Sensational Flesh. Amber Jamilla Musser

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СКАЧАТЬ writes that “in woman, an inclination to subordination to man is to a certain extent a normal manifestation.”⁷ This gendering made female masochism natural and hid female masochists.

      Female masochists became legible to Krafft-Ebing only through a masculinization of their desires. One way of accomplishing this was by articulating a cross-gender desire. For example, case 70 in the eighth edition of Psychopathia Sexualis expressed her wish to be a male slave rather than a female one because “every woman can be the slave of her husband.”⁸ She further described herself as “otherwise proud and quite indomitable, whence it arises that I think as a man (who is by nature proud and superior).”⁹ Her fantasies of transgressing the boundaries of femininity marked her desire to be whipped as masculine, which rendered her legible as a masochist. This woman’s agency, expressed most markedly in her wish for its absence, was a mark of masculinity. It was the female masochist’s overt sexuality, however, that was her most masculine attribute. Physicians and social theorists considered displays of autonomous female sexuality threatening for a variety of reasons. They hinted at independence from men and the potential participation in a sexual underworld of lesbianism, masturbation, and miscegenation.¹⁰

      While Krafft-Ebing viewed this willful stance of exceptionalism as a sign of pathology and perversion, it is easy to see how this practice could be rescripted as subversive in that it flew against prevailing societal norms. Indeed, this is the type of reading practice that I argue takes place first with Freud, then with Foucault, and then with Bersani and Edelman. One of the things that I want to emphasize, however, is how focusing on this element of masochism erases the other sensations that are at work. In his original description of masochism, the author of case 9 links his practices and fantasies of subjection with Venus in Furs’ lush tableaux of domination, providing submission with texture. By doing this, he marks masochism as a fantasy, a practice, an aesthetic category, and a physical sensation. Throughout this book, I seek to reinvigorate these other ways of reading masochism, particularly because reading it as exceptional reifies norms of whiteness and masculinity and suppresses other modes of reading power, agency, and experience.

      In Freud’s theoretical renegotiation of sexuality, there is no place for Krafft-Ebing’s masochist. Freud’s theory of sexuality, which is grounded in infantile pleasure, changes the landscape of what can be considered a perversion and why. Using pleasure as a metric and infancy as a mechanism, Freud reclassifies perversions as neuroses and cites infantile experiences, rather than degeneration, as their cause. Though this shift away from degeneration and hereditarian notions of perversion could serve to quell rampant anti-Semitism by portraying Jews (and indeed other ethnicities) as not pathological, the most radical shift in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality is the move away from the paradigm of perversion toward that of neurosis. For Freud, all perversions can be attributed to arrested infantile development; instead of being the norm, heterosexuality is the culmination of a difficult developmental process. Thinking about perversions as developmental rather than hereditary, coupled with understanding that heterosexuality is an accomplishment rather than a given, radically alters the schema of studies on sexuality. Instead of merely focusing on perversions, they give attention to the mechanism behind “normalcy.” What is “dominant” is placed under the microscope, and what could be considered perverse is no longer part of a binary but one end of a spectrum; space “outside” of pathology ceases to exist. This renders attempts at marking the exceptional difficult. Furthermore, after dismissing hereditarian arguments for pathology, Freud argues that this spectrum of sexual “normalcy” is socially relative. What some societies have judged to be abnormal is prized in other societies; more importantly, some societal rules have repressed normal sexual impulses, relegating them to the unconscious and causing neurosis. In a reading that again serves to highlight the specter of complicity, Freud argues that society produces what it pathologizes.

      In Three Essays, Freud transforms sexuality from a contained system that operates according to the binary of pervert/citizen into the ground for society and civilization. In displacing the pervert, the neurotic becomes simultaneously universal (everyone is vulnerable to repressed desires) and hidden. Despite the visibility of some symptoms, its true root remains in the unconscious. Importantly, this reorganization of pathology as invisible lays the groundwork for mapping both exceptionalism and complicity onto a number of practices; the difference between the two comes down to a matter of framing.

      Freud’s theoretical and methodological shift also works to reorient masochism. Rather than diagnose someone as a masochist, Freud looks for the presence or absence of masochistic desires. This difference exemplifies his modification of the concept; it is at once spatial (from external to internal), temporal (from present to past), and formal (social to instinctual). While Krafft-Ebing characterized the masochist as a performer attempting to invert social hierarchies in order to gain momentary pleasure from losing power, Freud argues that masochism is a product of polymorphous perversion and mixed-up instincts. In describing its etiology, he writes: “Ever since Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, it has been well known to all educationalists that the painful stimulation of the skin of the buttocks is one of the erotogenic roots of the passive instinct of cruelty (masochism).”¹¹ This statement, which focuses on the experience of being beaten, differs markedly from Krafft-Ebing’s analysis of Rousseau’s condition, which dwells on Rousseau’s desire, as a child, to be punished by his domineering schoolmistress.¹² The schoolmistress is absent in his story; the most important element is the stimulation of the buttocks. Krafft-Ebing would term this flagellation, but Freud sees this as emblematic of a deeper merging of pain and pleasure. It is not mere “nerve irritation” but symptomatic of an unconscious association of physical pain with pleasure, a type of internal confusion that leads some adults to seek punishment in order to achieve physical excitation.

      Freud’s use of the infant’s confusion of pleasure and pain as an explanation for sadism and masochism foregrounds the work of the unconscious. Since Freud conceives of pain in opposition to pleasure, masochism is particularly aberrant in his libidinally infused schema: Why would one seek pain? Freud’s only response is to imagine that the instincts are confused so that what is painful actually registers as pleasure. Eventually this problematization of pleasure grows into three distinct types of masochism: erotogenic, feminine, and moral. Freud defines erotogenic masochism as receiving pleasure from physical pain and feminine masochism as a practice that relies on the fantasy of submission in which male actors gain pleasure due to the adoption of the feminine role and the performance of submission.¹³ Moral masochism is an entirely new entity; it is an unconscious desire for punishment that manifests itself clinically as almost paralyzing feelings of guilt.

      Freud’s reworking of masochism transforms it into a way to describe what is essential about life, namely, negativity in the form of guilt, shame, and a desire for death. Freud’s characterization of life as unstable, chaotic, and yet driven toward stillness, a struggle that is overtly manifest in masochism, is at odds with Krafft-Ebing’s vision of a world that preserves autonomy and social hierarchies (keeping women and non-Germanic ethnicities at the bottom). Freud disrupts the concept of autonomy first by positing the unconscious and then by positing an unconscious drive toward death and pain. This replacement of order with chaos allows masochism to be read on myriad levels. It plays both to narratives of exceptionalism and to those of complicity and normalization. By this I mean that it is at once a marginal perversion and a necessary universality; it plays on axes of ethnicity and gender, but it is also beyond these categories; and it challenges autonomy as much as it negates its very possibility.

      Though Foucault’s use of S&M to articulate both individual freedom and communal resistance has been empowering for queer theorists, his insistence on difference from previous formulations of masochism occludes the similarity between his theorization of S&M and Freud’s.¹⁴ For both, masochism acts as a space of social critique; in Freud this manifests as guilt and shame, while Foucault imagines the production of new pleasures.

      In The Will to Knowledge, Foucault famously argues that one might be able to “counter the grips of power with the claims of bodies, pleasures, СКАЧАТЬ