Amber Jamilla Musser

Amber Jamilla Musser is Associate Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. Musser's research is at the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality studies. Her monograph, Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism (NYU Press, 2014) uses masochism as a lens to theorize different felt relationships to power. The book brings together debates on masochism within feminism, discussions of masochism from psychoanalysis and critiques of colonialism, literary presentations of masochism, and performance and visual art that draws on masochism's repertoire in order to make an argument about the relationship between sensation and knowledge production and the racialization of our current episteme of sexuality. Her current research project, "Brown Jouissance: Feminine Imaginings" uses women of color's aesthetic labors to re-imagine epistemologies of sexuality so that they center brown femininity. Dr. Musser has also published widely on race and critical theory, queer femininities and race, race and sexuality, and queer of color critique. She has an MSt in Women's Studies from Oxford University and received her PhD in History of Science from Harvard University. She has previously taught gender studies at New York University and Brown University.