I’m Your Baby Tonight
On Whitney Houston
AMBER JAMILLA MUSSER
The camera is tight on a close-up of a brown eye looking from left to right. The dance music starts; the camera pans over to the other eye; and then a close-up of the famous red lips is in front of the camera—parted before they purse into an mmhmmm. The camera zooms out to reveal more of Whitney Houston’s face as she sets with mood with atmospheric yeahs. Soon we see Whitney rocking a short shag, brown leather jacket, ripped jeans, and a single dangling cross earring. She smiles and sings, stepping into the mirror throughout in order to emerge as someone else—a Marlene Dietrich white-pants–suited type, a Supremes type replete with sequin minidress and frosted lipstick, and a gamine Audrey Hepburn type in a slim black turtleneck, black ankle-length pants, and white socks. In each of these scenes, Whitney dances and smiles. At the end of the video, she takes off on a motorcycle.
“I’m Your Baby Tonight,” the lead single from Whitney Houston’s 1990 album of the same name, was meant to reintroduce Houston to the Black audiences who felt as though her earlier albums had catered to white popular music tastes. In response to being booed at the 1989 Soul Train Awards, Houston began working with producers L. A. Reid and Babyface to infuse her music with elements of pop and R&B, foreshadowing what would become the new jack swing sound.[1] The song reached number one on the Billboard music charts and launched Houston into yet another stratum of global stardom.
The song is catchy and fun, and, in assessing its place within Whitney Houston’s oeuvre, Tom Breihan of Stereogum describes “I’m Your Baby Tonight” as unusual because Whitney sings about sex—“you are my fantasy,” she declares, “I’m giving you everything.” While the song begins with the phrase “From the moment I saw you, I went outta my mind,” Breihan puts particular weight on “tonight,” focusing on its noncommittal qualities—this is passion, he suggests, for only one night.[2] While I am interested in the eagerness embedded in Houston’s vocalizations of “whatever you want from me,” I’m less sure about their relationship to sexuality, if only because of the slipperiness of the words. “Whatever” holds multitudes, and so does “everything.” Since both of these are impossible to envision, never mind consent to in advance, they reveal not only the artifice of consent, but also the nonsubject position from which these statements arise.[3] What, we might ask, does desire mean in this context?
Whatever you want from me
I’m giving you everything
I’m your baby tonight
You’ve given me ecstasy
You are my fantasy
I’m your baby tonight.
Within the repeated offer to be “your baby,” the idea of fantasy hovers. Although Whitney sings “You are my fantasy,” it does not feel like a coincidence that for years I misheard the phrase as “I’ll be your fantasy.” After all, what else is a baby but fantasy, especially in psychoanalysis. For example, think about how the baby floats through the framework of Freud’s 1919 essay “A Child Is Being Beaten.” There, he first locates the beating fantasy in the postinfantile, pregenital stages of children between the ages of two and five. Though Freud argues that the fantasy occurs in all children regardless of gender, he uses a girl (often assumed to be his own daughter Anna) as his primary example, so I am following suit in my analysis. The child, he says, first articulates the fantasy as “my father is beating a child, whom I hate.”[4] According to Freud, the child is responding sadistically to her desire for her father and is attempting to punish her rivals for his affection. Although the transition from “my father is beating the child (who I hate)” to “a child is being beaten” (the fantasy’s second stage) would seem to be nothing more complex than a shift from active to passive voice, Freud suggests that the child wants to be beaten by their father based on his reading of the Oedipal complex. It is this never voiced desire to be beaten that he labels masochistic. This stage of the fantasy is only accessible, however, because of Freud’s investment in the Oedipal complex, whose logic implicates the child’s sexuality at the mention of the father.
Reading through the Oedipal complex, the baby, in Freud’s analysis of “A Child Is Being Beaten,” is the residue of the girl’s repressed wish for her father’s love and potentially a rival (sibling) for his affection. The eroticization of the father motivates the child’s jealousy toward the other child and compels her to wish that her father would beat the hated child. Still under her father’s thrall, the child then feels guilty for her initially violent impulses and wishes to be punished by her father, thus setting the stage for the masochistic portion of the fantasy. Freud’s logic, then, is dominated not only by the Oedipal complex but by the specter of guilt at the thought of violence. Though guilt became central to masochism in Freud’s later thought, its presence in this essay serves as a reminder of repressive societal forces. The child feels guilty for her erotic paternal attachment and violent tendencies because social norms stigmatized these feelings. The last stage in the fantasy returns the child to the spectator position and removes the father from the equation. The child reports that a teacher or father substitute is beating unknown boys. Freud argues that this stage should also be considered masochistic because the unknown boys are actually stand-ins for the girl, who, having given up her father as a sexual object, is conflicted about her femininity; she wishes to be a boy and imagines herself to be one of these unknowns. Here, we see Freud’s eventual argument that normal feminine development requires exchanging the wish for a penis for a baby.[5]
In many ways, “A Child Is Being Beaten” can be viewed as an elaboration of Freud’s arguments from Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality because of the prominence of childhood. It differs markedly, however, in several important respects. For one, Freud’s attention had shifted toward the Oedipal complex and the integration of masochism into his schema of developmental complexes. In linking the formation of femininity with masochism, Freud normalized feminine passivity while simultaneously suggesting that masochistic fantasies offered a way for everyone to grapple with a lack of agency. In this framing, masochism became legible as a strategy to cope with structural powerlessness, instead of being labeled a psychiatric category of sexual perversion, as had been the case.[6] While psychiatric diagnoses rely on the presence or absence of confession, Freud’s diagnoses are predicated on his (or the psychoanalyst’s) ability to make sense of the unconscious. This movement away from explicit patient confession echoes the epistemological shift away from thinking about the masochist as a specific type of person toward thinking about how masochistic desires can be found in everyone—thus giving us a new way to appreciate the dynamics at work in popular music.
The baby’s movement from rival to submerged and then conscious desire surfaces several things. Most overtly, we witness the intensity of affect and projection attached to the baby, who is beaten, repressed, and, also, wanted. The baby, however, only comes into view relative to the desires of another; its own subject position is incoherent. Desire, as Alexander G. Weheliye reminds us, is colonial in its relation to possession.[7] Can a subject exist under this projective intensity?[8] However, as we see with Freud, as a site of fantasy, projection, and desire, the baby is also part of the masochistic dynamic of subjectivity itself. This is to say that the complex and contradictory emotions that surround this fantasy reveal not only the ways that desire constitutes the subject as masochistic, but also how desire can destabilize the subject itself.[9] Recall that Judith Butler writes that “the subject engages in its own self-thwarting, accomplishes its own subjection, desires and crafts its own shackles, and so turns against a desire that it knows to be—or knew to be—its own.”[10] In Freud’s and Butler’s analyses of subjection, we can see that the processes of extension that undergird desire also unmoor because they admit the all that one cannot know or control. Butler’s insistence that desire itself undoes echoes the punishment (beating) that Freud sutures with desire for the father, a dynamic that suffuses both subject formation and the mechanisms of desire with negative affect.
“Let’s face it. I am a marked woman, but not everybody knows my name. ‘Peaches’ and ‘Brown Sugar,’ ‘Sapphire’ and ‘Earth Mother,’ ‘Aunty,’ ‘Granny,’ God’s ‘Holy Fool,’ a ‘Miss Ebony First,’ or a ‘Black Woman at the Podium’: I describe a locus of confounded identities, a meeting ground of investments and privations in the national treasury of rhetorical wealth. My country needs me, and if I were not here, I would have to be invented.”[11]
While Freud doesn’t quite go there, thinking with the baby—especially through Whitney—makes evident the ways that the wish reveals collisions between materiality and desire; here I am thinking of how Whitney’s embodied position as a Black queer woman and global music icon produces constraints and possibilities around the idea of desire. And, because of the ways that she is racialized and gendered, I am looking at the unruliness that happens as desire dissolves into nonsovereignty; this is the stuff that escapes the projections that surround Whitney Houston as a persona. When Whitney, the person, sings “I’m your baby, tonight,” she is not consciously scripting herself into an Oedipal drama, but she does imagine herself as a pliant object of affection, willing to contort herself to meet the demands of her lover as part of their bond. It is difficult, however, to hear these words and not feel the echo of Hortense Spillers’s words describing the more general plight of Black women in the United States: “If I were not here, I would have to be invented.”
In “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” Spillers describes a situation in which Black women are eroticized, demonized, violated, desexualized, and erased as part of the processes that uphold the imagined sovereignty of others—primarily white men and women. Spillers brings together literature and history to anchor her argument in the violent dynamics produced by settler colonialism and trans-Atlantic slavery, but the core of her analysis is that Black women have no place in this symbolic order. Or, rather, they are emplaced to the degree that they endow others with value, while their position holds nothing intrinsically in itself.[12] Already, we see that the invention of which Spillers speaks is related to the dynamics of projection that I described in relation to the baby. This is to say that the Black woman, like Freud’s baby, arrives in many different guises and is dense with affect.
One easy place to see this mutability is in the imaginary that surrounds Whitney herself.[13] It is thematized in the video for “I’m Your Baby, Tonight,” though it is notable that the avatars that she inhabits—Marlene Dietrich, Audrey Hepburn, and the Supremes—register differently from those that Spillers names. All are style icons, but it is hard not to notice that the Supremes, the other Black women with which Whitney aligns herself, refuse the singularity of an individual, multiplying the versions of Whitney that circulate and compounding Spillers’s argument about the malleability of Black women.
Beyond the music video, however, we can also see the ways that Whitney Houston herself, as artist, has also been composed through many overlapping sets of projections. After being discovered singing in church, Whitney became a background vocalist in high school, and one of the first Black women to appear on the cover of Seventeen magazine in 1981. Two years later, Clive Davis signed her to Arista Records. Her first album, Whitney Houston (1985), was marketed as R&B. However, Davis sensed that Whitney might be able to bridge the segregated music scene; so, producers for Whitney (1987) paired her big, dexterous voice with pop music in order to appeal more broadly to white audiences. Davis also pushed for her music videos to be played on MTV and VH1, not just BET. While these efforts were rewarded with multiplatinum record sales, by the late 1980s, as is evident by the 1989 Soul Train Awards, there was pushback in the Black community from those who did not necessarily identify Whitney as one of their own. Of course, Whitney’s story does not stop there—she also moved into acting, back to gospel, had a public fall from grace with her marriage to Bobby Brown, and drowned in a bathtub before Clive Davis’s pre-Grammys party in 2012, where she was meant to mount her comeback.
I rehearse these early moments in the commercialization of Whitney to illustrate the ways that these positionings are manifestations of different imaginations of the person that others wanted Whitney to be. Now, there is an entire industry of biographies, biopics, and memoirs by those who knew her and who are devoted to uncovering the contrast between the Whitney who circulated and the “true” Whitney.[14] This gap is one place where I locate the materiality of the wish; it is where Whitney as an actual person chafes at Whitney, Black female icon.
However, we can go further still. While there is ease in how Whitney occupies the position of wish for others and the limits produced by her own actions, which shape possibilities of projection, there is also the issue of her own complicity. These scenes of projection are, after all, enabled by Whitney’s own explicit play with her image and understanding that this is the role that others want from her. If, for Freud, mature femininity is attained by shifting the locus of desire from the penis to the baby, there are social dynamics undergirding this substitution. The wish for social power (the penis, which can better be understood in this context as the phallus) is unattainable; as a result, the most profitable course of action is to be proximate to this power through reproduction—to wish to have a baby. But Whitney does not wish to be enfolded into a reproductive drama. No, she sings about being the baby. On the one hand, we can understand this through Spillers’s own assessment of the fraught relationship that Black women have toward maternity in which they may be reproductive, but also unable to mother under the conditions and legacies of enslavement. Spillers writes that “‘motherhood’ is not perceived in the prevailing social climate as a legitimate procedure of cultural inheritance.”[15] From this perspective, we see that there is no power to be gained in having a baby, but occupying the space of the baby is another matter. Here, we might register Whitney’s willingness to be the baby, the wish, in exchange for the phallus (power) as symptomatic of the impoverished options available to Black women in the landscape of psychoanalysis. We also might not register this wish to be someone else’s wish as itself symptomatic of the nonplace that Spillers argues Black women already occupy. This is to say that this wish is no wish at all, but reality. Here, we also see that the subject can neither be constituted or undone by this because this isn’t quite desire at all. Wishing to be a wish in this instance is not a formulation of lack, but an announcement of what is, which is to say materiality.[16]
It is our task to make a place for this different social subject. In doing so, we are less interested in joining the ranks of gendered femaleness than gaining the insurgent ground as female social subject…. “Sapphire” might rewrite after all a radically different text for a female empowerment.”[17]
At the end of her essay, Spillers suggests avenues for future thought, which involve nothing less than rethinking and rewriting the psychoanalytic order of things. She asks us to consider thinking with Black women, and, in this context, it behooves us to consider Mama’s Baby as a subject position. Immediately, this reorientation moves us away from the paternal recognition solicited by the Oedipus complex toward theorizing care, enmeshment, and codependence.
Whitney does not wish to be enfolded into a reproductive drama. No, she sings about being the baby.
For Melanie Klein, infancy is when parameters of selfhood are established. Introjection (of the good nurturing breast) and projection (the expulsion of the “bad” breast) create an imagined division between the self and the rest of the world over which one does not have agency.[18] The task of the infant is to work through this division in order to understand the source of nutrition (the parent) as separate from itself, but whole (good and bad) and to achieve a depressive position, which involves “an awareness of vulnerability, dependence, and guilt.”[19] The infant’s selfhood is formed through this action of producing interiority, but there is no illusion that this process is not violent. There are stark differences between Klein and Freud. While Freud focuses on the ways that the emergent self copes with powerlessness by eroticizing it, Klein is interested in how this understanding of a lack of agency coincides with the simultaneous recognition of the fallibility of the Other and the difficulty of producing a radical break between self and the Other. In some ways, a Kleinian perspective gives us insight into why the outside world, even when its flaws are revealed, continues to inform desire. Klein’s depressive position might acknowledge structural problems, but this understanding does not diminish the want to be connected to this world. In other words, pain or punishment might not be the draw, but they may be the outcome.
*
Here we could ask: How else might Whitney metabolize these instructions to remain changeable? How might we become able to feel the intense vulnerability of her position and feel the ways that registering as vulnerable elicits violent responses from others?[20] I want to suggest that the layers of nonprotection that surrounded Whitney become an intrinsic part of this subject position itself, blending a Kleinian and Freudian reading of her wish to be a wish. Lost in these arguments (and her own vocalization), however, is the question of what a baby wants. I speak not of desire—is that possible when interior and exterior have no meaning?—but of cravings.
In Habeaus Viscus, Weheliye asks: “How can CLR James’s hunger strike while he is detained on Ellis Island and the Muselmänner’s apparitions of food teach us to mouth ‘I craves’ in a tongue as of yet nonexistent in the world of Man?”[21] James, who had overstayed his tourist visa from Jamaica, was detained on Ellis Island during his trial and before his deportation. Faced with bland institutional food, James could barely eat enough to stay alive. What Weheliye is pointing us to in this example is the way that craving is political. It moves us away from the question of bare life toward thinking about what shapes the conditions of enfleshment and sustenance. As he asks later, “What does hunger outside the world of Man feel like?”[22] As an appetite in excess of the minimal requirement for survival, cravings add thickness and point us toward the noisiness of the body.
Cravings are complex. Compared to desires, they are rawer, more opaque, and less tangible. They are governed by smells, textures, flavors, memory, and opportunity, all of which are subject to multiple circuits of power. On the macro level, we have considerations of the impact of spices and global routes for food. On the level of the individual, we have appetite, which is often connected to desire, but which I link in Sensual Excess to orientation.[23] There is also the level of the molecular, that which is called forth by the microbiome of the gut, thousands of bacteria, fungi, archaea, viruses, protozoa, and helminths inhabiting human digestive tracts. Originally imagined as invaders and studied in relation to disease or allergy, more recently, these microorganisms have begun to be connected to many elements of human behavior including immunity, mood, hormonal balance. Bacteria begin to migrate into the gut in utero, but its composition shifts after birth and with the introduction of solid food—shifts that illustrate the different levels of relation embedded within the flesh. The gut’s microbiome, multigenomic and multispecies, is very much embedded in sociality, but the micro produces relations that circulate at multiple scales, each of which displaces the “I” by admitting the sensual orientations that occur beyond individuality’s conventional boundaries.[24]
Whitney, it should be remembered, was famous for her cravings, having been in and out of multiple rehab facilities for drug addiction. In her meditation on Whitney’s life and death, Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley posits that these cravings for an altered state may have emerged alongside Whitney’s grappling with queerness and rampant homophobia.[25] Throughout her life and after, Whitney’s queerness was the subject of much gossip, especially surrounding her relationships with Robyn Crawford, her best friend turned assistant, who eventually revealed that they did have a sexual relationship for several years.[26] After Whitney’s death, many speculated that had Whitney been able to have a public relationship with Crawford—that is, been an out queer person—she would not have succumbed to addiction. Peter Tatchell writes, “Giving up Robyn—they’d been inseparable for years—must have been emotionally traumatic. Whitney’s life started going downhill soon afterwards. . . . She went on drink-and-drug binges—evidence of a troubled personal life and much unhappiness. It seems likely that the split with Robyn contributed to her substance abuse and decline.”[27] In Tatchell’s narrative, Whitney’s addiction is the result of an unfulfilled wish. She cannot have a happy life with Robyn, so she craves drugs. Here, Whitney’s inability to be with Robyn is equivalent to Freud’s argument that not having the baby leads to an unfillable void. In this schema, a relationship with Robyn (in an imagined nonhomophobic world) offers a version of social fulfillment akin to Freud’s argument that the baby signifies a woman’s wish to fulfill her social role as wife and mother (normative for early twentieth-century Vienna).
In reading Whitney differently, as a baby, however, I suggest that there is something more amorphous to Whitney’s cravings. This is not to deny the shaping effect of homophobia, but to think with what it might be to understand these cravings not as foreclosed wishes, but constitutive of the assemblage of Whitney herself. As Tinsley writes: “What if black women just need oceans of loving—from parents, friends, coworkers, selves, women, men—in order to unlock all of who we are, and some of that loving comes to us through sex?”[28] Even as they work against individuation, an openness to these multitudes does something; namely, they reveal the unruliness of being, which we might consider its own form of “ecstasy” in the ways that a self may be lost, but alternative ways of thinking pleasure are found. Perhaps this is another (less utilitarian) way to understand Whitney’s “I’m giving you ecstasy.”
[1] Famously, it is at this awards show that she met Bobby Brown, who had risen to fame after working with L. A. Reid and Babyface and who would later become her husband.
[2] Tom Breihan chronicles the backstory for the song in his column on Billboard #1 hits for Stereogum. This column is from October 25, 2021, and is archived here: https://web.archive.org/web/20211025132822/https://www.stereogum.com/2164907/the-number-ones-whitney-houstons-im-your-baby-tonight/columns/the-number-ones/.
[3] For an elaboration on the ruse of consent, see Avgi Saketopoulou’s Sexuality beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia (New York: New York University Press, 2023).
[4] Sigmund Freud, “‘A Child Is Being Beaten’: A Contribution to the Study of the Origin of Sexual Perversions,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. J. Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1919), 17:175–204.
[5] The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. J. Strachey (London: Hogarth Press), 22:101.
[6] Despite masochism’s universalization, it remained gendered in particular ways. Indeed, several of Freud’s female followers published books on the innate connection between femininity and masochism. In “The Significance of Masochism in the Mental Life of Women,” Helene Deutsch described the need for women to guard against their biological tendency toward masochistic impulses, which interfered with normal functioning. Karen Horney’s essay “The Problem of Female Masochism” challenged the naturalness of female masochism and argued that it could be attributed to societal norms that emphasized women’s dependence on men. Marie Bonaparte argued for the biological basis of masochism as a way to explain the pain caused by intercourse and reproduction. Women became marked as those who could not only tolerate but enjoy physical and psychic pain. This close alliance between masochism and femininity persisted throughout the twentieth century and it became an extremely contentious issue for feminists. See Helene Deutsch, “The Significance of Masochism in the Mental Life of Women,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 11 (1930): 48–60. For a reconsideration of her work, see Brenda S. Webster, “Helene Deutsch: A New Look,” Signs 10, no. 3 (Spring 1985): 553–571; Karen Horney, “The Problem of Feminine Masochism,” Psycho-Analytic Review 22, no. 3 (2013): 241–257; Marie Bonaparte, “Passivity, Masochism and Femininity,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 16 (1935): 325–333.
[7] Alex Weheliye, Habeaus Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).
[8] I explore these questions and this framework in Amber Jamila Musser, Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance (New York: New York University Press, 2018).
[9] Judith Butler explores these dynamics in both Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (London: Routledge, 1987) and Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997).
[10] Butler, Psychic Life of Power, 24.
[11] Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” in “Culture and Countermemory: The ‘American’ Connection,” special issue, Diacritics 17, no. 2 (Summer 1987): 65.
[12] For an elaboration on how this overlaps with questions of animality, see Zakiyyah Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (New York: New York University Press, 2020).
[13] I use her first name when I am referring to the constellation of her personae.<<AU: Please confirm? I assumed you meant multiple personae here, otherwise it’s not clear how there would be a constellation of just one persona.>>
[14] Cinematic explorations of Houston’s life include I Wanna Dance with Somebody (2022); Whitney (2015); Whitney: Can I Be Me (2017); Whitney: The Untold Story for the First Time (2018); Whitney Houston and Bobbi Kristina: Didn’t We Almost Have It All (2021). Memoirs by people close to her include Cissy Houston, Remembering Whitney (New York: Harper Collins, 2013); and Robyn Crawford, A Song for You: My Life with Whitney (New York: Dutton, 2019).
[15] Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 80.
[16] Incidentally, this gives us another way to register Spillers’s earlier comments that Black women are the beached whales of the sexual universe—unseen, awaiting their verb. Hortense Spillers, “Interstices: A Small Drama of Words,” in Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 152–175.
[17] Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 80.
[18] Melanie Klein, “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 27 (1946): 99.
[19] Eli Zaretsky, “‘One Large Secure, Solid Background’: Melanie Klein and the Origins of the British Welfare State,” Psychoanalysis and History 1, no. 2 (2008): 143, https://doi.org/10.3366/pah.1999.1.2.136.
[20] I produce this analysis from a reading of Sianne Ngai’s argument that people want to hurt what they find cute. See, for example, https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/43/jasper_ngai.php.
[21] Weheliye, Habeaus Viscus, 113.
[22] Weheliye, Habeaus Viscus, 113.
[23] Amber Musser, Sensual Excess.
[24] Kyla Schuller describes the micro as another force with which one can think about how biopower operates on individuals and populations. Kyla Schuller, “Biopower Below and Before the Individual,” GLQ 22, no. 4 (2016): 630, https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-3603126.
[25] Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, Ezili’s Mirrors: Imagining Black Queer Genders (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).
[26] Crawford, A Song for You.
[27] Peter Tatchell, “Whitney’s REAL Tragedy Was Giving Up Her Greatest Love of All—Her Female Partner Robyn Crawford,” Daily Mail, February 20, 2012, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2103164/Whitney-Houstons -REAL-tragedy-giving-female-partner-Robyn-Crawford.html.
[28] Tinsley, Ezili’s Mirrors, 155.