Amber Jamila Musser
Professor, American Studies, George Washington University
Amber Jamila Musser is a Professor of American Studies at George Washington University and the author of Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism (NYU, 2014) and Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance (NYU Press, 2018). Musser has published widely on race, critical theory, queer femininities, sexuality, and queer of color critique. A new project on sweat and the Black body explores its racialization, the workings of bodies exposed to ever-proliferating heat events, and narratives about bodies and their disciplining. This work moves between the eroticization of the sweat that glistens on black dancers’ bodies and the racist myth of malodorous black bodies. This swerves between the use of sweating as the product of exuberant and racialized embodiment and sweat as a sign of racial difference shows both sweat’s polyvalence and material components of desirability and disgust. Importantly, sweat brings us toward breath and the conditions of possibility.
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