History and Brown Jouissance

Abstract

This roundtable unfolded asynchronously via a shared Google Doc in April 2025.I began by inviting Amy Hollywood and Amber Musser to reflect on the different temporal models that structure desire and jouissance within psychoanalytic frameworks and on what political and theoretical resources might emerge from imagining not only a desire for the past but also a jouissance of history.Building on their recent work on jouissance in medieval, racialized, microbial, and nonhuman bodies, the discussion moves toward meditations on jouissance beyond annihilationwithin and outside the self, within and against historical time.Across several clusters of questions, Amy and Amber reflect on how attention to historical jouissance reshapes archival practice, alters how we read premodern materials, and reframes embodiment as something simultaneously marked by history and exceeding its constraints.In different but overlapping ways, Amy proposes history itself as a site of jouissance, while Amber foregrounds bodily experience as a primary locus of jouissance -both formulations remain unassimilable to the linear configurations of past, present, and future.The conversation concludes by turning to the ethical and political stakes of historical -and specifically Brown -jouissance in a present marked by displacement, dispossession, and ongoing forms of racialized and ecological violence.In doing so, this roundtable moves beyond dominant genealogies of jouissance in gay male studies, particularly those invested in annihilation or negativity, and toward an emphasis on transformation and relationality.My deepest gratitude goes to Amy and Amber for their generosity and intel-

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. GLQ A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 2026 · DOI ↗