Sensational Flesh. Amber Jamilla Musser

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СКАЧАТЬ chapter takes up the question of race, recognition, and the laboring body by focusing on becoming-black as a sensation of becoming-biological and of depersonalization. Through a close reading of Fanon’s historically situated description of racialization during colonialism, I look at the ways that the racialized male body has been described as an ahistoric plane of suffering and explore what work the spectacle of the black body in pain does to produce narratives of black atemporality and becoming-biological in conjunction with white guilt and liberal subjectivity. This chapter examines the racial dynamics at work in the concepts of empathy and sympathy to compare the shame of racialization with the affects produced by the masochism of the liberal subject as articulated by Sigmund Freud. In linking becoming-black with what I term “stickiness,” or the weightiness of being overdetermined, with ahistoricity, and with labor, I analyze the work of Glenn Ligon as illustrating how race has been understood as affective labor and as offering a model for moving beyond that space.

      “Lacerated Breasts: Medicine, Autonomy, Pain,” the book’s fifth chapter, looks at the explicitly sadomasochistic practice of Bob Flanagan, “supermasochist” and performance artist; Audre Lorde’s reflections on cancer; and Deleuze’s theorizations of illness and masochism. Through an analysis of Flanagan, Lorde, and Deleuze, this chapter examines desubjectification by focusing on illness, pain, and their attendant affects. The first half of the chapter grapples with different models of producing subjective coherence in the face of illness by paralleling Flanagan’s participation in S&M and Lorde’s practices of memoir. The second half of the chapter investigates the potential empowerment of desubjectification as it is worked through by Deleuze and Lorde.

      By foregrounding the agency of pain, we see the work of new materialisms in action. If animacy, according to Mel Chen, “helps us theorize current anxieties around the production of humanness in contemporary times,” this chapter looks toward two disparate modes of decentering the subject to understand what the political costs of such a move might be.⁷⁵ In the face of his own illness, Deleuze imagines masochism as a step away from the discipline of modernity and subjectivity; it allows for the opening of new possibilities for thought and life. The most developed form of this argument is his work with Félix Guattari on the Body without Organs (BwO), which they describe as an anti-Oedipal formation of becoming. We might see this idealization of desubjectification as akin to the models of masochism as a form of exceptional subversion, but I would like to stress that sexuality, subjectivity, and agency work very differently in the BwO. I turn to Lorde’s reading of the erotic as another mode of desubjectification. She writes toward a communal self, scripting agency and sexuality as affects of this plurality.

      Ultimately, what is at stake in each of these debates within queer theory and each of these local histories is the relationship between subjectivity, sexuality, and agency. The final chapter of Sensational Flesh, “Conclusion: Making Flesh Matter,” looks at the work of Kara Walker to probe the relationship between black women and the flesh. Through an exploration of how one might “play” with history, this chapter probes the limits of individual performance and agency and asks what it might mean to truly conceive of black female subjectivity. By looking at black female masochism, this chapter argues that our understandings of masochism have been shaped by particular framings of sexuality, subjectivity, and agency and asks how we might think otherwise.

      Sensational Flesh tells several stories about masochism and S&M in order to explore experience and sensation as connected to theory and practice. By placing flesh and difference at the center of knowledge production and circulation, it opens alternate modes of understanding circuits of power. This work centers sensation to look at how people experience power and subordination in a variety of disciplinary situations. At its core, Sensational Flesh is about how difference is made material through the particular understandings of sexuality, subjectivity, and agency; and ultimately the book works to produce a new mode of thinking sexuality.

      2. Specters of Domination: Patriarchy, Colonialism, and Masochism

      In her 1979 essay “The Meaning of Our Love for Women Is What We Have Constantly to Expand,” Adrienne Rich seems to have directly taken up Michel Foucault’s provocation that S&M is an emergent subculture within the gay world. But in contrast to Foucault’s discussions of creativity, eroticism, and freedom, Rich fixates on violence, power differentials, and self-destruction: “On the other hand, there is homosexual patriarchal culture, a culture created by homosexual men, reflecting such male stereotypes as dominance and submission as modes of relationships, and the separation of sex from emotional involvement—a culture tainted by profound hatred for women. The male ‘gay’ culture has offered lesbians the imitation role-stereotypes of ‘butch’ and ‘femme,’ ‘active’ and ‘passive,’ cruising, sado-masochism, and the violent, self-destructive world of gay bars.”¹ Here, S&M is assumed to contaminate the world of lesbianism. Rich rationalizes this distance by arguing that S&M is part and parcel of patriarchy. This chapter interrogates the ideologies and sensational structures that allow Rich to align S&M, patriarchy, and the butch as axes of domination that work against lesbianism and feminism. On the one hand, Rich’s comment speaks more generally to the distrust many radical feminists felt toward butches (and masculinity) in the 1970s and 1980s. On the other hand, the connection that Rich draws between butches and S&M speaks to the delineation of a particular sensational orbit for patriarchy.

      In unpacking the sensations that attach themselves to the distance that Rich and other radical feminists want to produce between feminism and patriarchy, this chapter interrogates the specter of domination from two disparate positions—that of the butch within radical feminism and the black man within colonialism. In both of these formulations, masochism is figured as a manifestation of patriarchal and colonial power. The feminist panic regarding S&M in the 1980s was explicitly about defining feminist possibilities of female sexual expression; its detractors saw lesbian S&M as a practice that invited masculinity into the bedroom. This conflation of S&M with masculinity and domination unintentionally reunited femininity and passivity such that S&M was read as a (condemned) performance of patriarchy—regardless of the acts performed. These sentiments coalesced into anxiety about the butch, who was also figured as masculine and dominating. In the second half of the chapter, I turn to Frantz Fanon to show how the black man is turned into a specter of domination under colonialism. In Fanon’s writing, being subjected to the sensational regime of colonialism results in feeling objectified and overexposed. By focusing on the role of masochism in Fanon’s description of the harms of colonialism and the place of S&M as a particularly pernicious axis of patriarchy for radical feminists, this chapter locates the cluster of sensations that undergird these systems of domination as having to do with distance.

      S&M, Patriarchy, and the Drive toward Separation

      Looking backwards, the focus on lesbian S&M within radical feminism might seem peculiar, but lesbian S&M seemed to offer a lens to study patriarchy by bringing issues of gender, agency, eroticism, and violence to the fore. In her remarks on the infamous 1982 Barnard conference on sexuality, a British feminist, Elizabeth Wilson, wrote that she found “it curious that one particular, and arguably rather marginal sexual practice should have come to occupy such a key space in the discussion of sexuality.”² Wilson went on to hypothesize that S&M “sometimes seems to have to do with sexual outlawry and the dark side of self and forbidden desires. Perhaps feminism really has done something to lesbianism in confusing it with non-eroticized love between women, so that some lesbians have been attracted to other, more deeply ‘forbidden’ ways of insisting that lesbianism is about sex.”³ Wilson’s comments highlight several axes of contention within American feminism in the early 1980s. In a moment when some feminists argued that focusing on sexuality was a symptom of the insidious nature of patriarchy and that pornography and promiscuity degraded women by reducing them to sexual objects, feminists who were invested in seeking liberation through sexuality were accused of being blind to its pernicious aspects. The arguments against lesbian S&M were the product of a set of overlapping assumptions: that the task of feminism was to end violence against women, that S&M was about violence and patriarchy, СКАЧАТЬ