Sensational Flesh. Amber Jamilla Musser

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      Foucault allows us to ask—What does it mean to figure subversion as a bodily act when complicity is the general condition of subjectivity? In terms of Foucault’s specific attachment to S&M, we might also ask what possibilities this form of corporeal subversion might offer to those whose bodies might be read differently (because of differences in race, gender, able-bodiedness, etc.) in these dynamics of power exchange. While I think these are valid questions to ask of S&M, to some degree I wonder if they are triggered less by Foucault’s commitment to S&M, which he articulates in response to a query specifically about possibilities of freedom for gay men, and more by those who have read these statements as a blanket endorsement for S&M.

      Masochism, Queer Theory, and Self-Annihilation

      A few years after Foucault’s statements on S&M, pleasure, and subversion, AIDS reached the broader American consciousness. Though not formally acknowledged by President Ronald Reagan until 1987, the disease by then had a very public face. Because it first gained notice among gay men, AIDS was linked with homosexuality. This association refocused attention to the homosexual body as potentially pathological and disease ridden while simultaneously scripting homosexual desire, especially among men, as dangerous and symptomatic of a death wish. Rather than being treated as a public health crisis, AIDS was framed as a matter of morality. AIDS, then, reoriented the public’s imagination with regard to sexuality, bodies, and pleasures. In 1988, Steven Seidman described some of these shifts:

      AIDS has provided a pretext to reinsert homosexuality within a symbolic drama of pollution and purity. Conservatives have used AIDS to rehabilitate the notion of “the homosexual” as a polluted figure. AIDS is read as revealing the essence of a promiscuous homosexual desire and proof of its dangerous and subversive nature. The reverse side of this demonization of homosexuality is the purity of heterosexuality and the valorization of a monogamous, marital sexual ethic. . . . Liberal segments of the heterosexual media have, in the main, repudiated a politics aimed at the repression of homosexuality. Instead they have enlisted AIDS in their campaign to construct an image of the “respectable homosexual” and to legitimate a sexual ethic of monogamy and romance.²⁴

      I have quoted extensively from Seidman because his statements underscore the degree to which AIDS permitted the villainization of homosexuality in the name of public health. Seidman argues that this backlash was already under way in response to a national feeling of “social crisis and decline” spurred by “an economic recession, political legitimacy problems stemming from Watergate, military setbacks in Vietnam and Iran, and social disturbances arising from the various civil rights, protest, and liberation movements.”²⁵ Homosexuals, Seidman writes, were seen “as a public menace, as a threat to the family, and as imperiling the national security by promoting self-centered, hedonistic, and pacifist values.”²⁶ If, as Seidman argues, AIDS provided the pretext around which sentiments of hostility coalesced, it also provided the impetus to rearticulate an ideology that placed monogamy and marriage at the center of a national morality. Since monogamy was framed as a matter of public health (despite the scientifically problematic nature of that equation), not adhering to those norms was scripted as a matter of personal failure and societal threat. What should have been read as a failure on the part of governments was treated as a matter of individual responsibility. Though Seidman does not use the term, this shift toward the individual, the private, and the moral clearly adheres to the logic of neoliberalism. Likewise, the response of some gay men to produce an image of a “good” homosexual who is respectable because of his monogamy and therefore not a threat to the nation is one of the origin points of homonationalism.²⁷

      Against this focus on individual responsibility and private citizens, we have a different context for reading Foucault’s discussion of bodies and pleasures. This context gives Foucault’s argument that individuals can resist heteronormativity through pleasure a moral overtone of shame and disgust. According to this logic, individual pleasure is dangerous because it causes societal harm and personal destruction, and the AIDS crisis was produced not by the failures of various structures—such as health systems and governments—but by individual selfish pleasures. How, then, can we discuss individual pleasures and subversive technologies of the self when the individual rather than the structure is seen as the problem? This is the context where we truly see the emergence of masochism as exceptional and subversive because analytic attention rests on the individual as agent rather than as a component of a larger structure, as we saw with the disciplined subject or complicit psyche.

      Leo Bersani begins to take up the question of the individual in his 1987 article “Is the Rectum a Grave?” The seminal article puts forth the argument that homophobia is connected to a “sacrosanct value of selfhood” that is threatened by “the self-shattering and solipsistic jouissance” of sexuality.²⁸ Jouissance, here, is more than pleasure; it is, following Lacan, beyond pleasure and pain and beyond identity. Bersani argues that the anality of gay male sex “advertises the risk of the sexual itself as the risk of self-dismissal, of losing sight of the self, and in so doing it proposes and dangerously represents jouissance as a model of ascesis.”²⁹ Here and in The Freudian Body, Bersani presents sexual practice and pleasure as a way outside of subjectivity. In the Freudian Body, Bersani writes, “Sexuality would be that which is intolerable to the structured self,” because, as he goes on to assert, “sexuality—at least in the mode in which it is constituted—could be thought of as a tautology for masochism.”³⁰ It is from the vantage point of celebrating gay male sexuality as a mode of self-annihilation and exceptionalism that Bersani comes to his reading of Foucault on sadomasochism.

      In Homos, Bersani elaborates on his statement that male homosexual desire is intimately connected to self-annihilation. Bersani draws on Foucault’s comments on sadomasochism to further politicize gay male sex by arguing that S&M, “partly as a result of the demonstration [it] is said to provide of the power of the bottoms, or presumed slaves . . . [,] has helped to empower a position traditionally associated with female sexuality.”³¹ S&M allows Bersani to argue (against Foucault’s other statements on friendship and homosexuality) that sex is where the radicality of homosexuality lies. For Bersani, “S/M raises, however crudely, important questions about the relation between pleasure and the exercise of power, and invites (in spite of itself) a psychoanalytic study of the defeat, or at least the modulation, of power by the very pleasure inherent in its exercise.”³² Though he is drawing on Foucault, Bersani’s investment in sadomasochism hinges, not on its potential to create nongenital pleasure, but on its ability to connect pleasure, power, and self-annihilation. Further moving away from Foucault’s understanding of S&M, Bersani writes, “The most radical function of S/M . . . lies rather in the shocking revelation that, for the sake of . . . stimulation, human beings may be willing to give up control over their environment.”³³ Bersani’s interest in sadomasochism stems from its suggestion that the subject renounces his or her agency. The subject, understood, according to the tenets of liberalism, as rational and possessing agency, wants to relinquish his mastery. Since this is his hold on the world, it is equivalent to self-annihilation. Bersani also invites us to consider sadomasochism through the lens of psychoanalysis, which fuses desire and the death drive into self-annihilation. This is in contrast to Foucault’s understanding of S&M as a technology of the self. Bersani’s attachment to psychoanalysis, fraught as it may be, also preserves a focus on pleasure as the ultimate aim, which problematizes Foucault’s interest in S&M as a community formation even as it may lead to other considerations of alternate forms of relationality.

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