Queering Sugar: Kara Walker’s Sugar Sphinx and the Intractability of Black Female Sexuality

Authors

Amber Jamilla Musser, CUNY Graduate CenterFollow

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2016

Abstract

This essay analyzes the controversy surrounding artist Kara Walker’s 2014 installation, A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, to unpack the pleasures and dangers that subtend discussions of black female sexuality. What Walker announced as a tribute to the labor of brown and black bodies produced myriad conversations about pleasure, danger, and black female sexuality. Most art critics argued that the piece reclaimed black female agency; many visitors criticized the work (and the public response to it) as disrespectful and problematic. In the essay, I argue that both of these responses highlight the difficulty of talking about black female sexuality outside a framework of violation, in which consent (mutual agreement to action) is never possible. This essay analyzes the multiple layers of conversation about black female sexuality that the work produced, concluding with murmurs of a new conversation around the sphinx that signal new modes of apprehending black female queerness.

Comments

This article was originally published in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, available at https://doi.org/10.1086/686756

This work is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0).