Sensational Flesh. Amber Jamilla Musser
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insight afforded by Foucault’s call to bodies and pleasures is the recognition that one’s relation to the disciplinary system of sexuality is necessarily articulated with regard to historically specific and bounded sites of contestation.”71 By looking at those who refuse to prize S&M and masochism as subversive, this chapter augments our understanding of the disciplining of sexuality. These local histories of masochism illuminate the contours (white, male) of a particular mode of freedom while expanding on what it feels like to be othered. Both Fanon and radical feminists articulate feeling dominated as part of the process of othering, a process in which voyeurism, antisociality, and detachment come together as the structure of sensations that inform these types of relationships to power. In this way, while I am speaking about two very particular case studies, they serve to show what is at stake when power is formulated as a binary: that is to say, when it is seen as something that one possesses and the other lacks.
The next chapter responds to the crushing weight of normativity by analyzing literary representations that thematize submission. “Objectification, Complicity, and Coldness: The Story of O’s Narratives of Femininity and Precarity,” Sensational Flesh’s third chapter, examines literary representations of submission and femininity to articulate what complicity feels like. Using The Story of O as a starting point, this chapter looks at the ways that submission has been understood as a performance of femininity in the context of postwar France. I argue that The Story of O produces a link between femininity, objectification, and recognition through masochism by foregrounding aesthetics and other models of agency under conditions of constraint. In this way, I read The Story of O as one of the spaces of cruel optimism that Lauren Berlant discusses in her analysis of life under neoliberalism. Berlant writes, “In cruel optimism the subject or community turns its treasured attachments into safety-deposit objects that make it possible to bear sovereignty through its distribution, the energy of feeling relational, general, reciprocal, and accumulative. . . . In a relation of cruel optimism our activity is revealed as a vehicle for attaining a kind of passivity, as evidence of the desire to find forms in relation to which we can sustain a coasting sentience, in response to being too alive.”72 In her formulation of cruel optimism, Berlant connects fantasies of change, manifested as a desire for passivity and an investment in materiality, to the reality of structural powerlessness.
Though Berlant is invested in life under the slow death of neoliberalism, the performances of femininity under the heavy hand of patriarchy of the immediate postwar period and earlier offer a similar model of confined subjectivity. Ambivalence toward gender, then, is at the heart of the Story of O. This ambivalence, embodied by the sensation of coldness, allows us to see the ways that femininity is embedded within prevailing discourses of power. Though this has some resonance with the fear that S&M relies upon an implicitly masculine subject, I read The Story of O as a narrative about complicity and the conditions that attend precarity. First, I read the novel in conjunction with Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, in which she argues that masochism is a mode of complicity with feminine objectification that impedes freedom. Next, I read Gilles Deleuze’s “Coldness and Cruelty” and Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs as producing parallel narratives of female complicity with patriarchy even as they strive to describe female agency. Finally, I read The Story of O through Jessica Benjamin and Jean Paul Sartre to understand complicity as the compromised outcome of seeking recognition. While this narrative focuses on femininity to underscore how coldness and an attention to aesthetics mark these situations of complicity, the larger question guiding this chapter is that of complicity and precarity. I want to examine what types of power structures complicity can produce and how these reveal strategies to deal with one’s overwhelming precarity. In contrast to the second chapter’s emphasis on thinking about power as a matter of “us” and “them,” this chapter locates relations to power on an intimate, subject-constituting level, echoing Berlant’s attention to structures of fantasy and subjectivity.
The conditions that foreclose agency are the subject of the fourth chapter, “Time, Race, and Biology: Fanon, Freud, and the Labors of Race.” By looking at the affective labor of subject formation, this chapter directly engages with recent work in queer of color critique. In Aberrations in Black, Roderick Ferguson describes the aims of a queer of color critique as “an epistemological intervention . . . [that] denotes an interest in materiality, but refuses ideologies of transparency and reflection, ideologies that have helped to constitute Marxism, revolutionary nationalism, and liberal pluralism.”73 Queer of color analyses make visible the “manifold intersections that contradict the idea of the liberal nation-state and capital as sites of resolution, perfection, progress, and confirmation.”74 This chapter continues that project by looking at these foreclosures of agency at the level of individuals.
The chapter takes up the question of race, recognition, and the laboring body by focusing on becoming-black as a sensation of becoming-biological and of depersonalization. Through a close reading of Fanon’s historically situated description of racialization during colonialism, I look at the ways that the racialized male body has been described as an ahistoric plane of suffering and explore what work the spectacle of the black body in pain does to produce narratives of black atemporality and becoming-biological in conjunction with white guilt and liberal subjectivity. This chapter examines the racial dynamics at work in the concepts of empathy and sympathy to compare the shame of racialization with the affects produced by the masochism of the liberal subject as articulated by Sigmund Freud. In linking becoming-black with what I term “stickiness,” or the weightiness of being overdetermined, with ahistoricity, and with labor, I analyze the work of Glenn Ligon as illustrating how race has been understood as affective labor and as offering a model for moving beyond that space.
“Lacerated Breasts: Medicine, Autonomy, Pain,” the book’s fifth chapter, looks at the explicitly sadomasochistic practice of Bob Flanagan, “supermasochist” and performance artist; Audre Lorde’s reflections on cancer; and Deleuze’s theorizations of illness and masochism. Through an analysis of Flanagan, Lorde, and Deleuze, this chapter examines desubjectification by focusing on illness, pain, and their attendant affects. The first half of the chapter grapples with different models of producing subjective coherence in the face of illness by paralleling Flanagan’s participation in S&M and Lorde’s practices of memoir. The second half of the chapter investigates the potential empowerment of desubjectification as it is worked through by Deleuze and Lorde.
By foregrounding the agency of pain, we see the work of new materialisms in action. If animacy, according to Mel Chen, “helps us theorize current anxieties around the production of humanness in contemporary times,” this chapter looks toward two disparate modes of decentering the subject to understand what the political costs of such a move might be.75 In the face of his own illness, Deleuze imagines masochism as a step away from the discipline of modernity and subjectivity; it allows for the opening of new possibilities for thought and life. The most developed form of this argument is his work with Félix Guattari on the Body without Organs (BwO), which they describe as an anti-Oedipal formation of becoming. We might see this idealization of desubjectification as akin to the models of masochism as a form of exceptional subversion, but I would like to stress that sexuality, subjectivity, and agency work very differently in the BwO. I turn to Lorde’s reading of the erotic as another mode of desubjectification. She writes toward a communal self, scripting agency and sexuality as affects of this plurality.
Ultimately, what is at stake in each of these debates within queer theory and each of these local histories is the relationship between subjectivity, sexuality, and agency. The final chapter of Sensational Flesh, “Conclusion: Making Flesh Matter,” looks at the work of Kara Walker to probe the relationship between black women and the flesh. Through an exploration of how one might “play” with history, this chapter probes the limits of individual performance and agency and asks what it might mean to truly conceive of black female subjectivity. By looking at black female masochism, this chapter argues that our understandings of masochism have been shaped by particular framings of sexuality, subjectivity, and agency and asks how we might think otherwise.
Sensational Flesh tells several stories about masochism and S&M in order to explore experience and sensation as connected to theory and practice. By placing flesh and difference at the