Sensational Flesh. Amber Jamilla Musser

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 acts and identities with resistant potential, I am suggesting instead that the more valuable insight afforded by Foucault’s call to bodies and pleasures is the recognition that one’s relation to the disciplinary system of sexuality is necessarily articulated with regard to historically specific and bounded sites of contestation.”⁷¹ By looking at those who refuse to prize S&M and masochism as subversive, this chapter augments our understanding of the disciplining of sexuality. These local histories of masochism illuminate the contours (white, male) of a particular mode of freedom while expanding on what it feels like to be othered. Both Fanon and radical feminists articulate feeling dominated as part of the process of othering, a process in which voyeurism, antisociality, and detachment come together as the structure of sensations that inform these types of relationships to power. In this way, while I am speaking about two very particular case studies, they serve to show what is at stake when power is formulated as a binary: that is to say, when it is seen as something that one possesses and the other lacks.

      The next chapter responds to the crushing weight of normativity by analyzing literary representations that thematize submission. “Objectification, Complicity, and Coldness: The Story of O’s Narratives of Femininity and Precarity,” Sensational Flesh’s third chapter, examines literary representations of submission and femininity to articulate what complicity feels like. Using The Story of O as a starting point, this chapter looks at the ways that submission has been understood as a performance of femininity in the context of postwar France. I argue that The Story of O produces a link between femininity, objectification, and recognition through masochism by foregrounding aesthetics and other models of agency under conditions of constraint. In this way, I read The Story of O as one of the spaces of cruel optimism that Lauren Berlant discusses in her analysis of life under neoliberalism. Berlant writes, “In cruel optimism the subject or community turns its treasured attachments into safety-deposit objects that make it possible to bear sovereignty through its distribution, the energy of feeling relational, general, reciprocal, and accumulative. . . . In a relation of cruel optimism our activity is revealed as a vehicle for attaining a kind of passivity, as evidence of the desire to find forms in relation to which we can sustain a coasting sentience, in response to being too alive.”⁷² In her formulation of cruel optimism, Berlant connects fantasies of change, manifested as a desire for passivity and an investment in materiality, to the reality of structural powerlessness.

      Though Berlant is invested in life under the slow death of neoliberalism, the performances of femininity under the heavy hand of patriarchy of the immediate postwar period and earlier offer a similar model of confined subjectivity. Ambivalence toward gender, then, is at the heart of the Story of O. This ambivalence, embodied by the sensation of coldness, allows us to see the ways that femininity is embedded within prevailing discourses of power. Though this has some resonance with the fear that S&M relies upon an implicitly masculine subject, I read The Story of O as a narrative about complicity and the conditions that attend precarity. First, I read the novel in conjunction with Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, in which she argues that masochism is a mode of complicity with feminine objectification that impedes freedom. Next, I read Gilles Deleuze’s “Coldness and Cruelty” and Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs as producing parallel narratives of female complicity with patriarchy even as they strive to describe female agency. Finally, I read The Story of O through Jessica Benjamin and Jean Paul Sartre to understand complicity as the compromised outcome of seeking recognition. While this narrative focuses on femininity to underscore how coldness and an attention to aesthetics mark these situations of complicity, the larger question guiding this chapter is that of complicity and precarity. I want to examine what types of power structures complicity can produce and how these reveal strategies to deal with one’s overwhelming precarity. In contrast to the second chapter’s emphasis on thinking about power as a matter of “us” and “them,” this chapter locates relations to power on an intimate, subject-constituting level, echoing Berlant’s attention to structures of fantasy and subjectivity.

      The conditions that foreclose agency are the subject of the fourth chapter, “Time, Race, and Biology: Fanon, Freud, and the Labors of Race.” By looking at the affective labor of subject formation, this chapter directly engages with recent work in queer of color critique. In Aberrations in Black, Roderick Ferguson describes the aims of a queer of color critique as “an epistemological intervention . . . [that] denotes an interest in materiality, but refuses ideologies of transparency and reflection, ideologies that have helped to constitute Marxism, revolutionary nationalism, and liberal pluralism.”⁷³ Queer of color analyses make visible the “manifold intersections that contradict the idea of the liberal nation-state and capital as sites of resolution, perfection, progress, and confirmation.”⁷⁴ This chapter continues that project by looking at these foreclosures of agency СКАЧАТЬ