Mickalene Thomas and the Science of the Rhinestone

• In Event: Dissenting from Diagnosis: Embodiment and Visual Culture

Abstract

Mickalene Thomas’ painting The Origin of the Universe (2012), is a dazzling work of art that positions her rhinestone embellished genitals in the center of the frame. From the outset, it is clear that Thomas’ centering of black female genitalia is radical. By presenting her bedazzled and enlarged vulva for consumption, she changes the meaning of a history that has used black women’s bodies as the grounds for gynecological experimentation or pornography that seeks to find the truth of race within black women’s splayed legs. Instead of a legacy of anonymous pain, Thomas presents us with pleasure—both hers and ours. This pleasure comes from a refusal of the mandates of truth that are set forth in sexology and pleasure in the surplus of excess surface. This talk reads Thomas' painting as a response to Gustave Courbet's Origin of the World (1866) and late nineteenth century sexological discourses that position black female sexuality as deviant. This deviance is imagined to be both anatomical--in the guise of an enlarged clitoris--and behavior--through the seduction of white women.  In this centering of the black clitoris, Thomas rebuffs the suggestion of anomaly with that of pleasure through the suggestion of scissoring. While Courbet’s Origin of the World, eschews any representation of the clitoris in favor of emphasizing the vagina as void, Thomas’ depiction of her clitoris is at once more anatomically correct and excessive in that it gestures toward a particular nexus of female pleasure that is activated through the surface rather than through penetration. From this perspective Thomas’ embrace of the clitoris and surface is radical. It summons lesbian feminist ideologies in tandem with histories of racialization to gesture toward the queerness of friction. Further, we should remember that Origin of the Universe 1 is actually part of a diptych. Its pair, Origin of the Universe 2 is a portrait of her former wife, Carmen McLeod. Thomas describes the paintings as “a sort of call and response, dealing with the nature of sexuality on a different level, romanticizing the nature of relationships and intimacy—and also having this connection with a black body in relation to a white body.”[1] Thomas’ mobilization of miscegenation through tribbing disrupts any neat idea of corruption or structural dominance. This is to say that Thomas’ blackness is neither a “masculine” corruptor of McCleod’s innocence nor is she mobilizing racialized abjection. Tribbing does not map easily onto these frameworks for thinking about race and power in large part because it exceeds the logic of penetrative sex. I read Thomas’ hint of reclaiming tribbing as suggesting a queer present for the practice and a way to re-read its excessive reliance on surface.

Author

• Amber Musser, Washington University In St. Louis