Sensational Flesh. Amber Jamilla Musser

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СКАЧАТЬ in order to open the possibility of subversion and non-normativity to spaces that are not dictated by sexuality. In this way, he seeks to point to networks of affinity between, say, the illegal alien and the queer. He writes that as normativity spreads, “the sinthomosexual [the equation of queerness with the death drive] is not absorbed but displaced onto other cultural subjects and figures. . . . Surely one meaning of the queer ought to be a figure that reveals the corrosive vitality of the death drive that coincides with the establishment of a universal social order.”⁴⁸ In this reformulation, sexuality is not the only political frame at work; it does not amend race but allows its structure to exist with, sometimes intersecting, sometimes not, that of sexuality.

      In short, this history of reading for exceptionalism has disavowed difference in its quest to decenter the subject. This is the omission that Muñoz and Reddy allude to. When sexuality is placed at the core of exceptionalism, other markers of difference are either forgotten or marginalized. What, however, would it mean to see masochism not as a practice of exceptionalism or subversion but as an analytic space where difference is revealed? Here, I would like to take a moment to reemphasize the political potential of masochism’s plasticity. Rather than speaking exclusively to subversion, this mobility allows us to see the multiple ways that people experience power and how that shapes the terms of their embodiments. We see glimpses of those spaces throughout my readings of these theorists’ concepts of masochism, but I would like to argue for another type of reading practice, empathetic reading, which would center difference, flesh, and multiplicity.

      Though thinking about flesh means thinking about embodiment, it articulates a particular relationship to embodiment in that it is mediated through the social. Flesh connects bodies to the external world by emphasizing the various conditions that make bodies visible in particular ways; it is about power and difference. Historically, flesh is the province of marginalized subjects. Even before Simone de Beauvoir wrote that woman is “shut up in her flesh, her home,” to equate women and racialized others with flesh was to repeat a Cartesian dualism in which the body was inferior to the mind.⁴⁹ Hortense Spillers, for example, describes the transformation of black bodies into flesh as one of the artifacts of the transatlantic slave trade. Spillers writes, “Before the ‘body’ there is the ‘flesh,’ that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of iconography. . . . Even though the European hegemonies stole bodies . . . we regard this human and social irreparability as high crimes against the flesh, as the person of African females and African males registered the wounding.”⁵⁰ This dismembering of bodies into flesh is part of the equation of blackness with depersonalization and nonsubjectivity. Spillers argues that this traffic in bodies (and I am using this resonance with Gayle Rubin’s essay “The Traffic in Women” deliberately) marks the production of flesh as a tactic of domination. Flesh connotes objectification, woundedness, and a lack of agency. Yet dismissing it is also problematic. As Spillers notes, “The flesh is the concentration of ‘ethnicity’ that contemporary critical discourses neither acknowledge nor discourse away.”⁵¹ As such, flesh occupies a fraught position within studies of difference. It oscillates between being a symptom of abjection and objectification and a territory ripe for reclamation. Despite its resonance with objectification and the negation of subjectivity, flesh has become an important political space. To ignore flesh is to ignore how bodies have been made to speak of difference.

      The difficulty in taking on flesh, however, stems from the fear that objectification reifies identity and essentializes subjects in particular ways. We see this ambivalence at work in feminist rhetoric that posits the body as “that which has been belied, distorted, and imagined by a masculine representational logic” while simultaneously seeking to redeem a feminine version of the flesh.⁵² This cycle of abjection and resurrection does nothing to move us beyond the impasse of identity categories. The question, then, is how to think about flesh outside of identity while retaining its purchase on theorizing difference. In what follows, I propose moving to sensation as an analytic because it allows us to think about flesh, not as something static and essential, but as something that changes, something that is in motion. In this way differences become a matter of relationships rather than fixed essences unto themselves. The focus on sensation to articulate difference leads us back to masochism and toward empathetic reading.

      Through synthesizing various iterations of masochism, empathetic reading allows us to read the affective and sensational currents that run through texts. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s practice of intensive reading, empathetic reading foregrounds both the corporeality of reading and the “impersonal flows,” the affects and sensations that texts produce. This set of practices brings attention to the ways that sensation shapes representation and allows me to weave together different tapestries of masochism from different voices grouped by sensational affinity, that is to say grouped by the sensations that they arouse in the reader rather than by historical, disciplinary, or identitarian relationships. Following Claire Colebrook, this is a methodology that asks, “What are the forces of potentiality hidden in our experienced encounters?”⁵³

      Empathetic Reading and Embodied Knowledge

      Empathetic reading is a reading practice, a critical hermeneutic, and the methodology that I use throughout the book. As a reading practice, empathetic reading highlights corporeality and the flesh. Some of this work is done by unpacking the historical structures in which each actor is embedded, but more generally it calls attention to the nonidentitarian circuits of embodied knowledge production. In this way I am taking up Elizabeth Freeman’s call to “theorize S/M, to historicize its theoreticians, and, most urgently, to theorize its historicisms.”⁵⁴ By taking the writer into account, I seek to make the flesh more visible within the process of knowledge production. In this regard, history of science and feminist theory has been useful. History of science has provided many ways to understand knowledge production as corporeal, oftentimes enlarging our concept of what counts as knowledge and who is a knowledge producer.⁵⁵ History of science’s particular emphasis on the materiality of practice has allowed me to focus on the sensations that are woven into knowledge transmission, giving weight, for example, to the smell of a whip and the texture of a corset. Feminist and queer scholarship also has a rich tradition of thinking critically about knowledge production and access to knowledge. This work emphasizes the importance of thinking through class, race, gender presentation, and sexuality (among other variables) as coproductive of identities. Feminist and queer theory allows us to think about the fact that different bodies have different types of relationships to power and experience its effects differently. This, then, highlights the importance of understanding experience as complex and multiple. By bringing these related but divergent methodologies together, I hope to emphasize the place of contingency and embodiment at the heart of knowledge production. Affect, sensation, experience, and multiplicity are the key terms that I seek to emphasize in thinking about reading.

      Further, as a reading practice, empathetic reading illuminates how subjectivity and power act in concert with embodied experience. These insights allow us to see masochism as a relational, contingent term that describes a plethora of relationships. What comes to the fore through this practice of reading is a series of unexpected sensational affinities. Theorists and practitioners speak to each other in multiple and unexpected ways. Empathetic reading also functions as a critical hermeneutic and methodology in that it highlights how we can discern the structure of sensation in various texts/performances and it works to give those sensations meaning, which in turn allows us to read difference in a sensational mode.

      As a marker of difference, sensation reveals something of the underlying structure that binds assemblages together. Gilles Deleuze provides an example of the relationship between assemblages and sensation. In Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, he describes Bacon’s 1978 painting Figure at a Washbasin, which portrays a figure clinging to the sides of a washbasin with his head down. The figure looks as though he is about to jump into the basin, but the rest of canvas—which looks to be the interior of a bathroom—is remarkably static. In his description of the painting, Deleuze writes that “the body-figure exerts an intense motionless СКАЧАТЬ