The Phenomenon of “Forgetting”

Whether emergent through neuroscientific effect or affective becoming, the phantom penis provokes us to think about the role external and internal pleasure plays in the capacitation, restrictions, or proliferation of its “material” existence. This essay is offered as a response to Chris Straayer’s article (this issue), which charts the banks of a multiplicity of disciplines in search of potential discursive attachments. Following an autoethnographic bend, I envision Straayer’s sites of attachment as moments to encounter the body and to imagine what possibilities exist: to envision a range of practices that can differently situate the self. Read through an account of the afterlives of the transatlantic slave trade, and its attendant investments in masculinity, violence, and threat, I consider how the penis often operates in a phantom capacity. In particular, the Black penis shores up a sexualized becoming that marks a transgression of the sociosexual order. Taking Mandingo (Fleischer, 1975) as the departure point, this response considers the molecular operations of desire and sensation against the searing backdrop of anti-blackness.