Sensational Flesh. Amber Jamilla Musser

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СКАЧАТЬ The underlying unity of these arguments against S&M was that feminism had to keep femininity (and women) safe from the incursion of patriarchy. Further, by framing patriarchy as separate from femininity and feminism, these arguments expressed their experiences of patriarchy as structured by sensations associated with distance, namely voyeurism and antisociality. This, in turn, figured lesbian S&M as a practice of domination characterized by invasion.

      Jane Gerhard describes the ideological convergence behind anti-S&M sentiment as a merging of antipornography feminism, cultural feminism, and lesbian separatism.⁴ Though each strain of feminism had its own concerns, they overlapped in their belief in an essential femininity that was separate from patriarchy. For lesbian separatists, this manifested itself as the idea that lesbianism was fundamentally different from and more egalitarian than heterosexuality, or, as Gerhard writes, that lesbianism seemed to offer “an emotional and political alternative to heterosexuality.”⁵ The project of cultural feminism “celebrate[d] women’s bodies as unique and their sexuality as independent of ‘male models’ of genital sex.”⁶ Antipornography feminists, on the other hand, were invested in illuminating the societal and personal harm that heterosexuality (in its numerous patriarchal guises) produced. Antipornography feminists, Gerhard writes, “tended to conflate social power (or, in the case of women, social subordination), heterosexuality, and the unconscious in a way that paralleled theories of women’s difference. The anti-pornography movement interpreted heterosexual intercourse as an expression of men’s power over women and the penis as a weapon in the larger effort to keep women submissive to men and male power.”⁷ Taken together, these ideologies position femininity in opposition to patriarchy. This logic mobilized feminism as a discourse that protected femininity from the violence that patriarchy produced on both the structural and the individual level.

      Radical feminism’s move away from a politics of sexual liberation toward a woman-centered, nonheterosexual ideology is exemplified by Adrienne Rich’s 1980 essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Rich frames her essay as an intervention against patriarchy’s insistence on heterosexuality and a plea for feminism to make space for lesbianism. She argues for a woman-centered feminism to incorporate a plethora of different types of relationships between women in order to rally against patriarchy’s denigration of these homosocial bonds: “Women’s choice of women as passionate comrades, life partners, co-workers, lovers, tribe, has been crushed, invalidated, forced into hiding and disguise.”⁸ Throughout the essay, Rich argues that patriarchy, which manifests as domination and violence, has suppressed femininity’s nurturing qualities, which are exemplified in the bond between mother and child. A particularly pernicious site of this oppression is pornography, which Rich describes as “a major public issue of our time” because it relays the message that “women are natural sexual prey to men and love it; that sexuality and violence are congruent; and that for women sex is essentially masochistic, humiliation pleasurable, physical abuse erotic. But along with this message comes another, not always recognized: that enforced submission and the use of cruelty, if played out in heterosexual pairing, is sexually ‘normal,’ while sensuality between women, including erotic mutuality and respect, is ‘queer,’ ‘sick,’ and either pornographic in itself or not very exciting compared with the sexuality of whips and bondage.”⁹ In the objections that Rich presents to pornography, we can see an essentialized image of women as nurturing and egalitarian, a characterization of heterosexuality as violent and oppressive, and a desire to remove lesbianism from the sphere of the pathological and the pornographic. Rich writes toward a space and a feminism where woman-identified women are able and encouraged to express their love. In this context we can clearly see the separate spheres assigned to femininity/feminism and patriarchy. Sensual, egalitarian femininity was contrasted with patriarchy’s investment in heterosexuality, masochism, violence, and pornography.

      As we see with Rich’s alignment of S&M with violence, humiliation, physical abuse, and heterosexuality, feminists argued that S&M was a pernicious extension of patriarchy because it coerced women into participating in this masculine sphere of unequal power distribution through a cooptation of eroticism. In her introduction to Against Sadomasochism, a 1982 radical feminist analysis of S&M, Robin Ruth Linden writes:

      Throughout Against Sadomasochism it is argued that lesbian sadomasochism is firmly rooted in patriarchal sexual ideology, with its emphasis on the fragmentation of desire from the rest of our lives and the single-minded pursuit of gratification, sexual and otherwise. There can be no doubt that none of us is exempt from the sphere of influence of patriarchal conceptions of sexuality and intimacy. For this reason, I believe that the recent interest by some women in sadomasochism is testimony to the profoundly alienated and objectified conceptions of erotic desire that our culture has produced and from which lesbians and feminists are by no means exempt.¹⁰

      Linden frames interest in S&M as a form of alienated compliance with patriarchy that manifests itself as an individual drive toward pleasure at the expense of feminist political progress. In this reading, S&M focuses on the individual instead of the collective and threatens to separate women from their sources of feminine power, thereby isolating them from the collective projects of feminism and female empowerment. S&M, then, is experienced as a practice that produces distance between women and feminism and a practice that threatens to contaminate feminism by breaching the distance between it and patriarchy.

      Voyeurism, Alienation, and Other Practices of Distancing

      These logics of distance are manifest at the level of sensation. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the kinship between arguments against S&M and those against pornography, one of the prevailing descriptions of patriarchy is that it is (among other things) a form of scopic violence, but there is more to the sensation of looking than the ocular. Like arguments against S&M, feminist arguments against pornography stress the costs of patriarchal domination for society at large and women in particular. Radical feminists argued that the pornography industry exploited women and that pornography itself eroticized domination and perpetuated violence against women vis-à-vis the internalization of patriarchy. In short, pornography, like S&M, was thought to be a practice that, at its best, misrepresented women and female pleasure and, at its worst, objectified and dehumanized them. In pornography, much of this objectification happened on the level of the visual; pornography was domination via the power of looking. As an example of this connection let us turn briefly to Andrea Dworkin’s and Catharine MacKinnon’s work against pornography. In their proposed antipornography ordinance, Dworkin and MacKinnon are explicit about this equation of looking with domination, going so far as to define pornography as “the graphic sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures and/or words.”¹¹ Though the US Supreme Court ultimately vetoed this ordinance, its formulation is instructive because it encapsulates the equation of visual objectification with patriarchal violence.

      While arguments against S&M were not as oriented toward representation and visuality as arguments against pornography, I argue that unpacking the sensations that characterized domination results in a similar connection between looking and S&M. Some women explicitly voiced the link between practices of S&M and feeling visually dominated. Marissa Jonel, who contributes an essay to Against Sadomasochism, writes about the surveillance that her former lover performed as a continuation of her submission after the end of their S&M relationship. Though Jonel is careful to draw a distinction between her abusive relationship and S&M, she is resolutely against S&M, arguing that “sm almost ruined my life.”¹² Most tellingly, Jonel describes her abuse as linked, not with pain, but with surveillance. She writes, “I was a virtual prisoner in my home” and describes this incarceration as a combination of isolation and constant monitoring: “Although we didn’t live together any more, my role continued as a masochist. I saw no other women and was kept under careful watch by telephone and visits from my lover.”¹³ Here, Jonel equates S&M with abuse and being watched with being dominated.

      In many ways, Jonel voices the explicit connection between domination and voyeurism that has already been described at length by philosophers like СКАЧАТЬ