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Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2015, 296 pp., $26.00 (paperback), IBSN-13: 978-0252081101.
L. H. Stallings’s groundbreaking book Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures, puts funk, as both a noun and a verb, at the center of Black Cultural Studies, and Sexuality and Gender studies. In it, she demonstrates the significance of black pleasure in all of its funkiness, as a form of intelligence, imagination, and resistance. Working against the limited narratives of black uplift and black respectability Stallings explores sites of black public and private sexual expression and cultures otherwise deemed transgressive, particularly by dominant black political movements.
This is a book unafraid to rock the boats of black feminist and queer cultural studies around issues of sexuality, power, marriage, and ethics. And it is unafraid to be intimate, and to bring together the sacred with the profane. Perhaps one of the book’s most beautiful moments is Stallings’s homage to her mother’s strength and commitment to a full sexuality, in the introduction:
In her mid- twenties to thirties, my mother was humble, funky, and fly. She liked wigs, dressing up, and dudes who could sing, drove sweet cars, and wore fly suits and gators. She was a Sunday-school teacher. She ushered on second Sundays, and also sang in the choir on fourth Sundays. She started out as a teenage mother working odd jobs and who eventually would become a teacher’s aide in the public school system for more than twenty years. She made sure her children read the Bible and spent copious amounts of their time at the library. She did all of this while keeping a secret stash of porn that stopped being a secret by the time my sisters and I were preadolescents in the 1980’s. (xiv)
In her mother, Stallings finds the ultimate model for complex black subjectivity, and for the resistant insistence on pleasure that is at the center of this work, as well as her first book, Mutha is Half a Word: Intersections of Folklore, Vernacular, Myth and Queerness in Black Female Culture.
Stallings opens up new theoretical ground by using the word “funk” as well as “stank” as embodied afrocentric concepts of the black body in labor (for work and for pleasure) that extend and transcend forms of discipline and structures of biopower. Here, she draws from Robert Farris Thompson’s etymology of funk’s West African origins:
The slang term “funky” in black communities originally referred to strong body order and not to “funk,” meaning fear or panic. The black nuance seems to derive from the Ki-Kongo lu-fuki, “bad body odor” and is perhaps reinforced by contact with fumet, “aroma of food and wine” in French Louisiana. But the Ki-Kongo word is closer to the jazz word “funky” in form and meaning, as both jazzmen and Bakongo use “funky” and lu-fuki to praise persons for the integrity of their art, for having worked out to achieve their aims. …For in Kongo the smell of a hardworking elder carries luck. This Kongo sign of exertion is identified with the positive energy of a person. (4)
Stallings takes funk’s emphasis on pleasure, expression, release, and community— and deepens it to think of it as a “multisensory and multidimensional philosophy” that centers the erotic. Rather than focusing only on funk music, funk’s compelling and perhaps most visible representative, she extends funk beyond studies of sound as “the affect that shapes film, performance, sound, food, technology, drugs, energy, time, and the seeds of revolutionary ideas for various black movements” (xvi).
One of Stallings’s most exciting critical interventions is her centering of the smell and force of funky black creativity to reorder our sense of the black body as it feels, responds, and creates. What this move does is to disorient our study of black cultural production and aesthetics, which has focused primarily on sight and sound to highlight aspects of affect and desire that may still be taboo—the “eruptions of funk” (to borrow Toni Morrison’s term) that come with our most taboo acts: nonreproductive sex; Bondage, Domination, Sadism, and Masochism (BDSM) and other forms of kink; orgies; partying, drug use, and other forms of leisure; sex work and other forms of underground economies; antiwork; and postwork—all figured here as potentially revolutionary practices of imagination and creativity.
Stallings’s re-privileging of these senses interrupts/dismantles the systems of labor that organize race and sexuality for profit, in which she includes racial realism in publishing, uplift movements, sexual identity within sexual canons of gender and sex, and work ethics of capitalism—by dismantling the regimes of the senses left over from the Enlightenment and Modernism that fetishize text and orality. In her interests in the work and labor connected with sex, and the ways that funk intervenes in and reorganizes social rules on work, leisure, and politics, she brings together scholarship on work and labor with aesthetic and spiritual aspects of black culture, always centering the possibilities of resistance and transcendence of social constraints of work.
Stallings is especially interested in funk’s power of change as it is embodied for black women—beginning with those closest to her: her mother, her students, and her own self. But she argues that funk opens up traditional masculinities and sexual practices for black men. Pushing beyond the limits of black respectability that she argues still shapes and inhibits much black feminist inquiry, she uses what she calls “mama’s porn”—the sometimes hidden, often life-saving practice of charting one’s own sexual pleasure, as the moving drive of her inquiry into the “funky erotixxx” of creativity and improvisation of our erotic lives (10). In her often brave embrace of “mama’s porn” she embraces the spaces of the profane: the party, the orgy, the strip club, pornographic, self-published other forms of noncanonical literature and film to more fully understand the “superfreak’s” intervention into the disciplining practices of respectability and work. In the process, she offers a new and compelling set of archives, as well as theoretical approaches.
An admired strength of this study is the boldness of its argumentation, informed by a wide and careful engagement with key texts on sexuality, subjectivity, history, aesthetics, and metaphysics, including Toni Morrison’s writings on ancestors, origins, and the rootedness of black storytelling; Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality’ Fred Moten’s work on economies of the black imagination; Frank Wilderson’s interrogations of necropolitics; Susan Stryker’s and C. Riley Snorton’s work on “transing” and black transgender identity; James Boggs’s and Kathi Weeks’s interest in labor, leisure, and anti-work; and perhaps most influential of all, Audre Lorde’s writings on the erotic, death, and the medicalization of black sexual subjectivity. Bringing together these thinkers, she persuasively activates the senses as a means to avoid necropolitics. Returning to sites of powerful thinking on the black erotic from the past, including Lorde’s, she attempts and succeeds in reopening the discussion for the possibility of agency and the production of alternative knowledges. For example, in her first chapter, “Sexual Magic and Funky Black Freaks,” she brings together the slave, freak, and sex worker as “three subjects linked by stunted readings of difference, in addition to the historical subjugation, stigmatization, and criminalization of their bodies in the West” (37). And in Stallings’s sixth chapter, “From the Freaks of Freaknik to the Freaks of Magic City: Black Women, Androgyny, Dance and Profane Sites of Memory,” she brings together dance, street parties, and strip club culture to offer new sites for thinking about black men and women’s sexual and economic agency, as performers, proprietors, and as audience members, as well as sites of queer archiving and world-making. In these ways, she draws on and extends recent work on black women in pornography and the sex trade that reach beyond criminalization, including Jennifer Nash’s The Black Body in Ecstasy and Cynthia Blair’s I’ve Got to Make my Livin’.
The book offers thoughtful and nuanced readings of texts that get very little attention in scholarship, as well as readings of better known texts that need new questions. Stallings’s analysis in her third chapter, “Make Ya Holler You’ve Had enough” of Chester Himes’s satiric work Pinktoes, with its dominatrix heroine offers up new ways of rethinking of Chester Himes’s resistant literary, political, and sexual strategies. Her reading of cult science fiction, from Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed Series, offers a fresh analysis of Butler’s posthuman sexual ethics in light of recent conversations on non monogamy and ethical slutting.
In the very valuable final chapter, “Black Trans Narratives, Sex Work, and the Illusive Flesh,” Stallings explores the intersectional politics of black embodiment for two transgender writers, autobiographer Toni Newman and novelist and short story writer Red Jordan Arobateau. By activating the notion of transing, practices of analysis that move both within as well as across and between spaces of gender in her analysis, Stallings explores the ways that the flesh within this writing exceeds the biological. These works represent a philosophy of identity that counters “the biopolitics of everyday life with a different definition of what it means to be human, [including] resistance to work society, and grammars and aesthetics culled from what has been theorized as transworld identity” (207). In their understanding, and some might say “overstanding,” of the politics of the flesh, including bodily modification and extension, Arobateau and Newman in this way confront and displace the fetishization of cis and transgender erotic relations, to offer new visions of creativity and pleasure.
Stallings’s book powerfully and persuasively addresses how and why black people have used sexual expression as a mode of survival and creativity in the New World. Her examination of the representation of sexual labor and expressivity in non canonical literature and other forms of culture, forces us to confront both the limits of our present research paradigms, as well as the power of moral panics around sex to marginalize or erase a spectrum of black experience and humanity.
