Sensational Flesh. Amber Jamilla Musser
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sensation to look at how people experience power and subordination in a variety of disciplinary situations. At its core, Sensational Flesh is about how difference is made material through the particular understandings of sexuality, subjectivity, and agency; and ultimately the book works to produce a new mode of thinking sexuality.
2. Specters of Domination: Patriarchy, Colonialism, and Masochism
In her 1979 essay “The Meaning of Our Love for Women Is What We Have Constantly to Expand,” Adrienne Rich seems to have directly taken up Michel Foucault’s provocation that S&M is an emergent subculture within the gay world. But in contrast to Foucault’s discussions of creativity, eroticism, and freedom, Rich fixates on violence, power differentials, and self-destruction: “On the other hand, there is homosexual patriarchal culture, a culture created by homosexual men, reflecting such male stereotypes as dominance and submission as modes of relationships, and the separation of sex from emotional involvement—a culture tainted by profound hatred for women. The male ‘gay’ culture has offered lesbians the imitation role-stereotypes of ‘butch’ and ‘femme,’ ‘active’ and ‘passive,’ cruising, sado-masochism, and the violent, self-destructive world of gay bars.”1 Here, S&M is assumed to contaminate the world of lesbianism. Rich rationalizes this distance by arguing that S&M is part and parcel of patriarchy. This chapter interrogates the ideologies and sensational structures that allow Rich to align S&M, patriarchy, and the butch as axes of domination that work against lesbianism and feminism. On the one hand, Rich’s comment speaks more generally to the distrust many radical feminists felt toward butches (and masculinity) in the 1970s and 1980s. On the other hand, the connection that Rich draws between butches and S&M speaks to the delineation of a particular sensational orbit for patriarchy.
In unpacking the sensations that attach themselves to the distance that Rich and other radical feminists want to produce between feminism and patriarchy, this chapter interrogates the specter of domination from two disparate positions—that of the butch within radical feminism and the black man within colonialism. In both of these formulations, masochism is figured as a manifestation of patriarchal and colonial power. The feminist panic regarding S&M in the 1980s was explicitly about defining feminist possibilities of female sexual expression; its detractors saw lesbian S&M as a practice that invited masculinity into the bedroom. This conflation of S&M with masculinity and domination unintentionally reunited femininity and passivity such that S&M was read as a (condemned) performance of patriarchy—regardless of the acts performed. These sentiments coalesced into anxiety about the butch, who was also figured as masculine and dominating. In the second half of the chapter, I turn to Frantz Fanon to show how the black man is turned into a specter of domination under colonialism. In Fanon’s writing, being subjected to the sensational regime of colonialism results in feeling objectified and overexposed. By focusing on the role of masochism in Fanon’s description of the harms of colonialism and the place of S&M as a particularly pernicious axis of patriarchy for radical feminists, this chapter locates the cluster of sensations that undergird these systems of domination as having to do with distance.
S&M, Patriarchy, and the Drive toward Separation
Looking backwards, the focus on lesbian S&M within radical feminism might seem peculiar, but lesbian S&M seemed to offer a lens to study patriarchy by bringing issues of gender, agency, eroticism, and violence to the fore. In her remarks on the infamous 1982 Barnard conference on sexuality, a British feminist, Elizabeth Wilson, wrote that she found “it curious that one particular, and arguably rather marginal sexual practice should have come to occupy such a key space in the discussion of sexuality.”2 Wilson went on to hypothesize that S&M “sometimes seems to have to do with sexual outlawry and the dark side of self and forbidden desires. Perhaps feminism really has done something to lesbianism in confusing it with non-eroticized love between women, so that some lesbians have been attracted to other, more deeply ‘forbidden’ ways of insisting that lesbianism is about sex.”3 Wilson’s comments highlight several axes of contention within American feminism in the early 1980s. In a moment when some feminists argued that focusing on sexuality was a symptom of the insidious nature of patriarchy and that pornography and promiscuity degraded women by reducing them to sexual objects, feminists who were invested in seeking liberation through sexuality were accused of being blind to its pernicious aspects. The arguments against lesbian S&M were the product of a set of overlapping assumptions: that the task of feminism was to end violence against women, that S&M was about violence and patriarchy, and that sex between women had more to do with mutual respect than with eroticism. The underlying unity of these arguments against S&M was that feminism had to keep femininity (and women) safe from the incursion of patriarchy. Further, by framing patriarchy as separate from femininity and feminism, these arguments expressed their experiences of patriarchy as structured by sensations associated with distance, namely voyeurism and antisociality. This, in turn, figured lesbian S&M as a practice of domination characterized by invasion.
Jane Gerhard describes the ideological convergence behind anti-S&M sentiment as a merging of antipornography feminism, cultural feminism, and lesbian separatism.4 Though each strain of feminism had its own concerns, they overlapped in their belief in an essential femininity that was separate from patriarchy. For lesbian separatists, this manifested itself as the idea that lesbianism was fundamentally different from and more egalitarian than heterosexuality, or, as Gerhard writes, that lesbianism seemed to offer “an emotional and political alternative to heterosexuality.”5 The project of cultural feminism “celebrate[d] women’s bodies as unique and their sexuality as independent of ‘male models’ of genital sex.”6 Antipornography feminists, on the other hand, were invested in illuminating the societal and personal harm that heterosexuality (in its numerous patriarchal guises) produced. Antipornography feminists, Gerhard writes, “tended to conflate social power (or, in the case of women, social subordination), heterosexuality, and the unconscious in a way that paralleled theories of women’s difference. The anti-pornography movement interpreted heterosexual intercourse as an expression of men’s power over women and the penis as a weapon in the larger effort to keep women submissive to men and male power.”7 Taken together, these ideologies position femininity in opposition to patriarchy. This logic mobilized feminism as a discourse that protected femininity from the violence that patriarchy produced on both the structural and the individual level.
Radical feminism’s move away from a politics of sexual liberation toward a woman-centered, nonheterosexual ideology is exemplified by Adrienne Rich’s 1980 essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Rich frames her essay as an intervention against patriarchy’s insistence on heterosexuality and a plea for feminism to make space for lesbianism. She argues for a woman-centered feminism to incorporate a plethora of different types of relationships between women in order to rally against patriarchy’s denigration of these homosocial bonds: “Women’s choice of women as passionate comrades, life partners, co-workers, lovers, tribe, has been crushed, invalidated, forced into hiding and disguise.”8 Throughout the essay, Rich argues that patriarchy, which manifests as domination and violence, has suppressed femininity’s nurturing qualities, which are exemplified in the bond between mother and child. A particularly pernicious site of this oppression is pornography, which Rich describes as “a major public issue of our time” because it relays the message that “women are natural sexual prey to men and love it; that sexuality and violence are congruent; and that for women sex is essentially masochistic, humiliation pleasurable, physical abuse erotic. But along with this message comes another, not always recognized: that enforced submission and the use of cruelty, if played out in heterosexual pairing, is sexually ‘normal,’ while sensuality between women, including erotic mutuality and respect, is ‘queer,’ ‘sick,’ and either pornographic in itself or not very exciting compared with the sexuality of whips and bondage.”9 In the objections that Rich presents to pornography, we can see an essentialized image of women as nurturing and egalitarian, a characterization of heterosexuality as violent and oppressive, and a desire to remove lesbianism from the sphere of the pathological and the pornographic. Rich writes toward a space and a feminism where woman-identified women are able and encouraged to express their love. In this context we can clearly see the separate spheres assigned to femininity/feminism and patriarchy.