Sensational Flesh. Amber Jamilla Musser
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of women.’”30 Bringing these threads together, we can see that the dildo represents the possibility of individual sexual pleasure in penetration, which operates in tension with the feminist ethos of collectivity; Lamos argues that the dildo “rejects traditional feminist claims to a moral superiority based upon supposed female innocence, powerlessness, and purity from which has issued a politics of resentment and vengeance.”31 Penetration, like S&M, was marked both as antisocial and as an invasion of female space.
In order to fully illustrate how distance operates as a sensational undercurrent for these feminist debates on S&M, butches, and penetration, I offer a brief glimpse at Lynda Hart’s and Judith Butler’s resignification of the dildo in the 1990s. Since they are writing from a frame that is not invested in keeping masculinity and femininity separate or reinforcing the link between femininity and feminism, they read the dildo as a form of subversive citationality that calls attention to the phallus’s lack rather than reading it as a symptom of patriarchal imitation.
For radical feminists, the falseness of the phallus was due to its conflict with an essential notion of femaleness. It was problematic because it bridged the gap between masculinity and femininity. In her analysis of the feminist problem with the lesbian phallus, Butler writes that “the phallus signifies the persistence of the ‘straight mind,’ a masculine or heterosexist identification and, hence the defilement of betrayal of lesbian specificity; secondly, the phallus enters lesbian sexual discourse in the mode of a transgressive ‘confession’; . . . it’s not the real thing (the lesbian thing) or it’s not the real thing (the straight thing).”32 In other words, the phallus is read as a violation of lesbian modes of sexual intercourse because it is perceived as a desire for the masculine (against the idea that lesbianism should be about the protection of a female space) and because it is perceived as an admission that heterosexual vaginal intercourse is preferred to other modes of intercourse. In her rereading of the phallus, Butler turns to psychoanalysis to argue that the phallus need not be linked to masculinity and can actually be read as an open signifier rather than specifically tied to masculinity or male genitalia. Butler then reclaims the phallus for lesbian sexuality, extending its parameters beyond the dildo and articulating, in psychoanalytic terms, the work that the lesbian phallus does: “Consider that ‘having’ the phallus can be symbolized by an arm, a tongue, a hand (or two), a knee, a thigh, a pelvic bone, an array of purposefully instrumentalized body-like things. And that this ‘having’ exists in relation to a ‘being the phallus’ which is both part of its own signifying effect (the phallic lesbian is potentially castrating) and that which it encounters in the woman who is desired (as the one who, offering or withdrawing the specular guarantee, wields the power to castrate).”33 A woman wielding the phallus is subversive; she threatens the notions of a subservient woman, and she threatens traditional masculinity by illuminating its redundancy (she, too, can castrate). As we can see, Butler’s rescripting of the dildo moves away from a logic of difference that situates masculinity and femininity as separate spheres. It is precisely the bridging of distance between masculine and feminine that allows for this subversion.
Hart argues that the link between the dildo and lesbian S&M allows us to read lesbian S&M as social critique through its reliance on mimicry, specifically phallic mimicry. By illuminating the elements of performance at work in sexuality, lesbian S&M challenges notions of the real: “If we think of the erotic interplay of lesbian s/m as resignifications that are no doubt enabled by certain heterosexual or homosexual models but at the same time dissonant displacements of them, we might move toward a better understanding of their erotic dynamics and better grasp the political and ethical controversies they have raised.”34 In crude psychoanalytic terms, Hart argues that masochism can be read as a delicate dance with power (the phallus): male masochism is a relinquishing of the phallus, and female masochism is an impossibility because the woman has nothing to give up.35 Even as the purposeful denial of equating power with the phallus can be read as an act of self-annihilation, in many ways it serves to reinforce the connection between masculinity, power, and domination. But, as Hart points out, “To a certain extent, the controversy about whether s/m is ‘real’ or performed is naïve, since we are already in representation even when we are enacting our seemingly more private fantasies.”36 While the link that Hart makes between the subversive nature of the lesbian phallus and the social critique articulated by lesbian S&M appears to parallel connections that radical feminists made between the patriarchy, the politics of penetration, and S&M, Hart is not invested in reifying separation. Her analysis, like Butler’s, emphasizes the impossible line between fantasy and reality as it is embodied in the phallus and S&M. The question of maintaining separate masculine and feminine spheres and the underlying importance of sensing distance either as isolation or as contamination are not at issue.
Radical feminists’ collapsing of gender roles, sexual practices, and power dynamics produced a structure where domination, masculinity, and patriarchy were aligned with distance, voyeurism, and antisociality. While S&M and penetration offer glimpses of what happens on an individual level when patriarchy sullies the sphere of feminism and femininity, S&M also provides a template for understanding domination on a macro level using the same logic of sensation. In making their arguments about these connections, radical feminists linked both contemporary and historical patterns of global domination such as slavery, colonialism, and the Holocaust to S&M because these, too, were manifestations of a patriarchal relationship to power and distance. This scalar analogy had wide-reaching effects for radical feminism—it increased the stakes for taking S&M seriously as a danger to society and opened the conversation to race in an explicit fashion.
By connecting colonialism and fascism to S&M, radical feminists made a case that S&M was especially dangerous because, in contrast to submission on the part of the colonized or otherwise dominated, it required choice. Robin Ruth Linden writes: “For women and other oppressed peoples, the historical and pragmatic significance of oppression is that it is always a received rather than chosen condition. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine even having the option to embrace the conditions of oppression.”37 Sarah Lucia Hoagland elaborates on the dangers of linking liberation with willful submission:
Aside from entrapment in patriarchal logic, the idea that trusting means submitting suggests we have not yet taken ourselves seriously enough. I do not find Blacks as a political group claiming that engaging in masochism (or sadism) is consistent with Black liberation. Nor do I find Jews as a group claiming the political right or necessity of engaging in masochism (or sadism) in the name of Jewish liberation. I do not mean by this that no blacks or Jews engage in sadomasochism. My point is that I see no one attempting to argue from within those political communities that submitting to (or dominating) another in the community is consistent with liberation.38
By asking how liberation could look like submission, Hoagland highlights the difficulty that feminists encountered theorizing consent within patriarchy. Robin Morgan historicizes S&M by analogizing its harm to women with slavery and the Holocaust: “Here we can encounter the virulently anti-feminist thought of such Freudians as Marie Robinson, whose book The Power of Sexual Surrender is to women what a tome called Why you Know you Love it on the Plantation would be to Blacks or one titled How to be Happy in Line to the Showers would be to Jews.”39 Her argument that S&M represented a form of subjugation similar to slavery or genocide implied that individual acts of S&M constituted a continuation of these painful legacies.
In these narratives, we can see that enlarging the scope of anti-S&M feminism from protecting femininity from contamination to protecting Others (the enslaved, the colonized, etc.) from the pernicious machinations of masculine power worked to feminize these groups and racialize the practice of S&M (both submission and domination) as white. In a moment of harmony between black feminism and antipornography feminism, sadomasochistic acts were read as racist and imperialist.40 In her short story “A Letter of the Times or Should This Sado-Masochism Be Saved?” Alice Walker gives voice to a professor who experiences a sense of betrayal at viewing a documentary on S&M that features a black woman who calls herself a slave. In describing the documentary, Walker writes, “The only interracial couple in it, lesbians, presented themselves as mistress and slave. The white woman, who did all the talking, was mistress (wearing