Sensational Flesh. Amber Jamilla Musser

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СКАЧАТЬ Foucault discusses the objectifying and dehumanizing medical gaze, which separates doctor from patient, and in Discipline and Punish he describes the panopticon as a model for the internalization of the gaze.¹⁴ Through Foucault we gain insight into the ways that subjects are formed through power; more precisely, we have been given tools to understand how power and vision collude to work on bodies. While these examples from Foucault illustrate the workings of power on a macro level, it is clear that power and the gaze also operate on the scale of the individual. We see this tangibly in Althusser’s famous description of being hailed by the police in “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatus,” but we can also turn to phenomenology, which has its own way of illuminating the work of visuality in constructing the subject. While Sartre argues in Being and Nothingness that looking objectifies the other, he also argues that the process of looking is what helps to constitute one’s subjectivity. Sartre is ultimately most interested in exploring what it means to oscillate between seeing and being seen, being-for-others and being-for-itself, but his theorization of looking as central to producing subjectivity is important because it links the gaze with autonomy and individuality. The gaze establishes the difference between the self and other by figuring their relationship in terms of distance. Taken together, Foucault and Sartre show us that vision is a complex sense that cannot be restricted to the ocular; looking is an act that produces objects, consolidates subjectivity, and enacts domination. Thinking about the way power and vision commingle through distance is central, I argue, to understanding the sensation of domination.¹⁵

      In this regard, discussions of S&M also move beyond the strictly visual toward articulating an affective link between power and distance. In order to show the collision between distance and domination, I turn to an essay by Elizabeth Harris that is also in Against Sadomasochism. Harris’s essay links sadomasochism with estrangement and alienation. After an S&M scene ends in her tears, she writes, “I had not felt such anguish in a long time and wanted to cry or scream it out. . . . When I finally stopped crying I felt estranged from my partner and our relationship and sadomasochism.”¹⁶ This estrangement, which she experiences as anguish, resonates with the distance radical feminists imagine is created within women when they participate in S&M. If S&M is a practice of patriarchy, it is a betrayal of, or distancing from, one’s essential femininity. Here, I am reading alienation and estrangement as psychic modes that coalesce around the sensation of distance. Though alienation and estrangement are feelings that arise from a disruption in consciousness, articulating the ways that they conjure up the physical sensation of distance speaks to the interconnectedness of affect and structures of sensation.

      Loosely following Foucault, Sartre, and Althusser, I argue that we consider this discussion of distance, both psychic and literal, as another permutation of voyeurism. What does it mean to theorize voyeurism as a form of distance? Film theory, which has been invested in unpacking spectatorship, among other things, is useful in this regard. In “The Imaginary Signifier,” Christian Metz brings together psychoanalysis and semiology to bear on film. He argues that film produces an all-perceiving subject; the spectator sees everything except for the “one thing only that is never reflected in it: the spectator’s own body. In a certain emplacement, the mirror suddenly becomes clear glass.”¹⁷ Metz’s description of the position of the spectator is explicit about the power that the spectator feels through looking. He labels the spectator “all-perceiving” and “all-powerful” because his or her absence from the screen allows for this fantasy of domination over that which he or she sees.¹⁸ In short, the cinematic spectator is a voyeur—something that Metz characterizes not by domination but by distance. He writes that “the voyeur is very careful to maintain a gulf, an empty space, between the object and the eye, the object and his own body: his look fastens the object at the right distance, as with those cinema spectators who take care to avoid being too close or too far from the screen.”¹⁹ In fact, Metz argues that cinema itself is predicated on the power imbalance of this simultaneous absence and presence; he terms this a technique of the imaginary, which “provides unaccustomed perceptual wealth, but unusually profoundly stamped with unreality.”²⁰

      Metz’s analysis of voyeurism as a sensation having to do with distance and power offers a way to characterize these critiques of S&M as having to do with a logic of distance and voyeurism. Voyeurism emphasizes the power imbalance between parties; the voyeur invades the scene and responds to it without requiring the consent of the watched. This formulation resonates with a radical feminist analysis of S&M as a practice without the possibility of consent that adheres to the logic of patriarchy. S&M is pernicious because it produces alienation and antisociality. When applied to a theorization of patriarchy and domination, this conglomeration of sensations—voyeurism, alienation, and antisociality—illuminates the fact that patriarchy can be read as a form of domination that relies on controlling the distance between parties.

      We can see some of the effects of that distance and antisociality at work in Laura Mulvey’s analysis of phallocentrism at work in narrative cinema. Not only are women not given a space as spectators, but their presence as objects to be looked at is seen as a distraction from the plot—even in the imaginary realm, women function only as decoration. In her 1973 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Mulvey argues that woman’s presence on screen correlates to her place in patriarchal society. She writes, “Woman then stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.”²¹ In Mulvey’s reading, the scopophilic impulse objectifies woman because she represents rather than produces meaning. Not only is the gaze in this situation predicated on distance, but it creates and perpetuates that distance. It produces women as objects who are not to be engaged, thus reinforcing their status as nonagential beings. And in this way it also reproduces a social separation according to gender. Taken together, this articulates the logic of patriarchy that radical feminism rallied against. Through this example we see clearly that the sensation of domination is dependent on an economy of distance, which foregrounds the practices associated with maintaining distance (in this case looking) and the feelings associated with that, described here as alienation and isolation. The structural coherence that emerges from this examination of patriarchy rewrites practices of lesbian S&M as having to do with antisociality and inequality rather than sexuality or violence. In terms of theorizing radical feminist responses to S&M, we become able to recognize their critiques of S&M as occurring on a deeper level than a kinship to patriarchy: we can see how their understanding of the assemblage of S&M was related to distance, scopophilia, and antisociality, all of which were in opposition to the sensations that they wanted to correlate with feminism, namely eroticism and mutuality.

      The Politics of Penetration: Analyzing Debates about the Butch and the Dildo

      If feminism’s task was to enable female sexuality to flourish apart from patriarchy and its ethos of domination, lesbian S&M was a symptom of patriarchal contamination and linked with masculinity. In opposition to radical feminism’s focus on woman-centeredness, lesbian S&M was likened to abuse, and its practitioners were described as adhering to traditional gender norms where masculinity and butchness were linked with domination and femininity was linked with passivity.²² Because lesbian S&M was seen as emulating patriarchal, masculine forms of domination through the eroticization of power, some radical feminists perceived it as reinscribing the notion of women as passive victims. Choosing submission or choosing to dominate was a sign of false consciousness, a sign that one was under the thrall of patriarchy. Sadomasochistic acts were lumped with rape and domestic abuse as a form of violence against women.²³ Domination was masculinized while submission was coded as feminine. In a retrospective analysis of these debates, Judith Butler highlights the problematic nature of this gendering: “[These positions] offer an analysis of sexual relations as structured by relations of coerced subordination, and argue that acts of sexual domination constitute the social meaning of being ‘a man,’ as the condition of coerced subordination constitutes the social meaning of being a ‘woman.’ Such a rigid determinism assimilates any account of sexuality to СКАЧАТЬ