Specimen Days:

Diversity, Labor, and the University

Amber Jamilla Musser

Identity politics within the institution and within sexuality studies conspire to pro-
duce me, a queer Black woman, as a specimen—that is to say, a commodity, static
and rare. That this feeling comes from two sources that are often assumed to speak
opposing languages—one of liberation and the other of the corporation—is no longer
surprising, given incisive critiques of the university and identity politics. Rather than
rehearse these arguments, this article teases out the affective currents that underlie
these overlapping forms of objectification. Using critical autobiography, it maps out
the emotional and physical work that I perform in three different loci: university
rhetoric on diversity and inclusion, women’s studies’ insistence on intersectionality
and visible difference, and the dynamics of the classroom.

Keywords: affective labor / diversity and inclusion / performance / teaching /

visibility / women’s studies

On a hazy day at the end of August when humidity clings stubbornly to the late
summer air, I don a bright sleeveless sheath dress and smile to greet my students.
I welcome them to class, describe the course’s objectives, outline what I expect
from them, and usually wrap things up with a short exercise. “Write your sexual
autobiography,” I tell them. “What sorts of things did you include? These are
the types of topics that we will be discussing all semester.” I open my course
this way in order to help my students make connections between the personal
and the political. I want them to engage with the material intellectually, yet I
also want them to feel the myriad ways that knowledge matters.
As their instructor, I am aware that I am standing in for a body of knowl-
edge. I am referring not only to the fact that I select the course’s content, but
also to the ways that my body speaks in the classroom and the work that it
performs for the university. As a Black queer woman who teaches and researches

©2015 Feminist Formations, Vol. 27 No. 3 (Winter) pp. 1–20

2 · Feminist Formations 27.3

in sexuality studies, identity politics within the institution and within sexuality
studies conspire to produce me as a specimen—that is to say, a commodity, static
and rare. I use the word specimen here because it draws attention to the ways
that money, science, and desire intersect to confer value on an object. Addition-
ally, these multiple valences allow me to highlight the differences among these
processes of objectification. That this feeling comes from sources that are often
assumed to speak opposing languages—one of liberation and the other of the
corporation—is no longer surprising, given the plethora of incisive critiques of
the university and identity politics. Rather than rehearse these arguments, this
article teases out the affective currents that underlie these overlapping forms
of objectification to show the labors of institutionalization, and the ways that
they impinge on the body by looking at university rhetoric on diversity and
inclusion, women’s studies’ insistence on intersectionality and visible difference,
and the dynamics of the classroom.

Diversity Initiatives and the Commodification of Difference

In conventional narratives of change in the university, the civil rights move-

ments of the 1960s incited student activists, who in turn put pressure on the
university to change things. Students occupied buildings, demanded more
faculty of color, more financial aid and better advising for minority students,
and courses and programs that would shift the canon in order to recognize the
powerful shifts in knowledge that were taking place (Yamane 2002). In this nar-
rative, these movements reoriented the university to make it more responsive
to the reality of its students and the world in which it existed. These protests
marked a pivotal moment when difference was recognized and revolution,
rupture, and change seemed possible. Indeed, there are two deeply intertwined
visible legacies of this moment: the development of women’s and ethnic studies,
and the university’s investment in diversity.
Roderick A. Ferguson (2012) voices deep criticism of this turn toward
diversity. Upending the conventional narrative, he argues that the university
worked to conceal the deeper systemic ruptures that these protests aimed for—
redistribution of economic and material resources, epistemological change, and
an overt politicization of knowledge—in favor of incorporating difference into
the existing system of power. He writes that “[w]hereas modes of power once
disciplined difference in the universalizing names of canonicity, nationality,
or economy, other operations of power were emerging that would discipline
through a seemingly alternative regard for difference and through a revision of
the canon, national identity, and the market” (6). Indeed, Ferguson’s project in
The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference
is to simultaneously trace the university’s framing of minority difference as an
asset to the university, and to find moments within these struggles that might
be taken up for different revolutionary aims.
 Amber Jamilla Musser  ·  3

In these narratives, the university’s interest in diversity cuts both ways:

on the one hand, it creates a space for the acknowledgment of difference and
the accompanying epistemological shifts that grappling with it entails; on the
other, in becoming something that the university prizes, diversity works as a
tool to discipline subjects—making them more aware, as Ferguson says, of their
place within the particular economies of minority difference, and making that
difference matter in ways that do not disrupt the prevailing system. He writes
that
[t]his new interdisciplinary biopower placed social differences in the realm of
calculation and recalibrated power/knowledge as an agent of social life. For the
American academy, the American state, and an Americanized capital in the
sixties and seventies, the question would then become one of incorporating
difference for the good rather than disruption of hegemony. (34)

What Ferguson has described is precisely the way that minority difference
became fetishized within the university. In this narrative, minority subjects are
specimens in that they are valued for their difference. In large part this valu-
ation occurs because possession of this visible difference reflects well on the
university. Within the context of the university, the presence of minority dif-
ference signals a particular commitment to education, justice, and social good.
Lisa Lowe (1996, 41) describes this work as an “educative function of socializing
subjects into the state.” Within an economy that prizes acquisition and variety,
the minority as specimen operates as a particular commodity; minorities signal
a particular investment in the project of diversity, even as representation is not
equivalent to an actual epistemological shift.
Because visible difference is important to the university, it takes great pains
to invest in it intellectually and socially with a complicated matrix of bodies
in-between. As universities moved to incorporate ethnic and women’s studies
onto their campuses, ad hoc courses about women and x, or race and x (x being
previously predominately male/white parts of the canon), often became formal
parts of the university during the 1970s and ’80s, complete with tenure lines
and official status as programs (or in some cases departments) with majors and
minors.1 As the visible intellectual arms of a university’s project in diversity,
women’s studies and ethnic studies hires are also expected to align with the
university’s commitment to hiring minority bodies. What this means is that
despite the fact that many scholars within women’s studies might see their
intellectual work as attempting to disrupt what we think we know about these
knowledges, to impart the ability to think critically, challenge sedimented
discourses, and continually trouble assumptions not just about women, gender,
or sexuality, but about relationality, social structures, and ethics, the university
wants to see this work represented in particular bodies.
Programs and departments reinforce this desire for knowledge to come
in particular packages. This leads to a proliferation of job ads for race and
4 · Feminist Formations 27.3

sexuality, say, hoping to hire scholars of color. This means that people who
represent minority difference on an intellectual and embodied level perform
much of the university’s work on diversity. This concentration of resources on
difference is made even denser by the fact that many of these positions are
located in programs that are marginal to the institution. This marginality is
felt through funding, resources, few faculty lines, and stretched administrative
support, all made more difficult by the recruiting of these faculty members
into other administrative positions in the university that speak particularly
to issues of diversity—such is the paucity of figureheads for these jobs. This
means that there are few people doing the labor of diversity for the institu-
tion. Further, within the context of ethnic and women’s studies departments
and programs, universities can point to the presence of minority faculty and
staff members without necessarily dwelling on the larger issues of access and
knowledge production that universities must still address. Lowe (1996, 41) writes
that “[e]xploiting the notion of ‘multiculturalism,’ the university can refer to
the study of ethnic cultures in its claim to be an institution to which all racial
and ethnic minority groups have equal access and in which all are represented,
while masking the degree to which the larger institution still fails to address the
needs of populations of color.” While the presence of minority students, faculty
members, and staff is an important aspect of changing the face of the university,
there is more to recognizing difference. When change only happens at the level
of representation it highlights the commodification of minority bodies.
The university’s social experiments in diversity are similarly fraught. Early
experiments during the 1980s and ’90s brought the advent of multiculturalism.
These centers, originally conceived as a way to recognize and celebrate differ-
ence within the student body so that students might learn from one another,
instead became places where difference was highlighted and a certain type of
de facto segregation emerged. As a project, multiculturalism was criticized as a
tactic to manage rather than engage minority populations because it produced
circumscribed spaces for difference to exist without attempting to interrogate it.
This naturalized the idea that difference occurred in certain bodies and would
manifest in certain ways, without examining social structures or conditions.
The language of multiculturalism is tolerance and segregation, which works
to maintain the status quo. In their work on tolerance, Ann Pellegrini and
Janet Jakobsen (2003, 45) critique tolerance as “exclusionary, hierarchical, and
ultimately nondemocratic” because it suggests that one must overcome differ-
ence rather than work to actually produce commonality. In her critique of the
ideology, Sara Ahmed (2000, 103) writes that “[s]uch a positing of originary
difference works to fetishize difference: what is concealed is precisely the his-
tories of determination in which differences come to mark out terrains, subjects
and bodies.” In Ahmed’s analysis we see that the ideology of multiculturalism
cultivated the idea that difference could be set apart from the university’s other
concerns.
 Amber Jamilla Musser  ·  5

Currently, universities have shifted focus away from multiculturalism

toward an ethos of diversity and inclusion (Moses and Chang 2006). In this
model, diversity encompasses more than racial minorities: it includes sexuality,
gender, socioeconomic factors, geography, religion, and so on. This new model
is exemplified by The Chronicle of Higher Education’s discussion of “the evolution
of diversity” in which Stacy Patton leads a group of deans in conversation by
recounting a conversation with a man who argued that diversity meant more
than race: “On the surface, I’m a white guy, but I come from a working-class
background and I’m Irish Catholic” (2015). As we can see from this example,
diversity and inclusion become modes of recognizing the importance of differ-
ence in a community while not actually articulating it as separate; it is a way
to make everyone different and have everyone learn from one another. The
origin point for this rhetoric is usually taken to be the 2003 Grutter v. Bol-
linger affirmative-action case and President Bush’s remarks on its outcome: “A
college education should teach respect and understanding and goodwill. And
these values are strengthened when students live and learn with people from
many backgrounds” (Moses and Chang 6). The benefit in university-speak is an
enriched educational environment and the idea that the playing field could be
level by acknowledging these forms of difference and taking them into account.
As practiced by the university, however, it is difficult to separate discussions of
inclusivity and diversity from neoliberalism’s prevailing ethos of color-blindness
and individualism. The university’s embrace of everyone is meant to erase struc-
tural causes of inequality in order to ensure that everyone has the “right to equal
opportunity.” Gavan Titley and Alana Lentin (2008, 11) describe this ideology
as “promising a tentative yet perhaps final recognition of the inescapability of
difference . . . diversity implies a value-based project of transformation towards
the irreducible and irrevocable.” The sleight of hand that wishes right into
access also ignores what will happen to these minoritarian subjects—students,
faculty, staff—in favor of emphasizing the university’s generosity.
Although diversity has come to describe a process of educating everyone,
it still hinges on highlighting those whose difference can be made visible, and
making them perform the labor that Ahmed’s (2012) interviews with those
subjects deemed “the race person” indicate. Inclusivity means that certain bodies
are more desirable because they make visible an impulse toward change, even
as they do not necessarily produce any movement beyond this visibility. Their
presence confers status because they are rare, desirable, and visible.
My own experience on the academic job market illuminates this desire
for visible markers of difference. Aside from the notorious tightening of the
job market in the humanities in general and for theorists in particular, I felt
simultaneously too visible and invisible during my time looking for an academic
position. While women’s studies has historically been friendly to LGBTQ
individuals, I wondered if my presentation as a normatively feminine woman
rendered me invisible as queer and in this way not necessarily less qualified to
6 · Feminist Formations 27.3

teach sexuality studies, but less “useful” as a community member who could not
be counted on to necessarily perform the labor of mentoring LGBTQ students
or being a visible ally. In smaller departments and programs the burden of rep-
resentation felt especially acute. If they could not tell I was queer, how could
students, many of whom look to faculty members who are “out” for guidance,
recognition, or simply empathy? On the other hand, this invisibility meant that
they were also worried about what I would be looking for at these places on a
personal level. So, there was a lot of energy at campus visits articulating the ways
in which a particular campus was friendly for people in a variety of personal
circumstances. These conversations were both nice and awkward. I did not want
to shut down certain avenues of conversation—for instance, the public schools
here are really great—because to do so would be to reveal information about
my personal life that could (in theory) lead to discrimination. The wideness of
topics also, however, made it difficult to see how I would actually fit in: Would
people assume that I was straight, and what could I do about that?
This problem is the counterpart to what Robyn Wiegman (2000) describes
as the necessity of queer academics to produce a public persona in line with the
presumptive heterosexuality of the institution. She writes that
[w]hat’s important here is not to dismiss the categorical dilemma that the
queer academic subject faces, where resisting the normative codes and social
forms is to render oneself fully (as opposed to partially) outside what we might
call the academy’s social mode of production; to acquiesce, through silence or
misleading speech, is to defer but not to escape the problematic of expectation
and disclosure. (76)

In Wiegman’s analysis the queer academic can become isolated because the
means of establishing affective bonds with colleagues is often along lines of
normative kinship. Working through this issue from the lens of making “dif-
ference” a priority as it is in diversity work, the onus is placed on maintaining
visible difference, but cultural sameness. This means performing all of the labor
that Wiegman describes, but doing so “as a queer.”
My own personal narrative becomes complicated according to lines of race.
It is difficult to discern what role race plays in marking my queerness invisible,
especially given the long historical divide between Black studies and queer stud-
ies (which scholars are now working to bridge) and the general invisibility of
Black women of color. As a woman of color, however, an identity that is thrust
upon me with much vigor once search committees laid eyes on me, there was an
entirely different set of issues. Visibility produced the identity, and what came
with it were a host of expectations around personal and scholarly allegiances.
Complicated relationships to blackness were disallowed and the rhetoric of
authenticity appeared. People assumed that I would want to be a faculty liaison
to the Black Students Association, that I would want affiliation with African
American studies, that what was most important to me was the number of other
 Amber Jamilla Musser  ·  7

Black faculty. There were conspiratorial whispers about Black people taking
over the institution, as though we were necessarily aligned because of historical
patterns of discrimination. In short, people expected my work on race to follow
particular identity formations, and I felt as though I was expected to behave and
perform in certain ways. As a result I felt caught among not feeling like people
thought I was “authentic” enough, feeling pressure to perform authenticity, and
feeling torn between disavowing that role and also desperately wanting a job and
so wanting to keep that visibility because it marked me as a desirable commodity.
This abbreviated narrative illuminates some of the affective notes that
diversity produces, in addition to highlighting the tensions between visibility
and invisibility. Inclusivity means making difference visible, but what counts
as visibility is dependent on historical variables. In this case the suturing of
gender transgression with queerness and blackness with heterosexuality, and the
assumption that blackness produces a particular political and social coherence.
That Black visibility is produced so unproblematically made me chafe at the
invisibility of my queerness, even as the very project of visibility is problem-
atic. My ambivalence in fully taking on blackness and my desire to be read as
queer also have to do with longer histories of femme invisibility in any number
of situations and my own personal history of racialization as an immigrant.
The fact that my own work touches on the malleability of these categories
and their constructedness is not an irony lost on me. Despite the fact that I
was being approached for my academic work, the ways that my body signals
diversity has also been a boon to committees eager to tap into special funds
for minority recruitment or fill minority positions on various committees. This
desirability and its imagined transparency are part of the commodification of
the specimen. In my case, the market demands visible racial difference, which
means reward, work, and difficulty in figuring out where my “invisible” sexual
difference places me.
The difference in visibilities of race and sexuality is not surprising. Dana Y.
Takagi (1999) has written about the need to further incorporate sexuality studies
into Asian American studies so as to prevent the disaggregation of these forms
of knowledge. In “Maiden Voyage” she argues that the assumption that race is
always visible poses particular difficulties for thinking about the intersections
of racial identity and sexual identity, writing that
[t]here are numerous ways that being “gay” is not like being “Asian.” . . . there
is a quality of voluntarism in being gay/lesbian that is usually not possible as an
Asian American. One has the option to present oneself as “gay” or “lesbian,”
or alternatively, to attempt to “pass,” or to stay in “the closet,” that is, to hide
one’s sexual preference. However, these same options are not available to most
racial minorities in face-to-face interactions with others. (98)

The visibility of race produces a different set of assumptions from the visibility
of sexuality; whereas making one’s sexuality visible is assumed to be a matter
8 · Feminist Formations 27.3

of agency, one’s racial identity is understood as a matter of external perception.

These differences matter when one begins to assess the work of diversity.
Because projects of diversity and inclusion are based on making difference
visible, I have to make my queerness apparent. Otherwise, I am continually
expected to do work only on behalf of my Blackness—a form of difference that
is thought to be easily legible. Although I spoke about it in terms of affective
labor vis-à-vis the job market and how one could or should position oneself as a
desirable candidate; on the job, it actually just means more labor. Each identity
category has its own groups on campus: for example, the Black Students Asso-
ciation, LGBTQ Caucus, Mixed Race Student Group, Association of Female
Professors, Leadership Initiative for Faculty of Color, LGBTQ social group for
faculty. I used to joke that the women’s groups wanted to get lunch, the Black
groups coffee, and the LGBT groups drinks, which was my way of injecting
humor into a situation that actually requires a great deal of affective labor, which
is the currency of diversity. First, one must ensure that these groups exist so
as to signal the university’s commitment to diversity and its acknowledgment
through the existence of these groups that people who are considered “diverse”
might need particular forms of support and outreach. Then, there is the matter
of providing said support (without any actual training except in the “university
of life”) to students, staff, and colleagues. This labor is uncompensated except
for the fuzzy feeling one might get from being continually told that the “con-
tribution” one is making to the university is through the embodiment of one’s
identity. Within the world of women’s studies, Wiegman (2000, drawing on
Dale Bauer) refers to this as the “second shift”:
This second shift comes in two primary forms: that of joint appointments,
which feature a double burden of teaching and service that is rarely compen-
sated (and more often than not a liability in tenure and advancement); and
that of interdisciplinary affiliations, which subordinate the labor that scholars
perform in women’s studies programs to the intellectual and institutional
priorities of the traditional academic department.2 (79)

This is the work a specimen performs for the university. But at what cost?
Negative emotions, such as shame, disavowal, or anger, that one might experi-
ence at having an ambivalent relationship to a fraught identity category—a
relationship that the university is banking on being public because of its push
toward visibility—must be negotiated on one’s own time. Positive emotions
like pride are turned into material labor (one takes on this administrative duty,
one hangs out with these students on one’s own time). All of this is also on
top of the general public burden placed on these identity categories through
the public’s (including the university’s) policing of behavior and other forms
of discrimination.
Yet, at the same time, the university is saving a lot of money by having
these bodies take on this extra labor; people may do this out of love, necessity,
 Amber Jamilla Musser  ·  9

or obligation—or a combination of the three. These bodies labor in particular

ways, making the university a smart economic participant for hiring visible
minorities, but this university labor can make it difficult to perform intellectual
labor, making retention and promotion difficult. While the visibility of these
identities confers privilege and desirability within the university’s neoliberal
ethos, the underside is exploitation. Diversity work is still often seen as exces-
sive and outside of the structure of the university, which means that there is
additional affective labor that the university assumes minority subjects will
perform because of various forms of identification and investments in projects
of difference. Diversity and inclusion often mean that it becomes the job of
those who have been structurally oppressed to illuminate those oppressions.

The Time Is Now:

Intersectionality, Queer of Color Critique, and Diversity

Thinking race, gender, and sexuality together have enabled people to see
multiple interlocking structures of oppression, various forms of discrimination
and privilege, and new modes of existing in the world. Yet, these intellectual
inquiries often become remolded by the project of diversity and inclusion when
transferred to the classroom. Here, we see that the legacy of diversity and inclu-
sion also enacts different forms of generational splits whereby what counts as
diversity is attached to particular visions of the future and the past. The type
of specimen that this reorientation produces is different from the specimen
who is rare; rather, this type of specimen is the stagnant. This is the version of
the specimen that happens when a part stands in for a whole and a creature is
caught and pinned up for display in perpetuity.
One of the first things that I teach in my introduction to women’s studies
is intersectionality—the idea that gender, race, sexuality, and so on must be
thought together when thinking about forms of oppression. We read Kimberlé
Williams Crenshaw’s “Mapping the Margins” (1991) to see the gaps that happen
when these variables are thought separately. Students latch onto intersec-
tionality easily and spend much of the remainder of the semester describing
anyone’s failure to discuss multiple components of difference as their failure
to do intersectional work. They are also eager to point out their own forms
of difference—for example, “I am a white lesbian from Chicago”—in order to
gesture toward ways of thinking about how these variables play out in their
own lives. Intersectionality has become shorthand for “people are complicated
and different.” In this formulation we can see the clear link to the rhetoric
of diversity and inclusion—intersectionality also includes everyone. In their
eagerness to be included in the rubric of intersectionality, however, students
often forget to do the accompanying analytic work to show how these different
structures actually work together in favor of highlighting the idea that there
might be difference afoot.
10 · Feminist Formations 27.3

In her elegant discussion of the imbrication of intersectionality and the insti-

tutionalization of women’s studies, Jennifer C. Nash (2014) argues that women’s
studies has almost become synonymous with intersectionality. She writes that
[i]ntersectionality is now celebrated as “the primary figure of political comple-
tion in US identity knowledge domains,” as “part of the gender studies canon,”
as “a new raison d’etre for doing feminist theory and analysis,” as “the most
cutting-edge approach to the politics of gender, race, sexual orientation, and
class,” and as “the most important contribution that women’s studies, in
conjunction with related fields, has made so far.”3 (45)

As women’s studies becomes imagined to be interchangeable with intersectional

analysis, Nash argues that intersectionality occupies a temporality of the “never-
quite-there”; it is either feminism’s past or feminism’s future. This temporality
of the not-quite-there is part of what my students are experiencing. Although
they do not know how to frame it in this way, their responses to intersection-
ality speak to an acknowledgment that the framework as used (especially in
nonlegal cases) is endlessly permeable and open to interpretation. Their dif-
ficulty in using it to actually address difference speaks to its position as part
of feminism’s past. Students, more often than not, tend to position themselves
as the future of a discipline, the future of social justice, the future of life, and
as such, in their hurry to absorb the mark of difference that intersectionality
confers, they consign Black feminism to the past and my own position as a
Black queer woman to the side.
While intersectionality began as a mode of inquiry within Black feminism
to draw attention to the force of multiple marginalizations, including race,
gender, class, and sexuality, as it gained institutional traction it focused more on
the intersection of race and gender than on sexuality and class. Nash (2011, 456)
argues that “sexuality and class would become largely erased by Black feminist
work on multiple marginalization, suggesting that Black women’s lived experi-
ences were constituted solely by the interplay—or intersection—of race and
gender.” This focus on race and gender and the particular figure of the Black
woman has had several important consequences. As she notes, it “neglects
the heterogeneity of ‘black woman’ as a category,” and equates Black feminism
almost exclusively with this intersection, which forecloses “explorations of other
intersections to a range of related activist-intellectual projects” (ibid.). That is
to say, Black women became the sign of marginalization; they were invoked as
a trope to consider the multiplicity of marginalization, but the category’s own
multitudes were seldom interrogated. My own invisibility as a queer woman is a
symptom of this. This invisibility feels like being pushed to the side, but there
are other ways that this version of intersectionality leaves me feeling flattened
and stuck by constantly reiterating the notion that Black women are “Other.”
In part this othering is due to the erasure of heterogeneity from the category
of Black woman, but it is also because of the consolidation of the category of
 Amber Jamilla Musser  ·  11

women of color into a singular entity that becomes emblematic of a series of

historical and structural oppressions that mark these racialized bodies as the
limit of theory and agency (Holland 2012). Institutionalized intersectionality
has produced a vision of the woman of color subject as emblematic of oppression
at the hands of patriarchy, capitalism, and racism—a subject defined by both
her difference and marginalization, a subject perpetually passé.
At a moment when students are clamoring to claim their own swaths of
difference, teaching intersectionality can be difficult: on the one hand, inter-
sectionality is easily envisioned as a useful rubric for understanding interlocking
nodes of power and how it works on bodies; and on the other, it seems to veer
(especially in our current climate) toward a narcissistic examination of self in
favor of structure. Student response easily moves toward finding the things that
mark them as special, instead of understanding that these moments of differ-
ence are emblematic of structures that produce differential access to things and
privilege. In rendering Black femininity visible and as what I have previously
described as the “fleshy limit of theory,” queerness becomes further invisibilized
(Musser 2014, 176): How could a subject who is so clearly of the past actually be
part of the new world order? How could the past be so complicated?
In other classes I talk about queer of color critique—another methodology
that brings bodies and difference together intellectually. I draw on its resources
to make my students see how to think about race and sexuality as epistemo-
logical problems rather than merely matters of individual identification. In
this regard, queer of color critique is explicit about the over-focus on sexuality
(especially LGBTQ identities) within queer theory. Its theorists argue that the
foregrounding of sexuality often occurs to the detriment of thinking critically
about race. That is to say, race becomes something that one can just leave at
the level of visible representation, whereas sexuality is something that is given
more depth. Sexuality has been positioned as the space in which rights are
most needed precisely because of this invisibility. Chandan Reddy (2011) argues
that sexuality studies enacts certain types of silences, writing that “sexuality
names the normative frames that organize our disciplinary and interdisciplinary
inquiries into our past and into contemporary racial capitalism” (20). From the
prism of sexuality studies, the structural violences of race are rendered invis-
ible in favor of a focus on the individual rights of sexual minorities; all issues
become a question of individual rights in this disciplining gaze. David Eng’s
(2010) discussion of colorblindness and queer liberalism makes the stakes of this
even broader. Queer liberalism is, he writes,
a contemporary confluence of the political and economic spheres that forms
the basis for the liberal inclusion of particular gay and lesbian US citizen-
subjects petitioning for rights and recognition before the law[,] . . . relies upon
the logic of colorblindness in its assertion that racial difference has given way
to an abstract US community of individualism and merit. (3)
12 · Feminist Formations 27.3

Here again we see the rhetoric of diversity and inclusion at work in the idea
that acknowledging difference is what it takes to allow for equal opportunity.
Part of the problem that both Reddy and Eng identify is that what we con-
sider sexuality is produced through certain important omissions. Even as most
queer studies and sexuality studies courses are oriented around Michel Foucault’s
The History of Sexuality (1978) and rehearse arguments about the birth of the
sexual sciences and the desire to know, classify, and make visible, actually grap-
pling with race is often out of reach. The History of Sexuality weaves together
confession, self-classification, and regimes of racism, thereby gesturing toward
the differing visibilities of race and sexuality. But often race is presumed to be
a visibly marked difference while sexuality is something that must be revealed.
Therefore discussions of race and sexuality often revolve around selecting
particular identities, and identifying how these identities operate in the world.
We might discuss Black or Asian masculinity, Latina or Black femininities, but
whiteness is often not probed as the default, and the structures that produce
this seem to many students to be far afield from sexuality studies. Queer of
color critique is meant to correct the idea that these particular identities are
additive components that they can choose to exclude rather than integral to
their understanding of sexuality.
While queer of color critique is intellectually useful, I worry that students
use my status as a minority to read race as my own pet project rather than
something that they (a predominantly white student body) should be inter-
ested in. It is far easier to convince students who are not queer that sexuality is
their province too, in large part because of the primacy of sexuality that both
Reddy and Eng describe. LGBT rights have been framed as this generation’s
civil rights issue in a way that imagines that race is no longer a contemporary
issue. Race becomes important enough to consider (particularly in moments
of crisis), but not important enough to be understood as a primary structure for
understanding the way in which the world works now. This difficulty in talk-
ing race, or rather in talking race as a matter of structure and history, produces
a different kind of “caught-ness” than my discussions about intersectionality.
Often, when students do acknowledge histories of structural racism, they assign
that knowledge to the past, failing to grasp the ways in which it might work on
contemporary individual bodies. This also leaves me silenced because it is easier
to talk about the systematic oppression of x, y, and z and harder to grapple with
its actual legacy in the current bodies. Talking about the now implicates them
in particular ways, so it can be easier to maintain a temporal gap. In this space
between the then and the now I become silenced by structure, which gives voice
to deep problems, but not to how they might actually feel.
 Amber Jamilla Musser  ·  13

Teach What You Know: How Theory Circulates in the Flesh

When the work of diversity and the project of thinking critically about sexuality
actually meet in the classroom I cannot help but participate in the underlying
dynamics of class, race, and gender. These moments occur on the affective reg-
ister, but they have real effects in terms of what knowledge gets transmitted and
how. This is not, however, the work of inclusion, but rather the work of having
my body teach others about the stakes of interaction and of being objectified.
This is another aspect of the life of a specimen: knowledge production through
circulation.
Circulation is one mechanism that I use to frame what happens in the
classroom when I am teaching women’s studies. I think the discipline has a
special responsibility to help students navigate an increasingly complicated
social and cultural landscape. While good thinking on questions of gender,
sexuality, race, class, ability, and location will not necessarily provide immediate
solutions to complex social problems, it will help students become ready and
willing to relate to the world around them both critically and actively. I see my
circulation in the university as a Black, queer woman as important to making
students think about difference.
As a teacher I have a tremendous opportunity to facilitate scholarship
that is based on empathy, critique, and creativity. Empathy is crucial because
it enables students to not only understand perspectives that are distinct from
their own, but teaches them to see and appreciate structures of sentiment and
logic. This increased awareness challenges students’ previously held views and
helps them to understand how collaboration, agreement, or even conflict (on
what types of grounds) might be achievable and productive.
Intellectually, I aim to foster careful thought about the cultural and histori-
cal borders that permeate our societies. I include an historical analysis of the
topic at hand so that students understand the way in which the world around
them has been formed—in large part through the work of historical contin-
gency. I blend this with attention to relevant critical texts so that students
can get a sense of how to think both philosophically and pragmatically. In my
introductory course I have students read selections of The History of Sexuality
alongside Frantz Fanon and Simone de Beauvoir so that they can read knowledge
as emerging from an historical and geographic context, and so that they can
consider gender, race, and geography vis-à-vis Foucault. In this way I emphasize
the fact that knowledge is grounded in times, places, and bodies. Not only does
Foucault emerge as an embodied subject, but students are forced to reflect on
their own subject positions. My background in the history and philosophy of
science has helped me to see the way in which our knowledge is governed by the
techniques that we use to collect it. To that end, I ask students to consider both
the theorists and themselves in context so that they understand the classroom
as only one mechanism of knowledge gathering and transmission.
14 · Feminist Formations 27.3

That said, I stand in front of the classroom presenting students with a

particularly complex set of intersecting identities. In telling students that race,
gender, and sexuality need to be thought of as co-extensive, I hope my body is
doing the work of preparing them to think about difference critically; in actual-
ity, however, I do not know what it is showing them. As we move from Foucault,
to Beauvoir, to Fanon, to Judith Butler I wonder how my sexuality and my race
intrude on the conversation. My students have varying levels of awareness of my
relationship to the quagmires of inclusivity, diversity, intersectionality, and queer
of color critique, but I am attentive to the fact that I am talking about sexuality
as a Black queer woman. When we read about the assignation of hypersexuality
to Black women’s bodies I wonder what they see. Do they recognize that these
paradigms also apply to me, or are they steeped in an ethos of color-blindness
where race is ignored? In one version I am offering them a visual representation
of the forms of woundedness that we are discussing; in the other these wounds
are historical and the ongoing affective labor my body performs is ignored.
It is my hope that knowing me helps them respond with empathy, curios-
ity, and wonder. That part of what they want to do is to learn from me—learn
that people are different and that there are varieties of difference, but that at
the base respect matters and knowledge comes in many forms. My difference
informs the syllabi that I put together, assignments that I produce, and my form
of instruction. I hope that they leave the classroom feeling challenged and open
and reoriented toward difference.
There are other moments, however, when my body intrudes in ways that
are more legible to me. When we read Audre Lorde or the Combahee River
Collective, to think about the importance of thinking about race as tied to
sexuality and to enlarge the genealogy of queer studies, my students articulate
their frustration that these women seem angry—their anger seems to startle my
students. I can only assume that they feel as though this passion is disproportion-
ate to the subject. In part this may be attributable to the difficulty that many
undergraduates have in reading historical documents as speaking to particular
moments in time that may not be our own. In this scenario my students simply
do not fully “get” the harms that racism has caused. But the other side of the
coin is that my students are identifying Black female anger as problematic.
That this suggestion of anger calls up stereotypes of the angry Black woman is
certainly revealing. Patricia Hill Collins (1990) has written extensively on the
ways that the trope of the angry Black woman has been used to discredit their
emotions as excessive and their critiques as irrational. They are also enacting
Ahmed’s (2010) discussion of the affective transferences of the “feminist kill-
joy.” She describes the unhappiness caused by the angry feminist as producing
tension outside of their own bodies: “it is not just that feelings are ‘in tension’
but that the tension is located somewhere: in being felt by some bodies, it is
attributed as caused by another body, who thus comes to be felt as apart from
the group, as getting in the way of its organic enjoyment and solidarity” (67).
 Amber Jamilla Musser  ·  15

Anger, Ahmed argues, is felt in the bodies of others and registered as discomfort,
but it also causes the uneasy to recognize the subjectivity of the angry agent. It
is this turn-around that makes me wonder if what is difficult for these students
is understanding Black women as agents; I wonder then if these are the texts
that make them aware that I also have agency. Do they understand me and my
mode of teaching to be aggressive according to these parameters? Do they not
see that the underside of these discourses is vulnerability?
If sometimes I feel vulnerable in this process of knowledge exchange, it is
hard for me to figure out just what they feel. While my students are actually
very open to gesturing toward race, they do not always know how to really talk
about it. They imagine that because they know to list race, gender, and sexual-
ity as variables when discussing what someone is or is not talking about they
have dealt with the issue. This is the institutionalization of intersectionality—a
checklist, a sense that Black women are the most wounded, and an obligation
as someone who is interested in marginalization (as these women, gender, and
sexualities students often are) to see what is not there. Sometimes I feel as
though my presence forces them to review this checklist even more aggres-
sively than they otherwise would. Perhaps this is one way in which my bodily
performance is generative; I feel like the superego who reminds them to think
about race. Often, however, the mention of racial difference is not discussed as
something that is structuring the present moment and the questions that we
are (or not) asking. In general, after the checklist, the conversation becomes a
monologue that I conduct and the discussion falls flat.
In this way it feels like a strange extension of W. E. B. Du Bois’s (1903)
meditations on double consciousness. “What does it feel like to be a problem?”
he famously asked in his essay on blackness. Within women’s studies the ques-
tion is formulated somewhat differently: it is both “What does it feel like to be
a problem?” and “What does it feel like to have created the problem?”—the
problem having been exacerbated by the intersection of university politics and
the norms of women’s studies and disciplinary tendencies of sexuality studies.
As much as these discourses hail me, I cannot be entirely “outside.” Agency,
especially as a professor/researcher/writer, cannot be passed off into the passive
voice, and thus one finds oneself in the peculiar position of being an instru-
ment of one’s own oppression. I wonder if they worry that I will become the
angry Black woman and force them to rethink, challenge, and dwell on it and
so they mention race to soothe me, but are actually afraid of engaging with it.
It is in the space of these exchanges, however, where other things happen,
and I am not quite sure what to make of them. Occasionally, I feel as though
their fear produces a sort of aggression toward me. This is the flipside of the
empathy that is cultivated within the women’s studies’ classroom. In being open
to thinking through multiple perspectives, disclosure has its own currency and
students can use it to produce their own uncomfortable classroom moments in
the name of marking the personal as political and staking a claim in our shared
16 · Feminist Formations 27.3

intellectual endeavor. Usually, this manifests as a graphic recounting of their

sex lives. As I listen to these chronicles numerous things go through my head;
I wonder if this is one of the few spaces they feel they have available to talk
about sex. More frequently, however, I wonder if they are trying to match the
hypersexuality assigned to Black women or assert authority in the classroom
by narrating their own relationship to the topic at hand. I experience these
moments of sexual assertiveness as violent, mostly because they seem designed to
undermine my authority whereby personal reflection takes priority over critical
engagement or to use their sexuality as a shield in order to avoid talking about
race. While this action gestures toward the historically fraught nature of Black
female sexuality, it also speaks to the difficulty of reading Black, female, and
queer together. I do not have a parallel wounded narrative for the production
of my queerness in the classroom or the effects it has. In part this is because my
students’ abilities to read my sexuality depends heavily on their own identifica-
tions. I am usually illegible to straight students, and queer students meet me
with varying levels of desire and distance. Unlike David M. Halperin (2002),
who writes about being perceived as a threatening, indoctrinating figure in the
classroom, the dynamics of gender and race have generally produced a silence
around my queerness. Race is assumed to be the primary vector of difference that
people should use to engage with me while queerness falls by the wayside. Both
of these instances of aggression and avoidance signal moments of resistance or
misinterpretation of the critical empathy that I attempt to induce, but they are
also aspects of what it is to circulate in the classroom.

Making Flesh Matter: Embodiment and Research

The tensions of thinking about diversity and inclusion through teaching and
presence also make their way into my own research. At its core I think women’s
studies entails the critical exploration of difference in its many forms. The ques-
tion that I strive to answer in my own work in this field is how to think about
difference outside of these strands of objectification. Following the trajectory
of this essay, my research projects ask both what it feels like to be a specimen,
and if there are ways to exist outside of that frame.
My recent book Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism (2014) uses
local histories of masochism to illustrate what it feels like to be embedded in
power from different perspectives. Power impacts subjects differently, therefore
this project seeks to nuance what it means to say that someone is subject to
power. What does submission feel like for different bodies? In my work I use
masochism to unpack the relationship between sensation and power. I propose
moving to sensation as an analytic because it allows us to think about flesh not
as something static and essential, but as something that changes, something
that is in motion. Here, I want to stress that I am thinking about sensation as
something that can be understood as having cultural and individual significance
 Amber Jamilla Musser  ·  17

rather than as a singular entity with a particular (vexed or not) relationship to

perception. In this way difference becomes a matter of relationships rather than
fixed essences unto themselves.
Using sensation as an analytic term allows us to bypass the sometimes prob-
lematic particularity of the individual and move toward theorizing the flesh. In
part this is because we can decipher affinities between individual experiences
and articulate structures of sensation. While avoiding edging toward one or
several essences of masochism, these structures of sensation move us closer
to theorizing embodiment and difference and what it feels like to exist in the
space between agency and subjectlessness. In order to do this we must perform
what I term in my book empathetic reading.
Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s (1995) practice of intensive reading, I use
empathetic reading to foreground both the corporeality of reading and the
“impersonal flows”—the affects and sensations that texts produce—in the
reader. Within the context of feminist theory, empathetic reading imagines
the body as a site of constraint and possibility in order to draw attention to the
ways in which sensation shapes representation. Using sensation as an analytic
structure, my book produces a series of unexpected juxtapositions to reveal the
ways in which flesh matters when one is talking about power.
One of the things that empathetic reading seeks to highlight is the corpore-
ality behind thinking. I want to be insistent about the fact that thinking comes
from bodies, and that this bodily knowledge becomes encoded in the work that
we, as scholars, seek to decipher. In addition to adding flesh to interlocutors who
frequently lack it, empathetic reading seeks to unlock the sensations that these
formations of knowledge produce. In order to do this I do not propose a somato-
Freudian excavation of our theorists or thinkers, but rather ask that readers place
their own bodies into the picture (via empathy, which I envision as a space of
multiplicity, not substitution) in order to attend to the sensations that are called
up by the material. I argue that these sensations allow us to understand, in an
embodied way, how people experience various structures. Empathetic reading
allows us to move between the scale of the personal and the structural. In this
way my research aims to disturb the primacy of the visual and to open access
to material by forging unexpected embodied affiliations. In the classroom, for
example, this means thinking less about the particular authorization that some
voices have claimed with respect to woundedness, and more about articulating
partial connections and exploring spaces of disconnect. In this way, rather
than by continually focusing on prepackaged identity formations, difference
and multiplicity become more apparent.
At its core my project is about the ways in which difference is made material
through race, gender, and geography, and how this materiality is experienced.
Hence it functions as a queer of color critique by exposing the racial and het-
erosexual assumptions behind liberal capitalism. Just as queer of color critiques
aim to destabilize prevailing understandings of historical materialism, my project
18 · Feminist Formations 27.3

uses similar tactics of critique to displace the liberal subject with multiple mate-
rial bodies in order to show how race, gender, and sexuality affect the ways in
which power is experienced. In this way it sits alongside other work on identity
in critical race theory. As a way to think about affect and the institutionalization
of women’s studies, however, I am also hopeful that it brings forth new ways to
think about the relationship between bodies and knowledge so that difference
can exist without producing various types of specimens and that one does not
always speak on behalf of others or as a vision of rarity or as an archaic form.
This multiplicity my scholarship is attempting to enact intersects with
the university’s drive toward visibility. If my scholarly projects have to do with
understanding multiple modes of inhabitation, projects of diversity and inclu-
sion produce a static frame for understanding embodied knowledge. My body
performs because it is hailed by these other forces. As a drive toward stabiliza-
tion and entrenchment institutionalization uses known entities as building
blocks to produce its foundations. Given its relationship with theorizations
of identity, the mobilization of race and gender for women’s studies (and the
precarious positionality of sexuality studies) is not surprising, nor is the swirl
of emotions—fatigue, stasis, vulnerability—that accompany it. Despite that,
I maintain hope that displacing visibility will move us away from specimens
who are commodified, rare, and static toward a landscape of partial connec-
tions, flesh, and critical empathy, which emphasizes relationality rather than
the purity of absolute difference.

Acknowledgments

This project owes a debt of gratitude to several important readers and friends.
Thanks to Stephanie Clare for helping me narrow down the scope of the essay,
the anonymous reviewers of Feminist Formations for their attentive and gener-
ous feedback, and Emily Owens and Jennifer Nash for their editorial work in
putting everything together.

Amber Jamilla Musser is an assistant professor of women’s, gender, and sexual-

ity studies at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of Sensational
Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism (2014) and is currently working on a book
manuscript titled Beyond the Feminine Mystique: Femininity and Its Objects.
She can be reached at amusser@wustl.edu.

Notes

1. The 1999 special issue of differences traces several different iterations of this
narrative. It was republished in 2008 as Women’s Studies on the Edge, edited by Joan
Wallach Scott.
 Amber Jamilla Musser  ·  19

2. See also Dale M. Bauer, “Academic Housework: Women’s Studies and Second
Shifting.”
3. In this excerpt, Nash draws on Robyn Wiegman’s Object Lessons; Maxine Baca
Zinn’s essay “Patricia Hill Collins: Past and Future Innovations”; Kathy Davis’s essay
“Intersectionality as Buzzword”; Ange-Marie Hancock’s Solidarity Politics for Millennials:
A Guide to Ending the Oppression Olympics; and Leslie McCall’s essay “The Complexity
of Intersectionality.”

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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without
permission.