Sensational Flesh. Amber Jamilla Musser

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СКАЧАТЬ Bodies and pleasures, Foucault argues, run counter to sex-desire. By this, he suggests thinking of pleasure as something separate from a psychoanalytic ethos of lack and the reproductive imperative that has governed sex. Pleasure, which can be “evaluated in terms of its intensity, its specific quality, its duration, its reverberations in the body and the soul,” offers a frame for thinking about embodiment that exceeds the disciplinary regimes that define modernity, therefore opening up different modes of theorizing resistance and power.¹⁶ Further, we can situate pleasure as one of the possible outcomes of the primary mode of resistance that Foucault articulates in the second and third volumes of History of Sexuality, namely, technologies of the self or asceticism. Foucault argues that asceticism lies at the base of self-formation, ethics, and freedom. For Foucault, freedom is more than resistance; it is creativity and a particular type of relationship to the self and the other that is based on exceeding and subverting the disciplinary boundaries of the body. Freedom, I argue, in this instance is about opening possibilities for thinking about corporeality.

      With this in mind, we can examine Foucault’s turn toward S&M, which he argues offers freedom because it is a practice in which subjects manipulate bodies and power relations in order to reconfigure their own relationships to pleasure. Foucault’s understanding of S&M is historically and geographically specific. In an interview, Bob Gallagher and Alexander Wilson press Foucault to discuss the impact of his work on gay liberation movements in North America. In gay history, 1982 was a year that contained the rosy residue of gay liberation’s political fervor, its ethos of sexual abandon, and the taint of anxiety related to Gay Related Immune Deficiency Disease (GRID), which would become known as AIDS after July 1982. The gay liberation movement, which was formed after the Stonewall Riots in 1969, succeeded in demedicalizing homosexuality by removing it from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1973; pushed for an agenda of skepticism toward psychiatry, government, and other institutions; and advocated promiscuity and the creation of a homosexual culture. In this moment before the event of AIDS, anxiety was building in American gay communities about the sudden illnesses and deaths of young men; it was not yet linked to sex or bodily fluids, but the perception of a “gay plague,” a punishment for homosexuality, was in the air. These undercurrents—the promise of gay liberation, the potential peril of homosexuality, and distrust of institutions like psychiatry, government, and the nation—lend the interview and Foucault’s comments on S&M a certain historicity. For example, while Foucault speaks of pleasure, experience, and sex as idyllic and without a mention of safety, the shadow of inadequate governmental response to the crisis looms—“Being homosexuals, we are in a struggle with the government.”¹⁷ Importantly, in a statement that will be echoed by later queer theorists, he is also invested in moving homosexuality away from an identity-based category toward a way of being. In response to a question regarding the needs of a gay movement, Foucault says:

      What I meant was that I think what the gay movement needs now is much more the art of life than a science or scientific knowledge (or pseudoscientific knowledge) of what sexuality is. Sexuality is a part of our behavior. It’s a part of our world freedom. Sexuality is something that we ourselves create—it is our own creation, and much more than the discovery of a secret side of our desires. We have to understand that with our desires, through our desires, go new forms of relationships, new forms of love, new forms of creation. Sex is not a fatality: it’s a possibility for creative life. . . . We have to create a gay life. To become.¹⁸

      In articulating a desire to move away from the regulation produced by sexual categories, Foucault invokes asceticism and pleasure. He seeks a move toward thinking creatively about what bodies can do and the relationships that they can form when they are unimpeded by normativity. While this interview can be read as a comment on the fear and panic surrounding GRID and the later emergence of AIDS, we can also read it as a death knell for identity politics. One does not have to be immobilized by the idea that there is one way to have sex and to be gay; rather, bodies offer multiple possibilities for creativity.

      In light of this, Foucault is asked about the “enormous proliferation in the last fifteen years of male homosexual practices: the sensualization, if you like, of neglected parts of the body and the articulation of new pleasures.”¹⁹ He responds by praising S&M as innovative because it allows for an alternate formation of subjectivity by offering new possibilities (separate from modernity’s sexual ethos of surveillance, discipline, and control) for being and relating to others. Foucault centers these possibilities on S&M’s innovative nongenital practices of pleasure:

      [S&M] is the real creation of new possibilities of pleasure, which people had no idea about previously. . . . We know very well what all those people are doing is not aggressive; they are inventing new possibilities of pleasure with strange parts of their body—through the eroticization of the body. I think it’s a kind of creation, a creative enterprise which has as one of its main features what I call the desexualization of pleasure. The idea that bodily pleasure should always come from sexual pleasure as the root of all our possible pleasure—I think that’s something quite wrong. These practices are insisting that we can produce pleasure with very odd things, very strange parts of our bodies, in very unusual situations, and so on.²⁰

      According to Foucault, the practice of S&M redraws the lines between pleasure and eroticism. Scientia sexualis, he argues, has privileged genitally based sexuality; S&M’s mobilization of a myriad of other body parts for pleasure turns eroticism into a nongenital, creative act. Foucault locates both resistance to a reproductive imperative and freedom in these continuous possibilities of creation and pleasure. In this schema, he posits pleasure and creativity against desire and violence. Desire, he argues, is mired in a psychoanalytic concept of lack and anticipation, while pleasure is marked by a temporality of the present. S&M reorganizes the body to emphasize pleasure rather than identity or discipline; it offers tangible corporeal freedom.

      Another important side of S&M emerges in this interview. Beyond thinking about it solely as a practice of the self, Foucault regards it as a type of collectivity, a subculture. As a subculture, S&M is part of dominant society, but it offers a space for difference and possibilities for resistance and freedom by illuminating forms of organization outside of the heterosexual norm. Here, we must remember that Foucault understands S&M as an emergent sexual subculture, which arose as an alternative to 1950s homophile societies as a place for gay men to assert and play with their masculinity.²¹ Thinking about S&M as a subculture allows Foucault to imagine alternative kinship structures. Rather than being bound by reproduction, these men are linked through the collective practice of S&M. This subculture offers a space for difference and possibilities for resistance and freedom.

      Foucault’s delight in the productive potential of S&M is palpable. At various points in the interview he describes S&M as “the use of a strategic relationship as a source of pleasure (physical pleasure),” “the real creation of new possibilities of pleasure,” and “the eroticization of power.”²² Underlying this sense of glee is a theory of S&M, a theory of its origins, practice, and ethics. Foucault’s S&M is a practice of eroticized manipulations of power involving bodies, pleasure, and pain between men or women. His interest in the eroticization of power signals, not only admiration for a sex practice that functions outside the reproductive imperative, but also a desire to think power in a new modality, to think about not just the power of eroticism but the eroticism of power.

      Throughout, Foucault posits S&M as outside: outside of history, outside of current sexual norms and practices, and outside of normative social hierarchies. Given Foucault’s insistence on novelty, the pertinent question becomes—what ruptures does he envision as having taken place? Classifying S&M as new marks this practice as different from earlier iterations of masochism; it allows us to read S&M as a practice that is suspended in the present, which offers insight into Foucault’s political and ethical sensibilities. By situating S&M as a sexual subculture within same-sex communities, Foucault attempts to align it with a logic that is separate from the reproductive ethos of modernity. In this utopian vision, СКАЧАТЬ