Notes on the Vestibular
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17169/ogj.2025.339Keywords:
Body, Space, Temporality, Flesh, Vestibular, EmpathyAbstract
Responding to the topic of “concept-metaphor membra(I)nes”, the author offers a tentative reading on the concept of “the vestibular” as it is used in Hortense Spillers’ essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”. In differentiating between “the body” and “the flesh”, Spillers’ use of the term “vestibular” is argued to conceptualize an outside of, albeit close to, the cultural that, at the same time, can also be read as the spatiotemporal dimension of the cultural “unconscious”. Here, the concept of utopia and its marking of unknowable spatial and temporal dimensions is applied to “the vestibular”. In three theses, Spillers’ notion of “the vestibular” is discussed on the backdrop of the distinction of “flesh” and “the body”, empathy of “the flesh”, and an extension to the physiological vestibular system.
References
Brown, Jayna (2021): Black Utopias. Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds. Kindle Edition. Durham: Duke University Press. doi: 10.2307/j.ctv1dgmm37
Edwards, Erica R. (2021): The Other Side of Terror. Black Women and the Culture of US Empire. Kindle Edition. New York: New York University Press. doi: 10.18574/nyu/9781479808427.001.0001
Goldberg, Jay M./Wilson, Victor J./Cullen, Kathleen E./Angelaki, Dora E./Broussard, Dianne M./Buttner-Ennever, Jean/Fukushima, Kikuro/Minor, Lloyd B. (2012): The Vestibular System. A Sixth Sense. Oxford: Oxford University Press. doi: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195167085.001.0001
Keeling, Kara (2025): “Flesh”. In: Andreasen, Torsten/Brogaard, Emma Sofie/Krause Frantzen, Mikkel/Huber, Nicholas Alan/Tygstrup, Frederik (Ed.): Finance Aesthetics: A Critical Glossary. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Keeling, Kara (2019): Queer Times. Black Futures. New York: New York University Press. doi: 10.18574/nyu/9780814748329.001.0001
Keeling, Kara (2007): The Witch’s Flight. The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense. Durham: Duke University Press. doi: 10.1215/9780822390145
Lanzoni, Susan (2018): Empathy. A History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. doi: 10.2307/j.ctv5cgb7s
Muñoz, José Esteban (2009): Cruising Utopia. The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press. doi: 10.1080/00918369.2010.503518
Oxford English Dictionary (2023): vestibule (n.), sense 2.a. doi: 10.1093/OED/9587252343
Spillers, Hortense J. (2007): The Idea of Black Culture. In: CR: The New Centennial Review 6 (3), 7–28. doi: 10.1353/ncr.2007.0022
Spillers, Hortense J. (1987): Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe. An American Grammar Book. In: Diacritics 17 (2), 64–81. doi: 10.2307/464747
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2025 Kara Keeling
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
All contributions in Open Gender Journal are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. You may freely make use of the corresponding texts in accordance to the conditions of the license (License contract, generally understandable version). There is no exclusive transfer of usage rights ("copyright transfer"). Open Gender Journal does not charge authors any costs for publication (so-called Article Processing Charges, APC) or submission (so-called Submission Charges). Authors are encouraged to share their contributions in other places, such as repositories.
