Little Red Goes to School

Useful dangers, peculiar pleasures

This is the tentative title of my dissertation project, and this is the 979-word version of the prospectus. Subtitle: “Theorizing Sadomasochism in Literary, Narrative, and Queer Studies.” I really would prefer doing without a colon, alas . . .

As always, any suggestions or critiques are appreciated.

***

Sadomasochism is the propulsory term of my project, the primary purpose of which is to complicate the way sadomasochism, as theme and form, functions among and between the disciplines of literary, narrative, and queer studies. My project will trace, and sometimes invent, a genealogy between the sadomasochistic themes and practices burgeoning in nineteenth century British literature and culture, through to the sadomasochism practiced in subcultures in the contemporary United States. This project will grapple with three moments in particular: one, the emergence and importance of sadomasochism as both theme and form for nineteenth century British culture; two, the obsession with sadomasochism by contemporary queer theorists working in the nineteenth century; and three, the continual use of the themes and forms of sadomasochism, often indirectly, by narrative theory. Using nineteenth century British literature and culture as a place to begin, but not necessarily a place to remain, I envision this project as creating a queer narrative theory of the erotic from the forms and themes of sadomasochism.

This will not be a chronological project, but rather a movement between and among disciplines, histories, theories, and texts. Through these circumlocutions, cruisings, and general déjà-vu, I hope to build bridges between these epistemologies in order complicate our understanding of sadomasochism, while using this re-vision of sadomasochism to sustain the connections between the literary, the queer, the narrative. To put it simply, the peculiar archive of sadomasochism steals from each of these critical modes—literary, narrative, and queer—while simultaneously creating each of these critical modes. This archive of sadomasochism can help to shed light on shared values, which can in turn help to illuminate a number of texts not typically thought of as “queer.” In other words, critical and literary texts that rely on the themes and/or forms of sadomasochism are marked by queerness at both thematic and formal levels. Perhaps most important, to build an archive of sadomasochism will help to understand a different relationship to literary history, one that functions through affect, anachronism, and analogy.

The introduction to this project will survey and complicate the way that sadomasochism has been conceptualized, by reading theorists such as Michel Foucault, Linda Hart, Gilles Deleuze, Gayle Rubin, and Sigmund Freud. Out of all of the chapters, this is anticipated to be the most chronological, beginning with a consideration of how and under what terms sadomasochism entered the nineteenth century epistemological moment, spending the most time with Freud’s complicated and paradoxical history with the term. While, initially, in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud places sadism and masochism fully within the realm of the perversions, his inquiries into “the origins of the instincts” lead him “to assign,” in a footnote, “a peculiar position . . . to the pair of opposites constituted by sadism and masochism, and to place them outside of the class of the remaining ‘perversions’” (24 fn.3, emphases mine). Even early in the conceptual history of sadomasochism, its peculiar and dialectical position is drawn as a movement between the perverse and the normal; and for Freud, “the pair of opposites” comes to serve as the very structure of erotic relationships. While the other leading theorists of sadomasochism immediately complicate its psychoanalytic beginnings, the paradox identified by Freud remains one of the enduring formal characteristics of sadomasochism, as it emerges in literary and critical texts, and as it functions in cultural practices.

The fact that formal elements of sadomasochistic cultural practices can also be read in literary and critical texts leads to the focus of the second chapter of my project, which will begin to explore this relationship between text and practice by taking a close look at the nineteenth century relationship between Hannah Cullwick and Arthur Munby. Most critics tend to resist thinking of their clearly fetishistic, power-play relationship in terms of sadomasochism. Images and writings from their relationship will be analyzed alongside contemporary popular discourse on BDSM (bondage & discipline, dominance & submission, sadism & masochism) practice in order to begin to articulate the particular erotics of sadomasochism, beyond the simple definition of “pleasure from pain.” The formal elements of BDSM erotics include suspense, plotting, paradox, and self-referentiality. This chapter will also begin to gesture toward an understanding of the queerness of sadomasochistic erotics.

The next three chapters of my project will each combine literary, narrative, and queer epistemologies in a reading of one or two nineteenth century authors in light of sadomasochistic themes and forms. Narrative theories of plots and plotting—particularly in terms of suspense, delay, and prolongation—will be explored alongside Charles Dickens’ Bleak House and Algernon Charles Swinburne’s poems (particularly “Anactoria”), and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s infamous essay “A Poem is Being Written” and Peter Brooks’ Reading for the Plot. The themes and forms of paradox will be explored in relation to Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis and Swinburne’s use of Hellenic meter, with a return to Sedgwick’s “A Poem is Being Written” and an encounter with Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text. Finally, first-person narration as an intensely self-referential sadomasochistic voice will be read through Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Villette, and D.A. Miller’s Bringing Out Barthes.

My project will conclude with an exploration of the type of subjectivity created through these formal elements, in order to begin to theorize the sadomasochistic subject in contemporary culture. Contemporary sadomasochistic practice has been critiqued for its elitism, for its dependence on fantasy and subsequent distance from real-world conditions, for its patriarchal reiterations, and for its overwhelming whiteness. A project that attempts to bring together formal and thematic elements of contemporary sadomasochistic practices into re-visions of canonical nineteenth century texts would not seem particularly immune to these criticisms. While dealing directly with these criticisms, I also wish to explore the potential of sadomasochistic erotics to help understand the relationship between the literary and cultural practice, between queer and narrative theory, and between the pains of writing and the pleasures of reading.

April 29, 2008 Posted by marycontrary | Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Take 2.

Still fleshing out the prospectus . . . still quite rough . . . truly a living document.

***

Sadomasochism is the propulsory term of my project, the primary purpose of which is to complicate the way sadomasochism, as theme and form, functions among and between the disciplines of literary, cultural, and queer studies. My project will trace, and sometimes invent, a genealogy between the sadomasochistic themes and practices burgeoning in nineteenth century British literature and culture, through to the sadomasochism practiced in subcultures in the contemporary United States. This will not be a chronological tracing, but rather a movement between and among disciplines, histories, cultures, and texts—circular, turning in upon itself. In its circumlocutions and cruisings and general déjà-vu, this project will grapple with three moments: one, the emergence, and importance, of sadomasochism as both theme and form for nineteenth century British culture [should I expand to European culture, if I am to consider Freud, Sacher-Masoch, etc.?); two, the obsession with sadomasochism by queer theorists of the nineteenth century; and three, narrative theory that makes use, typically subconsciously, of the forms and themes of sadomasochism. Each of these epistemological moments relate to sadomasochism in ways both direct and indirect, yet my intention is to bring the concept to the surface in order to explore the erotic movement of sadomasochism beyond perversion, beyond power, beyond sexual practice and Freudian idiom. Rather idealistically, perhaps, I envision this project creating a queer feminist narrative theory of the erotic from the forms and themes of sadomasochism, using nineteenth century British literature and culture as a place to begin, but not necessarily a place to remain.

Sadomasochism is a freighted and emotional term, one that is invoked contemporarily with two dominant meanings: one, in reference its Freudian and sexological history, it refers to the deliberate conjunction of pain and pleasure that is recognized as one of the most common “perversions”; and two, with feminist disapprobation, it refers to the very structure of power and function of patriarchy. A third, less common use of sadomasochism comes through to us from a certain queer aesthetics that, in both literary and cultural theory, tends to idealize the affects and communities generated within texts and within consensual sadomasochistic communities (and to certainly separate the practice from the theory and from the artistic work). I will attempt in this project to combine these definitions, across histories and disciplines, in order to understand how sadomasochism functions in more complicated, rich, and, ultimately, valuable ways. I wish to move beyond pure pathologization or demonization or reification.

One of the most important aspects of my exploration of sadomasochism is to consider how it functions as an erotics of both theme and form. [MAYBE THE WAYS MY IDEAS RELATE HERE should be structured differently: that typically sadomasochism is theorized in terms of theme. But the intervention I wish to make is to consider sadomasochism as both an erotics of form and a formal erotics. Oooooo. To do this, you’ll have to shift the “theme and form” stuff that already infuses most of what you’ve written here. But here’s the thing: I am also interested in shifting the way we thematize s/m erotics. So perhaps the intervention I am making is this: to complicate the way we thematize s/m and to add depth by considering the erotics of form and the formal erotics. This would allow me to keep some of my previous writing, and it would allow me to discuss the interdependence between theme and form. And don’t literary theorists love that??? Hmmmmm.] My discussion of both the themes and forms of sadomasochism will vary depending on the texts, theories, and practices in question. In general terms, however, I use “theme” to refer to DEFINE . . . My use of “form” will draw primarily upon certain textual and, I will argue, cultural elements such as paradox and plot. By exploring the sadomasochistic formal erotics and the sadomasochistic erotics of form, I wish to build connections between texts typically separated on the basis of quality, historical period, and discipline [this makes my project sound more interdisciplinary than perhaps it is]; to build connections between the erotics and the plots of certain theories, disciplines, and cultural moments; and to expand the definitions of sadomasochism and its potential meanings, as well as our understanding of what gets privileged as “erotic.”

While “erotic” and “erotics” will be considered primarily in terms of aesthetics and Foucault [yes, I need to elaborate on these two angles, but this will take some more reading on my part], these terms refer more to the movement of my project, the particular texture and tone of my exploration of sadomasochism. As such, my use of “erotic” and “erotics” will remain ephemeral and dynamic, terms that my project will seek to perform, embody, and live, rather than clearly define and stabilize.

THIS IS GOING TO BE THE WHY-IS-THIS-IMPORTANT SECTION, aka, MY-INTERVENTION-IS section . . .[it’s in some pretty desperate need of sources, but I’m forcing myself to tease out the different “moments” and the connections I (think) I want to make, before bringing in the surely complicating material . . .] My exploration of sadomasochism rests upon a series of analogical relationships, which by nature require a sort of suspension of disbelief, a kind of lyrical curiosity. These analogies have formed between disciplines that speak to one another, deal in one another, and which we might draw together along the lines of sadomasochism. Let us say that queer theory has always been a theory of narrative; and that narrative theory has always been a theory of the erotic; and that the erotic has always dealt with kinds of pleasure that are easily mistaken for pain, traded in pains that surface as pleasures. And that each of these . . . [Okay, the first part of this paragraph I’ve written to try to justify the attachment I feel to the immediately previous sentence. I’m not sure I understand what I mean by that sentence, but of course I like the voice – “Let us say . . . “ – and I think the “analogical” structure is important for understanding why I’m putting together what I’m putting together. ::sigh::] Sadomasochism occupies a peculiar place in critical theory. In literary theory it is, more often than not, invoked in order to pathologize the characters or the erotics of a text. This occurs primarily in reference to women and to femininity in general . . . especially if the female character in question is aligned with what is so often viewed as a “given” aspect of her gender role. Female sadists are definitely more celebrated than female masochists. The reverse is true for men: male masochism is often celebrated as a subversion of traditional gender roles, whereas male sadism can never be viewed as anything but purely demonic and patriarchal. Typically, literary theory deals in the themes of sadomasochism through the analysis of characters and subjectivities, and typically tends to negotiate subsequent erotics out of the text rather than granting their validity and value. [Note that there is a difference between the lit theory that deals directly with the term “sadomasochism” and those that talk merely about “pain and pleasure.” I suppose I will need to grapple with this distinction, but I’m not sure where.]

Within queer theory, reactions to sadomasochism fall in similar patterns along the lines of gender roles.

The relation between narrative theory and queer theory is, of all the moments I consider, perhaps the most indirect and yet owes the most to the form of sadomasochism.

I THINK THIS MIGHT BE CHAPTER the 1st STUFF: I will explore sadomasochism first as a viable form of eroticism. Indeed, Freud found the presence of sadomasochism so “common” in his patients that he was required to move it from the realm of perversions. For Freud, sadomasochism was not an isolated perversion of singular individuals, but it was the structure, the very form of even the most “normal” erotic relationships.

***

Bon appetit!

November 19, 2007 Posted by marycontrary | Uncategorized | 2 Comments

An exercise in ickiness.

But it is a beginning. This is the copy I submitted to the prospectus workshop last week. Nothing has changed, though folks recommended I re-arrange the order of some of the paragraphs, and Bruce Smith wanted me to focus more on what I mean by “erotics” . . . a good question, an important question, as all of the writing I’ve done in the past four years uses some version of “erotics” as a major guiding concept.

As for the order: all I can think is that I need to read more. Much more. And writing is so daunting at this stage of thinking.

***

First, please forgive the holes that exist in this proposal. I forced myself to let some of them, many of them, remain, in order simply to move forward with this first draft of the proposal, in order to see what would come of writing it all out, regardless of rightness and wrongness and the various leaps of faith and suspensions of disbelief required . . .

Second, please consider the following questions as you read:

• What doesn’t make sense?
• What needs more explanation and/or more sources (beyond the obvious gaps)?
• What parts of my language and style seemed forced and/or cheesy and/or inappropriate?
• Do any texts occur to you that I might add to my reading list?
• Is this at all what a dissertation prospectus should look like?
• Too ambitious?
• Any ideas for committee members?

Sadomasochism is a term that generates both an absence and excess of feeling, a blank look or a grimace or a spark. It is a term that does many things and no-thing. At once it is both common knowledge as the primary structuring of power in our daily lives, the reason we suffer for pleasure and suffer in the academy, forming the dismissive and self-evident language we use to talk about reading and writing, to analyze themes of pain and pleasure in literature and in our relationships; and also a dead-end kind of knowledge that, once invoked, appears to shut down possibilities: You’re so masochistic or That film is so sadomasochistic. It is both to be avoided and unable to be avoided. It is both perversion, and yet too common to be perversion. USE FREUD HERE. It is, decidedly, both / and, functioning in the movement of dialectic. SAY MORE. Sadomasochism is already known and yet never completely understood (recognized). It is misrecognition (??? a term used by Sedgwick and Miller, but I still haven’t exactly figured out what they mean, I think it might come to us from psychoanalysis . . . .). [I want to have some sort of introduction like this that doesn’t necessarily “tell a story,” but which does immediately introduce the complexity of the term I’ll be exploring. Something creative. The current state of this paragraph feels as if I am definitely making way too many assumptions . . . but is this inevitable? Je ne sais pas . . . ]

The primary goal of my project is to complicate the way sadomasochism is theorized among the disciplines of literary, cultural, and queer studies. My project will trace and create a genealogy between the sadomasochism burgeoning in nineteenth century British literature and culture through to the sadomasochism practiced in elite subcultures in the contemporary United States. I will trace sadomasochism as a passion, an obsession, an undercurrent and current; most importantly, however, I will trace it as a complex erotics manifested at both thematic and formalistic levels of texts and practices.

But this will not be a chronological tracing, rather a movement between and among moments, circular, turning in upon itself. This project will deal with three moments: one, the importance of sadomasochism as both theme and form in the nineteenth century; two, the obsession (direct and indirect) with sadomasochism by queer theorists of the nineteenth century; three, narrative theory that makes use, directly or indirectly, of forms and themes of sadomasochism [genre theory???]. Rather idealistically, perhaps, I envision this project creating a queer feminist narrative theory of the erotic from the forms and themes of sadomasochism, using nineteenth century British literature and culture as a place to begin, but not necessarily a place to remain.

INSERT PARAGRAPHS ON THE IMPORTANCE OF THIS PROJECT AND HOW VARIOUS COMPONENTS OF THE PROJECT HAVE ALREADY BEEN FRAMED BY OTHER SCHOLARS . . . .

• what the 19th c lit theorists say about sadomasochism
• what queer theorists say about it
• what narrative theory says about it
• how it is usually theorized from primarily a male perspective
• what I say about it!!!

November 13, 2007 Posted by marycontrary | Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Getting some where.

I had a project a few weeks ago. One more cohesive, a bit easier to articulate, settled in period and nation . . . but empty. I kept thinking of dry toast when I thought of the project, thinking of that scene in My Big Fat Greek Wedding when the Greek father bewails his daughter’s soon-to-be-in-laws for being about as exciting as “dry toast.” I have a terror of producing a work that reaches this pitch of crunchiness and crumbs. Despite my struggles to find the right project, I always had a sort of vision in mind: lots of texture, lots of color, lots of voice, permeable boundaries, a theme/theory bound loosely through a pastiche of texts.

The first project, which I really dragged from myself, for better or worse, was to be on female masochism in 19th century fantasy and narrative. Definitely approaches toastiness, though I would have fought to make it something provocative and something colorful.

Now, having talked with the Inland Emperor of Pastiche, I have less of an articulable project but there’s a layer cake in the works. (Apologies for the extended and painful metaphor, but it’s appropriate. I have promised myself that when I successfully defend my dissertation, I will treat myself to my favoritest cake in the whole wide world, from my old barista home, Zingerman’s Hunka Burnin’ Love Chocolate cake, where the layers are actual bars of Valhrona chocolate.) And I am amazed. I am happy and excited having layers (really) to explore, but no clear argument in mind.

The theme of this new project, loosely, is plots of sadomasochism; or when I’m feeling especially corny, plots of pain and pleasure. Or sadomasochism and story. What the project consists of at the moment is reading in three different areas and formulating what to me feel like only vague and abstract questions that I hope will get me somewhere specific. The reading list I’m growing is below. The top four texts in each list are what I will focus on over the course of this semester, on my way to a rough draft for the prospectus.

Literary Critics of the 19th Century (with direct or indirect interest in s/m themes)

1. D.A. Miller, Bringing Out Roland Barthes

2. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “A Poem is Being Written”

3. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot

4. Ellis Hanson, “Wilde’s Exquisite Pain”

5. more D.A. Miller, The Novel and the Police, Narrative and its Discontents

6. more Sedgwick, on James and Austen

. . . .

Theory on Narrative and/or sadomasochism

1. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text

2. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain

3. Lynda Hart, Between the Body and the Flesh

4. Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty

5. Freud on the death drive and on sadomasochism

6. DeLauretis and Mulvey and their use of the phrase “sadism demands a story”

7. Rita Felski, “Female Masochism”

. . . .

19th century texts

1. Swinburne’s poems and life

2. Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre

3. relationship between Hannah Cullwick and Arthur Mundy

4. Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley

5. Charles Dickens’ Bleak House

I am very unsure of where these lists will take me. But I’m okay with that, for the moment.

Finally, here are the vague and naive questions, which really just trigger in me: read more. Think more.

• What are the genres of sadomasochism, genres of pleasure and pain? (???)
• What are the plots of sadomasochism; or, what is the relationship between sadomasochism and plot? Or sadomasochism and story?
• What is the relationship between plot and desire; between plot and fantasy; between plot and the erotics?
• What do I mean when I use the terms “sadomasochism” and “plot” and “erotics”?
• How and why do 19th century literary theorists deploy plots of sadomasochism?
• What stories get told in critical theory on the 19th century; on sadomasochism?
• What stories of sadomasochism are told in 19th century culture?
• What is the relationship between sadomasochism and reading, or reading practices; and sadomasochism and writing, or telling?
• What fantasies are created in criticism on the 19th century?
• Can we only access sadomasochism through a historical, literary, and/or critical imagination?
• And what do any of these questions have to do with queerness, or queer theory?

October 7, 2007 Posted by marycontrary | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Fantasy of a Demon Eros; or, Feminist Erotic Ethics of the Perverse Sort

Here’s what I’ve been working on for the past couple of weeks.

Many thanks to the wonderful feminist theory class that gave me the freedom and stimulation to explore these themes with this kind of voice.

And dedicated to my Daddy, who puts up with a hell of a lot, and not just when I’m writing . . .

***
“What kind of fucking feminist are you now?”

She’s bent over the vanity stool, naked except for cuffs and chains and a heavy silver collar, the lock to which presses into the pocket of her throat. She tries to swallow it away, but it won’t budge. He stands behind her, still, except for the rocking motion she can sense, the slight breeze. Behind the blindfold race images, his hanging and pierced breasts, cane in one hand, flogger in other, eyes that burn, a caress of flame. She smells leather, anticipates the sharp and smooth edge of the cane, consistently amazed that such an ill-formed rod, unfinished but not rough, crooked but not bent, can create such a mixture of emotion and desire.

“I said,” his mouth at her ear, hand wrapped into her hair and pulling her head up and back slowly, “what kind of feminist are you now?”

The contract lays on the vanity, discussed, negotiated, compromised, satisfied, written and re-written, finally signed. Good for the next month. She begins to laugh, which she does when confronted with a deep joy inside herself, which is so much of a relief from what she views as her default emotion of tears. She begins to laugh, and he begins to laugh, she relaxes and breathes in deep, knowing it will come now. The arm with the cane draws back—

Here is our twenty-first century feminist heroine: ambivalent, doubtful, willing, curious, confused; at the same time, she is interested in ethics, in consciousness and self-awareness, in the interdependence of sex and imagination and power. Weighty concepts that lay on her tongue, sink down the back of her throat, rest full—sometimes unsettled, sometimes satisfied—in the gut. Here and for now she is female and feminine and submissive and masochistic. And, let us not forget, feminist. She struggles, sometimes, with these identifications. She resists. She persists. She bows her head and yields. But she is not weak.

This narrative, this fantasy of a contemporary feminist heroine engenders questions (“nagging” questions, to cite a relevant anthology) that have been circulating within feminist theory and activism for no short amount of time. How comfortable are, or should, we be with the power dynamics in our erotic relations? How comfortable are we with an image of female sexuality that is clearly masochistic and submissive, but also clearly consensual and pleasurable, and clearly part of a self-identified feminist subjectivity? What is the use of such paradoxes, such perversities? How in the world can we distill a feminist erotic ethics from the above image?

Our heroine is haunted by these specters of theories and debates, right and wrong, should and shouldn’t, split between the personal and the political. Split over how desire, when named political, is opened to celebration or refusal. One or the other, never or rarely a complex movement to and from, between, among, both/and, letting the joy and the critique revise and inform one another. Never a movement of ambivalence. This is a heroine who, at some point, perhaps, read a little in feminist theory and finds it invading the bedroom, her work, the kitchen, the bathroom, her walks through the park, and certainly her talks with “vanilla” friends. And play, of course play. The moment she is asked to submit and fights back, despite the fact that she has elected to be in a submissive scene. These questions, these debates, also continue to haunt social, cultural, and critical discourses, whether or not they bill themselves as feminist. Nevermind that the feminist “sex wars” of the 1980s and 1990s seem to have dissipated, seem to rest in an uneasy truce.

I have before me two texts representing the spectrum of feminist debates over sexuality: radical feminist Catharine A. Mackinnon’s “Sexuality” and feminist sex radical Carole S. Vance’s “Pleasure and Danger: Towards a Politics of Sexuality.” I find clues in the very publication of the texts themselves. The former, heavily anthologized and cited, included in a mainstream anthology of feminist theory. The latter, the first essay in a collection generated from a conference on the pleasures and dangers of female sexuality—now out of print and incredibly difficult to find. My copy, an ex-library book ordered from an online used bookstore, has stamped in red block letters on the first page: WITHDRAWN. I wonder if from disuse or from offense. I fantasize the stamp as a marker of danger. I take up the text with reverence, as an artifact, as a testament to a persistent threat. There is something to value here, something for our new feminist heroine. Something pleasurable and dangerous. Dangerous in its pleasure. Pleasurable in its danger.

In the beginning there was the sex and the words, spinning out from and between their bodies and mouths, virtual and otherwise, across the moments and enclaves of the sprawling city, across the generations and races and classes, until the first meeting in person which lasted for nine hours, webbing them officially into the most perverse, deviant, complicated, ambivalent, paradoxical, loving, passionate, thorough, loyal, and deep interaction she had ever been webbed into. The familiar trope—normative, even—of falling in love held its own sort of perverse promise. Here came together a Daddy and a little girl, both at pivotal moments, both in need and want, both willing.

Now there is sex and words, their word to one another, and something called play.

By day she is a professional—in charge, in control, independent. She is the baby girl. She is the brat. She is the professional. She is the nasty bitch. She is the woman. She fights with and between them all. She is learning to bridge.

She thinks over the question asked her the other night. What kind of feminist is she now?

The feminist sex wars may be over on the surface—or we’re putting on a good face, or it’s the same war shifted to new terrain—but traces of their violences linger, evident, for example, each time a work by radical feminists is anthologized. I would like to be generous here. I would like to say I can take the middle road between these opposing groups of theorists. But the violences committed by many radical feminists seem much more damaging, much less balanced and thoughtful, much less interested in generating dialogue, and instead intent on perpetuating misrepresentation and demonization. In the words of Gayle Rubin, radical feminist rhetoric

presents most sexual behavior in the worst possible light. Its descriptions of erotic conduct always use the worst available example as if it were representative. It presents the most disgusting pornography, the most exploited forms of prostitution, and the least palatable and most shocking manifestations of sexual variation. This rhetorical tactic consistently misrepresents human sexuality in all its forms. (301)

Such a misrepresentation of variations of human sexuality—our feminist heroine might be one example— serves to perpetuate, according to Rubin, a violence through rhetoric. In other words, there is an important difference between the tactics of radical feminists and the tactics of feminist sex radicals, and these tactics hinge on the very thing we call ethics.

Our heroine is enmeshed in such differences in the representation of her particular desires, which are perverse not only because they bring, to the surface and consensually—and often at the sake of reproductive and normative sex, as well as radical feminist politics—such decidedly un-sexy, un-erotic themes, themes in fact often viewed as antithetical to desire or the erotic. Her desires are perhaps even more perverse precisely because of their dangerous proximity to traditional female gender and sexuality norms. This proximity is the dead-end of the feminist debate over sadomasochistic practice—particularly when it comes to female masochism and lesbian sadomasochism. It is her seal of doom, her failure, her inevitable reiteration, something over which to agonize and self-flagellate, subject to the lashes and stings of her own guilt. Mackinnon’s voice is but one of a contingent of voices in our heroine’s head:

The relational dynamics of sadomasochism do not even negate the paradigm of male dominance, but conform precisely to it: the ecstasy in domination (“I like to hear someone ask for mercy or protection”); the enjoyment of inflicting psychological as well as physical torture (“I want to see the confusion, the anger, the turn-on, the helplessness”); the expression of belief in the inferior’s superiority belied by the absolute contempt (“the bottom must be my superior . . . playing to a bottom who did not demand my respect and admiration would be like eating rotten fruit”); the degradation and consumption of women through sex (“she feeds me the energy I need to dominate and abuse her”); the health and personal growth rationale (“it’s a healing process”); the anti-puritan radical therapy justification (“I was taught to dread sex . . . It is shocking and profoundly satisfying to commit this piece of rebellion, to take pleasure exactly as I want it, to exact it like tribute”); the bipolar doublethink in which the top enjoys “sexual service” while “the will to please is the bottom’s source of pleasure.” And the same bottom line of all top-down sex: “I want to be in control.” The statements are from a female sadist. The good news is, it is not biological. (169)

The logic is relentless. Our heroine is on her knees and in leather cuffs, positions and paraphernalia that render her both calm and safe, that both excite and frighten her, in highly complex ways. Subject to the voice and logic of Mackinnon, she is simplified, decontextualized, reduced to the lethal binary of rights and wrongs. Paraphrased and summarized, her voice dissected and dismembered. Morality is another kind of shackle.
Mackinnon offers a snapshot of the surface of a life, of subjectivity, of choices and autonomy, of the ability to revise Power. There is depth, paradox, complexity, particularity. There is a particular ethics, a peculiar erotic ethics, a perverse feminist erotic ethics.

This is not to say that feminist sex radicals, as well as advocates of BDSM, do not also commit their own sorts of rhetorical errors. Our heroine cannot be played for dumb. And so the critiques that her desires are simply a reiteration of patriarchal ideologies, or simply a reiteration of “the old libertarianism of ‘anything goes’” (Whatling 427) she dismisses precisely because they are presented with such simplicity. She knows that her desires are anything but simple. Still, she takes seriously the other, perhaps more valid, critiques. That BDSM practitioners tend toward “the reification of S/M as a practice . . . whereby the sexual act is overburdened with the fiction of total identity” (Whatling 418); toward wanting to compartmentalize BDSM practice into the bedroom and/or into the sexual, which contradicts the “claim [to] . . . enhance the quality of ongoing real relationships” (Bartky 367); toward a practice that “glorifies the life of fantasy to the point where the public realm all but disappears,” resulting in a “playing-out of sexual fantasies as if the historical and the political world did not exist” (Butler 171-2); and toward “naïve” and “liberal” notions of consent, autonomy, free will, sexual freedom, and choice (Butler 172-3, among many other contributors in Against Sadomasochism).

Her nude figure wrapped in leather and steel, blinded, trembling, laughing, crying, is a repository for these contradictory, ambivalent, paradoxical viewpoints, politics, desires. I would like to give her a chance to accept these desires. To welcome them. To explore them and always view them as a process, as subject to critique and revision. I would like to open our feminist heroine to the possibility of her desire being recognized in ways Judy Butler warns may be precluded by the tendency of BDSM to assume a “nonreflective attitude toward sexual desire,” which she finds particularly evident in the non-critical way in which the concept of “consent” is deployed (172). I would like to explore, with our feminist heroine, how BDSM desires are similar to the way Butler describes desires in general:

Giving consent to something is not a technique or a simple act. In sexual intimacy, the task of learning how and why we consent is for most lesbian-feminists a constant struggle. Sometimes we say yes, not wanting to, and other times we say no when our insides are screaming to say yes. But most of the time our desires are not so straightforward. They are, I think, complexes of things, fears, hopes, memories, anticipations. They arise from our concrete situation and are colored by the ambiguity of our experience. Consent can only be as complex as desire itself: consent is not a simple act, but a project, a skill we have constantly to learn. . . . Our desires can only be as sure and as free as we are. It is not, then, the free expression of desire, but, rather, the dialectic of choice and desire that is the crucial task . . . How to make our desires truly our own, how to choose them for ourselves. How to make “the free expressions of sexuality” truly free. (172-3)

These struggles extend beyond the sphere of lesbian-feminists. They eat away at our heroine. They, too, structure her desires and her subjectivity.

The Demon came to her tonight, the Demon Eros, part god, part human, possessing the terrifying ability to bridge.

She is in the shower and on her knees, sobbing, letting the water serve many purposes: memories of her mother, masks for the tears, cleansing and sluicing. This is not her preferred masochism. She wants to drown. No one ever told her it would be easy. But sometimes she doesn’t really get it. She doesn’t know how to let go and submit. She wonders if she even knows what the word means. She wonders if she’s wrong. She wonders how to know. Her mind runs over and over and over again, up against the same walls. These are recurring walls. She knows they have nothing to do with the particular relationship she has embarked upon, despite the fact that the issues are triggered: insecurities, shame, fear of making the wrong choice, fear of failure, the perfectionist, fear in general, distrust that eats into her days, and always the sharp and bitter voice that spins everything so negatively. The negative force from within. Enforcing staticity.

She is still kneeling in the shower. She imagines her Daddy entering and lifting her up, washing her body gently, soothing her tears. She wants to come to him whole, and hates herself for the fragments, for the voids that gape like wounds. The brat who protects those wounds with cruel words. Pushing pushing pushing. But he won’t come. She has to learn to make herself whole.

At some point she realizes the bathtub is hard, the water too hot. She could keep crying forever, it seems, it’s one of those days. She sits taller, she breathes deep, even as the water runs down her throat. She feels every part of herself. In that one moment they are all present, looking to her, demanding that she give them sway. They are a mess. But she can separate them. And build bridges. There is a kind of joy. She has never known herself on so many different levels.

She comes at the oddest moments. Born of Chaos. Her Eros. Her bittersweet. She is eros. She is her eros. She is her bittersweet.

What would really happen if she let it all go?

I have before me a vision of a feminist erotic ethics derived from BDSM erotics. To get there, to go there, I must set aside the counterarguments and questions I have thus far wrestled with. I have attempted to do so by setting aside the overly simplistic critiques offered by radical feminists because the hypocritical violence they perpetuate through their rhetoric gets us no where. Not only is their logic easily appropriated by the moral majority (Whatling 419), their arguments lack any attempt at understanding, at a willingness to consider alternate subject positions—yes, even the chained woman—and the complexity of such positions. Many other feminists, including myself and our heroine, agree with the goals of the radical feminist project, recognizing the importance of working to change the continual violence against women. However, as Vance insists, “to speak only of sexual violence and oppression ignores women’s experience with sexual agency and choice and unwittingly increases the sexual terror and despair in which women live” (Vance 1). What gets produced, then, is a female subject narrated by Sandra Lee Bartky—P., who is “deeply ashamed of her [masochistic] fantasies” (363). “She experiences her own sexuality as doubly humiliating; not only does the content of her fantasies concern humiliation but the very having of such fantasies, given her [feminist] politics, is humiliating as well” (364). The problem of P. is in line with the obvious problem of our heroine: “What to do when one’s own sexuality is ‘politically incorrect,’ when desire is wildly at variance with feminist principles?” (362).

Opening feminist theories of sexuality to the concept of ethics enables us to critique and understand the harms of particular feminist rhetorics concerning sexuality. Mackinnon and many other radical feminists perpetuate what Rosi Braidotti calls “negative passions or negative forces”—negative in a depathologized sense, functioning as prohibitions, inhibitions, refusals—which “dampen [any] ability to enter into relations with others, and dim [any] ability to relate to the world.” For Braidotti, “ethics” refers to “the way in which we act upon the world.” Her particular concept of ethics is derived from Gilles Deleuze, and serves to counter the negative passions and forces that “hinder” and “dim” the way we relate to others and the world at large. Transformative and affirmative ethics, according to Braidotti, promote a “transformation of what is designed to bound us negatively.” To act in “bad” ways upon the world is to impose or to maintain a “staticity,” promoted through fear, negativity, paranoia, anger, excessive narcissism and excessive limits. To act in “good” ways upon the world is to change it, “allow[ing] us to work on the horizons of hope,” and allow[ing] us to “look at conditions of possibility.” Doors open, even at the risk of risking it all. Better than the staticity of a lock-down, a shut-up.

Affirmative ethics falls in line with many conceptualizations of feminist ethics. Generally, feminist ethics “starts with the lived experiences of women in everyday moral deliberation,” while “traditional [male-centered] ethics starts with abstract rules, principles, and maxims that guide individuals in making moral choices.” Elisabeth Porter notes that while many types of ethics have emerged from feminism, there are “three interrelated features of feminist ethics”: personal experience, context, and nurturant relationships (4-5). In addition, feminist ethics also emphasizes particularity (in the face of extreme universality and impartiality) (10-11), care (in the face of extreme justice) (12-13), and self-respect and autonomy (21-24). Each of these features lends itself to one of the primary images and structures of feminist thought: interdependence. Sometimes invoked as a deliberate key term, more often than not implied in and among other concepts (such as in transformative and affirmative ethics, as well as in the more general ethical features mentioned above), interdependence is the tool by which we build relations with the world (human and non-human) and the tool which should guide our actions upon the world. Interdependence demands the stability of all subjects—not necessarily their coherence or wholeness—in order to build and promote relations and communities between subjects.

Our heroine, kneeling at the edge of a play dungeon, is witness to the interdependence and the affirmation. Our heroine, taking these emotions and satisfactions home with her, the fulfillment of her desires that extends as a deep joy throughout her being, understands that what she learns in and through BDSM reverberates through the rest of her life, into her interactions with others. Actual play may be separate, but what she learns and carries over is not. And, contrary to popular belief, she is not merely learning how to submit the way the patriarchy wants her to submit. The patriarchy is not so clear in its threat and its domination. She learns that, first and foremost, she must know herself—in all of her splits, all of her inner differences, all of her multiple and conflicting desires and wants. Her self-knowledge is key, and it must be a continual process. The self is never a coherent or complete entity in BDSM. Our heroine must practice both clear communication and negotiation of her desires and her needs. Each and every interaction with another member of the BDSM community must be given respect, care, trust; each and every member of the community must always work toward keeping other subject positions in mind. Thinking outside of oneself, thinking of others. These are the core ethics of BDSM, functioning in much more complicated and ambivalent ways than critics often acknowledge.

But to fully understand the complicated and ambivalent ethics of BDSM practice—to understand, in fact, why such a cultural practice demands such a clear set of ethics—we must consider the particular erotics of BDSM. It is precisely these erotics that fuel the easy dismissal of BDSM practice; and yet it is precisely these erotics that are not given enough complication and understanding. Aside from the eroticization of pain, power exchange, humiliation, shame, fear—aside, in other words, from the eroticization of what is typically considered negative, undesirable, and therefore the antithesis of the erotic—it is precisely the ethics of BDSM that become eroticized. In other words, our heroine experiences such acts of communication, care, respect, negotiation, and yes, even consent, as turn-ons. As forming their own sort of erotics. In BDSM practice, erotics and ethics are in fact interdependent on one another.

Beyond and because of the interdependence, the erotic ethics of BDSM might also be described as creative and revisionary. Creative in the sense that Foucault has described BDSM: “[BDSM] is the real creation of new possibilities of pleasure . . . 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. . . . 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” (165). For Foucault, BDSM practices help us to recognize the power of the body to take pleasure from multiple, nonsexual sources, and from entirely new sources, sources beyond the what is typically considered sexual.

Revisionary, in that the creation of new forms of pleasure happen with familiar objects, roles, institutions, worlds, narratives, and so on. What I mean is that while pleasure is desexualized, at the same time the “very odd things, very strange parts of our bodies, . . . very unusual situations” become sexualized, thereby transforming our sense of what is sexual, as well as transforming our understanding of those very things. BDSM practice takes what might be seen as the antithesis of the goals of “traditional” sex acts and transforms them into a source of eroticism. Such a transformation of hetero- and homonormative sex acts occurs through the negotiation of power dynamics (role play), fetishization (of objects, of roles, of age, of bodily fluids, clothing, etc.), giving pain, receiving pain, giving and receiving pain, multiple partners, sex without orgasm, orgasm without genitals, and so on. On the other hand, BDSM holds the potential to transform the ordinary into an erotic and/or sexual experience. The creative and revisionary strategies of BDSM erotic ethics has the potential to change the way we perceive, think, and act about the world and its inhabitants—including our sex and sexualities, including what we might label “feminist.” So much the better for our feminist heroine.

Her first time in a dungeon. An all women’s play-party. She plays the part of the voyeur, sent there with orders to watch. Not to touch. To watch, observe, absorb, let go. Not to speak. To watch.

She is not alone. Her escort is a switch, a woman who tops her husband but loves to submit as well. She is dressed in a rubber body suit that clings to curves and flesh, oddly erasing texture and yet heightening shape. She wants to explore and feel this woman’s body, but she has her orders. She yearns, yet takes pleasure in knowing that she is honoring her Daddy’s trust.

When they arrive, the party has been going for over an hour. People collect around certain stations, in the kitchen, straggling up and down the hallway of rooms between the main play area and the kitchen. She takes leave of her escort and scopes out the main room. The most visible. The most humiliating. She kneels in the corner and does what she is told. Removes the roll of duct tape, scissors, and permanent marker from her bag. Removes the yoga mat and the pillow. Removes her boots. She hasn’t been the best of girls, recently. She struggles with what it means to submit. She struggles with communicating clearly to her Daddy what it is that she needs. She struggles to communicate this to herself. Instead, she acts out. Instead of taking the few moments to identify her feelings, rather than acting blindly from them. She is still learning.

She unrolls the yoga mat and assumes a comfortable kneeling position, with the pillow for cushion. She arranges her skirt modestly around her thighs. She writes in large bold caps on a strip of duct tape the length of her mouth B R A T . She snips off the strip, stores the extra materials, settles into her kneel and places the tape across her mouth. No talking. Only watching.

At some point in the night, she begins to cry. What for, she doesn’t remember. The pleasure of her punishment? Wrestling with her eternal internal critic, who always seeks to make her feel bad or wrong or ashamed? Learning to separate this punishment from other punishments she might give herself? She is too hard on herself. And there is a deliciousness in letting someone else be hard on her.

At some point in the night, she is surrounded by three women who touch and comfort her. There is a deep eroticism here, though nothing strictly sexual. Her escort makes note, but doesn’t interfere. She isn’t breaking any rules. She isn’t touching or talking. But she is being touched and soothed. Her punishment. Her delight. Her window to other intimacies.

She once memorized a passage of Audre Lorde: “The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.”

The paradox, or the perversion of it all: she has never felt so loved in her life. And that terrifies her.

Change is hard. And Eros, generator of the erotic and of desire, was once a demon. For our feminist heroine, in her exploration of BDSM erotic ethics, what she discovers often comes in the form of a demon: both of this world and not, something, some being, some body able to bridge between the familiar and the ever unknown. Between the familiar and the unknown is an awe-ful and painful place to be, one full of ambivalence. Braidotti suggests that such a position, on the cusp of change, imbued with the affect of pain, is a marker of the work of an affirmative ethics. And in order to welcome and practice an affirmative ethics, we must “think again about pain”; we must ask “what does pain really tell us?” According to Braidotti, pain “expresses our affective core. It means we can touch and be touched. . . . Pain is a marker of our ability to feel.” Affirmative ethics is a foundation for creating change; and change—“to leave behind what was familiar, soothing, comforting”—is painful. But Braidotti urges a separation of pain from suffering, stating that to feel pain might not necessarily be to suffer, but simply to feel. To simply be affected. Such a conceptualization of pain and change is remarkably in line with BDSM erotics, which take as a source of pleasure ways of being that are often rigidly separated from the “pleasurable”—such as pain. Pain is transformed into a source of pleasure, into a way of being, into a way of feeling. Pain transforms into a fantasy, into a demon eros, into an erotic ethics. Our feminist heroine weeps from her pleasure, her ambivalence, and the pain of her endless change.

WORKS CITED

Bartky, Sandra Lee. “Feminine Masochism and the Politics of Personal Transformation.” “Nagging” Questions: Feminist Ethics in Everyday Life. Ed. Dana E. Bushnell. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1995. 361-84.

Braidotti, Rosi. “Affirmative Ethics.” Lecture. Center for Feminist Research Lecture Ser. University of Southern California. Los Angeles: 18 April 2007.

Butler, Judy. “Lesbian S & M: The Politics of Dis-illusion.” Against Sadomasochism: A Radical Feminist Analysis. Ed. Robin Ruth Linden, Darlene R. Pagano, Diana E. H. Russell, Susan Leigh Star. East Palo Alto, Ca.: Frog in the Well, 1982. 168-75.

Foucault, Michel. “Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity.” Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Ed. Paul Rabinow. Essential Works of Foucault Ser. New York: New Press, 1997. 163-73.

Hall, Cheryl. “Politics, Ethics, and the ‘Uses of the Erotic’: Why Feminist Theorists Need to Think about the Psyche.” Daring to Be Good: Essays in Feminist Ethico-Politics. Ed. Bat-Ami Bar On & Ann Ferguson. New York: Routledge, 1998. 3-14.

Lorde, Audre. “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. 1984. Triangle Classics. New York: Book-of-the-Month Club, 1993. 53-9 (54).

Mackinnon, Catharine A. “Sexuality.” (1989) The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist Theory. Ed. Linda Nicholson. New York: Routledge, 1997. 158-80.

Rubin, Gayle. “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality.” Pleasure and Danger: exploring female sexuality. Ed. Carole S. Vance. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984. 267-319.

Porter, Elisabeth. Feminist Perspectives on Ethics. Feminist Perspectives Ser. London: Longman, 1999.

Vance, Carole S. “Pleasure and Danger: Towards a Politics of Sexuality.” Pleasure and Danger: exploring female sexuality. Ed. Carole S. Vance. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984. 1-27.

Whatling, Clare. “Who’s Read Macho Sluts?” Feminism and Cultural Studies. Ed. Morag Shirach. Oxford Readings in Feminism. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. 417-30.

May 6, 2007 Posted by marycontrary | Uncategorized | 4 Comments

The Promiscuous Reader.

I can’t seem to break the habit of reading.

It occurs to me that if I am to become the Promiscuous Writer I wish to be perhaps I should first process my Promiscuous Reading. Otherwise it’s another case of the Return of the Repressed, which seems to be the anthem of my recent days, and which is an entirely different post. Ahem.

As I was saying, I can’t seem to break the habit of reading.

I read, even when I find myself having dreams about being behind — missing teaching, forgetting to read for my seminar, months going by without writing a blog, forgetting to fill out quals paperwork, to find a chair, struggling to drag together a committee without a clear project, forgetting even to study for quals . . . luckily most of these really are dreams. Still, I read and read and read. More to the point, I read what I’m not “supposed” to be reading.

I tell myself, and others, that reading is “my TV.” This is true, to some degree, primarily because I’ve never been much of a TV watcher, and yet still need the mental escape. Yes, I read for escape. Growing older, and therapy, and my struggles to pay attention to my graduate studies (to borrow Daddy’s phrasing, “I’m forgetting to remember”), and an overwhelming tide of memories of myself reading to get through my childhood — to ESCAPE my childhood — combine into this realization. There is escape reading and then there is . . . serious reading? I think of it as reading that demands a couple of pens, post-its, and at least two notebooks next to me, especially whatever current Dissertation notebook I’m filling. Whereas reading Kushiel’s Dart, for example — a fantasy, the heroine of which is destined to feel pain as pleasure, in other words, a masochist for a heroine; you should read the astonishment of the reviewers on this point! — has me dog-earring pages, and mulling over certain passages, but renouncing any sort of recording beyond what my mind chooses to retain.

I like my escape reading. No — I love it. I need it. I crave it. It renders me happy and guilty, all together (a quintessential masochistic experience?). After all, the only thing I ever consistently got in trouble for in school was reading something else, something other than the assigned text (which I had usually always already finished). So there are feelings of shame, even, in being caught at something I shouldn’t be doing. I wonder how gendered this feeling is. I think of my high school poetry teacher, telling the class that she had locked herself in the bathroom to finish a novel; she also retired there to talk on the phone with her best friend, away from the husband and kids. I think of my undergraduate poetry professor, confessing to locking herself in the bathroom to read the latest Harry Potter, before wrapping it up as a gift for her daughter’s birthday; and I remember her husband’s disapproval at her choice of text, the disdain of a poet toward fiction, not to mention genre fiction! Most recently, I remember stories of my step-daughter locking herself in the bathroom this summer, to lounge in a cool bath with one of her favorite fantasy quartets in order to escape the sweltering heat and her chores. I think of myself, sneaking a chapter here and there at school — novels, young adult, some fantasy and some erotica — and being slightly ashamed when anyone catches me doing it.

I try to balance my addiction. Read a little fun stuff, read a little serious stuff, read some fun stuff, grade papers, read some fun stuff . . . Or, in this case, read a little fun stuff, read some more fun stuff, play around with my wordpress template and finally work up the nerve to begin setting words down on the page. I know that I speak to a general struggle with the Demon of Procrastination, a struggle most people I know face. I understand that balance is the key. It is always difficult to sit down and do the “real” work.

I write about discipline, in other words. Self-discipline. There is a delicious indulgence that floods me when I read something I shouldn’t, something for fun — indulgence made all the sweeter because it’s somehow forbidden (masochism, encore?). As privileged and indulgent as my studies in English (loosely defined) may be, this path is full of obligation, deadlines, bureaucracy — things to avoid — whereas reading Kushiel’s Dart is not. At least, not apparently. Though I am reminded, as I always am, of one of Foucault’s amazing phrases: “insidious leniencies.” Yes, perhaps my escape reading is exactly that . . . because what exactly do I feel I’m escaping?

* * *

Somewhere in this post I meant to get at my fears of the Text. It is what I have been obligated to write about for some time, one of the only goals I was to complete this semester, through this blog. I have escaped into other writing, for certain. But I wonder if the process of producing these things called Dissertations and Books and the like — I wonder if that process should be as linear as it is drawn? I am, of course, just looking for a way to excuse my avoidance. I circle the issue of texts.

I’ll return for a while to my fantasy, where the heroine’s fate is embedded and unavoidable — a source of comfort to me, when there is so much we can so successfully avoid, so much we can circle, hem and haw, marinate, and just generally escape. Where does one draw the line?

More to the point: can those sources of apparent escape (nontraditional, shameful, fantasy, etc.) serve as the objects of “real” and “serious” study?

Yes, of course.

But even more to the point, which I knew, dammit, when I sat down to write this blog: do I want such objects? Or would I prefer to preserve my escape?

April 14, 2007 Posted by marycontrary | Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Lovely little drawing, lovely little muddler.

This little drawing doesn’t nearly capture what’s been going through my head during this month + of silence in the blogosphere.

But more and more I’ve been considering the pairing of pleasure and pain, which more and more seems so completely infused into every component of daily life, in so many different forms.

Of course, I’m only speaking from one kind of life . . . my little life. And if I’m going to write about sadomasochism, I’m going to have to encounter and incorporate at least one of the critiques from Against Sadomasochism: A Radical Feminist Analysis — that s/m is the problem of white women . . .

Which brings us directly to questions of leisure and privilege, time and money, and how those factors affect the kind of sex people have. Because I am more and more interested in the intersection between sex and knowledge, knowledge in the form of imagination or facts or narratives, the fact that certain sexual practices are associated with a form of “taboo” knowledge. I have never known a kind of sex more book-oriented than BDSM.

But still I am fearful of The Text, and making that choice, the choice of a text with which to test and qualify these ideas. See how long it has taken me to come back to the page, when I’ve been working up to this post for some time.

I remember David Lloyd once saying, in one of the faculty panels put together by last year’s brilliant Association of English Graduate Students committee at USC: “Let the object change you.” He was referring to the choices we have, or seem to have, on the texts we write on for our Diss. He was referring to following what you love, no matter what anyone tells you, and letting that object change the way you think. Fear of change, encore?

Somehow I feel I’ve gone about it in reverse. Where is my passion-generating text? How is one located, after the fact? After all these preliminary ideas?

Amazing what an encounter with a random drawing on google’s image search can engender . . .

All you lurkers with any advice, please chime in.

April 5, 2007 Posted by marycontrary | Uncategorized | 3 Comments

BdP intimacies: a love letter / thank-you note, of sorts.

A little over a year ago I headed to Santa Monica to meet my friend Jen for fish tacos and beer before my very first BdP show. Required by The Inland Emperor for a graduate seminar on queer space, I was mildly curious about the performance and the atmosphere. I remember sending my ex a flier of the show, or reading an e-mail to her over the phone — something of that sort, something that exhibited the pastiche of discourses and tongues now trademark of the BdP — and I remember her dismissive response: “I have no idea what that means.” Well, I didn’t know what the show would mean, either. But I dressed up in my red cowboy boots, made the date for tacos and beer, and put on my critical-love hat. I was going to see some queer Latina/o boi-butch performance art and, dammit, I’d try my best to find something of value.

I don’t know how The Inland Emperor and her students ended up in the front row, but there we were, very intimate witnesses to one of the most intimate performances I’ve ever seen.

I have to admit that I remember only bits and pieces from that first show, and I make no promises for the accuracy of these memories (fantasies?) — a video and voice lust-fest, a black-and-white checked bathroom, a lot of sex toys, including an enema and a sink full of dildos, a voice-over tale of pain and pleasure and shame, sausages frying, then the live bodies, the swing and smack of a flogger, or was it a whip? All right in front of my eyes, under my nose. I know there were other sketches and skits that produced various other pleasures and pains, yet I was set on fire by the opening.

At the break, restless with longing and a full bladder, I braved the bathrooms and then wandered away from the crowds to place the long-distance phone-call. I was turned on, and knew of only one person with whom I could share that feeling, one person thousands of miles away who could satisfy that desire. (The socially acceptable person, at least, because at the time I hadn’t been introduced to the differences between commitment and monogamy.) She was asleep. I couldn’t summarize what I had seen in that first act. I never was able to articulate to her just what was so deeply jarring and moving and fulfilling and fucking hot about it. To be fair, I probably didn’t want to tell her. I was predisposed to think that she wouldn’t understand. So it was my secret, one of them, in a relationship already coming to an end. I hung up the phone and returned for the second act.

That night I had great conversation and food with Jen. And I encountered, for the first time, as a spectator, my soon-to-be new Daddy, Daddy Rick, who created and performed in the enema-sausages-flogging piece that so haunted me.

Out of that art and intimacy came more art and intimacy. I haven’t done or read any theorizing on performance art, but it seems to me that one of the powers of performance art is what it generates in and among the group of spectators (critical intimacy?). Dialogue and desire, the chance to make new connections. This seems obvious to point out, but in thinking over my experience with BdP performances, and how I might best respond — rather than critique, at least for the moment — I am obviously inclined to elaborate on what has been done to me by the performances themselves. Me, the willing victim. So I hesitate to perform more close reading of their performances because my response is so personally and emotionally inflected. Caught up in this personal inflection I find I perhaps wasn’t the best critical viewer; and, logistically, I didn’t take notes. I can only offer close readings of my emotions. I admit willingly to my privileged and conceited position of personalization. But what better compliment can I give to the BdP than look at how you have drawn people together and here is how you have affected me. This is a shared implication, a drawing of momentary community between raced, classed, sexed, sexualized, and generational subjects that usually don’t find themselves in a communal space. Implicated together in the discomfiting intimacy of an erotically dripping performance.

But I was saying that the intimate, deliciously violating performances of the BdP engendered more intimate violations, and more art, this time between me and my Daddy. For example, Daddy Rick writes this poem, entitled “Exodus to the Flame”:

Time has allowed the fire to settle
Now it burns and sparks
Kindled by our flame
Awaiting a flare
Long nights spent apart
Dreams of holding, kissing, falling
Radiated by lust’s memory
Flashes of a glow
Eluded by life’s wicked truth
Escaping love’s present confine
Prisoner to romance
Containing love’s inferno
Exodus to the flame
Submitting to fear
Searching the firestorm
Holding on to a glimmer

I write in response:

Smoulder-spark

At the center of our bed is a smoulder
at the center of our smoulder is that spark
waiting to burst flame. The bed a shared memory
of lust kindling inside two spirits living
two lives, working to stoke the spark of delicious
inferno. Unable to indulge in that craved
destruction. Two spirits confronted with the
paradox of the wholeness blossoming from
ashes. Carrying the spark like a secret
a burden a promise a hunger. Because
fire is not kind. The spark ruthless
as it consumes in hot licks, our tongues burning
one another until we bring down so much
love it’s pain. But we beg to be blessed with such pain.
Gladly carry the spark and its promise of flame.

And hy returns with:

Ice and Fire together we unite
Lovingly we douse the craving that is ours
Melting away at the fear of pain and submission
Licking the flame that quenches the thaw

Burning the desire of lust’s wicked bond
Engulft in a cynical blaze of smother
Feeding the fuel when ashes smoulder
Dripping with the fluid of last night’s savor

Hide the ashes from the morning light
Shades keep out the sun while the burn is still
While the cat is witness to the fall of the wicked
Only now the fire winds again and the Phoenix rises

*

*

*

And so we write back and forth, through and over the terrain of our relationship, lovingly redeploying one another’s language and turns of phrase, in a verbal fondling and arousal not at all separate from pain, fear, anxiety. But in my mind this is about more than two people just writing love letters to one another. It feels like a reverberation of that first performance, an after-shock of the graduate seminar I was enrolled in, a trolley of change I gratefully hitched myself to at the end of last March, and of which I have vowed to never again let myself be afraid. These poems survey intimate moments but are not private, and not only because they are accessible in an online public space. They have a shared history. They are part of the intimacy generated by that one required BdP performance, a little over a year ago.

*

*

*

Everything I love is ugly. I mean, really. You would be amazed.

— Ani DiFranco, “Adam and Eve”

Just about a week ago, I saw my 2nd BdP show, this time at the side of Daddy Rick, now my partner in lust and love, in words and in flesh. I knew not what I would value from this performance, but I knew I would be looking to value something, because that seems to be one of my gifts. Recently I have been thinking of how values are established, what gets valued, what slips under the radar of worthy critique, of worthy creative production, of worthy critical attention. Thinking of graduate study and academia in general, it’s been brought home to me over and over how some texts and disciplines and methodologies are perceived as unworthy of my critical time. Questions such as “Are you still focusing on books?” or “Are you planning on sticking with that period?” contain subtle intonations of value. Sometimes I feel overwhelmed with the judgments circling around me, and I definitely find it more than a little difficult to figure out what I want to study, without considering who will and will not value the study. This is certainly more about my own issues and insecurities holding me back. And yet — and yet — I feel there is still some truth to the insidious circulation of value in academia. I find my professors, my peers, and myself participating in slights/sleights of judgment without considering contexts and wholeness. (Here is a structural question: is the dismissal a kind of fragmentation? Well, if value is not carefully and complexly assigned, fragmentation is sure to occur. Though wholeness is only a fantasy. I guess I’d just prefer a whole bunch of fragments.) I had such an experience in a graduate seminar with a celebrity-scholar. It seemed that every class was spent in dismissing someone’s argument, no attempts being made to find a moment, at least some moment of value, even in the suckiest of pieces. (Ironically, and sadly, in the following semester I took great pleasure in performing the same kind of judgment on this star’s most recent book.) Well, I’ve never been fond of the act of dismissal. As an action, it seems to be committing the same sins on which we so often base the dismissal. Granted, I am aware of my own tendency to let intellectual rigour slip in the face of my drive to locate and acknowledge some value. The point I want to make is that I approach everything in the world, except perhaps myself (though I’m getting much much better at developing a positive narcissism), as containing some nugget of value.

But what I have learned from BdP performances, and my recent exposure to performance art in general, is that one must approach it, and everything, with a willingness to shift what qualifies as valuable. In some ways, this most recent performance of the BdP directly addresses this issue. I found myself wondering, at first, how the title of the performance, “BdP get U.G.L.Y.,” worked to connect the drastically different skits. I was profoundly moved by what I felt to be the raw beauty of the pieces, particularly the video-skits in the first act. But the BdP were taking some pretty ugly subjects within both homo- and heteronormative communities and making art out of that “ugliness.” Much more could be said on ugliness as used, abused, and disabused by the BdP.

For the moment, however, I say thank you.

March 3, 2007 Posted by marycontrary | Uncategorized | 3 Comments

More terms.

Intersubjectivity

Femininity

Femme

Pain

Pleasure

Whiteness

Privilege

Reading practices

Love

Value

Taste

Distaste

Can I gather together texts around a theme, rather than a period or even a discipline?

Posts on deck: on the BdP; the eight million dissertation projects I have in mind; more on the fear/shame of the text; brother and perversion; the stray dog and puppies living underneath the house.

March 3, 2007 Posted by marycontrary | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Terms of interest, or: fear of The Text (part I).

These come to me in no particular order:

perversion         ethics         interdependence         dialectic         feminism         queer         love         narrative

sadomasochism          masochism         power exchange         phenomenology         materiality        desire

representation         erotics         play         discourse         rhetoric         fantasy         imagination         aesthetics

imaginaries

Again, these have no real meaning without texts, or complete sentences. And the list is always in progress.

This might also be called a fear of commitment.

February 23, 2007 Posted by marycontrary | Uncategorized | 1 Comment