Sensational Flesh. Amber Jamilla Musser

      

      Sexual Cultures

      General Editors: José Esteban Muñoz and Ann Pellegrini

       Times Square Red, Times Square Blue

      Samuel R. Delany

       Private Affairs: Critical Ventures in the Culture of Social Relations

      Phillip Brian Harper

       In Your Face: 9 Sexual Studies

      Mandy Merck

       Tropics of Desire: Interventions from Queer Latino America

      José Quiroga

       Murdering Masculinities: Fantasies of Gender and Violence in the American Crime Novel

      Greg Forter

       Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest

      Edited by Lauren Berlant and Lisa Duggan

       Black Gay Man: Essays

      Robert Reid Pharr Foreword by Samuel R. Delany

       Passing: Identity and Interpretation in Sexuality, Race, and Religion

      Edited by María Carla Sánchez and Linda Schlossberg

       The Explanation for Everything: Essays on Sexual Subjectivity

      Paul Morrison

       The Queerest Art: Essays on Lesbian and Gay Theater

      Edited by Alisa Solomon and Framji Minwalla

       Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism

      Edited by Arnaldo Cruz Malavé and Martin F. Manalansan IV

       Queer Latinidad: Identity Practices, Discursive Spaces

      Juana María Rodríguez

       Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance

      Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini

       Boricua Pop: Puerto Ricans and the Latinization of American Culture

      Frances Négron-Muntaner

       Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era

      Marlon Ross

       In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives

      Judith Halberstam

       Why I Hate Abercrombie and Fitch: Essays on Race and Sexuality in the U.S.

      Dwight A. McBride

       God Hates Fags: The Rhetorics of Religious Violence

      Michael Cobb

       Once You Go Black: Choice, Desire, and the Black American Intellectual

      Robert Reid-Pharr

       The Latino Body: Crisis Identities in American Literary and Cultural Memory

      Lázaro Lima

       Arranging Grief: Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America

      Dana Luciano

       Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity

      José Esteban Muñoz

       Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism

      Scott Herring

       Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination

      Darieck Scott

       Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries

      Karen Tongson

       Beyond the Nation: Diasporic Filipino Literature and Queer Reading

      Martin Joseph Ponce

       Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled

      Michael Cobb

       Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performance in the Asias

      Eng-Beng Lim

       Transforming Citizenships: Transgender Articulations of the Law

      Isaac West

       The Delectable Negro: Human Consumption and Homoeroticism within US Slave Culture

      Vincent Woodard, Edited by Justin A. Joyce and Dwight A. McBride

       Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures and Other Latina Longings

      Juana María Rodríguez

       Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism

      Amber Jamilla Musser

      Sensational Flesh

      Race, Power, and Masochism

      Amber Jamilla Musser

      New York University Press

      New York and London

      New York University Press

      New York and London

       www.nyupress.org

      © 2014 by New York University

      All rights reserved

      References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Musser, Amber Jamilla.

      Sensational flesh : race, power, and masochism / Amber Jamilla Musser.

      pages cm. — (Sexual cultures)

      Includes bibliographical references and index.

      ISBN 978-1-4798-9181-8 (cl : alk. paper)

      ISBN 978-1-4798-3249-1 (pb : alk. paper)

      1. Sadomasochism 2. Sexual dominance and submission. 3. Queer theory. 4. Race.

      I. Title.

      HQ79.M877 2014

      306.77’5—dc23

      New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books.

      A book in the American Literatures Initiative (ALI), a collaborative publishing project of NYU Press, Fordham University Press, Rutgers University Press, Temple University Press, and the University of Virginia Press. The Initiative is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. For more information, please visit www.americanliteratures.org.

      For my parents, who bought me my first leather skirt

      Contents

      Acknowledgments

      1. Introduction: Theory, Flesh, Practice

      2.