Kadji Amin, Amber Jamilla Musser, and Roy Pérez

QUEER FORM:
AESTHETICS, RACE, AND THE
VIOLENCES OF THE SOCIAL

T
his special issue wagers that a focus on aesthetic form need not be
a turn away from the politicized concern with race and social and
geopolitical inequities so critical within contemporary queer studies.
In making this claim, we simultaneously reach back to early queer literary
scholarship engaged with structuralism and aesthetics and reach through and
around contemporary queer theory into current conversations on racialization,
materiality, and sensation.

In doing so, we seek to make two principal contributions to scholarship on

aesthetics and social critique. The first is to assert that aesthetic form is crucial
to the work of queer artists, artists of color, and, more broadly, artists concerned
with the structural conditions of social violences. Many contributors to this
issue make this fundamental point in response to an interpretative violence too
often visited upon artists of colors and indigenous artists in particular. These
artists are often assigned the role of testifying to the sociological conditions of
their own disempowerment. They are the “native informants” of the art world,
tasked with producing art that transmits information rather than pushing aes-
thetic boundaries. Such a colonial tasking undermines or even silences analysis
of their aesthetic aims. Aesthetic innovation and formal manipulation are, how-
ever, the very substance of many of these artists’ engagement with legacies of
social violence. Aesthetic form offers resources of resistance to the violences of
interpretation that prematurely fix the meaning of minority artistic production
within prefabricated narratives.

Secondly, we seek to nudge the long history of scholarship on form and aesthet-
ics into the terrain of new scholarly and artistic work on affect, sensation, and

ASAP/Journal, Vol. 2.2 (2017): 227–239

© 2017 Johns Hopkins University Press.

 materiality. Envisioning form expansively, as the sum total of formal structure,
artistic technique, and plasticity of medium, opens the way to an engagement
with artworks in their multifaceted materiality, as a sensuous mode of relation to
their audiences. Approaching the sensuous materiality of artworks expansively
displaces the primacy of the visual—the regime within which queer bodies
and bodies of color have been most violently

“
We strive to think the queer as
enmeshed within—and indeed,
activated and enabled by—the
structures of aesthetic form,
social inequality, and conceptual
categorization within
which the work of engaged
artists takes shape.
subjected to the demands of cultural legibility.
The essays in this issue meditate on the ways in
which form often operates beneath the surface
of the visual, trafficking in affective and sensu-
ous modes of meaning-making.
Each essay here attends to the way form is made
useful to queer expression and social critique.
Engaging movement and oral storytelling as
resistance against the “poselock” of colonial
anthropology (Brewer Ball), the kinetic han-
dling of a film camera as a means of inhabiting

”
the city (Montez), queer sequencing in comics
(Fawaz), the body as a site of excess labor and
opaque expression (León), the use of adapta-
tion to toggle between historical periods and hint at disavowed embodiments
(Row), and the depressive aesthetic posture as a potential ethics of listening
(Ramos), these essays highlight conscious, queer activations of form.

This special issue pairs the words “queer” and “form” as a provocation to think
the ways in which form is not (or not only) something to resist and transgress in
the quest for a greater queer freedom. We strive to think the queer as enmeshed
within—and indeed, activated and enabled by—the structures of aesthetic
form, social inequality, and conceptual categorization within which the work of
engaged artists takes shape. Form informs queerness, and queerness is best under-
stood as a series of relations to form, relations not limited to binary and adversarial
models of resistance and opposition.

QUEER ACTIVITY

Roland Barthes describes the interpretation of form as summoning, as sooth-

saying, and as a “mantic activity.”1 But as an interpretive activity, aesthetic

ASAP/Journal 228 /
criticism is never a simple or neutral process of divining structure, but of mak-
ing forms do things: forms can be interpreted to fray the apparent self-evidence
of social patterns, rupture historical procession, or bring ruination and possi-
bility into view for planning our next move. In his expression of hope in the
performative promise of cultural interpretation, Barthes’s proposition that
“structuralism, too, is a certain form of the world, which will change with
the world” diverges from the determinist, universalist notions of structure we
might associate with early proponents such as Ferdinand de Saussure or Claude
Lévi-Strauss.2 Laying the groundwork for deconstruction as a politically salient
exercise, Barthes describes structural activity not as a cumulative empiricism,
but as an interpretive social and intellectual improvisation that can be guided
by a desire for change. Form is of the world, but as mediation and signification
it also produces the world. We revive Barthes briefly here to point to the ways
in which his vision of interpretive activity announces the methods of queer
cultural analysis and performance studies that influence the authors in this
special issue, particularly in signaling how contemporary queer interpretation
understands the world-making capacity of aesthetic forms. The world-mak-
ing ethos of contemporary queer studies is vulnerable to critique, because
when it is perceived as unmoored from history it appears idealistic and fac-
ile. The essays in this volume demonstrate our view that scholarly and artistic
world-making need not be a historically unmoored interpretative act, however,
but can be a creative orchestration of historical objects to create assemblages
that expose archival ties, make critical perspectives on the past intelligible, and
summon possibilities that unseat political stagnation. And if form is “what
keeps the contiguity of units from appearing as pure effect of chance,” then
queer formal practices wrest representation from the heterosexist and racist
mishandling of history.3

Our understanding of queer form aims to think anew about seemingly out-
moded formal movements such as structuralism, narratology, and the figural.
Methods of (lower-case) structural analysis in fact lurk fundamentally in queer
theory’s attention to the shuttling of meaning between the social and the
aesthetic. Might an inventory of queer formal practices by artists and schol-
ars engaged in politically engaged projects open up ways to see, or use, these
methodological standbys differently? How do some of the formalist moves and
methods of aesthetic analysis we regularly employ take on renewed value for
interdisciplinary queer criticism?

Amin, Musser, & Pérez 229 /

 “
Queer methods of critique […] reach promiscuously and willfully across
texts and time. We view these as performances of structural dissent—
the refusal to be deterministically structured—that offer a rethinking of
historical and formal method.

”
An analytical strategy that seems to have pride of place in queer cultural studies
is the intuitive combination of seemingly disparate objects whose connections
emerge through the critic’s idiosyncratic style of rhetorical and archival disclo-
sure. Eve Sedgwick’s proposal that we be willing to set unlikely objects and
ideas “beside” one another and proceed from there (rather than getting bogged
down in justifying the suitability of cultural material) serves as a touchstone for
a number of the essays in this issue. Sedgwick’s theory gives scholars license
to think together concepts and works of art that might appear inconsonant
according to strictures of historical period, genre, medium, or perceived cul-
tural context, but whose relevance and discursive imbrication become visible
through the activity of the queer critic, whose expressed desires or politics then
have space to become heuristic starting points. “Ideally,” she writes, “life, loves,
and ideas might then sit freely, for a while, on the palm of the open hand.”4
Centering the critic’s faceted subjecthood in this way, Sedgwick allows us to
unearth connections that are buried within imperatives of evidentiary method
and which are never ideologically neutral, self-evident, or apolitical. When we
read each other’s work, we often prompt each other to provide grounds for a
particular assembly of texts and artworks, especially when those works don’t
appear bound in an obvious way by historical context, medium, or subject
matter. In queer analysis, established categories often take a back seat to affect,
feel, style, or disruption. These writerly modes of critique are not automatically
signs of insufficient rigor; we view these permeable margins between critic and
criticism as the very vehicle for emergent forms of intellectual engagement, of
which we may presently have only limited visibility and approximate language.
Critical race theory, for example, is founded on an intervention within legal
studies that understands racism not as a cultural aberration discretely embedded
within neutral institutional structures such as the law, but as the foundation on
which structures like the law are built. Mass ideology bears a deep structure, a

ASAP/Journal 230 /
structure that obfuscates, naturalizes, and decenters itself by emerging across a
proliferation of seemingly disparate mediums and moments. Queer methods of
critique, including forms of queer of color critique employed by many of our
contributors, reach promiscuously and willfully across texts and time. We view
these as performances of structural dissent—the refusal to be deterministically
structured—that offer a rethinking of historical and formal method.

AESTHETICS AS A QUEER OF COLOR CRITIQUE

INTERVENTION

In Jennifer Doyle and David Getsy’s 2013 conversation on queer form in Art
Journal, Getsy begins by dismissing critics who claim that “anything other than
the obvious is ‘reading into’ or hopeful projective fantasy.”5 Doyle follows suit
by writing, “That complaint about ‘reading into’ usually displaces a conversation
about desire with a complaint about identity—it mistakes the effort to expand
on how pleasure works for a taxonomical project.”6 For Getsy and Doyle, the
conservatism of such complaints suppresses interpretative desire in the name of
authorial intent. By contrast, Getsy and Doyle’s intervention emphasizes the
multiple ways one can relate with and through art, thereby displacing artistic
intent with diverse frames of knowing, desiring, and seeing. In this rejection
of art as transparent we see an important parallel between their understanding
of queer formalism and the impulse behind queer of color critique. Emerging
from a tradition of materialist analysis, queer of color critique is invested in chal-
lenging how sexuality has been framed and aims to draw attention to racialized
historical foreclosures of imagination. In Aberrations in Black, Roderick Ferguson
describes this project: “we need a study of racial formations that will not oblige
heteropatriarchy, an analysis of sexuality not severed from race and material rela-
tions, an interrogation of African American culture that keeps company with
other racial formations, and an American studies not beguiled by the United
States.”7 In light of Ferguson’s work, we can see that queer of color critique aims
to illuminate questions of structure and epistemology. Like queer formalism, it
is a politics of knowledge production.

In fusing queer formalism with queer of color critique, our issue’s focus on
queer form fleshes out the territory around critique to illuminate the vast
sensuous modes queerness can take. Many of the essays and contributions
collected in this issue foreground questions of relation vis-à-vis race. These

Amin, Musser, & Pérez 231 /

essays’ insistence on thinking about race and sexuality in conversation with
queer form makes the consideration of aesthetics important for queer of
color critique. Not only does this fusion explicitly invite racialization into
conversations about desire and pleasure, but it also enables us to think about
aesthetics in the vein of the political. Bringing attention to aesthetics as a mode
of knowledge production, as Caroline Levine suggests in her analysis of form,
allows us to think about the different ways that knowledge is produced on and
through bodies.8 In the following essays, form focuses attention on how vio-
lence—homophobia, racism, gentrification, capitalism, and colonialism, for
instance—has structured conditions of possibility in material and epistemolog-
ical ways. Violence is both what must be rejected and what must be worked
through.

Through their descriptions of what a turn away from the mandate of trans-
parency looks like, Getsy and Doyle emphasize strategies of reading—queer
formalisms—that focus on the relationships that artists, and works of art, pro-
duce with viewers. These relationships are sensuous, suffused with what Doyle
terms the erotic, “a language or a set of affects animating and inhabiting this
kind of work, but also as a mode of knowing (or even being known by) the
object,” and with what Getsy often describes through the language of tactility.9
Just like queer of color critique, queer formalism expands the repertoire of what
counts as knowledge and finds pockets of existence among the crevices of the
normative. For our purposes, queer form means challenging the primacy of the
visual, which has too often been a site for pernicious power relations. As theo-
rists such as Michel Foucault, Simone Browne, Nicole Fleetwood, and others
have argued, visuality has long been imbricated in technologies of domination.
Nicholas Mirzoeff writes:

[F]irst, it classifies by naming, categorizing, and defining—a process

Foucault defined as “the nomination of the visible.”… Next, visuality
separates the groups so classified as a means of social organization. Such
visuality segregated those it visualized to prevent them from cohering as
political subjects, such as workers, the people, or the (decolonized) na-
tion. Finally, it makes this separated classification seem right and hence
aesthetic.10

At their base, such operations of surveillance and classification rely on the con-
cept of immutable difference, on sharp boundaries, and on the possibility of

ASAP/Journal 232 /
exhaustively knowing the other. These technologies produce, in short, what
Hortense Spillers describes as the impossibility of “the one.”11 This is to say that
subjects who are othered register in sociological rather than individual terms
within a metric of comparison. Queer form becomes an important tool for
working against this flattening of subjectivity.

We see queer form as an aesthetics that moves persistently around the visual,
thereby avoiding this flattening. To the extent that form operates behind the

“
scenes as ideological impulse and materiality,
queer formal practices can resist the dictates of
transparency normally required of non-nor- To the extent that form operates
mative subjects by illuminating the unseen.
behind the scenes as ideological
In this way it not only troubles the epistemic
assurances of the visual regime, but it also asks impulse and materiality, queer
how shifting away from static visuality can formal practices can resist the
circumnavigate questions of objectification. A dictates of transparency normally
move toward the diffusely sensual, and away
required of non-normative subjects
from the linearity of visual gazing, articulates
difference in terms that are not about dom- by illuminating the unseen.

”
inance or norms, but that underscore the
importance of thinking with other modes
of knowing, theorizing, and experiencing. Queer form is about other ways of
understanding relationships to power and relationships to being.

By announcing our interest in queer form as a sensual intervention in sexuality

studies and aesthetics, we position this special issue alongside other recent schol-
arly work that mobilizes the senses. Here, we are thinking specifically of GLQ’s
double issue “On The Visceral,” edited by Sharon Patricia Holland, Marcía
Ochoa, and Kyla Wazana Tompkins, and a special issue of Women and Performance
on “The Haptic: Textures of Performance,” edited by Rizvana Bradley. In the
former, Holland, Ochoa, and Tompkins describe their interest “in the mate-
riality of what must be cast out, and in the space of the nonproductive—what
takes place in the viscera at the intersection of food studies, critical race the-
ory, and sexuality studies.”12 Further, in their introduction to the second set of
essays that comprise “On the Visceral,” Holland, Ochoa, and Tompkins echo
Getsy and Doyle’s plea to move beyond the conventions of the identitarian and
toward the capacity for the visceral “to signify toward forms of feeling that are

Amin, Musser, & Pérez 233 /

not always liberatory or even eventful.”13 In this GLQ compilation, the visceral
enables a contemplation of materiality, the line between subject and object,
affect, and the porosity of borders. The visceral also looms large in Bradley’s
discussion of the haptic, although her special issue is more invested in questions
of texture and politics. The essays in the issue, Bradley writes, “consider how
touching, folding, fingering, or tracing the texture of an object, offer themselves
as techniques of knowing in art and performance. In doing so, they expand the
critical parameters of what the haptic can mean not simply in diverse contexts
of art and art making, but more specifically at the crucial edges of performance
and social practice.”14 In foregrounding corporeality, both “On the Visceral”
and “The Haptic” draw attention to the importance of non-visual frames of
knowledge. Alongside an impulse to think with the body, the essays in “Queer
Form” foreground questions of relation and sensuality as modes of critique.
They seek to expand our conceptions of often unacknowledged norms, without
necessarily staking a claim for the anti-normative. Instead, these essays ask us to
consider minoritarian aesthetics as the production of queer forms of knowing,
feeling, and existing.

Even as they displace the objectifying regime of the visual, the essays in this
issue critically interrogate the imperatives of representational content and linear
narrative in order to elaborate other modes of sensuous knowing. The insep-
arability of “form” and “content” in the process of meaning-making is a well
established doctrine across a range of critical traditions. When the artwork in
question is by a minoritarian artist or touches on political issues, however, the
import of form tends to become lost for critics and audiences alike. In her con-
tribution to this special issue, for instance, Christina León demonstrates that La
Chica Boom’s campy “Spictacles” of ethnic drag were not received as camp at
all. For white audiences, the artist’s performances of racialized abjection were
too close to racial “fact” to be interpreted as commentary, while the literality of
her brownness seemed to preempt formal mediation. As Iván Ramos explains,
moreover, the desire to know the content of a work—in laypersons’ terms, what
it is “about”—frequently functions as a way to avoid a more intimate engage-
ment with difference, particularly when this difference is racialized. In sum,
critics and audiences alike tend to receive work by indigenous artists and artists
of color as being all content and no form—overdetermined by the artist’s biography
and isomorphic with the sociopolitical. This overwhelming focus on ethnic or
sociopolitical “content” is very much of a piece with the history of the visual

ASAP/Journal 234 /
objectification, hierarchization, and categorization of racialized peoples that
functioned as a signal method of colonial modernity. Such a focus demands,
once again, that minoritarian subjects and their artistic productions yield, to the
observer, the truth of their own difference. “Queer form” emerges, by contrast,
as a name for the range of formal, aesthetic, and sensuous strategies that make
difference a little less knowable, visible, and digestible. This special issue makes
a case for the value of indirection, opacity, and withholding as queer strategies
for minoritarian art producers.

Linear narrative forms have their uses. They allow us to understand the signif-
icance of particular moments and settings within the arc of broader historical
transformations. They may also serve to mobilize feelings of outrage and indig-
nation at everyday experiences of loss, survival, and violence in order to drive
the present to a state of crisis. By offering an originary cause—this historical
injury, that devastating policy—as well as delineating a course of action that
would provide redress, such narratives can convert ongoing forms of disposses-
sion and misery into politicized mobilizations. For that reason, linear narratives
have been of great significance to queer, racialized, and indigenous histories
and political movements. Nonetheless, our contributors call attention to the
value of forms of narration, and aesthetics of time, that do not string events
into arcs of historical significance or linear narratives of cause and effect, injus-
tice and redress. Ricardo Montez argues, for instance, for a recognition of what
it feels like to inhabit history. His essay attends to the “queer potentiality” of
eventhood in Nelson Sullivan’s sensuous and embodied video documentation
of the New York downtown scene without framing it within the retrospective
historical narratives of gentrification and the AIDS crisis. Iván Ramos notes
how Chantal Ackerman’s 2002 film From the Other Side eschews documentary
conventions that might prompt cathartic identification and political outrage on
the part of the viewer. Instead, he demonstrates how Ackerman wields duration
and distance to force the viewer to sit with the ongoingness of dispossession
and loss for migrants across the U.S.-Mexico border. Katherine Brewer Ball’s
essay makes a case for “quiet indirectness” as a relation to the world and to oth-
ers, cultivated in Alaskan indigenous practices of learning and storytelling, that
sidesteps demands for recognition by the settler state. These essays analyze queer
formal strategies that skirt or stretch linear narratives to accommodate other
ways of inhabiting the event, sensing the everyday, and narrating communal and
environmental stories.

Amin, Musser, & Pérez 235 /

Both Katherine Brewer Ball’s essay “Queer Form, Quiet Frame: A Sense of
Native Alaskan Aesthetics in Emily Johnson’s The Thank-You Bar” and Christina
León’s essay “Forms of Opacity: Roaches, Blood, and Being Stuck in Xandra
Ibarra’s Corpus” emphasize the embodied production of opacity as queer forms
of minoritarian performance. Brewer Ball foregrounds questions of belonging
and citizenship through an analysis of Emily Johnson’s Thank-You Bar perfor-
mance. By using description as a performative mode of argumentation, Brewer
Ball argues for an aesthetics of quiet and indirection as a way of moving beyond
identity without losing sight of the powerful impact of settler colonialism. León,
in turn, analyzes Ibarra’s menstrual Rorschach tests as performances of with-
holding and opacity. Insisting on bodily presence without presenting her body,
Ibarra complicates expectations of what constitutes interiority while enabling a
queer form of camp to emerge. In León’s words, she finds a way “to expose her
interiority and yield it as radically opaque.”

Iván Ramos’ “Slow Encounters: Chantal Ackerman’s Encounters from the Other
Side and the Queer Form of the Mexican Migrant” and Ricardo Montez’s
“Virtuosic Distortion: Nelson Sullivan’s Queer Hand” focus on the deploy-
ment of cinematic techniques such as distortion and “besideness” as forms
of eliciting belonging and emotion that register outside of the camera’s gaze.
Ramos analyzes Ackerman’s Encounters From the Other Side to theorize beside-
ness as a formal technique that produces an aesthetic of Latinx dispossession:
what is important is what is just outside the cinematic frame. This space outside
invites melancholy and allows viewers to feel the traces of migration. Likewise,
Montez examines Sullivan’s use of the fish-eye camera lens as a technology of
strategic distortion by means of which Sullivan invites viewers into the wide
panorama of downtown New York in the late 1980s, with all its layers of queer-
ness. In this play with (cinematic) narrative, an aesthetics of movement emerges
as the source of unexpected intimacies.

Both Jennifer Row’s and Ramzi Fawaz’s essays focus on the processes of reading
and interpretation as forms of temporal trespass that enable intimacies with the
past. Row’s essay, “The Beads of Versailles: Othoniel’s Les Belles Danses,” uses
Jean-Michel Othoniel’s glass sculptures to explore different modes of trans-his-
torical belonging through the adaptation of historical, political, and aesthetic
forms. Rather than presenting static sculptures, she argues, Othoniel’s beads
embody the norms of seventeenth-century choreography, which lurk beneath

ASAP/Journal 236 /
the contemporary surface, persistently working to trouble particular norms of
gentility and modernity. Similarly Fawaz’s “Stripped to the Bone: Sequencing
Queerness in the Comic Strip Work of Joe Brainard and David Wojnarowicz”
urges us to consider the seriality of comics as a way to rethink intimacy during
the AIDS crisis. Seriality, Fawaz argues, enables us to experience the temporal-
ity of reading not as progressive, but as productive of various smaller intimacies
and futures. Through its emphasis on reading as choreography, seriality troubles
the fixity of the visual and invites an embodied viewer into the frame.

CONCLUSION: FORM AND LONGING

Would that saying were doing,

invoking were curing,
cutting were outing,
I’d have spelled myself home
Spelled the ruptures’ sutures
a thousand times by now.
—Tommy Pico, IRL15

Queers reach for aesthetic opportunity despite the failure of artistic expression
to enact immediate social change. Rather than impugn the appeal of aesthet-
ics, or cloister abstraction from practice, they suggest that aesthetic fashioning
plays an important role in activating queer politics. When the queer Kumeyaay
speaker in Tommy Pico’s IRL discloses his wish—“would that saying were
doing”—it is hardly an expression of surrender: the line appears at the start
of the first of three book-length poems. The subjunctive wish instead reveals
the paradoxical drive to narrate a resistance to modern colonized existence, in
spite of the apparent incapacities of the medium. In IRL, the long form enacts
the protracted drag of longing for a better medium, for sex, for reparation, and
for political change. The implicit acknowledgement that saying is not imme-
diately doing—and that we might cut and cut without “outing” that which is
blighted—here invokes the political limits of performativity with which some
lines of queer studies have grappled in a battle against strict political pragmatism.

The long poem in the digital age itself presents one such formal disavowal of
what might be considered politically pragmatic today. A form linked most dis-
tantly to the ancient epic, then to predominantly white and male modernists,
and more recently to contemporary white women poets, the long poem enables

Amin, Musser, & Pérez 237 /

Pico to mess with metrics of scale and taste: IRL does not present vignettes
of Indigenous representation but a sustained narrative full of political critique
and contradictory turns. It’s an epic that refuses to posture as high art, instead
riding a wave of information-age oversharing, one-liners, and snark. Pico uses
the affordances of the long-form poem to invoke the sensual proximity of dis-
parate vectors of experience and thought, like terror and pleasure, the historical
and the immediate, the obscure and the popular, the political and the sexual.
Length allows IRL to activate a queer, Indigenous interpretation of empire by
exhaustively sequencing sex, history, gossip, and critique into epic monumen-
talization. The poem does not allow the speaker to “spell his way home,” but
the spell is cast anyway, and a metaphorical home of political valence and utility
finds form in a public language.

To speak of the world-making capacity of aesthetic forms is not a willful act of

naivety (though such acts of unknowing have their own value), but a way to
keep critical practice vital and resist the downward pull of political surrender.
Pico invokes this paradox when he bemoans that saying is not doing amid the
hundred-page flow of IRL’s single column of text. Invoking an emergent world
is not a cure. In lieu of a cure, it performs a tear in the landscape of American
memory through which new stories can gain critical traction. Pico’s wish that
incantation might spell “the rupture’s sutures”— the rupture of colonial time
into the fabric of what preceded it—reminds us of the irreducibility of aesthetic
and social forms. The wish for repair through something as ubiquitous and as
plastic as language laments the limitations of the present, but it also insists simul-
taneously on the capacity of art to provide solace, pleasure, and possibility.

Notes
The editors of this special issue would like to thank our anonymous readers for
their thorough and nuanced reports; all the essay, forum, and interview contributors for
their time and collaboration; the artists who generously allowed their work to be featured;
Aaron Goldsman for his insights on the long poem; the ASAP/Journal editors, Amy J.
Elias and Jonathan P. Eburne, for adopting the issue and for their flexible guidance; and
the members of the Sexual Politics/Sexual Poetics collective—Katherine Brewer Ball,
Ramzi Fawaz, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Uri McMillan, Jennifer Row, Shanté Paradigm
Smalls, and Damon Young—with whom we generated some of the first ideas for this
special issue.
1
Roland Barthes, “The Structuralist Activity,” in Critical Essays, trans. Richard
Howard (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1972), 217, 219.

ASAP/Journal 238 /
 2
Ibid., 219. What we mean to highlight here is Barthes’s role in bringing politics to
structural interpretation—understanding structures visible in cultural production not as
pre-political or agentless, but as human-made, plastic, and historically contingent.
3
Ibid., 217.
4
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affectivity, Pedagogy, Performativity
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 3.
5
Jennifer Doyle and David Getsy, “Queer Formalisms: Jennifer Doyle and David
Getsy in conversation,” Art Journal, March 31, 2013 <http://artjournal.collegeart.
org/?p=4468>.
6
Ibid.
7
Roderick Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 29.
8
Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2015).
9
Doyle and Getsy, “Queer Formalisms.”
10
Nicholas Mirzoeff, “The Right to Look,” Critical Inquiry 37, no. 3 (Spring 2011):
473-496; 476.
11
Hortense Spillers, “‘All The Things You Could Be by Now If Sigmund Freud’s
Wife Was Your Mother’: Psychoanalysis and Race,’” Critical Inquiry 22 (Summer 1996):
710-34.
12
Sharon Patricia Holland, Marcia Ochoa, and Kyla Wazana Tompkins, “On the
Visceral,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 20, no. 4 (2014): 391-406, 392.
13
Ibid., 392.
14
Rizvana Bradley, “Other Sensualities,” introduction to special issue “The Haptic:
Textures of Performance,” Women and Performance 24, nos. 2-3 (2015): 129-133, 130.
15
Tommy Pico, IRL (New York, NY: Birds LLC, 2016), 83.

Her monograph  Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and

KADJI AMIN is Assistant Professor of Queer Studies in the
Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality at Emory
University. His research focuses on the disorienting effects of the
queer and transgender past on politicized fields of scholarship.
His book, Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern
Masochism was recently published by NYU Press, and she is
currently at work on another project tentatively titled “Brown
Jouissance: Feminine Imaginings.” 
ROY PÉREZ is Associate Professor of English and of American

Pederasty, and Queer History, is forthcoming in Fall 2017
with the Theory Q series at Duke University Press. He is
currently at work on a second book project that thinks through
divergent historical ontologies of transgender and transsexual
being.
AMBER JAMILLA MUSSER is Associate Professor of
Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington
University in St. Louis.  Her research interests include
critical race theory, queer theory, and sexuality studies.
Ethnic Studies at Willamette University. His writing appears in
Women & Performance, Bully Bloggers, and FENCE,
and in the collections Narrative, Race and Ethnicity in the
United States (2017) and Trap Door: Trans Cultural
Production and the Politics of Visibility (2017). His book
in progress, Proximities: Queer Configurations of Race
and Sex in Latina/o Culture, forwards a relational account
of Latina/o racial formations through aesthetic production,
examining sexuality and cross-racial representation in U.S.
Latina/o literature, visual art, and performance.

Amin, Musser, & Pérez 239 /