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“They Are Busy With This Woman”: The Abject Erotics of Gayl Jones’s Eva’s Man

The characters in Eva’s Man (1976), 1 Gayl Jones has said, “don’t stand for men and women—they stand for themselves, really.” I argue that Eva’s Man insists upon individual strategies for surviving what Saidiya Hartman calls the violent “afterlife of slavery.” Following generative work by scholars who explore transgressive, deviant sexualities as sites of power in Black feminist literature, I read protagonist Eva Medina Canada’s location of pleasure in the unlikely erotic sites of excretion and the abject as one such mode of survival—one erotic mode among many in Black feminist literature’s imagining of a simultaneously individual and coalitional politics. As such, Eva’s Man emphasizes the importance of reading Black feminist texts as what Sharon Holland names “contemporary interlocutors” in and leaders of ongoing efforts at survival—as offering resilient and visionary ways of being in the world. The novel opens with Eva incarcerated at a psychiatric prison after murdering and orally castrating Davis, a sexual partner with whom she had spent five days at a hotel. It intersperses unfolding events at the prison with earlier violations that recall and are rooted in the sexual violence of slavery, when rape served as a tool of economic exploitation and social control. Readers see Eva’s first vaginal penetration at age five; her molestation and attempted rape by her mother’s boyfriend; the sexual advances of a family friend’s daughter; ongoing harassment by her cousin Alfonso; assault by a stranger; and her husband’s abuse. And these violations are not unique to Eva; a family friend is assaulted by a neighbor, Eva’s parents have at least one violent sexual interaction, and Alfonso beats his wife. These moments of gendered violence remind readers that what Hortense Spillers names slavery’s “theft of the body” did not end with emancipation; it continues its violent distortions of the relationship between body, genitals, will, and desire, and offers the myth of hypersexuality to excuse these distortions. This history continues to affect—though it has never completely eliminated—the pleasures available in a nation founded on slavery. Sexual pleasure has been complicated by the forcible penetration and forcibly created porousness of Black bodies to sexual and structural domination. Eva’s Man tells one story about the legacy of those violations and complications, in which Eva turns to excretion and the abject as erotic sites. Julia Kristeva theorizes abjection as both a stage in psychoanalytic subject development in which things are made repulsive, cast off in order to delimit the self, and as what Kathryn Bond Stockton calls the “state of being thrown away.” The things cast off comprise the abject, that “something rejected fromwhich one does not part.” The abject is that which must be separated from the self for the self’s protection, but which is also necessary for its role in defining that self. The abject traditionally includes the smelly, the fecal, things produced by and excreted from the body. Queer of color critique scholars like Stockton, Darieck Scott, and Amber