Tamara Roberts

I Need a Little Girl: Forging an Afro Asian Feminist Counterpublic

Panel Abstract: This panel interrogates Warnerian theorizations of counter-publics through various public sexualities, emphasizing the resistance and performative agency in diverse cultures and dissident sexualities. Roberts (UC-Berkeley) examines the ways that blues shouters forged a feminist counterpublic through coded lyrics and public-known private lifestyles, asking us what current intersections of black and Asian femininity and sexuality in contemporary blues performances tell us about what type of counter-public this merger may hail. Manuel-Garcia (U Chicago) examines tactile intimacy among heterosexual men at Parisian nightclubs to argue that appetites for male-female sex can sometimes be obliquely addressed through homosocial/erotic touch, and that music plays a role in lubricating the transfer of pleasure across modes and sexualities.

Snorton (Harvard) theorizes black down low sexual communities through the analytic of the glass closet: a public space characterized by both hypervisibility and opacity, allowing us to understand black sexuality as that which is already understood as deviant, while simultaneously read as mysterious and untenable in mediated space. Tyburczy (LA&M) locates sites wherein BDSM sexuality and slavery dangerously crisscross on the surface of objects. She posits sites that feature materials such as real Antebellum slave whips alongside objects of consensual pleasure/violence as proffering an aspirational counter-public perspective on the history of sexual equipment, the perversion and eroticization of power exchange, and the mutually constitutive relationship between histories of eroticism and histories of discipline. Finally, Mitchell (Northwestern) examines mixed-use sexual spaces in Brazil where public prostitution occurs amidst family activities, challenging the distinction between counter/publics by asking this analytic to account for the affective slipperiness of tolerance, acceptance, and secret pleasure of upper-class patrons.