“Shadows and Noise” with Amber Jamilla Musser

How does your embodiment affect your perception and thus your writing? This is one of many questions Amber Jamilla Musser tackles in her most recent monograph, which builds on her brilliant work in Black feminism and queer femininity. Amber tells us how sensation and individual experience need to be part of an ethics of perception and why queerness is method that allows us to think capaciously and in connection with the body.

Come and marinate in the unruliness of being with us! Follow @queerlitpodcast and @a_jamilla on Instagram for more.  

References:
https://www.amberjamillamusser.com/
Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism (NYU Press, 2014)
Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance (NYU Press, 2018)
Between Shadows and Noise: Sensation, Situatedness, and the Undisciplined (Duke University Press, 2024)
Queer Form (special issue of ASAP, edited by Kadji Amin, Amber Jamilla Musser and Roy Pérez)
Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies (NYU Press, 2021)
Feminist Keywords Podcast
Karen Tongson
Association for Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP)
Jordan Peele’s Us
Ming Smith’s Flamingo Fandango (West Berlin) (painted)
Édouard Glissant
Ronak Kapadia
Stephanie Clare
Sharon Holland’s an other
Tiffany Lethabo King
Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Audre Lorde
Titus Kaphar’s Pillow for Fragile Fictions
Audre Lorde’s Zami: A Biomythography
Mecca Jamilah Sullivan’s Big Girl  

Questions you should be able to respond to after listening:

1.      What does Amber mean when she speaks about masochism?
2.      What might an ethics of perception be?
3.      Amber speaks about how our bodily histories affect how we perceive. What is you bodily history?
4.      Amber suggests that queerness is a method in Between Shadows and Noise. What does this method allow Amber to do?
5.      How is knowledge embodied? Do you think about this when you read or write academic texts, which often suggest a neutral, disembodied perspective?