Sensational Flesh. Amber Jamilla Musser
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, pleasure is not genitally focused but located in every part of the body. This shift allows for a proliferation of pleasures and opens new possibilities for relations between bodies and people. In short, it creates a new ethics. In producing a narrative of emergence, however, Foucault truncates the history of S&M. He refuses to fold it into the institutional narratives of the history of sexuality and psychiatry.23 Both of these narratives heavily rely on society’s valorization of the concept of modernity, which encompasses the workings of biopower, surveillance, and individuality. Situating S&M against and outside of these regimes suggests hope for, or perhaps signals the birth of, a new episteme, an episteme that works on the level of the community and individual subjects.
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