Sensational Flesh. Amber Jamilla Musser
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and presence; he terms this a technique of the imaginary, which “provides unaccustomed perceptual wealth, but unusually profoundly stamped with unreality.”20
Metz’s analysis of voyeurism as a sensation having to do with distance and power offers a way to characterize these critiques of S&M as having to do with a logic of distance and voyeurism. Voyeurism emphasizes the power imbalance between parties; the voyeur invades the scene and responds to it without requiring the consent of the watched. This formulation resonates with a radical feminist analysis of S&M as a practice without the possibility of consent that adheres to the logic of patriarchy. S&M is pernicious because it produces alienation and antisociality. When applied to a theorization of patriarchy and domination, this conglomeration of sensations—voyeurism, alienation, and antisociality—illuminates the fact that patriarchy can be read as a form of domination that relies on controlling the distance between parties.
We can see some of the effects of that distance and antisociality at work in Laura Mulvey’s analysis of phallocentrism at work in narrative cinema. Not only are women not given a space as spectators, but their presence as objects to be looked at is seen as a distraction from the plot—even in the imaginary realm, women function only as decoration. In her 1973 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Mulvey argues that woman’s presence on screen correlates to her place in patriarchal society. She writes, “Woman then stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.”21 In Mulvey’s reading, the scopophilic impulse objectifies woman because she represents rather than produces meaning. Not only is the gaze in this situation predicated on distance, but it creates and perpetuates that distance. It produces women as objects who are not to be engaged, thus reinforcing their status as nonagential beings. And in this way it also reproduces a social separation according to gender. Taken together, this articulates the logic of patriarchy that radical feminism rallied against. Through this example we see clearly that the sensation of domination is dependent on an economy of distance, which foregrounds the practices associated with maintaining distance (in this case looking) and the feelings associated with that, described here as alienation and isolation. The structural coherence that emerges from this examination of patriarchy rewrites practices of lesbian S&M as having to do with antisociality and inequality rather than sexuality or violence. In terms of theorizing radical feminist responses to S&M, we become able to recognize their critiques of S&M as occurring on a deeper level than a kinship to patriarchy: we can see how their understanding of the assemblage of S&M was related to distance, scopophilia, and antisociality, all of which were in opposition to the sensations that they wanted to correlate with feminism, namely eroticism and mutuality.
The Politics of Penetration: Analyzing Debates about the Butch and the Dildo
If feminism’s task was to enable female sexuality to flourish apart from patriarchy and its ethos of domination, lesbian S&M was a symptom of patriarchal contamination and linked with masculinity. In opposition to radical feminism’s focus on woman-centeredness, lesbian S&M was likened to abuse, and its practitioners were described as adhering to traditional gender norms where masculinity and butchness were linked with domination and femininity was linked with passivity.22 Because lesbian S&M was seen as emulating patriarchal, masculine forms of domination through the eroticization of power, some radical feminists perceived it as reinscribing the notion of women as passive victims. Choosing submission or choosing to dominate was a sign of false consciousness, a sign that one was under the thrall of patriarchy. Sadomasochistic acts were lumped with rape and domestic abuse as a form of violence against women.23 Domination was masculinized while submission was coded as feminine. In a retrospective analysis of these debates, Judith Butler highlights the problematic nature of this gendering: “[These positions] offer an analysis of sexual relations as structured by relations of coerced subordination, and argue that acts of sexual domination constitute the social meaning of being ‘a man,’ as the condition of coerced subordination constitutes the social meaning of being a ‘woman.’ Such a rigid determinism assimilates any account of sexuality to rigid and determining positions of domination and subordination, and assimilates those positions to the social gender of man and woman.”24 In figuring S&M as a patriarchal practice, radical feminists reentrenched gender norms surrounding masculinity and femininity. Femininity was associated with community, love, and mutuality, while masculinity was equated with domination, violence, and selfishness. While the practice of S&M was linked to masculine practices of patriarchy, the individual embodiment of these fears about masculinity and patriarchal contamination was the butch and the micropolitics of penetration. Radical feminists mapped anxieties about domination, masculinity, and a politics of distance onto her body. Though the butch was only tenuously linked with S&M, figurations of her provide a further window into the politics surrounding radical feminist critiques of patriarchy and the sensations that were connected to patriarchal domination.
The hostility toward butches that Rich voices at the beginning of this chapter echoes the overriding sentiments of radical feminism of the 1970s and 1980s. Woman-centered lesbianism and feminism demonized the iconic lesbian butch/femme couples of the 1950s and 1960s as imitative of heterosexuality.25 Though both the butch and the femme were criticized for internalizing patriarchy, the butch, the more visible of the pair, carried the additional burden of masculinity, which was even further proof of patriarchal compliance. In part, this disdain for masculinity can be attributed to historical causes. Sexological literature of the early twentieth century labeled lesbians inverts, which is to say their desire for women was characterized as masculine and they were described as possessing masculine physical traits and a masculine sexual appetite.26 This masculinization of women’s desire for women in terms of both character and quality (aggressive instead of the prevailing paradigm of feminine passivity) pathologized both female desire and lesbianism. As radical feminists worked to reorient female sexuality and lesbianism on their own terms, they emphasized the femininity of female desire and read any conjunction of women and masculinity as a symptom of patriarchal oppression.
While patriarchy and domination are characterized by a nonengaged distance, the butch provides a different analytic metric for understanding the traversing of difference, namely, she speaks to the political implications of penetration, which radical feminism coded as a sexual practice of domination.27 In her most feared specter, as masculine and dominating, the butch wields the phallus or dildo. While submission had its own problematic dynamics, the notion of a woman who wanted to dominate, or worse, penetrate other women was particularly pernicious. Heather Findlay describes this convergence in her analysis of the dildo wars: “Some lesbians have debunked the dildo and its notorious cousin the strap-on, calling them ‘male-identified.’ . . . Distaste for dildos, especially ‘lifelike’ ones, is based on the conviction that a dildo represents a penis and is therefore incompatible with ‘woman-identified’ sexuality. . . . The critique of the dildo . . . has developed in tandem with radical feminist attacks on butch-femme and sadomasochism . . . [, which] hold that both practices reproduce a ‘heteropatriarchy’ based on masculine and feminine sex roles.”28 In Findlay’s description of the tensions at work in these debates, we explicitly see the collapse between S&M, the butch, patriarchy, and the dildo. In addition to symbolizing the desire to penetrate, the dildo’s status as nonanatomical phallus represented a willful and gleeful adoption of dictates of masculinity.
By suggesting penetration (even in fantastical form), a woman with a dildo threatened radical feminist modes of sexual intercourse. The dildo marked a departure from a feminist ideology that imagined female sexuality as outside of patriarchy and lesbian sex as explicitly nonpenetrative. Colleen Lamos neatly summarizes the heteronormative assumptions of this position as exemplified in the writings of Marilyn Frye: “As recently as 1990 Marilyn Frye announced, remarkably, that ‘“sex” is an inappropriate term for what lesbians do’: Lesbians don’t ‘have sex,’ because that is a ‘phallic concept’ implying coitus.”29 Some of these analyses of lesbianism went so far as to displace individual female pleasure and desire with the generalizable desire for community among women—Lamos notes that according to Nett Hart “Lesbian desire is not