Sensational Flesh. Amber Jamilla Musser
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stood smiling and silent, was—the white woman said—her slave.”41 This contemporary and willful reclamation of an identity (or nonidentity) that embodied generations of harm offends the professor in Walker’s story (and presumably Walker herself). Walker describes the hurt and pain that this representation of history inflicts, not only on her character, but on those whom she is trying to teach: “All I had been teaching was subverted by that one image, and I was incensed to think of the hard struggle of my students to rid themselves of stereotype, to combat prejudice, to put themselves into enslaved women’s skins, and then to see their struggle mocked, and the actual enslaved condition of literally millions of our mothers trivialized—because two ignorant women insisted on their right to act out publicly a ‘fantasy’ that still strikes terror in black women’s hearts.”42 Walker’s disgust with S&M has to do both with the perceived continuum between the institution of slavery and sadomasochism and with the residual trauma of slavery. She cannot separate the idea of the slave from its history of racism, especially when embodied by a black woman who submits to a white woman. Indeed, the black woman, further the black lesbian, was frequently figured as the position of absolute powerlessness within the framework of 1980s feminism.43 This reading of black femininity as a site of perpetual duress and domination precluded the possibility of reading submission as anything but violent and painful. As Walker makes clear, S&M toggles between domination between individuals and domination on a macro scale.
Sullied States: Colonialism, Racism, and Masochism
The racialization of domination is one area where feminist arguments against S&M and patriarchy unexpectedly converge with Frantz Fanon’s exploration of the psychoanalytic dimensions of colonialism. While feminist arguments against S&M indict the racism of the practice, Fanon provides another perspective on the matter. In his explicit analysis of masochism as a product of colonialism, we are able to read around the radical feminist ethos of protectionism in order to explore the sensations that coalesce around distance in Fanon’s description of the experience of the colonized. Though this is a subtle inversion of the radical feminist framework, which situates S&M as the overarching structure of domination, it allows Fanon to argue that colonialism and racism (rather than masochism) are pathological. Through Fanon, we see colonialism as a performance of white submission, where the victim (the black man) is also produced as the feared specter of domination. The politics and sensations of distance are still very much at work in this narrative, but here these tactics are being mobilized against the perspective that we are privy to, that of the black man.
When the world is subject to Fanon’s gaze in Black Skin, White Masks, we are given the tools to experience what being a black man under colonialism feels like. Fanon describes many feelings and sensations of desubjectification, but most important to my narrative here is the painful separation that he describes between the colonizer and the colonized. Quite simply, “The black man is not a man.”44 Central to this production of distance is “unconscious masochism.”45
In a particularly evocative passage, Fanon describes the link between masochism and colonialism through an analysis of Uncle Remus stories. These stories focus on the heroic antics of Br’er Rabbit, who outwits his animal predators, Br’er Fox and Br’er Bear. White Americans, he argues, identified with Br’er Rabbit but then realized that they were problematically valorizing blackness and its aggression, since Br’er Rabbit was widely considered a stand-in for a slave. This allowed them to imagine that the Negro’s aggression was turned toward them, which gave them a reason to feel guilty for their domination. Central to this masochistic imaginary was the specter of the aggressive black man: “The Negro makes stories in which it becomes possible for him to work off his aggression; the white man’s unconscious justifies this aggression and gives it worth by turning it on himself, thus reproducing the classic schema of masochism.”46 Like the domineering woman in Psychopathia Sexualis, this trope served two purposes. It allowed blacks to have access to agency, even if it was located in the imaginary; and, Fanon argues, it made whites feel both justified in their racism and punished for it. In articulating a connection between the treatment of blacks in America and Sigmund Freud’s notion of moral masochism, Fanon argues that white practices of domination are laced with the guilty pleasures of masochism.
The masochism that Fanon describes is a complex psychic formulation. In accounting for it, he argues that it is born from white America’s initial “sadistic” aggression toward the black man, which is swiftly “followed by a guilt complex because of the sanction against such behavior by the democratic culture of the country in question,” given that overt discrimination is recognized to be incoherent with the ideals of democracy.47 Additionally, Fanon argues that this aggression is “tolerated by the Negro,” which is to say that he lacks the ability to combat it, and that in the white man it results in masochism (and produces guilt and shame at his behavior).48 Though Fanon uses the term masochism, it differs from the moral masochism that Freud describes, which involves the reactivation of the Oedipus complex and guilt by potentially provoking parental (but now subsumed by the superego) ire. The initial violation committed by the white (American) man was that of wanting to unnecessarily punish the black man. This desire, which Fanon terms sadistic, thereby coding it as erotic, violates the white familial credo of democracy and equality. The result is guilt, which he terms masochism because of the pleasure this narrative of personal suffering evokes for the white man.
Fanon’s equation of the superego with a national character, democracy, is strikingly different from Freud’s description of the superego as a punishing parent. It raises the question—How, indeed, can democracy punish? The answer to this lies with understanding Fanon’s radical break from a family-centered psychology toward one centered on nationality and race. Democracy punishes the white man, Fanon seems to argue, by revealing him to be perverse and making him feel guilty. The white man’s desire to hurt the black man shows that he has failed to absorb the lessons of the family/nation while simultaneously revealing these goals to be impossible. There is a break in the system; but unlike Freud’s concept of moral masochism, this does not result in punishment from the superego. As a concept, democracy cannot act in this way; it becomes nothing more than an ideal that is not reached, and that becomes the new familial reality. Unlike Freud’s moral masochist, who becomes paralyzed by his inability to resolve his or her new Oedipal crisis and continually seeks punishment, Fanon’s white masochist is not particularly impeded by this guilt. Though he seeks to self-punish, this punishment does not occur at any actual social cost to the white man; the actual burden is felt by the black man through the production of various sensations of distance.49
A Negro Is Raping Me: Fear, Masochism, and the Black Man
One of the tangible ways that the white man’s guilt manifests itself as a problem for the black man is through the creation and perpetuation of the myth of the dominating, threatening black man. Fanon analyzes this specter in his “explanation of the fantasy: A Negro is raping me [un nègre me viole].”50 Fanon offers this as a twist on Freud’s “A Child Is Being Beaten.” In Freud’s narrative, a child fantasizes about another child being beaten because he or she wants paternal affection. Freud suggests that this fantasy about another child is actually a fantasy about the child’s masochistic desire to be beaten by his or her father as punishment for his or her Oedipal desires. Fanon replaces the child with an adult woman and argues that her fantasy of punishment is to be raped by a black man: “I wish the Negro would rip me open as I would have ripped a woman open” (Je souhaite que le nègre m’éventre comme moi je l’aurais fait d’une femme).51
Immediately it is clear that this fantasy is embedded within a discourse of naturalized female masochism. The woman does not just want to be raped but wishes violence upon her body. This voiced desire for evisceration defines the white woman in terms of her predisposition for pain. She is presented as voraciously sexual with an appetite for destruction. In addition to this characterization of her desires, Fanon’s analysis of this fantasy further naturalizes white femininity’s relationship to pain by making a link to the work of Hélène Deutsch and Marie Bonaparte, “both of whom took up and in a way carried to their ultimate conclusions Freud’s ideas on female sexuality,” which is to say, they argued for an innately female biological desire for pain.52