Sensational Flesh. Amber Jamilla Musser

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СКАЧАТЬ of man and woman.”²⁴ In figuring S&M as a patriarchal practice, radical feminists reentrenched gender norms surrounding masculinity and femininity. Femininity was associated with community, love, and mutuality, while masculinity was equated with domination, violence, and selfishness. While the practice of S&M was linked to masculine practices of patriarchy, the individual embodiment of these fears about masculinity and patriarchal contamination was the butch and the micropolitics of penetration. Radical feminists mapped anxieties about domination, masculinity, and a politics of distance onto her body. Though the butch was only tenuously linked with S&M, figurations of her provide a further window into the politics surrounding radical feminist critiques of patriarchy and the sensations that were connected to patriarchal domination.

      The hostility toward butches that Rich voices at the beginning of this chapter echoes the overriding sentiments of radical feminism of the 1970s and 1980s. Woman-centered lesbianism and feminism demonized the iconic lesbian butch/femme couples of the 1950s and 1960s as imitative of heterosexuality.²⁵ Though both the butch and the femme were criticized for internalizing patriarchy, the butch, the more visible of the pair, carried the additional burden of masculinity, which was even further proof of patriarchal compliance. In part, this disdain for masculinity can be attributed to historical causes. Sexological literature of the early twentieth century labeled lesbians inverts, which is to say their desire for women was characterized as masculine and they were described as possessing masculine physical traits and a masculine sexual appetite.²⁶ This masculinization of women’s desire for women in terms of both character and quality (aggressive instead of the prevailing paradigm of feminine passivity) pathologized both female desire and lesbianism. As radical feminists worked to reorient female sexuality and lesbianism on their own terms, they emphasized the femininity of female desire and read any conjunction of women and masculinity as a symptom of patriarchal oppression.

      While patriarchy and domination are characterized by a nonengaged distance, the butch provides a different analytic metric for understanding the traversing of difference, namely, she speaks to the political implications of penetration, which radical feminism coded as a sexual practice of domination.²⁷ In her most feared specter, as masculine and dominating, the butch wields the phallus or dildo. While submission had its own problematic dynamics, the notion of a woman who wanted to dominate, or worse, penetrate other women was particularly pernicious. Heather Findlay describes this convergence in her analysis of the dildo wars: “Some lesbians have debunked the dildo and its notorious cousin the strap-on, calling them ‘male-identified.’ . . . Distaste for dildos, especially ‘lifelike’ ones, is based on the conviction that a dildo represents a penis and is therefore incompatible with ‘woman-identified’ sexuality. . . . The critique of the dildo . . . has developed in tandem with radical feminist attacks on butch-femme and sadomasochism . . . [, which] hold that both practices reproduce a ‘heteropatriarchy’ based on masculine and feminine sex roles.”²⁸ In Findlay’s description of the tensions at work in these debates, we explicitly see the collapse between S&M, the butch, patriarchy, and the dildo. In addition to symbolizing the desire to penetrate, the dildo’s status as nonanatomical phallus represented a willful and gleeful adoption of dictates of masculinity.

      By suggesting penetration (even in fantastical form), a woman with a dildo threatened radical feminist modes of sexual intercourse. The dildo marked a departure from a feminist ideology that imagined female sexuality as outside of patriarchy and lesbian sex as explicitly nonpenetrative. Colleen Lamos neatly summarizes the heteronormative assumptions of this position as exemplified in the writings of Marilyn Frye: “As recently as 1990 Marilyn Frye announced, remarkably, that ‘“sex” is an inappropriate term for what lesbians do’: Lesbians don’t ‘have sex,’ because that is a ‘phallic concept’ implying coitus.”²⁹ Some of these analyses of lesbianism went so far as to displace individual female pleasure and desire with the generalizable desire for community among women—Lamos notes that according to Nett Hart “Lesbian desire is not directed at individuals but ‘is for the community formed by the self/mutual love of women.’”³⁰ Bringing these threads together, we can see that the dildo represents the possibility of individual sexual pleasure in penetration, which operates in tension with the feminist ethos of collectivity; Lamos argues that the dildo “rejects traditional feminist claims to a moral superiority based upon supposed female innocence, powerlessness, and purity from which has issued a politics of resentment and vengeance.”³¹ Penetration, like S&M, was marked both as antisocial and as an invasion of female space.

      In order to fully illustrate how distance operates as a sensational undercurrent for these feminist debates on S&M, butches, and penetration, I offer a brief glimpse at Lynda Hart’s and Judith Butler’s resignification of the dildo in the 1990s. Since they are writing from a frame that is not invested in keeping masculinity and femininity separate or reinforcing the link between femininity and feminism, they read the dildo as a form of subversive citationality that calls attention to the phallus’s lack rather than reading it as a symptom of patriarchal imitation.

      For radical feminists, the falseness of the phallus was due to its conflict with an essential notion of femaleness. It was problematic because it bridged the gap between masculinity and femininity. In her analysis of the feminist problem with the lesbian phallus, Butler writes that “the phallus signifies the persistence of the ‘straight mind,’ a masculine or heterosexist identification and, hence the defilement of betrayal of lesbian specificity; secondly, the phallus enters lesbian sexual discourse in the mode of a transgressive ‘confession’; . . . it’s not the real thing (the lesbian thing) or it’s not the real thing (the straight thing).”³² In other words, the phallus is read as a violation of lesbian modes of sexual intercourse because it is perceived as a desire for the masculine (against the idea that lesbianism should be about the protection of a female space) and because it is perceived as an admission that heterosexual vaginal intercourse is preferred to other modes of intercourse. In her rereading of the phallus, Butler turns to psychoanalysis to argue that the phallus need not be linked to masculinity and can actually be read as an open signifier rather than specifically tied to masculinity or male genitalia. Butler then reclaims the phallus for lesbian sexuality, extending its parameters beyond the dildo and articulating, in psychoanalytic terms, the work that the lesbian phallus does: “Consider that ‘having’ the phallus can be symbolized by an arm, a tongue, a hand (or two), a knee, a thigh, a pelvic bone, an array of purposefully instrumentalized body-like things. And that this ‘having’ exists in relation to a ‘being the phallus’ which is both part of its own signifying effect (the phallic lesbian is potentially castrating) and that which it encounters in the woman who is desired (as the one who, offering or withdrawing the specular guarantee, wields the power to castrate).”³³ A woman wielding the phallus is subversive; she threatens the notions of a subservient woman, and she threatens traditional masculinity by illuminating its redundancy (she, too, can castrate). As we can see, Butler’s rescripting of the dildo moves away from a logic of difference that situates masculinity and femininity as separate spheres. It is precisely the bridging of distance between masculine and feminine that allows for this subversion.

      Hart argues that the link between the dildo and lesbian S&M allows us to read lesbian S&M as social critique through its reliance on mimicry, specifically phallic mimicry. By illuminating the elements of performance at work in sexuality, lesbian S&M challenges notions of the real: “If we think of the erotic interplay of lesbian s/m as resignifications that are no doubt enabled by certain heterosexual or homosexual models but at the same time dissonant displacements of them, we might move toward a better understanding of their erotic dynamics and better grasp the political and ethical controversies they have raised.”³⁴ In crude psychoanalytic terms, Hart argues that masochism can be read as a delicate dance with power (the phallus): male masochism is a relinquishing of the phallus, and female masochism is an impossibility because the woman has nothing to give up.³⁵ Even as the purposeful denial of equating power with the phallus can be read as an act of self-annihilation, in many ways it serves to reinforce the connection between masculinity, power, and domination. But, as Hart points out, “To a certain extent, the controversy about whether s/m is ‘real’ or performed СКАЧАТЬ