Sensational Flesh. Amber Jamilla Musser
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cites infantile experiences, rather than degeneration, as their cause. Though this shift away from degeneration and hereditarian notions of perversion could serve to quell rampant anti-Semitism by portraying Jews (and indeed other ethnicities) as not pathological, the most radical shift in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality is the move away from the paradigm of perversion toward that of neurosis. For Freud, all perversions can be attributed to arrested infantile development; instead of being the norm, heterosexuality is the culmination of a difficult developmental process. Thinking about perversions as developmental rather than hereditary, coupled with understanding that heterosexuality is an accomplishment rather than a given, radically alters the schema of studies on sexuality. Instead of merely focusing on perversions, they give attention to the mechanism behind “normalcy.” What is “dominant” is placed under the microscope, and what could be considered perverse is no longer part of a binary but one end of a spectrum; space “outside” of pathology ceases to exist. This renders attempts at marking the exceptional difficult. Furthermore, after dismissing hereditarian arguments for pathology, Freud argues that this spectrum of sexual “normalcy” is socially relative. What some societies have judged to be abnormal is prized in other societies; more importantly, some societal rules have repressed normal sexual impulses, relegating them to the unconscious and causing neurosis. In a reading that again serves to highlight the specter of complicity, Freud argues that society produces what it pathologizes.
In Three Essays, Freud transforms sexuality from a contained system that operates according to the binary of pervert/citizen into the ground for society and civilization. In displacing the pervert, the neurotic becomes simultaneously universal (everyone is vulnerable to repressed desires) and hidden. Despite the visibility of some symptoms, its true root remains in the unconscious. Importantly, this reorganization of pathology as invisible lays the groundwork for mapping both exceptionalism and complicity onto a number of practices; the difference between the two comes down to a matter of framing.
Freud’s theoretical and methodological shift also works to reorient masochism. Rather than diagnose someone as a masochist, Freud looks for the presence or absence of masochistic desires. This difference exemplifies his modification of the concept; it is at once spatial (from external to internal), temporal (from present to past), and formal (social to instinctual). While Krafft-Ebing characterized the masochist as a performer attempting to invert social hierarchies in order to gain momentary pleasure from losing power, Freud argues that masochism is a product of polymorphous perversion and mixed-up instincts. In describing its etiology, he writes: “Ever since Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, it has been well known to all educationalists that the painful stimulation of the skin of the buttocks is one of the erotogenic roots of the passive instinct of cruelty (masochism).”11 This statement, which focuses on the experience of being beaten, differs markedly from Krafft-Ebing’s analysis of Rousseau’s condition, which dwells on Rousseau’s desire, as a child, to be punished by his domineering schoolmistress.12 The schoolmistress is absent in his story; the most important element is the stimulation of the buttocks. Krafft-Ebing would term this flagellation, but Freud sees this as emblematic of a deeper merging of pain and pleasure. It is not mere “nerve irritation” but symptomatic of an unconscious association of physical pain with pleasure, a type of internal confusion that leads some adults to seek punishment in order to achieve physical excitation.
Freud’s use of the infant’s confusion of pleasure and pain as an explanation for sadism and masochism foregrounds the work of the unconscious. Since Freud conceives of pain in opposition to pleasure, masochism is particularly aberrant in his libidinally infused schema: Why would one seek pain? Freud’s only response is to imagine that the instincts are confused so that what is painful actually registers as pleasure. Eventually this problematization of pleasure grows into three distinct types of masochism: erotogenic, feminine, and moral. Freud defines erotogenic masochism as receiving pleasure from physical pain and feminine masochism as a practice that relies on the fantasy of submission in which male actors gain pleasure due to the adoption of the feminine role and the performance of submission.13 Moral masochism is an entirely new entity; it is an unconscious desire for punishment that manifests itself clinically as almost paralyzing feelings of guilt.
Freud’s reworking of masochism transforms it into a way to describe what is essential about life, namely, negativity in the form of guilt, shame, and a desire for death. Freud’s characterization of life as unstable, chaotic, and yet driven toward stillness, a struggle that is overtly manifest in masochism, is at odds with Krafft-Ebing’s vision of a world that preserves autonomy and social hierarchies (keeping women and non-Germanic ethnicities at the bottom). Freud disrupts the concept of autonomy first by positing the unconscious and then by positing an unconscious drive toward death and pain. This replacement of order with chaos allows masochism to be read on myriad levels. It plays both to narratives of exceptionalism and to those of complicity and normalization. By this I mean that it is at once a marginal perversion and a necessary universality; it plays on axes of ethnicity and gender, but it is also beyond these categories; and it challenges autonomy as much as it negates its very possibility.
Though Foucault’s use of S&M to articulate both individual freedom and communal resistance has been empowering for queer theorists, his insistence on difference from previous formulations of masochism occludes the similarity between his theorization of S&M and Freud’s.14 For both, masochism acts as a space of social critique; in Freud this manifests as guilt and shame, while Foucault imagines the production of new pleasures.
In The Will to Knowledge, Foucault famously argues that one might be able to “counter the grips of power with the claims of bodies, pleasures, and knowledges, in their multiplicity and their possibility of resistance.”15 Bodies and pleasures, Foucault argues, run counter to sex-desire. By this, he suggests thinking of pleasure as something separate from a psychoanalytic ethos of lack and the reproductive imperative that has governed sex. Pleasure, which can be “evaluated in terms of its intensity, its specific quality, its duration, its reverberations in the body and the soul,” offers a frame for thinking about embodiment that exceeds the disciplinary regimes that define modernity, therefore opening up different modes of theorizing resistance and power.16 Further, we can situate pleasure as one of the possible outcomes of the primary mode of resistance that Foucault articulates in the second and third volumes of History of Sexuality, namely, technologies of the self or asceticism. Foucault argues that asceticism lies at the base of self-formation, ethics, and freedom. For Foucault, freedom is more than resistance; it is creativity and a particular type of relationship to the self and the other that is based on exceeding and subverting the disciplinary boundaries of the body. Freedom, I argue, in this instance is about opening possibilities for thinking about corporeality.
With this in mind, we can examine Foucault’s turn toward S&M, which he argues offers freedom because it is a practice in which subjects manipulate bodies and power relations in order to reconfigure their own relationships to pleasure. Foucault’s understanding of S&M is historically and geographically specific. In an interview, Bob Gallagher and Alexander Wilson press Foucault to discuss the impact of his work on gay liberation movements in North America. In gay history, 1982 was a year that contained the rosy residue of gay liberation’s political fervor, its ethos of sexual abandon, and the taint of anxiety related to Gay Related Immune Deficiency Disease (GRID), which would become known as AIDS after July 1982. The gay liberation movement, which was formed after the Stonewall Riots in 1969, succeeded in demedicalizing homosexuality by removing it from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1973; pushed for an agenda of skepticism toward psychiatry, government, and other institutions; and advocated promiscuity and the creation of a homosexual culture. In this moment before the event of AIDS, anxiety was building in American gay communities about the sudden illnesses and deaths of young men; it was not yet linked to sex or bodily fluids, but the perception of a “gay plague,” a punishment for homosexuality, was in the air. These undercurrents—the promise of gay liberation, the potential peril of homosexuality, and distrust of institutions like psychiatry, government, and the nation—lend the interview and Foucault’s comments on S&M a certain historicity. For example, while Foucault speaks of pleasure, experience, and sex as idyllic and without a mention of safety, the shadow of inadequate governmental response to the