “My desire to touch queer history … involves engaging the playful tension between the object of my desire’s absence and my longing to conjure

[Wojnarowicz’s] presence.” Reading Shumake and Rawson together allows for a reading of Bird’s engagement with the video archive as one laden with her desire for the return of her dead friend. Reading the videos for their posthuman properties understands them as an extension of Alex’s presence and literally allows her video self - as archival footage and material - to speak its longings and inspire future actions. Alex functions, like

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Wojnarowicz for Shumake, as an artist who has left surprises for the researcher in the archive. The reversal in Maker comes when the reader realizes that the true narrative in

Davis’s novel is not solving the circumstances of Alex’s death, but rather Bird’s journey back to creating art, a journey facilitated in part by her immersion in her best friend’s life and her desire to reveal Frank’s wrongdoing. Even after her death, Alex remains pivotal to the artistic process for Bird with the videos reigniting creative passions and spurring new work.

Bird resolves to regain control of her narrative after Frank’s invasion of her domestic space and personal safety. Bird thinks, “Frank Burton was the reason she’d gotten her head busted, she was sure. She couldn’t prove it, but she also couldn’t go home and lose herself in the television news. This was her own disaster. She would fix it so he had to show himself” (164-165). Bird decides to use art as a way to regain control over her “disaster” and inveigh against the neoliberal experience of feeling helpless against the world’s disasters. Bird’s artistic creation stopped before Alex’s death, but also, partially, as a result of Frank’s hateful review of her work. Emboldened by decoding the mysteries in the videotapes, Bird devises a plan to lure Frank into a trap and force a confession by building a large installation art piece that incorporates her own self portraits, retablos depicting the events of Alex’s death, folk art from her friend’s collection, and one of Alex’s videotapes playing on loop. Bird refers to the installation as a way of “exorcising” her “demons” (222).

The installation is set in the space of Alex’s apartment, reconfiguring this domestic space as the setting for art and simultaneously extending the archive Alex began

137 with her videotaped monologues. Ann Cvetkovich writes about two artists who have made art out of the well-curated collections held in the ONE National Gay and Lesbian

Archives (Queer Archival”). She describes the artists’ willingness to incorporate their own investments into the new work crafted from the archival material and argues that as installation art these pieces “reconfigure the space of the archive, opening it up to new publics so that it is not policed and protected and creating innovative kinds of ‘safe space’ in the form of intimate sanctuaries where new socialities can be forged” (“Queer

Archival”). The final assemblage that Bird crafts follows these other archival artists in reconsidering where the archive can be found and who can access it.

Inspired by Alex’s videos, Bird retrieves her art supplies - the “pieces of her abandoned life” - and works with the door open between Alex’s apartment and her own

(209). Reopening the door signifies a reopening of the bond between herself and Alex, one that Frank endeavored to sunder as he worked to isolate Alex. She works with the door open, playing the videotapes at the same time so that her friend’s voice keeps her company and she can listen for further clues (208). Bird paints new works and examines her older work, previously cast aside, noting that the painting are “like old friends.

Mostly her old friend herself - self-portraits” (209). Returning to self-portraiture is framed as a return someone she once knew - both the person she was in happier days and the artist once was and is again. An invigorated Bird works through the night barely registering the passage of time with Alex’s tapes to keep her company. The constant presence of the tapes suggests the boundaries between the past and her present moment

138 become ever more permeable. Bird wonders “if she could paint TV static” (210) suggesting a desire to meld the uncertainty of the tapes with her own artistic medium.

Spurred by both her desire to express herself and her desire to entrap Frank, Bird uses creative expression as a way to move through and past her own grief and the political depression of the 1980s. In her book Depression: a public feeling, Ann

Cvetkovich argues for the potential of creativity as a way to describe “forms of agency” and “movement that maneuvers the mind inside or around an impasse, even if that movement sometimes seems backward or like a form of retreat” (21). Specifically, she focuses on crafting as part of what she calls the “utopia of ordinary habit,” a mode of thinking about everyday life as “the basis for the utopian project of building new worlds in response to both spiritual despair and political depression” (Depression 191). The emphasis on “habit” stresses that she sees crafting and other ordinary practices as mechanisms for “building new ways of being the world” through “activities that are not spectacular or unusual but instead arise from everyday life” (191). Bird and Alex work within domestic spaces that are also studio spaces, as is the case for so many artists that exist outside the more institutionalized sites of artistic production Frank represents in the narrative. Bird’s return demonstrates the possibilities inherent in creative production that

Cvetkovich describes.

Alice Walker’s classic essay “In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens” describes the

“numb and bleeding madness” of centuries of Black women unable to release “the springs of creativity” within them (233). This spiritual madness aptly describes the listlessness and political depression that plagues Bird after the twin disasters of first the

139 halting of her artistic production and then the loss of her best friend. Walker considers the many Black women who suffered under the “strain of enduring their unused and unwanted talent” (ibid) and ends with a consideration of the pleasure her mother finds working in the garden. She describes her mother gardening as “radiant, almost to the point of being invisible – except as Creator: hand and eye. She is involved in the work her soul must have. Ordering the universe in the image of her personal conception of

Beauty” (241). Her mother’s work in the garden functions as a transcendent experience in which she is able to exercise a measure of control over the world in which she lives, one that works to consistently disenfranchise Black women. Walker’s focus on the garden as space of creation also echoes in Bird’s reconsideration of her own domestic space as a site of art and uncovering the truth.

The vision of artistic production, as a means of spiritual expression that can be expressed through everyday tasks, follows Cvetkovich’s idea of the utopia of ordinary habit wherein domestic life holds “simultaneously utopian and ordinary desires and activities that can remake the affective cultures of nuclear family life, consumerism, mass media, and neoliberal culture” (192).31 I am not arguing that Bird’s return to artistic production solves her grief and depression, or on a broader scale that artistic productions

31 Walker’s essay is a necessary corrective to the limitations of Cvetovich’s book and her failure to consider the material limitations under which many women have historically been unable to access the habitus of creativity. While I appreciate Cvetkovich’s attention to the embodied and ordinariness of depression and modes of working with/and through these feelings, I find her conclusion severely limited by the way she approaches “crafting” as an example of accessing the utopia of ordinary habit. The entire feminist return to crafting as a subversive act relies on a premise that crafting is something that might not be done already in the service of preserving one’s possessions due to the necessary frugality of economic limitations. This limited view on crafting follows from the fact that, as Cvetkovich herself notes, her examples are exclusive to white middle class women. I understand her push to see creativity as embedded in daily life as a way of combating elitist notions about “art” as the provenance of those trained through recognized institutional means, but this seems to suggest that artists might not include those who have never had access to formal training and already seek to make art in their daily lives. 140 have the means of systemic reorganization and change. Rather, I see the return to art, and the engagement with (and expansion of) Alex’s video archive as opening up a space for affective and intimate changes in the fabric of an increasingly oppressive everyday life.

I am resistant to the idea of solving depression or grief, not because I am against therapeutic or biomedical methods of cure, but because even these approaches require a sitting with affective states, and working with (and through) instead of simply sidestepping. Judith Butler argues that grief can serve as a resource as long as we accept our vulnerability instead of banishing it; she calls grief “one of the most important resources from which we must take our bearings and find our way” (“Violence” 30). The unfinished business of grief and depression, and Bird’s embrace of vulnerability, can be seen in her extensive use of self-portraiture in the installation she constructs in Alex’s apartment; many of them “still wet, would be wet for days yet to come. The idea alone was breathtaking to Bird, hanging wet paintings for someone to see. She would never have done it before” (225-226). The self-portraits are technically unfinished and also depict Bird’s naked body which she hides for much of the novel because of the steady encroachment of vitiligo, a chronic skin condition in which skin pigmentation is lost.

When the vitiligo (which she calls Appaloosa after the breed of horses with a spotted coat)

first began to grow, she started doing self-portraits. Just heads. She was not comfortable

doing a body with discolored loins and thighs. She was not comfortable with the idea of

scars that did not merely rest here and there as history, markings of moments to be

forgiven or prized, but scars that tried to take the whole body and blot out its history (78)

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Bird initially experiences her vitiligo as another instance of history happening beyond her control with her own body turning against her. The placement of the whitened skin on her

“loins and thighs” links her changing body to her erotic desires, and troubles her sexual confidence. At least she is able to cover these spots; she knows that the vitiligo could

“ring the lips and eyes. Genes that could deform you in a minstrel mask … her own genes at war with what - her race?” (77). The loss of agency is not simply the disasters occurring in the world outside her domestic space but the battle raging within her body, literally changing her physical appearance with its links to her cultural identification as

Black. The “minstrel mask” is a sharp contrast with her assessment of the revealing self- portraits she displays in the installation in which the depigmentation appears “like a warrior’s scarification marks. Like designs one had chosen and painted on” (228). While

Davis returns to the image of scars on the skin, they are transformed into chosen marks of bravery and foreshadow the actual physical battle between Frank and Bird that plays out in the novel’s climactic scene. Bird’s paintings demonstrate an ability to claim these physical attributes - she does not avoid them or cover them but instead makes them central to her work.

Both Alex and Bird find power and pleasure in forms of self-portraiture. Carla

Williams argues that sexual self-pleasure and self-portraiture are both activities that, when engaged in by a black woman for an audience become “an empowering act for her because we are unaccustomed to black women defining their own sexual pleasure or their own images; the viewer relinquishes control” (131). Alex wields the power of controlling the camera, allowing the viewer access to her thoughts and images guided through her

142 own handling of the apparatus. Bird’s power comes in reclaiming her body from the vitiligo as part of taking hold of the narrative strands of her daily life. She incorporates these self-portraits into the installation that she builds and ultimately uses to undo Frank’s lies and bring about a certain measure of justice. Further, the self-portraits reflect Bird’s renewed comfort in her own body and a sexual reawakening.

Alex’s power extends after her death through the centrality of her videos to the altar Bird builds at the center of her installation art piece. Bird lures Frank to the apartment by planting the story that Alex’s effects are going to be moved to the archives at her undergraduate institution, thus ending his ability to easily steal the tapes that might implicate him in the possible death of his wife and Alex. The installation is a “new world” Bird creates, “a universe of its own, a crudely done art piece, a trap” (226). When

Frank - Bird’s “quarry” (227) - enters this trap he is faced by sheets of newspaper hung throughout the front hallway of Alex’s apartment. Bird plays on her knowledge of

Frank’s allergy to newsprint, an allergy that seems quite obviously to demonstrate his inability to handle the truth and thus he avoids it (when the reader first meets Frank he is wearing gloves to read the newspaper). The newsprint in Alex’s apartment frighten

Frank, “making blurred, blinding screens down the hall. A woman’s voice – Alex’s voice

– was droning on in seemingly aimless conversation, as if coming through a window”

(227-228). Focalizing this moment through Frank, Davis demonstrates his profound disorientation - he experiences his dead lover’s voice as if it were coming from a source outside when this does not make logical sense.

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Throughout the ensuing altercation between Bird and Frank, Alex’s voice continues to be heard as the television plays a looped set of the most incriminating videotapes, an “endless monologue” (234). Davis focuses on the consistent presence of

Alex’s voice, not her image, in this climactic scene. When he enters the living room,

Davis describes that Frank:

turned toward the voice of his lover Alex Decatur, talking on and making a tape for him

to watch. The TV was submerged inside a shapeless altar of sorts, a huge morass of Alex

Decatur’s real sentiments. It was like the real Alex, not the disciplined work in her mind .

. . but a collection of passions, sympathies, crucifixes, flowers dead and alive, santos and

unlit votive candles. (229).

Frank turns towards the voice as if Alex is present physically in the space and the materials of the altar stand in for her body and her emotional presence. The recorded voice “even more so than writing, represents pure interiority and the proper domain of the sovereign human subject,” according to Alexander Weheliye (Phonographies 27). The interiority that might attend the recorded voice becomes attached to the altar constructed by Bird, one described as “both ecstatic and grisly” (Davis Maker 229). Davis’s uses of the term “ecstatic” conjures up the idea of religious ecstasy, which makes sense given the pan-African/Latino imagery employed in the construction of the altar and the entire installation which includes “figures of sacrifice” from the Yucatan (228) and various masks from the women’s travels in Africa and Latin America (229).

Davis’s framing of the scene argues for the physical power of artwork as a weapon. While Bird understands the entire piece as calling for divine intervention, Frank experiences the various art pieces as bombarding him. Bird sees the altar as “a prayer 144 thrown up to many gods and many saints reborn in the Americas – in short, everybody to whom Bird knew to throw up a praise song or a prayer” (229). Bird knows her display is

“overwhelming” (ibid) and she imagines the art pieces attacking Frank: “the reds in the room bursting out at the eye, the blues becoming ominous instead of gay, the browns of her skin getting richer, the beiges glowing, the white eyes popping out” (228). Similarly, the various masks displayed are described as “awful leering faces, masks glaring with bulging eyes from everywhere in the altar” (229). Bird sneaks into the installation wearing a leather Jaguar mask for protection and armed with a bokken, a Japanese sword, taking some of her power from the collective power of the various art pieces assembled together in a final collaboration with her dead friend. The assemblage draws on the affective power of Alex’s voice and the various deities called upon by the folk art accumulated, along with Bird’s own creative potential unleashed by returning to art.

Frank acknowledges the energy created in the installation when he says, sardonically, “I believe this ought to take your magic powers away,” after taking off Bird’s Jaguar mask in the scuffle that ensues between them (236).

Bird turns Frank’s arrogance against him by filming his response to the installation and the ensuing fight between the two of them. In the fight between Frank and Bird, he admits to breaking into her apartment and attacking her. Frank’s arrogant, self-centered attitude, coupled with a dehumanizing view of women is made most vivid when he tells Bird, “You were in the way. I was just coming in your place to get the tape.

I had to get you out of my way” (233). Frank simultaneously validates the crucial nature of Bird’s place as Alex’s archivist and friend and his inability to see women as anything

145 other than merely obstacles to his own desires. While Frank never freely admits to killing

Alex, he does admit to abusing her, yet he recasts the scene to reflect a narrative of the lewd and fallen woman who leads the good man astray. “She killed herself,” he says,

“She was a liar and she’s even made her death a lie” (ibid). He similarly blames Bird for his violence towards her saying, “You’re going to force me to hurt you” (ibid).

Filming Frank provides Bird with the evidence needed to get him arrested and at the same time Frank becomes a part of this artwork, coming under the power of the combined artistic powers of Bird and Alex. Bird’s use of video technology - Alex’s art form - alongside her own medium of painting and sculpture suggests a collaboration between the two women that extends beyond the understood dead/alive binary. Frank comes once again under the control of the filmic apparatus. Here the covert filming brings about a measure of justice, even as Frank refuses to claim responsibility for the act of pushing Alex out of the window. Bird must turn to this form of documentation in order to finally get the police to believe an account of Frank as abusive and violent white man, instead of allowing him to simply retreat to the privileges of his social positioning.

The Unseen and the Gaps in the Archive

The actual death of Alex remains a lacuna at the center of the novel, one that is circled but never ultimately filled with the truth of what happened. Readers are inclined to believe Frank pushed Alex out of the window without him ever admitting it and without the event ever being seen. Davis’s failure to provide us with an account that offers clear causality or even an artistic representation reminds us that the archive is

146 riddled with absences and can never entirely encompass truths that may only be known in the body and moment. As part of her installation, Bird painted a series of retablos that depicts Frank’s last fight with Alex the night of her death. These paintings have an “eerie power” and show events “no one had seen but Frank Burton” (230). Bird’s paintings show “Alex crouching, trying to reach up and open the lock of her front door; Alex facing forward, thrown against the police lock, its pole surfacing above her neck as if it had gone through her; Alex’s body slammed against the inside door, legs splayed, face flinching from an attack; Alex falling” (ibid). The paintings follow traditional retablos in including words of thanks for the delivery of the victim depicted, yet here this takes on an ironic cast since the gratitude expressed is for surviving violent abuse (230-231). Bird uses folk art forms to comment on Frank’s violence and as a means to try and see what

Frank saw. Frank validates these paintings when, after admitting defeat in their physical fight, he tells Bird, “it’s all there except the one panel. The one that would be next to last”

(238). The missing panel would be the panel that shows how Alex moved out the window.

In his justification for what happened to Alex, Frank resists taking any ownership what happened saying, “She tried to come to you. And I knew she was still a liar. She handed me the string. The window was the string. The window was only to scare her into absolution. To ask my forgiveness. She didn’t like looking down from any height. The window was just to scare her. Don’t you see that?” (243). His question, “Don’t you see that?” returns to the novel’s ongoing obsession with what can and cannot be seen, and

Bird’s tortured position on the other side of the wall hearing but not seeing the awful

147 events. Frank reifies the intimate ties between the two women and himself - that in this moment of fear and death, Alex tried to come to Bird and Frank instead sought to scare her into telling the truth, or at least his version of the truth which he links with Western

Christian notions of purification through honesty. The only agential act in his statement is performed by Alex, not Frank, allowing him to pass blame to the woman for “telling everybody’s lies” and “adventures” in the videotapes (242). Frank’s rigid notion of truth sits entirely at odds with the possibilities seen in the uses of artwork as a means of extending the archive, even seating “everybody’s lies” as part of the broader affective story.

After Frank’s arrest, Bird wonders if she should paint the missing piece of the tableau of her friend’s death. The unknowability of that moment, with Frank passing responsibility onto Alex and inanimate objects (“the string” he claims Alex passed him and then the specter of “the window” as a transparent space to look through), echoes the missing moment in Nella Larsen’s classic novel Passing (1929). In the novel’s final scene Clare Kendry, who has been passing for white, falls to her death from an apartment window. Much has been written about the openness of Larsen’s ending in which readers are left unsure if Clare committed suicide, was pushed by her husband upon discovering that his wife is a Black woman passing for white, or was pushed by Irene Redfield, the

Black woman drawn to Clare’s dangerous lifestyle. The narrator explains that Irene

“never afterwards allowed herself to remember” what happens, only that, “One moment,

Clare had been there, a vital glowing thing, like a flame of red and gold. The next she was gone” (239). Larsen deliberately evades the reader’s question of how Clare was

148 extinguished, and the text ends with a man suggesting this was “Death by misadventure

… Let’s go up and have another look at that window” (246). This unknown man’s call to examine the window makes logical sense and simultaneously is entirely illogical since a window is an object one does not look at but, rather, one looks through (or passes through in the cases of Clare, Alex, and Ana Mendieta).32

In now classic queer readings of the submerged lesbian desire in Passing,

Deborah E. McDowell and Judith Butler argue Irene’s impossible erotic need for Clare causes the narrative to expel the passing woman (Butler “Passing, Queering,”

McDowell). I do not - as I previously discussed - see Bird and Alex caught in an unexpressed lesbian passion, but I believe that the ending of Maker does follow the readings of the earlier novel insofar as the way that the death of Alex can be read as an instantiation of the need for the “spectre of the black woman as an object of desire” must be destroyed by the white male figure in order to avoid her destabilizing power over his own whiteness (Butler “Passing” 137). Unlike Irene, however, Bird resists the structures of white supremacy by fighting back with her art and her own physical prowess.

McDowell suggests that Larsen uses the passing motif as a way to avoid taking risks in a

1920s moment where Black women’s sexuality held an ambivalent position (xxx-xxxi). I would not suggest these issues are resolved, but in Maker Bird is the clear victor and agent of her own sexual desires and uses the installation to retell Alex’s story. Further, while Bird never paints the moment in which Frank pushed Alex out of the window, she

32 While my analysis does not delve into Alex’s passing privileges, a longer reading of Maker alongside Passing might consider Alex’s light-skinned appearance which led to her being referred to as “high yellow” and “mariney” (37). 149 does imagine it and Davis uses this scene to demonstrate the power of imagination as a way to circumvent the limitations of our cultural obsession with ocular schemes of truth.

Bird imagines, that Frank might pick up Alex

because she was so little, so tiny and light. That he might pick her up because he could.

That she might have spent every second in terror. That she knew he was going to kill her

even if he didn’t think he would. That she had no idea all of creation would go with her

and have to be made again. … That he might not have a good grip on her. That the wind

could be sucking at the window. (246-247)

In her imagined version of events, Bird counters Frank’s account, emphasizing the terror felt by Alex and the lack of control that Frank had over the situation. Bird reframes the scene in terms of its importance to the loss of a precious life (“all of creation would go with her”). The moment in which Frank throws Alex from the window remains absent and sits between the sentence about his faulty grip and the following one about the wind’s power, but here the telling shows that Alex’s murder was about the way that

Frank cannot tame his own arrogant impulses and the power of his own body.

Not all stories, Maker shows us, will be told in the archive - some will only be told in the limitless space of our own imaginations. The conclusion of the novel demonstrates that while creativity may offer Black women a means of imagining new worlds and ways out of the present situation, the work does not end. After the arrest of

Frank, Bird throws a party in the installation in Alex’s apartment, allowing her and her friends to adequately sendoff not just Alex, but all their lost friends. At the end of the party, Davis writes, “They packed up everything in Alex’s place and closed and locked it for the last time” (245). The installation and its role as an archival space is fleeting. Davis 150 describes Bird’s affective shift: “The world was still offering up disasters to get lost in, but Bird did not stay up all night watching them. Almost any night she went to turn out the lights she would look through the doorway to her workspace,” and see the sculpture of one figure giving birth to another, echoing the idea that Alex birthed her own creative life. Davis does not provide an entirely settled conclusion, noting, Bird remembers,

“hearing somewhere that a saint who is not seen is not worshipped. She was working on that” (250). Frank saw Alex as conforming to the Christian archetype of the “Fallen woman” and required this narrative to justify his own abuses (230). Bird, however, draws on more syncretic New World ideas about sainthood, having painted Madonna figures among the many pieces in the installation some with Alex’s face (230). In the novel’s final scene, Davis shows Bird once again claiming her domestic space as a “workspace” and working to find a way to remember her friend through the lens of a more flawed idea of sainthood, one that stresses the human in those lost. Davis presents Black women’s creativity as both timeless and specific to each lived moment. Telling readers “She was working on that” presents life as unfinished business, leaving us with the ongoing life of the creative Black female mind.

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CHAPTER 3: Cheryl Dunye’s “Dunyementary” Style and Queer Negotiations of

Identity, Fiction, and Truths

“My work incorporates an autoethnographic focus building on a visual language that explores the intersection of truth and fiction in my life. Filmmaking opens a nexus of doorways, pages, and places—the timeless depths of my own eternity, choreographed in the moment, clinging with departure” – Cheryl Dunye, “Above the Line” (277).

Talking about her early films from the 1990s, Black lesbian filmmaker Cheryl

Dunye says, “I went through this whole process of learning the technology and then learning how to speak,” adding that once “I was able to speak, and knew who I was, I was able to articulate who I was” (Lavender Limelight). For Dunye, coming to voice was related to “not seeing any images by African American lesbians in the media … or any image of myself” so she decided to make movies that filled this absence (Lavender). She made films to deal with her identity “as a Black lesbian” and “what it means to be a

Black lesbian in the white lesbian world” (Lavender). Dunye used increasingly accessible and affordable video technology in the 1990s, discussed in the previous chapter, as a way to place herself in a cinematic landscape that failed to represent her experiences. Her use of video and film to create alternative histories and false documentaries critiques existing movies while also participating in broader traditions of filmmaking.

Dunye’s coined the term “Dunyementary” to describe her unique approach to making documentaries. The filmmaker describes Dunyementary as “mixture of

152 documentary, Dunye storytelling and you know, life itself” (Lavender) and “a mixture of the truth and fictions in my life and how they coexist” (Bryan-Wilson and Dunye 84). For example, in her first feature-length film The Watermelon Woman, Dunye plays the main character, a Black lesbian also named Cheryl, who becomes obsessed with a 1930s Black film actress. While the actress is a fictional creation of the film, real life figures including feminist writer Camile Paglia appear in the film as authorities on the so-called

“Watermelon Woman.”

Dunye’s work comments on historical and contemporary experiences in a way that addresses gaps in the official accounts of history. Dunye describes her filmmaking as “a political and social justice practice which purposefully complicates and blurs categories and boundaries. I encourage others to push these boundaries in their creative practices. Only then will archives reflect a bit of truthfulness in their content” (Bryan-

Wilson and Dunye 89). Dunye ties her films’ political potential to the generic, aesthetic and technological mixing found in her Dunyementaries. She explains that she likes work that is “not just talking about issues but is doing something with the form to push the issues. That’s why I make media, to push it one step further” (Juhasz “Cheryl Dunye”

300). The links between form and content are key to my argument in this chapter about the ways in which Dunye’s aesthetic approach mirrors the contradictory nature of Black lesbian identity.

In this chapter, I shift from the focus on written texts in my first two chapters to visual media. Where Maker of Saints imagined a visual archive on the page, this chapter and chapter 4 examine actual visual media. In this chapter I focus on Dunye’s two early

153 short films She Don’t Fade (1991) and The Passion and the Potluck (1993), both made on video during and after Dunye’s time as an MFA student at Rutgers University. As a director, Dunye remains probably most well-known for her first feature-length film The

Watermelon Woman (1997); the film is considered the first full length film directed by a

Black lesbian and gained notoriety as a key example used in a Republican attempt to cut funding for the National Endowment for the Arts in 1996. Republican Congressman Petr

Hoekstra demanded the deduction of Dunye’s grant after being alerted to the interracial lesbian sex scene included in Watermelon, described in one review as “the hottest dyke scene on celluloid” (qtd. in McHugh 357). The ensuing political and media debate over the NEA consistently referenced Watermelon and Dunye and, as Kathleen McHugh notes, “Most people would not have seen the film, but Cheryl Dunye was now widely known, from Congress to CNN and beyond, as a black lesbian filmmaker” (357).

McHugh describes this notoriety as an example of “the signature effect that exceeds the text itself” (357). Dunye was already well-known in academic and film festival circles for her short films, yet the drama surrounding Watermelon continues to inform Dunye’s broader career and the film has been critically positioned as central to her legacy.

My choice to focus on two of Dunye’s earlier films stems from my interest in the ways she uses them to develop her Dunyementary style in a more open and experimental mode; while Watermelon continues her playful approach to both form and content, it has a more straightforward narrative progression and does not engage in the multilayered play with “truth” that I read in both Potluck and She Don’t Fade. Dunye describes the

154 short form as allowing freedom she does not see as possible in longer films. In a recent essay, she writes:

Filmmaking, without the constraints of a feature-film format, allows me to reach viewers

like me who are hungry for any mediated representation of their real lives on the screen.

Short filmmaking has allowed me to observe as well as create a heightened cinematic

drama and portraiture that is palpable and functions as a strategy for overturning sexism,

racism, and homophobia in the media arts. (“Above” 277)

Her comments echo the earlier interview I noted in which she describes the call to filmmaking as the result of wanting to see people like herself on the screen. She narrates the smaller scale of the short form as allowing for a more visibly metafictional text that can entertain yet also serve activist ends. The openness of the short film allows for a broader experimentation, one furthered by the fact that the films I examine were made while Dunye was developing her craft, trying out various techniques, and limited by the budgetary constraints of working as a student filmmaker.

Both the films examined in this chapter exemplify Dunye’s signature

Dunyementary style. I argue that Dunye’s approach forces viewers to reconsider not just the truth of documentary, but also the expectation of linear narrative progression within fictional or documentary texts. By disrupting this motion, Dunye mirrors the complicated and dissonant erotic lives of the Black lesbian subjects centered in these films, all of which feature a protagonist played by Dunye herself. My analysis combines close attention to the films’ form and content - drawing on Black feminist visual and film theories and queer studies – with a broader consideration of the cultural and historical

155 context of Dunye’s early work. Dunye draws attention to the raced nature of the term

“lesbian” and offers a queerer understanding of Black women’s same-sex desires.

My reading of She Don’t Fade considers the ways in which Dunye’s choice to incorporate the filmmaking process in her work troubles simplistic binaries between

“truth” and “fiction” and plays with the conventions of the documentary form. I turn from the Dunyementary style overall to the specific ways in which Dunye opens out her filmic world to incorporate the viewer and centers Black lesbian desire through the use of what I call her “desiring camera.” In examining The Potluck and the Passion, the follow-up to

Fade, I argue that Dunye draws on elements of reality TV (a form emerging in the early

1990s) in ways which draw the viewer into a subcultural world of Black lesbians. Potluck extends the narrative from Fade through a fractured serialization while also introducing an interracial love triangle; ultimately I argue that Potluck uses formal and narrative elements to suggest that the categories of Blackness, lesbianism, and female identity are never static but always being negotiated. The later film’s focus on a love triangle which includes a Black woman who does not identify as a lesbian, paired with the use of reality

TV tropes of the confessional address to the camera, demonstrate a more expansive understanding of lesbian and Black identities. Following Dunye’s stated desire to see representations of women like herself in film, the two films then suggest that these identities are always in flux for those for whom they are a lived reality.

156

New Queer Cinema and Black Queer Film

Before turning to an analysis of Dunye’s films, I want to briefly contextualize her work within the overlapping historical movements of New Queer Cinema, a burgeoning

Black independent cinema in the 1990s, and the ongoing history of Black lesbian filmmaking. Dunye describes the mid-1990s as a “magical moment” for gay and lesbian cinema (Lavender). Dunye’s early films were released during the 1990s wave of films by/about LGBT subjects dubbed New Queer Cinema. Cultural critic B. Ruby Rich coined the term “New Queer Cinema” in a 1992 Village Voice article to describe a “watershed year for independent gay and lesbian film and video” (16). Key to this wave was the emergence of affordable video technology that gave filmmakers “the new tools to reimagine cinema with a video eye, revising the medium thrillingly from the bottom up”

(Rich xvii). Rich notes that the New Queer Cinema films of the early 1990s did not share a single aesthetic or approach but they all contain “traces of appropriation, pastiche, and irony, as well as a reworking of history… [These] works are irreverent, energetic, alternately minimalist and excessive. Above all, they’re full of pleasure. They’re here, they’re queer, get hip to them” (18). This resistance to normative boundaries of identity is mirrored in the ways these films rework history and freely play with fact and fiction, as described by Rich.

While New Queer Cinema opened a space for LGBT-identified filmmakers to present a more complex vision of queer lives and desires, there was a clear paucity of racial and gender diversity in the most visible figures in this movement. José Esteban

Muñoz describes the New Queer cinema as “a cinema of white normativity” (“Dead

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White” 138). In her 1992 article, B. Ruby Rich asks, “But will lesbians ever get the attention for their work that men get for theirs? Will queers of color ever get equal time?”

(30). Rich’s piece does reference Dunye (who had released several of her short films by

1992) and begins an ongoing convention that positions the director as an exceptional case and ideal example of the Black lesbian filmmaker. Dunye’s work, especially The

Watermelon Woman, was perhaps the most visible entry by a Black lesbian-identified director during the 1990s; the film was the first feature length film directed by a Black lesbian.

The narrative of New Queer Cinema generally follows from Rich’s frequently anthologized article taking on a definitional role. As I noted above, critics both note and question the overwhelmingly white cohort of filmmakers considered part of New Queer

Cinema; exceptions include Dunye and Japanese American director Gregg Araki.33

Louise Wallenberg’s essay “New Black Queer Cinema” seeks to reorient New Queer

Cinema by focusing on the 1989 films Looking for Langston by Black British filmmaker

Isaac Julien and Tongues Untied by Black American filmmaker Marlon Riggs.

Wallenberg reads these films, which predate Rich’s essay by three years, as the

“incitement to the [New Queer] Wave” (128) and argues they should be understood as

“not only as forerunners to, but also as vigorous inspiration for” the later New Queer

Cinema (140). Looking blends archival footage and Harlem Renaissance poetry with dream-like sequences which juxtapose 1930s fashion with 1980s Black queer culture.

Tongues similarly relies on montage to reframe visuals but focuses on Black gay male

33 Araki is most well-known for his “Teen Apocalypse” trilogy of films released in the 1990s and the 2004 film Mysterious Skin. 158 culture in the 1980s with the inclusion of interviews, poetry, and scenes of Black men dancing, singing, and engaging in Snap! Culture. Wallenberg’s analysis reads both films as queer rather than gay, arguing that their queerness lies not simply in chosen content but also “in their innovative subversion of film form and cinematic expression and narration” (140). Like Riggs and Julien, Dunye freely mixes fact and fiction in her films.

In reading Dunye’s distinctive style, I follow Wallenberg in considering how formal innovation and play reflects a queer aesthetic.

While both of the Black filmmakers Wallenberg centers have become crucial in discussions around Black queer cinema, their status in broader discussions of New Queer

Cinema remains tenuous. At the same time, Black lesbian filmmaker Michelle Parkerson asks in her 1993 essay, “But where in the current flurry of black gay male visibility on screen are the black lesbian movies – our own ‘evidence of being’? The question that remains for us, as we turn the century, is not so much ‘How Do I Look?’ but ‘Where Am

I?’” (236). Parkerson cites lack of economic and structural support and “a real and pervasive racist/sexist bias within our gay and lesbian community” as leading to the marginal status of black lesbian production (236). Parkerson cites her own work, alongside Dawn Suggs, Aarin Burch, and Dunye as examples of Black lesbian filmmakers who “have reached the screen in the face of tremendous odds, against a rising retrenchment of censorship” (236). Of the filmmakers considered, Dunye has achieved perhaps the broadest and most sustained visibility for her work.34

34 A documentary filmmaker and film studies professor, Parkerson is perhaps most well known for A Litany for Survival: The Life and Work of Audre Lorde (1995) which she collaborated on with Ada Gay Griffin. Her 1974 short Sojourn, co-directed with Jimi Lyons Jr, is believed to be the first film directed by an out 159

Dunye describes the work of Parkerson and Riggs as setting her “mind on fire”

(“Building Subjects” 18). Watching their films, Dunye writes, “I realized I could exist on the screen and began using my life, my sexuality, and my family and friends as subjects in my work” (ibid). Initially, Dunye writes, she focused on what she calls “my other” - white men and women - in her visual art, before incorporating her Black lesbian voice into her work. Drawing on her training in feminist theory as part of her academic work and a diversity of filmic influences (African American documentary along with classical avant-garde, European art cinema, the Underground, and 1970s television), Dunye’s work sought to show images of Black lesbians on screen that showed Black women loving other Black women in a vibrant lesbian community as a counter to both Black lesbian absence and lesbian stereotyping (“Building Subjects”; McHugh 339).

The growth of the gay and lesbian film industry in the mid-1990s provided a space to foster more work by Black lesbian filmmakers (Welbon in Keeling et al 425) and, as Jennifer DeCue notes, Dunye and other directors have fostered Black lesbian film cultures which continue to inform the terrain of cinema for Black lesbian film in the twenty-first century (Keeling et al 439n14). As I discussed in chapter 3, video technology also opened spaces for Black women to craft avant-garde and art films. In spite of the continual presence of Black lesbian filmmakers, their films continue to be positioned as exceptions and often only one film or director gains broad recognition; the 2011 feature-

Black lesbian filmmaker. The film won a student Academy Award. For more on Parkerson, see her discussion with Gloria J. Gibson in Black Women Film and Video Artists, edited by Jacqueline Bobo. 160 length film Pariah by Black lesbian director Dee Rees serves as a recent example of this phenomenon.35

Dunyementary Style in She Don’t Fade

From the very beginning of her 1991 film She Don’t Fade, Dunye lays bare the technological labor involved in composing a film and blurs the boundaries between fiction and fact. I read her Dunyementary style as an example of Nicole R. Fleetwood’s theory of the visible seam. Drawing on Kaja Silverman’s classic theory of suture,

Fleetwood writes, “As a theory of cinematic identification, it [suture] explains how classic narratives forge a relationship with the viewing subject through masking the process of production” (180; see also Silverman 201-215). In her analysis of the digital art of Fatimah Tuggar, Fleetwood argues that the “use of the visible seam acknowledges the imbalance of power between different viewing positions” (201). Making visible or exposing the seams means revealing to the viewer the ways in which classical narrative cinema relies on editing, camerawork, and other techniques to produce dominant stories and position the viewer in a specific relationship to the images and ideas presented.

Fleetwood’s focus is on texts that disrupt the normative storytelling patterns of classic

35 A roundtable of scholars of Black and queer film discussing Pariah showcases the ways in which white and heteronormative structures create a system in which only one great Black film is allowed to emerge every few years (Keeling et al). Dunye’s work overall has not achieved the mainstream distribution of a film like Pariah, but the trajectory of Rees’s nascent career does bear echoes of the earlier director; like Dunye, Rees followed her first feature length film with a critically acclaimed HBO film (Rees made Bessie, a Bessie Smith biopic that aired on HBO in 2015; Dunye’s film Stranger Inside about Black women in prison aired on HBO in 2001). I wonder if Rees will continue to work in the more mainstream realm or, like Dunye before her, choose to make more experimental independent films. 161

Hollywood filmmaking, but documentary film carries its own set of normative patterns of representation.36

While fictional narrative film obscures the director, I argue that classical narrative documentary presents the director as either a silent observer and amanuensis (we see them and they are our proxy in the new/different milieu being documented) or they bring us into a world they are intimate with (we are an invited voyeur). In this way, I see the documentary as maintaining Silverman’s idea of the suture with the seams (the film crew, the careful selection of which material will be included from potentially years of footage, guiding questions and suggestions, the influence an outside observer might have on close communities, etc) hidden through careful editing and curation to conform to what Trinh

T. Minh-ha describes as an aesthetic “style,” as opposed to the supposedly objective depiction of truth (40). Dunye’s work and other mid-1990s experimental short films by lesbians of color employ formal moves that “can limit access for audience members invested in narrative logic or the referential reality effect of traditional documentary”

(Goldstein 175). Initially, She Don’t Fade appears to provide the viewer with an easily digested entry point through the figure of the white lesbian but the film swiftly deconstructs the appearance of a straightforward documentary film.

The opening monologue suggests that Zoie, a white lesbian, will serve as the viewer’s point of reference in the film, positioning her in the role of Greek chorus or commentator on the action. She Don’t Fade opens with a black and white medium shot of

36 Fleetwood’s argument focuses on the specific affordances of digital media composing in comparison to classical Hollywood film composition. Obviously my argument in this chapter focuses on texts that use video and film exclusively but I see a similarity between Dunye’s choice to make visible the “seams” of her filmmaking process and the digital work by Tuggar that Fleetwood examines. I take up digital film and photography in my fourth chapter. 162 an empty chair facing the camera. A white woman wearing a striped, long-sleeve button- up shirt with rolled-up sleeves walks into the frame and sits down. Her styling – the oversized shirt, dirty blonde hair worn at shoulder length under a Kangol cap, nose ring and earrings – denotes a version of the 1990s lesbian scene. She explains, “this is a video about women or a big world of lesbianism” and introduces herself as Zoie, the “dyke yenta of sorts” who can provide “you” (the viewers) with the “big lowdown on what’s going to happen before it does.” She briefly lays out the narrative of the film – two women meet and enter into a romantic and sexual relationship before one of them becomes involved with another one. Lynn Goldstein observes that for white lesbian film viewers, lesbian of color short films may feel alienating because of the differences in life experiences across racial lines; Zoie seems to be offering the white viewer an omniscient and knowing point of entry into a film that ultimately centers on black women’s dating experiences and sexual desires. At the end of the speech, however, she troubles who she is speaking to by switching from a generalized group “you” to a specific individuated

“you”:

I know it sounds like a story that’s somewhat familiar and you might not be interested in

watching it cuz it might even be your own life, like it might even be mine, but I know

you’ll be really interested in it, as I am. I mean, here I am sitting here, telling you all

about, and you can trust me, just look at my face. All right, have a good time.

This initial speech serves as the prologue coming before the title and before viewers meet the film’s protagonist played by Dunye; after this scene Zoie is not seen until the last scene of the film when she once again addresses the camera/viewer directly. While the presumptive “you” in her speech is a white lesbian like herself, the scenes immediately 163 following this introduce us to Dunye and her character within the film (“Shae”), potentially shifting our understanding of who is assumed to be watching. The speech unsettles the status of the truth value of what is being presented – the story being told

“might” be the viewer’s life, or Zoie’s life – but simultaneously asks the viewer to trust the speaker based on her visual presence (“just look at my face”). While she suggests that the story being told might not be interesting because it reflects the viewer’s experiences or her own, the actual narrative of the film concerns Black lesbian cultures in a way not necessarily related to Zoie (especially since within the ensuing story she is markedly absence).

Telling the viewer to “have a good time” suggests a more dialogic relationship between the film and its audience – instead of the notion of the film as a static text that happens to the viewer, She Don’t Fade is framed as a shared experience, akin to a social outing. This approach echoes the focus in Dunye’s films on Black female friendship and desire as expressed in small social encounters such as coffee dates, potlucks, and going to the museum. While the viewer and the characters we meet directly after the prologue have a “good time,” Zoie actually recedes from the film until the final scene, toying with racial narrative expectations.

The prologue sets up the blurring of real/fictional that stretches across Dunye’s work. Showing the viewer the process of making the film obviously demonstrates

Fleetwood’s argument about visible seams, yet concealed under this move is a second level of seams obscured by Dunye and her collaborators – Dunye has chosen to include elements of the production and references to the extra-diegetic world that could as easily

164 be removed from the final product. I argue that the choice to show us the apparatus in process makes it part of the broader narrative; the viewer receives these scenes alongside more controlled elements of the film. If in classical cinema, “Cinematic assemblage as an editing technique and aesthetic device abets in the production of dominant narrative”

(Fleetwood 181), then Dunye’s intentional insertion of these visible seams undoes the tidiness assumed and this becomes part of a larger narrative. Writing about She Don’t

Fade and its follow-up The Potluck and the Passion, Valerie Smith observes that Dunye’s

“refusal to separate diegetic from extra- diegetic material in both works blurs the boundary between fact and fiction; if they document nothing else, they seem to document certain aspects of the filmmaking process” (104). I would go further and note that Dunye has intentionally inserted these elements of the production process; as the viewer we have no idea if these are “accidents” or intentional moments but ultimately this does not matter since they are included in the final film as presented to viewers. Dunye actively chooses to show the filmmaking process – a point that Smith makes, but which I argue is a more explicit choice than her analysis posits.37

An example of this intentional emphasis on the filmmaking process can be seen at the end of Zoie’s monologue. Starting with this opening scene, She Don’t Fade suggests

37 The reasoning behind the title She Don’t Fade is never made explicit in the film, unlike the follow-up film The Potluck and the Passion which is both about a potluck and draws its title from a line of dialogue. She Don’t Fade could reference the filmic editing technique in which a scene dissolves into a single color (usually black) or gradually appears from a single color. In this reading, the title would reference the fact that the film does not employ the fade in or fade out, instead simply cutting between scenes or between a scene and an intertitle. By saying “she” does not fade, the title follows the broader thematic approach of the film to link Dunye’s erotic desires with the filmic process. The lack of a fade also references the fractured serialization I discuss later in this chapter; the narrative begun in She Don’t Fade is not completed and continues into the following film, and arguably into Dunye’s later films. The film does not simply “fade to black” in the manner of a traditional narrative Hollywood film.

165 the form of a documentary with a static medium shot of someone talking to the camera, but unlike the rest of the “talking heads” the film never establishes if Zoie is speaking as her real-life self or as a character she portrays within the faux documentary. After finishing her monologue, Zoie steps out of the frame but the camera remains stationary on the empty chair. Off camera a voice says, “Looks good to me,” and then Dunye says,

“Great.” Dunye’s choice to include these moments in her final product means that they should be read as part of the whole – not as separate or tertiary as with traditional

“outtakes” which are understood as separate from the official text. In her analysis of

Dunye’s work, Smith argues that Dunye’s “use of outtakes dismantles the notion of the authoritative, explanatory voiceover” (106). I agree with Smith that their inclusion undoes the generic “voice of God” expected in documentary film, but I suggest that simply calling them “outtakes” undercuts Dunye’s control over the final product. The shot of the empty chair and the off-camera conversation about the image being crafted can be read as “outtakes,” but this term is usually used to refer to alternatives to the filmmaker’s intent, scenes that were literally taken out. DVDs often include outtakes that include actor mistakes and other moments in which the performers break character or otherwise counter the closed nature of the diegetic world. As viewers it is unclear if these moments are an intentional blurring of diegetic and extra-diegetic worlds or improvised and/or accidental mistakes intentionally integrated into the final work.

While the film introduces Zoie in the prologue through her direct address to the camera, Dunye as Shae is introduced first in street scenes of her selling knickknacks at a table out on the street. The images of Shae selling and then packing up her table and

166 wares are presented with diegetic street sounds but she is not mic’ed so we cannot hear what she is saying. This shot initially presents Dunye in a more traditional documentary shot with her at a remove from the viewer; the film then cuts to her in a straightforward medium shot with her sitting in the same chair previously used by Zoie. Dunye introduces herself as “Cheryl” and notes, “in this video I play Shae Clarke.” She explains that Shae is 29 years old and recently broke up with a lover and began her own vending business. While Dunye begins describing Shae in the third person, she then transitions to the second person in describing the value of the vending business (“You meet a lot of people, you’re out on the street”) and then into the first person when she explains that the business “got me into myself when I had been in relationships with women …. I’ve been going out with women pretty much as a livelihood for a while.” Her laugh after this comment feels natural and genuine and further complicates the viewer’s understanding – is Dunye speaking about herself or has she shifted from speaking about Shae to speaking as Shae?38 Dunye’s monologue positions the viewer as one of her confidantes as she lays out her struggle with serial monogamy and her desire to “approach women differently” and try to be less invested in the “couple thing.”

While Zoie establishes herself as the observer of this lesbian community, Dunye shares her own experiences and establishes her importance; this is emphasized by the placement of her directly after the intertitles reading “A film by Cheryl Dunye.” Dunye’s creative control and choice to confuse the viewer is key to seeing the ways in which the

38 Valerie Smith notes this confusion; she argues that the shift in pronouns “seems to suggest a heightened intimacy with the viewer, but it also hints at the speaker’s familiarity with the experience of which she speaks (105-106). 167 film troubles any notion of racial or sexual authenticity or the authenticity of the image.

Multiple readings of She Don’t Fade seek to inscribe a strict binary between Dunye the filmmaker and the characters she plays (Fuchs, Goldstein; see also Winkour’s comparable reading of The Watermelon Woman); while I agree that these roles are highlighted, I disagree with this investment in a simple either/or structure and instead see

Dunye clearly blurring these lines starting with her own monologue. Fuchs reads the film as containing two stories (Shae’s new approach to women and Dunye’s approach to making the film), which ultimately are collapsed and revealed as symbiotic (200-201).

Goldstein similarly identifies Dunye and her on-screen “characters” as evincing a “split subjectivity” (181). I do not see these elements as ever truly differentiated and I would argue from the beginning that Dunye blurs any sense of lines between fictional narrative and factual reportage. Ironically, I would argue that the film’s failure to neatly divide the various selves performed by each individual contributes to the experience of realness since the choice to showcase the filmmaking process, including the crafting of the characters, suggests the viewer is accessing a more truthful or raw account of events.

Robyn Warhol argues, through the work of Judith Butler, that TV representations of fully coherent identities ring false given the failure of coherent subjectivity inherent to attempts to narrate the self. Writing about NBC’s sitcom The Office, Warhol notes that,

“The reality effect inheres in the actors’ imitation of the incoherent subjectivity every actual viewer inhabits” (73). Dunye and the other performers featured in She Don’t Fade and its follow-up The Potluck and the Passion demonstrate, through their dizzying narration of their diegetic and extra-diegetic selves, the incoherence we expect from

168

“real” people. Whereas The Office achieves what Warhol terms “hyper-realism” by showing the characters’ inability to narrate a coherent self and showing how interviews conflict with narrative action, Dunye’s work evinces a more complex swing between filmic production, character construction, and the “real” people involved in making the film.

The blurring of any stable boundary between truth and fiction is made even more explicit with the introduction of Shae’s best friend Paula played by Dunye’s best friend

Paula Cronin. Dunye and Paula have been friends since the filmmaker came out. Dunye describes a friendship that has weathered breakups, makeups and exploring “women’s bars in the middle of nowhere.”39 After describing this indispensable friendship, Dunye says, “Paula’s here and I think she might wanna say something. Paula . . .” She crooks a finger at the camera and off camera we hear “No,” and Dunye implores, “Come on.”

Dunye tells the camera/viewer, “I guess Paulas are modest too, but they’re good to talk to.” After an intertitle that reads “Paula,” we cut to Paula sitting down in front of the camera in the same middle shot; she is a white woman with bobbed hair wearing a black leather jacket. She introduces herself: “Hi, my name is Paula and in the video, guess who

I play? Yeah, I play Paula. Paula is Shae’s best buddy in the video and she serves as

Shae’s little emergency valve …” After explaining her relationship within the film, Paula explains that her work is usually on the opposite side of the camera handling technical work since she has no acting skills. Paula delineates a fictional world when she says, “In

39 The comment about “women’s bars in the middle of nowhere” also suggests rural spaces in which possible lack of safety for two women who fail to live up to normative ideals about femininity and might be read as an interracial lesbian couple. 169 the story I am really an extension of Shae” and this comment also suggests her character’s presence as an extension of Dunye’s creative work. She briefly outlines

Shae’s character and notes that when things get “rough” Shae turns to “her Paula every now and then and we have a little talk.” In this moment, Paula transitions from referring to her character in the third person to the first person, echoing the movement in Dunye’s opening monologue. The dialogue between Paula’s comments and Dunye’s description of the “real” Paula links the world being created through the clearly fictional narrative of

Shae with the equally constructed albeit putatively “real” narrative of Dunye and her circle of friends and the making of She Don’t Fade. Fuchs suggests it is unclear if the two women are discussing the relationship between Shae and Paula or Dunye and Paula: I disagree and instead see them talking about both and suggesting boundaries that are actually permeable. Both iterations of Paula also serve as an inversion of the standard placement of the white lesbian figure – instead of serving as the protagonist both Paulas are the helpmate or support for the central Black lesbian character as she pursues her desires in the narrative.

The Expansive World of Dunyementary

In my next section, I want to turn from the interplay between truth and fiction to the relationship between the camera and the viewer. She Don’t Fade attends to the

“mysterious give-and-take between images and viewers” (Francis 99) in the consumption of film by openly noting the space between image and viewer, drawing attention to the role that the apparatus plays in capturing the images being consumed, and placing the

170 viewer with these technological tools instead of merely seeing the resulting product. This placement of the viewer alongside the camera extends Terri Simone Francis’s call to consider the ways that spectators may find themselves identifying with positions on the screen at odds or differing from their embodied subject positions (99). Below I consider how She Don’t Fade troubles the role of the camera and places the viewer in the world onscreen; instead of seeing a closed world, we are shown as part of an open world that expands the frame. As viewers, we are linked with the camera in some scenes, which takes on the intimate role of pursuing erotic pleasure; at the same time, sexual encounter becomes linked with the filmic process. The recording apparatus wielded by Dunye (and her crew as an extension presumably of her vision) works as a tool of desire and as viewers we become part of this world which centers and validates Black lesbian pleasure.

The viewer’s positioning oscillates between alignment with the camera and a position as a confidant or part of Dunye’s world. Ultimately, She Don’t Fade does not allow the viewer to take comfort in a fixed position; Dunye does not simply reconfigure our placement in relationship to the camera and the fictive world, but she refuses a single positionality. The placement of the camera and the viewer first becomes complicated through the introduction of Shae’s friend Paula played by Dunye’s best friend Paula

Cronin. Paula’s role in the production of the film along with her relationship to the camera and the space off-screen directs the viewer to remember the presence of the filmic apparatus while also linking us to the gaze and its creation. As part of the film crew, along with her onscreen role, Paula initially serves as part of the space-off, what Teresa de Lauretis defines as “the space not visible in the frame but inferable from what the

171 frame makes visible” (26). Filmic framing means that there is always going to be the space-off which the viewer knows by what is shown but cannot see; the blurred lines of

Dunye’s world brings us into both the place of the apparatus and that of those constructing the images. De Lauretis notes that commercial cinema erases or seals up the space-off while “avant-garde cinema” (a term I understand to include the experimental form of the Dunyementary) consistently makes visible the unseen and reveals it “to include not only the camera (the point of articulation and perspective from which the image is constructed) but also the spectator (the point where the image is received, re- constructed, and re-produced in/as subjectivity)” (26).

I understand Dunye’s films as following de Lauretis’s argument as She Don’t

Fade and The Potluck and the Passion opens out the space-off to include the camera and spectator and place them on an equivalent basis. De Lauretis sees “elsewhere” as holding the alternatives to normative ways of doing gender. Kara Keeling’s study of the black femme in cinema similarly posits the radical potential of what she calls (drawing on

Gilles Deleuze) the “out-of-field,” arguing that black femme figures in film, such as the character Ursula in Set It Off (1998), always carry “a reference to another space” (Witch’s

Flight 136) and thus her presence “rips the cinematic open from the inside” (Witch’s

Flight 137). While I draw on both de Lauretis and Keeling, I am reading avant-garde or alternative cinema and understand Dunye as incorporating the viewer and the camera into the space-off and thus not shutting out the radical potential but suggesting its continuity with the viewer. In the world of the Dunyementary the space-off includes both the extended fictive world considered by de Lauretis and Keeling and the “actual” world of

172 the film crew and apparatus. As She Don’t Fade establishes from the beginning these two worlds are linked given the interplay between the “real” and “fictional” employed by

Dunye.

When Dunye introduces Paula, she motions to a figure off-screen pointing at the camera/our position as the viewer. In this moment, the viewer has not yet seen Paula and thus we have only ourselves to place in her position. Even when we hear her demurrals, we have no visual image to link this with. Paula responds to Dunye’s request by waving her hands in front of the camera from behind it saying, “Hi.” In this moment, Paula’s body extends into our field of vision from the place where we have been positioned as viewers. When Paula finally comes before the camera for her monologue, she describes her work on the video, saying, that usually “I sit over there on that side of the camera

[pointing into the camera], and it’s a lot easier than sitting here because … I don’t know how to act.” Paula’s comment and gesture places the viewer on “that side of the camera” in the space-off, suggesting a kinship between watching and crafting the images we are consuming.

She Don’t Fade takes as its narrative focus Shae’s attempt to “approach women differently” and be more open to different types of romantic and sexual entanglements instead of simply serial monogamy. Both this film and its follow-up The Potluck and the

Passion probe the various sexual and intimate entanglements of Black and white lesbians in Philadelphia. The intimate relationship between the viewer and the filmic apparatus follows this thematic focus with the camera immersing us in Shae’s sexual pursuits and desires. I argue for an understanding of Dunye as wielding a desiring camera in both

173 films, a camera which serves the needs of her Black lesbian desires. My understanding of a desiring camera echoes Judith Butler’s discussion of the white lesbian director Jennie

Livingston and the iconic documentary film Paris is Burning (1991). Butler describes the intrusion of the camera into the filmic world as suggestive of “the camera’s desire, the desire that motivates the camera” (“Gender is Burning” 93). For Butler, the camera’s presence follows from Livingston’s (presumed) white lesbian desires but also carries a phallic power within a Lacanian/post-Laura Mulvey feminist understanding of the filmic apparatus. My analysis of Dunye’s work departs from this emphasis on the camera as always already a male trace, but follows Butler in asking how the gaze and the technology of its production might be read as enacting a specific (Black) lesbian desire.40

A scene intercut in the middle of Dunye’s opening monologue introduces the ways viewers are linked with the gaze while it also can function as an extension of

Dunye’s desiring eye. The scene starts with a black screen with the intertitle “shae’s new approach” before cutting to a street scene. A white woman passes the camera and its gaze turns to follow her; off camera Dunye says, “Um excuse me, hi. I’m a working on this video about … women and stuff and, I don’t know, you seem like you have a look or something for this video. I was wondering if I could interview you ...” Dunye’s reticence to explicitly lay out her topics – however that might be denoted (lesbian desire, women desiring women, etc) – leads her to rely on vague banalities (“women and stuff”) belying what sounds like nerves. What is unclear for the viewer is if Dunye’s nerves are related to

40 I am conscious in my analysis of Eve Oishi’s call to remember the ways that foregrounding reflexivity or even the presence of the filmmaker’s body on screen does not inoculate documentary films against the “residue of power inequalities existing outside the screen” (267). Oishi’s essay focuses on the power dynamics in representations of trans/queer of color subjects in Livingston’s Paris is Burning and Wu Tsang’s 2012 film Wildness. 174 approaching an attractive woman (camera or no camera) with a measure of romantic interest or, alternately, the fear of activating a homophobic response by outing herself as a lesbian and mis-reading a woman as a lesbian. The euphemism “a look” serves as a coded pickup line – if the woman intentionally has this “look” she will respond in kind, assuming she is interested. The risks of this moment – that Dunye’s come-on would lead to violence – are somewhat vitiated by the power she wields by holding the camera.

Further, the inclusion of the scene lets the viewer know that violence or its threat is probably not the end result of Dunye’s action.

Dunye’s presentation as a somewhat butch Black woman accentuates the potential risks explicit in approaching a white woman in public but the gaze of the camera carries with it a certain authority. In her analysis of Black filmmaker Shine Louise Houston’s queer pornography, Stallings argues that Houston’s camera carries the power to possess and penetrate (Funk 173) – terms that are typically associated with heterosexual male erotic performance but need not be tied to these bodies or encounters. This sexual understanding of the role of the camera lines up with Valerie Smith’s reading of the encounter between Dunye and the woman on the street. Smith argues that Dunye’s pursuit of this woman reveals “sexual pursuit and documentary film occupy similar terrain” in that both require subjects to “act naturally” in order to get the desired ends (an erotic encounter or an image that can be read as “real”) (106). Dunye’s failure to “get” this interview for her film doubles as her failure to read the woman and/or the situation.

The woman declines the interview and Dunye’s camera follows her walking away; off camera we hear Dunye say, “Um, okay” and then, presumably to herself (and by

175 extension us as viewers) “shit.” The scene further confuses any boundaries between the story of Shae and the story of making the film since it is introduced as “Shae’s New

Approach” and yet Dunye has been established as the primary bearer of the technological gaze. This moment of failure serves as an instance where Dunye shows us one level of

“visible seams” including the failed interview, but concealed below this is the clear choice to include this misfire within the final product. Choosing to include this scene highlights the work involved in trying to pursue other women in the context of Dunye’s daily life while also suggesting an unspoken but clear racial politics involved in lesbian dating – while her approach to the white woman fails, both of the Black women Dunye flirts with in the film respond with interest.

She Don’t Fade includes two other scenes in which Shae approaches women; unlike her failed interaction with the woman with “the look” these scenes of flirtation with Black women are presented with Dunye’s body in front of the camera. Instead of seeing the scenes in the point of view shot, we are positioned at the distance of a confidante watching a friend flirt with a potential love interest (or tryst). At the same time, the viewer is now able to see the entire scene since the camera is now no longer presented as between the woman approached and Shae; instead we see both women engaged in the pickup. Shae introduces the scene where she meets Margo in a brief interview scene. Filmed in a medium shot, Shae starts saying, “So the other day while vending I met this girl,” and then laughs, saying, “No that’s wrong.” She tries again, shakes her head, and interrupts her own account with, “No I can’t do it,” before switching to simply: “I met this girl, Margo.” Shae rolls her eyes at the camera, connecting with the

176 audience in her self-deprecatory gesture and maintaining our intimate relationship with her. Shae’s comments can be understood to be equally about her nervousness about the initial encounter with Margo or about the trickiness of capturing what actually happened

– in reporting the previous incident she finds herself unsure about how to narrate the events.

In the actual scene of Shae and Margo meeting, Dunye once again shows the complicated social situation of a (Black) lesbian trying to cruise women in a heteronormative world. Instead of a first person perspective (as in the failed interview of the white woman on the street), the scene of Margo meeting Shae while she is vending on the street is filmed in medium shot that shows both women. Margo is a taller Black woman with thin braids worn back from her face; she is wearing a black leather jacket over a dress with heels. Shae asks Margo, “Didn’t I see you at that bar the other night?” once again submerging queer desire through allusion, in this instance to a presumably women’s/lesbian bar. Unlike the previous attempt, however, Margo picks up the cue and this emboldens Shae to invite her for coffee. After the two make a coffee date, Margo walks away; Shae looks into the camera and shrugs. This gesture, like the earlier moment of rolling her eyes when attempting to tell the story of meeting Margo, invites the viewer to share in the emotional experience of the moment. Shae/Dunye’s asides position her as a point of connection for the viewer and, following Robyn Warhol’s analysis of the character Jim on the NBC sitcom The Office, these gestures aid in “constructing the

177 character as a subject who can connect intellectually and emotionally with the actual viewer” (66).41

If the shrug suggests a close level of connection between Shae/Dunye and the camera/our position as viewers, the actual scene of the date distances us once again from the subject of the presumptive documentary. The film presents the scene in a medium shot with the two Black women seated across from each other. Instead of providing the audio of their conversation, the audience hears ambient noises of the café and piano music, a move that stresses the connection between the women while alienating us from their experience slightly. Even when the camera cuts to slightly closer shots of the couple and then later zooms into their hands, their conversation remains entirely unheard by the viewer. The camera comes in close on their hands as the scene unfolds and thus leaves us to read their budding intimacy through their gestures: the women smoke, Shae plays with the lapel on Margo’s jacket, Shae feeds soup to Margo. In most of these close ups both women’s hands remain in the frame, retaining the important focus on their shared connection and growing intimacy. When they leave the coffee shop, information added in postproduction instructs the viewer how to interpret the moment between the two; a subtitle tells us “they even go shopping together” and an arrow on the screen draws attention to Shae’s hand on Margo’s back. Where another documentary might focus on larger social or cultural concerns, She Don’t Fade foregrounds the importance of these

41 On the popular NBC mockumentary sitcom The Office (2005-2013), the character Jim frequently glances at the camera in a move that “construct[s] the character as a subject who can connect intellectually and emotionally with the actual viewer” (Warhol 66). Robyn Warhol argues “as the receiver of Jim’s glances” the camera operators stand in for the viewers, “engaging them structurally in the intersubjective experience of Jim’s emotions” (66). 178 small moments (a shared bowl of soup, a hand at the small of another woman’s back) suggesting they are as deserving of the audience’s engagement.

The Politics of Black Lesbian Sex on Screen

When She Don’t Fade turns from flirtation to sexual encounters, Dunye’s film must navigate a fraught history of Black and queer women’s bodies being presented sexually as a means of furthering white heteropatriarchal ideas and pleasing a hegemonic straight male gaze. Writing about the representation of Black sexuality in film, Marlo D.

David observes the role that representation of racialized sexualities has played in enforcing hierarchies of power by showing Black sexuality as primitive with the Black body reduced to object (27).42 Much of Black filmmaking has responded to these fetishistic representations of Black sexuality through recourse to “positive images” that either absent erotic desire from narratives of Black life or attempt to reframe it as natural and therapeutic. In the 1990s, mainstream representations of lesbian sexuality similarly sat between two extremes – women who were exclusively sexual beings in perverse and quasi-pornographic ways or women whose sexual desires were downplayed. Frequently,

Kelly Kessler argues, lesbian sexuality presented in mainstream film extended tropes of lesbian sex as seen in heterosexual porn intended for straight male viewers; often with sexual completion halted through the intrusion of a male viewer, a male partner or a

42 David writes, “Regimes of power have historically flourished via representation of racialized sexualities to the extent that a vocabulary involving black sex has become firmly fixed within a number of popular cultures. Black sexuality, regardless of gender, is almost always depicted as corporeal, primitive, uncontrolled, grotesque, hilarious, animalistic, or frightening. Alternatively, images of black people’s nude or seminude bodies, when they are occasionally made visible, are reduced to fetish and object” (27). 179 phallic object (13-17).43 As Valerie Smith notes, the mingling of sexual desire with everyday mundane experiences of work and play in both She Don’t Fade and The Potluck and the Passion, suggests a third path for images of Black lesbian pleasure that situates it within the context of a life lived outside of the limited cinematic gaze of mainstream film

(104).

The sex scene between Shae and Margo is marked by a lack of completion and the intrusion of the filmic apparatus, the film crew, and, by extension, the viewer’s marked presence. In the section “Shae and Margo have sex” the film shows the two women sitting, fully clothed, making awkward conversation on the edge of Shae’s bed, before cutting to a medium shot of the couple naked in each other’s arms. After a brief interlude of the two women making out, Shae/Dunye says, “Just don’t be all quiet” speaking, presumably, to the crew of the film about the strangeness of performing sex for an audience. From behind the camera, the audience hears suggestions and commentary on the action: “Sit up some. Caress each other.” “You guys are dead.” “This could be afterwards, or in between, or … before round two.” After these and other suggestions, the actors and the unseen crew all start laughing. The inclusion of this moment reminds the viewer of the mundane nature of actual erotic encounters and links these to the performed

43 Kessler focuses on the Wachowskis’ film Bound (1996) as an instantiation of a lesbian film that presents women engaged in same-sex eroticism in which “the [sex] scene is not heterosexualized, and the women are not wearing sexy teddies and they do not look like they are playing slumber party games. It is simply hot, passionate sex with all of the sweat and grind often missing from male pornography, in which the lesbian sex is usually just a precursor to the “real” heterosexual sex” (16). Kessler’s analysis of the sexual encounters in Bound reads these scenes as open to both straight male and queer female viewers; in my following reading of the scene from She Don’t Fade I find that Dunye’s direction works against the voyeurism Kessler sees in Bound. Kessler’s article entirely absents any discussion of racial difference as it relates to the 1990s boom in lesbian representation in film and Dunye (and any other directors of color) are absent from her historical grounding (13). Where Kessler reads a lack of sexual completion as foreclosing lesbian pleasure on the screen, I understand the intrusions in She Don’t Fade as a technique for resisting the viewer’s desire to fix these images in one normative mold. 180 nature of this image. All of Dunye’s Dunyementary work consistently employs knowing humor, frequently in ways that highlight a shared moment between viewer and characters on screen, rely on an understanding of the subcultural practices enacted (only those in the

“know” would “get it”), or draw attention to the comedy of everyday life.

Jennifer Nash’s theory of “race-humor” can help us read the deconstructive nature of laughter in the bedroom scene. In instances of “race-humor” in pornographic films, the

“racial fictions” fundamental to the erotic charge of the film become “the subject of the joke” (Black Body 110). These racial fictions can be seen as both “comical and alluring simultaneously” (Black Body 127). Dunye’s insistence across her career on showcasing the female body naked and engaged in same-sex erotic play could place her work in the realm of the pornographic and the scene in She Don’t Fade is part of a broader investment in pairing laughter with overt sexuality. Writing about the pornographic film

Black Taboo (1984), Nash argues that race-humor “captures how pornographic protagonists make visible the fictions that underpin the genre, a strategy akin to showing a garment’s seams, exposing the stitches that hold it together” (Black Body 110). In the moment of the sex scene, the laughter by both the actresses and the offscreen camera crew draws our attention to the constructed nature of all sex scenes in film and, following

Nash, suggests that we question the way these constructed images are linked to similarly unstable and fabricated ideas about racial (and gendered/sexual) identities. The laughter at the absurdity of the staged sex scene echoes the viewer’s own experiences with “real” sexual encounters that lack the polish and choreography of a filmed sex scene but also suggests that we laugh at the inadequacy of this or any vision of sex to fit into normative

181 ideas about which bodies engage in sex and how they should. The scene also evokes behind-the-scenes moments in the making of pornography, scenes sometimes included as bonus features or as part of interview segments with the performers frequently included in recent queer and feminist pornographic films.

By bringing us into the scene and then breaking the moment through dialogue with those “behind” the camera, She Don’t Fade once again invites us into the process of making the image. While the viewer is never allowed to see the camera itself, in this scene a pan away from the bed reveals a heap of cords which suggest the unseen lights, camera, and camera crew. Instead of returning the viewer to the sex scene unfettered by commentary, the scene ends with a series of broken up shots of Shae and Margo as they have sex; the images run briefly before freezing and then moving again backed by the sounds of orchestra tuning before a concert. The audio suggests the preparation for the main attraction – the “actual” sex scene – and yet this never arrives for the viewer.

Editing the sex scene into a series of stops and starts toys with the audience and the visual pleasures of seeing bodies engaged in pleasure. The denial of the closed fantasy of the lesbian sex scene pushes back against the potentially normative gaze that might fix two black female bodies into a heteronormative script. Valerie Smith argues that Dunye parodies “conventions of representing romance and eroticism in order to undermine viewer desire for sincere and authentic images,” and specifically reads the bedroom scene as undercutting the mystification of sex in contemporary society (106). While the scene definitely resists a desire for sexual pleasure on the screen, bringing the viewer into the

182 process of crafting the scene actually strengthens intimate ties between the film’s world and ours, once again aligning us with the technology of filmmaking.

I am arguing that Dunye draws our attention to the constructed nature of sexual pleasure but not in a manner that distances or alienates us from the narrative, as might be expected in the postmodern move of breaking the fourth wall and speaking to the presumptive viewer. Robyn Warhol argues that instead of “interrupting the reality effect of narrative” “the more the mockumentary text manipulates structures of address to heighten the audience’s experience of metanarration’s effects, the more real its constructed people can appear to be” (64).44 She Don’t Fade more willfully mixes fact and fiction than the mockumentary text (The Office) examined by Warhol and the use of metanarration (addressing the viewer and apparatus) not only heightens the feeling of reality but also emphasizes the openness of the filmic world and the audience’s placement within the unseen space. Dunye’s choice to deconstruct the sex scene also suggests a realness about sex as a mundane and often hilarious encounter between one or more bodies, and in the process opens up a line between viewer and Dunye’s world. The theoretical destinations – a finished or polished movie, sexual completion and/or orgasm

– are decentered as the aim of the work undergone. As in the scene of Dunye approaching the woman on the street, the sex scene links attendance to filmic process with intimate process: the focus on visible seams in the filmic text occurs in moments of erotic negotiation. At one point during the sex scene, someone off camera says, “That’s good,” and Dunye asks, “Is it?” The unseen figure replies, “Just do it, that’s fine.” The

44 Warhol defines “metanarration,” a narrative theory term, as “the self-reflexive activity of narrators who draw attention to the text’s status as an act of narration” (64). 183 dialogue about the direction of the film could easily be transposed into the mouths of two lovers working to maximize physical pleasure. The viewer’s access to this moment of vulnerability about the bodily performances offers a site of identification that mimics our possible connection with the awkwardness of the sex scene.

The Desiring Lesbian Body as Narrative Drive

The sex scene’s refusal of climax (sexual or narrative) does not signal Dunye’s resistance to pleasure as a necessary operating principle. Shae’s ultimate choice to leave

Margo for another woman is entirely motivated by an unpredictable sexual urge described as both bodily and defying logic. Immediately after the sex scene, the film questions the status of their relationship with the intertitle “Shae and Margo ...?” In a brief monologue, Shae addresses the fact that the audience may assume “at this point in the video” that she’s “into Margo” but this would be a false assumption. Shae’s feelings for Margo have been sidelined by a glance she shares with another woman. The scene of

Shae and this mystery woman passing in a flight of open-air stairs is one of the most obviously staged moments in She Don’t Fade and comes closest to a scene from a conventional narrative film. Shae is heading up a flight of stairs while the other woman moves down; their moment of actual appraisal is brief but shown once in normal time and again in slow motion. This is followed by shots of each woman continuing along the staircase in opposing directions, each shot from far away in a move that would make sense in a more conventional film employing multiple cameras to shoot scenes from various angles and then presenting an edited selection of shots. The scene is presented

184 without the visible seams of filmmaking that attends the bulk of the narrative and thus suggests a more romantic or idealized moment of connection. Any possibility of a fantasy of romance is swiftly undercut by the following scene which establishes erotic pleasure and not the more respectable idea of romantic idealism as undergirding Shae’s experience.

The scene of unspoken appraisal between two women is followed by a conversation between Shae and her friend Paula. Shae describes the encounter with the mystery woman as releasing “hot magical energy” that flowed “from the eyes to the hooch” and “moved” her twice. While the encounter with the mystery woman begins as visual, Shae narrates the movement of the desire internally and across her body. Using the colloquial term “hooch” to refer to her vagina, Shae narrates sexual pleasure as not simply centered there but flowing from what she sees/wants and across her body. She shows this motion by gesturing at her vagina repeatedly as she recounts the experience to

Paula. This “hot magical energy” of desire follows L. H. Stallings’s examination of sexuality as an embodied knowledge that works across and beyond the five senses; the language of magic also invokes what Stallings calls “sacredly profane sexuality” which

“makes sacred what is libidinous and blasphemous in Western humanism” (Funk 10-11).

Desire in this paradigm is something beyond Shae’s control, something important to her bodily and spiritual happiness, and the film prizes the importance of this random meeting.

Based in part on this wordless exchange of glances, Shae breaks up with Margo.

Using their social network, Paula and Shae find out the mystery woman’s name is Nikki

– “She looks like a Nikki, doesn’t she?” Shae asks the viewer. The film departs from

185 reference to reality with a fantasy sequence in which the sex scene between Margo and

Shae is shown and then switches to a scene with Shae and Nikki. In a film obsessed with showcasing the means of production, this switch to fantasy further emphasizes the centrality of Shae’s desiring mind and body to the narrative. The scene relies on post production editing and thus suggests that the finished product of the film conforms to

Shae’s erotic desires; the fantasy suggests a frame beyond the documentary in which the entire diegetic world presented extends from her character’s needs.45

Shae formally meets Nikki in the final scene of She Don’t Fade when they end up at the same party held by mutual friends. When the two women go out to smoke, Zoie, who has been absent since the film’s monologue, picks up a microphone randomly at hand, turns to the camera and tells us the rest is “herstory.” Zoie’s joke – referencing the second-wave feminism neologism for decentering male-centered history – simultaneously mocks the supposed seriousness of the documentary form and suggests what is denied the viewer (Shae and Nikki developing a relationship) and its potential longevity. Viewers are denied sexual consummation after the raw attraction brought them together, but in

Dunye’s follow-up film The Potluck and the Passion we do get to see their domestic bliss.

Fractured Serialization in The Potluck and the Passion

The relationship between She Don’t Fade and The Potluck and the Passion initially seems obvious since the second film opens with the same couple (Shae and

45 I do not go further with this meta-reading of the text but Paula’s comment in her initial monologue that “I am really an extension of Shae” seems to support this additional layer of narration. 186

Nikki) who get together at the end of the first; however, the two films are stylistically different and take different content as their focus. The second film also focuses more directly on the intersecting categories of race, gender, and sexuality as they are negotiated by the central characters. I argue that Potluck employs formal and narrative elements to present shifting understandings of identity that resist static and essentialist categorization.

I would extend Valerie Smith’s reading of Potluck as constructing a “lesbian subject in process and under negotiation” (107) and argue Dunye shows Blackness, gender, and the category of “lesbian” all as constantly shifting terrain. Dunye calls into question normative expectations about the categories of “Black” and “lesbian” through her continued employment of a desiring camera that avoids classic cinematic conventions and her play with conventions of documentary film and reality television.

Dunye released Potluck two years after She Don’t Fade and saw it as continuing the Dunyementary approach. She explains that, based on the success of the previous film she received a few grants which “made the production all the more real as I continued to grapple with desire, race, and class in my lesbian life” (The Early Works). From the beginning Potluck is marked as aesthetically different from the previous film since it’s filmed in color and not black and white like She Don’t Fade.46 Simultaneously the opening scene of Potluck - a medium shot of Shae and Nikki sitting on a sofa laughing in the midst of a conversation – suggests continuity with the previous film, ending as it did with the beginning of the relationship between these two women. “So what are we doing

46 This shift from black and white to color may reflect the increased budget for Potluck (the grants that Dunye received) although the DVD menu for the collection of Dunye’s early works describes She Don’t Fade as an experiment with multiple aesthetic choices including black and white film. 187 here?” Nikki asks, gesturing towards the camera. The two women go on to explain to the camera that they are planning a potluck to celebrate their anniversary of a year as a couple. The potluck aims to reconnect with the friends lost as they turned inward to explore their budding relationship and also bring together their friends from disparate friend groups (Shae refers to them as “Different worlds, different schools”).

I argue the two Dunyementary films (Fade and Potluck) present a fractured serialization with the continuation of certain bodies and relationships in front of and behind the camera (most obviously in the continued direction by Dunye and her centrality as the actor/protagonist); this is fractured by a change in names, a gap in time, and the absence of Dunye’s best friend Paula who was central to the action of the first film.

Nothing suggests that the two women should not be read as the women who connect at the end of She Don’t Fade, but Dunye’s character in this film is Linda, not Shae, and it is unclear if Nikki has a different name as well.47 Serial narratives, according to Sean

O’Sullivan, are always a tension between the old (the established characters or setting) and the new (the unfolding narrative that changes and engages with the status quo).

O’Sullivan refers to this temporal gap as the “between” and sees serial television and novels as spending much of their narrative time in this space (121). Potluck opens by establishing a narrative gap – the year since the two women coupled – but also the comfort of both familiar bodies in front of the camera and the resumption of familiar narrative tics of the Dunyementary (referencing the camera and attendant technology).

The newness is also established since the previous film aimed to show Dunye’s character

47 She is never referred to by any name in the film. For this analysis, I am going to continue to refer to this character as Nikki. 188 as she resisted the serial monogamy she had previously favored and Potluck quickly establishes a comfortably domestic couple who bicker playfully in the first interview/discussion as they plan their anniversary. Potluck sits in the “between”

O’Sullivan describes but fractures the serialized elements further. By playing with seriality and employing her Dunymentary style, Dunye resists what Eve Oishi describes as the “challenge endemic to all documentary film” – how to import an entire world of representational choices and histories into “a bounded and relatively static final product”

(Oishi “Reading” 255). She Don’t Fade and Potluck together suggest a continuing and unfinished narrative instead of a bounded finality. This resistance to finality is echoed in the unfolding of relationships over the two short films: while Dunye’s character may have found a monogamous relationship, the second film centers on a love triangle between three new characters who attend the potluck.48

“Homoplace” and the Reality TV Aesthetic

The film’s focus on one evening and its comedy and drama along with other aesthetic choices made by Dunye also reveal ways in which Potluck draws not simply on the documentary form but also on the emerging reality television aesthetic of the early

1990s. Reality television has its roots in 1950s quiz shows, prank shows like Candid

Camera, talent contests like Star Search, and the rise of daytime talk shows in the late

1980s and early 1990s (Ouellette and Murray 4). Generally, however, the 1991 premiere

48 Kathleen McHugh reads Dunye’s use of recurring characters as akin to the 1970s television situation comedies Dunye cites as among her inspirations (341, 353). My analysis does not follow McHugh but in my suggestion that Dunye may draw on reality television I am implying some level of familiarity with popular genres, which does make sense given the director’s love for popular film and television forms. 189 of MTV’s The Real World is considered the beginning of contemporary reality TV. The

Real World placed seven strangers from diverse backgrounds in a shared living space and broadcast their various interactions as they navigated modern life. The successful series showcased the “emergence of many of the textual characteristics that would come to define the genre’s current form” and “trained a generation of young viewers in the language of reality TV” (Ouellette and Murray 4-5). My reading of Potluck, released in

1993 after two seasons of Real World, considers how the film reflects the newly developing grammar of reality TV which professes to “more fully provide viewers an unmediated, voyeuristic, and yet often playful look into what might be called the

‘entertaining real’” (Ouellette and Murray 5). As Susan Murray demonstrates in her essay on the topic, defining nonfiction television as either documentary or reality TV is often a matter of how these texts are being marketed and received instead of actual differences in content. She notes that regardless of their actual content or relationship to actual “reality” documentaries are assumed to be “educational or informative, authentic, ethical, socially engaged, independently produced, and serve the public interest, while reality television programs are commercial, sensational, popular entertaining, and potentially exploitative or manipulative” (67-68). Of course, Murray notes, observational documentaries focusing on the everyday and personal “can appear just as obsessed with the intimate as reality” but are positioned as attending to the mundane for the “greater good” (68). Murray calls programs that combine documentary or direct cinema techniques with the more overt narrative structures of soap operas “docusoaps” (67). The first season of Real World garnered notice for originality but the episodes structured around romantic or

190 interpersonal conflict were more popular and subsequent seasons moved from a less documentary format to a more drama-centered format borrowing from serial fictional television (Rupert and Puckett 94-95).49

I spend some time on the aesthetic and generic expectations of documentary and reality TV since I see these overlapping forms both toyed with in Potluck. In many ways, as I will discuss below, Dunye’s film focuses on the interpersonal relationships between opposing character types in a milieu suffused with various subcultural cues that are not explained to the viewer (thus failing to fulfill the supposedly educational function of the documentary film). Obviously, both reality TV and documentary film can serve educational functions although documentaries continue to be understood as providing a pedagogical function while reality TV series are understood as more experiential; both however can provide a window into a subcultural world that feels “foreign” to the viewer.50

Potluck unfolds in a much more insular physical space than She Don’t Fade, almost exclusively set in the apartment where the couple lives. Scenes that occur outside the apartment are tinted a light pink, highlighting their difference from the interior space;

49 In their essay on reality TV, Laurie Rupert and Sayanti Ganguly Puckett frame the shift in the aims of The Real World in alarmist and socially conservative terms, characterizing the series as “concerned with sex” (94) and chastising reality TV more broadly for favoring “ratings and money rather than directorial integrity, originality, or insight” (95). Their critique illustrates Murray’s claims about the ethical expectations of attached to some genres (documentary as serving a social good) while others are seen as simply a commercial enterprise (reality TV). This of course obscures the social importance of Real World as a series that, for example, was one of the first television series to present an HIV-positive man living a full life and entering into an interracial relationship. 50 As in the previous note, a clear example of the complex interplay between educational and entertainment roles can be seen in the inclusion of Pedro Zamora, an HIV-positive openly gay man, in the third season of The Real World. José Esteban Muñoz demonstrates the way in which Zamora used his time on the show to subvert the capitalist aims of MTV and promote education about multiple intersecting issues while the network simultaneously worked to contain his narrative within a more normative trajectory (Disidentifications 143-160). 191 the visual difference is perhaps most visible in the final scene when the character of

Megan storms out of the apartment and the film cuts from an interior shot (colored in the normal hues) to an exterior shot as she stomps away and runs into a lesbian couple who are late for the potluck. The film shows the two women planning their potluck, and then cleaning the apartment (referred to in an intertitle as “Homoplace”) before cutting to the potluck as it is happening. Dunye’s potluck space echoes the common conceit in reality television of placing a cast of characters in a relatively contained space (whether it be the shared house/apartment on The Real World [1991-present] or the family home of ur- reality TV docusoap PBS’s An American Family [1973]) and then observing the interactions between differing personalities. The parameters of the apartment are defined both physically by the various rooms shown over the course of the film (a bedroom, a kitchen, the living room, a large dining room table, and even the bathroom) as well as by the affiliations of those who enter into this “homoplace” with their connections to one of the two hosts. “Homoplace” suggests a gay or lesbian exclusive space but at least one of the women attending the party has had male romantic partners suggesting a more open understanding of “homo.” The couple’s gay male friend and neighbor, played by Black queer theorist Robert Reid-Pharr, comes over to help with preparation but leaves before the actual potluck because he says, there will be “Too much fish on the menu for me, darling,” invoking a slang term for women. Reid-Pharr’s comment suggests a further demarcation of the potluck space as one reserved for women.51 By reconfiguring the

51 Referring to women as “fish” or “fishy” definitely invokes a misogynist and essentialist understanding of women as reducible to their anatomy. Reid-Pharr uses the term jokingly in this scene and the lesbian couple receives it as a good-natured jest/explanation and not as an insult. The term “fish” either in reference to women or in reference to trans women (or trans feminine individuals) and drag queens’ ability to “pass” as 192 space as for women only, Reid-Pharr offers an instance of the film showing identities (in this case the “homo” or gay label) as constantly being renegotiated. The reconfiguring of what qualifies as a home space is a trope which echoes the uses of domestic space in the previous chapter; in Maker of Saints Bird and Alex use video technology and other art to make art in their adjoining apartments and mess with the public/private divide. In the next chapter, singer Erykah Badu’s choice to strip on the streets of her home town offers another figuration of the relationship between one’s body and one’s chosen or given home space.

Along with a spatially bound space, Potluck also presents a community bounded by a variety of cultural and subcultural knowledges related to the overlapping Black and lesbian or queer communities represented. Instead of fulfilling the ethnographic or educational role expected by documentary film or often built into the narrative structure of reality TV (such as series which aim to reveal a previously unknown subculture),

Potluck presents a series of jokes and references without any pedantic explanation. The use of the potluck as a structuring device facilitating the social encounters that provide the film’s central action draws on in-jokes within lesbian communities; the stereotype of the lesbian potluck as a traditional communal gathering is one fostered from within. Gail

Sausser skewers this trope in her humorous collection Lesbian Etiquette (1986) writing,

“I’ve gone to so many potlucks since I came out that I once threatened to write a cookbook called ‘1,001 Things to Make for a Lesbian Potluck’” (33) and noting that potlucks are “egalitarian events” allowing every attendant to bring what they can based

“women” continues to circulate in popular and queer cultural spaces with some finding it exceptionally offensive and others seeing it as simply a well-intentioned joke. 193 on their cooking abilities. Sausser’s essay on lesbian potluck also references the complex dietary restrictions of some within lesbian communities who eschew meat or dairy, a point Dunye also satirizes in her film when two women bond over their complete disgust at tofu quiche and their preference for fried chicken (a scene I will analyze when I analyze the film’s love triangle).52

Queering Lesbian Identities

While the film’s title and Reid-Pharr’s comment about “too much fish” might seem to present an essentialist vision of a lesbian space, a monologue by Reid-Pharr about his character and the term “queen” opens up a more expansive and queer understanding of identity categories. Reid-Pharr’s unnamed character serves to help the couple set up for the potluck – he critiques the cleaning, assists Nikki with choosing her outfit, and compliments Nikki on her anniversary present for Linda/Shae – but leaves before the actual event starts. When he first arrives at the apartment wearing a T-shirt that reads “Miss Girl,” one of the women refers to him as “such a queen.” Twice intercut with the ongoing action of him helping Nikki dress we see a close-up of Reid-Pharr saying,

“queen,” in a style reminiscent of the more essayistic films of Marlon Riggs. The third time the film cuts away to Reid-Pharr however it adopts the more documentary approach developed in She Don’t Fade with Reid-Pharr referring to his character in the third person (“he”) while also using the first person to expand on the idea of what “queen”

52 The film’s title comes from a comment by one attendee who tells her girlfriend, “We’re not going for the potluck; we’re going for the passion” indicating that the sharing of food is a means for connecting people with shared or divergent experiences. 194 means. He explains that the label “queen” “does not end the conversation but rather provides an entrée “into who that person may be.” He adds that calling someone a queen is not reductive, explaining:

It’s like saying that somebody’s Black. You know how people always say ‘Oh I’m not

just a black artist, I’m not just a Black writer.’ Well why do you have to say that because

Black is the world and Black is everything. I think that to be gay is completely expansive

and to be a queen is completely expansive. To be femme is completely expansive and that

he sort of, that character, sort of revels in it. And I don’t think that he would mind being

called a queen, wouldn’t think that that reduced him.

Reid-Pharr’s speech carries the weight of a documentary educational lesson and yet never really defines the multitude of terms (queen, Black, gay, femme) perhaps in part relying on assumed viewer knowledge but also because he conceives of them broadly. He defines these categories as broad and expansive (“everything,” “the world”) allowing them to encompass disparate individuals instead of simply defining a monolith. By saying that

“queen” shows what a person “may be” he argues that these terms are simultaneously open and constantly renegotiated. By claiming both “queen” (often broadly associated with effeminate performance in gay men) and “femme” (often broadly associated with feminine performance in lesbian women), the speech troubles neat binary oppositions about queer gender performances and their supposed association with certain bodies or sexual identities.53 In yoking Blackness with femme and queen identities/labels, Reid-

53 As ideas of queer identity and especially queer gender identities have become increasingly open in the last 15-20 years, “femme” as a label has moved outside of simply lesbian cultural contexts and some men or trans individuals also adopt the term as a way to describe their own performance of femininity or a feminine essence. I am not indexing this more recent usage here, but the dichotomy between gay and lesbian identities that was more visible and sustained in the 1970s, 80s and 90s. 195

Pharr predicts the mode of thinking that would come to be called queer of color critique in which identities of race, gender, and sexuality are co-constitutive, but his recital here suggests that they may sit alongside each other without necessarily having neat causal links.

In 1993, Reid-Pharr was a graduate student at Yale; he has since established himself as a key figure in theoretical conversations about queerness and Black identity.

Valerie Smith reads his monologue as linked to his later academic status and says he functions as “the voice of the authoritative commentator” in a traditional documentary

(108). While it is tempting to re-read the film in light of his later work, I am less convinced that his positioning in the film is about his academic stature (which is not referenced within the filmic world) and if he is presented as an authority figure, this is diminished by his subsequent decision to not stay for the potluck. His authority as a

“queen” is more clearly established within the filmic world and while he may physically leave, his ideas about the messiness of identity categories linger throughout the balance of Potluck. In his 2001 essay “Living as a Lesbian,” Reid-Pharr describes his relationship with Dunye: “I respect her boyishness as she cherishes my effeminacy. We are a couple, mentioned in one breath as dinner parties are planned, given to public quarrels over the minutiae of everyday life …” (160). This articulation of their close friendship provides an extratextual understanding of his placement within Potluck and further articulates the gender play he calls for in his monologue about being a “queen.”

Reid-Pharr does not directly address the category of “lesbian” in the film yet his ideas about the simultaneous expansiveness and messiness of labels can be seen in the

196 drama which unfolds during the potluck. By employing reality TV aesthetics and insisting on the continued presence of the camera as a desiring tool, the film proceeds to question the overlapping identities of Black and lesbian through the central love triangle that emerges at the anniversary soiree. While Linda and Nikki are the hosts, Potluck centers the shifting desires of three guests: Megan, a white activist, her date Tracy, a

Black graduate student, and Evelyn, a Black dancer and performer they meet at the event.

Over the course of the evening, Tracy connects with Evelyn and resists Megan’s somewhat imperialist desire to solidify a romantic relationship based on the white woman’s assumption that her extensive knowledge of Black culture qualifies her to have

Tracy.

Confessing to Difference

Megan and Tracy are both granted the power of individual interviews throughout the film; in some ways these follow the aesthetic pattern of She Don’t Fade with the women narrating their actions as their characters (both introduce themselves and then the characters they are playing in the film). Unlike the previous film the women’s direct address is frequently intercut to comment on the narrative action as it unfolds and in some places the monologues are dialogic as their accounts disagree about what is happening. Dunye’s use of monologues in Potluck mirrors the confessional, an elements of Real World that has become integral to the aesthetic and narrative structure of reality television; the confessional is a site away from the ongoing action where individual cast members are encouraged to “confess” how they feel about themselves, fellow cast

197 members, or previous events.54 By speaking to the camera, Warhol argues, “Subjects on

The Real World are thus implicitly granted authority to speak about their own impressions and feelings, and therefore to hail the viewer” (69). While Muñoz notes that these confessions are obviously heavily mediated by the show’s producers, he also argues, “These [confessional] spaces have been used by the cast as sites where they could perform their selves solo and in private. Real Worlders have used these solo performances to argue for themselves and their identities” (Disidentifications 145).

Warhol and Muñoz are both considering how reality television’s use of the direct address inveighs against structural elements of television more broadly – usually speaking to the camera is reserved for authority figures on TV – but I think that Dunye’s use of the intercut asides by two of her main characters serves a similar function of arguing for identities as the viewer sees them pitted against each other and called into question. The interviews with Tracy and Megan serve as spaces where we see their conflicting views of their relationship, opposing ideas about racial solidarity, and two different understandings of the interplay between desire and identity labels.

In the section entitled “Failing the Chitling Test,” the film introduces Tracy and

Megan with individual interviews alongside their role in the conversation at the potluck.

Each woman’s introductory monologue occurs before they enter the discussion in the action of the meal and taken together their asides and role in the general party demonstrate both the contested nature of their romance and their differing relationships

54 Katherine McHugh reads Potluck as parodying “the conventions of participant-observer ethnography in its use of the autoethnographic mode that Dunye developed throughout the Dunyementaries” (354). I find McHugh’s analysis compelling but I would argue that a) the reality TV genre draws from this ethnographic approach and b) Dunye’s films are not nearly as pedantic or wholly educational as the ethnographic tradition. 198 toward racial identity. A Black woman with short natural hair, Tracy’s Blackness is called into question through an awkward exchange with Linda/Dunye who attempts to connect with her by asking about her research. Tracy’s graduate work in 19th century

Irish novelists contrasts sharply with Linda’s work in Africana studies implicitly suggesting that Tracy is failing at a kind of political Black lesbianism. When Linda asks if Tracy’s work includes Black writers, Tracy awkwardly rebuffs her and Linda takes the opportunity to leave the room and check on her quiche. Tracy seems to be the one failing the Chitling Test, a reference to the sociologist Adrian Dove’s Dove Counterbalance

General Intelligence Test (known colloquially as the Chitling Test) developed in the late

1960s. The thirty question multiple-choice test demonstrated the cultural biases built into intelligence tests that favored white children by instead asking questions that favored certain iterations of Black experience (Newsweek). Dunye’s use of the phrase in the section title not only leaves the viewer to decide who is failing but further leaves some viewers to fail themselves if the reference is not part of their cultural knowledge.

Where Tracy’s lack of cultural cache signals what at first seems like failure, her date Megan is confident about her knowledge of Black culture in a controlling and fetishistic manner viewers are told will not end well. A white woman with short wavy red hair, Megan (or the actress who introduces herself as Nora) wears a blue dress and lots of costume jewelry in her close-up monologues. In her first aside, she tells the viewer,

“what happened at the potluck to Megan, my character, was that I came with someone who I felt like I had control over, in a way that I knew more about where she was coming from and I was going to teach her. And I got dumped.” Similarly to She Don’t Fade, the

199 film undercuts any narrative suspense by having a character/actor (in both cases a white lesbian) simply tell us the ultimate outcome of the central romance. Knowing that Megan will not be successful in her desire for Tracy opens up the possibility that perhaps the white woman is the one who fails the Chitling Test since her fantasy of cultural supremacy lacks an awareness of the effects of these actions in a real world context.

Megan’s telling comments that she believes she has “control” over Tracy and that she can

“teach her” demonstrate a clear critique of the well-meaning white liberal figure. When the film cuts back to the potluck scene from Megan’s first confessional scene she is loudly describing her involvement in a disruptive ACT-UP protest, further cementing her role as a white woman whose involvement in political movements and non-white/Third

World causes is about a performance of control over these causes.

Tracy’s growing discontent with Megan’s controlling and chauvinist behavior comes to a head at the potluck and, she tells the viewer in a later monologue:

I was almost embarrassed sometimes because [Megan] knew so much more about

the music, every [African] country, the clothing. She was really really into the

scene. I really liked it in the beginning but after a while it started to get on my

nerves because I felt that she was trying to prove to me that she knew what it was

like to be black more so than I did.

As I noted previously, Warhol argues that, paradoxically, narratives of self must be somewhat incoherent in order to truly feel real for viewers of reality television. Tracy’s openness about her shifting feelings about Megan feel real and also mirror the viewer’s assumed alliance with Tracy against her date. In her comments about Megan, Tracy

200 reveals the complexity of racial categories and racial performance showing that simple cultural knowledge cannot replace actual lived experience. Ultimately passing the

Chitling Test proves a set of cues and racial markers but it cannot measure, for example,

Tracy’s unique experiences as presumably one of few Black women pursuing graduate education in literature (especially non-US/European literature). The language of “the scene” suggests a hobbyist approach to Black culture – that Blackness is similar to getting “into” a musical form like disco or heavy metal – as opposed to a lifetime framed by a Black lesbian identity. Tracy’s use of the colloquial expression of getting on one’s nerves tethers her annoyance to a bodily experience that cannot be simply adopted like clothing or musical preferences. Linda’s interaction with Tracy about her research stands as another moment of social shame, with one Black woman subtly policing another through her faulty assumption they would both be studying African American literature.

Evelyn’s disruption of the budding relationship between Tracy and Megan echoes her broader role as a figure who disrupts presumed identity categories. The attraction between Evelyn and Tracy ultimately gives Tracy the energy to resist Megan’s controlling attitude and follow her own desires. The film never presents Evelyn in a solo confessional interview and so her character develops solely through her interactions with the other characters at the potluck. Crucial to the resolution of the film and its resistance of static identity politics is the fact that Evelyn does not identify as lesbian, a fact that

Megan tells the camera in one of her annoyed asides. Without access to Evelyn’s own account, the viewer must draw on the references Evelyn makes to a former male partner alongside her flirtation with Tracy to attempt to categorize her desires. Evelyn’s openness

201 to romantic partners who are men or women suggests an openness that could alternately be read as a bisexual sexual identity or a queer way of being in the world.

At the same time, as Cheryl Clarke notes, the label of bisexuality can be seen as

“safer” than “lesbian” “for it posits the possibility of a relationship with a man, regardless of how infrequent or nonexistent the female bisexual’s relationships with men might be”

(244). While Clarke argues there is “no one kind of lesbian” and “Not all women who are involved in sexual-emotional relationships with women” identify with a lesbian identity or community (243), she does simultaneously analogize bisexuality to mixed-race

African Americans who choose to not identity as Black (244). Clarke’s emotionally charged 1981 essay demonstrates a complicated relationship between the intersecting identities of Blackness, lesbianism or “dyke” identity, and woman/black womanhood.

Clarke writes quite openly as a Black lesbian but Potluck does not provide the viewer with any access to Evelyn’s own thoughts about her identity; her desires are entirely presented through action and interaction which in many ways mimics the way in which identities are always in process in the daily lives of those inhabiting them. Tellingly, within the lesbian community Dunye depicts in her film, it is the white woman who balks at Evelyn’s desires not neatly following identity lines. As Stefanie Dunning writes about

Dunye’s later film The Watermelon Woman, Potluck does not traffic in the positioning of the Black body as the “other” but rather centers Black female lesbian desire (93-96).

Megan emerges in Potluck as the outside figure: an unlikable and possessive white lesbian figure who cannot understand the more expansive ideas of desire practiced by the

202 other women at the potluck. At the aesthetic level, Potluck privileges the flirtation between Evelyn and Tracy in ways that mirror their growing connection.

Desiring Women Not Labels, or, the Not Lesbian

I argue the film validates Black female pleasure through its employment of the same type of desiring camera I argued operated in She Don’t Fade. Where the first film followed Shae’s literal gaze and demonstrated the laughter and awkwardness of sexual encounter, Potluck resists the filmic conventions of shot-reverse shot in order to visually demonstrate the success and failure of the growing bond between Evelyn and Tracy.

Shot-reverse shot describes a cinematic convention “in which the second shot shows the field from which the first shot is assumed to have been taken” (Silverman 201).

Conversations between two people are a classic example of this, with the scene cut so that the image alternates between the two speakers implying that the camera’s gaze on one originates in the space of the other. Kaja Silverman describes shot-reverse shot as central to maintaining the “cinematic illusion” as this convention seeks to present the fantasy of the shots issuing from the gazes of characters and thus denying the presence of a technological apparatus (202). Avoiding this convention, as Dunye does in Potluck with the conversations between Evelyn and Tracy serves as another instance of the filmic seams being made visible and reminds the viewer again of the presence of the camera itself. This dynamic unfolds in the first moment of potential connection; the camera shifts from a medium shot of Tracy talking to unseen women at the table to swing back and forth between Evelyn and Tracy when they discover both grew up in the same DC

203 suburbs. The physical blocking of the scene and the camera framing places Megan between the two black women (presumably intending to sit next to her “date”) and instead of cutting between the two as they discuss their shared spatial history the camera physical moves back and forth highlighting Megan’s silent presence between them.

Evelyn and Tracy connect over a shared background and visually are linked not just by their Blackness but also their natural haircuts – Evelyn wears short braids pulled back under a kente-patterned headband and Tracy has short kinky hair. Stefanie Dunning notes that while shorter haircuts on women are often understood to symbolize a masculine presentation which is associated with lesbianism, for Black women these hairstyles can also signal a break from Eurocentric codes of beauty (100-102). These ideological codes are neither simply about blackness or a queer relationship to sexuality/gender but can be read as operating as both without a clear fixity. While the two

Black women begin to build a rapport, this is halted when Evelyn realizes Tracy is younger than her. The camera demonstrates the potential severing of their growing bond when it ceases to oscillate between them and instead zooms in on Megan who visually represents this breakage.

The two Black women reconnect in the ultimate intimate space – the bathroom – a space that on reality television has historically been the only off limits space. Dunye’s desiring camera however follows Tracy into the bathroom in anticipation of Evelyn’s entrance. Following the final intertitle, the film cuts to a medium shot mostly taken up by an expanse of blue wall painted with colorful shapes but Tracy can be seen in the right corner of the screen seated. The camera remains stationary as Tracy stands up from the

204 toilet, pulls up her pants, and flushes – the bottom half of her body remains outside the frame but the sounds and what is visible allows the viewer to understand the space they have been placed inside. From this intimate space, the film cuts away to a brief solo interview with Tracy: she tells the camera, “Evelyn walked in on me in the bathroom,” mimicking the type of simultaneous commentary frequently intercut into the action on reality television. This type of cutaway provides a glimpse of interiority and establishes

Tracy’s experience as primary to the unfolding scene, especially coming after the sharing of the intimate moment of using the restroom.

When the film returns to the bathroom scene, Evelyn enters from the left in the midst of a coughing fit. The two women share a moment in this distinctly awkward space as Tracy tries to help her stop the coughing and a subsequent bout of hiccups from drinking beer too quickly. In another brief confessional shot, Tracy laughs as she explains what happened. Back in the bathroom, the scene shifts from random encounter to a more intentional probing by both women as each attempts to assess the interest of the other:

Evelyn asks how long Tracy has been dating Megan and Tracy describes the relationship in more casual terms. Tracy compliments the spicy chicken Evelyn brought and both admit to not trying to the tofu dishes presented at the potluck. As Kathleen McHugh notes of Potluck, “the dynamics of food sharing hilariously belie any fantasy of lesbians as a homogenous community” (354). An early potluck scene shows various characters outlining their various food aversions, including strict veganism, while other guests explain that their dishes contain meat, dairy, and other potentially forbidden ingredients.

Dunye mocks stereotypes of the so-called “crunch granola” lesbian, one who has strong

205 moral and political convictions about eating only healthy foods and often avoiding meat or dairy. Potluck demonstrates the inability of any single stereotype to encapsulate ideas about lesbianism in multiple realms including cuisine. Kathleen McHugh writes that while Dunye “depicts women who share sexual preferences and practices, she cannily throws food culture into the mix, taboos on what can and cannot be eaten wreaking havoc with the contours of any stable grouping based on sexuality” (355). Various bodily appetites are revealed as under constant negotiation; the two Black women connect over shared food pleasures even though Evelyn does not carry the label of “lesbian.”

Evelyn’s offer of providing the recipe becomes an opportunity for flirtation when

Tracy insists that she was would rather watch Evelyn make it for her. Sharing food and the process of making it conjures intersecting notions of shared community (lesbian or queer, women, Black) while also invoking clear notions of bodily intimacy. Tracy’s enjoyment in eating chicken as she has never had it before draws on intersecting notions of cooking within Black communities. Evelyn insinuates that she has tempered the spiciness for the potluck, saying that Tracy should have it when she “really” makes it.

Tracy’s naiveté about cooking chicken returns to some of her earlier discomfort around not being Black enough and yet, unlike Megan’s possessive whiteness, Evelyn offers to share this knowledge. Dunye’s film does offer a potentially culturally essentialist or

Black nationalist message in this moment of two Black women aligning themselves

206 through shared cultural practice, yet at the same time this is complicated by the obvious erotic insinuations which offer a more complex idea of Black lesbian/queer community.55

The blossoming of the attraction between Evelyn and Tracy, then, offers a notion of Black lesbian/queer identities as interlaced with overlapping notions of Blackness and female desire. Writing about Watermelon Woman, Dunning argues Dunye “centers the black woman’s experience in order to demonstrate black lesbian experience is black experience” (96). I am arguing that Potluck takes a queerer approach to identity but similarly the earlier film argues for these alternative and queer erotic arrangements as part of the Black experiences of the women centered by the narrative. I say “queerer” not in order to fix “queer” as an identity category, rather to address the fact that Evelyn’s sexual identity remains unmarked in the film. She references a previous male partner in conversation but the most information the viewer receives is delivered by Megan in one of her asides. Grousing about the rift opening up between her and Tracy, Megan tells the camera, “I really don’t get what’s up with her. She [Tracy] meets this Black woman

[Evelyn] for a total of three hours, the woman doesn’t even identify as a lesbian, and

[Tracy] starts ignoring me.” Dunye’s use of the confessional here allows the film to showcase a more direct vision of Megan’s interior monologue in which she understands her role as arbiter of identities – in this case she implies both that Tracy’s interest in

Evelyn is illogical since Evelyn is not a lesbian while also suggesting that there is a racial politics at play. Megan has clearly understood her proximity to Tracy as reinforcing her

55 McHugh reads in the film’s title and the ongoing discussions of food/eating a “naughty double entendre” about lesbian sexual practices (353). While I find this reading amusing, I privilege a broader understanding of food and cooking as intimate embodied practices instead of a more direct relationship to specific sexual practices. 207 cultural currency in Black circles (she has a Black woman as a date so she must “get it”) while also showcasing her depth of knowledge (she knows Black culture “better” than the

Black woman she is with).

Megan is of course correct in thinking that racial politics inform her fraught relationship with Tracy, yet she fails to see that they are the result of her own racist framing of their engagement with each other. Similarly, her thinking about Evelyn as not lesbian fails to account for the multitude of women whose desires escape simple identity categories; Megan sees this only as a lack of identification instead of as an opening out of possibilities. Megan says, “I thought Tracy and I had things in common” missing entirely how little she bothers to listen to Tracy and, even at the end of the film, remaining woefully unaware of how she operationalizes racial difference as a tool of domination.

As in She Don’t Fade, the burgeoning relationship at a party is placed offscreen and the camera exits the party still in process. Potluck ends with Megan storming out of the party alone; Tracy chooses to stay and continue talking with Evelyn, a move that clearly forecasts the end of any potential relationship between Megan and Tracy. Instead of staying at the potluck, viewers follow Megan’s angry exit which is punctuated by the shift from the black and white coloring of the shots in the apartment to the pink tinted coloring of the world outside Linda and Nikki’s space. Megan’s chosen expulsion from the “homospace,” marked through this visual shift, signals the film’s investment in the relationship blossoming between Evelyn and Tracy. The white woman’s racial myopia should not be read as Dunye’s complete foreclosure of racial solidarity; obviously her close alliance with Paula in Fade demonstrates that the director is not advocating a strict

208 cultural nationalism. For Megan, Evelyn’s lack of labeling makes her simultaneously illegible and a threat. Megan’s character stands in for a failure to reckon with one’s racial privileges as well as cautioning against an obsessive need to categorize which undercuts racial and sexual identities as constantly under negotiation.

Dunye’s film reflects the vision of lesbianism presented by Reid-Pharr when he writes: “To become lesbian one has to first be committed to the process of constantly becoming, of creatively refashioning one’s humanity as a matter of course” (“Living as a

Lesbian” 161). Reid-Pharr argues the platonic ideal of lesbian is unachievable yet the lived experience of loving and desiring other women is one of constant “becoming.”

Dunye’s fractured serialization with her own physical presence consistently figured in her films demonstrates this failure of arrival; the narrative of black lesbian desire is about living in the present and moving forward, not simply arriving at some sort of endpoint or conclusion. Kara Keeling argues that the cultural ascendance of a certain vision of the

“Black lesbian” and the “Black lesbian film” of necessity means the casting aside of those images which fail to fit a narrowed dominant understanding of these categories. For

Keeling, Dunye’s choice to lay bare the labor of creation allows the viewer to see that other ways of being “Black lesbian” exist and have been consciously left out and this allows other modes of potentiality to continue to circulate (“Joining” 224). Keeling’s analysis examines Watermelon Woman but this resistance to a static “Black lesbian” and its links with the reflexive gestures of the Dunymentary are clear in Potluck and She

Don’t Fade as well and underpin the ways in which Dunye’s work links aesthetics with a queer approach to identity formation and negotiation.

2 09

Archiving the Present

Dunye’s body of work in the 1990s has received considerable scholarly attention, but in more recent queer and queer of color writing the focus has been solely on her film

The Watermelon Woman. This makes sense since the film’s narrative thrust – Dunye as a

Black lesbian videographer turning to the archives to establish a tie with a long ago Black lesbian foremother – allows for generative conversations about the value of alternative archives for queer people of color and the relationship between the historical past and ongoing issues of race, gender, and sexuality in the present. Queer theorists invested in broadening the vision of the archive use Watermelon as example (see Cvetkovich Archive

239-241; Kumbier); the film has also demonstrated the limits of identity categories

(Keeling “Joining the Lesbians”) as well as the truth value of fictional texts about racial histories (Reid-Pharr “Makes Me Feel Mighty Real”). Watermelon’s broader distribution and ease of accessibility, along with its notoriety (because of its use in the fight against the NEA) and its historical importance (as the first Black lesbian-directed feature) surely also account for the film’s precedence in continued theoretical discourse.

In this chapter, I have chosen to focus on two of the earlier short films that initially seem less concerned with questions of the archive and historical memory than

Watermelon. Given my broader focus on Black women’s negotiation of the past, turning to these two Dunyementary films about Black lesbian experiences in the contemporary moment of the 1990s may seem counterintuitive. Obviously, writing over two decades after their release the films now have their own archival function of capturing a specific moment in growing lesbian visibility, the importance of Black lesbian countercultural

210 spaces, and the rise of a Black lesbian/queer cinema. Further, however, the willingness in these films to play with the documentary form alongside other aesthetic experiments

(film and video, various colorations, text on the screen, etc) argues for an expansive understanding of texts that deserve placement in the historical/archival record. The

Dunyementary style’s focus on the everyday experiences of Black lesbian and women who desire women shows them as worthy of ethnographic study and being remembered.

Dunye writes, “I am dedicated to building a visual language for black lesbian life that focuses on our creativity, our culture, and concerns about a world where we are forgotten” (“Building Subjects” 18). The visual language Dunye has built across her career inveighs against a world that seeks to deny Black lesbian existence – both in the past and in the present. Instead of being forgotten, Dunye asks that Black lesbian lives be celebrated as constantly being reanimated and considered by those living in the present moment. Dunye continues to make films exploring the Black lesbian experience, most recently in the short film Black is Blue (2014) which centers on a Black trans man coming to terms with his former Black lesbian community.

In a moment at the beginning of Potluck, Dunye gestures towards the contentious history of the camera in capturing marginalized experiences; Reid-Pharr and

Linda/Dunye talk in the background of the shot but in the foreground Nikki applies makeup with the camera as her mirror. “I love when she puts on makeup,” Linda says to

Reid-Pharr, highlighting the intimacy of this moment of preparation or putting on the public face. Nikki’s use of the camera as a mirror continues Dunye’s ongoing investment in marking the apparatus and bringing the viewer into the filmic world, but here the

211 camera serves a reflective surface. I do not want to simply read this moment as telling the viewer that the camera serves as a reflective surface since representation is a freighted project no matter who controls the gaze, but I would argue that here Dunye pokes fun at the false notion that her gaze might carry the imprimatur of authenticity or a univocal gaze in Black lesbian life. At the same time, the moment of intimacy with the camera is linked with the construction of Linda’s gender and erotic performance, and further, the viewer is asked to think about if the apparatus can ever be a mirror. Dunye’s “visual language for Black lesbian life” presents one vision of this world, yet it is always a production, a negotiation, an image under construction; she wants the viewer to remember not simply what they have seen but also how every image and sound comes to us constructed out of love and desire.

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CHAPTER 4: “I don’t wanna time travel no mo”: Race, Gender, and the Politics of

Replacement in Erykah Badu’s “Window Seat”

“Are you watching, America?” —Erykah Badu, tweet, April 2, 2010

Black singer Erykah Badu’s controversial 2010 music video “Window Seat” opens with a dissonance between video and audio signaling a disordering of links among the historical past, the post-racial present, and sacred space. Viewers watch Badu park her classic car in present-day downtown Dallas, Texas, while audio is overlaid from the day of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. A newscaster describes the rows of spectators waiting to see the car carrying Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline. The words

“A Story by Erykah Badu” appear on the screen in shaky black-and-white text imitating the instability of analog film, and the historical audio is replaced by the sound of a spinning analog film-reel. The entire video is processed digitally to appear slightly out of focus, with the exception of Badu’s face. Color appears muted and washed out, suggesting the quality of 1960s amateur films.

When the video returns to Badu exiting her vehicle, the opening drum beats of the song “Window Seat” begin. Badu adopts an irreverent swagger as she walks the route of

Kennedy’s motorcade and strips naked. While processed to approximate the look of older film technology, the video was filmed on location in front of actual unknowing

213 bystanders in contemporary Dallas. Badu never meets the eyes of the confused tourists that watch as she methodically removes her clothing a piece at a time, taking the items off and letting them fall on the sidewalk to be left behind. Her clothing is not the flashy or high fashion couture that might normally appear in a music video; instead, she wears mundane clothing—a black trench coat, a purple hooded sweatshirt, black leggings, and generic black underwear—and her hair is worn back from her face under a rag. The act of removing clothing signifies sexual intimacy, yet “Window Seat” does not frame her body in the glamorous style of traditional music videos. She is Othered both because of her methodical undressing and her position as a Black woman moving through the visual realm and the physical space. As she removes her underwear, the viewer sees ample hips which might be read as a reminder of Badu’s body as maternal. The blurring of her breasts and crotch speaks to the way that Badu outs social convention, choosing to engage discourses of deviance by exposing herself. The entire video feels dreamlike, an effect aided by slowing down the actual footage and the lack of ambient sounds from the day of filming. In the final seconds, the video becomes more surreal when Badu falls down as if dead on the spot where Kennedy was shot. The sound of a rifle shot is heard and the word “groupthink” bleed from her head onto the sidewalk. The camera angle shifts upward toward the sky, then the gaze returns to the site of Badu’s “death,” and the video is edited so that she appears reborn and walks toward the camera. Throughout the video Badu wears her hair back from her face, but this reborn Badu wears long beaded braids.

Badu’s confident public spectacle demonstrates what I understand as her

214 commitment to a Black feminist project of using cultural production to question dominant ideologies. She demands that viewers (both her unknowing audience in Dealey Plaza in

Dallas and internet viewers) encounter her sexual and maternal body on her terms.

“Window Seat” restages Kennedy’s assassination with Badu’s Black body standing in for the dead president’s white masculine presence. Filmed in one take, guerilla-filmmaking style in 2010, Badu released the video via the micro-blogging Twitter as the first single off her fourth album, New Amerykah Part Two: Return of the Ankh (2010). After the video became a viral sensation, the city of Dallas fined her for disorderly conduct, since she filmed without a permit. The city’s legal response, along with popular media responses, reveals progress narratives of racial progress in the United States as fantasies instead of lived realities. In this chapter, I move significantly forward in historical time from Cheryl Dunye’s 1990s experiments with video technology to the use of digital filmmaking in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Like video before it, digital filmmaking allows for even greater mobility and interactivity for users and further democratizes access to capturing visual images.

I argue that Badu’s video does not simply stage an historical moment, but queers the boundaries between past and present by staging what I call a “politics of replacement.” As I elaborate in this chapter, I understand the politics of replacement as an artistic tactic employed by Black female artists that uses the plasticity of technology in the late-twentieth and early-twenty- first centuries to contest official narratives about race, gender, and sexuality. By assuming ownership of the space of Kennedy’s presidency and spectacular death, Badu becomes a disruptive Black time-traveler

215 refusing the official rendering of racial history in the United States. “Window Seat” and its reverberations reveal the limitations of the progressive optimism bound up in the characters of Kennedy and President Barack Obama, who is often understood as the earlier president’s spiritual descendant. According to Erica R. Edwards, reading Obama’s win as the fruition of ongoing Black freedom struggles serves the logic of post- racialism by producing popular media depictions of anti-racist activist movements as simultaneously triumphant and no longer necessary or “anachronistic” (192). The “surge in racist and seditious rhetoric after Obama’s election affirms how fragile and contested the reforms of the civil rights movement are” (Gaines 195) and the continued need for political critique, like the one leveled in “Window Seat.”

Badu’s “Window Seat” unsettles official narratives of a linear progress from racism and inequality to post-racism and equality by returning to the iconic image of

Kennedy’s assassination folded into a larger narrative of civil rights. In our culture of what Shannon Winnubst calls “phallicized whiteness,” temporality is always oriented toward an unattainable future in an economy of utility built around the social myth of

“progress” (Queering 150–75). The spectacle of Badu’s Black female body opposes body politics that reinforce normative links between proper time and proper movement through space. As I’ve discussed throughout this project, queer theory’s recent turn to temporality offers a way to understand deviant or queer bodies as failing to follow normative cycles of bourgeois reproduction, capitalist production, and hetero-patriarchal maintenance

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(Freeman Time Binds; Halberstam; Kafer).56

Reading “Window Seat” as a critique of the post-racial mood of the nation after

Obama’s election requires an understanding of the staging of racial inequality as an historical problem. Scholars employ terms including new racism (Collins Black Sexual) and color-blind racism (Bonilla-Silva and Dietrich) to describe how racism continues in spite of popular sentiment that race no longer pertains to everyday life in mainstream

(white) America. David Theo Goldberg describes the processes of post-racialism in language I find productive for considering the disordering impulses of “Window Seat”; he argues that post-racialism “erases the very histories producing the formations of racial power and privilege, burying them alive but out of recognizable reach, thus wiping away the very conditions out of which guilt could arise. No guilt because nothing recognizable to be guilty about” (209). Working from Goldberg’s description, I consider post-racial functioning as both a popular theory about the achievement of equality and as an historical moment at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

Badu refuses the cultural mandate to bury racism in the past by restaging an historical moment in a highly public setting. Her performance reveals the ongoing machinations of power relegating Othered bodies to certain social positions, a process made literal when those same bodies are denied access to public spaces. Katherine

McKittrick describes geographic domination as the process of naturalizing categories of

56 Queering as I use it in the is chapter operates as a verb describing actions which push against normative logics, both those that are intentional and those socially informed, as in the deviance attributed to Black women’s bodies. I am not using queer as an identity-marker or adjective meaning same-sex eroticism. Jason King notes that Badu gained widespread notice, unlike fellow neo-soul singer Meshell Ndegeocello, whose openness about bisexuality ran counter to heteropatriachal understandings of Black “community” (237). Badu may flout middle- class ideals of propriety, but she remains within a heterosexual paradigm.

217 difference through the fantasy that space exists as static and ahistorical (Demonic ix–xxi); it “naturalize[s] both identity and place, repetitively spatializing where nondominant groups ‘naturally’ belong” (Demonic xv). As a Dallas native, the fining of Badu for expressing herself in the center of her own city demonstrates a form of spatial disenfranchisement; through her disruption of a space enshrining a fallen president,

“Window Seat” shows geography is an “alterable terrain” that Black women can use to assert a sense of place (Demonic xviii).

My analysis of “Window Seat” and its reverberations engages not just queer and feminist critiques of temporality and spatiality, but also follows Black feminist critiques of popular visual culture’s consistent reliance upon Black women’s presence as a sign of excessive sexuality (Collins Black Feminist; Fleetwood; hooks “Selling”). Patricia Hill

Collins argues that “controlling images” or stereotypes work to maintain the social dominance of white patriarchal interests by attempting to contain the perceived excessiveness of Black women’s bodies (Black Feminist 76–106). In “Window Seat,”

Badu attempts to disavow simplistic readings of her Black body through tropes of the sexually available Jezebel, the “wasteful” reproductive impulses imputed to the “welfare queen,” or the cold asexuality of the proper Black lady (ibid.; Thompson). Badu’s performance attempts to disrupt normative readings of her body, but she cannot escape the fact that for Black women, “private identities are always and already public”

(Holloway 18). Black women’s experience of being subject to the gaze is not just about race, but also intersecting ideas of gender, sexuality, and class. I understand processes of racialization as concomitant with the production of sexuality and gender as social

218 categories of meaning; race cannot be discussed separately from intersecting categories of identity (Crenshaw; Ferguson).

My interrogation of “Window Seat” requires braiding together strands across historical moments and media. Before tussling with the visual, I consider the time- traveling impulses of Badu’s lyrics and music in “Window Seat.” I then turn to an examination of the visual archive of Kennedy’s tragic death, and demonstrate Badu’s employment of a politics of replacement to disorder the former president’s iconicity.

From the realm of the visual, I move to the physical space of Dealey Plaza and the broader setting of Dallas—places that seek to bury racism in the past through memorialization and spatial segregation. Badu’s Black female body conflicts with the sacred nature of Dealey Plaza as the site of the tragic end of an iconic white hetero- patriarchal romance of progressive patriotism. My analysis ends in the precarious historical moment “after” race that “Window Seat” attempts to interrupt and disorder.

The rhetoric of responses to Badu’s public nudity reflects the vexed position of the Black maternal body in a moment at the supposed end of Black politics. In spite of the video’s controversial reception, “Window Seat” offers a new way to consider the public’s relationship to history and space, looking both backward and forward to queerly imagine new possibilities.

Badu as Mother/Artist/Sociologist

My examination of “Window Seat” joins previous readings of Badu’s history of using her artistic work for “self-conscious, self-directed acts of intellectual disruption”

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(Edwards Charisma xii). Scholars of Black popular culture examine Badu’s engagement with Black feminist thought (Johnson; King), her syncretic use of various Afrocentric religious forms (Maxile), and the ways in which her work critiques patriarchal Black nationalist frameworks (Edwards Charisma; Iton In Search). I follow these thinkers in positioning Badu’s work as a form of cultural critique that engages multiple historical moments and forms of media. Black feminist scholarship argues for the importance of acknowledging intellectual work outside the academy. Historically, Black women developed oppositional knowledge through visual and musical artistic productions, which often achieved greater popular circulation than written texts (P.H. Collins Black Feminist

18–19). Badu (2011) describes “Window Seat” as doing intellectual work: instead of serving as mere entertainment, she views the art functioning as political protest that draws on theoretical concepts. In a 2012 Twitter post, Badu identifies herself as a mother, artist, and sociologist, tying together these different social identifications as a means of signifying the multiple valences of her cultural production and arguing for their interrelationship in her work.57 While “Window Seat” may initially appear pedantic in its insistence on delivering a message, the public response to the video and filming demonstrates the message’s continued relevance. Recent articles by Emily Lordi and

Vicki Callahan describe “Window Seat” as a “an exemplary womanist performative turn”

(Callahan 27) and a “model of contemporary, non-protest-oriented black feminist cultural

57 Badu’s Twitter post was in response to her collaboration with the rock band Flaming Lips. When a video of their 2012 cover of the song “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” went viral, Badu was horrified by the distortion of her vocals and the video’s racist depictions of Black women’s bodies as a site of disgust. She tweeted: “As a human I am disgusted with . . . what appears to be desperation and poor execution. And disregard for others. As a director I am unimpressed. As a sociologist I understand your type. As your fellow artist I am uninspired. As a woman I feel violated and underestimated.” 220 politics” (Lordi). My analysis joins their work and expands the frame to read Badu not simply as reflective of broad American presidential history and the legacy of the Civil

Rights Movement but also within the sociopolitical landscape of Dallas, Texas and

Badu’s personal relationship to this city.58

“Window Seat” needs to be understood within the broader context of Badu’s career, especially her position as the most visible artist in the neo-soul movement of the

1990s. The neo-soul genre revisits political themes and older Black musical styles associated with the civil rights era while reflecting the influences of hip-hop that came to mainstream prominence during the 1980s and ’90s.59 Producer Kedar Massenburg developed the marketing concept of neo-soul, and Badu was the first woman he signed up. Her 1997 debut album Baduizm went multi-platinum, and the following year she won the Grammys for Best New Artist and Best Female R&B Vocals. Jason King argues that

“[t]his wave of resuscitated soul culture has found its most articulate voice in Erykah

Badu” (212). Badu disavowed the neo-soul label in recent years, but her music owes an obvious debt to the soul music of the early 1970s.

58 I read Emily Lordi’s essay “‘Window Seat’: Erykah Badu, Projective Cultural Politics, and the Obama Era” only after this piece was published in its form as an article. Lordi’s essay shares a similar focus on the ways in which Badu’s engagement with Kennedy might be seen as a critique of the lack of radical progress in the wake of Obama’s presidency. Lordi reads “Window Seat” as “a model of contemporary, non-protest- oriented black feminist cultural politics” which she considers “projective” since it “it is more legible as a performative seizure of power than as a critique of or appeal to power.” The politics of performance I describe in this chapter similarly describes Badu’s “seizure of power” through the lens of Black feminist theorization and aesthetic traditions; my focus however includes a spatial and sociocultural analysis of Dallas absent from Lordi’s work. Unlike Lordi, I read Badu’s video as embodied protest and am not sure about the distinctions she elaborates between “non-protest-oriented” work and critiques of power. 59 Phillip Lamarr Cunningham (2010) argues that neo-soul music is just a continuation of earlier soul music, and that the “neo-soul” label relies upon popular and academic ideas about the death of R&B and soul music in the late 1970s. The desire to produce neo-soul as separate from previous music mirrors the broader discussions in this article about the notion of progressive narratives that rely upon endings and the fulfillment of aims. 221

Given her placement within the neo-soul genre and investment in Afro- centric politics, her engagement with Kennedy’s white masculine iconicity might appear strange.

Looking backward at the histories of the Black freedom struggle continues the trajectory of Badu’s earlier music videos. For example, her video “Next Lifetime” (1997) depicts a failed love affair reincarnated across three historical moments, including 1968 during the

Black Power movement, and demonstrates the singer’s “irreverence for spatiotemporal boundaries” (King 212). Badu’s impulse to play with historical memory follows a broader trend in the artists of the post–civil rights/post-soul era. Post-soul artists, argues

Mark Anthony Neal (22), “bastardize” past cultural moments to produce alternative meanings.

Listening to “Window Seat”

Before reading the visual text of “Window Seat,” I want to contextualize the song within the broader themes of Badu’s last two albums, as well as briefly consider the song’s acoustic and lyrical qualities. “Window Seat” was the lead single from the album

New Amerykah Part Two: Return of the Ankh (2010), a sequel to New Amerykah Part

One: Fourth World War (2008). Whereas the earlier album references 1970s

Blaxploitation film and strong Black nationalist themes, Return of the Ankh takes a more intimate tone, with Badu’s lyrics examining romantic desires. The “return” of the album’s title suggests a generic continuation, but also, in the symbol of the Egyptian ankh, the rebirth of more Afrocentric/woman-centered symbology and cosmology. Return of the

Ankh links these themes with acoustic references to space travel and science fiction,

222 suggestive of both the future and also the popular discourses surrounding the space race of the 1950s and ’60s. Championed by US presidents, including Kennedy, America’s space race explicitly tied space exploration with narratives of national triumph over foreign powers. Space travel and the cold “inhuman” sound of electronic or computerized voices throughout Return of the Ankh link the alienation of technology with the distance between lovers.

While my analysis focuses on the visual realm and its relationship to temporal and spatial politics, the actual music of “Window Seat” also reflects Badu’s project of disrupting the normative forward trajectory of national history. Initially, the video for

“Window Seat” appears to markedly depart from the content of the song, a mid-tempo ballad imploring a lost love to “come back baby, come back.” Both lyrically and sonically, however, the song presents Badu as a time-traveler thwarting the post-racial impulse to forget the historical past in pursuit of a color-blind present. Badu’s lyrical style has frequently drawn comparisons to earlier blues and R&B singers; Angela Y.

Davis, for example, compares the singer’s phrasing to Black blues singer Billie Holiday

(Blues Legacies 197). These comparisons reflect Badu’s strategic use of moans, phrasing that breaks up lines in ways that disorder straightforward lyrical meaning, and the use of nonverbal vocalizations that move between scat and mumbling. “Window Seat” opens with Badu calling out “Hey” before switching to musical moans and indecipherable vocalizations. The nonverbal sounds in the opening seconds, and repeated throughout the song, work against listeners’ expectation of lyrical comprehension and push against the song’s forward momentum.

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The first lines of the song seem to place Badu in a concrete time and place when the singer says “So, presently / I’m standing here right now,” but the “presently” undermines the arrival of this present moment (the personal moment and, more broadly, the post-racial national moment) and the song goes on to deconstruct the rigidity of this

“right now.” The speaker vacillates between purchasing a plane ticket to get “out of town” and find her lover, and calling on the lover to “come back.” Badu’s inability to bury this potentially lost love parallels what literary theorist Juliana Chang identifies as the melancholic racialized subject who fails to properly memorialize the past and pursue the appropriate forward-moving narrative of progress. Instead of “assimilating [the past] into the national Symbolic, the melancholic . . . subject embodies the past, improperly keeping alive what has not been symbolized” (112; emphasis in original). Badu refuses to accept her bodily placement in a specific temporal location and consistently troubles the boundaries of time and space. She sings, “In my mind I’m tusslin’ / Back and forth

’tween here and hustlin’ / I don’t wanna time travel no mo / I wanna be here.” The speaker cannot stop time-traveling in spite of her desire to be fully present because her resistance to progressive narratives disrupts the assumed links between physical space and the present historical moment. The back and forth of the lines reflects Badu’s refusal to actually ground herself; she moves between “here and hustlin’,” and the line draws on the double meaning of hustling to mean both hurrying and working to survive by any available means.

When Badu describes her present moment, she sings, “On this porch I’m rockin’ /

Back and forth like Lightnin’ Hopkins.” The song’s motif of continuous motion is paired

224 with a reference to Hopkins, an influential twentieth-century African American blues performer from Houston, linking Badu to the history of her home state and to Black music in the United States. Musically, “Window Seat” moves forward at a mid-tempo beat without ever progressing to a crescendo signifying a sonic climax and conclusion; this reflects the speaker’s failure to ever arrive at an endpoint, with the lyrics constantly returning to the “back and forth.” Badu’s plaintive tone and melancholic moans throughout “Window Seat” represent a refusal or inability to move beyond the putatively buried past, but she also consistently argues for a present moment—except for her, this moment is layered with the past and possible futures. The track “Out My Mind, Just in

Time” from Return of the Ankh also explores this contrary relationship to time, with Badu repeating the phrase “not this time, not this time,” yet also arguing that she has gone “out my mind / just in time”—the present becomes an unstable place in the song’s dizzying acoustic mix of multitracked voices and psychedelic synths.60

Black feminist critic Daphne A. Brooks argues that Black female soul singers attempt to use the grain of their voices to turn their hypervisible “black female corporeality . . . into a phantasmagoric instrument of mobile feeling” (“Bring” 191). If, to follow Chang’s notion of melancholic temporality, Badu “embodies the past” through her vocal performance of deep emotion in a citational style drawing on multiple Black

60 My reading of the melancholic subject and affect of Badu’s “Window Seat” is similar to Robin James’s reading of Black Barbadian singer Rihanna’s recent work. James reads Rihanna’s lack of traditional development towards musical climax, paired with the singer’s flatness of affect, resists cultural imperatives for resilience in musical structure. James writes that Rihanna’s song 2012 single “Diamonds” “feels aimless and dull because it lacks the spectacular crises and overcomings we have come to expect from contemporary pop songs. It feels, in other words, like a failed musical investment. ‘Diamonds’ drains its musical resources, so it sounds and feels musically melancholic. Its vocals and video similarly short-circuit resilience discourse and produce a distinctly gendered, racialized melancholia” (Resilience 148). 225 musical genres, I contend that her audio recording cannot escape its links to the corporeality of her Black female body. The viral success of the “Window Seat” video and the ensuing public outcry and legal action complicate a reading of the song as freeing

Badu’s voice from the politics of her physical body.

The Politics of Replacement

Badu’s engagement with her viewers through the disruptive spectacle of her body reflects the disordering nature of the Black female body within the realm of the visual. I call this type of Post-Soul performance the politics of replacement; to enact a politics of replacement, Black female performers access the space of an iconic figure in a manner not fully reverential or parodic. I link the rise of these queer acts to the increasingly supple creative space of digital filmmaking and the growing visibility of Black female photographers in the late twentieth century. The digital allows for (seemingly) limitless access to “rediscovered archives” (aided by the internet) and the production of “thickened media” dense with multiple layers of content (Iton In Search 113). On a more practical level, the guerilla-filmmaking approach employed with “Window Seat” was facilitated by the ease of digital film technology, as was the postproduction editing that slowed down the images and processed them to appear like 1960s film stock.

The “politics of replacement” that I articulate here follows José Esteban Muñoz’s influential theory of disidentificatory performance in which nonnormative subjects

(queers of color, women of color, and so on) stage critique from within dominant cultural forms and texts. Muñoz writes that “[t]he process of disidentification scrambles and

226 reconstructs the encoded meaning of a culture text in a fashion that both exposes the encoded message’s universalizing and exclusionary machinations and recircuits its workings to account for, include, and empower minority identities and identifications”

(Disidentifications 31). Badu and other Black female artists expose the normativizing work of historical narrative by replacing key figures with their own bodies, yet maintaining the symbolic markers of iconic symbols. The politics of replacement I describe also has kinship with Daphne A. Brooks’s theory of Black feminist surrogation as a performance practice by Black female singers at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Working from Joseph Roach’s theory of surrogation, Brooks argues that Black female soul-singing functions as an “embodied cultural act that articulates black women’s distinct forms of palpable sociopolitical loss and grief as well as spirited dissent and dissonance” (“All That” 183). The attention in her essay to the ways in which these Black female bodies contest normative narratives of hyper-visibility as a means of protest is similar to the politics of replacement described in this chapter, but I focus on the realm of the visual as the primary site of analysis. While I read the sonic as important to Badu’s political intervention, I understand this as being in concert with the video. Where surrogation seeks to “evok[e] an absence” (Roach, qtd. in Brooks “All That” 187), the politics of replacement reminds us of historical absences by replacing the normative site of identification with the Black female body that is often obfuscated by history.

In the digital age, complicated narratives about bodies marked by race, gender, and sexuality continue to circulate through popular media. Writing about the visual archive of the Black girl-group Destiny’s Child, Patricia Hill Collins describes the

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“intimate yet anonymous terrain” of contemporary mass media in which every consumer

“can imagine a one-on-one relationship with one, two, or all three members of Destiny’s

Child.” She notes that “mass media provides a way that racial difference can safely enter racially segregated private space of living rooms and bedrooms” (Black Sexual 29). This assertion highlights the erotic frisson of Black bodies circulating through the digital spaces of the internet, and rightly links this with a complex history of African Americans performing for the pleasure of white audiences. Yet, as McKittrick argues, “[t]he consumption of contemporary black musics and black video has established an arena through which the artist … can publicly disclose the contradictions, possibilities, and histories of blackness” (Demonic 139). “Window Seat” engages with multiple histories in the digital-sphere arena, simultaneously feeding and resisting racist and sexist structures through play with the figure of the Black nude.

Black female musical artists use digital filmmaking to reveal the possible impossibility of taking up certain positions in historical memory, as with Badu’s assumption of the white male presidency. The politics of replacement forces the viewer to encounter the time-traveling Black woman; her presence reveals the machinations of historical narratives that obfuscate certain bodies and experiences. Before turning to

“Window Seat,” I want to briefly highlight a few examples of other musical artists engaged in this play with time and the visual. R&B singer Chrisette Michele’s “Can the

Cool Be Loved?” (2012) reimagines iconic photographs of 1960s film star Audrey

Hepburn, with the Black singer taking her place. In pop singer Beyoncé’s video for “Why

Don’t You Love Me?” (2008), the singer stars as the prototypical 1950s housewife (B.B.

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Homemaker). B.B.’s darkly comic failure mocks ideas about the happy housewife while leveling a second level of critique by showcasing a Black woman in the place of the iconic 1950s white bourgeois homemaker. More recently, a 2015 Super Bowl ad for

American Family Insurance featured singer Jennifer Hudson singing a cover of the 1970s

R&B hit “O-o-h Child” dressed in 1940s costuming and walking through a diner and street scene. The setting evokes Edward Hopper’s iconic paintings of urban life in the

1930s-1950s, especially his 1942 diner scene “Nighthawks.” The ad lightens the melancholic nostalgia of Hopper’s scenes of lone figures through the use of the song and the ad campaign’s narrative (all of the performers besides Hudson are contest winners receiving their big break through their inclusion in the ad). Hudson’s moment through the ad’s fantasy space represents an ahistorical freedom in this idyllic version of the 1940s; the ad acknowledges her anomalous presence at the close when Hudson smiles at a white policeman after he tips his hat. Hudson and the cop note the impossibility of her entrance into this painting in this sly exchange.

In her reading of Black singer Janelle Monáe’s video “Cold War” (2010), Shana

L. Redmond notes that Monáe performs time-travel through her use of aesthetics invoking histories of US political unrest while also “articulat[ing] a distinct distance from this past by invoking it and then deftly outmaneuvering it by constantly challenging the narratives that fossilize that past” (396). Redmond’s reading briefly links “Cold War” with “Window Seat” (406), and argues that both are part of a longer tradition of Black women using their bodies “to critique and to resituate history, including the identities produced from and within it” (394). Renina Jarmon similarly describes the use of time-

229 travel as a “strategic tool” employed by Black female artists, including Monáe and Badu, to acknowledge the importance of Black women’s archives, and to “connect historical social justice struggles from the past to our present moment and ostensibly to the future”

(82). This time-traveling impulse echoes Emily Lordi’s comments about the ways in which recent Black female singers reimagine “fantastic forms of black female mobility”; for “Window Seat” mobility refers both to a disordering of normative time and a movement through literal space.61

The artistic impulse toward a politics of replacement draws on emerging trends within Black female photography of the late twentieth century as well. Music videos consistently straddle the line between pure commodity and art object. In the age of digital filmmaking, music video production remains indebted to its more “highbrow” relative: still photography. I read Badu’s politics of replacement alongside Black women’s photographic depictions of Black female nudes that began in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Until recently, the African American art world and the broader

US/European art scene avoided depicting naked Black women’s bodies, given “the aberrant representations of the Black female subject in dominant visual culture”

(Fleetwood 122; see also L.G. Collins). After centuries of objectification by the white male gaze, recent Black female photographers like Renee Cox and Carrie Mae Weems

61 A 2016 Super Bowl commercial featuring Janelle Monáe showed the singer walking between three different dance parties, each evoking a different era through costuming and music. In the first room Monáe danced to the Contours’s 1962 song “Do You Love Me?”, in the second to Madonna’s 1989 song “Express Yourself,” and the third depicted a futuristic scene of dancing to the Pepsi theme song “The Joy of Cola.” While a brief moment, the scene of Monáe dancing and singing to Madonna’s hit stages a subtle commentary on the white singer’s history of appropriating Black musical art forms. In a Billboard article, Monáe says of the ad, “I consider myself a time traveler, so I was excited when they told me we’d be time traveling. It’s about the joy of dance and has some nostalgic moments.” 230 seek to reclaim the power of the image by employing the imprimatur of historical truth culturally afforded to the photographic image. Often, as with the singers discussed above, these photographers engage with existing historical records “coded in images bound by fear and desire” (Willis and Williams x). Similarly, Badu’s video revises the mainstream historical record by remixing Abraham Zapruder’s iconic amateur film of the JFK assassination. Considered “one of the most recycled film clips of contemporary visual culture” (Vågnes 6), the twenty-six-second Zapruder film began circulating in bootlegged film prints in the late 1960s (Lubin 164–67). Today, the film continues to circulate through video websites like YouTube and remains the basis for cultural memory of the

Kennedy assassination.

Kennedy’s brief presidency and his tragic death operate as cultural short- hand for the possibilities of racial change: the 1964 Civil Rights Act passed in his memory served to solidify his status as a martyr figure. In an interview, Badu says that “JFK is one of my heroes, one of the nation’s heroes … John F. Kennedy was a revolutionary; he was not afraid to butt heads with America, and I was not afraid to show America my butt-naked truth” (Badu, qtd. in Hanek n.p.). Badu’s quip draws parallels between her naked body and the memory of Kennedy as a racially progressive president. Framing him as

“revolutionary” reflects the dissonance between the cultural memory of the former president and his actual actions in regards to civil rights. Historian Nick Bryant argues that Kennedy was a gradualist, using the civil rights movement as a means of gaining of face in 1961, but that he “never wanted a vicious assault on segregation” (192). Once he won the presidency, Kennedy approached the issue of civil rights through “symbolic

231 gestures and tokenistic measures” (Bryant 467) instead of pursuing radical reform. The violent unrest during the summer of 1963 led to Kennedy’s historic television address calling for a civil rights act, but the legislation would not come to fruition before his death. After assuming the presidency, Lyndon Johnson swiftly pushed the act through in memorial to the slain president, thus contributing to the canonization of Kennedy. In death, the nation remembered Kennedy as a martyr in the fight for civil rights for African

Americans.62

“Window Seat” attacks the iconic status of Kennedy by reimagining the moment as an act of violence reducing the president to merely/entirely a body. The politics of replacement reveals the privileged status enjoyed by (white) masculine subjects in both the historical moment of 1963 and the present (of 2010). Badu’s performance asks the viewer to view her as synonymous with the historically white hetero-patriarchal presidency, representing what Emily Lordi calls the “imaginative seizure of the mythic power ascribed to the president.” Yet, this act simultaneously demonstrates the impossibility of this performance. The boundaries of the presidency remain, even in the age of Obama, yet Badu’s replacement suggests the false nature of these limitations and their ideological underpinnings.

The politics of replacement employed by Badu disrupts the normative understanding of blackness in relationship to historical progress. US historical progress

62 Both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X publicly described Kennedy’s death as the result of his fight against racism (Bryant 459). An editorial published by the Associated Negro Press titled “Between the Lines: Kennedy’s Crucifixion” argued that the president was “crucified on the corss [sic] of race prejudice … He died for the Negro race” (Hancock). In a national survey during the weeks after the assassination, 80 percent of African Americans described the president’s death as akin to the loss of a close friend or relative (Sheatsley and Feldman 154–55). 232 narratives continue to be manufactured under the sign of whiteness. Sharon Patricia

Holland argues that “[i]f the black appears as the antithesis of history (occupies space), the white represents the industry of progressiveness (being in time)” (10). Badu’s restaging of Kennedy’s assassination critiques the relegation of Black bodies, and the racism linked with them, to a racist past, at a remove from the unmarked whiteness of the present post-racial moment. A politics of progressive forward motion, without any backward glances, conflicts with bodies that are queered, feminine/female, and/or not white (Freeman “Time Binds”). “Window Seat” demonstrates the threat that the past

“sometimes makes to the political present” (Freeman Time Binds 63). Badu’s assassination literalizes the ways in which she disrupts the visual, historical, and spatial orders brought together in her performance.

The Politics of Homage

In contrast to the politics of replacement that Badu performs in “Window Seat,” recent music videos by white singers perform a politics of homage to the iconicity of the

Kennedys. The Zapruder film depicts the tragedy not only of Kennedy’s murder, but also his wife’s desperate attempts to get help. Singer-songwriter Tori Amos and pop singer

Lana Del Rey both visually position themselves in the place of Jacqueline. The adoption of the First Lady’s position by these artists reifies Jackie’s status as an exemplar of white femininity and proper maternity. The Kennedys were known for visual glamour and physical attractiveness—Jackie’s signature fashion choices were emulated around the world. In his 1967 study of the assassination, John B. Mayo Jr. describes Jackie as

233 restoring the “dignity and grandeur” lost in the murder’s savagery. He adds that “[she] showed that ours was still a magnificent nation. Through it all she maintained her self- control” (46). The public perception of the president’s wife as poised and fashionable—a calm broken only in the moment of climbing to the back of the car after the shots are red at her husband—undergirds Amos’s 1998 single “Jackie’s Strength.” The song links a bride’s desire to run away from her nuptials with the tragedy in 1963. Amos’s black-and- white video for the song references the assassination by showing the singer in a glamorous wedding dress driving through a suburban scene of sadness; instead of placing herself inside the Kennedy’s Camelot, Amos opens her video with a film clip of the presidential couple.

The more recent video for Del Rey’s single “National Anthem” (2011) shows the singer as both the famous actress Marilyn Monroe, JFK’s alleged mistress, and as

Jacqueline. Within the video’s narrative, both women are only as important as their ties to the masculine body of Kennedy. In a twist suggesting links between the Obama presidency and Kennedy’s term, Black rapper A$AP Rocky plays the president in

“National Anthem.” Del Rey’s video reimagines home videos of the Kennedy family at their compound in Massachusetts, with Del Rey and Rocky playing with children marked as biracial. The video ends with a reenactment of the assassination that uses super- saturated color to evoke the Zapruder film, but never shows the actual dead president. Del

Rey’s song lyrics tell the listener, presumably her lover, “I’m your national anthem,” suggesting that Del Rey’s white female body in the video is to be read as representative of the body politic.

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“National Anthem” echoes “Window Seat” in its racial remixing of the Kennedy iconography. Del Rey suggests a place for interracial desire and reproduction reflective of the conversations about race that arose during the Obama campaign because of the candidate’s mixed-race parentage. At the same time, the video privileges Del Rey’s white gaze while silencing Rocky as the reimagined JFK. The intentional choice of a Black rapper over an unknown actor suggests a desire to appear progressive, yet the lack of an actual verse in the song by Rocky heightens his silencing in the video as foreclosing the possibilities of blackness.

Both “Jackie’s Strength” and “National Anthem” center the white female body as both a model for mourning and a sign for the national body. The videos present Jackie as the ideal stoic mother; instead of the critique embedded in replacement, Amos and Del

Rey engage in homage. The aristocratic bearing of the white mother produces the stereotypical inverse, the hysterical poor Black mother beset by the horrors of a racist past. While Badu’s assassination links her to the fallen president, her own female and maternal body also suggests possible links with Jackie’s position in visual culture. (Later in this chaper, I consider the racial politics of maternity and childhood in the context of

Dallas’s legal response to “Window Seat.”) Both Amos and Del Rey use clothing to link their bodies to Jackie’s place in the patriotic fairytale couple.

In contrast, Badu wears workout clothes, which serve an entirely utilitarian purpose. She begins the video wearing large sunglasses in a nod toward Kennedy’s wife, but her removal of them signifies her dismissal of this alliance. The active nature of

Badu’s stripping contrasts strongly with Mayo’s description of the First Lady’s measured

235 poise. Her nakedness reveals a clearly feminine frame while at the same time suggesting sartorially that she is closer to the corpse of Kennedy than his well-dressed wife. The deviance suggested by her public nudity draws attention to the unsteady nature of white heterosexuality symbolized by the Kennedy marriage, a union beset by whispers about his infidelity. Badu’s choice to return to this tragic scene reminds us of the corporeality of the white heterosexual body, one so often abstracted from “particularity and specificity— so that it can function as the universal signfier and appear as the controlled, contained body” (Winnubst Queering 75). As I will show in the next section, Badu’s replacement of

Kennedy not only undoes the mythic nature of his death, but also disorders the physical space of Dealey Plaza by subverting its function as solely a site of memorialization.

Race and Sacred Space in Badu’s Dallas

The replacement at the center of “Window Seat” does not just trouble the visual domain of the film, but exhumes the layered history of the physical space of the JFK assassination. A Dallas native, Badu chose to film her video in Dealey Plaza in the city’s downtown because “the grassy knoll was the most monumental place in Dallas I could think of” (Badu, qtd. in Hauk). The “grassy knoll” refers to a small sloping hill inside

Dealey Plaza, infamous as a rumored site of the gunman and also where Zapruder stood as he filmed (Lubin 163). The plaza is part of an area designated a National Historic

Landmark district by the federal government in 1993. Nomination papers for the district stressed the importance of the area as a visual testament that “retain[ed] a very high level of historic integrity” (US Department of the Interior 4). The designation seeks to preserve

236 a specific visual memory by emphasizing that the site resembles the physical landscape that Kennedy’s motorcade drove through in 1963.

Every year, at least a million visitors come to Dealey Plaza to explore the route taken on that fateful day (Miller; Sixth Floor Museum). Leah Vande Berg describes these communal acts as akin to religious pilgrimages taken by believers to visit sites of spiritual significance. She argues that these pilgrims set out on a quest to repair “a violent breach in the social and spiritual fabric of the United States” (50). Maintaining Dealey Plaza as it appears in public memories of the assassination allows visitors to physically insert themselves into a historical moment. The “X” on the street that marks where Kennedy’s car was when he was shot remains and can be seen in “Window Seat.” The plaza allows for the retelling of a particularly American narrative of white hetero-patriarchal leadership foreclosed by violence.

If Dealey Plaza is understood as a sacred space, the specter of Badu’s nudity functions as blasphemy. In his 2010 Dallas News column, James Ragland quotes

Lindalyn Adams: “I don’t understand how someone who lives here, who is a resident of this city, could do such a thing.” Adams led the campaign during the 1980s to revitalize the plaza and install the Sixth Floor Museum (Fagin). Ragland’s column describes the guerilla filming as occurring in front of “unsuspecting tourists,” recasting the disrobing as an assault on the space played out in front of visitors. In a 2010 interview on National

Public Radio, Dallas Observer senior writer Robert Wilonsky joked that “[t]he thing I like most about it is the fact that if nothing else for a few days, Dealey Plaza is no longer known as the place where John Kennedy was killed, but it’s simply known as the place

237 where Erykah Badu got naked” (Wilonsky, qtd. in Norris). Intended as comical, his comment suggests that Badu’s stripping crafts a new narrative, replacing the official historical memory immortalized in Dealey Plaza.

Commentators pose Badu’s public act and “Window Seat” as threatening to eclipse the memory of an event that garnered Dallas an international reputation as a racist city. In the wake of the assassination, residents were cast as “murderers and conservative extremists” (US Department of the Interior 43). At the time of Kennedy’s visit, few of the local political leaders supported the president, given the right-wing politics of the community. White liberal activists Jeanette and George Crawford describe Dallas of the early 1960s as harboring intense racial hatred; the couple recalls their children hearing other children cheer at school on the day of the assassination. In his front-page editorial in Dallas’s Black newspaper Dallas Express, Marlon Butts argued that because “Dallas is a city where hate is bred, born, grown, and destroys the minds of its citizens, the

President was murdered in our streets.” While the editorial reflected the general feeling within the African American community in Dallas, the response from white conservative elites was to “chas[e] the New Right into the political closet” (Phillips 159) and work to reduce the image of the city as run by racist extremists (158–62). The Crawfords describe the recasting of conservative politics after Kennedy’s assassination as a “changing of masks,” instead of an actual political shift.

Dallas attempted to contain racism in the realm of the past through commemorations, such as the erection of an empty tomb, or cenotaph, in 1970, and the later creation of the Sixth Floor Museum, which is dedicated to commemorating

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Kennedy’s death. Harvey J. Graff argues that “[c]ommemoration seemed to contain [the assassination] in history, allowing Dallasites to stop reflecting on what share of responsibility or guilt their city justly or unjustly bore and treat the event much as the rest of the nation did” (21). “History,” argues Sixth Floor Museum project director Conover

Hunt, “takes the sting out of a lot of memory and puts it in a place where it’s safe and can’t really hurt us anymore.” Burial (as in Goldberg’s metaphor for post-racialism), masking, and commemoration all become powerful metaphors for hiding from the racism of the past; history becomes a means of assuaging guilt at the same time that we mark our progressive distance from the ugliness of the past. Historian Michael Phillips writes that these attempts to “forget the past” at the end of the twentieth century operate “under the influence of whiteness” (178).

In spite of (and probably because of) the efforts to contain the racist past through memorialization, contemporary Dallas remains one of the nation’s “most spatially segregated cities” (Graff 7). Dallas residents describe the city as “two cities,” with the

“southern sector” functioning as politically “neutral” code for a region that includes the mostly African American south Dallas, along with the African American and Mexican

American west Dallas. The language of the two cities “annuls the agency of minorities at the same time as it attempts to remove white racism from the story” (Graff 164). Adams’s contention that Badu blasphemes Dallas (Ragland) reflects a broader trend in the city of silencing voices from south Dallas and denying certain citizens access to city government. The revitalization of the Dealey Plaza area in the early 1990s continued an

’80s gentrification project that displaced many African Americans. By overlooking

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Badu’s right to speak as a Dallas resident, Adams continues the trend in news media coverage that privileges the successes of only some geographic regions and their citizens.

Implicit in Adams’s comment about dishonoring a shared home is that Badu has no right to interface with Dallas in a manner reflective of her own personal and artistic sensibilities.

Badu claims Dallas as her hometown and continues to engage with the community where she grew up. In spite of increasing crime since the 1980s, Badu’s grandmother still lives in south Dallas, and her home serves as a site for family celebrations (Hall 32). Badu’s narrative reveals her ongoing investment in Dallas, stretching from her childhood to the birth of her own children in the city. “Window Seat” stakes a claim to being heard in the symbolic heart of Dallas—not in unseen south Dallas, but instead in the place where the world comes to mourn Kennedy. The intimacy of walking naked through these streets undercuts rhetorical projects of racial avoidance by showing a clear personal connection with the city. Dallas’s legal response serves to further police Badu’s ability to express herself in this public space and demonstrates

McKittrick’s argument that challenging the naturalization of spatial segregation “can be a very threatening geographic act; it is punishable, erasable, and oppositional” (Demonic

145).

The Best Interests of the (White) Child: Black Maternity in the Age of Obama

The legal ramifications of Badu’s choice to strip in public and film a video of it without a “permit” enters ongoing debates about who is considered a “fit mother” in

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America. After initially choosing not to pursue charges, the Dallas Police Department issued a disorderly conduct citation, roughly the equivalent of a traffic citation, in the wake of the video’s viral popularity. My intention is not to question the legality of Badu’s legal sanction (she fully expected to be arrested onsite), but instead to draw attention to the symbolic ramifications of the city’s response. Whereas both Del Rey and Amos staged their homages in fictional spaces, Badu purposely chose to lm hers in public and to test the limits of the freedom that her body was allowed. Her knowing play with the law aids her critique of the continued persecution of Black bodies in the twenty-first century.

An article in the Dallas Morning News reported that “police state that Badu had disrobed in a public place without regard to other individuals and children who were in close proximity” (Eiserer n.p.). The distinction between individuals and children here establishes youth as a class needing special protection from the spectacle of Badu’s nakedness. A complaining witness, according to the police statement, “observed Ms.

Badu remove her clothing on the public street. The witness had two small children with her and was offended.”

In the media coverage of Badu’s actions, the white complaining mother and her right to protect her child is opposed to the spectacle of Badu’s Black body. In No Future,

Lee Edelman argues that a conservative agenda undergirds US politics and champions futurity through images of the Child and the children who must be protected. Other queer theorists note that while the protection of “innocent” children guides our political system, not all children are granted equal protection in the current political climate, especially those who are Othered by categories like race, class, sexuality, or ability (Kafer; Muñoz

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Cruising). While race is not noted in the statement from the Dallas Police Department, the oppositions stated in the complaint suggest a staging of the “protection” that is socially granted to whiteness, especially to white children. The complaining witness is a mother and thus Badu is not a mother, or at least not the right kind of mother because she dares to bare her body in proximity of a child. Badu’s perceived attack on white children marks her as a queer figure, daring to threaten the ongoing propagation of the white family, “the basic unit [of] American political economy” (Abdur-Rahman 18).

Childhood requires constant protection due to the supposed mental fragility of youth, one easily scarred by the state of nakedness that all humans enjoy (or deny). In her interview with the Dallas Morning News (Hauk), Badu describes having the approval of her own children to film the video (in 2010, her children were aged 1, 4, and 10). When the interviewer asks if she considered the presence of children in Dealey Plaza, the singer answers, “I didn’t think about them until I saw them, and in my mind I tried to telepathically communicate my good intent to them. That’s all I could do, and I hoped they wouldn’t be traumatized” (Hauk). The news story contrasts Badu’s children with the witnesses; in her response, the singer avers that she had only good intentions toward all those present. Elsewhere, Badu notes that “we are taught that nudity is a bad thing”

(Window Seat), referencing the use of taboos around nudity to instill sexual shame in children as part of their education into appropriate erotic citizenship.

In referencing Badu’s own children, the Dallas Morning News’s story attempts to return to her the maternal role effaced in the police’s official statement. Historically,

African American women in the United States have been barred from the place of

242 acceptable reproduction, first through the denial of filial ties to their children under chattel slavery, then through ongoing cultural myths about Black reproduction as a form of degeneracy (Roberts 3–55; Spillers). Cultural stereotypes like the Jezebel, the

Mammy, and the Welfare Queen function to persuade people that African American women are unfit mothers. In turn, these tropes justify dehumanizing practices that violate

Black women’s privacy and limit their reproductive options (Roberts, 3–21). Fantasies about white womanhood, exemplified by iconic figures like Jackie Kennedy, continue to set the standard for what is considered “normal,” leaving Black women unable to measure up to standards established by a white supremacist system. While Black reproduction is seen as degenerate, Dorothy Roberts argues that white reproduction

“brings personal joy and allows the nation to flourish” (9). Both Roberts and Edelman stress the links between progressive narratives about the future and reproduction, but certain mothers are not part of this trajectory. Badu’s own maternity is not part of the official narrative about her video; she is regarded solely as acting against normative standards of decency—standards that include protecting children from the spectacle of the naked body, one that in this context cannot be read in any other way except sexual.

Badu’s public nudity attacks middle-class notions of propriety, notions that Black women have historically attempted to adopt in a bid for a certain level of enfranchisement. Performing middle-class respectability has been one way by which

Black women strove to gain political recognition in the United States and thus distance themselves from tropes of sexual deviance and irresponsible maternity. As Lisa B.

Thompson argues, the Black “lady” achieves class status through a performance of

243 propriety that includes either adopting conservative sexual mores or entirely cloaking her sexuality. Badu’s refusal of the Black-lady role places her outside progressive narratives of African American uplift through class ascendancy. Greg Thomas asserts that Badu shows a clear investment in what he calls “sex-radicalism,” and works to defy ideas that her stance as a politically aware performer is linked to a puritanical middle- class respectability (25, 30). Of course, performances of this type can easily be misconstrued as purely a recapitulation to normative ideals of women’s bodies as sexually available and salable.

Badu’s flouting of notions of respectability not only outraged officials in Dallas, but also those who believed that her stripping functioned merely as a bid for financial success. In her skeptical reaction to “Window Seat” in the popular Black magazine Jet,

Katti Gray focuses on the singer “baring her behind,” calling the video an attempt to

“out-freak the other freak who holds the [Number] 1 slot on the [Billboard] charts” (39).

The language of freakiness distances Badu from the position of full-fledged subjectivity or Black maternity. In many popular discourses, Black women’s bodies cannot function as anything other than a sign for unrestrained sexual desires; Gray’s response distances

Badu from the middle-class Black-lady trope. Elizabeth Freeman argues that class describes not simply one’s material situation, but also a mode of self-presentation that, when performed in line with dominant ideologies, appears “natural” in its relationship to

“sexual and social reproduction.” She contends that failures to “inhabit middle- and upper-middle class habitus appear as, precisely, asynchrony or time out of joint,” linking disruptions of class performance to a resistance to normative narratives of temporal

244 progression (Time Binds 19).

Gray’s critique of “Window Seat” links Badu’s nudity with ongoing debates about the representation and treatment of Black women in popular music videos. Badu, however, actually sets herself apart from other Black women working in the music industry by adopting an ambiguous and even conservative tone when she explains why the video garnered such widespread controversy: “[What] I really learned was that when it [my nudity] was packaged the way I [sic] was, with no high-heeled shoes or long hair or spinning around a pole or popping it, people have a hard time processing it when it’s not packaged for the consumption of male entertainment” (Window Seat). Hip-hop videos prize young, ethnically ambiguous women with long hair; these repeated images connote that “a particular type of beauty is offered up as ideal” (Sharpley-Whiting 27). Badu reacts to this trope in her comment, but also taps into what Denean Sharpley-Whiting calls “a peculiar place of cultural antipathy” occupied by Black women in hip-hop culture who choose to work in overly sexual roles, such as dancers in music videos (xi). Badu’s somewhat derisive attitude toward other women in music videos participates in this dismissal of certain performances of sexuality, but it also showcases her clear intention to use her body not in order to titillate but to provoke conversation and thought. By offering a rationale beyond simply pleasing the heterosexual male gaze, Badu—and, I would argue, other Black women performing a politics of replacement—suggests that music videos can entertain while also serving as a site of radical rupture in contemporary scripts of progress.

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The (Re)birth of Black Feminist Politics

Badu says of her video and its message, “[i]t doesn’t belong to me anymore”

(Window Seat). “Window Seat” ends with a rebirth—a smiling Badu walks toward the camera—and suggests that we need to reassess our own relationship to the ends of history. In his recent assessment of Black cultural politics, Richard Iton writes that

[o]ne aspect of this willingness to accommodate the death drive embedded within the

archive of “modern” black politics—its teleological, antireflexive casting marked by a

cascade of “posts”—is the decreasing capacity for certain forms of irony associated with

a fear of undecidability and a sublative impulse that requires that certain forms of

transgressive politics be stigmatized, closed down, and/or rendered inaccessible and

irretrievable. (“Still Life” 36)

By performing a politics of replacement, Badu employs irony in a reaction against the progressive, forward-facing impulses embedded within both mainstream and Black politics. She negotiates pathways through historical time and the physical space initially forged by white masculine bodies, and disorders the assumed stability of these normative identity formations. When she performs the impossible—namely, embodying the fallen president—Badu stages a transgressive politics that argues for future possibilities of change. She employs the tropes of the queer deviant, the Black female body, the sexual, and the maternal as a means of exposing the post-racial moment as bankrupt; yet, unlike other cultural actors who read this failure of equality as further proof of the death of

Black politics, she calls for an exhumation of the racist past as a way to move forward. In this moment of rebirth, Badu embodies the returning ankh of her album’s title.

Throughout “Window Seat,” Badu maintains a focused and hardened demeanor, 246 but when she is reborn in the closing moments, she smiles. Politics becomes dangerous when we disavow the joy and pleasure written on the bodies under discussion; we cannot eschew playfulness as a source of possibility for remaking the world. The answer here is not a new world because, as the video shows us, this world is never just experienced in the present; rather, the post- racial world might be one in which artistic endeavors employ transgression to walk through those spaces and times of iconic whiteness. The post- in post-racial can become the site of possibility for walking routes once barred, routes out of the death of history and into the light of new possibility. In her study of eccentric post- soul musical artists, Francesca T. Royster describes these performances as producing a

“layered rather than separate time, living on the hyphen of the past and present, daring itself to look behind” but also to consider the possibilities of the future and the

“something new” (13). Political failure need not be a bar to the future, and “Window

Seat” demonstrates the ways in which layered time offers ways forward. “Window Seat” reveals a need to turn to history with a tongue placed firmly in one’s cheek; Black feminist politics cannot be discarded, since it is neither dead nor has it lost its mortal necessity.

Coda

Since I started writing about Badu’s video in 2012, growing public visibility around the deaths of Black men, women, and trans individuals has given birth to the

#BlackLivesMatter movement, a movement which moves between real life protests and digital activism. Black queer feminists Alicia Garza, Patrise Cullors, and Opal Tometi

247 launched the #BlackLivesMatter movement in 2013 and continue to work with local protestors and activists across the country. What began as a hashtag (#BlackLivesMatter) responding to the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the murder of Florida teen Trayvon

Martin, has blossomed into a broad movement Garza describes as “an ideological and political intervention in a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise.” Zimmerman’s acquittal, the non-indictment of white police officer

Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Black teen Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and other high profile acts of police and extra-judicial violence garnered visibility through the intersecting modes of social media and on the ground protests. I see clear links between Badu’s video and the resulting backlash, as well as Badu’s strategic use of the Internet, especially Twitter, in our current national debate around the disproportionate police violence experienced by Black Americans.

The last four years have seen an increasing media and scholarly attention to Black

Twitter, a term referring to the ways in which Black users of the micro-blogging platform comment on politics, popular culture, and daily life in ways which blend cultural critique with the specificity of Black lived experience. As Sanjay Sharma and Sarah Florini both argue, the term Black Twitter should be understood to index strategies of self-naming as

Black without reifying static notions of racial identity or assuming racial identity of social media users based solely on their words or limited personal information (such as the graphic chosen by a Twitter user to denote their online “identity”). At the same time,

Black Twitter has become a rich composing site for Black Americans commenting on and participating in anti-racist protests. Pritha Prasad’s recent examination of Black

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Twitter articulates the ways in which this phenomenon allows for users to extend the reach of their physical bodies and offer protection when protests may operate as sites of bodily threat for Black bodies. She writes:

Black Twitter functions not just as a tool or accompaniment to “real” protests elsewhere,

but rather as an alternatively embodied, relational rhetorical imaginary that affords

multiple simultaneous spatialities and temporalities. Consider the genre of the hashtag

itself: a performative composing medium that not only demands relationality through

repetition, recirculation, and retweeting, but also acts as an affirmative mechanism that

quite literally locates subjects “in the flow of relations with multiple others.” (7)

I follow Prasad in understanding Black Twitter as holding the potentiality for alternative futures, even in spite of its relationship to the capitalist space of Twitter (one frequently utilized for the dispersal of mainstream news and highly commercial interests). Prasad’s articulation of Black Twitter as allowing for digital intimacy between users across the country and world offers another version of queer temporality, with hashtags recirculating across time zones, moments, and emerging social movements. While much has been made in the media recently about the uses of social media for bullying marginalized groups (including vocal members of the intersecting LGBT, Black, and feminist communities), Black Twitter and other Internet subcultural practices also allow for coalitional work unbounded by spatial distances. Lisa Nakamura’s recent work on the unpaid labor of women of color and other marginalized peoples on the Internet draws attention to the ways in which activism and coalitional politics may include remaking digital spaces more accessible and less emotionally toxic for all users. She writes,

“Though the dream of an egalitarian Internet has been dashed enough times to make even 249 technological utopianists wary, the labour of woman of colour feminists on social media has created a vital and resurgent space for new styles of community” (112).

Badu’s internet presence on Twitter and the photo-sharing mobile application

Instagram allows her to directly participate in this emergent form of community which spans digital and “real” spaces. I considered rewriting this chapter extensively in order to reflect the ways in which social movements and social media have crafted new language and spaces for connection; spaces that were emerging at the time I was initially writing about Badu, as seen in her choice to release “Window Seat” first through Twitter and later comment on its controversy through the site. I choose instead to present this coda as a way to reconsider the following chapter. My analysis also reflects a specific moment in which the language of post-racialism seemed destined to crowd out substantive discussion about continuing racial inequalities. The protests in Ferguson and across the country forced Americans to confront head on the lie of a post-racial society which took its fullest form in the exceptional optimism of the Obama presidency. Social media has played a decisive role in catalyzing institutional response (even with markedly uneven results), as seen in the uses of Twitter and other social media outlets to force officials to respond to the four hours Michael Brown’s dead body was left in the street in Ferguson.

Re-reading my chapter now, Badu’s choice to walk through a public street and strip takes on a new cast since the #BlackLivesMatter movement lays bare the vulnerability of certain bodies (Black and Brown, disabled, feminized, gender nonconforming, etc) in the simple act of walking through the world. In her recent study of the legacy of the Los Angeles Crisis (in the wake of Rodney King’s beating by the LA

250 police), Lynn Mie Itagaki notes the continual reemergence of debates over civility and how this concept is used to justify violence against certain besides. Her comments resonate with Badu’s protest art: “We continue to have public conversations over right and wrong behaviors: how walking in the middle of the street or walking around middle class neighborhoods late at the night with the hood of a sweatshirt up makes some of us into criminals and justifies some of our deaths” (217). Badu’s video and the way it touches the supposedly buried past of racism while also suggesting a different future remains vital – a point I take up in my conclusion.

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CONCLUSION

The past and the present merge to meet us here – Warsan Shire63

Freedom, freedom I can’t move Freedom, cut me loose – Beyoncé (featuring Kendrick Lamar)

I ended the previous chapter with a call to remember that Black feminist politics remain vitally necessary and an imperative to look towards the future. In this conclusion,

I briefly consider the future and how Black women’s art imagines a future built out of the past. A utopic future appears in the final lines of Helen Cade Brehon’s essay in the 1970 anthology The Black Woman. Brehon, the mother of the collection’s editor Toni Cade

(Bambara), writes of a future revolution, “Looking back – no more! To what shall I look forward? Chaos, revolution, more love, hate, fulfillment, need, pride, embarrassment?

After the ‘Great Day’ I do hope I’ll be able just to hail a cab – Utopia!” (296). Brehon’s facetious comment about the aftermath of revolution in the form of the mundane moment of catching a taxi reflects a utopic vision which sees the everyday experiences of racism

(and interlocking sexism and heteropatriarchy) resolved in small moments of interaction.

Mingling affective experiences with the upheaval of revolution and its attendant chaos,

Brehon grounds a notion of what I would call Black feminist utopianism in a single

63 Quoted in Beyoncé’s Lemonade (2016). 252 moment that stands outside the workings of law and yet is still limited by political and judicial systems. Racist practice, of course, is a series of everyday occurrences that together form the elaborate systems that activists continue to protest and seek to overthrow. Many of the authors in Cade’s groundbreaking collection – the first exclusively focusing on Black women – pair a critique of contemporary culture with a call for revolutionary change, the replacement of the current form of social organization with one which actually meets the needs of the citizenry. A revolution, these women contend, cannot simply approach one axis of oppression for it will have not done anything revolutionary simply in undoing one layer of injustice. Cade writes that those seeking change must “fashion revolutionary selves, revolutionary lives, [and] revolutionary relationships” (134).64

In this conclusion, I want to briefly consider a Black feminist queer vision of utopia which, following The Black Woman as well as recent Black feminist and queer of color writing, imagines a different future based on quotidian gestures and new forms of attachment. Specifically, I sketch an understanding of the utopic within the site of the home as it is represented in pop singer Beyoncé’s recent visual album Lemonade (2016).

Lemonade imagines an all-Black Southern home space drawing on historical, literary, and cinematic predecessors yet propelling them into the possibility of the future. The visual album illustrates the broader argument of this project about Black women’s use of expressive technologies to play with historical time and produce fictions which speak truths about embodied experiences.

64 For a discussion of Toni Cade Bamabara’s utopian thought see Avery Gordon’s essay “Something More Powerful Than Skepticism.” I employ Gordon’s ideas across this conclusion. 253

In reading Lemonade as a Black feminist utopia, I follow Jafari S. Allen’s call to

“queerly trace our genealogies” in Black queer studies (“Black” 219-220) and Avery

Gordon’s assertion that the classic definition and historiography of utopian thought is a racially exclusive construction that fails to attend to many texts penned by non-white and non-Western authors (191). Allen argues for an understanding of Black feminism as a queer Afro-futuristic project which “imagines and attempts to call into being futures in which black folks exist and thrive (even if on the detritus of the past)” (“Black” 223).

Jennifer Nash describes a Black feminist love-politics which disavows an “attachment to the present” and instead “love-politics practitioners dream of a yet unwritten future; they imagine a world ordered by love, by a radical embrace of difference, by a set of subjects who work on/against themselves to work for each other” (“Practicing Love” 18). Nash describes a Black feminism which moves beyond a political approach based in a desire for institutional recognition and instead follows José Esteban Muñoz’s vision of queerness. Queer utopianism in Muñoz’s formulation describes “a modality of critique that speaks to quotidian gestures as laden with potentiality” (Cruising 91). Muñoz argues that, “The here and now is simply not enough. Queerness could be about a desire for another way of being in the world and time, a desire that resists mandates to accept that which is not enough” (Cruising 96). Nash and the writers in The Black Woman similarly approach utopianism through “quotidian gestures” and other small moments of intimacy which offer forms of redress outside of the state’s response to harms, thus performing “a critique of the state and its capacity (or incapacity) to ever adequately remedy injuries”

(Nash “Practicing Love” 16).

254

Allen’s comment about the “detritus of the past” echoes the engagement with historical remnants, memories, fictional accounts, images, sounds, and other ephemera which have been used in queerly creative ways by the writers, filmmakers and performers featured in this project. In making these works, all of these women explicitly argue for their importance in relationship to divergent histories including the Kennedy assassination, the 1980s art scene, the pleasures of enslaved men and women, and the foment of New Queer Cinema. Simply arguing for their place in history, as Dunye does by claiming small intimate moments as worthy of the documentary gaze, or when Badu places her own naked body in the sacred space of Dealey Plaza, disrupts a normative linearity which would like to straighten out and silence Black women’s experiences.

Blackman, Davis, Dunye, and Badu all argue for their placement within a queer archive of memory for Black women which moves forward into a different kind of future.

Before I consider the utopic vision in Lemonade, I will briefly outline the film.

Like all of the texts examined in this project, Lemonade exceeds both generic and media boundaries. Initially the visual album aired as a one-hour special on HBO (the subscription channel Home Box Office), before being available exclusively through the streaming platform Tidal (owned by Beyoncé’s husband Jay Z with shares owned by multiple artists including Beyoncé) and then later available for purchase through more traditional means (iTunes and lastly a physical CD). Unlike her previous visual album

Beyoncé (2013), Lemonade is not simply a set of music videos which run consecutively but rather the film presents a set of linked vignettes following a fictionalized Beyoncé as she navigates the despair and anger of discovering her partner’s infidelity, ultimately

255 reconciling with him after connecting with a strong Black women’s community. The film mixes straightforward narrative with fantasy sequences (as when Beyoncé, dressed in a yellow designer dress, gleefully smashes car windows with a baseball bat and spectators rejoice) and moves between multiple settings including a large Southern estate, a bleak urban landscape at night, and a strange underwater bedroom. Lemonade’s visuals draw clear inspiration from a rich set of Black cultural artifacts including Carrie Mae Weems’s black and white photographs of Black men and women and Julie Dash’s groundbreaking narrative film Daughters of the Dust (1991).65

Lemonade’s visuals are constantly interacting with the music, which is at times differently mixed in the film (most noticeably in the reduction of male voices on all three tracks which feature male artists) and includes additional aural components not found on the music album. In the film scene for “Don’t Hurt Yourself,” for example, the song is interrupted by audio of a 1962 Malcolm X’s in which he avers that Black women are the most disrespected and vulnerable people in America.66 Threaded throughout the visual album between songs are audio clips of Beyoncé reading poems by Somali-British poet

Warsan Shire, a poet made famous by her sharing of work on social media platforms including Twitter and Tumblr. As Robin James argues, an analysis of Lemonade’s music

65 Specifically, Janelle Hobson draws parallels between Carrie Mae Weems’ series “The Louisiana Project” and the imagery of the Southern plantation space reclaimed by the Black female body. In the segment “Hold Up,” the yellow designer dress Beyoncé wears, along with her emergence from water draws on the imagery of the Afro-Latina goddess Oshun. The visual references to African deities further aligns Lemonade with a queer temporality moving between the past, present, and future. For more on Lemonade’s intertextual references see Janelle Hobson’s “Lemonade: Beyoncé’s Redemption Song.” Hobson and Treva Lindsey (“Beyoncé’s Lemonade”) both also draw attention to the many literary references found in Lemonade. 66 The full audio clip features Malcolm X saying, “The most disrespected person in America is the black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the black woman. The most neglected person in America is the black woman.” 256 cannot be divorced from the visual components and that a true attendance to Black feminist musical analysis requires understanding music as entrenched in the visual and cultural components of lived experience (“How not”).67 Where the visuals conjure up a host of literary and visual references, the music is similarly dense with allusion and referent including a broad array of musical samples and interpolations, along with movement across multiple musical genres including New Orleans big band, rap, R&B, and alternative rock.68 As this brief discussion of the visual and aural components suggests, Lemonade – like all of the texts discussed in this project – is a dense thick artifact enmeshed in a long Black cultural tradition.

The affective trajectory of Lemonade draws quite clearly on the viewer’s knowledge of Beyoncé and her husband rapper Jay-Z as one of the most visible Black celebrity couples in the United States. Watching social media responses to the HBO airing of the visual album reveals a clear reading of the narrative of betrayal and reconciliation as being about this very public marriage. The emotional journey of the film

67 James’s analysis focuses on reviews of Lemonade which attempt to separate the music from the visuals in a move. She argues this move severs the music from a Black feminist practice. She contrasts these reviews with the multiple reviews and essays penned by Black women, writing that when these women write about “what affects and knowledges and emotions [Lemonade] communicates, they are talking about the music–they [Black feminist writers] just work in a tradition that understands music as something other than ‘the music itself’ (that is, they don’t think music is abstracted away from visual and cultural elements, from structures of feeling common to black women with shared histories and phenomenological life- worlds)” (“How not” original emphasis). 68 Beyoncé has cultivated an image of intense control over her creative output and executive produced both the music and visual albums. I see her work with musical artists across genres and the broad array of samples (including Led Zeppelin, Andy Williams, field recordings by Alan Lomax, and the Southern rap duo Outkast) as part of her investment in the type of densely intertextual work frequent in Black cultural production. The dizzying amount of writers credited for many of her songs has, however, also led to a series of Internet memes which lambast her for her lack of creativity, frequently contrasting the number of writers credited on her albums with the small number on either the work of recent white rock artists (especially the alternative rock singer Beck) or with older classic rock artists (such as Queen). The latter comparison completely ignores, of course, the change in copyright law since the 1990s because of sampling. 257 is signaled by chapter titles which move from “Denial” and “Anger,” through

“Accountability” and “Loss,” to “Hope” and “Redemption.” As is frequently the case with our most favored celebrities, many viewers and listeners read the public persona and art as an articulation of Beyoncé’s private affairs, a missive from an icon known for keeping a tight control on the circulation of her image. I would argue instead that

Lemonade serves as a variation on the Dunyementary with Beyoncé presenting a version of her life, one that mixes actual footage of her family (including her parents, her daughter, and her husband’s grandmother speaking at a 91st birthday party) with evocative fantasies and set pieces. Further, the movement of the album (both visually and aurally) is from a narrative of personal hurt to a shared need for revolutionary freedom and the finding of solace amongst a larger community. As Treva Lindsey writes,

“Lemonade wasn't just a visual album about cheating; it was a visual album about the power of black women's kinship across generations. It shows our communal spaces as healing, loving, and necessary” (“Beyoncé’s Lemonade”). Given our assumed knowledge of Beyoncé and Jay-Z, the focus on the cheating narrative makes sense, but I want to follow Lindsey’s call to read the broader narrative of Black women forging communal spaces for healing. My argument for envisioning a Black feminist future in Lemonade, one visualized as a Black feminine space, should not be read as suggesting that the visual album repudiates all men or crafts a separatist space entirely. Beyoncé’s marriage is celebrated in the closing section of the film alongside documentary footage of other couples (including interracial and same-sex pairings).

258

The spaces shown in Lemonade with only Black women operate in the utopian temporality Kara Keeling calls “poetry from the future” sitting outside normative attempts to fix subjects in a specific time and place (“Looking for M-”). Historical markers are in flux with the women wearing contemporary designer clothes alongside

Victorian-influenced attire; the setting includes the interior of a large Southern mansion or plantation but full of only Black women, thus inverting the power structure most obviously invoked with this locale. In one scene, a crowd of Black women dressed in white dresses come together outside for a group portrait taken with an old-fashioned plate camera; the scene recreates pivotal scenes from Dash’s Daughter of the Dust in which the

Peazant family has a Northern photographer document their last days in the Low

Country, on an island off South Carolina. Unlike in Daughters, however, the photograph captures women united by space and experience instead of strict family ties, and instead of a man, Lemonade has teen actress Amandla Stenberg play the role of photographer.

Stenberg’s inclusion in the film and in this role draws on her visibility as both an actress and a vocal Internet personality invested in raising awareness about feminism, bisexual identities, and gender fluidity.69 Stenberg’s bisexual non-binary identity paired with her

Blackness and her youth informs her positioning as the photographer; the scene then shows the past bleeding into the present with her twenty-first century celebrity persona paired with the presence of the anachronistic photography equipment.

69 Stenberg first gained broad notice for her role in the film adaptation of the popular YA novel The Hunger Games, a role that received considerable fan backlash since many readers had failed to realize her character Rue was described as not white. Stenberg has become a highly visible presence on social media as she works to educate fans about cultural appropriation and queer genders and sexual identities. Over 2 million viewers have watched her YouTube film “Don’t Cash Crop on My Cornrows.” 259

While Stenberg and other celebrities featured within Lemonade could be read as playing a fictional part, Lemonade’s inclusion of iconic images of Black death demonstrate that this colorful swampy Southern landscape is contiguous with our contemporary moment. The importance of photography continues into the next sequence which features Black women holding photographs of Black men lost to state violence, including the mothers of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner; the mothers, dressed in colorful finery, sit enthroned and hold photographs of their dead sons, one unable to make it through the shoot without crying.

In drawing on the iconicity of Black men’s death, the film risks participating in the effacement of the death of Black women and Black trans or gender non-conforming individuals. Jennifer Nash notes that even in the discussion around #BlackLivesMatter a

“pervasive racial iconography” has become naturalized, one in which “black women are represented as witnesses of violence and black men are represented as victims of violence, where black women raise the dead and black men are the dead” (“Unwidowing”

752). Treva Lindsey calls on those documenting the current anti-racist movement to not relegate “Black women and girls, queer people, and trans* people to the margins” (“Post

Ferguson” 236). Lindsey and Nash raise important cautions about the need to not reify a simplistic understanding of the violence experienced by Black Americans; at the same time I want to hold this concern in tension with the stunning, moving spectacle of the mothers holding up the photographs of their dead sons in a musical album/television

260 special released by a mainstream musical artist.70 I find the choice to include these women and their grief exceptionally powerful even while it may narrow the parameters of the #BlackLivesMatter movements aims.

While the space of the mothers could be read as reifying the gender binary Nash describes, Lemonade can also be read as placing them within a space of healing across generations of Black women. As I have argued throughout this project, queerness can help describe intimacies which fall outside of normative connections and roles, ties beyond the limiting notions of friendship or romantic/erotic relationships. I see this queer community unfolding in the scenes at the end of Lemonade showing Black women perched in mossy trees, moving through the garden picking fresh produce, sitting down at a long outdoor table under the trees to a shared dinner. Black women move through the space in brightly colored dresses with the images super saturated to heighten the brilliance. Black women sit in stillness together on a front porch. These Black women include Stanberg, teen actress Zendaya, tennis star Serena Williams, and Oscar- nominated child actress Quvenzhané Wallis; all figures who have faced scrutiny for their raced and gendered bodies in the public sphere. The utopian space of the front porch, the garden, and the dinner table are not free from the contemporary and past moments. These other temporalities are not intrusions but instead fertile ground for building community.

In the closing song, “All Night” which plays over the chapter titled

“Redemption,” Beyoncé sings about love as a “weapon” and a site of “salvation.” The

70 In discussing Lemonade, a colleague noted that in removing Kendrick Lamar’s rap from the film’s mix of the song “Freedom,” the song removes a Black male voice. The use of rap on a song focusing on revolution draws on a history of hip hop as the provenance of Black rebellion; his absence from the film simultaneously reinforces a logic of Black male scarcity while crafting a space that is only women. 261 invocation of love “all night long” clearly reads as sexual, yet could also describe the alternate future Lemonade envisions separate from Beyoncé’s interactions with her actual family; this dreamy Southern home space suggests shared domestic tasks and breaking bread together can offer redress to the harms of racism, sexism, and state violence. My vision of queer utopianism draws on Toni Morrison’s vision of “home.” Morrison notes that frequently a world “free of racial hierarchy” is described as a “dreamscape –

Edenesque, utopian, so remote are the possiblities of its achievement” (3). She instead imagines “a-world-in-which-race-does-not-matter” as a home because it “domesticates the racial project” (3) and “moves the job of unmattering race” away from “an impossible future or an irretrievable and probably nonexistent Eden to a manageable, doable, modern human activity” (4). The reconfiguring of home spaces has figured across this project, including the domestic spaces that foment art in Davis’s Maker of Saints, in Badu’s choice to stage protest on the streets of her hometown, and Dunye’s construction of a

“homoplace” in The Potluck and the Passion. In each of these instances, the home which has not always been a space of freedom for women and people of color is reimagined as a site of potential. Morrison’s vision of moving the “racial project” into the domestic space serves as an instantiation of Nash’s Black feminist love-politics. Nash reads these love- politics as an affective project that “reformulates public culture and organizes it around affect and new conceptions of redress” (16) and reorients public culture toward “a different sense of temporality” (16) that allows for the dream of a “yet unwritten future”

(18).

262

Beyoncé’s choice to place her narrative of homecoming in the South, long caricatured as the site of American racism and figured as a site caught in the past, implies that utopian thinking requires seeing past seemingly ossified notions of space and time.

The South shares with domestic space a history of being seen as oppressive to Black women and Lemonade seeks to undo this narrative. I employ an expansive understanding of the domestic in examining the porches and front rooms and living rooms and bedrooms of Southern homes as intimate spaces shared by Black women and ripe for potential futures. Black women move through these spaces imparting wisdom on future generations and making futures for those to follow. As Nash argues about Black feminist love-politics, intimate moments can reconfigure the public sphere through a turn towards affective connections between people. These kinds of attachments offer spiritual and embodied remedy, often by working through pleasure and pain, a common theme across this project.

The freedom offered in Lemonade is one that is ephemeral and a work in progress. Beyoncé sings the song “Freedom” to a tent revival made up of Black women, the chorus oscillates between lines about being unable to “move” and a need to “keep running.” “Freedom” in this song is not an arrived at state of being but rather something constantly sought through continual physical and spiritual movement against the confines of society. The line “I can’t move” echoes “I can’t breathe,” the chilling words of Eric

Garner before he died in a police chokehold in 2014. Instead of offering the tent revival a song about Christian salvation, Beyoncé performs a song about “Freedom” as a constant struggle, reflecting the ongoing work of anti-racist Black feminist work in the

263 contemporary moment. Freedom, Avery Gordon argues, “is an uneven process, not very linear, always looping around, catching folks at different moments … Freedom is, in short, the process by which we do the work of making revolution irresistible, making it something we cannot live without” (204-205). The temporality of freedom is not a straight line but rather a constant working through, a negotiation between stillness and frenetic movement, like the aesthetic movements seen across Lemonade. The pleasures and joys of freedom, articulated in the rich and dense aesthetic project of Lemonade, and felt by the characters imagined across the texts examined this project, offer an affective move towards some other way of being, different ways of knowing time and history. By making revolution irresistible, Gordon writes, “we make the best history we can now, which is only ever when we have a chance” (205). Touching history, as Black women have across medium and genre, means subverting the flows of progress in ways which open up spaces to reconsider the past and imagine different futures while glorying in the present.

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