There’s No Beginning and There Is No End: Mariah Carey and the Refusal of Time

Amelia Groom

Mariah Carey in drag as her own stalker, surrounded by images of herself, in the music video for “Obsessed,” 2009. [ID: A figure in white track pants and a black sweater, turned away from the camera, on a bed in the corner of a room with walls lined with Mariah Carey posters.]

Issue #138

September 2023

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Notes

Mariah Carey and Michaela Angela Davis, preface to The Meaning of Mariah Carey (Andy Cohen Books, 2020).

See →.

Carey and Davis, preface to The Meaning of Mariah Carey.

Mariah Carey (@MariahCarey), Twitter, September 14, 2022 11:38 a.m. →.

Mariah Carey (@MariahCarey), Twitter, January 16, 2019, 5:03 p.m. →.

See →.

Carey and Davis, The Meaning of Mariah Carey, 19.

Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” Against Interpretation and Other Essays (Noonday Press, 1966), 285.

Terry Castle, “Desperately Seeking Susan,” London Review of Books 27, no. 6 (March 17, 2005) →; GBH Archives, “Camille Paglia on Susan Sontag 1993,” YouTube video, July 1, 2011 →.

Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” 285.

Carey and Davis, The Meaning of Mariah Carey, 335.

See →.

“Mariah Carey Eternally 12: The Conspiracy,” April 15, 2021, in The Obsessed Podcast, 41:32 →.

See →.

Mariah Carey (@mariahcarey), Instagram photo, March 28, 2020 →.

See →.

Carey and Davis, The Meaning of Mariah Carey, 76–77.

Cited in Georges Didi-Huberman, “The Imaginary Breeze: Remarks on the Air of the Quattrocento,” Journal of Visual Culture 2 no. 3 (2003): 277.

Didi-Huberman, “The Imaginary Breeze,” 277.

Didi-Huberman, “The Imaginary Breeze,” 286.

Kristian Vistrup Madsen, “The Charms on Her Bracelet,” The White Review online, February 2021 →.

Amalle Dublon, “Mariah Carey Remix, 25th Anniversary Edition (feat. Theodor Adorno and Lauren Berlant),” Art in America online, November 9, 2022 →.

See →.

Virginia Woolf, “On Being Ill,” The New Criterion, January 1926 →. I borrow the term “queer extensities” from Amalle Dublon, “‘A Very Soft or Long Attack and Release’ or Heyyyyy: Queer Extensities,” Queer the Noise, no. 3 (2014) →.

JJJJJerome Ellis, “The Clearing: Melismatic Palimpsest,” Prospections, December 3, 2021 →. See also JJJJJerome Ellis, The Clearing (Wendy’s Subway, 2021) →; and JJJJJerome Ellis, The Clearing, NNA Tapes, 2021 →.

See →.

Ellis, “The Clearing.”

Carey and Davis, The Meaning of Mariah Carey, 303.

Carey and Davis, The Meaning of Mariah Carey, 97.

Carey and Davis, The Meaning of Mariah Carey, 147–48.

Carey and Davis, The Meaning of Mariah Carey, 170.

Carey and Davis, The Meaning of Mariah Carey, 161–62.

Carey and Davis, The Meaning of Mariah Carey, 170.

“Fred Moten & Harmony Holiday on the Sounds of Friendship,” Frieze online, December 17, 2020 →.

Carey and Davis, The Meaning of Mariah Carey, 180.

Madsen, “The Charms on her Bracelet.”

Rob Tannenbaum, “Emotions,” album review, Rolling Stone, November 14, 1991 →.

This text began as a short talk for the “Public Sewer (Keep your mind in the gutter™)” event series at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam, for which speakers are asked to address a submerged niche interest in the gutters of their creative practice. The author wishes to thank the organizers Aidan Wall and Artun Alaska Arasli for the invitation, as well as the audience members who offered helpful questions and responses. Thanks also go to Amalle Dublon, M. Ty, Elvia Wilk, and Vivian Ziherl who helped in developing the text in various ways—and to the participants at the Warman School Summer Residency who shared valuable insights and feedback.

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