Articles

“Black Speculations: A Roundtable,” MELUS (forthcoming)

“Blackness, Pleasure, and Agency in Porn Studies: A Roundtable” Porn Studies (2025) 1–21.

“Limited Accounts: Thinking Race and Recognition,” differences (2024) 35 (3): 63–89.

“Black, Queer, and Sick: Amplifying Representation’s Noisiness,” differences: A Journal of feminist cultural studies (September 2024) 35 (2): 79-88.

“Learning to Listen: On Maternal Opacity,” Studies in Gender and Sexuality (2024) 25 (3): 161-167.

“Felt Pleasures: The Jiggle, The Lesbian, and Janelle Monáe’s ‘Lipstick Lover,’” Film Quarterly (2024) 77(3): 45-52.

“I’m Your Baby Tonight: Materiality and the Wish,” Parapraxis, December 2023

“Between Porosity and Shine: Toward a Fleshy Analytic of Sweat,” Social Text 155 June 2023 44(2): 1-18.

“Introduction,” with Linda Blum to “Complexities of Care and Caring” co-edited with Martha Feinman and Linda Blum Signs 49.1(Fall 2023): 1-6.

“Femininity” in Syntax of Thought Reading Leo Bersani, differences 34 (1) 2023: 113-118.

"Racialized Femininity and Representation's Ambivalences in Trajal Harrell's Return of La Argentina" in Ambivalent Criticism, ed Michael Dango and Tina Post, post45, issue 8 (October 2022)

"Sensing Brownness: On Racialization, Perception and Method," Dossier on The Sense of Brown, Afterimage (2022) 49 (1): 45-52. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2022.49.1.45

“Race and the Integrity of the Line: Sexology and Representations of Pleasure,” Social Text 148 (Fall 2021) 17-36.

“Sweat, Display, and Blackness: The Promises of Liquidity,” Feminist Media Histories Feminist Media Histories, Vol. 7, Number 2 (2021), pps. 92–109.   https://doi.org/10.1525/

“Tear and the Politics of Brown Feeling,” ASAP/J  September 30, 2021 <<

“Dysfunctional Blackness: Toward Being-with and Relational Freedom,” Ontological Terror Symposium, Syndicate Lit January 20, 2021

“Dialogues: Audre Lorde Revisited: Amber Jamilla Musser and Lana Lin” ASAP Journal, January 2021 6.1: 1-17.

“Beyond Desire: Blackness and Form,” Formalism Unbound, post45, Fall 2020

“The Limits of Desire: Jacolby Satterwhite and the Maternal Elsewhere,” The Black Scholar (2020) 50(2): 37-42.

“Teaching the Second Sex: A Conversation,” with Soyica Colbert and Paige McGinley Feminist Formations 32(1) Spring 2020: 98-116.

“Sweat” Social Text Periscope on COVID-19 April 27, 2020

“Blackness, the Virtual and the Work of Fabulation,” Social Text Periscope on Tavia Nyong’o’s Afro-fabulations January 28, 2020

 “Time to Smell the Flowers: A Sensational, Transnational Trajectory in Black Feminism,” Black Feminism Remixed Symposium in Syndicate Literature December 5, 2019

“A Chromatic Presence: Barbara Hammer and What You’re Not Supposed to Look At,” co-written with Maureen Catbagan Women and Performance 29:3, 235-242, 

“Toward Mythic Feminist Theorizing: Simone Leigh and the Power of the Vessel,” differences (2019) 30 (3): 63–91.

“Surface-Becoming: Lyle Ashton Harris and Brown Jouissance,” Women and Performance (2018) 28(1): 1-12.

“Jennifer Packer: M. Heller,” 1x1 Brooklyn Rail April 2019

“Race, Affect, and Assemblage: Toward Brown Jouissance,” Social Text Periscope on Terrorist Assemblages, October 25, 2018

“Mammy’s Milk and Absent Black Children,” Studies in Gender and Sexuality (September 2018)

Return of La Argentina, Black One Shot, ASAP-J online, June 4, 2018

“Introduction,” with Kadji Amin and Roy Pérez,  “Queer Form,” co-edited with Kadji Amin and Roy Pérez  ASAP Journal 2.2 (May 2017)

“Sex, Sensation, and Funky Pleasures,” Funk the Erotic Symposium, Syndicate Lit March 8, 2017

“Queering Sugar: Kara Walker’s Sugar Sphinx and the Intractability of Black Female Sexuality,” Signs: Journal of Women and Culture (2016) 42(1): 1-22.

“Race, Pornography, and Desire: A TBS Roundtable,” The Black Scholar (online—September 2016)

 “Black Hair and Textures of Defensiveness” Palimpsest (2016) 5(1): 1-19.

“Queering the Pin-Up: History, Femmes, and Brooklyn” GLQ (2016) 22(1): 55-80.

 “Specimen Days: Diversity, Labor, and the University,” Feminist Formations (2015) 27(3): 1-20.

 “Fifty Shades of Grey, The Story of O, and the Possibilities of Critique,” Feminist Theory (2015) 16(2): 121-136. DOI: 10.1177/1464700115585723

 “Lesbians, Tea, and the Vernacular of Fluids” Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory (2015) 25(1): 1-18. DOI: 10,1080/0740770X.2014.994841

 “Object of Desire: Towards an Ethics of Sameness” theory and event (2013) 16(2).

“On the Orgasm of the Species: Female Sexuality, Science, and Sexual Difference" Feminist Review (2012) 102: 1–20.

“Anti-Oedipus, Kinship, and the Subject of Affect” Social Text (2012) 30(3): 77-95.

“Reading, Writing, Masochism: The Arts of Becoming” differences (2012) 23(1): 131-150.

Racial Camouflage: Thinking Race Apart from Sexuality,” Studies in Gender and Sexuality (2012) 13(3): 231-5.

“Reading, Writing, and the Whip,” Literature and Medicine (2009) 27(2): 204-222.

 “From Our Body to Your Selves: The Boston Women’s Health Book Collective and Changing Notions of Subjectivity, 1969-1973,” WSQ (2007) 35(1&2): 93-109.

“Masochism, A Queer Subjectivity,” Rhizomes 11, Fall 2005. (online)

Book Chapters

"The Queerness of Blackness,” Cambridge History of Queer Literature, edited by Benjy Kahan,

“Building a World: Sensation’s Queer Intimacies,” in Routledge Companion to Queer Literary Studies, edited by Melissa Sanchez (forthcoming)

“Bodies” This is Not a Feminism Textbook, edited by Catherine Rottenberg, (London and Cambridge, MA: Goldsmiths and MIT Press, 2023).

“Queer” This is Not a Feminism Textbook, edited by Catherine Rottenberg, (London and Cambridge, MA: Goldsmiths and MIT Press, 2023).

“Introduction” co-written with Keywords Feminist Editorial Collective, Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies (New York: New York University Press, 2021), 1-8.

 “Race” co-written with Keywords Feminist Editorial Collective for Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies (New York: New York University Press, 2021), 178-183.

“Sex,” Keywords for Gender and Sexuality Studies (New York: New York University Press, 2021), 200-201.

 “Arrested Intimacies of the Flesh,” Queer Communion: Ron Athey (London and New York: Intellect Ltd, 2020)

“Sheree Rose, the Maternal, and the Erotics of Care,” Rated RX: Sheree Rose with and after Bob Flanagan (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 2020), 122-128.

“Bette Davis Eyes and Minoritarian Survival: Camp, Melodrama, and Spectatorship,” Affect and Literature. Edited by Alex Houen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020).

“On Pins and Needles: Punks, Dandies and Spectacularity” Oxford Handbook of History and Material Culture, edited by Ivan Gaskill and Sarah Anne Carter (Oxford University Press, 2020), 90-104.

“All About Our Mothers: Race, Gender, and the Reparative,” After Queer Studies: Literature, Theory, and Sexuality in the 21st Century, Edited by Tyler Bradway and  E.L. McCallum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 122-136.

“Consent, Capacity, and the Non-Narrative,” Queer Feminist Science Studies Reader, Edited by Cyd Cipolla, Kristina Gupta, David A Rubin, and Angela Wiley (Seattle: University of Washington, 2017); 221-233.

“Thinking Precarity and Sexuality with Queer Theory,” A Companion to Critical and Cultural Theory. Edited by Imre Szeman, Sarah Blacker, and Justin Sully (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017); 243-254.

“Re-membering Lorde: Adding Lesbian Feminist Mother Poet to Black,” No Tea, No Shade. Edited by E. Patrick Johnson (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 346-361.

“On the erotic” Gender: Sources, Perspectives, and Methodologies. Edited by Renée C. Hoogland. Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks: Gender (Farmington Hills, MI: Macmillan Reference USA, 2016); 69-82.

“Sadomasochism, domination, and submission,” The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015) (online)

Popular Writing

“Let’s Get Loud!” Movement Project Research Journal, 60 Spring/Summer 2024

“Mother Love” for Mommy Wound, edited by Katie Brewer Ball and Vick Quezada, March 2024

“Compulsion or Excess” Texte zur Kunst, December 2023 <https://www.textezurkunst.de/en/132/amber-jamilla-musser-compulsion-or-excess/>

“Silvermuon: An avatar, an invitation,” Asia Art Archive, November 2023 <https://aaa.org.hk/en/like-a-fever/like-a-fever/silvermuon-an-avatar-an-invitation/series/the-stakes-of-naming>

“Tamarind and the Politics of Rest,” March 02: Black Ecologies edited by Imani Jacqueline Brown and Sarrita Hun, (The Luminary, St. Louis, MO, Fall 2021), 42-52.

“The Sunken Place: Race, Racism, and Freud,” Public Books October 1, 2019 <<https://www.publicbooks.org/virtual-roundtable-on-the-ego-and-the-id/#musser>>

“Infinity Folds: Sonic Sculptures and Dancing Shapes,” collective terrain/s ed Lydia Bell Danspace Projects; New York, 2019 18-22

“The Mess We’re In” Public Books, Roundtable on Future Sex, March 24, 2017 << http://www.publicbooks.org/virtual-roundtable-future-sex/ >>

Book Reviews

"Book Review: Black Utopias" Journal of Popular Music Studies, Vol 34 (1): 170-171.

“On Julie Beth Napolin’s The Fact of Resonance” Social Text online, September 21, 2020 <https://socialtextjournal.org/on-julie-beth-napolins-the-fact-of-resonance/>

“Review of Nicole Brittingham Furlonge Race Sounds: The Art of Listening in African American Literature” ALH Online Reviews, Series XXIV << https://static.primary.prod.gcms.the-infra.com/static/site/alh/document/ALH_Online_Review_Series_24/13._Musser.pdf?node=13671cb6ca48d8773fb4&version=121738:8eeb0badcb621a830d7e>>

 “Ezili’s Mirrors: Imagining Black Queer Genders by Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley” TDR 63 (2) Summer 2019: 177-178.

Virtual Intimacies: Media, Affect, and Queer Sociality by Shaka McGlotten reviewed in Screen Bodies, June 2017

“Black Women, Pornography, and Economies of Desire,” (review of A Taste for Brown Sugar), GLQ 23:1 (January 2017): 160-162.

Habeaus Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human by Alex Wehilye reviewed in philoSOPHIA (2016) 6.1: 156-160.

“How to Be a Credit to Your Race,” Review of Margo Jefferson’s Negroland, The Common Reader, January 26, 2016. (online)

 “The Short and Happy Life of Robert Peace” The Common Reader, June 1, 2015 (online)

“Breathing Race into the Machine: The Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Plantation to Genetics” African American Review (2014) 47(1): 201-204.

“Desire, Belonging Touch” review of The Erotic Life of Racism, WSQ (2014) 42(3-4): 312-3.

“The Politics and Erotics of Time” (review of E. Freeman Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories) Reviews in Cultural Theory (2011) 2(1). (online)

Catalog Essays

“Tomorrow: Fantasy, Abolition, and Black Refusal” in Whitney 2024 Biennial Catalogue (April 2024)

“Fragmentation, Commodification, and Autonomy: Varieties of Gynecological Representation” in Scientia Sexualis Catalogue (October 2024)

“Solidarity: In and Through the Work of Kinship,” essay for Kindred Solidarities, Rubin Foundation, the 8th floor, October 2021 << https://www.the8thfloor.org/kindred-solidarities-essay>>

“Sensing Vastness,” catalogue essay for DeLuxe show for Karma gallery, September 2021, expanded and reprinted for Gulf Coast magazine, January 2022

“Pedagogy, Power, and Play: When Race Saturates Sex,” in Saturation ed by Riley Snorton and Hentyle Yapp, (Cambridge, MIT Press: 2020), 299-304.

Art Reviews (Unless otherwise noted, art reviews can be found on Brooklyn Rail)

“Kemar Keanu Wynter: Rücken,” Brooklyn Rail, October 2024

“David-Jeremiah: I Drive Thee,” Brooklyn Rail, September 2024

“Danielle Mckinney: Quiet Storm,” ASAP/J, May 2024

“Kyle Dunn: Night Pictures, Brooklyn Rail, May 2023

 “King Cobra: White Meat,” Brooklyn Rail, May 2023

 “Kerry James Marshall: Exquisite Corpse,” Brooklyn Rail, December-January, 2023

 “Jennifer Packer in Conversation with Amber Jamilla Musser,” Brooklyn Rail, December-January 2022

 “Get Lifted: The Art of the Ecstatic,” co-written with Maureen Catbagan, Brooklyn Rail, September 2021

 “Mickalene Thomas in Conversation with Amber Jamilla Musser,” Brooklyn Rail September 2021

 “Interspecies Futures, Veiled Taxonomies, Lights, Tunnels, Shadows, and Passages at Center for Book Arts,” Brooklyn Rail, June 2021

 “Chitra Ganesh: A City Will Show You Her Secrets if You Know How to Ask,” Brooklyn Rail, April 2021

 “Jonathan Lyndon Chase: Big Wash,” Brooklyn Rail, Dec/Jan 2021

“Kent Monkman with Amber Jamilla Musser,” Brooklyn Rail, November 2020

“Toyin Ojih Odutola: Tell Me a Story I don’t Care if it’s True” Brooklyn Rail, October 2020

“Maureen Catbagan,” Brooklyn Rail, September 2020

 “Rashid Johnson: Untitled Anxious Red Drawings,  Brooklyn Rail, June 2020

 “Doreen Garner: The Remains” Brooklyn Rail, February 2020

 “Jacolby Satterwhite: Room for Living” Brooklyn Rail, October 2019

 “Sonya Clark: Monumental Cloth, The Flag We Should Know,” co-written with Maureen Catbagan, Brooklyn Rail, July/August 2019 <<

 “Lorna Simpson: Darkening,” co-written with Maureen Catbagan, Brooklyn Rail, June 2019

 “Yukultjni Napangati,” co-written with Maureen Catbagan, Brooklyn Rail, March 2019

 “Jacob Lawrence: The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture,” Brooklyn Rail, March 2019

 “God Made Me A Face: A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin,” Brooklyn Rail, Feb 2019

“Sable Elyse Smith: BOLO Be on (the) Lookout,” Brooklyn Rail, Dec/Jan 2018

 “Toyin Ojih Odutola: When Legends Die,” Brooklyn Rail, October 2018

 “PÒTOPRENS: The Urban Artists of Port-au-Prince,” co-written with Maureen Catbagan, Brooklyn Rail, October 2018

 "Tracey Moffat's Vigils and Travellers," co-written with Maureen Catbagan Brooklyn Rail, July/August 2018

 “Architectures of Blue: Race, Representation, and Black and Brown Abstraction,” Brooklyn Rail, October 2017