Sensational Flesh. Amber Jamilla Musser
investment in heterosexuality, masochism, violence, and pornography.
As we see with Rich’s alignment of S&M with violence, humiliation, physical abuse, and heterosexuality, feminists argued that S&M was a pernicious extension of patriarchy because it coerced women into participating in this masculine sphere of unequal power distribution through a cooptation of eroticism. In her introduction to Against Sadomasochism, a 1982 radical feminist analysis of S&M, Robin Ruth Linden writes:
Throughout Against Sadomasochism it is argued that lesbian sadomasochism is firmly rooted in patriarchal sexual ideology, with its emphasis on the fragmentation of desire from the rest of our lives and the single-minded pursuit of gratification, sexual and otherwise. There can be no doubt that none of us is exempt from the sphere of influence of patriarchal conceptions of sexuality and intimacy. For this reason, I believe that the recent interest by some women in sadomasochism is testimony to the profoundly alienated and objectified conceptions of erotic desire that our culture has produced and from which lesbians and feminists are by no means exempt.10
Linden frames interest in S&M as a form of alienated compliance with patriarchy that manifests itself as an individual drive toward pleasure at the expense of feminist political progress. In this reading, S&M focuses on the individual instead of the collective and threatens to separate women from their sources of feminine power, thereby isolating them from the collective projects of feminism and female empowerment. S&M, then, is experienced as a practice that produces distance between women and feminism and a practice that threatens to contaminate feminism by breaching the distance between it and patriarchy.
Voyeurism, Alienation, and Other Practices of Distancing
These logics of distance are manifest at the level of sensation. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the kinship between arguments against S&M and those against pornography, one of the prevailing descriptions of patriarchy is that it is (among other things) a form of scopic violence, but there is more to the sensation of looking than the ocular. Like arguments against S&M, feminist arguments against pornography stress the costs of patriarchal domination for society at large and women in particular. Radical feminists argued that the pornography industry exploited women and that pornography itself eroticized domination and perpetuated violence against women vis-à-vis the internalization of patriarchy. In short, pornography, like S&M, was thought to be a practice that, at its best, misrepresented women and female pleasure and, at its worst, objectified and dehumanized them. In pornography, much of this objectification happened on the level of the visual; pornography was domination via the power of looking. As an example of this connection let us turn briefly to Andrea Dworkin’s and Catharine MacKinnon’s work against pornography. In their proposed antipornography ordinance, Dworkin and MacKinnon are explicit about this equation of looking with domination, going so far as to define pornography as “the graphic sexually explicit subordination of women through pictures and/or words.”11 Though the US Supreme Court ultimately vetoed this ordinance, its formulation is instructive because it encapsulates the equation of visual objectification with patriarchal violence.
While arguments against S&M were not as oriented toward representation and visuality as arguments against pornography, I argue that unpacking the sensations that characterized domination results in a similar connection between looking and S&M. Some women explicitly voiced the link between practices of S&M and feeling visually dominated. Marissa Jonel, who contributes an essay to Against Sadomasochism, writes about the surveillance that her former lover performed as a continuation of her submission after the end of their S&M relationship. Though Jonel is careful to draw a distinction between her abusive relationship and S&M, she is resolutely against S&M, arguing that “sm almost ruined my life.”12 Most tellingly, Jonel describes her abuse as linked, not with pain, but with surveillance. She writes, “I was a virtual prisoner in my home” and describes this incarceration as a combination of isolation and constant monitoring: “Although we didn’t live together any more, my role continued as a masochist. I saw no other women and was kept under careful watch by telephone and visits from my lover.”13 Here, Jonel equates S&M with abuse and being watched with being dominated.
In many ways, Jonel voices the explicit connection between domination and voyeurism that has already been described at length by philosophers like Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, and Jean Paul Sartre. In The Birth of the Clinic Foucault discusses the objectifying and dehumanizing medical gaze, which separates doctor from patient, and in Discipline and Punish he describes the panopticon as a model for the internalization of the gaze.14 Through Foucault we gain insight into the ways that subjects are formed through power; more precisely, we have been given tools to understand how power and vision collude to work on bodies. While these examples from Foucault illustrate the workings of power on a macro level, it is clear that power and the gaze also operate on the scale of the individual. We see this tangibly in Althusser’s famous description of being hailed by the police in “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatus,” but we can also turn to phenomenology, which has its own way of illuminating the work of visuality in constructing the subject. While Sartre argues in Being and Nothingness that looking objectifies the other, he also argues that the process of looking is what helps to constitute one’s subjectivity. Sartre is ultimately most interested in exploring what it means to oscillate between seeing and being seen, being-for-others and being-for-itself, but his theorization of looking as central to producing subjectivity is important because it links the gaze with autonomy and individuality. The gaze establishes the difference between the self and other by figuring their relationship in terms of distance. Taken together, Foucault and Sartre show us that vision is a complex sense that cannot be restricted to the ocular; looking is an act that produces objects, consolidates subjectivity, and enacts domination. Thinking about the way power and vision commingle through distance is central, I argue, to understanding the sensation of domination.15
In this regard, discussions of S&M also move beyond the strictly visual toward articulating an affective link between power and distance. In order to show the collision between distance and domination, I turn to an essay by Elizabeth Harris that is also in Against Sadomasochism. Harris’s essay links sadomasochism with estrangement and alienation. After an S&M scene ends in her tears, she writes, “I had not felt such anguish in a long time and wanted to cry or scream it out. . . . When I finally stopped crying I felt estranged from my partner and our relationship and sadomasochism.”16 This estrangement, which she experiences as anguish, resonates with the distance radical feminists imagine is created within women when they participate in S&M. If S&M is a practice of patriarchy, it is a betrayal of, or distancing from, one’s essential femininity. Here, I am reading alienation and estrangement as psychic modes that coalesce around the sensation of distance. Though alienation and estrangement are feelings that arise from a disruption in consciousness, articulating the ways that they conjure up the physical sensation of distance speaks to the interconnectedness of affect and structures of sensation.
Loosely following Foucault, Sartre, and Althusser, I argue that we consider this discussion of distance, both psychic and literal, as another permutation of voyeurism. What does it mean to theorize voyeurism as a form of distance? Film theory, which has been invested in unpacking spectatorship, among other things, is useful in this regard. In “The Imaginary Signifier,” Christian Metz brings together psychoanalysis and semiology to bear on film. He argues that film produces an all-perceiving subject; the spectator sees everything except for the “one thing only that is never reflected in it: the spectator’s own body. In a certain emplacement, the mirror suddenly becomes clear glass.”17 Metz’s description of the position of the spectator is explicit about the power that the spectator feels through looking. He labels the spectator “all-perceiving” and “all-powerful” because his or her absence from the screen allows for this fantasy of domination over that which he or she sees.18 In short, the cinematic spectator is a voyeur—something that Metz characterizes not by domination but by distance. He writes that “the voyeur is very careful to maintain a gulf, an empty space, between the object and the eye, the object and his own body: his look fastens the object at the right distance, as with those cinema spectators who take care to avoid being too close or too far from the screen.”19 In fact, Metz