EXCESSIVE VISION(S): MULTI-MEDIATED INTIMACY, VISUALITY, AND THE BODY By Majida Kargbo B.A., Williams College, 2010 M.A., Brown University, 2011 A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of American Studies at Brown University Providence, Rhode Island May 2018 © Copyright 2018 by Majida Kargbo This dissertation by Majida Kargbo is accepted in its present form by the Department of American Studies as satisfying the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date________________ ____________________________________ Professor Ralph Rodriguez, Co-Director Date________________ ____________________________________ Professor Lynne Joyrich, Co-Director Recommended to the Graduate School Date_________________ ____________________________________ Professor Leticia Alvarado, Reader Approved by the Graduate Council Date_________________ ____________________________________ Andrew Campbell Dean of Graduate School iii CURRICULUM VITAE Majida Kargbo was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. She received a B.A. in English and History from Williams College (2010) with a thesis on the aesthetics of non-binary sexual identities (“Between a Bridge and a Wall: Bisexual Narratives in Literature and Film”). While at Williams Majida was also the recipient of the QuestBridge Scholarship and the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship. At Brown University, Majida earned her M.A. in American Studies (2011) and will receive her Ph.D. in American Studies this May (2018). Majida published an article, “Towards a New Relationality: Digital Photography, Shame, and the Fat Subject” (2013) in Fat Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society and an essay on artist Wangechi Mutu’s collage art is forthcoming in Signs. She has presented work at various national and regional conferences including Thinking Gender (2013), Gender, Race, and Representation in New Media at Cornell University (2013), The National Women’s Association (2013, 2014, 2017), the Association of Asian American Studies Conference (2014) The Society for Cinema and Media Studies (2014, 2015), The American Studies Association (2015, 2016), and the Modern Language Association (2016). Her research and professionalization has been supported by the Mellon Mays Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women, among others. In addition to teaching two self-designed courses, Majida has also contributed to the University by serving as a graduate coordinator for the LGBTQ Center for five years, a coordinator of graduate student professionalization for career services for two years, a mentor iv and project coordinator for The Leadership Alliance Mellon Initiative, Graduate Community Fellow and as editorial assistant for the Women Writers Project and the Modernist Journals Project. She was a recipient of the Graduate Student Community Life Award (2017) in recognition of her community engagement while at Brown. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project could not have been completed without the support and generosity of many people over the years. First and foremost, my committee. Thank you, Ralph Rodriguez, for your mentorship, constant encouragement, and brilliant insights. Lynne Joyrich, your rigorous engagement with visual culture, media studies and popular culture has deeply influenced my work. My deepest gratitude to Leticia Alvarado for your thoughtful comments and meticulous edits that helped transform nascent ideas into critical arguments. Writing this dissertation has been a solitary process, but it never felt like a lonely one because of my community both near and far. I have been fortunate to be surrounded by passionate thinkers and generous hearts during my time at Brown. Colleen Tripp, Pia Sahni, and Pier Dominguez’s friendship, warmth and willingness to indulge my many, and varied, pop cultural obsessions made me feel like Providence could be home. Sara Matthiesen, your brilliance, passion, generosity and commitment to community has inspired me in more ways than you know. Sarah Brown and Elizabeth Wolfson, thank you for your openness, the advice, the adventures, and your friendship. Amy Chin, your friendship and support has helped me immensely in pushing through these final years of graduate school. Our conversations on everything from identity formation to Ru Paul’s Drag Race has enriched my life and helped to shape the kind of scholar, teacher, mentor, and community member I hope to be. And to my dear friend Dae Selcer, thank you for continually believing in me and serving as a reminder that I am more than my research. I would not have made it through graduate school without the unconditional love and constant support of my parents, Vivian Kargbo and Craig Maxwell. To my mom: thank you for vi always having confidence in me when my own faltered, for your wisdom, and for continuously modeling how to live a life of compassion. To my dad: thank you for giving me my first lesson in the transformative power of chosen family. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Signature Page……………………………………………………………………………………iii Curriculum Vitae…………………………………………………………………………………iv Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………………….vi Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………..1 Too Freaky, Too Vulnerable Chapter One……………………………………………………………………………………...16 Towards a New Relationality: Digital Photography, Shame, and the Fat Subject Chapter Two……………………………………………………………………………………...44 Slow Deaths, Quick Laughs: The Black Female Body in *Loosely Exactly Nicole and The Mindy Project Chapter Three…………………………………………………………………………………….88 Leaky Bodies: Wangechi Mutu and Ellen Gallagher’s Collage Art Chapter Four……………………………………………………………………………………129 How To Be Seen: Excess, Lack and the (Black) Cinematic Body Coda…………………………………………………………………………………….............170 Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………174 viii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1 Cover image of Fat Ladies in Spaaaaace coloring book……………………………….18 Figure 2 An Obeast in the wild…………………………………………………………………..37 Figure 3 A “daguerreotype” of a hunted Obeast…………………………………………………38 Figure 4 Nicole and Devin fanning themselves in the opening scene of the season premiere…..46 Figure 5 Close-up of Nicole and Devin’s sweaty bodies………………………………………...46 Figure 6 Kate’s “bad” food in This Is Us………………………………………………………..55 Figure 7 Kate weighing herself just before falling off the scale…………………………………55 Figure 8 Kate throwing out all of her “bad” foods………………………………………………56 Figure 9 Mindy’s “talking” Barbie………………………………………………………………68 Figure 10 Laverne Cox teaching Mindy how to be “fabulous”………………………………….84 Figure 11 Mindy after Sheena’s makeover………………………………………………………85 Figure 12 Precious fantasizing about living a glamorous life……………………………………87 Figure 13 Mutu Pin-Up installation at the Studio Museum in Harlem, 2003……………………98 Figure 14 Wangechi Mutu, Pin-Up, mixed media on paper, 2001………………………………99 Figure 15 Wangechi Mutu, I Have Peg Leg Nightmares, collage and watercolor on Mylar, 2003……………………………………………………………………………………..103 Figure 16 Wangechi Mutu, Riding Death in My Sleep, ink and collage on paper, 2001……….106 Figure 17 Ellen Gallagher, Host (detail), oil, pencil, paper on canvas, 1996…………………..109 Figure 18 Ellen Gallagher, Soma (detail), oil, pencil, paper, on canvas, 1998…………………110 Figure 19 Ellen Gallagher, Untitled, Oil, pencil, and paper, 1995……………………………..112 ix Figure 20 Ellen Gallagher, Paper Cup (detail), ink on paper on canvas, 1996…………………113 Figure 21 Ellen Gallagher, Preserve (Karate), oil, pencil, plasticine, magazine page, 2001…..119 Figure 22 Ellen Gallagher, Preserve (Medalo) oil, pencil, and pomade on magazine page, 2001……………………………………………………………………………………..121 Figure 23 Ellen Gallagher, Preserve (Yellow), oil, pencil, and paper on magazine page, 2001………………………………………………………………………………..........122 Figure 24 Ellen Gallagher, DeLuxe (detail), photogravure, spit-bite, collage, cutting, scratching, silkscreen, offset lithography and hand-building, 2005………………………………...128 Figure 25 Micah and Jo’ at the Museum of the Africa Diaspora……………………………….136 Figure 26 Medicine for Melancholy opening scene……………………………………………138 Figure 27 Extreme close-up of Jo’……………………………………………………………...138 Figure 28 The “drug dealers” approach Micah and Jo’………………………………………...151 Figure 29 The “drug dealers” try to sale SoBE…………………………………………………151 Figure 30 Animation in An Oversimplification of Her Beauty………………………………...165 x INTRODUCTION Too Freaky, Too Vulnerable Some of us are “too much.” Too large, too thin, too freaky, too plain, too outspoken, too dark, too light, too old, too vulnerable. Some of our bodies are over-determined, always-already imbued with an excess of meaning. Some of our bodies pose “problems” through their very visibility and corporeality. They are hungering bodies; bodies that yearn; bodies whose conspicuousness give form to that which has been erased. But if “too” is a signal of excess, it is also a marker of attachment, of being “with,” “alongside,” and “as well.” To be “too much,” then, is to be both in surplus of and in community with. It is this unruliness of “excessive” bodies—their refusal of affective and material containment—that creates the space for a different kind of encounter. Rather than think of excess as only a state of being—a subject’s relation to other bodies or manifestation of particular structural logics—this project endeavors to show the ways in which excess is also a way of extending the self into new terrain. While the excessive body is often conjured as a disruption of normative ways of knowing and being in the world through visible markers of difference such as size, race, or extravagant emotion, I argue that the excessive body’s destabilizing effects and radical potentiality are rooted in its ability to reach beyond the self and form different kinds of socialities. The unspoken threat of being too much is also a threat of being too close. 1 Excessive Vision(s): Multi-Mediated Intimacy, Visuality, and the Body is a study of excess as a strategy for creating new forms of sociality. Specifically, I look at how making visible bodies that have been marked as “too much” opens up the possibility for the deployment of marginalized identities in more expansive and fluid ways. This process of intentional re- visioning of the excessive body reveals, in turn, a new way to relate to non-normative bodies that can be grounded in intimacy rather than distance. How do we create the circumstances under which atypical, non-normative, unruly, minoritarian bodies can be the grounds on which to build sociality? One way to do so, I contend, is not through the normalizing, flattening process of turning “difference” into an asset that makes marked bodies “useful” to the logics of the state.1 Rather, we need to be able to articulate the multiple and contradictory ways of being in social worlds together. In doing so, the process of becoming—coming into being as a legible body—is troubled and revealed to be a non-static, ongoing engagement with other bodies that are always orienting themselves in new and strange ways. I argue that if “excessive” bodies (fat, black, and queer) engender dis-ease, discomfort and a need to protect the cultural forms and ideologies that construct the Self through exclusion of those disruptive forces, the excessive body is never fully absent and resists the forces of containment and erasure. There is always a remainder, a residue that haunts the margins, and has residual effects and affects. I contend that what remains is not simply the residue of contamination, fear, disgust, and repulsion that often attends the encounter with excess, but rather a new kind of intimacy; an intimacy inextricable from constructions of the excessive. Intimacy requires a level of emotional and physical proximity, but it also opens up the possibility of being too close; to feel, but perhaps to feel too much. But the language of being “too close” and “too much” is also the effect of 1 Jodie Melamed, “The Spirit of Neoliberalism: From Racial Liberalism to Neoliberal Multiculturalism,” Social Text 89, vol. 24, no. 4 (2006): 1-24. 2 socially constructed ideas about which bodies are read as “appropriate” and which are read as “deviant.” They are common phrases that mask the epistemological and ontological assumptions that being seen, heard, touched, and felt by others are somehow a surplus and not essential to identity formation. Bodies whose corpulence can’t be ignored, whose racialization make the supposed neutrality of the white body harder to turn “universal,” and whose sexual fluidity ruptures heteronormative logics, make visible the lie of the autonomous, nonporous Self that can encounter bodies made “Other” with no meaningful effect. Although encounters with the other are often uncomfortable, it is a discomfort, I argue, not simply of distaste or repulsion (the act of distancing at the heart of the proclamation “they are just too much”) but also of a desire for the troubling of boundaries between Self and Other that open up our senses to unknown, but emergent forms of belonging, connectivity, and relationality. It is these forms of subjectivity and sociality that I explore through an analysis of various forms of representation of “excessive bodies.” Excessive Vision(s) seeks to trouble the boundaries of representational identity politics, in part, by being promiscuous with media forms. It argues that not only what we imagine about the other and our otherness, but also the way that difference is imagined—the forms by which that otherness is made visible—is crucial to the creation of the intimate encounter its ability to disrupt our being-in-the-world together. This is not to privilege one mode of representation as somehow more radical or productive or full of possibility. When you are scrolling a website featuring fashionable fat bodies, being dwarfed by the art object on display in a museum exhibit, are viewing a film, like Medicine for Melancholy, that defies conformity to the genre within which it operates, and are, perhaps, denied access altogether to what you so desperately want to be made visible, what new spaces are made possible? What effect does the mode of representation, the 3 degree to which we are granted access to visions of the body, have on how we understand identity—race, gender, sexuality, and fat—in that encounter? Bodies Seen, Bodies Sensed: Theoretical Perspectives But what, exactly, is this “body” that becomes “excessive”? In this project the body includes but is not limited to the material corpus. As such, my project combines phenomenology, affect studies, and cyborg theory to theorize modes of being-in-the-world that bridge the gap between materiality and immateriality. In this way, my project links body and technology, the visual and the textual, affect and ideology in order to reveal sites of excess as spaces that create encounters of porous subjectivity. My project’s investment in phenomenology is rooted in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s coupling of the visual to the process of embodiment. In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau- Ponty argues that as beings-in-the-world, each of us is fundamentally a worldly being, a bodied being capable of sensing and being sensed by others. And it is the capacity of sensing and being sensed from which all consciousness, consciousness of the world and others and also self- consciousness, emerges. Subjectivity is the awareness of oneself as a subject, as an active and distinct entity. In the Cartesian model, subjectivity is a reflection on oneself as the “I” who is the subject of thought. This model of the rational ego creates a divide between the Self and Other. The other is excluded from my private field of perception and reflection as I am excluded from hers. Merleau-Ponty arrives at a different account of subjectivity from his examination of sense phenomenology. He finds that subjectivity is “bound up with that of the body and that of the 4 world.”2 What has been understood to be the subjective aspect of the being, he concludes, is inseparable from the body and the world. The problem of embodiment raises questions concerning the notion of the mental as a distinct phenomenal region mediating our intentional orientation in the world. Merleau-Ponty does not deny the existence of mental phenomena, but insists that thought and sensation occur only against a background of perceptual activity that we have always already understood in bodily terms. One’s own body is never a discrete object of perception. As Merleau-Ponty says, “as for my body, I do not observe it itself: to be able to do so, I would need the use of a second body, which would not itself be observable.”3 He thus concludes, “Insofar as it sees or touches the world, my body can therefore be neither seen nor touched. What prevents its ever being an object, ever being ‘completely constituted,’ is that it is that by which there are objects.”4 For Merleau-Ponty, it is precisely the phenomenological dovetailing of our bodily movements with our visual orientation in the environment that constitutes our positive sense of being embodied perceptual selves. Far more than Edmund Husserl’s various appeals to hypothetical inferences and associations among kinesthetic and outward-directed sensations, Merleau-Ponty’s thick conception of perceptual agency already implicates the body in all perceptual acts. Our ongoing background perception of our own bodies is nothing like an object- directed awareness focused on any of its distinct parts, as for example when we locate tactile sensations on our skin or in our joints. Our sense of embodiment is bound up instead with a primitive understanding of the body as a global and abiding horizon of perceptual experience. In 2 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception (London and New York: Routledge Classics, 1962), 475. 3 Ibid., 91. 4 Ibid., 92. 5 other words, according to Merleau-Ponty, my body simply “is my point of view on the world5.” Thus, for Merleau-Ponty, the seer’s visibility conditions vision itself; it is the ground he shares with the visible, the condition of any relation to them. As Elizabeth Grosz says in her reading of Phenomenology of Perception, “To see, then, is also by implication, to be seen. Seeing entails having a body that is itself capable of being seen, that is visible. This is the very condition of seeing, the condition of embodiment.”6 Merleau-Ponty’s enmeshment of the physical and the visual has been taken up by affect scholars like Vivian Sobchack and Elizabeth Wilson.7 Both attempt to think past the Cartesian divide of mind from body and of subjects from objects by describing how our perceiving, perceptible, and materially sensible bodies form a double entwining with the perceiving, perceptible, and materially sensible world around us. As the entrance of affect into body studies reveals: the body is not a stable thing or entity, but rather a process that extends into and is immersed in the world: Affect is integral to a body’s perceptual becoming (always becoming otherwise, however subtly, than what it already is), pulled beyond its seeming surface-boundedness by way of its relation to, indeed its composition through, the forces of encounter. With affect, a body is as much outside itself as in itself—webbed in its relations—until ultimately such firm distinctions cease to matter.8 5 Ibid., 70. 6 Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 101. 7 For more on body-image as kinesthetic, non-visual process see: Vivian Sobchack, ‘Living a phantom limb: On the phenomenology of bodilyintegrity’, Body & Society 16(3) (2010): 51–68 and Elizabeth Wilson, Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body, Durham, NC: Duke University Press (2004). 8 Melissa Gregg, and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds., The Affect Theory Reader, (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010), 3. 6 Thus, rather than talk of bodies, I want to talk of the brain-body-world entanglements and where, how, and whether one should attempt to draw boundaries around self and other, material and immaterial. Bodies are open, defined by their capacities to affect and be affected. However, affect has a fraught relationship with visualizing embodiment because it refers to those registers of experience that cannot be easily seen and that might be variously described as non-cognitive, trans-subjective, non-conscious, incorporeal, and immaterial. As Seigworth and Gregg note in The Affect Reader, affect is read variously as “excess, as autonomous, as impersonal, as the ineffable, as the ongoingness of process, as pedagogico-aesthetic, as virtual, as shareable (mimetic), as sticky, as collective, as contingency, as threshold or conversion point, as immanence of potential (futurity), as the open.”9 In short, affect too is not a thing but rather a process, a mode of circulation between bodies. Much of affect theory criticizes the limitations of focusing on the visual because a visual prospective tends to close down our understanding of bodies to static, two-dimensional things or entities. Brian Massumi terms this “mirror vision,” where the emphasis is on the static image. Affect theory introduces the concept of body-schema which is a non-visual or non- representational sense of the body. This is a model of the body that is not just about how a body looks either to oneself or to others, but rather about how a body feels, emphasizing a kind of intensity generated between bodies. However, we need not discard the image entirely. As Mike Featherstone argues, following the work of Annette Kuhn, the image is also imago: “to look or think photographically also requires an attunement to the affective work of images; to their 9 Ibid., 9. 7 suggestive capacities of captivation and enchantment.”10 Intensities which are felt rather than seen, according to Featherstone, can still be registered, mediated, and visualized. What we need, Featherstone argues, is to take account of how people move between different registers, between body-image and body-without-an-image, between “the mirror-image and the movement-image, between affect and emotion, between the subject-object and the sensation of visceral and proprioceptive intensities.”11 It is just such an accounting and movement that I offer in this dissertation. That is, this project explores “excess” as an ontological and affective category that slips between the visual and the haptic, thereby productively blurring the line between intensities felt and intensities that crowd the scopic field. By refusing both the split between material and immaterial and corporeality and virtuality, this project turns toward a haptic embodiment that envisions excess as productively tactile. Excessive bodies are simultaneously entities and metaphors, living beings and narrative constructions. They transgress the line between “real” and constructed, troubling the boundaries between the material body and the metaphorical body. The excessive body, therefore, has the potential to disrupt traditional categories. Through the violation of boundaries, the excessive subject creates new couplings between parts that are not supposed to touch. This project explores the new, different kinds of ways the excessive body “touches” other bodies by making visible the porous and permeable nature of embodiment, thereby envisioning new relationalities that reconfigure the imagined distance between Self and Other. Theses bodies productively trouble the borders between seen and unseen, intimacy and distance, the haptic and the impalpable. 10 Mike Featherstone, "Body Image and Affect in Consumer Culture," Body & Society 16, no. 1 (2010): 198. 11 Ibid., 213. 8 And if excessive bodies transgress material bounds, they also exceed temporal limitations. The excessive troubles the constitution of a position that would allow for the demarcation between the “present” and “the past” because excess necessarily queers one’s relationship to temporality by disrupting fixity. Excessive bodies, I contend, are queerly temporal because they are always already both in-time (the very nature of excess is that it is always so insistently there) and out-of-time (relationality with the Other must constantly be re-negotiated and “wholeness” is always deferred). Excess, then, does not easily map onto historical chronologies. It is not linear, but lateral; an expanding out, not always forward. The project, then, is temporally unbound. Although all of the case studies come from the contemporary moment and some consider technologies that were nonexistent 10 years ago, this is not because there is something especially “modern” about excess and its affective possibilities. Rather, these sites were chosen—digital image-sharing platforms, television, cinema, contemporary art—because of the generative ways they engage with excess as an effect of visuality and affect. Excess allows us to consider how our sense of identity would change if we considered our attachments as a result of growing outwards and not inwards. Perhaps development—of ourselves, of our understanding of others—can be experienced not as a progressive movement forward toward a definite and knowable end, but as time recessed, suspended, and expanded. Mediated Materialities “Excessive Vision(s)” analyzes both the representation of “excessive” bodies, and the excess ideological and social meanings that clutter the margins of what we imagine to be pure “vision(s)” of the body. Therefore, I have chosen subject positions always already imbued with excess—the fat body, the disabled body, the racialized body, the female body, and their various 9 intersections—and positioned them against a wide array of media—photography, digital communities, live performance, television, film and fine art—in order to explore their potential to disrupt normative fields of vision and therefore normative modes of relating to the imagined Other. There is nothing inherently radical or transformative about the media I investigate. Rather, it is their relationship to excessive bodies that creates a productive space that re-configures our vision of excessive embodiment. Thus phenomenology, critical race studies, and queer theory are deployed in this project as a means of thinking, visualizing, and feeling the excessive body anew. Visibility both shapes my object because I pursue the scopic de/construction of excess in the visual and performative texts and inspires my methodology because I analyze the way these texts’ visual syntax re-imagines excess. Yet I also attempt to go beyond “visibility” to explore other senses and sensations—sensations that yield a different understanding of bodies. Emphasizing the ways these texts and the mediums they embody collide with histories of visuality and affect, I argue that an intimacy capable of resisting the narrow scopic field of embodiment is made possible by media that destabilize spectatorial embodiment in a manner that allows for an encounter with otherness that neither reifies nor erases difference. It produces a form of queer tactility, where perceptions, affects, and bodies touch in disturbing ways that can often open onto new and potentially radical embodied relations. Queer tactilities, then, are forms of touching that disturb and transform the entities meeting through such an encounter. I argue that visual mediums are experienced by spectators not merely from the detached position of the disembodied gaze but also the corporeal position of an embodied subject. I suggest that this methodological shift in how we analyze visual culture has importantly queer roots and queer effects: not only does it build on the queer critique of visibility politics as 10 inadequate for the task of collective world-making, but it also enables queer relationalities between bodies, mediums, and representations The first chapter, “Towards a New Relationality: Digital Photography, Shame, and the Fat Subject,” explores digital image-making processes of online fat activist and body positive communities. I am interested in the way in which the singular photograph, which captures a distinct moment in time, is re-deployed as a signifier of temporal expansiveness by members of these communities. The digital photograph gets transformed into an index of liveness, thereby queering the fat subject’s relationship to the photograph as the static before/after image. The ubiquitous before/after image is both representative and constitutive of the queer temporality felt by some fat subjects. The viewer’s full identification with the image is displaced because the legitimating process of entering the optic field is predicated on making the fat body the abject Other to the new thin self. If we “learn to see ourselves photographically,” some fat subjects learn that one’s relationship to the present (fat) body can only be integrated and narrativized as a possible identification from the vantage point of the future (thin) body looking back on abject fat embodiment. Fat subjects, then, are positioned in temporalities that have either passed or have yet to come, but are never simply present. The emphasis on the image allows, I posit, for a radical reorientation and reimagining of the role of abjection, such that the encounter with shame and disgust can transform not only the perception of the fat bodies in the image but the viewers’ body as well. What if these sites enact a kind of embarrassing intimacy with the fat body that does not entirely function to dispel discomfort, but instead uses the uneasiness felt by both fat and non-fat subjects to queer the relationality with our own bodies and with others’? If “live” performance art forces us to recognize the limits of our own body and psyche in relation to the artist and the audience, how 11 might the virtual—the repetition of the image in a photo-blog and the embedded images/video of an online “exhibit”— help us reimagine “liveness,” where past and future are invisible constitutive excesses, or remainders, of the present moment and stage new relational encounters? I then move from the digital screen to the television in “Slow Deaths, Quick Laughs: The Black Body in *Loosely Exactly Nicole and The Mindy Project.” Shifting from queer temporality of the before/after image, the second chapter explores the way the fat black female body has been figured as an especially immobile signifier of reduced embodied agency whose excess marks the limits of certain kinds of intimacies. I argue that in MTV’s *Loosely Exactly Nicole, Nicole Byer’s depiction of a deeply flawed and sometimes failing fat, black subject ruptures the representational possibilities for—and the meanings attached to—the corpulent black female body. Byer’s performative excess and failure to always be the “good” subject turn both blackness and fatness into a fluid subject position that reenvisions what it looks like to live, and live well. The chapter then turns to the way “living the good life” often relies on imagining the black body as static for non-black subjects. The first season of The Mindy Project deploys the black body as a marker for the limits of relatability. The show very carefully manages Mindy Lahiri’s visibility so that the absence of identificatory capacity that often manifests in the audience-reception of excessive (black) bodies of color is not replicated when Mindy’s curvaceous, South Asian body is on display. The show imagines blackness, both metaphorically and literally, as the limit to the transgressive possibilities of the “unruly,” marginalized body of color. I then move to the frustration of the possibility of visual unity in the work of collage artists Ellen Gallagher and Wangechi Mutu as they grapple with what Nicole Fleetwood calls the “excess flesh,” the over-determination of meaning, of black women’s bodies in “Leaky Bodies: 12 Wangechi Mutu and Ellen Gallagher’s Collage Art.” I specifically focus on Ellen Gallagher’s series of panels that appropriate images of stereotypical black figures from mid-twentieth- century black culture magazines such as Ebony and Sepia. Gallagher’s collaged sheets of blue- lined school writing paper onto canvas are often crowded with disembodied popping eyes and hot dog lips, covering the surface as if a face looking for its body—a sort of excess in spite of lack. This chapter explores Gallagher’s many references to a minimalist fine art tradition as a means of confronting the interstices of representation. Gallagher comments on historical and aesthetic languages by creating almost 3D images with the melding of multiple materials (paper, pencil, newsprint, oil, gold leaf, and plasticine). It is the meticulously and materially layered quality of this work that makes the encounter with her creations move beyond the merely visual and feel like they are reaching out to touch the viewer. The haptic also plays an important role in the work of New York based, Kenyan multi- media artist Wangechi Mutu. Here, I focus on Mutu’s richly detailed and multi-layered collages of female bodies. Her composite portraits of merging subjectivities—Western/“African,” black/white, beautiful/grotesque, “normal”/disfigured, whole/fractured, national/diasporic, to name a few—works to undo the binaristic logic that constructs the “excessive” subject with images of post-biological, hyphenated, black, brown, and white bodies. Instead of striving for some version of an ideal subject whose plurality somehow counters the logic of excess, Mutu deploys the excessive in her art to picture the awkward, failed, but moving attempt to arrive at an image of constantly shifting needs, desires, identity, and knowledge. The final chapter, “How to Be Seen: Excess, Lack and the (Black) Cinematic Body” thinks about the externalization of racial subjectivity and visuality not through the haptic excess of Gallagher and Mutu, but rather through lack. Film is a particularly fraught space for the black 13 subject, where representations of an “authentic” black subjectivity is expected precisely because an excess of meaning is attached to the surface of the skin. But what would it mean to detach from the expectations of representational politics, to be disinterested in “positive” or “negative” portrayals? What if, instead, one were attentive to the bodies that inhabited a specific space rather than solely to the racial contours of experience, ideology, and representation? I turn to examples of the Barry Jenkin’s directed “black” mumblecore film Medicine for Melancholy (2008), the melodrama of Lee Daniels’ Precious (2009), and Terence Nance’s genre-defying An Oversimplification of Her Beauty (2012) to work through narratives of black experience where the black body’s subjectivity, having been externalized, is not truncated to an overdetermined racial identity. The chapter focuses primarily on “mumblecore,” an independent film genre whose narratives rely on the unremarked upon presence of white bodies. It explores the ways Barry Jenkins’ Medicine For Melancholy (2009), often the only film that centers black bodies included in discussions of the genres, both relies on and disavows mumblecore tropes to destabilize place of the black body in cinema. Through particular aesthetic choices and sonic cues Barry Jenkins creates a world wherein the African American protagonists, Micah and Jo’, do not restore a sense of social or visual homeostasis, but often produce a visceral sense of racial and bodily disorientation. It lingers in the film’s différance and explore excess through lack. What happens when the black body—so often the excess, surplus, the hypervisible—is framed within the small, intimate world of mumblecore? What difference does difference make when black subjects are at the center of the narrative? How does this cinematic aesthetic strategy open up new modes of being for the black body that rely on a critical discourse of the minimal, the small gesture? 14 The chapter pairs Jenkins’ work with that of Terence Nance’s film An Oversimplification of Her Beauty (2013) and Lee Daniels’ Precious (2009), black bodies that also go through a process of profound estrangement from the Self. In Precious we don’t get authenticity, but performance; not documentary, but narrative fiction; not an abject black girl from the inner city, but “some fuckin’ white chick from the Valley.” In this world, the fantasy most approximates reality. It is this disjuncture that is constantly at play in the film. Precious is excessive in both form and content, but its extravagance calls attention to what it would mean for a black body to perform a role that has not been given to you. Nance’s film, on the other hand, is a highly experimental pastiche of animation and stop- motion, candid video, verbose direct address, doodles, footnotes, sonic bridges, and mockumentary. Unlike Medicine for Melancholy, the film is visually and sonically dense. And yet they both produce representational spaces where black bodies produce a new set of possibilities that are neither positive nor negative, but instead occupy the in-between of time and space, digital and analog, vulnerability and empowerment, excess and lack that produces an encounter that disorients the viewer. Representations of excessive bodies can create encounters not just of estrangement, but of a kind of intimacy that opens up new possibilities for a relationship with embodied difference. If the threat of the excessive body is its potential to spill over and contaminate its surroundings, there is also the potential for a different kind of contact. Images can “touch” in ways that transform the overdetermination of certain identities into the site of a different kind of agency and sociality. These are risky encounters: there is a potential for loss, but also for gain. 15 CHAPTER ONE Towards a New Relationality: Digital Photography, Shame, and the Fat Subject We have all seen headless fatties.12 Their bodies, rendered visibly foreign and grotesque as any potential for relationality is removed with the excision of the head, are often parading across magazines with bold lettering declaring the “obesity epidemic” sweeping the nation. They are floating bodies stripped completely of any individuating characteristics. They are signifiers of cultural anxieties that simultaneously disembodies (because they are illegible as either sexed bodies or “productive” citizens) and renders them only body, or excessively bodied (there is no need for the face because everything— laziness, greed, lack of discipline—is written on the body).13 The fat (non)subject, then, exists in the liminal state of being too present and not present at all. But imagine another image: a drawing of a fat woman in a space suit. She’s wearing a form- fitting jumpsuit made of spandex with matching boots and gloves. Her helmet and ray-gun look more like homemade affairs than signs of a technologically advanced future (one imagines a displaced and slightly disgruntled goldfish somewhere in the background after its former habitat has been repurposed and the dangling plug of the hair dryer/ray gun just out of our line of sight). “Sincerity explores the edges of the universe, charting new planets and seducing alien women” is written at the bottom of the image. The sketch belongs more to low-budget 1950’s television imaginings of “the great 12 Charlotte Cooper. 'Headless Fatties' [Online]. London. (2007) Available: http://www.charlottecooper.net/docs/fat/headless_fatties.htm 13 For more on fat liminality see: Samantha Murray, “(Un/Be)Coming Out? Rethinking Fat Politics.” Social Semiotics 15:2. 16 unknown” than the high tech vestiture we’ve come to associate with the future. But the power of this image, what makes it so astonishing, has nothing to do with the apparel and the degree to which it is able to resemble a world (and bodies) that may seem similar to us, and everything to do with the body in the suit: a fat person in space. Our fat cosmonaut is one of “eighteen fat sci-fi heroines doing what they do best: trekking across timeand space, blasting into adventure, and saving the day” in one of the earliest fat positive adult coloring books, Nicole Lorenz’s Fat Ladies in Spaaaaace: A Body-Positive Coloring Book14 (FLiS). The cover image features a fat, woman of color with vibrant pink cropped hair battling a space octopus (Fig. 1). Within its pages you can color in a fat woman riding a space unicorn (based on the likeness of fat activist and writer Marianne Kirby); a fat doctor’s assistant (a riff on the long running British science fiction show Doctor Who), exasperatingly waiting for him to figure out their next destination with his head buried in an upside down “atlas of the universe”; and time travel with an intrepid, history-loving explorer who has considerably overshot the Defenestration of Prague and landed atop a dinosaur. As noted on the back of the book by the author, “There’s a whole universe of body types out there, and they all deserve to be represented” (Lorenz 2011: back cover). The images include both static and dynamic poses, and many, such as the space unicorn riding fatty, are modeled after real life people involved in fat acceptance activism. 14 Nicole Lorenz, Fat Ladies in Spaaaaace: A Body-Positive Coloring Book, Sourcebooks (2016). 17 Figure 1 Cover image of Fat Ladies in Spaaaaace coloring book In a reading of the objects that appear in Edmund Husserl’s writing, Sara Ahmed concludes “we get a sense of how being directed toward some objects and not others involves a more general 18 orientation toward the world. The objects that we direct our attention toward reveal the direction we have taken in life.”15 Coloring books, I argue, also function as objects that orient us toward the world. For many, they are one of the earliest ways we learn to express our creativity. To learn to follow the curve of the line. To add our own pigments and shades to bring the flat image to life. Will we learn to color within the lines? Are the people a fleshlike color or have we opted for a fluorescent green face and purple hands? The coloring book is for children. It is a pastime meant to provide a space for creative exploration. What we rarely think about are what bodies are not included—who isn’t allowed to be colored in and, in effect, be brought to life. Be part of the field of what is imaginable. It is a kind of orientation towards the livable. An introduction to not only who gets to have a life, but whose life (and livelihood) gets to be projected beyond the present. The coloring book page and the selfie, then, are one in the same. They mark a kind of living. I recognize the seeming incongruence of opening a discussion of internet communities comprised of self-identified fat individuals taking amateur self-portraits with a hand drawing of an anachronistic curvy fat woman in space. However, I am interested not in the drawing as singular object, but rather its place in a constellation of images and image-making processes with which it is in dialog. That is to say, the image is salient because of its mode of reception—digital communities—and its representational ability to comment on the discourse that “live” fat images enter into—the liminality of fat embodiment. The sketch, drawn by the artist and writer Nicole Lorenz, and later turned into the coloring book Fat Ladies in Spaaaaace: a body positive coloring book, was initially seen on fat activist and writer Marianne Kirby’s popular blog “The Rotund” and has subsequently been “liked” and re- 15 Sara Ahmed, “Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology,” GLQ (12:4), 2006: 546. 19 blogged on numerous other body positive and Fat Activist sites.16 This fat online community making through image-sharing has formed in response to the image of the abject fat body in the social imaginary. 17 They are an attempt to shift away from the medicalized and pathologized discursive erasure of the fat body to the resignification of the fat subject that can exist beyond the future conditional—“If I lose weight, I might be legible as a gendered body, a desiring body, a livable body, a body who does not function only as the shamed Other.” The drawing, while being playfully exuberant in its affirmation of fleshy corporeality, is also playing with the tropes of science fiction and speculative literature. For if sci-fi is comprised of “works operating within the conditional clause—works that reveal insights into the possibility of what could have happened, or what might occur if certain social/political/historical conditions…were different or were to change,”18 surely we are also called to imagine otherwise when we see a fatty in space. The futurity of this image offers something new to the viewer not because of the fantastical images of technological progress we expect, but because it uses the very materiality of the body to imagine a different future. And in a world where our futurescapes are peopled by everything from “perfect” genetically engineered human specimens to floating heads who seem to have transcended the “problem” of the body altogether, this assertion of excess flesh is quite radical. Instead of the fat body being made subject to or acted on by technology, the drawing reimagines the fat body as a subject of technology. She is a fatty who not only has a head, but whose curve-hugging ensemble is an avowal of her fleshy corporeality. 16 Kirby, Marianne. “Fat Ladies in Spaaaaaaaaace; A Body Positive Coloring Book.” The Rotund. August 15, 2011. 17 As Julia Kristeva notes “The Abject has only one quality of the object—that of being opposed to I.” Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 1. 18 Esther L. Jones, “Traveling Discourses: Subjectivity, Space and Spirituality in Black Women’s Speculative Fictions in the Americas,” Ph.D dissertation, The Ohio State University, 2006. 20 We live in a culture where the fat body exists in a permanent state of the “before” picture to be compared to the “after,” successfully slimmed self (thereby becoming, most importantly, no longer the object of shame), causing the fat “present” to always be understood merely as a state of transition. The fatty in the space suit, however, undoes this normative teleology by inserting the fat body into our narrative of futurity and, therefore, of possibility. The ontological shift enacts a new epistemological reading of the fat subject. It at once refuses the position of abjection and shame in the present and disavows the supposedly progressive, post-body, post-human narrative of futurity that continues to reify the “mind” in the Cartesian mind/body split. 19 Fat positive blogs and tumblrs, known as the “fatosphere” by many of its participants, are part of a larger fat activist (FA) and fat pride movement that, in the United States, can be traced back to the founding of the National Association to Aid Fat Americans in 1969. This recent turn toward the digital has lead to a proliferation of online communities not only creating counter-narratives, but counter- images in response to the abject figure of the fat body common in popular culture. Though there are a number of popular blogs that circulate images taken with high resolution cameras and stage photographs with an attention to detail, aesthetics, and composition that reflects a desire for a more polished end-product, I am interested here in sites whose primary images are the amateur self-portrait: the image captured by positioning the camera phone and a mirror just so, or the snapshot that reveals the awkward angle of the camera as the individual tries to be both photographer and subject. Although unpolished, imperfect, sometimes awkward, and often proclaiming in the attached description a desire to love their body someday, these photographs are not “failed” images. Rather, the visible seams in the process of their production reveal a certain fashioning of the self, an act of becoming in relation to others through the repetition of the image. It is in these “imperfect” repetitions that we begin to see a 19 Katherine N. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics (Chicago: London: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 193. 21 relation to fatness that does not smoothly transition from bodily alienation to fat acceptance (as one would expect from a “fat positive” movement) and, instead, reveals the hidden gaps, ambivalences and ellipses of fat identification. What new spaces of representation are opened up by cyber communities? Though the field of Fat Studies is rapidly growing and beginning to map out a rigorous theoretical intervention on fat body discourse, it is crucial that this separate, but often overlapping, movement is not primarily marked by language, but is image-based. I contend that the (relatively) recent trend of moving away from text and emphasizing image by fat activists is not merely a shift in greater technological access and ease of use for many, but a radical act of social and cultural transgression. These sites use the seeming fixity of the photographic self-portrait to counter the socio-cultural pathologization of the fat body that only understands the fat subject as unstable (morally, emotionally, and physically) and mutable (at its core, diet rhetoric relies on the belief that bodily change is not only desirable, but possible). This transgression is made possible by the unique ability of digital image sites to create community and simulate a sense of proximity to the Other through repeatability of the image. One scrolls through hundreds of images that in the singular simply document a moment in one individual’s life, but in the plural, as repetition, functions as a testament to the insistence on lived fat embodiment in the present. Forums and litservs that serve as spaces for fat-identified individuals and allies to create a sense of community that may be lacking in their offline lives have existed since the early stages of the internet. However, these spaces were text-based and much of the Fat Studies work on online communities has focused on the textual.20 In Revolting Bodies?, for example, Kathleen LeBesco 20 Fat studies is an interdisciplinary field, combining perspectives and research methods from humanities and social sciences. It builds on the tradition of gender studies and queer studies, focusing attention on the social, cultural, historical and political aspects of the way in which fat people are portrayed and treated. For more on this emergent field see: Charlotte Cooper, “Fat Studies: Mapping the Field,” Sociology Compass 4 (2010). 22 explores the role that cyberspace plays in the resignification of fat, but locates the cultural transgression in the text, noting “I am interested in investigating the Internet as a forum of political work, a ‘subaltern counterpublic’ that has potential to create new rules for identity membership owing to erasure of the physical on text-based sites.”21 Though it is undeniable that a productive and necessary counterpublic was formed through these early cyber communities, the erasure of the physical may allow for the space to voice the lived experience of corporeal embodiment, but it does not undo the binary logic that privileges the mind over the body. The de-hierarchizing of mind and body can only be accomplished through the utilization of both text and image. In part, this shift towards the image is the result of user accessibility. Tumblr, a platform that allows users to post various content to a short-form blog, was launched in 2007. The microblogging structure of tumblr encourages the sharing of multimedia, often in the form of images culled from various places across the Internet. Unlike the discussion groups and listservs that LeBesco explores, tumblr has become popular precisely for its minimization of the use of text and emphasis on the visual as a means of communication. Tumblr created a new visual vernacular, a vernacular that allowed for community formation around a self expressiveness that did not have to function within “an invisible, text-only space for representing the fat body.”22 This is not to suggest that LeBesco’s reading of early digital fat communities is incorrect. These forums, listservs, and blogs have undeniably created (and continue to create) spaces where individuals can begin to navigate fat shame and stigma. For some, Internet communities function as a social space that allows for a critical distancing from the shaming gaze of others. It is from this critical distance that 21 Kathleen LeBesco, Revolting Bodies: The Struggle to Redefine Fat Identity (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), 99. 22 Ibid., 99. 23 both longtime activists and those new to FA can engage in the political (and politicizing) work around fat identity, ideology, and aesthetics. The fact that these vital discussions on the role that image plays in fat subject’s everyday intimate relations with ourselves and others could only even begin to be conceivable for many participants in the absence of image does not speak to the liberatory and progressive possibilities often promised by a “post-identity” cyber experience. Rather, it exemplifies the constitutive role of the visual and the profoundly negative impact it can have on one’s sense of self both “IRL” (in real life) and online. Absence is never merely absence; we are produced by both that which is excluded and included. The Internet, of course, is not now, nor has it ever been, the only place for re-imagining the fat body’s image in the social sphere. Painting and photography have played an integral role in rearticulating the conventional meanings often attached to the still image of the fat body but the zine is the most direct predecessor to this digital shift. Though the limitations of production make the circulation of zines relatively small, the zines’ DIY aesthetic, often self-reflexive nature, and ability to serve as a catchall ranging from ephemera to art to politics mirrors in many ways the function of tumblrs and other photo-based blog sites. As Le’a Kent shows in her reading of the short lived 90’s zine Fat Girl, the combination of image and text was central to their radical identity politics. Fat Girl’s insistence on the visibility of the fat body was not simply an attempt to have fat recognized as an identity category, but a radical reconfiguration of what fat is and could be.23 As fat visual culture scholar Stefanie Snider writes, “by recognizing that discourse on and of the body, especially the multiply ‘deviant’ body, is never natural or inherent, 23 Le’a Kent, “Fighting Abjection: Representing Fat Women” in Bodies Out of Bounds: Fatness and Transgression (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), eds. Jana Evans Braziel and Kathleen LeBesco,138. 24 the collective members of Fat Girl open up a space of representation in which they actively work to assert different modes of discourse about and around the fat lesbian body.”24 Judith Butler posits that the materiality of sex is constructed through a ritualized repetition of norms. Performativity is not simply an act or “choice,” but a reiteration of norms. However, this reiteration is never a faithful reproduction of preexisting norms, but is in its very reproduction a re-membering of that “norm.” Thus through the imperfect reassembling of norms, identities that have been marginalized turn their abjection into a form of political and social power that creates new modes of being in the world. This is achieved through a linguistic battle: “As we think about worlds that might one day become thinkable, sayable, legible, the opening up of the foreclosed and the saying of the unspeakable become part of the very “offense” that must be committed in order to expand the domain of linguistic survival.”25 If, as Butler suggests, language “is a set of acts, repeated over time, that produce reality effects that are eventually misperceived as ‘facts,’”26 FA tumblrs show not only how fat can become “thinkable, sayable, legible” through image, but that the discursive possibilities of a fat subjectivity must necessarily be counteracted by images as well as language. To be hailed as “fat” is always already to be hailed as having the potential for selfhood because the present fat body is only legible as liminal. It is crucial, then, that FA is not engaged only in “locutionary acts”—the reclaiming of “fat”—but an intervention through image because their hypervisibility actually erases the individual. What would it mean if the “repeated” act, which then becomes 24 Stefanie Snider, “Fat Girls and Size Queens” in The Fat Studies Reader (New York University Press: 2009), eds. Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay, 124. 25 Judith Butler, Excitable Speech (New York: Routledge, 1997), 41. 26 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: London: Routledge, 1999), 147. 25 “entrenched practices and, ultimately, institutions,” was not a speech-act per se, but an image- act?27 In addition to the linguistic battle that these sites wage by making previously marginalized identities “thinkable, sayable, legible,” these sites radically reconfigure the ways in which the fat body is viewable. One effect of the headless fatty phenomenon is that fat bodies do not have mouths from which to speak. If they are imagined to exist at all it is not as a means of communication, but as a hole, a void in to which things are indiscriminately shoved. The headless fatty, then, is the symbol of our cultural assumption that anything a fat subject could have to say can be read on the body. And yet the existence of these sites suggests an alternative to the culturally silenced fat subject. To whom are these tumblrs speaking? What are they saying? How does the de-emphasis of text and re-centering of the image highlight the importance, of that which cannot be put into words but is recognizable through viewing? Seeing Photographically Susan Sontag posits that we use photographs of ourselves as a barometer of attractiveness, to have an aesthetic relationship to self. Photographs do more than capture the “real”; they also “create the beautiful”—that is, make visible what is possible to visualize as beautiful.28 The act of being photographed causes anxiety and carries within it the potential for destabilization because what one wants from a photograph is not simply the documentation of the “real,” but for the photograph to be the “idealized image.” Thus, photographs provide access to our aesthetic existence that other mediums or modes of viewing the self do not. Indeed, it would seem that even the fleetingness of the image captured in the mirror is deemed to provide 27 Ibid., 148. 28 Susan Sontag, “Photography: The Beauty Treatment.” New York Times. November 28, 1974. 26 insufficient access to one’s aesthetic appeal. The gaze of the camera is required. However, we not only learn our own aesthetic existence through the distancing gaze of the camera lens, but also learn how to view ourselves and, equally important, how others view us. I argue that this process of knowing oneself through image happens not only between subject and image (and subject-made-object through image), but between the photographic image of the body and the viewer of the image. Fat photo-blog communities become spaces of radical possibility because of this duality. The viewer does not just see bodies that are like their own; these bodies become their own. In one of the earliest studies of fatness not as health issue, but as a social identity, sociologist Marcia Millman interviewed several women about their experiences. One participant, Joan Bauer, shared: I operate from the neck up, I do not look in mirrors…I do look at my face when I have to, to comb my hair, and use only a mirror that will reveal just my face. I have receded from the physical world…I feel bodily uncomfortable. I block out sexuality…I block out the feeling of my body being used, looked at, put to work, employed, any of these things—adorned, dressed.29 Bauer’s description of moving through the world as if she only existed from the neck up, avoiding mirrors, and withdrawing from the physical world as much as possible is a result of having been shamed. Feeling “bodily uncomfortable” is caused not by “excess” flesh, but rather by the internalization of the shaming gaze of others. Although there are certainly very real ways in which fat people might experience the world differently—creased flesh, one’s body brushing against another’s, the need to contort oneself to fit into a socially acceptable space—what Bauer describes is not living in a fat body, but a response to living with a fat body. The distinction of in/with is crucial because it expresses some fat subject’s dual relationship to the body as both 29 Marcia Millman, Such A Pretty Face: Being Fat in America (New York: London: Norton and Company, 1980), 195. 27 that which obscures a separate, “inner” self, and something one lives “with” (as an appendage, as insufficient prosthetic), but is never understood as fully part of the self. If this bodily discomfort cannot be solely attributed to living the actual materiality of the body, then perhaps it is the result of living with images of bodies—the images projected onto us by others, the images we internalize and, perhaps when we turn to the photo-blog, the images that begins to take on new, more complicated resonances with abjection. Although my focus here is on the digitized photograph the “image” is much more than binary codes and pixels. Images also circulate through intangible ideologies and discourses that effect how we perceive others and ourselves. That is to say we “see” beyond that which is materially viewable. What we see is never simply the result of vision. The visible, as Linda Alcoff argues, “is recognized as the product of a specific form of perceptual practice, rather than the natural result of human sight.”30 Perception, then, is not merely physiological—the eye perceives, the visual image is relayed to the brain, the viewer then recognizes (or misrecognizes) the object as something that is nameable—but constitutive. Perception produces subjects. There is no form of viewing that is outside of culture and discourse. Viewing exceeds the biological and reflects a knowingness rooted in the cultural.31 All subjects are produced within and constituted by culture and various techniques of power. The fat subject is no exception. It would at first seem that this is simply an old argument applied to new subjects. But this is a look at the different effects discursive constructions have on the way certain subjects are able to be made visible to themselves and others. In the response of fat subjects to the perception of the fat body we see that although the process is the same—the filtering of ‘vision’ through the social, cultural and political—they are 30 Linda Alcoff, Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 180. 31 Ibid. 28 lived differently and constitute subjects who through the very cultural narrative that constructs their visibility, radically destabilizes their relationship to self. Paradoxically, the fixed narrative that makes fat subjects culturally legible renders them illegible to themselves. Jean Bauer does not only choose to look only at her face because she has an affective response of disgust to her own body, but at a fundamental level she cannot see her body even if she were to look in a full length mirror or catch a glimpse of herself on a reflective surface because of the queer temporal space in which fat bodies exist.32 A queer temporality results from the slippage between images of the fat body (the actual ‘image’ in magazines, film, etc) and imaginings of fat corporeality. In the dominant cultural narrative, when a face is attached to the image of the fat body it is only when the fat body is figured as something that was (necessarily) shed and now exists as the past tense of the thin future self. It is a queer temporality, indeed. I use the term “queer” here strategically and purposefully to denote the double queering of the fat body. Excess flesh literally queers how people are gendered (women are “masculinized,” men are “feminized”).33 Additionally, fat is understood within the cultural imaginary as a body in flux, a body outside of normative spatio-temporal bounds. Thus, to be hailed as fat, or to describe oneself as fat (whether it as an act of reclamation or a repetition of the moment of shaming), is actually to “speak” an identity/identification in flux. For both the “fat” and “thin” subject, fat identity is always straddling the line between mundane descriptor (akin to height, eye color, hair length, etc.) and the much more destabilizing assertion that it is a state of existence—a conditional mode of being in the world that is potentially not permanent. The exclamation “look at the state you’re in!,” a shaming phrase at the heart of all shaming/bullying directed at fat people and the 32 As Sara Ahmed notes, to queer something is “to disturb the order of things.” Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 161. 33 Jana Evans Braziel, “Sex and Fat Chicks: Deterritorializing the Fat Female Body” In Bodies Out of Bounds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 231. 29 unspoken accusation many fat people have admitted to thinking when looking in a mirror, highlights the hegemonic perception of the impermanency of the “identity” for which they are being shamed. The underlying logic of these shaming events is the belief that under proper surveillance the body will become sufficiently disciplined, transformed, and then recognized as a “proper” member of the collective social body. “Get in shape!” “Flab to fab!” “Shape up!” “Lose 20lbs in 20 days!” The list is endless, but the message is always the same: fat may be present (in more ways than one), but its permanence is a continual site of confrontation with our embodiment. Thus, the ubiquitous before/after weight loss image both represents and constitutes the queer temporality of the fat subject. The before/after picture reveals the displacement of full identification for both the viewer (both “fat” and “normal”) and the viewed because the observer only sees the abjected other that has only really become visible in the “after” image and the abject subject (both the “before” image and fat subject in the present) learns that her only relation to her body and therefore only hope of bridging the mind/body gap is in the future tense.34 This is not simply an image. It teaches the fat subject how to relate to herself and others. If we “learn to see ourselves photographically” the fat subject learns that there is no present, only future. Or, put another way, one learns that the relationship to the present (fat) body can only actually be integrated or narrativized as a possible identification from the vantage point of the future (thin) body looking back on the abjected fat self. Thus, fat subjects are positioned in temporalities that have either passed or have yet to come, but never present. Bodies in Flux 34 Robyn Longhurst, “Becoming Smaller: Autobiographical Spaces of Weight Loss” Antipode (2011), 5. 30 I am not, however, arguing for a fixed, essential fat identity or an unambivalent support of “fat pride.” Rather, I would like to use fat subject formation as a destabilizing force for certain theories of identity which pivot on the championing of mutability—the transformative possibilities of (un)becoming.35 This vein of identity theory can take on a different tenor, or is itself queered, by the fat body which has always already been understood as mutable. Indeed the fat body’s mutability is most distressing because in the very moment that the fat individual fully realizes her “potential” (becoming “thin”), she also reinforces the slippery boundary between these states of existence (without vigilance, one can become “fat”). The narrative of (un)becoming and its relationship to the incongruence between mind and body that results in a bodily discomfort is echoed by many queer subjects. I turn to the transgender body not because all of the complex, intersecting, and ambivalent narratives that encompass the transgender and fat experiences can or should be easily mapped onto each other, but because there are similar strains to the social understanding of how both narratives function. Furthermore, the fat transgendered subject, the queer transgender subject, and the queer fat subject all intersect in multiple ways to challenge and complicate the brief narrative I provide below. My intent is not to delimit the possibilities for new theories of relationality made possible by the politics of positionality, but to open up a dialog around the citation of “transition” as a destabilizing social practice within certain queer conceptualizations of transgressive identity politics. In Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality, Jay Prosser writes that he wants to “reveal the materiality of the figure in transition.” According to Prosser, “Transition provokes 35 “Becoming,” and the contestation of its essentialism, plays a central role in queer theory. As Judith Butler asks, “What kind of subversive repetition might call into question the regulatory practice of identity itself?” (Gender Trouble, 32). Butler opens up the space to think about a process of queer unbecoming, of interpretive difficulties, moments of intelligibility, and a challenge to the limits of normativity. 31 discomfort, anxiety—both for the subject in transition and for the other in the encounter; it pushes up against the very feasibility of identity. Yet transition is also necessary for identity’s continuity; it is that which moves us on.”36 Thus Prosser points to the ways in which the narrative of “transition” holds a privileged space in theories that are invested in deconstructing normative and normalizing narratives of self. But if we return to how fat subjects might relate to the “before/after” image, “transition” and shifting identifications (“I used to be fat, but now I am thin and if I am not vigilant I soon will be again”) begins to sound less like queer possibility and increasingly more like normative foreclosure. For the fat subject, whose very identification with fatness is socially inscribed as changeable, the particular kind of bodily change required to achieve “wholeness” resides in rather fraught relationship to abjection. For some, shame both pushes one toward a new embodiment and regulates the need to maintain one’s newly thin self. Noting a trend in transgender autobiographical narratives to conceive of the body as the improper object of the subject, Prosser describes the refusal of the subject to own his body: “I do not recognize as proper, as my property, this material surround; therefore I must be trapped in the wrong body.”37 The gender dysphoria felt by some transgender subjects which manifests as a rejection of the body mirrors the somatic alienation of the fat subject (recall Jean Bauer). In some transgender narratives but, more importantly for my argument, in the socio-cultural understanding of these narratives, this separation is overcome and the integrity of the body is reestablished through bodily modification. Transition, then, plays a restorative role; it makes that which was felt to be torn, rent and incomplete whole again. For the fat subject, however, this sense of incompleteness is imposed externally, produced by the social imaginary that informs how the fat individual relates to herself 36 Jay Prosser, Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 3. 37 Ibid., 77. 32 through visual representations of corporeal “excess.” For the fat subject the encounter with the before/after weight loss picture or the image of the headless fat body speaks not to some a priori sense that transition into a thin body is required for wholeness, but that one must be torn, rent and incomplete if transition (into thinness) is not continually attempted. Fat photo-blogs and tumblrs counter this wholeness-through-transition narrative by tapping into the ethical dimension of photographs. If “through their codes and conventions, styles of lighting and modes of address, photographs literally show us how to relate to another person,”38 these image-blogs show their fat viewers and subscribers that it is possible to identify with one’s self and with others in one’s “pre-transitional” body. Because we often learn to “see” ourselves through the perceptions of others, it is important that these sites reconfigure the relation between the viewer and viewed. By creating new spaces for the circulation of the fat image, fat positive blogs and tumblrs alter the conditions of visual reception and perception. If “visual perceptions of non-normative bodies, in particular, have been shaped through countless structured acts of viewing, in contexts that range from talk show spectacles to case studies of medical pathology,” these new photographic communities help to re-condition the gaze by circulating images that refuse the past/future dyad.39 The amateur self- portraits that abound on these sites are in direct opposition to the medical, pathologizing gaze that form the cultural screen through which we understand the fat body. The camera, acting as “another eye” for both the fat subject taking a picture of themselves and the fat viewer of the photograph, does not aim at classification, but re-signification of abjection, disgust and shame. 38 T. Benjamin Singer, “From The Medical Gaze to Sublime Mutations: The Ethics of (Re)Viewing Non-Normative Body Images” in The Transgender Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 2006), 602. 39 Ibid., 607. 33 A common counter-narrative to the perpetual state of fat transition is fat pride. Marilynn Wann, one of the most well known fat acceptance leaders in the United States claims in Fat!So?: Because You Don’t Have to Apologize for your Size, that “As a fatso, you possess the ultimate weapon against weight worries, body prejudice, and size-related discrimination: fat pride.”40 But it is rarely an unambivalent transition. As Samantha Murray says, “I tried to work out why I didn’t feel better as an ‘outed’ fat girl. Surely in reclaiming the word ‘fat’ I was disallowing its pejorative use against me. Perhaps I was. But I also felt even more distance from my own body than ever before.”41 I do not want to simply read these sites as participating in a celebratory moment for fat embodiment. The move from abjection to “acceptance” is never smooth and, perhaps, not even entirely desirable. Bodies are invested with cultural meanings. We never simply “see” the materiality of the body because its surface is obscured by the power of the socio-symbolic order. But as Elizabeth Grosz argues if “abjection guards the borders of the subject and society, abject materials and acts can also be used to affirm our corporeality, subverting those symbolic systems in which our sense of self is enmeshed.”42 This subversion is made possible not by replacing the “negative” with the “positive” but enacting a new kind of intimate relationality between abject-self (viewer of image) and abjected Other (the image itself) that never entirely dispels shame, but puts it to a different use. 40 Marilyn Wann, Fat!So? Because You Don’t Have to Apologize for Your Size. (Berkeley: Ten Speed Press, 1998), 28. 41 Samantha Murray, “Doing Politics or Selling Out? Living the Fat Body,” Women’s Studies: 34, 269. 42 Colin Counsell and Laurie Wolf, eds. Performance Analysis: An Introductory Coursebook (London: New York: Routledge, 2001), 140. 34 Shame isn’t absent from these sites; it is simply put to a different use that destabilizes what Elpseth Probyn calls “feeling in a spatial sense,” that which make certain bodies “feel or appear to be disgusting or out of place.”43 In this way shame can be a productive affect because “it helps us to reflect on our individual and collective identities and thus our affective investment in our own and other bodies.”44 Participants are made to reassess “Shame on you,” the speech act by which all fat bodies are hailed in the cultural imaginary—is the object of the “you” external or internal?—and disidentify with fat shame not simply through relentless “positivity,” but by repeating (and naming) the shaming event: the living of the “before” image. 45 In a slight reworking of Butler, I’d suggest that if looking (not saying) is a form of doing and part of what is getting done is the self, then fat photo-blogs are a mode of doing something together and becoming otherwise.46 Through the digital amateur self-portrait, fat subjects create a space for the critical acknowledgement that “shame effaces itself…shame and pride, shame and dignity, shame and self-display, shame and exhibitionism are different interlinings of the same glove.”47 By tapping into shame’s affective instability through fat photo-blogs, fat subjects can begin the complicated and often contradictory process of negotiating shame. Shame is produced and sustained by our relations to others. This proximity, however, can be transformational not 43 Elpseth Probyn, Blush: Faces of Shame (University of Minneapolis Press: 2005), 2. 44 Nikki Sullivan and Samantha Murray, eds., Somatechnics: Queering the Technologies of Bodies (Ashgate Publishing, Ltd, 2009), 41. 45 Disidentification is the process by which minoritarian subjects manage an identity that has already “spoiled” in the majoritarian public sphere. José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 46 Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: London: Routledge, 2004), 173. 47 Eve Kosofksy Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 38. 35 because it turns shame into something else—pride—but because it allows us to imagine new forms of attachments and identifications when we make visible the ambivalence at the center of embodiment that has been marked as excessive. It Ain’t Over Until the Fat Lady Laughs Like the digitized selfies explored in the beginning of this chapter, Rachel Herrick’s Museum for Obeast Conservation Studies (MOCS) reimagines the relationship between body image and the material body. MOCS is a museological parody of the exhibition of difference through the meticulous creation of a history of the “obeast” genus. Upon physically entering the exhibit or exploring the space digitally (Herrick has mirrored the exhibit experience through the creation of a virtual tour replete with a newsletter sign-up), the viewer is confronted with information about the “endangered North American obeast.” Clicking through the site, one discovers that MOCS “was founded in 2010 as an organization for the historic and scientific study of the endangered North American obeast. Given their reclusive natures and dwindling numbers, little is known about this genus of bipedal mammals, which was hunted to near extinction during the 19th century.” But what is the obeast, exactly? A portmanteau bringing together the words obesity and beast, one discovers that the “animal” is performed by and modeled on Rachel Herrick’s own fat female body. Herrick-as-obeast is the stand-in for the representations of fat people in mass media, the medical industrial complex, and American culture at large. The exhibit is filled with dioramas featuring life size representations of obeasts, video clips of obeast researchers “on the hunt” for the animal in its natural habitats, portrayals of the morpheological evolution of the obeast (from whale to the muumuu wearing figure of Herrick), obeast heads “stuffed” and 36 mounted on the walls, a meticulously archived collection of “traditional” obeast artifacts (ancient sculptures and hand crafted dolls), and pamphlets historicizing the scarcity of the obeast and their recent return from the “brink of extinction.” Herrick’s Museum for Obeast Conservation Studies uses the conventions of display in a museum setting to question conventional narratives through the spectacle of the obeast. Not only is the obeast itself “excessive” (weighing 400lbs), but the mode of representation self-consciously reproduces the excess ideologies that construct the (Fat) Self. Figure 2 An Obeast in the wild 37 Figure 3 A “daguerreotype” of a hunted Obeast MOCS’ deft mocking of an actual museum exhibit speaks to the colonialist ideologies and scientific gaze that underpin dominant representations of the Other, much like CoCo Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s seminal performance piece “The Couple in the Cage”(1993). As cultural studies scholar Tony Bennett writes, The emergence of the art museum was closely related to that of a wider range of institutions— history and natural science museums, dioramas and panoramas, national and, later, international exhibitions, arcades and department stores—which served as linked sites for the development and circulation of new disciplines (history, biology, art history, anthropology) and their discursive formations (the past, evolution, aesthetics, man) as well as for the development of new technologies of vision.48 Thus, these institutions relied upon particular rhetorics of racial, sexual, and economic difference in order to perpetuate hierarchies of power, thereby embedding racism, sexism, and classism within their structures of looking. Significantly, the Museum for Obeast Conservation 48 Tony Bennett , “The Exhibitionary Complex,” new formations ( Spring 1988), 73. 38 Studies gains its authenticity precisely through its ability to appear “authentic” by mimicking the language and storylines circulated by these kinds of cultural spaces and disciplines. Yet by creating the stuffed and posed obeasts as literal duplicates of her own self for display in the physical and virtual gallery space, and by playing the role of the obeast in the photographs and videos, Herrick also comments on the limitations and possibilities opened up by encounters with multiplicity, with that which overcrowds the visual fame, because everywhere one turns there is another Herrick-as-obeast. The photographs, diorama figures, and the mounted obeast heads are obviously modeled on a white fat human female, not on any other bi- or quadripedal animal. The pelts of the obeast, in different patterns and colors, depending on their gender and species, are very obviously hand-fabricated muumuus—the shapeless garb that has become the representative garment of slovenliness, undesirability and uncontained excess—not actual furry skins; the gendered facial features are obviously human glasses for the females and human cosmetics for male, not facial growths or skin discolorations signaling gender difference; the shoes worn by the obeast are clearly made from plastic and not part of the animal’s actual feet. We are never meant to mistake the obeast as anything other than human, than belonging to the same genus as the exhibit-goer. Herick’s performance of the obeast as a human being draws attention to the absurdity that fat people have been relegated to a space outside of the normative. Herrick performs a critique of the notion of the veracity of objectivity and culturally mandated narratives of fatness from the inside out. She writes, I am interested in the way information and ideas get legitimized by frameworks like these, and how these legitimized ideas become incorporated into the ideology of culturally dominant (centralized) groups. My intention through the obeast work is to adopt the perspective and voice of the dominant group and satirize its systems by participating in them, straight-faced, within the parameters of a preposterous pretense. If in this way I can weave a narrative that wavers between almost plausible and completely absurd, what might that indicate about the conventions of information authority that we hold so dear and believe so reflexively?49 49 Rachel Herrick, The Museum for Obeast Conservation Studies, MFA Thesis, 2. 39 The “preposterous pretense” is created by the juxtaposition of intricate detail with the performance of being the obeast in multiple and diverse forms in the exhibit. It is the absurdity that is of particular import to Herrick: “Frankly, the obeast is a badly created animal. It wears glasses, and shoes, etc, I’m not really making an attempt to hide my appearance so that hopefully right of the bat the humor comes through.”50 In short, Herrick is performing, but performing badly; she is letting the audience in on the joke. MOCS presents the audience with a very stereotypical image of fat corporeality, but then gives the viewer the tools needed to deconstruct the dominant cultural narratives with which it is in dialog, to rethink the museum as a space of neutral knowledge dissemination, and to question fatphobia. But the “bad” performance happens on two registers. On the one hand, the obeast has very particular visible seams in the process of its production which undermines being taken as “truth.” But on the other hand, this is very much not a performance—Herrick is actually obese. I argue, then that The Museum for Obeast Conservation Studies is more than a critique of fatphobic discourse: it performs the disjuncture between image and imago of the fat body. As cultural theorist Mike Featherstone argues, following the work of film scholar Annette Kuhn, it is important to be attentive to both the physical image itself and the affects it produces in the viewer. To look or think photographically also requires an attunement to the affective work of images; to their suggestive capacities of captivation and enchantment.51 This might be described as the more ineffable quality of presence or style often used to describe some Hollywood studio 50 Ibid., 6. 51 Annette Kuhn. The Power of the Image: Essays on Representation and Sexuality (New York: Routledge, 2013), 16. 40 photographs of film stars in the inter-war years.52 This ineffable quality is also represented by the proliferation of photographs of streetstyle that circulate on blogs and in books, such as the The Sartorialist and the fat photoblogs, which are said to capture the cultivation of presence.53 The affective image/body that Featherstone discusses can be equated to Brian Massumi’s concept of “movement vision,” which is aligned to a body in process.54 The shift from body- image to body-without-an-image is important for refocusing our attention on bodies as processes—as bodies that are fundamentally instable. However, as shown with the before/after image, this transitory positionality is complicated for the fat body, whose mutability is always only figured through abjection: the transition from uncontrollable excess to docile thin body. MOCS mocks the stereotype of the animalistic, lazy, dumb, and uncritical fat person by reproducing the encounter with this excessive, non-normative body. It’s a reproduction, however, with a difference: it recognizes that images do not exist statically but rather must be embodied in order to be actualized and that it is crucial to create a space that allows those intensities which are felt rather than seen to be registered. That is to say, what would it mean for the encounter with excess to be one not of disgust or repulsion, but rather one of absurdity? There is a long tradition in popular culture of setting up the fat female body as a site of comedy. It is common to depict the fat subject in ways that pander to the cultural stereotypes of fat people, particularly white women, as out of control, sexually voracious, verbally outspoken, psychologically damaged and unable to contain themselves emotionally or physically. These 52 Mike Featherstone, "Body, Image and Affect in Consumer Culture." Body & Society 16.1 (2010). 53 Scott Schuman, The Sartorialist (New York: Penguin Books, 2009). 54 Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 51. 41 representations of female corporeal excess as the “natural” site of the comedic are perhaps most prevalent in sitcoms like Fat Actress (2005), Mike & Molly (2010), and Super Fun Night (2013). MOCS plays with these dehumanizing, reductive tropes not by offering another image entirely, but rather by exaggerating these cultural perceptions and anxieties about fat. The obeast, and therefore Herrick herself, performs fat as our culture represents it: simpleminded, undisciplined, endangered yet threatening (and threatened). By performing this abjection, Herrick destabilizes the imagined distinction between image (representation as material truth) and imago (representation as affective intensity) and suggests that the dehumanization of obesity can become darkly humorous, rather than merely pitiable. Indeed, it is this dark humor that brings the viewer closer. Instead of being organized around the affects of disgust or ridicule—emotions that make one turn away or reestablish distance—MOCS reestablishes intimacy between the viewer and the observed through its use of humor. The exhibit stages an encounter with the excessive, fat body that reorganizes the affective economies of bodily difference. The exhibit includes a reproduction of the “original” early 20th century bean bag toss game with wide-open obeast mouths as targets for players to fill. Herrick heightens the dehumanizing tendency to a ridiculous level. There is no subtext in the exhibit; there is just text. Fat people are not like animals, they are animals that are tracked in the wild, killed for their pelts, studied like a thing of mystery. There are hilarious viral videos, images of the muumuu clad obeast made to look like a 19th century daguerreotypes, and amusing written descriptions of fake ancient artifacts and the obeast’s anatomy (“cankles” are even turned into objects of serious scholarly discussion). However, it is a laughter that does not dispel discomfort. We are meant to laugh and feel ill at ease simultaneously. Indeed, this affective duality is at the heart of the project: the viewer’s 42 relationship between material and immaterial, what is seen and what is felt, one’s own body and the body of the other is fundamentally destabilized. Instead of the excessive Other occupying the space of unruliness, of nonormativity (and therefore, ultimately, inassimilable), MOCS implicates the viewer. The viewer cannot simply be a witness to the discursive and representational violence that renders the fat body inhuman, but rather is made to participate through a particular kind of laughter: laughter intermingled with, and vacillating between, anger, repulsion, and desire. It is a laughter that dares the viewer to risk the self, to risk taking and giving offence: an unruly laughter. Unruly laughter does not bring instant relief to the viewing body. Instead, it requires one to rethink one’s identifications and attachments. Fat photoblogs and The Museum for Obeast Conservation Studies show that although fat bodies are often deemed outrageous, transgressive, messy, and in flux, their excessive corporeality is a reservoir of potential affects, movements, connections and attachments. 43 CHAPTER TWO Slow Deaths, Quick Laughs: The Black Female Body in *Loosely Exactly Nicole and The Mindy Project In the opening credits of *Loosely Exactly Nicole, Nicole (played by Nicole Byer) sits delicately perched on the edge of a couch, demurely smiling at the camera that frames her face in extreme close-up. Seconds later, she rolls her eyes and her ramrod straight posture slinks down into a more natural pose as she leans over to get a slice of leftover pizza. The camera pans out to reveal a coffee table in disarray. In addition to the half-eaten pizza, there are bills, jewelry, half- eaten Kraft singles, keys, an ashtray, an empty coffee mug, various empty wrappers, fake eyelashes, a TV remote, and the various other detritus that accumulate over the week as one comes and goes. In bold, white type face the show’s title appears on screen, with an asterisk added to “loosely” right before the fade away. *Loosely Exactly Nicole premiered on MTV in September 2016 and, after a 10-episode first season was cancelled in February 2017. However, Facebook’s newly launched video on demand service, Facebook Watch, announced that it was picking up the show for a 10-episode second season that premiered in December 2017. *Loosely features black comedian and actress Nicole Byer, a former star of MTV’s popular unscripted show Girl Code. Byer plays a— loosely—fictionalized character on the show also named Nicole Byer who has moved from New Jersey to California to try to make it in the entertainment industry. Nicole is not quite living the Hollywood dream. She’s Hollywood-adjacent, sharing an apartment with one of her best friends, 44 Devin (Jacob Wysocki), in a low-income neighborhood in Van Nuys. There is not a hint of LA glamour in the show’s depiction of the San Fernando Valley. In the humorous opening scene of the first episode, the show emphasizes the stark difference between the dream and the reality faced by most hopeful actors who move to LA by showing Nicole and Devin splayed out on the couch in the living room, sweating profusely and fanning themselves slowly (Fig.4). Their old apartment, which looks like it has been built several decades ago, does have an air conditioning window unit, but it has seen better days and no longer gets cold enough to offer much relief. Nicole, clearly uncomfortable, says she thought the weatherman said it was going to be 72. Devin responds that “No, they said it was gonna be 72 at the beach. This is Van Nuys. They don’t call it the Devil’s taint for nothing.” Which prompts Nicole to muse if “God’s punishing this area because so much porn’s shot here.” The camera then cuts to Devin, who gives a non- verbal response in the affirmative. It’s a hilarious, if a bit predictable way to start the show. The Valley has long been associated with the seedier side of the “film” industry and a fat person sweating is an oft-used sight gag. And, yet, something else seems to be going on here as well. An interviewer remarks, “You open the show with the two of you sweating mercilessly on camera. It was a very distinct way of being like this show is about two fat people. Right now. And this is what we’re about and we’re not hiding it.”55 There’s a risk in this “distinct” opening. There is something surprising and a bit unnerving about the way we are encouraged to look at these fat, sweaty bodies (Fig.5). 55 BUILD Series. “Nicole Byer on ‘Loosely Exactly Nicole.’” Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 7 September 2016. 45 Figure 4 Nicole and Devin fanning themselves in the opening scene of the season premiere Figure 5 Close-up of Nicole and Devin’s sweaty bodies 46 What, then, makes this moment feel remarkable? The way the scene carefully navigates the representation of the sweating fat body not as purely visual gag (although it does present the sweating body, irrespective of size, as potentially fertile ground for a comedic exchange) but as an intimate, and relatable, encounter for Nicole, Devin, and the viewer. It elevates the mundane into a pointed commentary on unruly bodies and the kinds of affections and affective attachments that we imagine are possible. Although it certainly isn’t a groundbreaking joke premise to invoke the porn industry while in the Valley, the scene is significant because of the way the banter plays out. While the dialog between the two is comedic, it also functions as shorthand for the dynamic of Nicole and Devin’s friendship. The viewer feels as if they’re eavesdropping on a private moment. It is a moment made even more intimate by the fact that these sweaty bodies are fat. Not just the slight plumpness that often passes as “plus size” in mainstream media (like the bodies of Amy Schumer, Mindy Kaling, or Christina Hendricks), but bodies with prominent stomachs, fleshy rolls that have not been smoothed by Spanx or girdles, and double chins that cannot be contoured away with the expert application of makeup.56 Fat bodies are not supposed to be seen, but not only are they hypervisible in this show, there is no attempt to hide their corpulence. Instead, Nicole and Devin flaunt their size, emphasizing their excess through the taboo depiction of fat bodies that are tired and profusely sweating. They do not seek to contain their bodily limits. Their unabashed sweat troubles the representation of the fay body as abject. 56 There is much debate among fat activists about which bodies get marked as “plus size” and which bodies, usually celebrities, are only slight curvier versions of an already thin celebrity norm. 47 All bodies sweat, but the representation of the sweaty body is rarely objective. There is “good” sweat and “bad” sweat. “Good” sweat is the result of exercise. It is a sign that one has exerted effort to sculpt the body. However, despite the exhortations for fat people to stop being couch potatoes, to exercise more, to “Move Your Body,” as the Beyoncé and Swizz Beatz song created for Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! public health campaign commands, this exertion is usually only appreciated on the already fit body. Fat people do exercise, of course, but as many in the fat acceptance and body positive movements have commented, no one wants to see them exercise. The only “acceptable” sweaty fat body is one that has been spectacularized on reality television shows “like Bulging Brides, Celebrity Fit Club, Honey We’re Killing the Kids, and The Biggest Loser” where viewers are encouraged “to peer and gawk at the contestants, taking pleasure in the ways they are goaded with tempting snacks and punished with arduous exercise routines.”57 When the television is removed and the reality is all that remains, fat people have a much different experience. Essayist Christine Schoenwald’s description of being a fat, exercising body belies the myth of health concerns behind body shaming, as she writes: I’m riding my bike around a local community center on a Sunday morning. The air is crisp and fresh - a rarity in Los Angeles - and I enjoy feeling the cool air against my skin as I ride. I remember how happy I felt when I rode my bike as I child, and how similar I feel now. Suddenly, I’m jerked from my place of bliss when someone yells, “Hey Lard Ass! Why don’t you exercise and lose some weight?”58 The irony that “bike riding is exercise” isn’t lost on Schoenwald. But the illogical response of the passerby suggests another source for the animus. The inability to read 57 Amy Farrel, Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture (New York, London: New York University Press, 2011), 119. 58 Christine Schoenwald, “I’m Overweight and Get Fat-Shamed When I Exercise,” Ravishly, Sept. 9, 2016, https://ravishly.com/2016/12/27/im-overweight-and-get-fat-shamed-when-i- exercise 48 Schoenwald’s body as an active body, a body in motion, belies the way that “fat” is often read as an abstract, unliving substance distinct from people actually living in fat bodies. The anonymous insulter, then, reveals the way that fat bodies, even in motion, are understood as inert; moving, yes, but towards a “slow death.”59 And, therefore, not really living at all. This view of the fat body as a kind of not-quite-living is not just found in the casually yelled insult or the internet troll, but is deeply embedded in some branches of feminist scholarship as well. Some scholars are deeply critical of body norms, but advocate weightloss dieting at the same time.60 Other arguments manifest as a criticism of, and sensitivity to, forms of gendered, racialized, and/or class oppression, while simultaneously maintaining implicit or explicit rejection of fat subjectivity which they see as a structurally induced health problem.61 Feminist cultural theorist Lauren Berlant falls in this camp. In the essay “Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency)” Berlant uses ‘obesity’ as an example of how contemporary capitalist culture pulls people into patterns, practices and bodily states that 59 Lauren Berlant, “Slow Death (Obesity, Sovereignty, Lateral Agency)” in Cruel Optimism (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011), 95-120. 60 Sheila Bovey, What Have You Got to Lose? The Great Weight Debate and How to Diet Successfully (London: The Women’s Press, 2002); Susie Orbach (1987), Fat Is a Feminist Issue: The Anti-diet Guide to Permanent Weight Loss (New York: Berkley Books, 1987); for more critical discussion of this approach, see: Charlotte Cooper, “Fat Studies. Mapping the Field,” Sociology Compass, vol. 4, no. 12 (2010): 1020–1034. 61 Anna Kirkland, “The Environmental Account of Obesity: A Case for Feminist Skepticism,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 36, no. 2 (2011): 463–485; Elizabeth Probyn, “Silences Behind the Mantra: Critiquing Feminist Fat,” Feminism & Psychology, vol. 18, no. 3 (2008): 401–404; Antronette K. Yancey, Joanne Leslie and Emily K. Abel, “Obesity at the Crossroads: Feminist and Public Health Perspectives’. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol.31, no.2 (2006): 425–443. 49 simultaneously sustain them and shatter them.62 This notion of self-medication through self- interruption63 is also an essential argument in Berlant’s broader, rich analysis of ‘cruel optimism’ as a condition of life under capitalism. She reads ‘objectively obese’ bodies from the outside as self-evident signs of those bodies’ desperate inner states and relations to the world.64 Berlant mentions but dismisses critical fat studies, instead presenting as a fact the medical scientific view of ‘obesity’ as disease, although this so-called fact is also a product of the capitalist culture she critiques.65 Although Berlant does not demand the eradication of fat in the future, she does see fat (or ‘globesity’ in her terms) as a condition that signals ‘deterioration’66, life turning against itself. But, this is not what fat is or ontologically does to bodies. Rather, Berlant’s text repeats the representational structure of abjection when she implicitly but clearly distinguishes between fat as inanimate flesh that slows down but just barely does not kill embodied agency, and the more animate, non-fat ‘normal’ body which does not lend itself as readily to deterioration. Experiential knowledge and the possibility of not experiencing fat as reduced embodied agency or a self- disruptive condition never enter the picture. 62 Lauren Berlant, “Slow Death (Obesity, Sovereignty, Lateral Agency),” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 33, no. 4(2007) 759. 63 Ibid., 777. 64 See the work of Anna Kirkland, “The Environmental Account of Obesity: A Case for Feminist Skepticism’. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Vol. 36, no. 2 (2011): 463–485. 65 For examples, see: Paul Campos, “The Obesity Myth: Why America’s Obsession with Weight is Hazardous to Your Health (New York: Gotham Books, 2004); Hannele Harjunen, “Neoliberal Bodies and the Gendered Fat Body” (London: Routledge, 2017). 66 Lauren Berlant, “Slow Death (Obesity, Sovereignty, Lateral Agency),” 754. 50 In Sara Ahmed’s discussion on the politics of fear, an object, body or concept becomes a fetish object when it is distanced from the material contexts and histories which give it depth and complexity, and is recycled as a simplified, condensed sign of threat.67 When fat is portrayed as a fetish object, as in Berlant’s work, it is separated from actual, living fat people and becomes a life-threatening quality that renders gender, ‘race’, class, ability and personal history as factors that have little to no impact on what fatness feels like or means. When fatness is attached to a person, it suddenly flattens their multifaceted corporeal existence into one denominator, deemed dangerous for not only the person but for others whose economic resources and aesthetic sensibilities are supposedly invaded by fat bodies. Fat also becomes flattened in itself into a substance that means the same regardless of where, for whom, how, when, to what degree and against what historical background it exists. *Loosely resists this flattening and the inanimacy often attached to the fat body by exerting their agency with an intensity and intentionality that does not figure fat as a condition of self-disruption. Devin and Nicole aren’t active in the “appropriate” ways—they don’t have a gym membership or pop in an exercise DVD for at home workouts or even go on leisure walks—but they do live very active, purposeful lives. Indeed, their lives, like most low-income working households, rely upon an excess of labor. Both have multiple side hustles and take odd jobs to just make ends meet as Nicole pursues her creative passions. Nicole and her friends, thin and large, are often shown eating. Berlant writes, “Eating can be seen as a form of ballast against wearing out, but also as counter-dissipation, in that, like other small pleasures, it can produce an 67 Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 92–94. 51 experience of self-abeyance, of floating sideways.”68 There is a sort of possibility within this formulation that suggests that perhaps eating, for fat bodies, is not just a response to stress or a form of self-medication. But Berlant then pivots and argues that “Eating adds up to something, many things: maybe the good life, but usually a sense of well-being that spreads out for a moment, not a projection toward a future. Paradoxically, of course, at least during this phase of capital, there is less of a future when one eats without an orientation toward it.”69 Thus, Berlant negates the possibility of living fat in the present and marks it as a signal of life turning against itself. Let us return, then, to the way *Loosely begins with the image of ornery, overheated, overweight bodies. What’s so surprising about this moment is that the scene functions on two levels: to reveal and to revel. The scene uses Nicole and Devin’s quick banter and references to past shared experiences to establish their deep affection for one another. But it doesn’t let the viewer separate the pleasure derived from their easy and loving rapport from the fact of their fat. Their sociality is not the momentary cessation of time, but “a projection toward a future.”70 The show revels in the fact that not only is it uncommon to see not one, but two fat characters on screen at once, but they are “bad” representations. They are not the abject, yet hopeful participants in The Biggest Loser or Celebrity Fit Club. They are “bad,” improper, unruly bodies not because they live sustainable lives that do not see fat bodies who take pleasure in consumption as “counterabsorption in episodic refreshment.” Instead, they live lives of refusal; not of food, but of a diminished (and diminishing) future. 68 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 116. 69 Ibid., 117 70 Lauren Berlant, “Slow Death (Obesity, Sovereignty, Lateral Agency)” in Cruel Optimism (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011), 117. 52 Elaborating on how the opening scene sets the tone for the rest of the show, Byer comments, “No, you will not see me throwing out a box of doughnuts crying. Which is what I saw in a trailer for a show that actually exists. A fat lady was like ‘oh noooo’ and then she like sat on the floor and was like ‘just tell me to lose the weight.’ And I’m like it’s not that serious.”71 Byer reenacts the scenes with exaggerated gestures and a melodramatically forlorn line reading. Although she is careful not to name the show, it is obvious to anyone who has seen the trailer, or for the millions of viewers who tune in to NBC’s hit melodrama every week, that she is talking about the character Kate Pearson (Chrissy Metz) in This Is Us. The show follows the complicated personal and family dynamics of the Pearson clan. While the other characters have multiple, intersecting issues affecting their lives, Kate’s storyline focuses entirely on her size. Kate, the only other plus size female lead currently on television, is the antithesis of Nicole, and unlike the playful, slightly unexpected first scene in *Loosely, there is nothing surprising about our introduction to Kate. The first time we see Kate, she is peering inside her refrigerator. The camera slowly moves to reveal the contents. Post-it notes are peppered throughout urging her to make “better” food choices. One note literally identifies a food item as “bad” and another sharply reminds her not to eat her birthday cake until her party. Kate then moves to the bathroom, where she strips down into her underwear to weigh herself. Somehow, in the course of stepping on the scale, she falls and badly sprains her ankle. In a starkly different image from the discarded food wrappers that unapologetically clutter the table in the opening credits of *Loosely Exactly Nicole, Kate is then shown throwing out all of her junk food. 71 BUILD Series. “Nicole Byer on ‘Loosely Exactly Nicole.’” Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 7 September 2016. 53 In an unsurprising turn of events, Kate, now pledged to lose weight at last, attends a diet group where the group leader, a black woman, talks to everyone about her weight loss and professes her passion to now help other people “be skinny like [her].” She is by any standard, though, still fat. In fact, many of the other group members, who have just begun their weightloss are her size. While it is possible to read this as an attempt to point out that even a person who one would classify as “fat” may have been much fatter and lost a significant amount of weight, thereby troubling the social construction of corpulence, the context suggests that we are meant to laugh at her. The “comedy” continues as an attendee tearfully explains that she wasn’t allowed to eat pizza as a kid, so now she “has to eat the whole thing,” and she’s thinking she should “just get her stomach stapled (a reference to gastric bypass weight loss surgery) and be done with it.” The way the scene is shot—the camera moves back and forth between the tearful storyteller and the barely restrained laughter of some of the other group members—and the open mockery by the irreverent funny fat guy, Toby (Chris Sullivan) highlights the idea that the viewer is supposed to think that it is absurd that anyone would be forced to resort to surgery when they “simply” have to stop consuming so much pizza. During the break, pizza-mocking Toby flirts with Kate. It is a meet-cute eerily similar to the premise of Mike & Molly (2010-2016)—the only other show on air with a fat couple in leading roles since Roseanne (1988-1997)—as it reveals the limits of imagining a fat sociality that exists outside of weightloss.72 Indeed, the only other time that Kate is represented as an object of desire is when a horse caretaker at a fat camp flirts with her. 72 However, there have been a number of television series with a fat male lead and slender wife in the interim: The King of Queens (1998-2007), Grounded for Life (2001-2005), According to Jim (2001-2009), Still Standing (2002-2006), Kevin Can Wait (2016). 54 Figure 6 Kate’s “bad” food in This Is Us Figure 7 Kate weighing herself just before falling off the scale 55 Figure 8 Kate throwing out all of her “bad” foods There are women like Kate. And Metz is an excellent actress who imbues Kate with a depth of feeling and humanity that transcends her limited storyline. There are many women who struggle with the moralizing of food as “good” and “bad” and feel the crushing self-loathing when they “can’t control” their desire to reach for the “bad” food. There are many women who have bodies like Chrissy Metz—not the curvy, hourglass figures slightly larger than a size 8 that have become the face of “plus size” body positivity in mainstream media, but a 5’5,’’ apple- shaped woman at the top end of “plus size.”73 But the consistent stereotypical representation of fat subjectivity is dehumanizing in its narrowness. 73 Which bodies are perceived as fat or not depend greatly on the combination of height, weight, and body type. “Superfat” or “Deathfat” is often used by fat activists as an act of reclaiming rhetoric meant to shame and as a useful descriptor for individuals who exist outside of the realm of “plus size” usually discussed and represented in mainstream media. For more on this topic, see: The Fat Lip, “Beyond Superfat: Rethinking the Farthest End of the Fat Spectrum” (20 Dec. 56 I take issue not with This Is Us’s verisimilitude, but rather with the ways its stereotypical representations participate in the foreclosing of certain kinds of orientations to the fat body. Narrative threads carve lines that can be followed within the world of the show and without. This is what makes culture so powerful—it helps us imagine new threads, different modes of being that we can follow in our own lines. In her exploration of what a queer phenomenology might look like, Sara Ahmed writes: To be oriented is also to be oriented toward certain objects, those that help us find our way. These are the objects we recognize, such that when we face them, we know which way we are facing. They gather on the ground and also create a ground on which we can gather. Yet objects gather quite differently, creating different grounds. What difference does it make what we are oriented towards?74 Images also “create a ground on which we can gather.” They are capable of orienting us towards new possibilities. Commenting on the couch scene and the difference between the display of her fat body and Chrissy Metz’s, Byer says “There is no victimization. But we also don’t like harp on it. We’re just two people who live in the world.” She continues, describing the process of casting the role of her gay best friend, Devin (Jacob Wysocki): “I think what I like the most about him being a bigger…like I requested…like I said I only really want to see bigger dudes…is I wanted someone to be like my perfect mirror and I think we mirror each other very well.” Fat bodies are not usually allowed to “just” be in the world. They are often understood not as simply part of a vast spectrum of modes of embodiment, but as problems to be solved (just type in “obesity epidemic” in any search engine). It is a radical representational choice, then, to show two fat bodies on screen and force the viewer to contend with their assumptions about fat bodies—excessive, sweaty, lazy—and not “harp on it.” The show subverts the idea that the thin 2016,) http://thefatlip.com/2016/12/20/beyond-superfat-rethinking-the-farthest-end-of-the-fat- spectrum/ 74 Sara Ahmed, “Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology,” GLQ (12:4), 2006: 543. 57 body, either as an internalized mind/body split or as material reality, should be the idealized image that haunts the fat body. Instead, Devin, a tall man with a prominent gut is her “perfect mirror.” The gaze into the mirror is an intensely intimate act of assessment and (self) reflection, making the mirror an important part of what it means for many to feel embodied. It represents truth and illusion at the same time. The mirror is as much about interiority as it is about surface as we simultaneously get a glimpse of ourselves “as we are,” as we think we are, and as we hope to be. But, here, Byer makes the mirror a communal experience; an embodied act of being together in the world. Although in popular culture, fat people are often reduced only to their size, thereby, in effect, making Nicole and Devin interchangeable, Devin—a tall, white, fat man—is not what one would naturally think of as her mirror or mirror image. But Byer’s understanding of him as a mirror(ing) image gestures towards the complex multiplicities of fat embodiment and identity more broadly. Devin is Nicole’s “perfect mirror” because he allows for her irreverent, outrageously inappropriate, sex positive personality to not be read as the natural characteristics of a fat, black female body, but as a way of being in the world that is possible for any body. *Loosely Exactly Nicole provides a different kind of orientation towards fat excess and to the fat black woman’s positionality as “too much.” Aware of how important this move to reimagine the process of mirroring is, she tells an interviewer, “I shouldn’t have a show, on paper.” “ A fat Black lady who just fucks people left and right on her show, and we never talk about how she’s fat and Black? That’s crazy! But I look at women like Queen Latifah, Mo’Nique, and Gabourey Sidibe as having paved the way for someone like me to exist. So, 58 ‘Living Single,’ ‘The Parkers’—without these shows, I wouldn’t have my show.”75 Given the vastness of our cultural landscape, it is a rather limited range of representational touchstones. There were sitcoms pre-dating Living Single and The Parkers and Sidibe’s role that featured fat black women— Beulah (1950), That’s My Mama (1974), Good Times (1974), What’s Happening!! (1976), and Gimme a Break (1981)—but all position the large, black female body in the role of mother or caregiver, slight variations on the sexless mammy archetype. As we know, this onscreen archetypal mammy figure effects fat black women in their real lives. The television images of the nurturing black mother acts as a sort of distorted mirror that effects both how fat black women are perceived and the kinds of (non-sexual) intimacies that are deemed permissible. In “Fat is a Black Women’s issue” Retha Powers writes: I was constantly perceived as a maternal Black woman by my peers and teachers. I think some people actually visualized themselves clinging to me with their head to my bosom. And why not? The image of the big, strong, nurturing Black woman has existed in print and visual media for years, most prevalent in film. Hattie McDaniel won an Oscar for her portrayal of this image. Unfortunately, this problem-solver and eternal-sustainer persona becomes the life work of many women.76 Powers calls this dynamic the “persistent mammy-brickhouse Black-woman image” as she reflects on a high school counselor telling her “You don’t have to worry about feeling attractive or sexy because Black women aren’t seen as sex objects, but as women…you’re lucky because you can go beyond the stereotype of women as sex object; you just have to worry about being yourself” after confessing her struggles with an eating disorder. Besides the counselors remarks being deeply insensitive to Powers’ disclosure, it reveals the way that fat and race intersect to erase the full subjectivity of fat, black women—especially as desirable bodies. 75 Sydney Bucksbaum, “Nicole Byer Won't Apologize for Her Comedy (But She'll Always Read the Comments),” The Hollywood Reporter, 29. August, 2016 https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/nicole-byer-loosely-exactly-nicole-921599 76 Retha Powers, “Fat Is a Black Women’s Issue,” Essence (Oct. 1989): 78. 59 Countering this erasure, *Loosely Exactly Nicole doesn’t shy away from Nicole’s sexuality. In addition to her occasional lover, Derrick, Nicole is often entering new romantic entanglements. She is constantly ogling men, talking about her desire to have sexual encounters with men she meets, and, quite often, charming men she is attracted to into mutually satisfying sex. It is interesting that Byer places her show in the televisual genealogy of Living Single and The Parkers as *Loosely is a hybridization and reworking of both that remixes key components of their structure to envision different forms of livability. Living Single followed a group of four female friends and their two male neighbors living in a Brooklyn brownstone apartment. The show centered around Queen Latifah’s character, Khadijah James, and each week found the group in various complications related to their jobs, love lives, and each other. Although Khadijah, played by an uncharacteristically curvy-by-tv- standards Latifah, was never wanting for paramours, it is Maxine, the high-powered attorney who we see traces of most in *Loosely. Dark-skinned, sporting braided hair with an undercut, and always in a power suit, Maxine had healthy sexual relationships without long-term commitments. Maxine dated often and was typically the one to cut relationships short when men wanted more serious (and more monogamous) relationships. She lived her life on her own terms, was verbally assertive, and was quick to challenge men, often to great comedic affect with Khadijah’s neighbor and friend, the persnickety and handsome stockbroker Kyle Baker (T.C. Carson). Their verbal spats underscored the attraction they had for each other and when they finally sleep together after a drunken night, it is Maxine, not Kyle, who decides to keep the relationship in the realm of casual sex, directly mirroring the kind of sexual entanglements Nicole often finds herself in. The Parkers is a more fraught legacy for *Loosely. Although fat black women are often 60 relegated to the mammy archetype, television representations of fat women also mark them as sexually unruly, often mocking their presumably elevated sexual desire by having their romantic quests perpetually thwarted by indifferent love interests. Full-figured comedian Mo’Nique stars in the comedy series in which she plays the role of Miss Nikki Parker, a black, single mother who is a student at the same community college as her teenaged daughter. The running gag throughout the show’s five seasons is that Nikki suffers from delusions that she is in a mutually agreeable relationship with her love interest, Professor Oglevee (Dorien Wilson), while the audience and the other characters within the show know that this is untrue. Nikki’s inability to see in the way that virtually everyone else sees—her mirror is deceiving her—underscores that her body’s deviance from the socially acceptable and her emotional excess leads to “improper” sociality. Although Nikki does ultimately get her man and marries Oglevee in the series finale, this final gesture does not undo the way a major narrative thread for six seasons was the linking of excess appetites for food with unruly, socially unacceptable sexual desires. I have been arguing for new forms of intimacy, new forms of attachments that are made possible by reimagining excess. But some intimacies, like the expectations Powers exposes, have already been imagined and are experienced as an unwanted exertion of power, an expectation of benefiting from emotional labor that is never returned. Though both suggest a level of emotional and physical proximity, we must be careful not to conflate access to and an intimacy with. Some intimacies have always been assumed. Some bodies have already been perceived as touchable. In Black Bodies, White Gazes, George Yancy describes the racially charged nature of the unwanted touch for black bodies: “After all, the history of whiteness demonstrates that curious white hands can lead to violent acts of objectifying and experimenting on Black bodies; and desirous white hands can lead to violent and unspeakable acts of molestation, where the Black body undergoes 61 tremendous pain and trauma.”77 This possibility of the harmful touch is crystallized in Eric Garner’s last words of “Don’t touch me please, don’t touch me” just before being thrown to the ground. Some touch is a threat, a provocation, a closeness that turns the subject into an object. Excess, then, cannot be understood as providing the opportunity for an intimate encounter without the mutuality of the gaze that recognizes the autonomous, sovereign humanity of another. *Loosely Exactly Nicole reimagines what intimacy can look like for fat, black bodies who already exist in the overdetermined perceptual space of “too much.”*Loosely re-envisions excessive relationality by not centralizing blackness. At the same time, Nicole’s blackness is not incidental. As an aspiring actor who goes on many auditions, she’s often asked to make her race the core of her performance. In the fifth episode of the first season, Nicole is literally asked by a white casting director to “be blacker.”78 In the scene, she is reading for a part in a commercial called “Restless Leg Sufferer.” She delivers her one line—“Now I only have to take one pill instead of three”—in her everyday, casual voice, the way you might imagine Rachel from Friends giving the line read. The casting director is unsatisfied and asks her to “try it…sassier.” Nicole repeats “sassier” inquisitively and is offered the clarification: “yeah, you know…urban.” Nicole continues to be a little confused about what an “urban” delivery of the line means and the casting director, exasperated, says “Blacker. I want it Blacker. Do you understand what I’m 77 George Yancy, Black Bodies, White Gazes (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), xiii. 78 Nicole Byer wrote and starred in a viral skit on the same theme in 2013 where she is asked by a white casting director to be “a really urban, ethnic Black person.” She continues to be pressed to “be blacker,” prompting Nicole to make her delivery so loud and physical that she is dancing while delivering the line in the final take. In the end, we see a clip of the film for which she was auditioning. A white, blonde woman get’s the part. UCB Comedy. “Be Blacker: A Sketch for UCB Comedy.” Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 14 February 2013. 62 saying?” Nicole responds by giving the line with the stereotypical “sass” of a “Black” woman, rolling her neck and gesticulating. The scene continues with Nicole ratcheting up the “blackness” after receiving successive prompts from the casting director to do “Church lady black” and “Oprah Black.” We sense that somehow, although doing exactly what was asked of her, she has somehow gone too far, been too excessive as, in the end, she gets the dreaded, “Thank you. We’ll be in touch.” In another casting scene, however, the racial signs do not operate so coherently. In the first episode of the series, Nicole reads a part in a script for “a hooker named Big Butt Bertha, who is as wide as she is horny.” The combination of corpulence, sexual aggressiveness and race is, as discussed earlier, a common trope. While the show clearly critiques typecasting, it uses this moment to explore the nuances of racial alterity and Nicole’s failure to recognize the limits of the racialized sign. She conscripts the young Taiwanese boy, Troy (Ian Chen) she sometimes babysits to read lines with her. As Troy plays the role of a pimp, he stops before reading a line that contains the N-word (neither character ever, actually, says the word in full): Troy: I can’t say that word. Nicole: Listen, we’re saying it for a very important reason today. Troy: My mom says I should never say the N-word for any reason. Nicole: OK, listen, Troy. Black people can say that word, and Taiwanese people are the black people of Asia. Troy: We are? Nicole: Yeah, sure. Plus, we’re in a car. Nobody can hear us. Nicole’s “yeah, sure” is telling. She knows that her logic doesn’t quite hold. What is true about the historical weight of that word and the debates around its use within the Black community is complicated by her desire to benefit from the entertainment industry’s inability to 63 see beyond what Ellen Gallagher refers to as “the super signs of race.”79 Nicole does the calculus and, in that moment, decides she’d rather willingly objectify herself in the present to have the chance at subjecthood later. In an industry that only values certain bodies, it is a bargain that many women and people of color often have to make. Here, Nicole is willingly operating within the very systems and modalities that are critiqued in the “Be Blacker” encounter later in the season. Race occupies a fraught space in the show. We want to root for Nicole, but she resists being the “good,” earnest non-white subject just trying to pursue her dreams. She, too, gets caught up and entangled in, on the one hand, wanting the fluidity of her racial subjectivity to be recognized and, on the other hand, mobilizing the performativity of race to re-create the stereotype that will, paradoxically, let her be “seen” as a black body. Nicole is a complicated, flawed character. Sometimes she is the “bad” subject. But *Loosely Exactly Nicole is interesting precisely because it allows Nicole to remix the signs of fatness, blackness, and gender in ways that do not align with normative readings of a body marked as excessive. That’s what makes the asterisk in the title so provocative. So much can be said and left unsaid with an asterisk. The asterisk is a sign in flux, much like Nicole herself. Asterisks are placeholders—they are used to mark an absent presence. Asterisks are wild cards— they are symbols that stand for more than what is presently visible. Asterisks are a corrective— they are the typographical acknowledgment of a previous mistake. The asterisk in the show’s title is at once a knowing nod to Internet culture (the asterisk is commonly used in online chat to denote a misspelling or misstatements) and a signal of an intentional identitarian slippage. By not simply using Exactly Nicole, the show acknowledges that although we know scripted television isn't "real," we yearn for it to give us access to some greater reality or “truth.” But it is, 79 Greg Tate, Robert Storr & Jill Medvedow, Ellen Gallagher, Catalogue for the Exhibition Ellen Gallagher, ed. Jessica Morgan(D.A.P./ICA Boston, 2001), 98. 64 inevitably, always just a glimpse into a possible way of being. We know that this isn’t exactly Nicole (Byer). It is merely an approximation. In the gap between what is “true” about Nicole the actor and Nicole the character, the show plays with the idea of what we think a fat, black female body can be and do. I want to turn now to a fat black woman’s body imagined much less expansively in a network television series. Race, Ambivalence, and the “Funny” Woman In the pilot episode of The Mindy Project doctor Mindy Lahiri (Mindy Kaling) says “My body mass isn’t great, but I’m not like, Precious or anything.” These words are said off-handedly for quick laughs. In a moment of frustration after having seen her “dream guy” marry another woman, Mindy is trying to figure out how she ended up alone, once again. As her best friend asks, “Did you think that [he] was just gonna ditch the wedding and run off with you like you’re Katherine Heigl?” And she replies, with perfect comedic timing, “Kind of, yes.” Although, by her own admittance, she isn’t a Katherine Heigl type, Mindy is still perplexed because she is highly educated, stylish, and, though no Hollywood waif, isn’t obese. She has all of the other markers of respectability; while a minoritarian subject she cannot be mistaken for being “like Precious.” Mindy’s friend hastens to remind her during this post-breakup tough-love session that “Your life is not a romantic comedy.” While this very meta-commentary may be true, it doesn’t undo the way the show is very explicitly set up as part of the romantic comedy tradition, and the limits that this genre imposes both narratively and structurally. The opening scene of the pilot is a montage of Lahiri at various ages—young child, high school student, college freshman— watching romantic comedies, repeating lines that she had clearly learned by heart from repeated 65 viewings. On various televisions we see scenes so familiar that they instantly inspire a nostalgia and leave an emotional residue for the romantic comedy rhythms of the 80s and 90s—Billy Crystal gesturing towards Meg Ryan as he says “I’ll have what she’s having,” Tom Hanks’ Joe Fox expressing to Meg Ryan’s Kathleen Kelly that he would have liked to say “Hey, how about…oh, how about some coffee, or, you know drinks or dinner or a movie...for as long as we both shall live?” in You’ve Got Mail, and, finally, Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant at the height of their most endearing romantic personas as Roberts delivers the line: “Don’t forget I’m just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her.” In many ways the show pays homage to these narrative conventions. Indeed, the conceit of the pilot, and of the show more broadly, is to track the many mishaps that befall Mindy as she waits for this form of romantic relationality to play out, just as she has seen time and again on the silver screen. At the same time, The Mindy Project troubles the audiences expectations of romantic comedy by making visible the artifice of “meeting the one,” playing with shifting temporalities, and focusing the gaze on a non-white leading lady. When Mindy’s life fails to mirror Meg Ryan’s or Julia Roberts’ on-screen personas (as it, of course, never can) Dr. Lahiri insists on making reality bend to her romantic longings and reads “fate” in the mundane. After the opening voice-over film montage, Mindy meets another doctor at her hospital (played by Bill Hader), has a forced “meet-cute”—a common plot device enabling the first meeting of a film’s romantic lead characters—in the elevator, and promptly falls in love with him. The comedy comes from the way this encounter is not represented as effortless happenstance, as is often the case in the rom-com genre, but rather as very particularly and forcefully manipulated by Mindy herself. At the point of this awkward, one-sided “love at first sight,” the sitcom grinds to a halt as 66 a security guard suddenly appears on the screen and says, “What does this have to do with the circumstances of your arrest?” We have jumped in time to the present day, where Mindy, frazzled and dressed in cocktail attire, tries to explain her actions on the day her former boyfriend got married. In her recollection, she gets drunk, makes an inappropriate speech, rides home on her bicycle yelling “I’m Sandra Bullock” and falls into a pool before finally getting arrested for drunken and disorderly conduct. But prior to arrest, and still trying to get her bearings after unexpectedly taking a fully clothed dive into a stranger’s backyard pool, Mindy hallucinates that a Barbie doll has come to life and is speaking to her. Carelessly forgotten, one imagines, by a child after a long day of make-believe, Mindy’s encounter is much more sobering: the Barbie doll—White and blonde and with just a tad too much eye shadow and lipstick verging on garish—tells Mindy that she needs to get her life together and that at least she (the doll) has a boyfriend. It’s a moment simultaneously playful and disturbing. There is a charming unexpectedness to the doll-come-to- life, but also something sinister about this personification of white, heteronormative femininity telling Mindy that she isn’t quite measuring up. As Janani Subramanian argues, “The alternation between flashbacks and the present day, along with tracking shots, underwater shooting and special effects (a Barbie doll with a moving mouth), immediately distinguish the program as a different kind of situation comedy—one where the situations are not limited by linear narratives and interior sets and are instead motivated by our heroine’s absurd and offbeat mode of comedy.”80 The kind of manic screwball energy infused in these scenes approximate scholar Kathleen Rowe’s description of the “unruly woman” 80 Janani Subramanian, “The Mindy Project: South Asians and Television Multiculturalism” in Kaklamanidou, Betty, and Margaret Tally, eds. The Millennials on Film and Television: Essays on the Politics of Popular Culture (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014), 72. 67 paradigm in female comedy, which suggests that excess of body and behavior is one way that “woman as subject” can lay “claim to her own desire.”81 Figure 9 Mindy’s “talking” Barbie And, of course, the show introduces racial alterity into the normative lead of situation comedies and rom-coms. In The Mindy Project the object of desire is not Meg Ryan, Julia Roberts, Zooey Deschanel, or Cameron Diaz—it’s Mindy Kaling, the first South Asian creator, showrunner, and star of her own show. Of course, there’s an entirely different legacy of romantic comedy leading ladies one could trace that envision non-heterosexual and/or non-white relationalities (think here of Something New, Love and Basketball, Bend It Like Beckham, But I’m a Cheerleader, to name a few) but to do so would be unfair to the internal narrative structure that The Mindy Project sets up for the viewer: we are going to see an updated, modern rom-com translated for the small screen. 81 Kathleen Rowe, The Unruly Woman: Gender and the Genres of Laughter (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995). 68 Funny Looking But what difference does the difference actually make? What effects and affects are produced by having a Barbara Stanwyck-esque screwball comedienne combined with Nora Ephron emotionality embodied by a South-Asian leading lady? It matters that Mindy Kaling isn’t white or thin. Her racial and corporeal difference always brings to the forefront the way some bodies don’t get to just tell jokes, they are the joke. Sometimes to be funny means “funny looking.” There is a constant push and pull between the affect of a comedian’s body and the effectiveness of the joke as “humorous.” Andrew Stott notes this tension, writing “An ideal of physicality must exist against which the comedian can be found lacking, thereby reassuring the audience that comic substance will be found in departure from those ideals.”82 The notion of being “funny looking” gets compounded when the gender, race, and size of the comedic body deviates from the normative white male funny man (of any size). What we end up with on the show, then, are the limits of representational difference for meaningful critique. Kaling described Dr. Mindy Lahiri’s character as “politically all over the map” on Charlie Rose. Rose immediately reads this lack of political stability as a dynamism made possible by Kaling/Lahiri’s corporeality. That is, there is something about what her body represents—her race, what he imagines to be her culture (and acculturation), and her defiant curviness. He asks, “is it possible to make her more interesting because she’s…because she has the background she has and looks the way she does?” Kaling responds: My character could probably not exist if she wasn’t Indian. Because if I was being played by, frankly, a thin, beautiful blond woman, you might find it incredibly insufferable. But I have the trappings of a marginalized person, and when that person is, like, decisively saying sort of conservative things and all over the map things [Kaling interrupts her line of thought]—another thing about my character which I love is she’s constantly insisting that she’s young and hot to 82 Andrew Stott, Comedy (New York and London: Routledge, 2005), 84. 69 everyone. And she’s always saying like “I’m a smoking hot doctor who makes a lot of money.’ And she has this confidence that is, like, so delusional.83 Thus, The Mindy Project posits a world in which minoritarian identification allows one to move freely into the terrain of the taboo, of the knowingly and playfully offensive. There is a certain subversive social currency attached to some bodies. Because Lahiri occupies a marginalized positionality she is “allowed” to be naïve, a bit “delusional,” and as recurs throughout the show, blur the lines around racism and racial knowing. The show’s subversiveness is supposed to reside in its pastiche, its postmodern mashup of “incongruent” bodies and ideologies. Dr. Lahiri’s “misaligned” political and ideological statements juxtaposed against her embodiment of racial difference are played for comedic effect. Her libertarian leanings, mis-identification of a scarf as a burqa, and comments about race are immediately absorbed into the rom-com expectation of “quirkiness”; they suddenly become merely “endearing” and “loveable” facets of Lahiri in particular, and the world of the show more broadly. In short, the show is highly performative. We are all familiar with the stereotype that women simply aren’t funny or, at the very least, cannot possibly be as funny as men. Disproving these essentializing attempts of shoring up male privilege is both unnecessary and beyond the scope of this paper. However, what is of interests to understanding the complexity of The Mindy Project’s “funny lady” are the underlying ideologies and assumptions about ways of being in the world invoked by such utterances. As Danielle Russell lays out [T]he presence of a female comic elicits a much different audience reaction than that of her male counterpart. ‘Deviant behavior and expression’ are somehow more palatable from a man. He is granted his due—assumed to be funny until he proves to be otherwise—while she starts from a different position—she must prove that she can be funny.84 83 Charlie Rose, “Mindy Kaling,” 28 March, 2014. https://charlierose.com/videos/18000 84 Danielle Russell, "Self-deprecatory humour and the female comic, "thirdspace: a journal of feminist theory & culture 2, no. 1 (2007). 70 In short, because of the complex ideological assumptions surrounding the performance of gender and humor (and, I would add, race), female comics have to work twice as hard to win the audience. While Russell is speaking to the demands of the stage comic, his analysis is applicable to female comedic performances more broadly. For some, the “funny lady” is a contradiction in terms because to be “funny” is to make a fool of oneself, to exaggerate one’s body and/or voice, and to externalize the self for the pleasure of others whereas to be a “lady” is to be attractive, to minimize oneself, to become all surface and no interior. In other words, to be seen and not heard. This contradiction between the humorous body and the desirable (and desiring) body is at the heart of The Mindy Project. Dr. Mindy Lahiri is not thin by Hollywood standards, is not white, and is not silent. In many ways, Lahiri’s curvaceous, Indian American, and loud subjectivity “exploit[s] the gap between being a body and having a body.”85 As Stott claims, “the comic body privileges the facts of physicality over the ideal of the physique, and its function over poise.” According to Stott, “comedy strategically bypasses civility to return us to our body, emphasizing our proximity to the animals, reminding us of our corporeality and momentarily shattering the apparently global imperatives of manners and beauty.”86 This reflexive return to the audience’s own body that Stott theorizes is complicated when “the gap between being a body and having a body” is collapsed not by the comedic performance itself, but by the perception of some bodies as performative a priori. This perceptual and affective slippage between being and having is the everyday lived experiences of excessive bodies. Dark-skinned, curvy women are often read as comic bodies whether or not they intentionally make themselves 85 Simon Critchley, On Humour (New York: Routledge, 2002), 43. 86 Andrew Stott, Comedy (New York and London: Routledge, 2005), 86. 71 the objects of the comedic gaze. Thus, Kaling/Lahiri’s racial, gendered and corporeal alterity is already in excess of the comedic body. While rarely directly tackling issues of racism and sexism beyond partaking in the tradition of the “very special episodes” format, The Mindy Project plays with the dual nature of her “comedic” body by emphasizing the archetypes of the “unruly” female comedian. As Kathleen Rowe writes, “the unruly woman…is unable or willing to confine herself to her proper place,” “her body is excessive or fat,” “her speech is excessive in quantity,” “she makes jokes, or laughs herself,” and “her behavior is associated with looseness.”87 Dr. Lahiri is, compared to other leading ladies, a plus-sized, serial-dater who hates exercise, is so often in the process of eating that her culinary appetites are a frequent source of commentary from her office-mates. And, indeed, her “unruliness” has lead to some viewers and critics deeming her “unlikable,” coded language for women who unapologetically demand to be seen and heard on their own terms. Her (un)likability has inspired internet threads with on the nose titles like “I hate the Mindy Kaling show” and many critical essays debating the merits of having a likeable central character. As Jake Flanigan says in The Atlantic, Mindy Kaling is “kind of a jerk.” She is “disposed to gossip, blasé about the environment, religious when it’s convenient, materialistic, often selfish, and occasionally dishonest.”88 As Flanigan goes on to argue and as Kaling herself has said many times, this makes her more “relatable” and “three dimensional.” Unlike those romantic comedy leads she is constantly referencing, Mindy Lahiri is flawed, like the rest of us: 87 Kathleen Rowe, The Unruly Woman: Gender and Genres of Laughter, 31. 88 Jake Flanagin, “Mindy on The Mindy Project Needs to Stay Unlikeable—for the Good of TV,” The Atlantic, September 17, 2013. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/09/mindy-on-i-the-mindy-project-i- needs-to-stay-unlikable-for-the-good-of-tv/278832/ 72 She’s a narcissist. She’s prickly and self-involved, the sort of doctor who, trying to advance her career, requests that her assistant start sending insured patients her way. When the assistant says, “So more white people,” Mindy tells her not to write that down, while mouthing, “Yes, more white people.”89 The show dwells in life’s messy contradictions. Lahiri’s conservative politics, outrageous sexual commentary, and constant jokes about food consumption are meant to be amusing precisely because they fail to meet our expectation of what a body that looks like Mindy’s is supposed to do and represent. And, yet, the performance of Kaling as Lahiri resists directly mapping onto the sort of disruptive, carnivalesque messiness of the unruly woman. For Rowe, the unruly woman is a carnivalesque figure who inverts gender norms as a “woman on top,” dominating men and freely feeding her hungers for food, sex, talk, laughter and command. Kathleen Rowe draws on writing about the tradition of the carnivalesque or grotesque woman to develop her own criteria of unruliness, which she then applies to modem television personalities including Roseanne Barr and Miss Piggy. In mapping out the history of the theory upon which the figure of the unruly woman is based, Rowe begins her discussion with Mikhail Bakhtin, author of Rabelais and His World. She writes that his discussion of the carnivalesque, rooted in literary tradition, provides a starting place to question power dynamics of social interactions.90 Carnivalesque practices, whether through performances, texts, or events, provide for the acknowledgement of the dominant classes and cultural norms, while simultaneously mocking and degrading these higher forms, often through use of the grotesque body.91 Within the space of the carnival, hierarchical structures are suspended, allowing a leveling to occur between the 89 Willa Paskin, “Mindy Kaling’s entitlement project,” Salon, Sept. 24, 2012. https://www.salon.com/2012/09/24/mindy_kalings_entitlement_project/ 90 Kathleen Rowe, The Unruly Woman: Gender and Genres of Laughter, 32. 91 Ibid., 32. 73 basest elements of society and the most pious. In furthering the work of Bakhtin, Rowe argues that the figure of the unruly woman is rife for feminist reappropriation, as the unruly woman, in her excess and parodic state, "points to new ways of thinking about visibility as power.”92 Lahiri is often obnoxious and sometimes “unlikeable,” but never turns fully into the grotesque. Bakhtin argues that “the grotesque image reflects a phenomenon in transformation, and an as yet unfinished metamorphosis, of death and birth, growth and becoming.”93 Lahiri has shades of the outrageous, the ambivalent, and the contradictory, but she does not make herself “monstrous and “hideous.” In part, this is because the show works hard to not only normalize Kaling’s body, but to represent it as capable of being fashionable and desirable. Although Kaling is nowhere near the corpulence of other small screen comedians like Rebel Wilson in the short-lived Super Fun Night, Melissa McCarrthy in Mike and Molly, Retta in Parks and Recreation, to name a few, Kaling’s stylish outfits full of bright colors and unexpected patterns is an important visual counter to the frumpy, lackluster clothes characters who do not conform to the size 0 norm are often relegated to. The only vestiges of the audience’s expectations of the “funny fat lady” that remain are the constant references to Mindy’s excessive dietary habits. As Bakhtin indicates, “eating and drinking are one of the most significant manifestations of the grotesque body. The distinctive character of this body is its open unfinished nature, its interaction with the world.”94 But the 92 Ibid., 11. 93 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. by Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana Press, 1984), 24. 94 Ibid., 281. 74 frequent site gags of Mindy’s overindulgence do not make her “ugly, monstrous, [or] hideous.” In a radical reversal of the logic of the “funny fat lady,” Mindy’s love of sweets normalizes her. Precisely because her body is not read as obese (and therefore in need of immediate medical intervention), but rather as just “chubby.” This, in turn, is meant to make Lahiri more relatable. She is excessive, but never “too much.” Kaling notes: “I want her to be realistic and authentic. So many of the female characters that I see on TV, they’re just kind of put-upon and boring. They’re so worried about viewers not being able to handle them being nuanced or occasionally selfish. But every woman I know is occasionally selfish—and also can be heroic and funny. I just try to make her interesting and nuanced, and if some people think she’s obnoxious sometimes, well, people are sometimes obnoxious, and they can still be heroes.”95 The show posits that Mindy Lahiri, then, is “realistic,” “interesting,” and “nuanced” because of her flaws. This is, of course, not a novel idea. But what is new is the body these flaws have been associated with. Lahiri’s level of self absorption and entitlement reaches Larry David levels. But unlike “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” the figure behaving “badly” is neither white nor male. This shift of embodiment is crucial to what makes The Mindy Project compelling. Why, the show asks, would we expect a highly educated, affluent, and confident woman to act otherwise? The answer that is never explicitly discussed until the fourth season, of course, is that she is Indian-American. Annoyed by being interrupted during a date in the pilot episode, Mindy says on a phone call, “Do you know how difficult it is for a chubby 31-year old woman to go on a legit date with a guy who majored in economics at Duke?” Lahiri addresses her age and weight, but not her race. It is quite refreshing to have a non-white character who is not defined solely by their racial or cultural affinities (as white actors are allowed to do by default). As many viewers have noted, 95 June Thomas, “Mindy Kaling Rethinks ‘Likeability,’” Slate, Aug. 1, 2013. http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2013/08/01/mindy_kaling_likable_the_mindy_project_ma y_change_its_female_character_to.html 75 this makes her “so much more than her race.” By choosing not to focus on her Indian heritage, these commenters argue, we get a more well-rounded character because she has “personality.” But, I argue, it is telling that it is only through lack, through the omission of certain identitarian markers, that we somehow get access to greater depths. Mindy Lahiri is made whole and, albeit at times unlikeable, wholly relatable because she fails to make direct reference to her own racialized body. That is to say, her playfulness with the “funny fat lady” trope is delimited by the very careful navigation of racial boundaries. In an interview Kaling attributes some of the show’s negative reception to sexism: That’s one of the things you learn. Unfortunately, if you’re a woman, there are some things that people don’t want to see. There’s a sense of protecting the female character that I hadn’t really anticipated. Some of that is bullshit, and we need to stretch what we expect our female characters to do. But you want the lead character who’s a doctor, who’s going to find romance, to be someone you respect and who does noble acts. We all come from comedy cred, and we have that side of us where we think, “Oh, we should just do edgy stuff.” But at its heart it's not that kind of show. So the character has evolved a little bit.”96 What “people don’t want to see” is a woman taking up too much space. But comedy, especially taken to the hyperbolic extremes of The Mindy Project, is all about making a spectacle of oneself. And, as Mary Russo says in The Female Grotesque, unruliness has a particular gendered dynamic: “making a spectacle out of oneself seemed a specifically feminine danger. The danger was of an exposure…”97 The risk of “exposure” in The Mindy Project is not the risk of vulnerability, but rather the risk of being seen as ambivalent, a subject in flux. The audience wants “someone you respect and who does noble acts,” but Kaling “wanted to be a very flawed, delusional, funny character” not play someone whose “predominant characteristic is that she’s nice.” 96 June Thomas, “Mindy Kaling Rethinks ‘Likability.’” 97 Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity (New York: Routledge, 1994), 53. 76 Thus, Mindy Lahiri becomes a spectacle because of her ambivalent subject position. Julia Kristeva posits that abjection is “above all ambiguity” because “while releasing a hold, it does not radically cut off the subject from what threatens it - on the contrary abjection acknowledges it to be in perpetual danger.”98 The paradoxical notion of being apart and yet not apart engenders horror. However, there is also fascination because “abjection lies there quite close, but it cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire.” This proximity to the abject causes strong bodily reactions of revulsion: Loathing an item of food, a piece of filth, waste, or dung. The spasms and vomiting that protect me. The repugnance, the retching that thrusts me to the side and turns me away from defilement, sewage and muck99 However, if The Mindy Project wallows in the filth, it only does so insofar as it exposes the gendered parameters of embodiment. Bodily processes become fodder for quick one-liners and sight gags which moves toward the radical potentiality of the ambiguity of abjection, but race is excluded from this formulation. Kaling understandably balks at having “to get it right and have the character be a shining example of a minority,”100 but in not wanting to create a one- dimensional positive stereotype of a racialized body, the show places the burden of racial signification on other bodies. While the patronymic does serve to continually mark her as an Other, the very logics of the show’s genre—a romantic comedy—resists the radical possibilities of what makes The Mindy Project feel novel and not like just another repetition of Bridget 98 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 9. 99 Ibid., 2. 100 Women in the World. “Mindy Kaling in conversation with Alicia Menendez.” Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 7 April 2016. 77 Jones’s Diary or You’ve Got Mail—the star is a dark-skinned Asian woman who isn’t thin, but is still confident in her body. Although Mindy’s racial and gendered difference becomes the site of productive plurality by carefully managing the audience’s impulse to read her as a non-normative subject, but noticeably does not travel and attach to the bodies of other women of color on the show. This tendency is highlighted by the way The Mindy Project portrays Tamra, the black nurse played by Xosha Roquemore. For the majority of her early episodes, Tamra, the only other person of color on the show, literally sings and dances as she delivers her lines—the punch line is the “excess” of her black female embodiment. In the first season, her (brief) moments of wisdom are always portrayed as a surprising and unexpected dose of rationality. All that we know about her life outside of the office is that she has a boyfriend, Ray Ron, who is coded with all of the stereotypical trappings of “black masculinity,” except the “joke” is that he is actually a white man played by Josh Peck. This, unsurprisingly, led to some critiques of the show’s racial politics. The show attempted a response in the second season with an episode entitled, heavily tongue-in-cheek, “Mindy Lahiri Is A Racist.” In the episode, written by Ike Barinholtz (who plays Nurse Morgan) and David Stassen, Danny Castellano, Lahiri’s love interest, has a patient who tells him she has been singing his praises on her mommy blog. The viewer instantly knows something is a bit off in the way that her comments practically ooze with double entendre: “It’s so rare to find a practice in Manhattan these days with such a, I don’t know, wholesome roster of doctors…Of course [she says as we cut to Tamra and Mindy in a slapstick tableau of half-shaven legs and bruised hips in the bathroom…it’s a long story] I’m not crazy about everyone here, but I guess 78 every place has to have at least one of them, right?” Danny obtusely replies, “A mouthy drama queen? Yes.” The episode unfolds as a battle of racial political correctness between Mindy’s office (comprised of all white male doctors with the exception of Lahiri) and the (all white male) midwife practice on the floor above them whose racial politics are also rendered comically suspect: the midwives are such self-aware, white liberals that they are horrified that Mindy’s office refuses to display posters of a black politician who is running for congress. What’s most interesting about this episode, however, is the way it deals with nurse Tamra. Mindy and Tamra, as our resident persons of color, are tasked with writing a public statement to allay the community’s concerns about the practice’s anti-black politics which are praised by the mommy blog and compounded by their petty refusal to publicly support the black politician. But over dinner, Mindy once again insults Tamra’s boyfriend and calls him a deadbeat. Upset, Tamra leaves and joins the midwives. In the end, as all good romcoms do, the conflict is resolved, but not before Tamra explains that it’s not that she thinks Mindy is racist, but rather that “you can be condescending to the people under you at work.” In this moment it becomes not a problem of race, but one of class. Tamra’s confession of being made to feel inferior and unimportant are a narrative attempt to solve the subplot of the episode by saying no, Mindy Lahiri is not a racist, she is just a snob. While there is certainly something refreshing about the show’s suggestion that the true problem lies in Mindy’s interpersonal failings, it still evades the ways in which class and race are deeply entangled in the representation of Dr. Mindy Lahiri. Which brings us back to the opening joke: “My body mass index isn’t great, but I’m not, like, Precious or anything.” What does it mean to “not be like Precious”? Who, or more precisely, what is Mindy Lahiri positioning herself against? What are the logics that underpin 79 this “joke”? I content that the racial, class, and aesthetic categories being imagined and deployed in this utterance signal the ways in which the containment of Mindy’s unruliness for comedic affect relies on other marginalized subjects’ excess. Lahiri’s South Asian body is able to occupy a space traditionally marked as white not through the subversion of excess, but rather through the strategic projection of excess onto other bodies. Precious, of course, is the name of the poor, obese, black character in Sapphire’s Push, later adapted by Lee Daniels for the screen in 2009. I begin with this moment of non- identification not because it is exceptional, but because it stages a relationship to the obese black body through the quotidian, banal rhythms of a half-hour comedy. That is to say, there is a casual expectedness to this sort of comment; a cultural short-hand that (ostensibly) needs no expanded context for the joke to land because of what “Precious” stands-in for in the cultural imaginary. And, although Mindy Kaling’s social media presence would suggest that she is not an advocate of body shaming generally, the Precious reference works precisely because of the way the character is conflated with the actress. The “humor” of this joke resides, presumably, in the contrast between Mindy (Lahiri and Kaling) and Precious. That is, Precious is representative of unruly blackness and she is invoked in order to highlight the starkly different nexus of racial, cultural, and social relations that both of these marked bodies inhabit. Mindy, although not the conventionally slender Hollywood figure, is not obese; she mostly dates white men (in the 6 seasons of the show, Lahiri has only dated two men of color, neither of whom lasted beyond one episode); and is firmly positioned in the upper middle class.101 Precious, on the other hand, is, as David Edelstein wrote in a review, “the 101 I note Mindy Lahiri’s dating life not to suggest that she should be dating non-white men, but rather to highlight that for a television show set in New York City, the whiteness of her suitors seems to be an intentional choice. 80 embodiment of everything—I mean, everything—American society values least and victimizes most. She’s a poor, illiterate, morbidly obese, dark-skinned African-American girl.”102 Thus, the joke relies on the excessiveness of Precious’s body. Indeed, the reference recalls the film’s initial reception which focused on Gabourey Sidibe’s body, alternating between awe at this new-comers deft performance and lightly veiled repulsion of Sidibe’s/Precious’s body. Most reviews and articles could not comment on the film without sensationalizing Sidibe’s corpulence. Anthony Lane wrote in The New Yorker that Sidibe is “grimly overweight, her face so filled out that the play of normal expressions seems restricted.”103 Another reviewer calls her “mountainously obese.” A.O. Scott followed a similar line in the New York Times when he called Precious’s “massive body at once a prison and a hiding place,” adding with an unclear mixture of compassion and disdain that Sidibe seems “inarticulate and emotionally shut- down.”104 And, in New York magazine, David Edelstein remarked hatefully that the actor’s “head” is like “a balloon on the body of a zeppelin, her cheeks so inflated they squash her eyes into slits.” Edelstein echoes Lane’s assumption that “normal expression” is debilitated by fatness when he writes that Sidibe’s expression is “either surly or unreadable. That even with her voice- over narration, you’re meant to stare at her ebony face and see nothing.”105 102 David Edelstein, “When Push Comes to Shove,” New York Magazine, November 2, 2009. http://nymag.com/movies/reviews/61750/ 103 Anthony Lane, “Making Peace,” The New Yorker, November 9, 2009. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/11/09/making-peace 104 A.O. Scott, “Howls of a Life, Buried Deep Within,” The New York Times, November 5, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/06/movies/06precious.html 105 David Edelstein, “When Push Comes to Shove—and Shove Back, Hard,” New York Magazine, November 3, 2009. http://nymag.com/daily/movies/2009/11/when_push_comes_to_shove--and.html 81 Given the moral opprobrium that circulates around fat bodies it would be unusual if reviewers had not made note of Sidibe’s body. What is of interest here is not simply the casual fatphobia that permeates many of the reviews (both positive and negative), but the way the film forces the viewer to contend with representations of excess that pushes against the conflation of actor and actress upon which The Mindy Project’s joke pivots. As Margo Crawford asks, “What would it take to see Precious as performing a role, not the inevitable embodiment of that role?” The reviewer’s responses to the film reveal the impulse to read the “fact” of Sidibe-as-Precious’s body—obese, dark, tragic—as sign of “real blackness.” I draw attention to the discourse circulating around Precious’ and Sidibe’s body because there are important parallels to the ways black, “unruly” corpulence is imagined in these reviews and the way that the specter of racialized corpulence haunts the margins of The Mindy Project. As the Times critic Hirchberg suggests the “problem” of Precious is the initial feeling of repulsion felt by some viewers that eventually, slowly, shifts into an uneasy form of identification.106 It is an identification that has to be earned, and even then it is partial and always tenuous precisely because of Precious’ abject racial and socio-cultural position. In addition to her corpulence, clothing is used to distance Precious from the viewer. Although her wardrobe of nondescript hoodies, t-shirts, and jeans are fairly normative for a high school student, the moments where the viewer gets glimpses of her vibrantly dressed fantasy-self reveal the obvious lack of intentionality in her sartorial choices and the ways in which they are yet 106 Lynn Hirschberg, “The Audacity of ‘Precious,’” New York Times Magazine, Oct. 21, 2009. 82 another signal of her self-erasure. 107 Unlike Mindy Lahiri’s colorful, whimsically designed outfits, Precious clearly derives no pleasure from her clothing. Her clothing—nondescript hoodies, t-shirts, and jeans—are not merely markers of her class, but of her (in)ability to approximate normative beauty standards and therefore be fully included in the social body. The Mindy Project very carefully manages Mindy Lahiri’s visibility so that the absence of identificatory capacity that manifested in the audience-reception of Precious is not replicated when her non-white, non-Hollywood thin body is on display. That is to say, the show constructs “Precious,” both metaphorically and literally, as the limit to the transgressive possibilities of the “unruly,” marginalized body of color. This is made even more explicit in a recent episode from season 3 entitled, “What to Expect When You’re Expanding.” In this episode, Mindy seems to have run out of the seemingly bottomless confidence that infuses every facet of the show. As her pregnancy makes her insecure about her looks, she vocalizes everything she’s afraid of: that she’ll never lose those last few pounds, that Danny will just get better looking. To help Mindy out of this rut, which manifests most visibly in her resorting to baggy tracksuits in lieu of her usually very colorful and form-fitting ensembles, Tamra’s cousin Sheena, played by guest star Laverne Cox of Orange is the New Black fame gives her a confidence pep-talk and makeover. Speaking in a nondescript yet universal urban mashup of every sassy black best-friend sidekick, Sheena’s excess is presented as normative precisely because of how her body is racially marked. She wears large hoop earrings—commonly known as doorknockers—and a brightly printed romper with a belted gold chain. Lest the intent of Sheena’s ghetto-fabulousness be lost 107 For more on the centrality of clothing in fat identity formation see: Lauren Downing Peters, “You Are What You Wear: How Plus-Size Fashion Figures in Fat Identity Formation,” Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body & Culture 18: 45-72 (2014). 83 on the viewer, the makeover she gives Mindy results not in a return to her usual beautiful, perfectly curated outfits, but rather in Mindy getting her own pair of doorknockers (albeit slightly smaller) and being dressed in a skin tight bodysuit with gold lame accents and gold chain accessories. Notably, sites like “The Mindy Project Style” and “Worn on TV,” which closely track all the outfits worn on the show by Kaling and find their real-life versions or their closest approximations, did not bother with this particular ensemble. This “comically” urbanizing presence of Sheena’s excess is further emphasized when, at the end of the episode, Mindy says “I like how urban you’re being right now” after Danny, having been trained by Cousin Sheena/Laverne Cox on how to properly treat a woman says “A real man makes his woman feel beautiful.” Figure 10 Laverne Cox teaching Mindy how to be “fabulous” 84 Figure 11 Mindy after Sheena’s makeover In many ways Kaling writing herself as a romantic comedy heroine with a string of white, male love interests is a radical act. Mindy’s brown skin and self-declared “chubbiness” recalls Linda Mizejewski’s analysis of Queen Latifah in the comedy Bringing Down the House (2003): “the excessiveness of this heroine is proscribed by the cultural ideals of white femininity, which in turn is pictured through very select bodies.”108 However, I contend that Mindy’s comedic “unruliness” is very carefully policed and, in fact, depends upon conjuring up and then disavowing the truly “excessive” embodiment that Sidibe-as-Precious and, later, Cox-as-Sheena represents. On the one hand, Mindy is the perfect post-feminist subject, as Angela McRobbie 108 Linda Mizejewski, "Queen Latifah, Unruly women, and the Bodies of Romantic Comedy," Genders 46 (2007). 85 would call her: she is educated, professional and posseses the means to lead an independent life full of exciting choices, and these choices are negotiated along predominantly heterosexual upper class, and consumer oriented lines. It is “believable” because as media scholar Shilpa Davé argues, in popular culture South Asians are associated with privilege and success within American racial paradigms. On the other hand, Mindy’s privilege as a post-feminist romantic- comedy heroine mitigates her brown-ness as her body size, her clothing, her comfortable lifestyle, and her similarly privileged friends and coworkers construct her “as the right kind of subject who can make the right choices” because the character is embedded in a genre that carefully regulates the kinds of attachments, affects, and relationalities “excess” is allowed to produce. The Mindy Project imagines new possibilities for the curvy, irreverent, brown body. It is a text intentionally rife with contradictions, ambivalence, and blurry intentions. The Mindy Project intentionally, and often uproariously, blurs the line between expectations of authenticity and performance. It uses genre hybridity, fluctuating affect, and exaggerated performance to disrupt the normative logics attached to South Asian bodies. But the possibilities it offers are not without limits, and that limit is repeatedly the black female body. These possibilities are carefully regulated through the figures of black womanhood briefly glimpsed in the peripheral and loosely sketched Tamra,109 the strategic deployment of Laverne Cox as Sheena, and the invocation of Precious. These unruly bodies are put to use but, unlike Dr. Mindy Lahiri, are not allowed to tarry for too long. 109 Although this chapter primarily focuses on the first two seasons of The Mindy Project, we get more details about Tamra’s life in subsequent seasons. It is slowly revealed that she is a model, dates affluent men, and is given her own will-they-or-won’t they storyline with a fellow nurse (Ike Barinholtz). 86 I want to leave you, then, with an image of a glamorous Precious. The smiling, confident Precious in a floor length red gown with leopard print detailing and perfectly coifed hair that periodically disrupts the flow of the film’s traumatic images. These fantasy images interspersed throughout the film make us reconsider not only Precious’s position as the traumatized, figure at the center of the narrative, but also our desire (along with Mindy Lahiri’s) to distance ourselves from her. It is an image of a Precious who forces us to contend with how difficult it is to be “trapped in a body that looks like pain,”110 that looks like a wanting never fulfilled, who is also “not a Katherine Heigl type.” Figure 12 Precious fantasizing about living a glamorous life 110 Margo Natalie Crawford. "The Counterliteracy of Postmelancholy," Black Camera 4, no. 1 (2012), 205. 87 CHAPTER THREE Leaky Bodies: Wangechi Mutu and Ellen Gallagher’s Collage Art “Despite all our desperate, eternal attempts to separate, contain, and mend, categories always leak.” --Trinh T. Minh-ha111 Collage as Self-Making Categories are comforting. They allow us to place others in relation to ourselves. But these categories are fictions—the placement is never natural. Categorizations is a process. It takes effort to fit people into predetermined schema. The impulse to categorize is an act of desperation, an attempt to get hold of and hold firm to something that cannot be contained, that “always leaks.” Categories are porous and imperfect. They always need to be put back together, mended, contained in new ways that don’t make the fissure too obvious to the naked eye. Collage draws the eye to “all our desperate, eternal attempts”112 to categorize. Derived from the French verb “collier”—“to give” or “to stick”—collage is an act of repair through the dismantling of categories. The cut and the suture are an integral part of collage. The image is excised from one context and joined to another. But the process of suturing always reveals the seam. The delicate, intentional putting together of objects makes a new kind of whole. The act of gluing and sticking 111 Trinh T. Minh-Ha, Woman, Native Other: Writing Postcolonialism and Feminism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989), 94. 112 Ibid., 94 88 together reveals the stickiness of subjectivities. While collage refers to all different types of composite art, whether two-dimensional or three-dimensional, I am interested particularly in photomontage and the way that the multiplying of images can creates an excess that feels tactile. Wangechi Mutu and Ellen Gallagher, the artists whose work is explored in this chapter, use photographs to (re)present the black female body. Their manipulation of images creates new, multidimensional ways of looking at the nonwhite female body. Collage practice has existed for centuries, but it was not considered a fine art until the twentieth century when Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque began experimenting with adding different materials to their cubist paintings. The geometric planes and compressed space of cubism were given more volume and texture with the addition of all sorts of objects including newspaper cuttings, parts of musical instruments, tobacco boxes, fabrics, and metals. This move toward construction was a departure from the “analytical” cubism of their earlier work and relied on synthesis, the collection of disparate elements into a coherent whole. This more tactile shift was a way of playing with the distancing of abstraction and the intimacy of touching the object itself. The protruding materials glued onto the canvas surface was a way of manipulating excess, I argue, in order to bring the viewer in more closely. Mixed-media collage feels like it is reaching out towards you and that perhaps you can (and should) reach back, too. I point to Picasso and Braque not because Mutu or Gallagher are interested in their themes or even see their work as being in dialog with the cubist tradition, but to show the genealogy of tactility, excess, and intimacy, that the collage form engenders. Indeed, there are other, less masculinist collage histories one could point to. Artists Melissa Meyer and Miriam Schapiro questioned why so many women made collages. They placed collage within the framework of women’s domestic culture with their discussion of 89 femmage in the feminist journal Heresies published in the late 1970s.113 In defining femmage, they extended collage beyond the context of modern art, looking at “women’s activities” such as sewing, hooking, cutting, piecing, and quilting as forms of collage. In this new, expanded context that accounted for gendered labor, Meyer and Schapiro stressed the resourcefulness that often accompanied the practice of women’s collage-making activities in the domestic sphere. Traditionally restricted to the home, women were limited by what was readily available there. This situation often led them to adopt a strategy of “making do” with the materials on hand, of finding new ways to adapt a variety of resources. Meyer and Schapiro’s introduction of femmage questioned the construction of the art historical canon. The omission of femmage highlighted the biases of the traditional hierarchy of the fine arts over crafts, especially as women’s creations were historically described as craft and not art. Of course, this division between “craft” and “fine art” becomes difficult to maintain when confronted with actual objects. Furthermore, the hierarchy it upholds, as Schapiro argues, is a major obstacle to the greater appreciation of art produced by women. The labeling of traditional art-making by women as craft obscures the way in which art institutions and access to them are socially and culturally mediated. As Linda Nochlin argues in her article “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” if women were most often relegated to the domestic sphere, and to the roles of mothers and wives, these social conditions and the restrictions of their situations played a role in shaping their artistic methods and materials.114 113 Miriam Schapiro and Melissa Meyer, “Waste Not Want Not: An Inquiry into what Women Saved and Assembled--FEMMAGE.” Heresies I, no. 4 (Winter 1977-78): 66-69. 114 Linda Nochlin, "Why have there been no great women artists?" in The Feminism and Visual Culture Reader (1971): 229-233. 90 This is not to say that Mutu and Gallagher are in engaged in some sort of essentializing “women’s work.” Femmage’s re-centering of craft and “making do” resonates with both Mutu and Gallagher’s art practice. Collage requires resourcefulness. Unlike expensive traditional art supplies, collage supplies are readily available and often free. The practice of collaging is a way of taking images of life and real world experiences and serving them to the world in a new way. They are involved in a different kind of piecework. Gathering together materials not to make a quilt or produce needlework, but to piece together new ways to view a body. This piecing together of the visual requires the subversion of the relationship between the signifier and the signified. By gathering objects from different places, using nonconventional materials, and providing unexpected contexts for once familiar images, collage is an art practice that trains the eye to see in ways it is unaccustomed to. In this way, collage art is a phenomenological practice. If “phenomenology asks us to be aware of the ‘what’ that is around” (Ahmed, 545), by literally cutting apart and piecing back together found objects collage helps us take stock of our current direction—the way our vision is the result of a certain kind of placement in relation to others—and consider new directions. By collapsing and reimagining the relationship between background and foreground, collage puts the viewer on unsteady ground. Collage produces this effect through the strategic deployment of material and emotional excess. The uncanny juxtapositions, tensions between where we expect objects to be and where they actually end up, are the result of them being a little “too much” in the visual field. Collage draws attention to this visual excess. It requires the viewer to navigate the “misplaced” object that has found its (new) place. Objects in collages are never supposed to be there, the pop up in unexpected places. Thus, they are always in excess. It is this intentionally excessive quality that I 91 am interested in. Wangechi Mutu and Ellen Gallagher use an excessive art form—collage—to create new visions of excessive subjects—black women. The Beautiful Grotesque115 In its ability to surpass the bounds of the normative, the excessive (body) troubles our encounters with, and understanding of, images, institutions, and real bodies. For Mikhail Bakhtin, the grotesque body (which becomes grotesque precisely through its use of excess and hyperbole) “is a body in the act of becoming. It is never finished, never completed; it is continually built, created, and builds and creates another body."116 Wangechi Mutu’s collage portraits feature women with grotesque bodily injuries and while one can read Wangechi Mutu’s work as quite literally creating “another body” through the use of the grotesque, such a reading limits the scopic and affective possibilities Mutu’s work open up for the viewer. Instead, I want to focus on the corporeal attachments opened up by the space between the spilling over of one’s body into another’s. The way that the viewer’s encounter with the image creates not necessarily a form of instant identification, but rather awkward attachments through the fragmentary assemblage of body parts, symbols, and textures to displace antiquated notions of identity with vivid and complex subjectivities. Wangechi Mutu, a Kenyan-born, New York-based mixed media visual artist, is known for her layered, slightly grotesque, often wry hybrid female figures. Her work engages broad themes of selfhood, embodiment, and beauty centered on the black female body. I am particularly drawn to Mutu’s collages because of their heft. Collage can take many forms. At its 115 For more on racialized abjection and black grotesquerie as an aesthetic mode see: Aliyyah Abdur-Rhaman, "Black Grotesquerie," American Literary History 29, no. 4 (2017): 682-703. 116 Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Indiana University Press, 1984), 317. 92 simplest it is the cutting of an image from one source and applying it to another image, in the process creating new contexts for both. But for Mutu, it is a process of thick layering, of creating the body of her figures not just through image, but through multiple later of objects and materials. Mutu has discussed how her need for materials that could hold more weight for these multilayered projects contributed to her experimentation with collage. Mutu explains, “Thus began my transition to larger collage, and with this shift in the fluidity and morphing of the figures came a move to super-synthetic Mylar.”117 Mylar, a synthetic material, a transparent polyester film, has higher chemical stability and tensile strength, providing a stronger base than paper to support her heavily layered constructions. While Mutu’s work spans a wide range of media, it is her spectacular, evocative, and provocative collages that most express her maximalist tendencies. Her images are drawn from The National Geographic, early medical journal, and fashion, pornographic, and motor magazines. These found images, however, rarely look like their source material once she does her “surgery.” The female bodies she creates out of these composite images only look human because you get glimpses of the normative body through the exaggeration of form. Mutu’s figures have eyes, but they are at once too large and too small for their face. Their bodies evoke the human form, but taken to the extreme—hyperextended arms, backs bent in ways simultaneously painful and sensual. Skin that is at once diseased and just the reflection of mottled sunlight. They are bodies both familiar and deeply strange. The mixture of found fragments—leather, fur, packing tape, glitter—thick paint that sometimes drips and pools on the page, and layers of multiple bodies clipped from magazines create new contradictory bodies. 117 Isolde Brielmaier, “Interview with Isolde Brielmaier,” in Wangechi Mutu: A Shady Promise, ed. Isolde Brielmaier (Bologna, Italy: Damiani, 2008), 53. 93 They are glamorously wounded, sexual yet diseases, vulnerable and immodest. They wear all their pain, joy, vulnerability, defensiveness, longing, nonchalance, timidity, and aggressiveness on the surface. We see everything and not enough all at once. Collage’s ability to reveal and conceal becomes especially poignant when used as a lens through which to view the black female body. Mutu explores black female subjectivity’s oscillation between the alluring and the grotesque. Her creations pull us closer instead of repelling. Their composite bodies pull us into the process of making a body grotesque, thereby revealing that it is not inherent. Mutu’s bodies are leaky. Their surfaces are not smooth. They look back, beckoning you to look closer and allow your gaze to wander, penetrating more deeply. Mutu’s collages turn flat images into flesh bodies; bodies that extend beyond the page. The images create a new spatial orientation that uses materials to giver her creations materiality (embodiment). In the process, the image becomes live and the already-live (the viewer) becomes aware of the way the social too often reduces the subject to surface. This longing not to be reduced to surface—to not be the stereotype found in the fashion magazines glossy pages or to be captured by Carol Beckwith and Angela Fisher--is what collage makes visible.118 Mutu’s collage keeps our senses open to emergent and unknown forms of belonging and connection because it creates a space for the viewer to have an encounter with difference that turns repulsion—what might, for a moment, be a desire to turn away from her beautifully grotesque figures—into longing. The women in their tactile creation feel like they are reaching out, crossing the expanse between viewer and viewed and forming a new kind of encounter. 118 Carol Beckwith and Angela Fisher are longtime photography collaborators who have published numerous books documenting “fast disappearing” sacred tribal ceremonies across Africa (http://carolbeckwith-angelafisher.com/about-us/bio/). Wangechi Mutu intentionally uses these images in her work as a critique of the ways these images are frequently staged and rely on the fetishization of the “traditional,” anti-modern African village for their circulation. 94 These figures’ embodiment of contradictions—grotesque beauty, virile sickness, fragmented wholes, inorganic organism—trouble our understanding of identity. Their hybridity challenges the viewer to confront their own methods of categorization and become aware of their complicity in those same (re) organizing practices. Wangechi Mutu’s work is often compared to Hannah Hoch’s political collage and photomontage work. Working in the Dadaist tradition, Hoch used images from the mass media to critique the failings of the Weimar German government, with a focus on gender issues. Like Mutu, there is a kind of deliberately haphazard reappropriation of images that point to the importance of the artist’s hands in the process. However, I want to caution against drawing too easy a line between Hoch and Mutu as both use collage in very different ways. As Mutu says of Hoch, “I do admire Hoch’s work and simply process. I can tell that she rummaged madly through books and magazines. But the idea of clear binaries—African/European, archaic/modern, and religion/pornography—I’ve never really believed in that. I’m interested in powerful images that strike chords embedded deep in our subconscious.” 119 Mutu’s work eschews binaries. The visceral reaction she hopes to engender is not simply from the uncanny pairing of images. She is after something entirely different. Mutu’s work is less about the splicing itself and more about the affect produced after these bewitchingly monstrous assemblages have been encountered. Mutu strikes a chord by showing relationalities, not stark differences. Often, she builds her figures with fragmented animal prints and organic earth patterns, accessorized with high heels, glittered apparel, jewelry, and painted acrylic nails. The animal print and earth patterns are 119 Wangechi Mutu, “Perverse Anthropology: The Photomontage of Wangechi Mutu, A Conversation with Lauri Firstenberg” in Looking Both Ways: Art of the Contemporary African Diaspora (Museum for African Art, 2003), 137. 95 clearly a parody of “primitive” stereotypes, but the additional accouterment aren’t re-creating the “archaic/modern” and “African/European” binary. Rather, they show the continuities of the fetishizing gaze. It’s a way of looking at black female bodies that creates relatability out of seeing incongruity. Mutu does this by creating bodies in the process of becoming. But it is a becoming that troubles the notion that at the “end” there is a “whole.” Disrupting our aesthetic and narrative desire for wholeness, Mutu instead plays with the notion of identity assemblages. She strategically pieces together various parts and reveals through her layering the essential role that lack plays in identity formation. More than just Butler’s notion of the “constitutive outside,” I contend that there is a productive excess in Mutu’s work that becomes almost haptic and creates a space not only for visceral attachment—the repulsion and desire generated by the grotesque— but for a critical and productive encounter with the attachments that fail to form—those connections that are severed, ruptured, and “incomplete,” like her portraits of black women missing limbs. Mutu’s watercolor and collage Pin-Up series from 2001 is composed of several “portraits” of partially nude female figures whose gestures mimic and blur the lines between glamorous fashion pin-up posters and images from the sex industry. What is most striking about these images is that each figure is an amputee. Some are missing legs, feet, hands, and a few have crutches or peg legs. They look directly at the viewer, prompting a gaze that is then immediately disrupted. The images provoke a sexualized gaze that simultaneously seduces and repels the viewer. I’m interested in Mutu’s construction of this dual gaze and the way she combines the excess of the collage aesthetic with bodily lack to comment on the contradictory 96 notions of self-perception and presentation of black women’s bodies, but also embodiment broadly conceived. The Pin-Up series confronts the way black women’s bodies are made vulnerable by the overdetermined meanings attached to the black body. The “aggression” is not something that emanates from their bodies (or mouths), but rather gets transformed in these collages as harm inflicted on the body. Their bloody, severed limbs and makeshift prosthetics are mutilations done by the artist, but also by society which has forced her to cut off parts of herself and contort in ways that appease an external gaze. In a conversation with Barbara Kruger, Mutu explained the project as a series of “body injuries or mutilations or malformations or exaggerations or prostheses, as a way of talking about the need to extend, perforate, change, or shape-shift your body in order to exist.”120 I argue that by placing their wounded bodies in the hyper-sexualized context of sex work, Mutu uses excess to force the viewer to look at these bodies as black, sexualized, and disability and beyond their race, gender, and ability. Nicole Fleetwood’s theorization of excess flesh is useful in thinking through the way excess can be a site of productive and imaginative sociality. Fleetwood writes, “One of the primary issues at stake…is the problem of the visible female body or, more precisely, that the black female body always presents a problem within a field of vision structured by racialized and gendered markings…the black female body functions as the site of excess in dominant visual culture and the public sphere at large.”121 Fleetwood develops a theory of excess flesh in which she explains how uses of the black female body by black artists 120 Alessandra Raengo, On the Sleeve of the Visual: Race as Face Value (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2013), 63. 121 Nicole Fleetwood, Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (University of Chicago Press, 2011),109. 97 articulate “the visual and discursive breaches that these enactments make in deviant visual culture as an important site of engagement in the public sphere.”122 The combination of violence and eroticism begs the viewer to first recognize the condition under which notions of black womanhood and beauty have been structured and then reconsider ways of looking that do not replicate that harm. Figure 13 Mutu Pin-Up installation at the Studio Museum in Harlem, 2003 122 Ibid., 109. 98 Figure 14 Wangechi Mutu, Pin-Up, mixed media on paper, 2001 Once carefully cut and positioned, these forms adopt new meanings often not related to their traditional significations. Through a process of displacement and aggregation, Mutu creates hybrid figures that test the meanings of fragmented signs. Is a collage fragments made whole or is the whole always fragmented? The artist explains in a conversation with art historian Gerald Matt, I am not sure what the viewer sees when they look at my work but I hope that there is something that happens in the eye and mind so that what one is looking at can be easily confused or interpreted as something else; so prosthetics and limbs or accessories and growths or even animal parts and adornment are confused with one another.123 123 Gerald Matt, “Wangechi Mutu in Conversation with Gerald Matt,” in Wangechi Mutu: In Whose Image?, ed. Gerald Matt (Nürnberg: Verlag Moderne Kunst, 2009), 39. 99 The “something” that Mutu hopes to happen between the mind and the eye is the effect of her dense image-making practice. This aesthetics of confusion through multiplicity— intentionally over stimulating the viewers’ eye—is a strategic re-deployment of excess. If black women’s subjectivities are always “structured by racialized and gendered markings,” Mutu makes those markings strange and difficult to read through strategically layering of images, paint, and found material to reveal the lack of coherency in this system of oppression. Just as we see the disjuncture between body parts produced by the artist’s cut, the perception of identity itself becomes radically disjointed in Mutu’s collages. By making bodies that are both incomplete—the very practice of collage produces bodies that are not and will never be “whole” in the normative sense—and overdetermined—borrowing images from mass media—Mutu creates a new kind of black flesh that suggests new possibilities for organizing one’s relationship to the body, thereby opening up new kinds of attachments. Mutu’s destabilization of identity categories is established through experimentation with liquid as well as the more traditional collage technique of juxtaposition and incongruous layering (though in most of her works, this photographic layering is more dense than in other artist’s collages). In the collages there is paint applied as dispersed particles through airbrush techniques in radial bursts of color fields, washes that bleed or rely on water tension, repulsion between the liquids that don’t mix and drips as well as oozes. Thus, her art feels heavy and also viscous. The control of her cut is countered by the fluidity of ink, paint, water, and liquefied metals. The solidity of the paper, linoleum, vinyl, or Mylar is paired with liquidized materials that suggest movement even though they have been stilled, preserved within the collage. In her description of this process, Mutu explains: I’ve often worked on a work for a few months and at some point I feel like I’m at this grand point with it, and I throw some ink on it to make it look a particular way. And I wake up in the morning 100 and the ink has flown and flowed and gone all over the place and I have to decide whether there’s something about that mistake that’s inherently important to what I’m trying to say.124 Mutu is careful in her constructions, but the movement of non-solid materials cannot always be predicted. It is not the “mistake” itself that gives her pause, but the decision about whether the places the liquid “has flown and flowed” helps her say anything. And, indeed, it seems to help her say a lot. In this way her art “speaks” back in an act of mutual improvisation between artist and material. Discussing this uncertain outcome, Mutu concludes “It’s always more interesting when the work disobeys me […] I end up with these incredible mistakes.”125 These “incredible mistakes” allow her to represent the leakiness of bodies. The leaking of categories is only a telling of the fact that they actually belong together. Mutu takes the seeming stability of the image’s iconicity—the particular lighting and posing that is unique to the fashion magazine, the porno mag, or the coffee table book on Africa—and makes them elastic. These images now made elastic and pliable through Mutu’s manipulation collapse categorical assumptions. Can you find an “appropriate” place for these distorted bodies? Which categories— animal, human, machine—would make them more legible? In Mutu’s work, the familiar is made alien, forcing the viewer to think about how aliens are almost always imagined as looking like us, with just a slight distortion of the face. An alien is just a word for a thing we don’t know, but is also us. Mutu’s collages resist the viewer fully “knowing” the figures. Instead, one gets access to the body that does not masquerade as “truth.” Unlike her later work, the Pin-Up series is fairly small in size. The images are slightly larger than standard pieces of paper. Their power doesn’t manifest in scale, but rather through the redeployment of the hyper-sexualized body. Soon after Pin-Up, Mutu shifts to larger 124 Fashion Institute of Technology, “ARTSpeak 2010-2011 Lecture Series: Wangechi Mutu,” Kaltura, 1:20:03, June3, 2012. 125 Ibid. 101 creations like Riding Death in My Sleep (2002) and I Have Peg Leg Nightmares (2003). In both of these collages there is also a shift in materials. In addition to the photographs and watercolor used in previous works, Mutu begins to introduce Mylar into her work. The application of Mylar over paper allows the paint to pool, splatter, and drip all over the hybrid bodies, giving the figures a plastic-looking “second” skin. The image oozes and bubbles up, almost reaching out through the material. In I Have Peg Leg Nightmares, the body is covered in blotchy clusters of dots, has a face of borrowed eyes and lips, and her amputated leg explodes blood, the detached ‘skin’ recalling the delicate movement of a sea anemone where the peg is attached. Parts of her skin appear to be floating away from her body in globules and cluster toward the top of the image, suggesting that as the skin exceeds the flat surface of the canvas it also exceeds her control. The skin is fugitive, escaping her body and, with arms tied behind her, she is unable to contain its dispersal. Like blackness, the skin has a meaning that exceeds the subject. The figure is positioned vulnerably and although her back is to us, she turns to face the viewer in an over-the-shoulder-glance. She is simultaneously protecting herself and open to contact as she looks directly back at the viewer. As the material layers build in the collage, the body becomes more vulnerable to attack but she also becomes more open for a different kind of encounter. 102 Figure 15 Wangechi Mutu, I Have Peg Leg Nightmares, collage and watercolor on Mylar, 2003 Mutu continues to play with themes of distortion and proximity in the other Mylar collage portraits produced during this times. In the Alien Awe Series (2003), The Naughty Fruits of My Evil Labor (2005), You love me you love me not (2007), Mutu troubles our vision by having an object stand in for something it does not signify in its “natural” context. An ear becomes a vagina, a chameleon transforms into an eyelid, a lower lip blooms with the petal of a 103 flower, a breast grows out of the nose like a wart, a knee is replaced with an African mask. The cut of the collage isolates certain details from their photographic contexts and through the artist’s suture mutates, much like the blobs of ink, as floating signifiers that can now be the fertile ground for new meaning making practices. This strategy focuses the gaze on individual elements, but unlike the normative gaze which makes them metonyms for a subject’s entire identity, they become the starting points for new, more expansive self-making. Mutu’s collages push back against the forensic and ethnographic photograph which makes you think you can know someone by looking at them. Mutu’s wild borrowing of images to construct faces and bodies jumbles signs in order to destabilize our trust in perception. Her alien figures are only alien in so far as the practice of photography can be an alienating process for some bodies (recall the ambivalence of the fat selfie). Mutu’s figures aren’t constructed to remain alien, however. They are not representation of an unknowable Other. They are Others who can only become known in fits and starts. By taking steps back, by leaning a little closer, by puzzling over a pairing of images you’ve never seen before—Why is the leg a motorcycle? Why is there a talon growing from an eyelid?—you are called upon to make new relationships. In an interview with Edgar Arcenaux, Mutu makes explicit the experience of being marked as alien and our cultural representation of the alien, saying: “As a non-American, as someone bureaucratically and officially alien, that term itself raises questions about what that means anyway. If you see any depictions of alien in Hollywood or mass media and apply it to yourself, there is inevitably going to be this disconnect or questioning. That's where some of those things come from.”126 Thus, she uses her alien, hybrid 126 Edgar Arceneaux, “Wangechi Mutu and Her Post Human Kenyan Mutants,” KCET: Artbound, Jan. 8, 2013 https://www.kcet.org/shows/artbound/wangechi-mutu-and-her-post-human-kenyan- mutants 104 forms to “play with this notion of what draws you in, what gives you a sense of comfort, gives you a set of codes that allows you to judge this person.”127 Figure 16 Wangechi Mutu, Riding Death in My Sleep, ink and collage on paper, 2001 127 Ibid. 105 Wangechi Mutu’s portraits are not concerned with depicting the body in a naturalistic manner. Rather, they demonstrate that identity can be captured neither photographically, nor realistically, nor through imitation. Identity is understood as a mixed relationship of being and nonbeing, existence and projection formed in predisposition, environment and ideal. In order to take into account the staging of its content and ability to postulate a many-faceted layering of the other, its useful to consider the portraits a sort of mask-like placeholder for the Other that can never be established beyond doubt. Mutu’s images do not depict any specific individuals, but rather she creates beings in excess of the individual, beyond the individual, thus putting into question the possibility of the portrait as a mirror of the subject per se and suggesting that it is reflects the Other back to the Self. Excessive bodies are outrageous, transgressive, messy, and in flux. But the excessive body’s extravagant corporeality is a reservoir of potential affects, movements, connections and attachments-- a certain form of intimacy. Mutu’s half human, half animal, half machine, half human, half monster, sickly and beautiful, primitive and over civilized, futuristic and archaic create a space in which to lose one’s sense of proportion, to lose oneself in the inordinate, extravagant, outrageously excessive body, then, is to enter a state of extreme intimacy, a vulnerable encounter predicated on the potential for loss, but also for gain. Mutu’s work exposes the ideological social function we have attached to certain images, thereby calling the viewer to reassess their own attachments to the (racialized) body and explore the perverse pleasures of re- imagined multiplicity. Mutu’s work invokes pluralistic amalgam in an effort to imagine the other imagining us. In the process, she transforms the viewer into a witness who participates in an 106 encounter that is analogous, according to Emmanuel Levinas, to the call of the “Infinite Other,” which can only be answered by the response, “Here I am.”128 DARK MATTER People get overwhelmed by the super signs of race. And I’m never trying to avoid those signs. I say this is the given and that’s where I build from—it’s the idea that dark matter is expansive not reductive. --Ellen Gallagher129 That question exists as a play on American identity and how identity is fractured. I love that sense of history and drag. The fiction is placed in doubt. –Ellen Gallagher130 Like Mutu, Ellen Gallagher is also interested in prosthetics. But her prostheses take another form. Her prosthetics take the form of plasticine wigs covering the hair of black models she has clipped from old publications of Ebony magazine. Her prosthetics don’t replace a limb, but function as additions to the body. The wigs stand out not just because of their bright yellow color against the pale gray of the reproduced image, but because of their obvious excess. The elaborate head-pieces couldn’t possibly be replicated in real life. Some of the wigs are so embellished that they morph into masks, leaving just the whited out eyes or the mouth visible. Ellen Gallagher, is an American artist born in Providence, Rhode Island. As an artist, Gallagher emerged in the 1990s when she combined minimalist foundations with extracted body parts, such as “googly” eyes and engorged lips, found in minstrel imagery. Examples of these repeated signs can be seen in Host and Soma two large-scale works completed in the 1990s. 128 Emmanuel Levinas, “The Face of the Other” in Totality and Infinity, trans. A. Lingis, Duquesne University: Pittsburg, PA (1969). 129 Ellen Gallagher quoted by Jessica Morgan, “Interview: Ellen Gallagher,” in Ellen Gallagher (Boston: The Institute of Contemporary Art, 2001), 26. 130 Ibid. 107 These cartoonish body parts float across gridded pictorial structures and, through a process of abstraction and repetition, they challenge the validity of cultural signs. However, it was not until her Preserve series that she borrowed advertising prints and reappropriated them with her own materials and imagery through the reiteration of images. Figure 17 Ellen Gallagher, Host (detail), oil, pencil, paper on canvas, 1996 108 18 Ellen Gallagher, Soma (detail), oil, pencil, paper, on canvas, 1998 In Gallagher’s works, lips, eyes, and faces will be repeated so often that they are almost emptied out of meaning entirely. Sometimes a character, like Peg Leg Bates, will make an appearance, signaling the continuation of a metaphor or oblique narrative. Her surfaces are simultaneously deeply mundane and richly metaphoric. Gallagher’s abstraction and repetition turns surface into depth and in the process drains certain images of their racist ideologies. There are two primary modes of repetition in Gallagher’s work: the repetition of a body part in various sizes over the entire surface of the page and the precision of a grid in which her images are placed in miniature. Her approach to collage oscillates between the intentionally archaic and the highly regimented, representing two different visions of managing excess and the simultaneous attraction to and repulsion from markers of (racial) differences. 109 Gallagher’s strategy of mixing modernism and minstrelsy bears similarities to Gertrude Stein’s writings. Stein’s experiments with language are defined by a highly idiosyncratic, playful, and repetitive style, such as one of her most famous lines, “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,” in the poem “Sacred Emily.”131 This type of repetition can be seen throughout Gallagher’s work as she repeatedly draws or applies plasticine moldings of racial signs associated with blackface minstrelsy. From a distance, these signs look abstract. Only when the space is closed between the art and the viewer is it revealed that they are stock derogatory emblems of black minstrels: the overdrawn red lips of the Sambo doll, the ever-smiling mammy, and the obligingly subservient Uncle Tom. By putting these provocative images onto grade-school paper, Gallagher exposes the way this is a learned visual grammar. There is nothing innate about what these signs mean or natural about their deployment. Gallagher exposes the way that race, while meaningful, is a performance whose gestures can be made unpredictable by creating more imaginative spaces for the sign. Popularized in the nineteenth century, the minstrel is a classic example of performance used to flatten the meanings of the sign—race—and use it to delimit its identitarian possibilities. White comedians rubbed burnt cork or shoe polish on their skin, wore wooly wigs, gloves, and tails to lampoon black bodies. African-Americans were portrayed as buffoonish and lazy characters. In 1828 the actor Thomas Dartmouth “Daddy” Rice introduced his act “Jump Jim Crow,” in which he poked fun at the song-and-dance of a crippled Black man by using wild upper body movements with little mobility below his waist.132 By 1838 the name Jim Crow had become a racial slur. However, 131 Gertrude Stein, Geography and Plays (University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 187. 132 Eric Lott, Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy & the American Working Class (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 18. 110 blackface was not only done by white performers. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, black stage performers, like Bert Williams also performed in blackface, reclaiming the genre. It is this version of repetition that her work is interested in replicating. Speaking of Williams’ performance, Gallagher says, Blackface minstrel is a ghost story. It’s about loss: there’s a black mask and sublimation. The actor Bert Williams reactivated the minstrel mask. I heard a recording of him singing I Don’t Like the Face You Wear in this hideous fake black dialect. He slows down the text, re-entering it and seeing it as a distortion…Disembodied eyes and lips float, hostage, in the electric black of the minstrel stage, distorting the African body into American blackface. I’m not interested in recapturing the Sambo image. Bert Williams understood these distortions as form in motion, reanimating something meant to be static. He re-mastered the minstrel mask, making it speak his name.133 Repetition for Gallagher is about a kind of distortion that is able to “reanimate something meant to be static.” This is accomplished through the tension between minimalism and excess.134 Gallagher put the minimalist grid to a different use by embedding racial and identitarian subtext. Instead of the simplistic, geometric shapes and lines of the minimalist tradition, Gallagher replicates her grids with popping eyeballs, blubber lips, and Afro hairdos, transforming lined penmanship paper into a reworking of emblems of black minstrelsy. Her grids function differently from the minimalist formalism, she explains: “The paintings are built with a grid, but unlike the mute 1960s grid of minimalism, my grid refers to map-making or a navigational chart; it activates the space. I’ll enlarge details or cut them until they’re seamless, making a fake ad or using real ads, scanning them so you can’t tell the difference between the original and the alteration. The surgeries are about invasion and abstraction.”135 133 “History and Drag: Ellen Gallagher in Conversation with Cheryl Kaplan,” db artmag 33, Deutsche Bank (01/18/06-03/29/06), 3. http://db-artmag.de/archiv/2006/e/1/1/408-3.html 134 Gallagher’s collages recall the work of Agnes Martin, a minimalist artists who created serene paintings composed of grids and stripes. See: Rosalind Krauss, "Grids," October 9 (1979): 51-64. 135 “History and Drag: Ellen Gallagher in Conversation with Cheryl Kaplan,” db artmag 33 111 Gallagher’s work, then, is a way to help the onlooker to map new courses of relationality. It’s telling that she likens 1960s minimalism to “muteness,” as to be mute can refer to the placidity of a certain kind of abstraction or to the inability to speak. Gallagher wants her art to speak. An, indeed, her collages do have a kind of rhythm and “voice.” Sometimes it’s the whisper of Peg Leg Bates or Eunice Rivers Laurie haunting the margins of an image or the shout of an advertisement’s tag line, still trying to sell its products across the expanse of time. But their speech is disobedient. They refuse to speak the language of racialized oppression. Gallagher’s work breathes new life into these signs and, by extension, creates different spaces for the subjects marked by these signs to be expansive, not reductive. Figure 19 Ellen Gallagher, Untitled, Oil, pencil, and paper, 1995 112 Figure 20 Ellen Gallagher, Paper Cup (detail), ink on paper on canvas, 1996 Gallagher constructs her collages out of a wide range of materials ranging from the more common (pigment, paper, pencil, and watercolor) to the more unexpected (enamel, oil, rubber, and plasticine). The base of her collages, however, are always constructed deceptively simply from composition paper, penmanship paper, and magazine advertisements. Onto the paper she layers repeated racialized abstract forms. When these forms aren’t abstracted, like the images found in vintage ads from Ebony, Black Digest, and Our World magazines, Gallagher de-faces them by whiting out their eyes and adding thick layers of plasticine. She refers to her methodical whiting out of eyes the process of conscripting them into her universe.136 It’s a mode of time travel that allows the models who “exist” somewhere in time from 1932-1970 to have new 136 Stina Björkell and Geni Raitisoja, “Interview with artist Ellen Gallagher and her latest exhibition in Sara Hildén museum,” Radio Classic Finland https://soundcloud.com/radioclassicfi/interview-with-artist-ellen 113 meaning in our present moment. The plasticine used to create the masks and elaborate wigs is a kind of enfleshment that also allows these models to “live” for the modern viewer. Gallagher’s plasticine “flesh” can be seen in the Preserve series which first debuted in 2001 as a solo exhibition at the Des Moines Art Center. A large section of this show featured a series of collages by Gallagher in which she alters wig advertisements taken from popular magazines such as Ebony, Our World, and Black Stars. The layout of her collages builds on the modernist compositional device of the pictorial grid that divides the advertisement into squared compartments. These gridded compartments keep the magazine pages organized and structured all the while visually separating the advertisements within the page. Targeting a readership of African American women, the borrowed advertisements were published between the 1950s and 1970s; they reveal some of the fashionable black hairstyles sported through the use of wigs. The wigs were often given names in the ads that characterized their look or evoked a certain attitude that the customer might undertake when wearing the wig. Some of these include “freedom wig,” “capless joy,” “gypsy darling,” “brown skin beauty,” “mushroom,” “lioness shaggy,” and “Afro American,” as seen in her collage (Karate). The magazine pages become Gallagher’s canvas and the visual ground on which her collages are built. By “built,” I refer to the artist’s physical process of layering her own materials and imagery onto the magazine advertisement, and thereby building her collage into a three dimensional work. As a result, the entire magazine page serves as the framework for each collage making the dimensions of each work around the size of the magazine page. Many of these components, particularly her plasticine shapes, add a three dimensionality to her work, and thereby, grants the original media archive both a tactile quality and an imposing presence. Her innovations not only add a layer of color to the black and white advertisements, but also alter both the propagandistic text and the physicality of the models’ 114 heads. As a result, the viewer experiences a manipulation of signs, texts, faces, and content with the vintage media sources as the foundation of the artist’s composition. Gallagher turns the flat pictorial space of the grid into a three dimensional form by layering plasticine shapes onto her compositions. Thus, while they may not have bodies, they feel embodied through the additive nature of her plasticine creations. Gallagher uses the material excess of the plasticine layered on top of the flat page to draw the viewer closer. The wig models in the advertisement no longer feel part of a static past, but as participants in other possible lives created by Gallagher’s composition. Gallagher sees plasticine as not just a material that adds physical dimensions to the flat image, making the archival paper feel like it is jumping out at you, but as imbuing the image with motion. As she says in an ART21 interview, “plasticine is used in animations and Claymation”…and “alludes to that idea of mutability and shifting.”137 One work from her Preserve series, (Karate) borrows a magazine page that is vertically bisected, separating the different advertisements that inhabit the page. The left side of the composition appears to be a karate advertisement that the artist has obsessively covered with blue, yellow, and white plasticine shapes; these shapes are manically repeated and obscure the majority of the left side. The upper left section of the work is patterned with jumbled rows of circular shapes. Many of these shapes are made of two plasticine layers: the bottom layer in blue and the top in yellow. Some blue circles are plastered without a layer of yellow, but instead are marked with small black dots. As seen in many other collages from the Preserve and DeLuxe series, Gallagher’s layering of materials and abstract forms build the composition into a sculptural unit, using the gridded advertisement as its organization. For Gallagher, the applied plasticine circles resemble abstracted floating eyeballs—a 137 “Ellen Gallagher: ‘eXelento’ and ‘DeLuxe’,” ART21.org (2005, 2011) https://art21.org/read/ellen-gallagher-exelento-and-deluxe/ 115 motif that she has carried over from her earlier work. The bottom of the left section of the collage is predominantly covered with repeated sets of engorged blue lips and some repeated circular shapes seen in the upper left section. Gallagher began incorporating these shapes in the mid-1990s and has continuously reused them in her work since. She borrows these abstracted eyes and lips from black minstrel imagery that degraded blacks with exaggerated physical features and foolish behavior. These shapes invade her compositions like a viral infestation. In some cases, they only cover half of the ground, but bleed partly into other sections of the magazine page. In this respect, they do not completely adhere to the gridded organization of the preexisting media archive, but penetrate the divisions mapped throughout the advertisement. As a result, the viewer is overwhelmed with these signs, each one slightly different from one another, and experiences their manifestation into an overpowering entity. By repeatedly entering these abstracted body parts into a new terrain, Gallagher decontextualizes the forms and allows them to adopt new meaning. The right side, less obscured by the artist’s plasticine shapes, shows twelve different wigs, each one modeled on a different woman. Gallagher masks out much of the text on this page, such as the entire heading of the wig advertisement. She has applied circular yellow and blue plasticine shapes onto each model’s eyes. As a result, she has physically transformed the women into inhuman faces similar to the effect created by nineteenth-century American minstrel imagery. The figures lose a sense of individuality, and instead, collectively appear as an unusual species each adorned with a different hairstyle. Furthermore, by defacing some of the text printed in the magazine page, Gallagher obscures the original function of the page as an advertisement. In the absence of the textual context, these models appear as anonymous floating heads that assume the name of the wig that they each individually wear. In some collages, Gallagher not 116 only plasters over the eyes, but also colors over the hairstyles with pomade, a hair product especially popular in the 1950s.138 Figure 21 Ellen Gallagher, Preserve (Karate), oil, pencil, plasticine, magazine page, 2001 In (Medalo) another collage from her Preserve series, she has added a layer of pomade on 138 Pomade is a greasy and waxy substance used to style hair. Although still used today, it is often associated with hairstyles of the 1950s. It gives hair a slick and shiny appearance. 117 the lower section of the ad and draws into it with multiple circular shapes evocative of her signature floating eyes. The artist treats the pomade as a paint pigment that turns the hairstyles into a blondish color. Using a hair product popular at the time the advertisement was published, Gallagher not only depersonalizes the models but also nearly conceals their race. In other words, she creates an implicit mockery of these cosmetic techniques by demonstrating their ability to transform and even depersonalize an individual. In this way, she highlights the mutability of physical appearance and thereby problematizes racial stereotypes attached to physicality. 118 Figure 22 Ellen Gallagher, Preserve (Medalo) oil, pencil, and pomade on magazine page, 2001 (Yellow), another work from the Preserve series, is built from another wig advertisement in which Gallagher changes the hair color to a bright yellow, by gluing cut pieces of yellow paper over each person’s hair. The magazine organizes the figures’ portraits into columns and 119 rows, similar to the layout of a yearbook page. The result is a gridded magazine advertisement in which every person, man and women, has been adorned with a different yellow hairstyle, some of which do not match the style masked in the advertisement below. The yellow paper jumps out at the viewer and obliterates each individual’s portrait with its vibrant color. Figure 23 Ellen Gallagher, Preserve (Yellow), oil, pencil, and paper on magazine page, 2001 Upon a quick glance, the viewer’s eye scans over rows and columns of abstracted yellow shapes. The yellow shapes stand as the focal points of the work and thereby take on a character 120 of their own. Again, the artist transforms the models into cartoonish depictions that ultimately dehumanize the figures. Although defacement often signals mockery, Gallagher’s work also exhibits the mutability of physical appearance and the ways that physicality transforms the identity of the figures. In other words, her collages recall the problematic notion that identity is often dictated by one’s individual appearance. However, she questions the validity of racial signs, particularly signs representative of physical features, by demonstrating their fragility and ephemeral quality. Furthermore, by practicing methods of defacement, alteration, erasure, and repetition, her collages indicate the ability to transform identity through the use of image mutation. Although Gallagher’s works may inevitably problematize racial imagery, one must note she does not attempt to criticize or rectify the advertisements, but rather, she enters herself into the ongoing discourse surrounding mass media imagery and the stereotypes that they circulate. Her collages offer a response and even a contribution to mass media imagery, and the magazine ads thereby adopt different meanings determined by Gallagher’s appropriation. By combining imagery from the nineteenth century with imagery from the mid-twentieth century, Gallagher instigates a discussion about anachronistic racial imagery between these historical eras. Her twenty-first century perspective brings a third era into the equation and bridges the time gap between these periods. Her material additions to these advertisements transport the images into a contemporary setting that grants them current relevancy. Through her method of collage, with an emphasis on the stratums of both materials and meanings, Gallagher creates a visual thread that connects various centuries of American culture and black identity. Just as her collaged materials are layered, so too are the embedded significations and the generations that her materials and imagery span across. 121 Her Preserve and DeLuxe series further emphasizes the versatility of signs through repetition and decontextualization. By haphazardly repeating the same racial signs over and over, with slight variation in each form, Gallagher highlights the arbitrariness and the infidelity of the signifier. In other words, through her method of abstraction and repetition Gallagher challenges the historic significance of the sign, but also invalidates its attachment to bodies and stereotyped populations. As a result, she not only destabilizes the racial signs as falsities, but also strips them of their previous visual power, one form at a time. Without the additional facial structure surrounding the eyes and lips, these forms transform into abstract shapes unrelated to their racist underpinnings, and take on a character of their own. At times the lips may resemble abstracted illustrations of beans, while the eyes may appear as random polka-dot patterns. Gallagher’s process liberates the viewer to formulate new meaning instigated by each individual’s subjective interpretation. Understanding the unfixed quality of the sign and “its exchangeability based on its value,” as described by Bois, Gallagher parodies its vulnerability with the rigidity of the compositional grid.139 She tampers with the modernist grid structure, not just in her collages, but also in other mediums that she employs. Grid formations are found in the foundations of many of her works—some that she has created, as seen in her gridded display of the DeLuxe collages, and others inherent in her chosen medium, seen in the magazine advertisements themselves. Art historian Rosalind Krauss has discussed the grid as an abstract concept whose limitations Western artists either accept or challenge.140 Realizing the limitations presented by gridded 139 Yve-Alain Bois, “The Semiology of Cubism,” in Picasso and Braque: A Symposium , ed. Lynn Zelevansky (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1992), 174. 140 Rosalind Krauss, “Grids,” October Vol. 9 (Summer, 1979). 122 structures, Gallagher nevertheless addresses its prevalence in the Western world. At times, for example, she defaces the gridded organization of magazine advertisements but in other instances, she builds from the preexisting arrangement of a grid. In the case of (Karate), the advertisements are divided into three grid-like sections that structure the composition and foster a visual sense of confinement. Gallagher generally adheres to the structure by applying plasticine shapes inside the lines that separate the advertisements. In this case, she integrates a preexisting grid as an outline that compositionally organizes her collaged additions. As Krauss wrote in her essay “Grids,” published in 1979, “grids are not only spatial to start with, they are visual structures that explicitly reject a narrative or sequential reading of any kind.”141 Due to the idea that the grid exists strictly as a spatial and visual structure, Krauss addresses the prohibitions that grids impose on subjective interpretations and perpetuating or opposing narratives. The idea that the grid signals purity and levels any sense of alterity suggests that it does not easily accommodate difference or change. However, Gallagher challenges this very notion by using the pictorial lattice to challenge the mythical significations of cultural imagery. The grid allows her to exploit the syntax, or the structural relationship, of the components that comprises her collages. In other words, viewers can focus on the composition’s formality and view each form for its physical and structural properties. The cut and dry organization enlivens the purity of each compositional form and constituent that Gallagher applies to the magazine page. As a result, the abstracted eyes and lips associated with black minstrelsy are recast in a neutralizing space and stripped of their associative meaning; instead formal qualities emerge as the focus of the composition, particularly when Gallagher subtracts a model’s individuality by masking out her eyes and other physical features. In other words, 141 Ibid., 55. 123 Gallagher employs the relative purity of the grid to declassify signs that may have previously marked or masked racial identity. She extracts the cultural significance from the sign and inserts the “plastic expression” that allows colors and forms to assert their presence. In this way, she decouples the found imagery from the purpose it had in advertisements and this process demonstrates that such images can be both decoded and disempowered. In other words, by incorporating the grid to recontextualize cultural imagery, Gallagher employs the compositional lattice both as a weapon and a formal device. Although she exploits the relative purity that the grid offers to viewers, Gallagher also welcomes the subjective readings unique to each viewer. By reverting power to the viewer, she directs attention to the biases and inconsistencies that inform the significations of signs. As a result, she reveals the erratic nature of signifiers and the instability of meanings. Gallagher abstracts, erases, fragments, and exploits human anatomy to encourage the viewer to rethink the significance of invasive imagery circulated by mass media. Furthermore, she applies racist imagery into her collages as a way of commenting on society’s tendency to measure an individual’s worth by their physical attributes. At the same time, she realizes the subjectivity inherent in such imagery and appreciates that new meanings emerge as more people view her work. Gallagher relies on the fact that no symbol or sign maintains a stagnant concept or definition; each carries a social life of its own determined by the viewer. She alludes to the arbitrariness of the sign, through aggregation, abstraction, and repetition. By mutating mass media documents, she encourages viewers to attach new associations to the historical imagery she reuses. In his exhibition catalogue essay, Fleming recognizes that Gallagher “mak[es] 124 viewers aware of their historical power [and thereby] pushes us into a new world.”142 Like many artists working in the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuries, she appropriates imagery and welcomes multiple interpretations while debunking fixed content. The fact that she embraces multiple readings also explains her fascination with printed materials due to their wide dissemination. Like many collage artists, Gallagher shares an interest in the ubiquitous power of mass media. In an interview with ART21, she explains: I really get excited by this idea that a printed material can be so widely distributed. The black press was widely distributed and there is a great American history of manifestos. I was always jealous of writers because their story could be in so many different hands—it didn’t have to occur only in a gallery or a museum. There is a possibility for distribution and freedom.143 When Gallagher adds her own material onto the magazine pages or yearbook pages, she enters into the immortal lives of those models she alters. She includes herself into the network of social media by actively responding and contributing to it. Gallagher describes the characters and stories that she appropriates as conscripts because she brings them into her life without their permission. This suggests that after a person’s image has entered into the social media at any level, there exists a dimension of that person’s life that he/she cannot control. Gallagher takes advantage of this by using these images to participate in the ongoing dialogue of the black body. These models from the advertisements, as faces widely circulated by the media, become part of Gallagher’s narrative. As old imagery permeates throughout contemporary society, new meanings emerge, and Gallagher exploits this potential by adding her own layer of meaning. 142 Jeff Fleming, “Ellen Gallagher: Preserve,” in Ellen Gallagher: Preserve (Des Moines Art Center, 2001), 8. 143 “Ellen Gallagher: ‘eXelento’ and ‘DeLuxe’,” ART21.org (2005, 2011) https://art21.org/read/ellen-gallagher-exelento-and-deluxe/ 125 Figure 24 Ellen Gallagher, DeLuxe (detail), photogravure, spit-bite, collage, cutting, scratching, silkscreen, offset lithography and hand-building, 2005 126 CHAPTER FOUR How To Be Seen: Excess, Lack and the (Black) Cinematic Body Everything about being indie is tied to not being Black.144 --“Micah” in Medicine for Melancholy “Weird” is an apt description of our remaining trapped in the ideological, historical, political appearance of our bodies even as we feel profoundly alienated from our own appearance. “She’s a thin girl trapped in a fat girl’s body” is one way to simplify this idea, but the nature of the weirdness has a deeper dimension— the free spirit trapped in the body that is supposed to signal pain.”145 (emphasis added) --Margo Natalie Crawford As a catachresis, “black” is not only a rhetorical construct but a sensorial one as well, fact that bear far-reaching repercussions for how race is constructed through the senses and the senses are then engaged by the “blackness” of “black” cinema”146 --Alessandra Raengo Visualizing Blackness, Contesting Blackness Black is not a color, but a condition. It is the condition of being positioned in certain socially and culturally specific ways; of being racialized. There is no racial “essence.” There are only “contingent dynamics that have linked human appearance and ancestry to distinctive social, semiotic and psychocultural locations. The dynamics are contingent but not arbitrary, which is to say that they are sociohistorically specific, and that they have done their work in definitive and 144 Barry Jenkins, Medicine for Melancholy, 2008. 145 Natalie Crawford. "The Counterliteracy of Postmelancholy," Black Camera 4, no. 1 (2012): 205. 146 Alessandra Raengo, "Shadowboxing: Lee Daniels’s Non-Representational Cinema" in Contemporary Black American Cinema: Race, Gender, and Sexuality at the Movies, ed. Mia Mask (New York: Routledge, 2012), 202. 127 patterned ways.”147 What, then, makes “black art” black? What functions have to be performed successfully in order to secure that identification? Where do we locate it? How do we identify it? Is blackness the property of visual objects or is it a way of understanding the relationship between objects? These questions, raised by Darby English in How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness animate both academic and popular discussions of black artistic production. At the center of these queries is a desire to think more critically about “black representational space.” That is, what kinds of limits are placed around art produced by black bodies? The “black” of black art is a call for the work to be a representative extension of, if not the community more broadly, at the very least its maker. As English argues “when black art became part of a political program of uplift,” such a naturalized discourse of belonging continues to act as a form of “tactical segregation” because it separates “from works of art elements of their informing contexts that reflect interests in issues other than race.”148 Thus, there is no space for the complexity of art produced by artists who identify as black because their racial subjectivity overshadows all other elements of the work. Allesandra Raengo extends this reading to film, as she argues “however we tentatively define the black of black cinema (as subject matter, ideological alignment, social function, racial identity of the author, and so on), once it appears next to the term cinema, the latter is immediately burdened with the expectation to reveal a racial referent.”149 In short, the 147 Paul Taylor, "Black Aesthetics," Philosophy Compass 5, no. 1 (2010): 3. 148 Darby English, How to See a Work of Art in Total Darkness (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 10. 149 Allessandra Raengo, “In the Shadow,” Camera Obscura 83, Volume 28, Number 2 (2013): 5. 128 body remains the “anchoring authorial and authorizing force” in the determination of a cultural product’s “blackness.” As Stuart Hall writes in “New Ethnicities,” we have entered a moment where black cultural production can no longer afford to entertain the question of representation in singular ways because “what is at issue here is… the recognition that ‘black’ is essentially a politically and culturally constructed category, which cannot be grounded in a set of fixed trans-cultural or transcendental racial categories and which therefore has no guarantee in nature.” 150 Hall recognizes that race as a cultural phenomenon cannot be simplified for the sake of maintaining the semblance of a stable racial category for this would simply reiterate the essentialism of anti-black racism. As Hall contends, “there is no guarantee, in reaching for an essentialized racial identity of which we think we can be certain, that it will always turn out to be mutually liberating and progressive on all the other dimensions. It can be won. There is a politics there to be struggled for. But the invocation of a guaranteed black experience behind it will not produce that politics.”151 To contest anti-black racism without recognizing the complexity of black experience is an inadequate gesture because it reinscribes the very essentialism it seeks to undermine. The very nature of black embodiment needs to be rethought because “if identities are not metaphysical, timeless categories of being; if they point not to ontologies but to historical specificities and contingencies; if their mappings of bodies and subjectivities are forms of and not simply resistances to 150 Stuart Hall, "New ethnicities" in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, eds. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (London: Routledge, 1996), 443. 151 Stuart Hall, "What is this ‘black’ in black popular culture?" in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, 474. 129 practices of domination—then a politics based on identity must carefully negotiate the risk of reinscribing the logic of the system it hopes to defeat.”152 What is needed, then, is a shift from black ontology to black discursivity. To contest a singular, “metaphysical” perception of the black body we need to move away from delimiting conceptions of the signification of blackness. Blackness is not a thing but rather an enactment. If blackness is not ontological, the lines of influence, allusion, causality, reference, and exposition need to be to be redrawn, particularly in terms of “black film.” Instead of understanding the “black” of black cinema in the rather vague sense as “of the black experience,” this project engages with Kimberly Benston’s description: Blackness in fact emerges from close scrutiny of the movement’s leading theorists…as a term of multiple, often conflicting implications which, taken together, signal black America’s effort to articulate its own conditions of possibility. At one moment, blackness may signify a reified essence posited as the end of a revolutionary ‘metalanguage’ projecting the community towards ‘something not included here’; at another moment, blackness may indicate a self-interpreting process which simultaneously ‘makes and unmakes’ black identity in the ceaseless flux of historical change.153 In this way, “Blackness is not an inevitable object, but rather a motivated, constructed, corrosive, process.”154 To think processually is to move beyond representation; to be concerned with what is being performed and not necessarily who is doing the performance. 152 Robyn Wiegman, American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 35. 153 Kimberley W. Benston, Performing Blackness: Enactments of African-American Modernism (New York: Routledge, 2013), 3. 154 Ibid., 6. 130 ‘Post-Black’ Possibility One response to the weariness of this burden of representation is the move towards “post- blackness.” The term “post-black” first became part of popular discourse when Thelma Golden, deputy director and curator of the Studio Museum of Harlem, used the term to characterize the work of young artists she had selected for a 2001 exhibition entitled “Freestyle.” Developed in conversations with artist Glenn Ligon, “post-black” referred to a trend Golden and Ligon saw among black artists: such artists “were adamant about not being labeled as ‘black artists,’ though their work was steeped, in fact deeply interested, in redefining complex notions of blackness.”155 The “post” in post-black refers to moving beyond the representational imperatives placed on black artists from both inside the group as well as outside. It was a disavowal of the impetus to produce “positive” images of the Black Arts Movement. As Mary Schmidt Campbell summarizes, “what [post-black artists] are claiming as full citizens is a blank canvas with no predetermined expectations, no constraints, no prohibitions, only the full range of whatever unpredictable interventions the unfettered imagination can produce.”156 The discussion of this as a trend that is not contained to the art world but is occurring is black American culture more generally has been taken up by a number of writers and thinkers in recent years, most visibly in Touré’s 2011 book Who’s Afraid of Post-Blackness?: What It Means to Be Black Now. However, that is beyond the scope of this project. Instead, this chapter focuses on “race as a medium, something we see through, and an intervening substance between people.”157 155 Cathy Byrd, “Is There a ‘Post-Black’ Art? Investigating the Legacy of the ‘Freestyle’ Show,” Art Papers 26, no. 6 (2002): 14. 156 Mary Schmidt Campbell, "African American Art in a Post-Black Era," Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 17, no. 3 (2007): 317-330. 157 Allessandra Raengo, “In the Shadow”: 27. 131 This chapter is concerned with black cinema that works to detach from the overdetermined blackness of the “black” body in our socio-perceptual imaginary. It takes up the notion of “post-blackness” as not simply a move away from the burden of representation or as a call for multiplicity (the idea that there are infinite ways to “do” blackness), but as a particular engagement with racialized subjectivity that disrupts the imagined index/referent relationship. Medicine for Melancholy, Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, and An Oversimplification of Her Beauty are three rich texts that use a complex mix of sound, image, and form to play with the audience’s expectations of what black skin is allowed to index and for whom. Although interested in the representations of complex black subjectivity in an effort to do away with good/bad representations, I do not wish to participate in what Judith Williamson points to as “another kind of orthodoxy within this critical arena, another good/bad dichotomy which, to parody it rather crudely, says realist, narrative, mainstream cinema=bad; non-narrative, difficult, even boring oppositional cinema=good.”158 Rather, I put together the indie Medicine for Melancholy, the mainstream Precious, and the avant-garde adjacent An Oversimplification of Her Beauty to begin to imagine new spaces of possibility for blackness to be a site for new intimate, extravagant forms of attachment. The Intimate Gesture: Mumblecore and the (Black)Body “Everything about being Indie is tied to not being Black.” What images come to mind as you read these words? Perhaps Wes Anderson’s whimsical-if-you’re-a-fan-twee-if-you’re-not 158 Judith Williamson, "Two Kinds of Otherness: Black Film and the Avant-garde, "Screen 29, no. 4 (1988): 108. 132 films. Or maybe Radiohead’s enigmatic lyrics? Or perhaps you just conjured tight-fitting jeans and a T-shirt so ironic it’s almost a parody of itself? If I told you a person in a film says, “Everything about being indie is tied to not being Black” what image comes to mind? Who is doing the saying? Does it matter? What if the speaker was white? Or, then again, perhaps black? Does the statement have different reverberations depending on the gender of the speaker or that of who is being spoken to? If the flat architectural repetition of suburbia were the backdrop, how would you feel? How would your affective attachments shift if this proclamation were made in an urban setting? Would knowing the director’s race affect your reading of this utterance? Do you imagine a particular genre, an aesthetic that would be a more suitable--or at the very least more expected--framing for this position? There is, of course, no “correct” answer, or even a singular answer, to these questions. I ask them neither as recrimination for the conjuring of a static image nor as exculpation if you heard Sza, Syd, NAO, or Solange; if you imagined the directorial gaze of J.D. Dillard, Cheryl Dunye, Spike Lee, Kathleen Collins, or Jessie Maple; if you thought of the quirky black girl and not the gangly white, male teen. I ask these questions, rather, as a way to begin to tease out the multiple provocations at the heart of this statement. It is a provocation captured in this film still below. 133 Figure 25 Micah and Jo’ at the Museum of the Africa Diaspora I know. It seems to be the opposite of provocative. It appears to be entirely void of what even the most tame of imaginations would call “incendiary.” But that’s precisely the source of its power and why I find it so compelling: it captures such a common, unspectacular moment of being-alone-together. The tenderness of a shared silence. We cannot be entirely sure of what their relationship is to each other (and as we find out over the course of the film, neither can they), but neither is their relationship to us—to the viewer—overdetermined. It is difficult to read these black bodies not because they are inherently unintelligible, but because they can be made intelligible in any number of ways. It is provocative because its very banality empties out what categories and subject positions the black body can occupy. Let us return, then, to the line that opened this chapter. “Everything about being Indie is tied to not being Black.” It is said by Micah (Wyatt Cynac), half of the kind-of couple whose 134 one-day romance is the subject of Berry Jenkin’s 2008 Medicine for Melancholy. Micah, a fixed- gear bike-riding supplier of upscale private aquariums, lives in a studio apartment just large enough to fit a double bed and the aforementioned bike. Jo’ (Tracey Heggins), on the other hand, lives in an expensive condo in the Marina and doesn’t seem to have much by way of gainful employment besides occasionally doing esoteric screen prints and running errands for her art curator boyfriend. They are both young, educated, and not quite sure of their place in the world. We first meet Micah and Jo’ in a bed that belongs to neither of them, where they have awakened together on the morning after a party. The camera pans to a man and woman groggily getting out of bed as almost blindingly bright sunlight shines through the large windows of an upscale residence. There is little sound as the viewer follows the slow, furtive movements of the camera. It quickly becomes clear that they are unfamiliar with their surroundings and with each other as they awkwardly negotiate each other’s personal space and fumble through rooms. Having both used their fingers as toothbrushes, climbed over other sleeping bodies in search of entangled sweaters and carelessly tossed shoes, Micah and Jo’ leave the house clearly fighting hangovers. There is something tender about their lack of ease with each other, the gentleness with which they navigate being near but never quite touching. 135 Figure 26 Medicine for Melancholy opening scene Figure 27 Extreme close-up of Jo’ 136 The color saturation is extremely low and it makes the images appear almost black and white, save for muted tones of red. While primarily photographed in these cool tones, the level of desaturation fluctuates, intentionally letting richer hues seep onto the screen; almost teasing us with the hint of unseen depths of experience. This is no storybook “meet-cute.” Indeed, we are denied access to the initial encounter all together as it becomes clear that the pair we glimpse in the establishing shot has already met the night before, off-camera. Both act shy and embarrassed, and Jo’ seems in a particular hurry to put this brief encounter behind her. Micah, though, proposes breakfast and a shared cab ride home, which Jo’ accepts more out of fatigue and some sense of post-coital decorum than out of genuine interest. Our first encounter with Micah and Jo’ then is of the residue of an intimacy that has already passed and what remains to be discovered— what the film’s loose narrative explores—is what attachments, if any, remain. This is quintessential “mumblecore.” Mumblecore isn’t easily defined, as can be seen in the various definitions used by film critics and academics. Justin Horton summarizes the style: “Frequently improvised, cast with nonprofessional actors, and characterized by narrative looseness, mumblecore films attempt to make a virtue of their roughhewn visual style.”159 According to the press, mumblecore is characterized by “a tendency toward semi-plots, improvised dialogue, low-key acting, and an aversion to pretense and sheen that’s at once studied and off-handed”;160 “a low-key naturalism, low-fi production values and a stream of low-volume 159 Justin Horton, “The Sound of Uncertain Voices: Mumblecore and the Interrogation of Realism,” Cinephile 7, no. 2 (2011): 23. 160 Shawn Levy, “Sunday Extra: Interview with Aaron Katz of ‘Quiet City,’” OregonLive.com, 16 September 2007, http://blog.oregonlive.com/madaboutmovies/2007/09/sunday_extra_interview_with_aa.html 137 chatter often perceived as ineloquence. Hence the name: mumblecore”;161 “generally these films are severely naturalistic portraits of the life and loves of artistic twenty-somethings. The genre’s ultra-casual, low-fi style has been simmering for the last decade, made possible by the accessibility of DV and inspired as much by reality shows and YouTube confessionals as by earlier American independent cinema.” 162 Lynn Hirschberg points to the larger context of Hollywood film production, positing mumblecore as a character centered micro budget response to a movie business that has “lost its middle,” with mega budget action blockbusters dominating the major studios’ slates.163 Mumblecore is perhaps best described as a collection of aesthetic practices and affective affinities than a genre, but for expediency, I will use the term here. Broadly speaking, mumblecore films tend to explore thee ambivalences of youth, the difficulties of knowing one’s feelings and the subsequent inability to communicate what one is feeling, and the precarity of relationships. Films in the genre typically focus on characters, mostly in their mid to late 20s, who are often stuck in a place of in-betweeness that resists full articulation. There’s a sort of self-aware aimlessness and a togetherness-in-limbo that breeds a particular kind of intimacy (both between characters and between the film and viewers). What is said and left unsaid is the main “action” of the film, actors are often untrained, and they are made on a shoestring budget with handheld digital cameras. Films like Lena Dunham’s Tiny Furniture (2010) where a directionless and adrift young woman returns home after college to her artist 161 Dennis Lim, “A Generation Finds Its Mumble,” New York Times, 19 August 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/movies/19lim.html 162 Alicia Van Couvering, “What I Meant to Say,” Filmmaker, Spring 2007, http://www.filmmakermagazine.com/archives/issues/spring2007/features/mumblecore.php#.Wm qSf5OpnOQ 163 Lynn Hirschberg, “Core Values,” New York Times, 23 November 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/t-magazine/culture/06talk-mumblecore.html 138 mother’s loft in Brooklyn to try to figure out her life. Mark and Jay Duplass’s The Puffy Chair (2006), a man’s humorous journey to gift a chair to his father as he struggles with his own complicated feelings about adulthood and relationships. Joe Swanberg’s Hannah Takes the Stairs (2007), which follows a woman’s on again off again relationships with her office mates. Andrew Bujalski’s Funny Ha Ha (2002), which follows a young woman who has recently graduated from college and, you guessed it, is unsure about what comes next in her life. Films, in short, like Medicine for Melancholy. The strategic use of long silences balanced with dialog-driven character development, focus on slow, everyday intimate banalities in lieu of standard plot progression, and the use of a digital camera marks Medicine for Melancholy an easy fit within the genre. However, there is one crucial exception: the somewhat aimless, identity-seeking 20-somethings are Black. Whiteness is as much as a defining characteristic of the genre as lo-fi production quality and the focus on emotion over “action.” As film critic Dennis Lim notes, “hardly models of diversity, the films are set in mostly white, straight, middle-class worlds.”164 It is telling that while the genre is almost entirely focused on white subjectivity and self-knowledge, whiteness itself continues to be an absent presence both diegetically and in most critical discussions of the genre. In part, this is due to the genre’s constructed genealogy. Critics often cite John Cassavetes, Eric Rohmer, Jim Jarmusch, and Richard Linklater as the predecessors to, and the artistic inspiration for, the genre. Never, however, do they mention the low-budget innovations in scene composition and camera movement of the LA Rebellion films or the complex, sometimes funny, always moving films of the so-called Black New Wave [I’m thinking here, for example, of Leslie Harris’s funny and moving coming of age story Just Another Girl on the I.R.T. (1992)]. By positioning mumblecore 164 Dennis Lim, “A Generation Finds Its Mumble,” New York Times, 19 August 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/19/movies/19lim.html 139 within the white independent cinematic tradition, whiteness becomes the unspoken backdrop for this “more intimate” film genre. Whiteness is allowed to operate as an empty signifier on which to project emotional depth. It is not, I contend, coincidental that mumblecore is imagined as the domain of the white auteur and subject. White bodies have long been positioned as the neutral, universal other. What I want to explore, however, is the way the supposed neutrality of the white subject opens up space for a particular kind of imagining about intimacy and connection that relies on the way whiteness occupies a space of identitarian emptiness. Rather than read Medicine for Melancholy as mumblecore that “just happens” to take on blackness, that treats its subjects racialization as merely incidental as films in the genre often do in their gloss of whiteness, Medicine For Melancholy’s aesthetic choices play as significant a role in its commentary on black subjectivity and (ir)representability as the very pointed dialog around sociality, culture, and class I gestured toward at the opening of this chapter. What would it mean to not read the genre (mumblecore) and the narrative (an African American man and woman negotiating a new relationship) as merely incidental to the other, but constitutive of a kind of aesthetic practice that contends with racial alterity in new and productive ways? “Everything about being Indie…” What attachments and disavowals to “indie” and “black” are conjured by Micah’s words? When we say “indie” do we mean a process of production and distribution that exists outside of the “mainstream”? Is it a mode of consumption? An aesthetic affiliation? A shorthand for one’s positionality outside of “the system” that signals a grassroots ethics? Surely, all of these things are invoked in complicated and intermingled ways. However, when explicitly linked to “being black,” indie seems to be functioning here as a linguistic shorthand for a particular aesthetic and cultural position: a mode of being in the world that is just as much about one’s presentation of Self (the ironic graphic T-shirt, tight(er) jeans, 140 flannel, and, at the very least, a striving middle class subject position) as it is about others’ perceptions of you. Furthermore, the proclamation posits that “indie” is a fixed socio-cultural signifier that is primarily organized around the category of whiteness. “Black” occupies a similar space of fixity in this formulation. If “indie” functions as a placeholder for a quote/unquote “white” sensibility, then “black” is similarly being mobilized in this construction as a stand-in for an assumed assortment of aesthetic and cultural affinities that cohere around what we term “blackness.” The assertion, then, articulates a sense of stasis that asks one to not only contend with the proposed binary of “indie” and “black,” but to confront our own imaginings of these categories as terms with fixed meanings that can be mobilized in pre- determined ways. It bothers Micah that he, a man who describes himself as “black, first. A man, second” seems to be required to suppress his black identity in order to participate in certain cultural practices. Jo’ doesn't agree and sees Micah’s journey from “just Micah” to “just black” as an undesirable self-effacement, a subsuming of the individual under the sign of “blackness.” Of course, they are both right and wrong. And this is the line—both literally and metaphorically—that the film is constantly navigating. Micah’s words suggest a degree of self-awareness and self-questioning that structure the loose plot. It’s a provocative statement in that it invites us to respond to the logic that would deny blackness in the presence of “indie” and a provocation in so far as it deliberately teases and taunts a response to the contrary. It is simultaneously, however, a rather banal statement that ventriloquizes a common moment in “black” cinema where “us” and “them” is culturally established and constantly performed as mutually exclusive. It is in this in-between space that 141 Medicine for Melancholy plays with the audience’s expectations of what black skin is allowed to index, and for whom. Medicine for Melancholy uses the interplay between content and form to critique the a priori whiteness of mumblecore. Set in a gentrifying San Francisco, the film explicitly discusses issues of race, class and income inequality. There is even a moment where the film breaks from Micah and Jo’s easy, flirtatious banter and the camera hovers just outside the door of a meeting on changing housing prices. The audience lingers for a moment, along with them. What’s interesting about Jenkins’s camera is that these deeply contentious issues are presented as simply part of the fabric of a meandering day as two people get to know each other a little better. It’s an inversion of how some mumblecore directors envision the role of the camera. Remarking on how he and his brother came to filmmaking, Jay Duplass asks “Can you imagine what it would be like pitching a movie like Faces today.” Citing Cassavetes as an early influence, he continues, “We were obsessed with the documentary approach. We became interested in bringing a camera to actors instead of bringing actors to the camera; shooting documentary style and letting the action go free.”165 In “bringing the camera to the actors,” Duplass suggests that somehow we get access to a more “real,” less mediated relationship between characters. Medicine for Melancholy similarly operates under the assumption that, to draw from media scholars Adam Ganz and Lina Khatib, since the digital camera is always on, the performers are potentially always performing.166 But in the moment of the housing meeting, Jenkins suggests that the camera can 165 Director’s Guild of America, “From Cassavetes to Mumblecore: Indie Film Game Changer,” 12 Nov., 2011, https://www.dga.org/Events/2012/01-January-2012/75th-Indie-Event.aspx 166 Adam Ganz and Lina Khatib.,"Digital cinema: The transformation of film practice and aesthetics," New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 4, no. 1 (2006): 26. 142 move more freely and in this movement links the intimacies of the interpersonal with the political. That is to say, while unlike other mumblecore films which focus almost exclusively on the minute shifts in interpersonal relationships, Medicine for Melancholy takes on discussions of race, politics, and class, but structures the narrative such that it seems that there is no way that two people, living in the world could not but help talk about such things. Jenkins presents issues of racial assimilation, gentrification, and economic precarity as of apiece with any modern romance. They are not to the intimacy of the small gesture that animates mumblecore films, but constitutive of it. “As negotiations of identity and different political views of race are of central importance in Medicine for Melancholy,” scholar Simon Dickel argues for the film’s placement somewhere between mumblecore and post-black aesthetics. Mumblecore, according to Dickel, is just too “narrow.”167 I argue, however, that the addition of more explicit political dimensions through discussions of gentrification and negotiations of blackness reveals a limit of imaginative capacity for the form’s potential, not of genre. There is nothing necessarily narrow about the graininess of the digital camera, the proximity of the lens (alternating between medium and close-up shots, rarely panning), and the small-scale of their storytelling (focusing on the minutiae of inter- personal relationships) in mumblecore cinema. Why, then, move away from mumblecore? If we readjust our gaze, what the film gives us is not a disavowal of “white” indie film practices, but rather the use of mumblecore as a form of post-black aesthetics. Instead of 167 Simon Dickel, "Between Mumblecore and Post-Black Aesthetics: Barry Jenkins’s Medicine for Melancholy," in Understanding Blackness Through Performance: Contemporary Arts and the Representation of Identity, eds. Anne Cremieux, Xavier Lemoine, and Jean Paul Rocchi (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 110. 143 blackness operating as the absent-presence, Medicine for Melancholy makes the white body the spectral presence in the film. Jenkins externalizes—makes tactile and felt—the overwhelming whiteness of the “indie” film genre through the use of de-saturated color, diegetic references to art-house films like Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle and Claire Denis’ Vendredi soir, and the absence of any meaningful interactions with white bodies. Although the conversations between Micah and Jo’ often explicitly explore what it means to be a black body in a “white,” increasingly gentrifying San Francisco, white bodies never actually materialize. As their day together progresses, we learn that Jo’s partner, away on business in London, is white. We come to “know” him only through the expensive apartment where Jo’ lives, a quick errand at a gallery she runs for him before continuing the day with Micah, and a text exchange we never see, but know from Jo’s furtiveness must be from him. Micah, on the other hand, has just broken up with his girlfriend who is white, we learn, from a quick glimpse at a MySpace screenshot. The viewer is primarily given access to “whiteness” not through embodied presence, but through aesthetics, through a kind of tactile and emotional feeling out of what, as Micah vocalizes, “being indie” really means. Jo’ wears a self-designed screen printed T-shirt with the word “Loden” as an oblique reference to white feminist filmmaker Barbara Loden, director of the 1971 film Wanda. Micah’s musical references (as well as the very carefully curated soundtrack) reveal his embeddedness in San Francisco’s predominantly white indie music scene and runs counter to what one “expects” from a film featuring black bodies. The level of de- saturation so high at times the screen is almost bleached, drawing attention to the dearth of bodies of color in San Francisco while simultaneously troubling what it means to visualize a “black” body at all. Thus, there is a residue of whiteness, a kind of affective cultural resonance that filters our perceptions of, and access to, the two central black characters. 144 In “White: Essays on Race and Culture,” Richard Dyer examines the connection between how whiteness is signified and how the manner of signification produces structural privilege in racial discourse. He observes that its power can be located in the ability to stabilize the sign of nonwhiteness. Dyer points out that whiteness’s real power stems from its freedom to exist as an unquestioned paradox—“it both is and is not a color, is and is not a tangible sign.”168 Dyer asserts that white masculinity in particular has a “divided nature, contradictory in the manner that it encompasses a multitude of signs along scales of both race and gender: light and dark, masculine and feminine. It is “exceptional, excessive, marked” yet also “non-extreme, unspectacular, plain,” and ordinary. As Gerald Sim’s notes, “from this highly fluid and multifaceted state, [whiteness] reaches ideological stability not by repressing excess signification, for that would deny whiteness its most potent power. Rather, it does so by denying all signification, thus adopting the character of emptiness.”169 Medicine for Melancholy very self-consciously plays with this notion of excessively marked (white) bodies and emptiness through staging Micah and Jo’s encounter in a mumblecore aesthetic, in a genre that is often alternately praised and ridiculed for being “about nothing.” This playfulness with form and subjectivity is evident early in the film when Micah appears at Jo’s door (in a condo owned by her boyfriend) to return the wallet she left in the cab on the ride back from the café. Looking incredulously around Jo’s apartment, Micah asks: M: So you don’t pay rent here? [ Jo’ shakes her head] Who does pay rent here? J: No one. 168 Richard Dyer, White (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 47. 169 Gerald Sim, The Subject of Film and Race: Retheorizing Politics, Ideology, and Cinema (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 35. 145 M: OK who pays the mortage? J: My boyfriend. M: Your boyfriend. J: My boyfriend. M: And, where is he? J: London. M: London. J: Yes. London. Would you stop repeating me? M: Alright. What’s he do? J: He’s a curator. M: A curator. [realizing he’d repeated her again] Sorry. Sorry. It just seems weird that, as a curator, he doesn’t really have any art on the walls. Like, none. I mean it just seems like, they’ve probably got like an extra painting or a sculpture lying around that he could have brought home. Sorry. Sorry. Is he white? J: Does it matter? M: Yes and no. J: Well, what if I told you he is white. [Micah makes the ‘I knew it’ laugh-face] And, what if I told you we met in a volunteer program in Bayview. Would that matter? M: Yes and no. The repeated refrain “yes and no” gestures toward the complex interplay between perception and lived experience. There is a deep ambivalence, a desire to make truth claims while simultaneously disavowing them. This tension—and the attempts to render it visible and 146 representable on screen—is central to the film’s narrative. Rather than provide a definitive answer or suggest that the question itself is meaningless, the film uses the genre conventions of mumblecore to theorize the outcomes, knowledge, and intensity that black bodies produce. Rather than assume how the surface of the skin can and should signify, the film detaches from the expectations of representing an “authentic” black subject. As Micah and Jo’ mumble through their ever-shifting racial and intimate positionalities, Jenkins, to borrow from Nicole Fleetwood, “troubles blackness,” as they produce a sense of racial disorientation forcing us to grapple with the “yes” and “no” of Micah’s questions.170 This disorientation is made explicit in the only scene in the film where Micah and Jo’ engage with other people of color. The viewer thinks they know what to expect when they see two large, dark skin black men wearing baggy pants and oversized coats asking Micah “Hey, what’s going on, bro? You need something?” The film plays with the viewer’s ability to “know” what it is that they think they see. Perhaps, no matter how savvy your reading practice, which has room for, I’m sure, a multiplicity of black embodiment, you are so used to encountering a certain kind of image of urban black masculinity that, although slightly jarring in the context of this particular film, you imagine you know who these men are (and what they’re up to) the moment you glimpse them. Or maybe throughout the film Micah was nothing more than a curio, a visual anomaly and now you are satisfied at finally being allowed a glimpse at the more “authentic” black male. Whatever viewing position you take, there is a moment, however brief, where you believe that you know what and how these black bodies signify: two black men approaching our hipster protagonists late at night offering drugs. Indeed, Micah and Jo themselves have a brief 170 Nicole Fleetwood, Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness (University of Chicago Press, 2011). 147 moment of “knowingness” when they’ve been approached and quickly respond in the negative, even before seeing what goods are for sale. But there is slippage (misalignment) between what they/we think they/we know and what is actually happening. Yes, the men are pedaling wares, most likely ill gotten and at a greatly reduced price, but drugs aren’t what’s on offer: they have “formula 50” (Glaceau Vitamin Water), Arizona Tea, Kamboucha, and Sobe. Not only are they offering the furthest thing from narcotics, but these are beverages that are heavily inflected with a certain kind of cultural (and financial) capital. These drinks are marketed primarily to a “health” conscious community with disposable income. The stark juxtaposition between what we expect two black men who “look like that”-- baggy clothing, unfashionable large jackets, one sports a do-rag while the other is wearing sunglasses…at night (the complete opposite of our blipster protagonists) is intentional. The film questions what is actually being sold and to whom. The humorous encounter with the street peddlers makes the viewer see the link between the commodities on display in the inner lining of their outsized jackets and the black body as commodity. As an image that has been packaged and “sold” to the viewer in a particular way. The film’s staging of the encounter with the “drug dealers” renders visible the way black skin is made to “perform literally.” Rather than allow for a direct relationship between exteriority (black skin) and interiority, the men both literally and metaphorically reveal the incongruity of what’s “inside” through the opening of the jacket. In this moment of unexpected commodity circulation we are shown how Blackness “circulates” in ways that limits its range of signification—that make it impossible for these men to be read as having affinities with “indie” cultural practices. 148 Figure 28 The “drug dealers” approach Micah and Jo’ Figure 29 The “drug dealers” try to sale SoBE 149 A destabilizing gesture that does not simply offer mulitple ways of racialized being--we can have an “urban” and an urbane black masculinity--but de-naturalizes our perceptual practices. In this brief scene we are encouraged to look differently; to recognize blackness as catachresis: From a rhetorical standpoint, in fact, “black” is not simply a metaphor (comparative darkness regarded as blackness), not just metonymy (skin pigmentation as index of inner racial essence), but rather as catachresis, that is, the rhetorical figure that attributes a name to something that supposedly does not have one…[Black] performs literally, even though it is only figural.”171 The film’s staging of the encounter with the “drug dealers” renders visible the way black skin is made to “perform literally.” Rather than allow for a direct relationship between exteriority (black skin) and interiority, the men both literally and metaphorically reveal the incongruity of what’s “inside” through the opening of the jacket. In some ways, however, Micah does believe that the black body performs literally. “Is it any surprise that folks of color in the scene date outside their race? I mean, think about it, like everything about! Everything about being indie is all tied to not being black,” he says accusatorially after Jo’ gets a text message from (he assumes) her boyfriend. The viewer can’t quite place the source of this sudden animosity towards Jo’ and we get the feeling that Micah doesn’t fully understand it himself. There’s a blurriness, a fuzziness around the edges of this potentially damning statement—to Jo’s politics and to the film as a whole—that can never be made definitive. The murkiness of the intimate and the political is precisely what the film labors to make visible. And, significantly, the focus is shifted to the (implicit) whiteness of indie and not the black body. Micah could have said “Everything about being Black is tied to not being indie,” but to say this is to misrecognize the cultural and economic capital that animates “indie” as well as to fall into the ontological trap of essentializing blackness. Instead, he questions the central negation that haunts indie identification: the black body. 171 Alessandra Raengo, "Shadowboxing,” 202. 150 When asked in an interview if at the end of his time with Jo’ Micah felt that he had to be in a relationship with a black woman would he think that that was a reasonable conclusion to arrive at, Jenkins replied No, it’s not. I would definitely lean more towards where Jo is or where Jo is going. I think race is a limiter. I think it has its uses, there’s nothing wrong with common experience, the bond and the things you can collectively learn as a community from that collective experience but I think race is just another thing that separates us and I’m all about bringing people together.172 Where Jenkins arrives and, by extension where he hopes Micah ends up, is at a “recontextualizing” of the tension he feels around creating “a more dynamic definition of what it means to be black.” Instead of thinking about a move towards an embracing of complexity as a capitulation to whiteness—as a sort of melancholic position that results from the “taking in [of] the other-made-ghostly” 173 —Micah should be thinking about class position as a source of affective attachments and identification. As Jenkins reflects, “San Francisco is not forcing these people out of the city because they are black, it’s forcing them out because they are poor.” In Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza Deleuze writes: “Whence the importance of the ethical question. We do not even know what a body is capable, Says Spinoza. That is: we do not 174 even know of what affections we are capable nor the extent of our power.” While the black body is never explicitly invoked by either Deleuze or Spinoza, this statement can be used to address the capacity to visualize the raced body. Consider Deleuze’s reading on the notions of action and suffering: “We suffer external things, distinct from ourselves, we thus ourselves have 172 The Fader, “Q+A: Medicine for Melancholy’s Barry Jenkins,” February 26, 2009, http://www.thefader.com/2009/2/26/q-a-medicine-for-melancholy-s-barry-jenkins 173 Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press), 8. 174 Gilles Deleuze, Expression in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 226. 151 a distinct force of passion and action…Our force of suffering exerts nothing because it expresses nothing at all.”175 It involves only our impotence, that is to say, the limitation of our power of action. In Ethics, Spinoza offers a complex set of philosophical propositions and proofs which hinge on our ability to see the body as a set of “powers,” powers which should not be seen as solely individuated and which are often indistinguishable from God, that is, not solely of man’s own making or mental capacity. As I do not wish to oversimplify and it is beyond the scope of this current project to delve into the complexities of this treatise, it is of particular interest how Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza conflates the notion of external suffering with an impotent subjectivity. It speaks to a certain narrative of black bodily experience where the black body’s subjectivity, having been externalized—made “excessive”—is often truncated by significations of racial suffering and an overdetermined racial identity. Instead of imagining an impotent embodied subjectivity, how can we envision a black body that is active and very much alive? Frantz Fanon provides a fruitful point of departure for beginning to answer this question. Although Fanon emphasizes the trauma that black bodies experience at being seen as “raced” and not fully “human,” he does allude to the existence of another kind of space, an almost inconceivable sphere where the black body and consciousness are freed from the psychic and social traumas of anti-black fears, limitations, and anxieties and moves instead with a sense of agency and interiority. The next to last sentence of Fanon’s seminal text, Black Skin, White Masks reads, “At the end of this book we would like the reader to feel with us the open dimension of every consciousness. My final prayer: O my body, always make me a man who 175 Ibid., 224. 152 questions!”176 Here he anticipates an inherently sturdy, almost transcendent, subjectivity that lies beyond the totalizing effects of racism and the traumas of the “historico- racial schema.” Fanon’s rigorous analysis documents the trauma that “seeing” enacts on black bodies, yet here he also posits that the visual sphere might yield great metaphysical capacities. He outlines a template of subjectivity, one of feeling, being and the intense desire of seeking, knowing, and questioning. If the film offers a curative for melancholy, what is the lost object and what process of healing does it offer? Freud distinguishes melancholia from mourning because unlike mourning, the loss in melancholia is an unconscious one. There is no apparent “object-loss” to the subject and the observer. It is tempting to say that the lost object at the center of Medicine for Melancholy is the never-fully-attainable white body. As Anne Cheng argues in The Melancholy of Race, racial melancholia is a state of being psychically stuck due to a pathological interminability that resists substitution of a lost, idealized racial perfection, defined by white culture.177 In Cheng’s formulation the non-white subject is forever seeking a “never-possible perfection” that results in “an inarticulable loss that comes to inform the individual’s sense of his or her own subjectivity.”178 While this reading opens up a rich discussion on the state of grief, national belonging and identity for the non-white subject, this does not so easily map onto our protagonists. Casually dropping by the Museum of the African Diaspora and spending a good portion of their day on a self-guided tour of the history, art and cultural richness that resulted 176 Frantz Fanon Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 206. 177 Anne Anlin Cheng, The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press). 178 Ibid., 175. 153 from African migration, the film neither posits that Micah and Jo’ suffer from a “pathological interminability” nor that they are “unable to mourn” their racial past. If there is a loss with which to contend, it is at once the (romantic) love object as our protagonists navigate a fragile new relationship and the excessive meanings attached to black skin. Indeed, this is what animates the film. Perhaps, the film posits, our skin can mean what we want it to. But in this making of new meaning, we must also create new ways of relating to each other. The “medicine” offered to viewers is not a cure-all, but rather a viewing practice; a way of situating the non-white Self through the banality of indie cinema so that we can begin to interpret these bodies in ways that do not only function as “raced” objects, but also as sites for exploring subjectivities and experiences that lie beyond familiar tropes of identity. Of course, Micah and Jo can be the site of this bodily ambivalence that engenders new attachments because of their class, education, hybrid cultural affinities, and body type. In many ways, they are the ideal subjects to “trouble blackness” precisely because their bodies are so untroubling. Their “excess” always remains metaphorical; an (in)tangible presence that is no less real or without social consequence for its lack of materiality, but also more porous because it lacks definitive substance. What happens, then, when this excess is made material? Of course, Micah and Jo can be the site of this bodily ambivalence that engenders new attachments because of their class position, education, and hybrid cultural affinities. Because of all the things that allow us to read them as “indie.” In many ways, they are the ideal subjects to “trouble blackness” precisely because their bodies are so untroubling. Their “excess” always remains somewhat removed; at once tangibly present and out of frame. It’s an excess no less real or without social consequence for its precarious materiality, but also more porous because it is performed—made visible—in unexpected ways. But what is it like to be trapped in a body that 154 looks like pain, that looks like a wanting never fulfilled? That looks like Gabourey Sidibe’s abjection in Precious or Wangechi Mutu’s achingly beautiful amputees? In a genre where everyone is just so normal and the “drama” comes from self-reflexive malaise, it’s a question that haunts the margins of all mumblecore cinema. “A Body That Looks Like Pain” From the start, Precious has occupied an odd position in the film world. Although at this point Lee Daniels had produced the critically acclaimed Monster’s Ball, Precious was only his second time in the director’s chair. His directorial debut, Shadowboxer, received poor reviews and made less than half a million dollars making Daniels a risky investment. While Daniels has spoken in many reviews about the way he had to “hustle” to raise the funds for the film, Precious remains in a liminal state between indie production and major film. Though by no means a blockbuster budget, at $10million the film was also not made on a shoestring like the vast majority of films we traditionally include under the umbrella of “independent cinema.” The film was distributed though Lionsgate Films, a production company considered a “mini-major” and was executive produced by Tyler Perry and Oprah Winfrey. Because of its means of distribution it received wide release, which garnered major interest in the film world and was nominated for 6 Oscars, winning two in the supporting actress and best adapted screenplay categories. Thus, in many ways Precious followed very mainstream production and distribution processes. And, yet, the film itself is rather unconventional in form and aesthetic. While a larger budget means we don’t get the grainy, DIY aesthetic which often accompanies lower costs of production, we also don’t lose the visual strangeness that is often covered up by the glossiness offered by high(er) budgets. 155 As one critic describes it, the film is “hothouse melodrama one moment, kitchen sink (and frying-pan-to-the-head) realism the next, with eruptions of incongruous slapstick throughout.”179 Indeed a slew of seemingly contradictory terms have been used to describe the film: Blaxploitation farce, grotesque, realistic, high sensationalism, comedic, horror movie, desperate overkill, fantasy, tear-jerker, lookie-lookie luridness, documentarian realism, salacious, gothic, unabashed melodrama, social documentary, nightmarish. These wide range of descriptors are, in fact, all true. Daniels has drawn on a number of genres and aesthetics to tell Precious’s story. Although one could argue that this is merely the sign of a new filmmaker who has yet to find his footing, I contend that this schizophrenic blending of genres is an intentional aesthetic approach. Daniels responds to Crawford’s question about the inevitability that haunts perceptions of the performance of blackness with excess. Rather than shy away from the layers of abjection that permeate the source material, Daniels uses an aesthetics of excess—jumping from gothic surrealism to melodrama to glimpses of humor—to jar the viewer out of a passive viewing experience. Some of the images are horrific and traumatic—the flashbacks to Precious’s rape by her father, her mother’s violent rages—but the film resists the process by which these images become naturalized as poor, black abjection by weaving together genres, making the viewing experience a space of anarchic de-familiarization. Margo Crawford argues, “when Precious learns how to sound out as she writes, she weaves together sound, word, and image and discovers an excessive, pleasurable self-expression that pushes against the need to wait for someone to fill in the blank spaces.”180 The film both 179 Scott Foundas, “Precious is the Diary of a Sad Black Woman,” Village Voice, November 3, 2009, http://www.villagevoice.com/film/precious-is-the-diary-of-a-sad-black-woman-6392060 180 Natalie Crawford, "The Counterliteracy of Postmelancholy,” Black Camera Vol. 4, number 1 (2012): 196. 156 parallels Precious’s on-screen journey and the novel’s blend of vernacular, narratiive prose, and lyrcism to “fill in the blank spaces,” the gaps that we do not even recognize as gaps in our perceptions of the black body. Speaking of this delicate interplay between perception, embodiment, and knowingness, Gabourey Sidibe says in an interview: I feel weird saying it came natural to me but I mean, I know this girl. I know her in my family, I know her in my friends, I’ve seen her, I’ve lived beside this girl. And there’s no class I could have taken to help me to learn more about her because I knew her already.” A pause. “I didn’t want to be friends with those girls because they had too much drama going on in their lives. I feel guilty for having ignored them. This was at the Wit Hotel on the afternoon before the movie’s red carpet premiere at the Chicago festival. I mentioned the movie’s fantasy scenes, which provide a respite for Precious’s grim daily reality. She imagines herself as a fashion model and movie star.181 “Oh, they were the best scenes because on some days I was bleeding and had dirt on me. So when I got to have makeup on and really pretty hair and a pretty dress, those were just the best days. Because on other days I sometimes had a pregnancy pad on and it just made it worse. Yeah, not only did I have to wear tight, unflattering clothes, sometimes I’d have to be on the ground in leaves or underneath a bridge or a cold gutter or someplace and so it was all hell as a fat girl.”182 Sidibe’s struggle with explaining her experience of inhabiting this role as both mirror image and disembodied image—“I know this girl” and “it was all hell as a fat girl”—evokes a melancholic position while simultaneously negating it as she identifies primarily with the “fantasy” sequences. What Sidibe calls attention to with her dis-identification is the ways in which certain bodies are trapped in their ideological, historical, and political appearances even as they feel profoundly alienated from their own appearance. This phenomenon of simultaneous seeing and unseeing is articulated in the novel: 181 Roger Ebert, “For Gabourey Sidibe, ‘Precious’ Is a Fantasy Come to Life,” October 26, 2009, http://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/for-gabourey-sidibe-precious-is-a-fantasy-come-to-life 182 Roger Ebert, “For Gabourey Sidibe, ‘Precious’ Is a Fantasy Come to Life.” 157 I see it over and over, the real people, the people who show up when the picture come back; and they are pritty people, girls with little titties like buttons and legs like long white straws. Do all white people look like pictures? No, ‘cause the white people at school is fat and cruel like evil witches from fairy tales but they exist. Is it because they white?.Why can’t I see myself, feel where I end and begin.183 This complex navigation of real/unreal, visibility/invisibility, image/absence reveals how difficult it is to be “trapped in a body that looks like pain.” A body without individuation (and, therefore, rendered invisible) because of “the way of seeing that can only feel pity when they look at that body.”184 Precious confronts this limited and limiting way of seeing the poor black body through its genre hybridity. In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes locates a melancholy in the still image of photography that is missing in the moving pictures of cinema. In the paparazzi images, photography (the still image) is reclaimed as Precious’s escape from the naturalizing of the inevitability of her trauma (visually produced by the cinematic flow of pictures). The glamorous fantasies disrupt the flow of the trauma, disrupt the gaze. The film make us reconsider not only Precious’s position as the traumatized, melancholic figure at the center of the film but also the melancholy of the racial wound as, in part, the dual effect of being excessively gazed upon and being made excessive through hyper-visibility. When dominant ideology is fully naturalized, we think that what we see is simply there. But the film’s genre promiscuity makes it difficult to align what we actually see with what we expect to see and therefore with how we feel about the images on display. Precious takes us from still image to cinematic flow, from hothouse melodrama to slapstick, from suffering to laugher, 183 Sapphire, Push (New York: Vintage, 1996), 31. 184 Margo Natalie Crawford. "The Counterliteracy of Postmelancholy," 205. 158 and back again. As the old saying goes, we don’t know whether to laugh or cry. The film suggests that we do both. That we feel deeply and unexpectedly. Precious is not a feel good film. It is disturbing, overwhelming, bludgeoning, shocking, punishing, brutal and, as one critic has described a moment in the film, “leaves you feeling like Mike Tyson just knocked you out.”185 And, yet, the film does not depict suffering as an essential component of identity. In an essay on Toni Morrisson’s Beloved, Kristin Boudreau identifies two patterns that valorize pain: “European romanticism and African American blues.”186 In Keats’s summary, the romantic asks “Do you not see how necessary a World of Pains and troubles is to school an Intelligence and make it a soul?” and revels in “A Place where the heart must feel and suffer in a thousand diverse ways!”187 In contrast to the romantic’s experience of suffering as a private form of soul-making, the blues tradition “expands into a public realm what had hitherto been a private experience of suffering, taking the individual outside of himself and his private pains.”188 Both traditions suggest that pain can be transcended through its transformation into art. Boudreau argues, however, that this can be dangerous because it takes the pain out of suffering, thereby transforming suffering: “If one claims…that suffering makes one fully human, might not this very assertion glorify the pain traditionally deployed against the enslaved body and 185 Wesley Morris, “Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire,” Boston.com, November 20, 2009, http://www.boston.com/ae/movies/articles/2009/11/20/precious_bluntly_goes_to_a_place_rarely _seen____the_life_of_a_young_black_girl/ 186 Kristin Boudreau, “Pain and the Unmaking Self in Toni Morrisson’s Beloved,” in Contemporary Literature XXXVI (1995), 448. 187 Quoted in Boudreau, 448. 188 Ibid., 449 159 mind?”189 By romanticizing pain, “we take the dangerous risk, in Emerson’s words, of ‘courting suffering’ in order to verify our humanity.” Boudreau proposes that Beloved suggests a different view of pain: “suffering…unmakes the self and calls violent attention to the practice of making and unmaking the self.”190 The film, like Precious, is constantly in the process of making and unmaking itself. It is uncomfortable to witness. There is nothing soul-making about our viewing experience or the abuse that Precious endured. Her experiences do not make her stronger; her suffering was not the necessary precondition of romantic transcendence into a fuller selfhood. As Morrisson writes in Beloved, “anything dead coming back to life hurts.”191 It is not just the proximity to pain that the film makes us feel, but the performativity of that pain that offers new possibilities. The story of Claireece Precious Jones, an intentional amalgam of multiple narratives in the novel, is important to tell but it is also just a story. The film’s full title, “Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire,” may be clunky, but it also serves as a reminder that Precious is a work of fiction. It is a performance of blackness. Daniels highlights the importance of the performative in an interview with The A.V. Club: AVC: What made her right for this role? LD: Her smarts. I interviewed 400 girls—I stopped counting by then. Detroit, L.A., Atlanta, Boston, New York, Harlem, Philadelphia. I try to go for as much authenticity as I can, and I try to go for grit and honesty and in-your-face without makeup, and that certainly applied to the search for 189 Ibid., 462. 190 Ibid., 275. 191 Toni Morrisson, Beloved (New York: Knopf, 1987), 55. 160 Precious, too. When I was looking for Precious, I was looking for Precious. I found her. I found 300 of them. But when Gabby auditioned, her tape was brought to me. It was brilliant. But then she started talking to me, and she talks like that. GS: [Cheery tone.] Like this! LD: Like some fuckin’ white chick from the Valley, okay? So, what is this, you know? And I hired her on the spot . . . no, I didn’t hire her on the spot, we talked. I wanted her to talk a little bit about herself and about me and about us, and about what she thought about things, and life, and Lenny Kravitz, and . . . GS: Sunglasses! LD: And then I hired her. I felt that if I had hired one of the girls that I was trying to be authentic with, that would have been exploiting them. Really not putting on a movie, but rather just exploiting this girl that is the ultimate truth, and it would have been a documentary, as opposed to acting. GS: The fantasy scenes would have been weird, too. LD: Yeah, because she’s not acting in the fantasy scenes. She’s just being Gabby in the fantasy scenes; she’s being “Tee-hee-hee-hee!”192 Thus, in Precious we get not authenticity, but performance; not documentary, but narrative fiction; not an abject black girl from the inner city, but “some fuckin’ white chick from the Valley.” In this world, the fantasy most approximates reality. It is this disjuncture that is constantly at play in the film. Precious is excessive in both form and content, but its extravagance calls attention to what it would mean for a black body to perform a role that has not 192 Nathan Rabin, “Lee Daniels and Gabby Sidibe,” The A.V. Club, November 5, 2009, http://www.avclub.com/article/lee-daniels-and-gabby-sidibe-34991 161 been given to you. Instead of using one of the 300 “real” women, Daniels chose Sidibe because she’s a fat black valley girl performing blackness in a new way. The “blackness” of this black cinema, then, is recognizing how the Other’s overembodiment, the Other’s excess, provides the context for the white normative body. Race is not substance; it is a medium, a thing we see through. Although by no means perfect, Precious is an attempt to destabilize surface/content, exterior/interior, race/subjectivity. How Do You Feel? Partially completed IFP Narrative lab and an official selection of 2012 Sundance Film Festival, the film has garnered a wealth of critical recognition, if not wide viewership. It won the 2012 Gotham Award for “Best Film not Playing at a Theater Near You.” In the same year, Filmmaker Magazine selected Nance as one of the 25 new faces of independent film. If Precious is a hybrid, Terence Nance’s An Oversimplification of Her Beauty creates its own genre. From the beginning, the viewer enters a multi-layered narrative world with no clear lines between fiction and reality. The film constantly jumps between documentary footage, colorful animation, claymation, interviews, self-documentation on the film festival circuit, direct address, fictionalized memory, and diverse musical choices. A multimedia hybrid of narrative and documentary that employs experimental techniques, Oversimplification has the feel of a journal or sketchbook. Private notes, doodles, photos, and drawings morph into illustrated titles and remarkably varied animated sequences (Nance collaborated with several different artists), the visual manifestations of Terence’s dreams and emotional states. The motif of analog technology—images of pausing and switching cassettes and the mixtape/needle-drop soundscape, 162 also created by Nance—further reinforces the impression of a handcrafted texture, as does its epistolary nature with much of the “story” framed by letters, texts, and phone messages. After the title sequence, Nance abruptly stops the action, pausing the image as if it were from a degraded videotape while the narrator explains the relationship between the previous short and the new feature. Built around an earlier Nance short called “How Would You Feel?”, Oversimplification opens with a man the narrator calls “You” (played by Nance) in a self-pitying, navel-gazing mood, because the woman he likes (Namik Minter) has canceled a date. Then the movie expands outward, considering the larger context for the protagonist’s case of the blues, taking into account his job status, sleeping habits, past romances, and other, more esoteric factors. Nance describes “You” through multiple second-person voices, adding lengthy quotes from relevant books and old love letters, along with animated interludes in different styles. Nance repeatedly moves back and forth between the old film (“How Would You Feel?”) and the new creation (“An Oversimplification of Her Beauty”), “to provide the context necessary to tell a complete story.” The first film is presented as nonfiction, although the film is constantly blurring the lines beteen reality and fiction, winking at the audience throughout as the fact that we are watching a film necessitates that our experience has always already been a re-creation. Set in New York City, the central narrative focuses on the evolution and deconstruction of a friendship/relationship between Nance and his archetypal desired woman (Namik Minter). Throughout the course of the film their relationship oscillates between a platonic friendship and an unfulfilled romantic one, shifting the bearer of unrequited love between Nance and Namik at different times in the story. Though told in a recursive fashion the story is ultimately, like Medicine for Melancholy, boy meets girl and boy does not know how to turn this connection into a long-term romantic relationship. It is a simple, universal narrative. Through his use of direct 163 address, Nance makes clear that the cinema (and the process of filmmaking) is a vehicle for obsessive return and itself an obstacle to romance and any humanizing project. The second- person narration offsets the potential voyeurism of watching someone agonize over being stood up, and this helps include viewers rather than alienate them. The audience is periodically asked “How would you feel?” by a voice-over thereby becoming implicated in this quarrelsome love story. The nature of this implication may rely on the fact that the viewer literally sees themselves reflected in the highly educated black 20-somethings struggling to make ends meet in the creative class, but it is not necessary. The question is not ‘How does it feel?,’ displacing the affect onto Nance’s slightly fictionalized version of himself. Rather, it’s ‘How would you feel’: a direct call for the viewer to not understand the character’s hurt, but to imagine their own affective, bodily response. An Oversimplification of Her Beauty has been compared to David Lynch’s Inland Empire, Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt, Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation, John Cassavetes, Charlie Kaufman, Woody Allen and Michel Gondry. While varied and apt, these comparison’s notably do not touch on the black arts tradition that is referenced in key moments throughout the film. Although Oversimplification does not explicitly articulate blackness as a theme (as Medicine for Melancholy does), it is aligned with the contemporary, historically informed practices of African-American and Diaspora Artists (the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts is an associate producer), of which Nance is a member and for whom he documents as a cinematographer. For example, an elegant, watercolor animation sequence near the end recalls the stylish figures of Barkley L. Hendricks, a painter whose work has been characterized as “Black Romantic” (a term that links the Black Arts and Black Power Movements with representational painting). Further, the saturated cinematography by Matthew Bray and Shawn 164 Peters captures glowing backlit afros and a multiplicity of black and brown skin tones reminiscent of the portraiture of Hendrick and others. In one of the funniest moments, Nance laments his poor punctuality, and claims that he runs on “Afrocentric time.” This wry observation is matched with a hilarious hospital-set animation of Nance point-blank refusing to emerge from his mother’s womb; The wacky, fluid and cosmic animation, which seems inspired by everyone from Jean-Michel Basquiat to Sun Ra and Barkley L. Hendricks, helps push the film into Afrofuturist territory (the term, coined by Mark Dery, encompasses the work of multimedia artists interested in projecting black futures). Meanwhile the flexible score – running the gamut from evocative, ancient blues to the subtle sci- fi soundscapes of experimental hip-hop producer Flying Lotus – pays aurally satisfying homage to black musical tradition. Figure 30 Animation in An Oversimplification of Her Beauty 165 As Nance notes, “thee only point where ethnic identity is explicitly references is the hair touching scene on the bus.” A racially specific insecurity lies in the moment when a random white girl on the bus touches Nance’s hair while the film’s narrator describes Nance as “busy finishing your education so that you can finish with finding who you are, so that you can finish with those years in life in which you have no clear answer to the question: What do you do?” As with many moments in the film, the narration doesn’t align with the image on screen. As the voiceover gives the viewer access to the typical musings of a college student as they wonder about their place in the world, what we see is a white woman, slightly out of frame, reach across and touch Nance’s rather large Afro. No words are exchanged. We never see the woman’s face. The camera only lingers, briefly, on a half-wry, half-knowing smile of the (fictionalized?) Nance. The lack of verbal or even physical acknowledgment (there is no swatting away as the hand quickly grabs at his coils) immediately calls to mind the film’s refrain “How would you feel?” In Nance’s explorations of his own limits—his vulnerability and emotional unavailability—the film draws attention to the tension between intimacy and masquerade. Nance’s visualization of abjection, rejection, and unnerving exposure challenges the stereotype of black masculinity. In a black media scape loaded with images of black masculinity that generally treat displays of bravado and invulnerability as axiomatic, Nance’s circumspect self- portrait casts quite a different shadow. It is a shadow that echoes Raengo’s call for a non- representational black cinema: The image-state of the shadow offers instead an alternative paradigm whereby blackness is no longer conceived as a content but rather as a state of the image. Most especially, this paradigm allows race to be severed both from a compromised epistemology of the visual that repressively maps a visible outside onto an invisible inside and from cultural expectations about what black bodies can be and do.193 193 Alessandra Raengo, "Shadowboxing,” 201. 166 Concerned with the project of black self-making, Nance recognizes the artistic possibilities involved in projecting blackness from a point other than the mainstream. The film uses an aesthetics of collage to create what Michele Prettyman Beverly has described as a post- black “politics of bodily liberation” in which white and black bodies circulate, affect, and are affected ‘beyond the entrenched meanings and boundaries of cultural politics. As in Medicine for Melancholy and Precious, it is a space where black bodies occupy the in-between of time and space, still image and flow, vulnerability and empowerment, extravagance and abjection. 167 CODA The idea for this project began not with my discovery of the deeply pleasurable, passively self-absorbing act of scrolling online images; or the yearning to see unruly bodies that were merely living a life in all of their complicated, messy beauty projected on my screen; or that uncanny feeling of having somehow been looked at and felt by a thing that can neither see nor touch; or, even, the jolt of excitement of being shown a way of looking at a body with a new kind of tenderness. Although all of these describe meaningful and memorable ways we brush up against excess daily, it was the words of the black, lesbian, feminist, mother, poet warrior Audre Lorde that inspired this work. In the prologue of Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Lorde dedicates the book to DeLois, who she loved and feared because “she was big and Black and special and seemed to laugh all over,” to Louise Briscoe who died alone but not lonely, to the battered white woman and her child who leave Lorde feeling both sorrow and an impotent rage in her dreams, to “the pale girl…with only a nightgown and bare feet, screaming and crying” to be taken to the hospital, to the first woman she courted and, finally, to the found community that have given her shelter.194 It is the late night encounter, however, that has always lingered in my mind. Lorde writes of this unnamed, desperate girl: I stopped the car quickly, and leaned over to open the door. It was high summer. “Yes, yes, I’ll try to help you, I said. “Get in.” And when she saw my face in the streetlamp her own collapsed in terror. 194 Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (Berkeley and Toronto: Crossing Press, 1982), 4. 168 “Oh no!” she wailed. “Not you!” then whirled around and started to run again. What could she have seen in my Black face that was worth holding onto such horror? Wasting me in the gulf between who I was and her vision of me. Left with no help.195 It is this brief exchange that haunts Excessive Vision(s). The girl’s need, vulnerability, and fear are palpable in Lorde’s short description of the encounter. And, yet, when she peers into the car and sees not the face of salvation or reprieve or the diffusion of harm—a white face—but that of a Black woman, she recoils. The horror of her situation not, as one would suspect, dissipated by the presence of a kind stranger, but amplified when black skin becomes visible. One cannot help but think of Franz Fanon’s recounting of hearing a child say “Maman, look, a Negro; I’m scared.”196 The fear that this girl, “the age of [her] daughter,” and the child expresses is of similar provenance. There is an affective exchange between Lorde and the girl, a communication at the level of bodily feeling. It is a fear deeply rooted in racialized attitudes that transform the proffered hand into an object of abject horror, more terrifying even than the more immediate threat to her life materializing just behind her—“leather jacket and boots, male and white.” Though this girl’s terror is the result of internalized racial hatred, what makes this recounting so compelling to me is not simply the relationship between the white gaze and the black body, but the rapid exchange of bodily attitudes and postures that are reproduced between these two bodies. Lorde calls this exchange a “gulf” that engenders in her not anger, but a feeling of being wasted. This moment was pregnant with possibility but because the girl’s vision of Lorde was so obscured by layers of “knowledge” about what bodies like Lorde’s are meant to be 195 Ibid., 5. 196 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 1952, 2008), 95. 169 she was unable to see her body as it was—a body that is capable of all forms of sociality because her gaze does not turn others into objects. So many are wasted in this way; discarded as unclean, as undesirable, as unruly, as just too much in need of care. It was this tension between being marked as both excessive—too large, too dark, too queer—and superfluous—certain needs, desires, and ways of living a life are imagined to have no use for the social body—that Excessive Vision(s) has explored. In a slight reworking of George Bataille’s description of the phobic object, I argue that the excessive body is a “sticky…object without boundaries.” 197 One effect of this is that excessively marked bodies experience socio-spatial ambivalence. This can be seen with participants in online fat activist communities, in the Museum for Obeast Conservation Studies’ marking as ‘endangered’ the very body (Rachel Herrick) that was necessary for the “exhibit” to come into existence, Micah’s grappling with what it means to be a black body who enjoys “white” aesthetics, and Precious’s rich fantasy life. This ambivalence, however, can also be the grounds for the emergence of new kinds of affects and affective attachments. If excessive, overdetermined, unruly bodies produce ambivalent affects, their effects can also be contradictory and unexpected. Indeterminacy can be profoundly unsettling for the subject that lives in the inbetween, but it can also be the starting point for imagining different kinds of relationships to one’s habitus. Wangechi Mutu’s visually dense hybrid figures, Nicole Byers’ “loosely” autobiographical portrayal of a fat, black woman in the entertainment industry, Terence Nance’s genre bending self-exploration, and Ellen Gallagher’s maximalist minimalism are examples of ways to put that ambivalence to a different use. If the frightened girl (you, me, all of us) wants to 197 Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, vol. II, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 95. 170 yell “Not you!,” they respond not with acceptance of this rejection or (only) with anger, but with a question: What does this make you feel? Sara Ahmed argues that instead of thinking of emotions as “the inside getting out” or “the outside getting in,” we must understand emotions as doing the “work to create the very distinction between the inside and the outside” (Ahmed, 2004: 28). That is, “it is through the movement of emotions that the very distinction between inside and outside, or the individual and the social, is effected in the first place” (28). In Excessive Vision(s) I have attempted to show that excess does not have to make you feel fear, disgust, detachment, or hopelessness. It can instead help begin the process of the repair of one’s limited vision(s) through a radical destabilizing of the very category of excess. How do some bodies become “too much”? Against what and whom are they measured? Who must be excluded from the intimate touch or the gentle embrace so that others can be made whole? I have been promiscuous with genre, form, and identities in gesturing towards answers to these questions because excess touches bodies differently. The experience of being made Other through the logics of excess cannot be smoothly mapped onto different identity formations. However, the effect of turning excess from homogeneity into hybridity, from singularity to multiplicity, from stasis to disruption are similar: the viewer is confronted with their own complicity in “wasting” others. These works re-position these wasted bodies as central to building a present where the face revealed in the streetlamp is an invitation, not a refusal. 171 BIBLIOGRAPHY Abdur-Rahman, Aliyyah I. "Black Grotesquerie." American Literary History 29, no. 4 (2017): 682-703. Adams, Rachel. Sideshow USA: Freaks and the American cultural imagination. University of Chicago Press, 2001. Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004. _______. The Promise of Happiness. 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