After Lynching Affects: Flesh, Gender, Violence, and the Political

In this paper, I explore the political relation of lynching practices to gender as a type of affectivity. Starting from Amy Wood’s analysis of lynching photography in Lynching and Spectacle. Wood’s use of photography illustrates how the lynched black body is used as a prop for the development of white masculinity. I argue that this creates a gender loophole, where black male gender is silenced. Using the work of Hortense Spillers notion of un-gendering and James Baldwin’s description of lynching in “Going to Meet the Man” I attempt to complicate the way the violence applied to the body, the reduction of the body to flesh, and the affective dynamics of the molestation of lynched bodies. I suggest that this complicates not only the representation at play in the photograph, but the politics that are operative and concealed external to it.