Sensational Flesh. Amber Jamilla Musser

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СКАЧАТЬ our seemingly more private fantasies.”³⁶ While the link that Hart makes between the subversive nature of the lesbian phallus and the social critique articulated by lesbian S&M appears to parallel connections that radical feminists made between the patriarchy, the politics of penetration, and S&M, Hart is not invested in reifying separation. Her analysis, like Butler’s, emphasizes the impossible line between fantasy and reality as it is embodied in the phallus and S&M. The question of maintaining separate masculine and feminine spheres and the underlying importance of sensing distance either as isolation or as contamination are not at issue.

      Radical feminists’ collapsing of gender roles, sexual practices, and power dynamics produced a structure where domination, masculinity, and patriarchy were aligned with distance, voyeurism, and antisociality. While S&M and penetration offer glimpses of what happens on an individual level when patriarchy sullies the sphere of feminism and femininity, S&M also provides a template for understanding domination on a macro level using the same logic of sensation. In making their arguments about these connections, radical feminists linked both contemporary and historical patterns of global domination such as slavery, colonialism, and the Holocaust to S&M because these, too, were manifestations of a patriarchal relationship to power and distance. This scalar analogy had wide-reaching effects for radical feminism—it increased the stakes for taking S&M seriously as a danger to society and opened the conversation to race in an explicit fashion.

      By connecting colonialism and fascism to S&M, radical feminists made a case that S&M was especially dangerous because, in contrast to submission on the part of the colonized or otherwise dominated, it required choice. Robin Ruth Linden writes: “For women and other oppressed peoples, the historical and pragmatic significance of oppression is that it is always a received rather than chosen condition. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine even having the option to embrace the conditions of oppression.”³⁷ Sarah Lucia Hoagland elaborates on the dangers of linking liberation with willful submission:

      Aside from entrapment in patriarchal logic, the idea that trusting means submitting suggests we have not yet taken ourselves seriously enough. I do not find Blacks as a political group claiming that engaging in masochism (or sadism) is consistent with Black liberation. Nor do I find Jews as a group claiming the political right or necessity of engaging in masochism (or sadism) in the name of Jewish liberation. I do not mean by this that no blacks or Jews engage in sadomasochism. My point is that I see no one attempting to argue from within those political communities that submitting to (or dominating) another in the community is consistent with liberation.³⁸

      By asking how liberation could look like submission, Hoagland highlights the difficulty that feminists encountered theorizing consent within patriarchy. Robin Morgan historicizes S&M by analogizing its harm to women with slavery and the Holocaust: “Here we can encounter the virulently anti-feminist thought of such Freudians as Marie Robinson, whose book The Power of Sexual Surrender is to women what a tome called Why you Know you Love it on the Plantation would be to Blacks or one titled How to be Happy in Line to the Showers would be to Jews.”³⁹ Her argument that S&M represented a form of subjugation similar to slavery or genocide implied that individual acts of S&M constituted a continuation of these painful legacies.

      In these narratives, we can see that enlarging the scope of anti-S&M feminism from protecting femininity from contamination to protecting Others (the enslaved, the colonized, etc.) from the pernicious machinations of masculine power worked to feminize these groups and racialize the practice of S&M (both submission and domination) as white. In a moment of harmony between black feminism and antipornography feminism, sadomasochistic acts were read as racist and imperialist.⁴⁰ In her short story “A Letter of the Times or Should This Sado-Masochism Be Saved?” Alice Walker gives voice to a professor who experiences a sense of betrayal at viewing a documentary on S&M that features a black woman who calls herself a slave. In describing the documentary, Walker writes, “The only interracial couple in it, lesbians, presented themselves as mistress and slave. The white woman, who did all the talking, was mistress (wearing a ring in the shape of a key that she said fit the lock on the chain around the black woman’s neck), and the black woman, who stood smiling and silent, was—the white woman said—her slave.”⁴¹ This contemporary and willful reclamation of an identity (or nonidentity) that embodied generations of harm offends the professor in Walker’s story (and presumably Walker herself). Walker describes the hurt and pain that this representation of history inflicts, not only on her character, but on those whom she is trying to teach: “All I had been teaching was subverted by that one image, and I was incensed to think of the hard struggle of my students to rid themselves of stereotype, to combat prejudice, to put themselves into enslaved women’s skins, and then to see their struggle mocked, and the actual enslaved condition of literally millions of our mothers trivialized—because two ignorant women insisted on their right to act out publicly a ‘fantasy’ that still strikes terror in black women’s hearts.”⁴² Walker’s disgust with S&M has to do both with the perceived continuum between the institution of slavery and sadomasochism and with the residual trauma of slavery. She cannot separate the idea of the slave from its history of racism, especially when embodied by a black woman who submits to a white woman. Indeed, the black woman, further the black lesbian, was frequently figured as the position of absolute powerlessness within the framework of 1980s feminism.⁴³ This reading of black femininity as a site of perpetual duress and domination precluded the possibility of reading submission as anything but violent and painful. As Walker makes clear, S&M toggles between domination between individuals and domination on a macro scale.

      Sullied States: Colonialism, Racism, and Masochism

      The racialization of domination is one area where feminist arguments against S&M and patriarchy unexpectedly converge with Frantz Fanon’s exploration of the psychoanalytic dimensions of colonialism. While feminist arguments against S&M indict the racism of the practice, Fanon provides another perspective on the matter. In his explicit analysis of masochism as a product of colonialism, we are able to read around the radical feminist ethos of protectionism in order to explore the sensations that coalesce around distance in Fanon’s description of the experience of the colonized. Though this is a subtle inversion of the radical feminist framework, which situates S&M as the overarching structure of domination, it allows Fanon to argue that colonialism and racism (rather than masochism) are pathological. Through Fanon, we see colonialism as a performance of white submission, where the victim (the black man) is also produced as the feared specter of domination. The politics and sensations of distance are still very much at work in this narrative, but here these tactics are being mobilized against the perspective that we are privy to, that of the black man.

      When the world is subject to Fanon’s gaze in Black Skin, White Masks, we are given the tools to experience what being a black man under colonialism feels like. Fanon describes many feelings and sensations of desubjectification, but most important to my narrative here is the painful separation that he describes between the colonizer and the colonized. Quite simply, “The black man is not a man.”⁴⁴ Central to this production of distance is “unconscious masochism.”⁴⁵

      In a particularly evocative passage, Fanon describes the link between masochism and colonialism through an analysis of Uncle Remus stories. These stories focus on the heroic antics of Br’er Rabbit, who outwits his animal predators, Br’er Fox and Br’er Bear. White Americans, he argues, identified with Br’er Rabbit but then realized that they were problematically valorizing blackness and its aggression, since Br’er Rabbit was widely considered a stand-in for a slave. This allowed them to imagine that the Negro’s aggression was turned toward them, which gave them a reason to feel guilty for their domination. Central to this masochistic imaginary was the specter of the aggressive black man: “The Negro makes stories in which it becomes possible for him to work off his aggression; the white man’s unconscious justifies this aggression and gives it worth by turning it on himself, thus reproducing the classic schema of masochism.”⁴⁶ Like the domineering woman in Psychopathia Sexualis, this trope СКАЧАТЬ