Mad Sex; or, Mad Black Women and the End of the Phallus

• In Event: Mad/Queer Pedagogies of Dissent

Abstract

In this talk, I ponder two fictional women who inhabit precarious intersections of blackness, madness, and queerness. The first is Eva Medina Canada, a beleaguered black woman and psychiatric prison inmate at the center of Gayl Jones’ 1976 novel, Eva’s Man. The only child of black working-class parents and later an itinerant manual laborer in mid-twentieth century America, Eva is assailed by sexually abusive men and boys throughout her life. Her “madness”—perhaps the outcome of decades of antiblack and misogynist abuse and trauma—culminates with the murder, necrophilic assault, and gruesome mutilation of a man who has sexually objectified her. In stark contrast is Eva’s contemporary, Liliane Bliss Lincoln, the heroine of Ntozake Shange’s novel Liliane: Resurrection of the Daughter (1994). Born to a prominent black judge and demure housewife, Liliane becomes a painter, sculptor, experimental performance artist, wanderlustful world traveler, and erotic adventurer for whom sex is artistic praxis. Her peculiar “madness”—the product of black bourgeois repressions as well as antiblack and misogynist traumas—is sublimated into relentless artmaking.


For all their radical differences, Eva and Liliane are both are black-American women born circa 1940; both confront anti-blackness and misogyny on interpersonal and structural registers; both are only-children decisively shaped by the infidelity of their mothers and the abuse their fathers perpetrate against those mothers; both are haunted by madness and “treated” by (very different) clinicians in stylized scenes of psychiatric evaluation and psychoanalysis. Moreover, both women might also be read as “queer”—not because they are same-sex desiring, but because they are black women whose racial, sexual, and affective lifeworlds situate them far outside Western heteronorms. In particular, Eva and Liliane are peripatetic women who eschew the normative protocols of conjugal-maternal domesticity and both participate in radically non-normative (mad, queer) sex. Eva’s necrophilic intercourse and castration-by-bite of the still-warm body of a man she just murdered is absolutely a long, far cry from Liliane’s sexually adventurous black womanhood. And yet, both acts—biting off a section of penis and having the gall to be woman and “fuck” whomever you please—threaten prevailing masculinist prerogatives. The former subverts the masculinist prerogative to possess a penis the latter, perhaps, challenges the prerogative to wield the Phallus. This talk will reveal how Eva and Liliane both expose the limits of the penis-cum-Phallus.

Author

• LaMarr J Bruce