What are the affective registers of senses to Black bodies and subjects? How do taste and Blackness play? Turning to the bodily sense of taste, I endeavor to make meaning of the Black body as a sensory apparatus bursting with quotidian brutality and pleasure, burdened with the task of locating another kind of sexual future. Exploring the possibilities of taste and eating in the construction of Blackness under antiblackness, I imagine consumption as acts of refusal and resistance. The sensation of tasting and Blackness as spectacle becomes a way of sensing for Black subjects. The sensorial is historically tethered to the experiences, memories, and survival of captive Africans manifest in breathing, eating, touching, and smelling, marking (in)humane conditions, captured in their struggle to breathe while positioned in tiny unlivable spaces, side-by-side, packed like spoons, with no room to turn, piled on top of one another aboard overcrowded slave ships. Transported as cargo—things or objects to be sold. Olaudah Equiano shared his firsthand account of being held captive on a ship:

I was soon put down under the decks, and there I received such a salutation in my nostrils as I had never experienced in my life: so that, with the loathsomeness of the stench, and crying together, I became sick and low that I was not able to eat, nor had I the least desire to taste anything. I now wished for the last friend, death, to relieve me.¹

Unbearable breathing conditions aboard the ship amplify a particular relationship people of the African diaspora endure to hear, see, touch, smell, and taste. Equiano, writing of his lived experiences extending to bodily senses, wilting emancipatory longings, tasting dehumanizing forces of slavery from which captive Africans understood death as preferable to bondage. He desired above-deck conditions, finding breathing fresh air as a luxury denied containing a corporeal reality: “The air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness amongst the slaves, of which many died.”² Equiano provided an account of captivity, an autobiographical novel guided by a sensorial experience; bodily sensations allow him to describe the tight space of the ship and the closeness of cargo—bodies and objects, the sugar, coffee, chocolate, spices, and rum, that rubbed against one another—all to be sold. Often sea conditions were rough, requiring that portholes be shut, leaving captive Africans gasping for breath. Many elected to jump into the sea, holding their breath, or refused to eat, starving themselves to death. The various acts of rebellion and refusal accentuate their sensorial responses to captivity. The afterlife of slavery employs particular grammars inherent to Black being and nonbeing; as Christina Sharpe writes, “Always, Black being seems lodged between cargo and being.”³ It is on the ship that Blackness gains its meaning, for both captive and captor. These acts onboard the ship employ the materiality of Blackness as a felt experience rooted in the senses. I wonder if the captive Africans sensed what awaited them if they survived the journey, if their bodies felt that bondage would be more sinister than death.

Equiano’s written text describes a longing for death, whereas the inability to eat provides an uncanny sense of relief. It eludes to copulation and consumption travels within experiences of repulsion and delight through taste, sight, sound, and smells that at times play well with one another, enacting various interactions between Blackness and funk, sweat, urine, feces, and death. In concert with the cries of agony, the closeness of cargo aboard the ship captures the sensorial experience of captivity, positioning the captive body as an active and affective register under the guise of antiblackness⁴ as catalyst for the autobiography, slave narratives, travel narrative, and spiritual narrative of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Or Gustavus Vassa, The African. The pungent smell of enslaved Africans upon ships contributed to the racialization of bodily difference. Europeans fastened perceptions of savagery in relations to bodily odor, constructed in their imaginations of African inferiority, insisting on bodily odor as a biological difference.⁵ Revealing an insatiable desire and hunger for flesh, Black inferiority included myths of sexual deviance that materialized in sexual modes of consumption, whereas Blackness in an antiblack world adhere to disgust and repulsion. Senses—sight, sound, taste, touch and smell—as modes of erotic power and resistance under anti-racism establish alternative futures of the stench of Black bodily fluids and loss of appetite experienced under enslavement and captivity. Funk “within and outside of the Black musical genre,” and as a scent emphasizes the smelling of bodies, signifying funk as an “adapt[ation] eros to decolonizing efforts or funk with the erotic . . . as a philosophy about being or (un)becoming human . . . as a philosophy about what it means to be otherly human, inhuman, or nonhuman.”⁶

The matter of Blackness is immortalized through speculative violence of Black bodies hung, choked, buried, maimed, beat, burned, sexually violated, dismembered, and castrated while the subjects are still alive. Lynching and dismembering Black people, a metaphorical eating of the body, serves to terrorize, punish, contain, and regulate, maintaining ideals of superiority, with white supremacy espousing the notions of victimhood and law and order. Frederick Douglass alludes to the experienced sensibilities he felt in witnessing the beating of his aunt Hester by Captain Anthony—a distinct bodily sensation of hunger and lust he describes as voyeurism, a sort of spectatorship as a means to distribute terror. In Black Boy, Richard Wright wrote of the terror he endured from “the white death” growing up in Mississippi; the ever-looming uncertainty of death that “influenced my conduct as a Negro did not happen to me directly; I needed but to hear of them to feel their full effects in the deepest layers of my consciousness.”⁷ The bodily sensations he described as “tension would set in at the mere mention of whites and a vast complex of emotions, involving the whole of my personality, would be aroused. It was as though I was continuously reacting to the threat of some natural force whose hostile behavior could not be predicted. I had never in my life been abused by whites, but I had already become as conditioned to their existence as though I had been the victim of a thousand lynchings."⁸

This is also evident in witnessing the bodily sensations of Eric Garner as he’s wrestled to the ground. His body hitting, touching the pavement, facial expressions of agony, sensing fear, as he struggled against white bodies dressed in blue, arms around his neck. His voice trembled while his body slowly ceased to struggle with little movement, the fading sound of bodies wrestling slowly dissipates as he proclaims repeatedly, “I can’t breathe.” We are haunted by the image of him taking his last breaths as arms belonging to those who swore to protect and serve brutally crushed his throat, choking the life from his body. We watched, unable to look, as Eric Garner died multiple times as the media continuously replayed the video. We listened to his last words on July 17, 2014, “I can’t breathe,” the same words that were used nearly six years later, on May 25, 2020. “I can’t breathe” was echoed when a Minneapolis police officer held his knee on the neck of George Floyd, crushed his throat, choking him to death. Darnella Frazier, a Black teenager who took out her cellphone on the Minneapolis street, captured the murder of George Floyd by police officers. The visual recording undermined the initial account of Floyd’s death by the Minneapolis Police Department, leading to criminal charges against four officers. The bodily sensations described and felt, constructed through the terror of existing in an antiblack world are poignant, looming, generating a set of anxieties of consumption and Blackness.

It is (im)possible to untether Blackness from/to its relationship as the captive body, constructed through objectivity, lacking agency as bounded to fabrications regarding the incapacity to feel and to endure pain. In “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Hortense Spillers constructs a clear dissimilarity between the “captive body” and “Black flesh,” which has been imagined and assembled through the brutality of enslavement and continues, post-slavery, to signify “lacerations, wounding, fissures, tears, scars, openings, ruptures, lesions, renderings, punctures.”⁹ In stunning contradiction, the captive body is reduced to a thing as a category of otherness. Fundamentally, the existence of the captive body and Black flesh, the contours of touch and taste, illustrate specialized senses constructed with otherness as an apparatus through which to “mak[e] sense of the world; in this way sensation has an external dimension.”¹⁰ Provoking a set of intimacies connecting tasting, eating, and swallowing to sensorial experiences situated at the intersections of race, class, place, gender, and sexuality, I call attention to the sensation of taste originating from Black beingness and body—mouth, lips, throat, and buttocks, overburdened as illicit, vulgar, disgusting, and simultaneously sites of excessiveness and pleasure.

In On the Postcolony (2001), Achille Mbembe illuminates Cameroonians’ use of satire as critical to political humor and argues that beyond the plurality of the “mouth, belly, and phallus, the body is the principal locale of the idioms and fantasies used in depicting power.”¹¹ The historical frictions residing in the economies of flesh suggest there is power in excessive appetites tied to Blackness as experienced in autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR). ASMR can be understood as a communal space for a collective refusal and reordering of human subjectivities through becoming and being, eating and tasting as a performance and nonperformance, which manifests in relation to market demand. A means of survival and refusal as models of selfhood, taste, and tasting embrace gustatory practices and literal taste as a reluctant theme throughout cultural landscapes, challenging iconographies constructed upon the sexual mythologies of Black subjectivity. In “Economies of Flesh: Representing the Black Female Body in Art,” Lisa Collins explores how “the economies of flesh—that is, various markets for Black female bodies—have affected the creation and reception of images of Black women,”¹² which are represented in art as strange and grotesque. In “An Aesthetic of Blackness: Strange and Oppositional,” bell hooks confronts Western philosophies and theories that position Blackness as strange and oppositional to whiteness and beauty. Aesthetics, she argues, is in the eye of the beholder: “it is a way of inhabiting space, a particular location, a way of looking and becoming.”¹³ It is informed by the personal and political. Under antiblackness the Black aesthetic and aesthetics of Blackness perform as low and popular art forms; they become a material of acquired taste under capitalism and imperialism, erotized for their otherness.

The vulnerability and power of taste is bounded to otherness as commodified for the pleasure of the dominant culture, as captured by the use of the phrase “ate that,” denoting the successful completion of something done extraordinarily well. Said to have originated in Queens in New York City and used by poor and working-class teens of color, the term is employed to bestow praise and is used as a form of support in acknowledging an accomplishment. It is similar to the ways Black subjects employ laborious bodies to produce eating as a political and capitalist practice. Utilizing mouths as forms of corporeality, the interplay of tasting in mediated arts situates senses as avowed performances of Blackness and affect. Consumption can be understood as leisure whereas the psychic and the social elicit disgust and titillation, the production of meaning shifts from eating to tasting as an exercise of eros.

Turning to eating, tasting, and swallowing as spectacles that provoke emotions of disgust and desire creates close encounters with Black excessiveness. There is an obscure longing to experience and construct delectability as a sensation of excessive taste for and by people of the African diaspora. The performance of tasting preserves the enduring construction, crippling effects, and pleasures accompanying the (im)possibilities of Blackness. The sensation and embodiment of taste as disgusting and delightful through visceral sensations acknowledges a fraught state of being and nonbeing for Black subjectivity.

In Wangechi Mutu and Santigold’s The End of Eating Everything, an 8-minute art film commissioned for the exhibition entitled Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey held at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University [2013], the erotics of Blackness are embodied through a magnificent fantastical creature undefinable by colonized thought and language. Resisting objectivity and human othering, its recognizable phenotype exists with Black fleshiness imagined as strange and beautiful. Social constructions of race, gender, and sex manifest as a critique of the human. Are we savages or monstrous others constructed by a desire to partake of “the end of eating everything” while attempting to classify the being and beingness of both the captive body and that of our own? If the artist’s motive is to liken the unknown based upon knowledge of the middle passage and the making of the captive body in the transatlantic slave trade, “the captive body becomes the source of an irresistible, destructive sensuality; at the same time—in stunning contradiction—the captive body reduces to a thing, becoming being for the captor; in this absence from a subject position, the captured sexualities provide a physical and biological expression of ‘otherness.’”¹⁴ An uncertainty pervades; the gender, sex, and species of the unknown appears to exist at multiple intersections of the human and nonhuman, physically resembling a bird of the genus Corvus. In an interview, Mutu reveals her desire to construct the unknown, which is positioned here on earth as a living being, as a metaphor for questioning humanity. The unknown is a “planetary woman who is both a ship and a moving home” that is temporal and fragile.¹⁵ The head and face of the unknown, along with Mutu’s use of “woman,” provides new understandings and assumptions based on colonized histories and languages that construct Blackness as the other for which not even gender pronouns are appropriate.

The unknown encounters a flock of Black birds, possibly Ravens or American or Fish crows. In folklore and fiction, crows are characterized as tricksters—symbolizing trickery, posing as messengers from the Gods—a sign of bad things to come, of death. A flock of crows are known as a “murder”; as a community, they maintain a grudge for generations. When crows discover the dead body of another crow they are said to hold “funerals” and “wakes,” alerting others in the area to gather as they cry out collectively, possibly a warning sign to others. When the unknown and the murder of crows encounter each other, words appear beneath them; the unknown communicates through telekinesis to the flock of birds. Arguably, the nonsensical words appear driven by hunger; the stomach expressing a sense of longing, loss, pain, and emptiness:

I never meant to leave
I needed to escape
And now it’s so far
Who knows where?
It’s been like this for a very long time…
It follows me, and I them
Hungry, alone and together

Expressions of regret and sorrow present the narrative as dystopian in nature, introducing hunger as conflict and motivation for the unknown. The creature’s bodily fullness is shielded from our sight until eating proceeds. The face and head, with its dancing Medusa-inspired locs, appears to be a maternal figure. Floating or flying, the creature sniffs the air, smelling the birds to determine if it would like to taste them. Throwing back its head, the creature snarls, mouth wide open displaying human teeth. As it rips through feathers and flesh, eating the crows, blood fills the dismal space. As the body of the creature moves into view, Black tar colored arms waving are in captivity, contained within the body of the beast. Mutu’s commentary is clear: We are what we eat. The enormous Black body is covered with cankerous cancer-like cells and lesions. It continues to violently eat Black flesh, ripping though the flock of birds.

Overly indulgent and monstrous, the mass of the body is revealed, a mother ship ravaging through the middle passage, a fleshy assemblage floating in an unknown space—in or outside of the body. Eating unveils the beauty and fullness of the body, of the breast, imagined through tropes of femininity; the mouth eating and tasting speaks to the alternative impulse of eating for the unborn. The animated flesh and bodily mass make knowable the meaning of sight, smell, hearing, and taste. In The Case of Blackness, Fred Moten writes, “in both colonial oppression and anticolonial resistance; to the regulatory metaphysics that undergirds interlocking notions of sound and color in aesthetic theory: blackness has been associated with a certain sense of decay, even when that decay is invoked in the name of a certain (fetishization of) vitality.”¹⁶

Mutu does not untether the unknown from Black flesh and bodies nor from their association with repulsion, hunger, and pain to read consumption practices of Blackness as a utopia by which pleasure-seeking becomes the only motivation for people of African descent to ascend, as an ecstasy that is seemingly futile to conceive. The existence of what appears to be bone fragments in the creature’s body signals to a question Alex Weheliye asks in Habeaus Viscus: “How does the historical question of violent political domination activate a surplus and excess of sexuality that simultaneously sustains and disfigures said brutality?”¹⁷ The creation of an organism caught between being and nonbeing reimagined as a ship made of human cartilage illustrates the violence of Blackness. The short film illuminates the labor and immoderations of the pornographic elements of the unknown as a trope. Despite aims to distance objectivity from the narrative of criminality and woundedness, eating is the rationale of a (sex) fiend. In Homo Aestheticus: The Invention of Taste in the Democratic Age, Luc Ferry writes, “With the concept of taste, the beautiful is placed in relation to human subjectivity so intimate that it may even be defined by the pleasure it provides, by the sensations or sentiments it provokes in us.”¹⁸ Yet, turning to Black bodies and bodily sensations produces a set of intimacies with witnessing consumptive practices from which lips chew, smack, bite, rip, and taste flesh excessively before morphing into bodily waste.

Eating and tasting for people of the African diaspora is mired in racial and class differences of taste. Eating is consumption for nourishment, whereas tasting is grounded in the art of being, denoting taste beyond a leisure activity, where savoring is a universal yet racialized sensation. No matter the sustenance brushing against the mouth, the parting of the lips followed by the work of the saliva-producing tongue, preparing to taste as morsels sensuously touch the back of the throat—narrow the canal to pretend starvation and offer satisfaction. Consider the phenomenon of Blackness as an intervention, a metaphor for becoming and being, an aesthetic of taste that signifies hunger as a sensation from which swallowing is profane.¹⁹ Consumption of food and bodily fluids as affective modalities, creativity, and intimacies facilitates a sense of protection, healing, comfort, and pleasure. Bodily senses demonstrate how reconstituting Blackness becomes possible within “eating culture”; a set of consumptive “practices and representations of ingestion and edibility . . . metaphorically and metonymically figured through the symbolic process of eating.”²⁰ Eating is a response to racial anxiety and bodily terror, exposing vulnerabilities and intimacies of engagement with self and others. Kyla Warzana Tompkins poses that eating “threatened the foundational fantasy of a contained autonomous self—the ‘free’ Liberal self—because, as a function of its basic mechanics, eating transcended the gap between self and other, blurring the line between subject and object as food.”²¹ In ASMR, eating and the mouth become sensorial apparatuses for the content maker, tasting becomes a means of creating triggers for those desiring sounds associated with the mouth, tongue, and lips. Black content makers reliance on Blackness as a familiarity depends almost solely on seeking Black bodies producing ASMR content. Chewing, licking, and sucking food, fingers, genitalia, and objects with or without swallowing in pursuit of freedom, pleasure, leisure, care, eroticism, and fetish refuses²² and complicates grammars of Black flesh and the captive body, providing alternative ways for sensorial modes of refusal and rebellion to exist.

In reading eating as an extension of tasting, as a rebellious activity that moves alongside and against the logics of antiblackness, bodily senses create alternative futures and possibilities in the space in-between the object and subject. What Maurice Merleau-Ponty names the body-subject presents an experiential, lived body that is knowing and introspective of its perceptual occurrence and keenly participates in the construction of reality.²³ While the violence of antiblackness is instructive to understanding how Blackness is imagined and constructed under white supremacy, it is assumed and positioned to construct sensorial activities and content centering the laborious Black body enacting modes of others’ pleasure while creating therapeutic care from which they benefit financially. Blackness as an aesthetic in ASMR is constructed through aura, and new media act as a catalyst for eating and humanity, where taste is central to becoming and being. Popular Black content creators exist on the margins of their white counterparts as specialized and desired, almost invisible in the industry. While building a brand from sensorial pleasure is primary to be a successful content creator, it is uncertain if Black ASMR artists position their bodily content based on race and gender or to develop a Black aesthetic.

In ASMR and Mukbang,²⁴ eating refers to the pleasure of often-involuntary sensory feelings viewers experience from watching the sensorial stimulating videos. Witnessing the eating large quantities of food on YouTube and pornographic sites induces tingling sensations in the brain, head, neck, and spine. Audiences desires to witness Black content creators’ overindulgence in tasting, to produce aural triggers by Black fleshy mouths—lips and tongue slurping, smacking, chewing, sucking, and tasting skin. Content creators develop food-oriented platforms catering to the audiences’ taste; they rely on their visceral appeal and the satisfaction experienced by viewers. ASMR culture has therapeutic benefits; feminist scholars note gendered affective labor from which women create online communities of affective kinship, healing, and care²⁵ and various modes of intimacies, post-human eroticism, and the sonic. In ASMR, content creators focus on the sensorial and the inescapable sight and materiality of race and gender as it is experienced and sensed by racialized subjects. Blackness is registered though senses, specifically that of taste. The unresolved tension of Blackness as a matter of taste that is tied to power where Black ASMR content creators and their viewer-listeners experience the phenomena. In performing the consumptive practice of eating and tasting, Black female content creator ASMRTheChew employs elements of care, intimacy, and racial consciousness as resistance.

“I am a Black Woman and Afraid of the Police, Seafood Crab legs,” a 40-minute YouTube video produced by ASMRTheChew, begins quietly, with whispering, a common practice in ASMR videos, followed by cracking open crab legs. Luxuriously dipping and stirring crab legs in a bowl of brown garlic sauce, whispering, smacking, sucking crab meat from the legs while expressing a sense terror and fear of the police. While affirming racial solidarity for viewer-listeners, she mentions that all types of people are protesting in response to the killings of unarmed Black people. A refusal to be denied pleasure despite efforts of antiblackness, tasting and savoring flavors of garlic while slowly speaking to the experience of seeing the murder of George Floyd. Whispering evokes sensations of contact with the viewer-listener, slurping the juice, sucking out the crab meat, enjoying the taste; chewing as she vicariously describes the fear and pain of antiblackness. ASMRTheChew creates videos centering sounds and the visual, triggered by touching various surfaces, smacking and eating, speaking softly, and reading to viewers. “I am a Black Woman . . .” released on YouTube on May 31, 2020, exploits the affective registers of ASMR while positioning the disgust and pain of watching a police officer kneel on George Floyd’s neck for eight minutes, preventing him from breathing and killing him. She dunks pieces of potato and crab in a see-through container filled with a brown-colored roux and talks to the viewer as if they are sitting together, enjoying a crab boil.

This video is intended to elicit awareness around racial injustice using the affective triggers of a predominately white viewing audience. Taking apart and exposing the inside of the baked potatoes and cracking open the crab legs to pull out the white pieces for the camera, she speaks softly, expressing remorse and sadness as she licks her fingers. Then she cuts into an avocado, noting the racial diversity and peaceful protest as she places the avocado in the roux. The camera moves in close to her fingers as she rubs crab legs, breaking one off from the cluster to place it in the roux as she sucks and bites.

ASMR is an overwhelmingly white and female industry and, due to algorithms, Black content creators are rarely featured. Performances such as that from ASMRTheChew generate the sensation and haptic stimulation that the viewer-listener is in close proximity. Chewing and smacking is “transduced into touch, and taut membranes of the listener’s headphones become coterminous with his own skin” (Hudelson, 2012). Fantasy and pleasure allow the listener-viewer a feeling of intimacy, as if sitting across from the ASMR creator, sharing exchanges of physiological responses and triggers of the persistent whispering and tasting. AMSR from Black content creators considers the uses of the Black throat, where swallowing and “eating functions as a metalanguage for genital pleasure and sexual pleasure.”²⁶

Eating as an act of survival and for the pleasure of feeling good facilitates acts of refusal, creating alternative logics and dialectics of taste, tasting, and swallowing. Black ASMR content makers utilize Blackness, inviting nonwhite viewers to an inclusive and familiar site to construct articulations of self. Tasting in light of suffering as unavoidable to the historical Black experience are reconstituted aesthetics. The intentional practice of Blackness as an aesthetic based on excessiveness and refusal made evident under antiblackness by Black creatives precedes Black women’s ontologies. Black subjects excessively eating and tasting through bodily orifices such as the mouth can be understood as a conferred “space with a cultural and erotic history of its own, one that, particularly in the overlapping of dietetic and sexual reform in the antebellum period, offers glimpses of a presexological mapping of desire, appetite, and vice.”²⁷ The mouth is an archival sensing register, an undoing of what Spillers terms a “cultural vestibularity,” an imposed grammar promising an alternative world-making as a refusal to forget, silence, and suture wounding and employ hunger as a performance. Blackness as an aesthetic and a way of being through eating constitutes new world-making for Black subjects and bodies as sensory engagements are produced through taste and tasting.

It was widely accepted by the medical community that there were major anatomical differences in the Negro. Physicians throughout the nineteenth century commonly accepted the white body to be superior. The Association of American Anatomists circulated a questionnaire that asked physicians to “keep a careful record of all variations and anomalies” between the two races. Although osteological peculiarities had been observed by anthropologists before the nineteenth century, racial difference was determined upon facial characteristics that noted physical difference. Throughout the nineteenth century the physician remained the chief source of information for comparative race analysis.²⁸ The evolution of races, developing from the subspecies of the human through the savage native tribes and culminating in the advanced civilizations identified by their upright posture, led to corresponding changes in the thorax, pelvis, and lumbar vertebrae.

In “Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality,” Evelynn Hammond likens Black women’s sexuality to a “black hole,” as “a site of difference” in “the ways in which queer, black, and female subjectivities are produced.”²⁹ In “Black Anality,” Jennifer C. Nash turns to Hammond to explore “the undertheorizing of the ‘other’ Black hole—the one that is both overdetermined and undertheorized—ask[ing] how the black female anus acts as a significant space through which black female sexualities particularly, become tethered imaginatively, discursively, and representationally to the anus.”³⁰ In similar fashion, I ask how the Black female throat in captivity and freedom might “act as a significant space through which black sexual difference—and Blackness more generally—is both imagined and represented?”³¹ Black anality pronounces the histories and ongoing discourses of pleasures imagined of Black women’s anus as “attached to anal ideologies including spatiality, waste, toxicity, and filth”³² while “exam[ining] moments where black female bodies can attach themselves to these ideologies in ways that engender delight in Blackness itself.”³³ The Black female throat deployed in The End of Eating Everything, as located in Black ASMR creative content, its use by the Rhythm and Blues (R&B), and in hip hop lyrics and music videos such as W.A.P. (wet ass pussy) travel similarly. The representation of Black female sexuality is constructed through an imagined otherness, promising to be exceptional. Invented to be a capacity of insatiable sexual satisfaction and mastery through illusory tightness and extreme wetness of the vaginal, anal, and oral cavities mark the possibilities and difference of Black pussy (vulva and vagina) and the Black throat.

The music video accompanying the remix to “Throat Baby (Go Baby)” (2021) by BRS Kash and featuring DaBaby and rap duo City Girls is filled with fantastical colorful scenes devoted to his fantasies of playing within Black women’s throats. Kash ventures into the mouths and throats of various Black women throughout; one sits at the table with him and her mouth opens as he raps, revealing a pool of milky white liquid on her tongue. The camera continues to descend down her throat as he stands on her tongue near her tonsils, dancing and rapping. He dives from a diving board into a woman’s throat and, posing as a gynecologist, he examines her throat, finding a sonogram of a baby. During the City Girls verse, they appear in Barbie doll boxes, their rap feature affords the imagined Black female throat in BRS Kash’s fantasy an opportunity to be heard, after being objectified. In verse three and four Yung Miami and JT rap, the Black throat in “Throat Baby” enhanced with autotune after the City Girls become “City Barbie” dolls is shaped by “ghettoized fantasies about Black sexuality.”³⁴ The desirability of the City Girls is shaped by the pornification of the Black throat performing cunnilingus and fellatio.

In Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance, bell hooks considers the commodification, desire, and pleasure for racial otherness. The taste for Black culture is enticing, offering an alternative to what has become known as whiteness, which, lacking in seasoning and flavor, is constructed as vanilla, bland and unexciting in comparison, as plain is the normal default. Blackness is then imagined in opposition to whiteness, excessive through flavor and the exotic otherness of cocoa smell, taste, and sight. In “Throat Baby,” whiteness as bodily fluids gains alternative meaning through its proximity to the Black, the taste is inconsequential, the excitement exists in the imagery of touching of the back of the throat, site of fellatio, followed by swallowing bodily fluids. Where Cardi B raps of desires to gag, choke, and uvula (thingy thing in the back of her throat), to be hit in W.A.P. offers another facet of taste as a racialized and gendered experience of consumption. Inducing gagging and choking as a result of pleasure as opposed to revulsion reveals expectations of tasting, gender, and Blackness as linked to the Black sexual body.

The rejection of ideals of gender from the desire to suck, lick, gag, and choke is a rejection of traditional femininity, under which racialized feminine-presenting and -identifying subjects are not women but are still commodified and fetishized objects of patriarchy, as seen in the remix of “Throat Baby.” Tasting appears to contain a dual purpose: the refusal of ingestion, both physically and materially, which brings on eating wrought by overconsumption, and the denial of traditional femininity, the roles of the lady, which contains the repudiation of the use of bodily fluids for reproduction.

Taste is a form of power. Tasting is an erotic power. By specifically contributing to “our understanding of eros and eroticism and labor and leisure,” taste disrupts the dominant white-Eurocentric framework that positions normative assumptions of power rooted in rationality and patriarchy and denies feminine energy as a divine source of knowledge.³⁵ Tasting is a form of knowing safety from harm, situating pleasure and a sense of satisfaction at the center, a consumptive practice that invites the touching of interior fleshiness, ending with the mouth. Felt all over, using lips and tongues, feeling textures, sucking motivated by excitement, finally swallowing as an act of satisfaction, wet from joy, instructive in teaching the how and what in feeling good, decadency—excess as experienced with tasting—lingering, tapping into the potential goodness of the object or sustenance emphasizing sensations providing an awareness of self.

Central to this project is the erotics of Blackness and antiblackness and their relationship to taste (and the distasteful) beyond the carnal, elucidating a set of intimacies about self and the human condition. In addition is how taste and Blackness are constituted within concepts of culture and citizenship. In The Erotic Life of Racism, Sharon Holland calls into question the (im)possibilities of the erotic: What if our erotic selves have been compelled not just by state intervention but also by such terms as “'community,' 'home,' and 'race'?"³⁶ Blackness as the subject and object of taste under such terms illuminates Holland’s question, influenced by Simone de Beauvoir’s assertion that “there is in eroticism a revolt.”³⁷ Taste under commodified conditions as a practice of indulgence has the potential for antiblackness and for antiracism. “The erotic thus recalls the impossibility of community with another, mocking our ability to connect, and also highlights the reciprocal nature of subjectivity, or what it means to be a subject.”³⁸ Tasting is rooted in a new world-making, materializing, and creating (im)possibilities. The uses of the erotic transform taste as felt in the gut, as a source of rational and irrational thinking in which the body is a source of knowledge.

Despite the hesitancy of liberation projects positioning phalluses near mouths, lips, and throats, fellatio and cunnilingus³⁹ exists as trafficked in sexual and pleasure economies. Oral pleasure as a sexual and nonsexual practice leads to sexual futures, aware of anxieties and traumas associated with Black bodies and subjects. This project begins with bodily senses formed in captivity transformed across and throughout the historical Black experience. Illustrated in explicit sensorial encounters captured in autobiographic and slave narratives, the development and use of senses tied to Black subjecthood is irreconcilable, poignant, and erotic, as demonstrated in the deployment of excessive eating subsumed into nothingness and/or Blackness⁴⁰ through a beautifully grotesque Black unnamed/unknown ship from racial subjectivity existing amongst a set of ambiguities. Tasting as refusal through eating as a form of labor, pleasure, and care invites further exploration of Blackness and the erotics of the throat. Taste and tasting live together within Blackness as a kind of power of the body. A life-sustaining sensation propelled knowing that originates from need and pleasure-seeking.

To climax alongside Audre Lorde, tasting of the erotic as she intended, understanding: “The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire.” Lorde's positioning the erotic as a source of power and form of resistance seems similar to hunger pains, informing subjects of a bodily need to consume subsistence and nourish insatiable appetites. The sensation of fullness from which Lorde writes functions as evidence of consumption that feels good, towards senses, and satisfying to the body. The erotics of taste “offers a well of replenishing and provocative force”⁴¹ for Black subjects moves beyond texture and touch in the "afterlife of slavery." An aftertaste, which plays in the “space of sexual imagination constitutes a particularly perilous emotional terrain. That we might consider our pleasure both important and possible constitutes a refusal of all that has been used to define us as damaged and unworthy, perverse and undesirable.”⁴² Sexual hermeneutics emerge from the possibilities of the Black throat, a wet apparatus where reimagining pleasures in the here and now, creating alternative futures demanded by the sense of taste and act of tasting. The erotics of the Black throat from which a particular taste resides and is "produce[d] not only allow us to imagine utopia but, more important, whet our appetite for it."⁴³ Whereas Blackness and taste willfully collide, play, and gesture towards the meaning of humanity.