Shame, Kathryn Bond Stockton argues in Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame , has often been a meeting place for the signs “black” and “queer” and for black and queer people—overlapping groups who have been publicly marked as degraded and debased. But when and why have certain forms of shame been embraced by blacks and queers? How does debasement foster attractions? How is it used for aesthetic delight? What does it offer for projects of sorrow and ways of creative historical knowing? How and why is it central to camp? Stockton engages the domains of African American studies, queer theory, psychoanalysis, film theory, photography, semiotics, and gender studies. She brings together thinkers rarely, if ever, read together in a single study—James Baldwin, Radclyffe Hall, Jean Genet, Toni Morrison, Robert Mapplethorpe, Eldridge Cleaver, Todd Haynes, Norman Mailer, Leslie Feinberg, David Fincher, and Quentin Tarantino—and reads them with and against major theorists, including Georges Bataille, Sigmund Freud, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, and Leo Bersani. Stockton asserts that there is no clear, mirrored relation between the terms “black” and “queer”; rather, seemingly definitive associations attached to each are often taken up or crossed through by the other. Stockton explores dramatic switchpoints between these terms: the stigmatized “skin” of some queers’ clothes, the description of blacks as an “economic bottom,” the visual force of interracial homosexual rape, the complicated logic of so-called same-sex miscegenation, and the ways in which a famous depiction of slavery (namely, Morrison’s Beloved ) seems bound up with depictions of AIDS. All of the thinkers Stockton considers scrutinize the social nature of shame as they examine the structures that make debasements possible, bearable, pleasurable, and creative, even in their darkness. “ Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame is an exciting, pointed, splendidly written, culturally important book.”—Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, author of Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity ""Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame" is an exciting, pointed, splendidly written, culturally important book."--Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, author of "Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity" Kathryn Bond Stockton is Professor of English and Director of Gender Studies at the University of Utah. She is the author of God Between Their Lips: Desire Between Women in Irigaray, Brontë, and Eliot . BEAUTIFUL BOTTOM, BEAUTIFUL SHAME Where "Black" Meets "Queer" By KATHRYN BOND STOCKTON DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS Copyright © 2006 Duke University Press All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8223-3796-6 Contents ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.......................................................................................................1INTRODUCTION Embracing Shame: "Black" and "Queer" in Debasement.....................................................39ONE Cloth Wounds, or When Queers Are Martyred to Clothes: Debasements of a Fabricated Skin..........................67TWO Bottom Values: Anal Economics in the History of Black Neighborhoods.............................................101THREE When Are Dirty Details and Scenes Compelling? Tucked in the Cuts of Interracial Anal Rape.....................149FOUR Erotic Corpse: Homosexual Miscegenation and the Decomposition of Attraction....................................177FIVE Prophylactics and Brains: Slavery in the Cybernetic Age of aids................................................205CONCLUSION Dark Camp: Behind and Ahead..............................................................................223NOTES.................................................................................................................257BIBLIOGRAPHY..........................................................................................................265 Chapter One CLOTH WOUNDS, OR WHEN QUEERS ARE MARTYRED TO CLOTHES DEBASEMENTS OF A FABRICATED SKIN Cloth and Skin Clothing is the problem from which I launch my book and my book's specific aims: to scout debasement's surprising values, to understand debasement as crucial to the crossings between "black" and "queer," and to focus squarely on fictions' theoretical/speculative force. In a book that moves from debasements attached to the actions of clothing, to anal penetration, to interracial rape, to decomposition, to hauntings by the dead, a look at clothing comprises this book's first layer for a reason. Clothing raises the question of a surface to which shame attaches. One such familiar surface is skin. Civil rights activists, black student radicals, and black studies scholars, among many other readers of race, have made us familiar with the prejudicial hate attaching to a surface-nonwhite skin-that people of color don't choose for themselves. But I want to ask about an unexamined switchpoint between "black" and "queer": the switchpoint between these nonelective sk