Dermopolitics and the erotics of the Muslim body in pain

Abstract

This article considers the role of sexuality in constructing racialized Muslim bodies within the contemporary global order. The author draws on Saidiya Hartman and Hortense Spillers’ theorizations of the flesh as the site of racial inscription. These theories have tackled how the body becomes raced through divergent sexual regulatory practices. Following their insights, the author argues that Muslim bodies are racialized through discourses of sexual vulnerability and the visual circulation of their bodies as flesh. The author focuses on performance pieces by Coco Fusco and ▪▪▪▪▪▪ ▪▪▪▪▪▪▪ in order to consider how race is “epidermalized” or experienced at the level of the skin, the body, and the flesh. The author shows that these artists perform resistant and emancipatory practices through complex identifications with undesirable and unexpected figures. Their erotic performances, she argues, contest the operation of power on subjugated bodies.

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