Sensational Flesh. Amber Jamilla Musser
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issues of agency, freedom, representation, and experience. Masochism is important not for its essence but because it exists as a set of relations among individuals and between individuals and structures. This mobility makes it a useful analytic tool; an understanding of what someone means by masochism lays bare concepts of race, gender, power, and subjectivity. Importantly, these issues converge on the question of what it feels like to be enmeshed in various regimes of power.
In order to really understand what is at stake in masochism, I suggest we theorize the structures of sensation underlying these performances of submission. In this way, we can attend to the question of flesh and difference. While avoiding edging toward one or several essences of masochism, these structures of sensation move us closer to theorizing embodiment and difference and what it feels like to exist in the space between agency and subjectlessness. In its quest to center the flesh, Sensational Flesh produces a counternarrative to that which defines masochism not as a diagnostic space but as an exceptional practice linked to subversive politics. Though I argue that masochism is always politically charged, I caution against always reading it as a subversive practice. By working around the collapse between masochism and subversion, this book explores the territory in between, the space where bodies are embedded in power.
The history of masochism’s association with subversion is important, however, because it allows us to see not only why masochism has had such critical purchase but also what gets elided in that collapse—namely questions of difference. While this introduction explores masochism’s link with the subversive, the remainder of the book foregrounds other sensational orbits by resurrecting other bodies and histories that are also animated by masochism. Difference and sensation come together to perform a queer of color critique.
An Exceptional Practice: Masochism, Sexuality, and Subversion
I fancied that I was a prisoner and absolutely in a woman’s power, and that this woman used her power to hurt and abuse me in every way possible. In this, whipping and blows played an important part in my fancy, and there were many other acts and situations which all expressed the condition of vassalage and subjection. I saw myself constantly kneeling before my ideal, trod upon, loaded with chains, and imprisoned. Severe punishments of all kinds were inflicted on me, to test my obedience and please my mistress. The more severely I was humiliated and abused, the more I indulged in these thoughts.2
These are the confessions of the “first” masochist, an anonymous man who described his sexual practices in a manuscript that he sent to Dr. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, an eminent psychiatrist in Graz, for inclusion in Psychopathia Sexualis, Krafft-Ebing’s compendium of sexual disorders, in the hopes of enlightening the scientific community about masochism, a term that he invented as an homage to Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs. In 1890, this man was rewarded for his efforts by becoming case 9 in the sixth edition of Psychopathia Sexualis, Neue Forschungen auf dem Gebiet der Psychopathia Sexualis. His inclusion reoriented Krafft-Ebing’s theory of sexuality by introducing the psychiatric community to masochism and making it one of the fundamental disorders of sexual desire. Masochism, according to Krafft-Ebing, was about submission. He considered it a feminization of man’s sexual rôle, a perversion that was characterized by passivity and subjection.3 As a diagnostic category, masochism’s “essential element” was “the feeling of subjection to the woman.”4
I begin with this narrative not only because it marks masochism’s first foray into scientific literature but because it also inaugurates its connection to the subversive. Historicizing the trajectory of reading masochism as exceptional—in the sense of “unusual” and in the sense of something that “gestures to narratives of excellence”—exposes the political potency of subversion and the assumptions and silences about bodies, race, and gender that undergird this exceptionalism.5 This history of exceptionalism, which takes us from Krafft-Ebing through Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, Leo Bersani, Lee Edelman, and contemporary queer theory, allows us to begin to understand how masochism functions as an embodied form of social critique and simultaneously how its performative inversions can serve to reinforce the status quo. Further, linking subversion and exceptionalism entails discerning what is deemed subversive for these contexts and how masochism fits into that picture. This means examining different ideologies surrounding sexuality, politics, and pathology.
For Krafft-Ebing, the most compelling aspect of this man’s narrative was his explicit desire to invert the conventional social order and submit to a woman. Krafft-Ebing could not understand why men would want to be powerless. The masochist’s desire to invert norms and abdicate agency was not only irrational but pathological in the context of nineteenth-century Austria. Masculine submission threatened to upend established social order by placing women in positions of power. Against a backdrop of fears of feminism, lesbianism, and female empowerment, the masochist became a visible symptom of the declining state of manliness and masculinity.6
We see evidence of this transgression in case 9’s narrative through the liberal use of the passive voice. He is “trod upon, loaded with chains, and imprisoned.” Here, the passive voice marks his submission. Literarily, he willingly abdicates his agency, but this maneuver is not without complication. The fantasy is enacted so as to focus on his pleasure—both voyeuristic (“I see myself”) and sensational—denying agency to his mistress. In describing practices of self-annihilation, he reifies the self, and not just any self, but an agential masculine self. This is submission of a particular type. Here we begin to understand why, despite being articulated as a practice in which one becomes feminized, Krafft-Ebing’s formulation of masochism produced a gap between feminization and femininity. Women, though described as passive and lacking in agency, were not usually considered masochists. The naturalization of submission in women made it difficult for psychiatrists to imagine a separate category of female masochists. Symptoms of masochism in men were classified as normal behavior in women; Krafft-Ebing writes that “in woman, an inclination to subordination to man is to a certain extent a normal manifestation.”7 This gendering made female masochism natural and hid female masochists.
Female masochists became legible to Krafft-Ebing only through a masculinization of their desires. One way of accomplishing this was by articulating a cross-gender desire. For example, case 70 in the eighth edition of Psychopathia Sexualis expressed her wish to be a male slave rather than a female one because “every woman can be the slave of her husband.”8 She further described herself as “otherwise proud and quite indomitable, whence it arises that I think as a man (who is by nature proud and superior).”9 Her fantasies of transgressing the boundaries of femininity marked her desire to be whipped as masculine, which rendered her legible as a masochist. This woman’s agency, expressed most markedly in her wish for its absence, was a mark of masculinity. It was the female masochist’s overt sexuality, however, that was her most masculine attribute. Physicians and social theorists considered displays of autonomous female sexuality threatening for a variety of reasons. They hinted at independence from men and the potential participation in a sexual underworld of lesbianism, masturbation, and miscegenation.10
While Krafft-Ebing viewed this willful stance of exceptionalism as a sign of pathology and perversion, it is easy to see how this practice could be rescripted as subversive in that it flew against prevailing societal norms. Indeed, this is the type of reading practice that I argue takes place first with Freud, then with Foucault, and then with Bersani and Edelman. One of the things that I want to emphasize, however, is how focusing on this element of masochism erases the other sensations that are at work. In his original description of masochism, the author of case 9 links his practices and fantasies of subjection with Venus in Furs’ lush tableaux of domination, providing submission with texture. By doing this, he marks masochism as a fantasy, a practice, an aesthetic category, and a physical sensation. Throughout this book, I seek to reinvigorate these other ways of reading masochism, particularly because reading it as exceptional reifies norms of whiteness and masculinity and suppresses other modes of reading power, agency, and experience.
In Freud’s theoretical renegotiation of sexuality, there is no place for Krafft-Ebing’s masochist. Freud’s theory of sexuality, which is grounded in infantile pleasure, changes the landscape of what can be considered a perversion and why. Using pleasure as a metric