Sensational Flesh. Amber Jamilla Musser
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him to be attentive to the flesh while not reifying any connection between experience and identity.
While empathetic reading is centrally concerned with deciphering the structures of sensation that subtend various objects/assemblages/texts, it does so by being attentive to the sensations aroused in the reader. While Deleuze’s practice of intensive reading is attentive to readerly sensation, it is not actually invested in the corporeality of the reader. Here is where we part ways; empathetic reading relies on fostering a connection between the corporeality of the reader and the structures of sensation. This emphasis on readerly corporeality allows the objects/assemblages/ texts to be grouped by structure of sensation, thereby allowing for promiscuous and queer groupings and underscoring the work of empathy.
Bringing readerly flesh into the production of textual affect brings to mind other work within queer theory on embodied reading. I place Carolyn Dinshaw’s queer “touch across time” and Elizabeth Freeman’s erotohistoriography alongside empathetic reading. Dinshaw emphasizes the production of history via “a relation across time that has an affective or an erotic component,” with political and present consequences for this touching: “What importance do social, cultural, economic, and political constraints and hierarchies have if we speak so blithely of ‘reenactment,’ ‘citation,’ ‘living with’ a figure from the past?”61 Freeman’s vision of erotohistoriography makes more explicit the ways that history can serve the present; she argues that affective temporal relations may produce “reparative criticism” that “insist[s] that various queer social practices, especially those involving enjoyable bodily sensations, produce forms of time consciousness—even historical consciousness—that can intervene into the material damage done in the name of development, civilization, and so on.”62 While both Freeman and Dinshaw underscore the importance of the corporeal links that are forged between the reader, text, and in many cases, the past and present, empathetic reading offers a twist on that methodology by making explicit the consequences of taking writerly flesh into account through the juxtaposition of disciplines and histories and empathy.
I argue, therefore, that in addition to forging a relationship with the text, the reader forges a relationship with the writer of the text and his or her subject position. Further, these sensational connections between reader, text, and writer are forged through empathy and identification. In its least vexed form, empathy asks the reader to imagine his or her body in the place of another. Even as I write this I acknowledge that this logic of substitution, the literal replacement of one body for another, can be dangerous, both because it threatens to obliterate the other and because it risks “naturalizing the condition of pained embodiment.”63 Though empathy can be a problematic term, I use it to speak about the way that feeling through another can be a space of multiplicity rather than erasure or imperialism.64 In this I am drawing on Elin Diamond’s analysis of identification, or what she terms the slide from “I” to “we.”65 In articulating the political possibilities for identification, Diamond cites Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clément’s description of reading as a form of identification: “One never reads except by identification. But what kind? When I say identification, I do not say loss of self. I become, I inhabit. I enter. Inhabiting someone at that moment I can feel myself traversed by that person’s initiatives and actions.”66 While Cixous recalls Deleuze’s analysis of reading as a process of becoming, she emphasizes the transformation (and augmentation) of self rather than its unmaking. This distinction is critical because it highlights how empathy can work. By preserving the integrity of the self, Cixous draws attention to the way that identification can be a form of inhabitation and multiplicity. Neither self nor other is destroyed, but a lacuna of sensations and feelings binds this hybrid of reader-text-writer. Just as Diamond posits the potential for a politics of identification, “a politics that dismantles the phenomenological universals of transcendent subjects and objects; that places identity in an unstable and contingent relation to identification; and that works close to the nerves dividing and connecting the psychic and the social,” I argue that a critical employment of empathy can produce similar effects.67 Allowing this multiplicity into the empathetic equation shifts the focus away from understanding the other as unified and transparently available to us and invites us to experience affinities on a corporeal level with others through sensation. This dimension of multiplicity is a space where difference can become apparent while still registering the structures of sensation that undergird the text. Empathetic reading, therefore, allows us to grapple with the position of the other while maintaining a sense of the impersonal flows that bind things together.
Masochism’s Sensations and Histories
In writing the histories of masochism that form the bulk of Sensational Flesh, then, I aim to attend to questions of flesh and sensation. Practically, this has meant paying attention to particular bounded histories in order to see how they might speak to larger questions about the multiple types of relationships that we have with power. Broadly speaking, these histories focus on power’s work in the process of othering, the types of intimacy that power cultivates, the depersonalization enacted by power, and the self’s tendency both toward and against cohesion. Though I have separated each structure of sensation into a different chapter, I do not meant to suggest that they do not operate in tandem or even at odds with each other. These histories are meant to enliven our thinking about masochism by presenting contradictions, various imaginaries, multiple forms of power, and diverse responses to that power. Further, I see these disparate embodiments as part of larger conversations within queer theory on antinormativity, precarity, queer of color critique, and new materialisms, though the chapters do not explicitly engage with queer theory.
The second chapter, “Specters of Domination: Patriarchy, Colonialism, and Masochism,” picks up where my history of exceptionalism leaves off and analyzes masochism, not as a mode of subversion, but as a symptom of the normative. It does this, first, by exploring the relationship between masochism and white male privilege as it was articulated in feminist debates about patriarchy and lesbian sadomasochism in the United States in the early 1980s; and, second, by analyzing Frantz Fanon’s meditation on colonialism as a pathology that produces white masochism.
Debates about female sexuality in the 1980s revolved around the place of patriarchy in structuring female desire. Some radical feminists argued that sexuality was being used to continue to oppress women. Overt displays of sexuality such as pornography and sadomasochism were deemed especially pernicious because of their ties to masculinity and patriarchy. If heterosexual sex was bad, pornography and sadomasochism exacerbated the power imbalance between the sexes and reinforced the notion of passive femininity. In this way, I see these arguments as heirs to a fin de siècle sexological linkage between female sexuality, deviance, and masculinity. Though these debates most directly respond to radical feminist proclamations of sexual liberation, which were initiated in part by a rejection of Freud and other nineteenth-century sexologists, their ideology echoes this historical linkage between masculinity and sexual desire.68 Additionally, this close association between women and passivity played into cultural ideas of women as willing victims in rape, abuse, and domestic violence. The assumption that women unconsciously wanted to be abused was a contentious point of the American feminist movement.69
These arguments against S&M’s subversive quality gain depth when juxtaposed with Fanon’s analysis of masochism and colonialism. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon conceptualizes masochism as inherently white, understanding it to be part of the affective residue of racism. Speaking from the position of the colonized, Fanon provides an analysis of the psychic tolls of being subject to domination. Thus I add a racialized dimension to this collusion between masculinity and masochism. By unpacking the ways that masochism can function to stabilize regimes of domination, this chapter resonates with recent critics of queer theory’s focus on the antinormative. In her discussion of fake orgasm, Annemarie Jagose notes that critical consensus has moved toward the idea “that transformative political potential attaches by default to queer sexual practice, that is the non-normativity of queer erotic practice that makes it recognizable as political.”70 In the face of this push toward the antinormative, Jagose argues that a turn toward normativity and other configurations of sexuality might actually offer more potential for queer analysis: “Pushing against the commonsense plausibility that credits certain transgressive