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2. Specters of Domination: Patriarchy, Colonialism, and Masochism

In her 1979 essay “The Meaning of Our Love for Women Is What We Have Constantly to Expand,” Adrienne Rich seems to have directly taken up Michel Foucault’s provocation that S&M is an emergent subculture within the gay world. But in contrast to Foucault’s discussions of creativity, eroticism, and freedom, Rich fixates on violence, power differentials, and self-destruction: “On the other hand, there is homosexual patriarchal culture, a culture created by homosexual men, reflecting such male stereotypes as dominance and submission as modes of relationships, and the separation of sex from emotional involvement—a culture tainted by profound hatred for women. The male ‘gay’ culture has offered lesbians the imitation role-stereotypes of ‘butch’ and ‘femme,’ ‘active’ and ‘passive,’ cruising, sado-masochism, and the violent, self-destructive world of gay bars.”¹ Here, S&M is assumed to contaminate the world of lesbianism. Rich rationalizes this distance by arguing that S&M is part and parcel of patriarchy. This chapter interrogates the ideologies and sensational structures that allow Rich to align S&M, patriarchy, and the butch as axes of domination that work against lesbianism and feminism. On the one hand, Rich’s comment speaks more generally to the distrust many radical feminists felt toward butches (and masculinity) in the 1970s and 1980s. On the other hand, the connection that Rich draws between butches and S&M speaks to the delineation of a particular sensational orbit for patriarchy.

In unpacking the sensations that attach themselves to the distance that Rich and other radical feminists want to produce between feminism and patriarchy, this chapter interrogates the specter of domination from two disparate positions—that of the butch within radical feminism and the black man within colonialism. In both of these formulations, masochism is figured as a manifestation of patriarchal and colonial power. The feminist panic regarding S&M in the 1980s was explicitly about defining feminist possibilities of female sexual expression; its detractors saw lesbian S&M as a practice that invited masculinity into the bedroom. This conflation of S&M with masculinity and domination unintentionally reunited femininity and passivity such that S&M was read as a (condemned) performance of patriarchy—regardless of the acts performed. These sentiments coalesced into anxiety about the butch, who was also figured as masculine and dominating. In the second half of the chapter, I turn to Frantz Fanon to show how the black man is turned into a specter of domination under colonialism. In Fanon’s writing, being subjected to the sensational regime of colonialism results in feeling objectified and overexposed. By focusing on the role of masochism in Fanon’s description of the harms of colonialism and the place of S&M as a particularly pernicious axis of patriarchy for radical feminists, this chapter locates the cluster of sensations that undergird these systems of domination as having to do with distance.

S&M, Patriarchy, and the Drive toward Separation

Looking backwards, the focus on lesbian S&M within radical feminism might seem peculiar, but lesbian S&M seemed to offer a lens to study patriarchy by bringing issues of gender, agency, eroticism, and violence to the fore. In her remarks on the infamous 1982 Barnard conference on sexuality, a British feminist, Elizabeth Wilson, wrote that she found “it curious that one particular, and arguably rather marginal sexual practice should have come to occupy such a key space in the discussion of sexuality.”² Wilson went on to hypothesize that S&M “sometimes seems to have to do with sexual outlawry and the dark side of self and forbidden desires. Perhaps feminism really has done something to lesbianism in confusing it with non-eroticized love between women, so that some lesbians have been attracted to other, more deeply ‘forbidden’ ways of insisting that lesbianism is about sex.”³ Wilson’s comments highlight several axes of contention within American feminism in the early 1980s. In a moment when some feminists argued that focusing on sexuality was a symptom of the insidious nature of patriarchy and that pornography and promiscuity degraded women by reducing them to sexual objects, feminists who were invested in seeking liberation through sexuality were accused of being blind to its pernicious aspects. The arguments against lesbian S&M were the product of a set of overlapping assumptions: that the task of feminism was to end violence against women, that S&M was about violence and patriarchy, and that sex between women had more to do with mutual respect than with eroticism. The underlying unity of these arguments against S&M was that feminism had to keep femininity (and women) safe from the incursion of patriarchy. Further, by framing patriarchy as separate from femininity and feminism, these arguments expressed their experiences of patriarchy as structured by sensations associated with distance, namely voyeurism and antisociality. This, in turn, figured lesbian S&M as a practice of domination characterized by invasion.

Jane Gerhard describes the ideological convergence behind anti-S&M sentiment as a merging of antipornography feminism, cultural feminism, and lesbian separatism.⁴ Though each strain of feminism had its own concerns, they overlapped in their belief in an essential femininity that was separate from patriarchy. For lesbian separatists, this manifested itself as the idea that lesbianism was fundamentally different from and more egalitarian than heterosexuality, or, as Gerhard writes, that lesbianism seemed to offer “an emotional and political alternative to heterosexuality.”⁵ The project of cultural feminism “celebrate[d] women’s bodies as unique and their sexuality as independent of ‘male models’ of genital sex.”⁶ Antipornography feminists, on the other hand, were invested in illuminating the societal and personal harm that heterosexuality (in its numerous patriarchal guises) produced. Antipornography feminists, Gerhard writes, “tended to conflate social power (or, in the case of women, social subordination), heterosexuality, and the unconscious in a way that paralleled theories of women’s difference. The anti-pornography movement interpreted heterosexual intercourse as an expression of men’s power over women and the penis as a weapon in the larger effort to keep women submissive to men and male power.”⁷ Taken together, these ideologies position femininity in opposition to patriarchy. This logic mobilized feminism as a discourse that protected femininity from the violence that patriarchy produced on both the structural and the individual level.

Radical feminism’s move away from a politics of sexual liberation toward a woman-centered, nonheterosexual ideology is exemplified by Adrienne Rich’s 1980 essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Rich frames her essay as an intervention against patriarchy’s insistence on heterosexuality and a plea for feminism to make space for lesbianism. She argues for a woman-centered feminism to incorporate a plethora of different types of relationships between women in order to rally against patriarchy’s denigration of these homosocial bonds: “Women’s choice of women as passionate comrades, life partners, co-workers, lovers, tribe, has been crushed, invalidated, forced into hiding and disguise.”⁸ Throughout the essay, Rich argues that patriarchy, which manifests as domination and violence, has suppressed femininity’s nurturing qualities, which are exemplified in the bond between mother and child. A particularly pernicious site of this oppression is pornography, which Rich describes as “a major public issue of our time” because it relays the message that “women are natural sexual prey to men and love it; that sexuality and violence are congruent; and that for women sex is essentially masochistic, humiliation pleasurable, physical abuse erotic. But along with this message comes another, not always recognized: that enforced submission and the use of cruelty, if played out in heterosexual pairing, is sexually ‘normal,’ while sensuality between women, including erotic mutuality and respect, is ‘queer,’ ‘sick,’ and either pornographic in itself or not very exciting compared with the sexuality of whips and bondage.”⁹ In the objections that Rich presents to pornography, we can see an essentialized image of women as nurturing and egalitarian, a characterization of heterosexuality as violent and oppressive, and a desire to remove lesbianism from the sphere of the pathological and the pornographic. Rich writes toward a space and a feminism where woman-identified women are able and encouraged to express their love. In this context we can clearly see the separate spheres assigned to femininity/feminism and patriarchy. Sensual, egalitarian femininity was contrasted with patriarchy’s 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 argues that cinema itself is predicated on the power imbalance of this simultaneous absence and presence; he terms this a technique of the imaginary, which “provides unaccustomed perceptual wealth, but unusually profoundly stamped with unreality.”²⁰

Metz’s analysis of voyeurism as a sensation having to do with distance and power offers a way to characterize these critiques of S&M as having to do with a logic of distance and voyeurism. Voyeurism emphasizes the power imbalance between parties; the voyeur invades the scene and responds to it without requiring the consent of the watched. This formulation resonates with a radical feminist analysis of S&M as a practice without the possibility of consent that adheres to the logic of patriarchy. S&M is pernicious because it produces alienation and antisociality. When applied to a theorization of patriarchy and domination, this conglomeration of sensations—voyeurism, alienation, and antisociality—illuminates the fact that patriarchy can be read as a form of domination that relies on controlling the distance between parties.

We can see some of the effects of that distance and antisociality at work in Laura Mulvey’s analysis of phallocentrism at work in narrative cinema. Not only are women not given a space as spectators, but their presence as objects to be looked at is seen as a distraction from the plot—even in the imaginary realm, women function only as decoration. In her 1973 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Mulvey argues that woman’s presence on screen correlates to her place in patriarchal society. She writes, “Woman then stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.”²¹ In Mulvey’s reading, the scopophilic impulse objectifies woman because she represents rather than produces meaning. Not only is the gaze in this situation predicated on distance, but it creates and perpetuates that distance. It produces women as objects who are not to be engaged, thus reinforcing their status as nonagential beings. And in this way it also reproduces a social separation according to gender. Taken together, this articulates the logic of patriarchy that radical feminism rallied against. Through this example we see clearly that the sensation of domination is dependent on an economy of distance, which foregrounds the practices associated with maintaining distance (in this case looking) and the feelings associated with that, described here as alienation and isolation. The structural coherence that emerges from this examination of patriarchy rewrites practices of lesbian S&M as having to do with antisociality and inequality rather than sexuality or violence. In terms of theorizing radical feminist responses to S&M, we become able to recognize their critiques of S&M as occurring on a deeper level than a kinship to patriarchy: we can see how their understanding of the assemblage of S&M was related to distance, scopophilia, and antisociality, all of which were in opposition to the sensations that they wanted to correlate with feminism, namely eroticism and mutuality.

The Politics of Penetration: Analyzing Debates about the Butch and the Dildo

If feminism’s task was to enable female sexuality to flourish apart from patriarchy and its ethos of domination, lesbian S&M was a symptom of patriarchal contamination and linked with masculinity. In opposition to radical feminism’s focus on woman-centeredness, lesbian S&M was likened to abuse, and its practitioners were described as adhering to traditional gender norms where masculinity and butchness were linked with domination and femininity was linked with passivity.²² Because lesbian S&M was seen as emulating patriarchal, masculine forms of domination through the eroticization of power, some radical feminists perceived it as reinscribing the notion of women as passive victims. Choosing submission or choosing to dominate was a sign of false consciousness, a sign that one was under the thrall of patriarchy. Sadomasochistic acts were lumped with rape and domestic abuse as a form of violence against women.²³ Domination was masculinized while submission was coded as feminine. In a retrospective analysis of these debates, Judith Butler highlights the problematic nature of this gendering: “[These positions] offer an analysis of sexual relations as structured by relations of coerced subordination, and argue that acts of sexual domination constitute the social meaning of being ‘a man,’ as the condition of coerced subordination constitutes the social meaning of being a ‘woman.’ Such a rigid determinism assimilates any account of sexuality to rigid and determining positions of domination and subordination, and assimilates those positions to the social gender of man and woman.”²⁴ In figuring S&M as a patriarchal practice, radical feminists reentrenched gender norms surrounding masculinity and femininity. Femininity was associated with community, love, and mutuality, while masculinity was equated with domination, violence, and selfishness. While the practice of S&M was linked to masculine practices of patriarchy, the individual embodiment of these fears about masculinity and patriarchal contamination was the butch and the micropolitics of penetration. Radical feminists mapped anxieties about domination, masculinity, and a politics of distance onto her body. Though the butch was only tenuously linked with S&M, figurations of her provide a further window into the politics surrounding radical feminist critiques of patriarchy and the sensations that were connected to patriarchal domination.

The hostility toward butches that Rich voices at the beginning of this chapter echoes the overriding sentiments of radical feminism of the 1970s and 1980s. Woman-centered lesbianism and feminism demonized the iconic lesbian butch/femme couples of the 1950s and 1960s as imitative of heterosexuality.²⁵ Though both the butch and the femme were criticized for internalizing patriarchy, the butch, the more visible of the pair, carried the additional burden of masculinity, which was even further proof of patriarchal compliance. In part, this disdain for masculinity can be attributed to historical causes. Sexological literature of the early twentieth century labeled lesbians inverts, which is to say their desire for women was characterized as masculine and they were described as possessing masculine physical traits and a masculine sexual appetite.²⁶ This masculinization of women’s desire for women in terms of both character and quality (aggressive instead of the prevailing paradigm of feminine passivity) pathologized both female desire and lesbianism. As radical feminists worked to reorient female sexuality and lesbianism on their own terms, they emphasized the femininity of female desire and read any conjunction of women and masculinity as a symptom of patriarchal oppression.

While patriarchy and domination are characterized by a nonengaged distance, the butch provides a different analytic metric for understanding the traversing of difference, namely, she speaks to the political implications of penetration, which radical feminism coded as a sexual practice of domination.²⁷ In her most feared specter, as masculine and dominating, the butch wields the phallus or dildo. While submission had its own problematic dynamics, the notion of a woman who wanted to dominate, or worse, penetrate other women was particularly pernicious. Heather Findlay describes this convergence in her analysis of the dildo wars: “Some lesbians have debunked the dildo and its notorious cousin the strap-on, calling them ‘male-identified.’ . . . Distaste for dildos, especially ‘lifelike’ ones, is based on the conviction that a dildo represents a penis and is therefore incompatible with ‘woman-identified’ sexuality. . . . The critique of the dildo . . . has developed in tandem with radical feminist attacks on butch-femme and sadomasochism . . . [, which] hold that both practices reproduce a ‘heteropatriarchy’ based on masculine and feminine sex roles.”²⁸ In Findlay’s description of the tensions at work in these debates, we explicitly see the collapse between S&M, the butch, patriarchy, and the dildo. In addition to symbolizing the desire to penetrate, the dildo’s status as nonanatomical phallus represented a willful and gleeful adoption of dictates of masculinity.

By suggesting penetration (even in fantastical form), a woman with a dildo threatened radical feminist modes of sexual intercourse. The dildo marked a departure from a feminist ideology that imagined female sexuality as outside of patriarchy and lesbian sex as explicitly nonpenetrative. Colleen Lamos neatly summarizes the heteronormative assumptions of this position as exemplified in the writings of Marilyn Frye: “As recently as 1990 Marilyn Frye announced, remarkably, that ‘“sex” is an inappropriate term for what lesbians do’: Lesbians don’t ‘have sex,’ because that is a ‘phallic concept’ implying coitus.”²⁹ Some of these analyses of lesbianism went so far as to displace individual female pleasure and desire with the generalizable desire for community among women—Lamos notes that according to Nett Hart “Lesbian desire is not directed at individuals but ‘is for the community formed by the self/mutual love of women.’”³⁰ Bringing these threads together, we can see that the dildo represents the possibility of individual sexual pleasure in penetration, which operates in tension with the feminist ethos of collectivity; Lamos argues that the dildo “rejects traditional feminist claims to a moral superiority based upon supposed female innocence, powerlessness, and purity from which has issued a politics of resentment and vengeance.”³¹ Penetration, like S&M, was marked both as antisocial and as an invasion of female space.

In order to fully illustrate how distance operates as a sensational undercurrent for these feminist debates on S&M, butches, and penetration, I offer a brief glimpse at Lynda Hart’s and Judith Butler’s resignification of the dildo in the 1990s. Since they are writing from a frame that is not invested in keeping masculinity and femininity separate or reinforcing the link between femininity and feminism, they read the dildo as a form of subversive citationality that calls attention to the phallus’s lack rather than reading it as a symptom of patriarchal imitation.

For radical feminists, the falseness of the phallus was due to its conflict with an essential notion of femaleness. It was problematic because it bridged the gap between masculinity and femininity. In her analysis of the feminist problem with the lesbian phallus, Butler writes that “the phallus signifies the persistence of the ‘straight mind,’ a masculine or heterosexist identification and, hence the defilement of betrayal of lesbian specificity; secondly, the phallus enters lesbian sexual discourse in the mode of a transgressive ‘confession’; . . . it’s not the real thing (the lesbian thing) or it’s not the real thing (the straight thing).”³² In other words, the phallus is read as a violation of lesbian modes of sexual intercourse because it is perceived as a desire for the masculine (against the idea that lesbianism should be about the protection of a female space) and because it is perceived as an admission that heterosexual vaginal intercourse is preferred to other modes of intercourse. In her rereading of the phallus, Butler turns to psychoanalysis to argue that the phallus need not be linked to masculinity and can actually be read as an open signifier rather than specifically tied to masculinity or male genitalia. Butler then reclaims the phallus for lesbian sexuality, extending its parameters beyond the dildo and articulating, in psychoanalytic terms, the work that the lesbian phallus does: “Consider that ‘having’ the phallus can be symbolized by an arm, a tongue, a hand (or two), a knee, a thigh, a pelvic bone, an array of purposefully instrumentalized body-like things. And that this ‘having’ exists in relation to a ‘being the phallus’ which is both part of its own signifying effect (the phallic lesbian is potentially castrating) and that which it encounters in the woman who is desired (as the one who, offering or withdrawing the specular guarantee, wields the power to castrate).”³³ A woman wielding the phallus is subversive; she threatens the notions of a subservient woman, and she threatens traditional masculinity by illuminating its redundancy (she, too, can castrate). As we can see, Butler’s rescripting of the dildo moves away from a logic of difference that situates masculinity and femininity as separate spheres. It is precisely the bridging of distance between masculine and feminine that allows for this subversion.

Hart argues that the link between the dildo and lesbian S&M allows us to read lesbian S&M as social critique through its reliance on mimicry, specifically phallic mimicry. By illuminating the elements of performance at work in sexuality, lesbian S&M challenges notions of the real: “If we think of the erotic interplay of lesbian s/m as resignifications that are no doubt enabled by certain heterosexual or homosexual models but at the same time dissonant displacements of them, we might move toward a better understanding of their erotic dynamics and better grasp the political and ethical controversies they have raised.”³⁴ In crude psychoanalytic terms, Hart argues that masochism can be read as a delicate dance with power (the phallus): male masochism is a relinquishing of the phallus, and female masochism is an impossibility because the woman has nothing to give up.³⁵ Even as the purposeful denial of equating power with the phallus can be read as an act of self-annihilation, in many ways it serves to reinforce the connection between masculinity, power, and domination. But, as Hart points out, “To a certain extent, the controversy about whether s/m is ‘real’ or performed is naïve, since we are already in representation even when we are enacting our seemingly more private fantasies.”³⁶ While the link that Hart makes between the subversive nature of the lesbian phallus and the social critique articulated by lesbian S&M appears to parallel connections that radical feminists made between the patriarchy, the politics of penetration, and S&M, Hart is not invested in reifying separation. Her analysis, like Butler’s, emphasizes the impossible line between fantasy and reality as it is embodied in the phallus and S&M. The question of maintaining separate masculine and feminine spheres and the underlying importance of sensing distance either as isolation or as contamination are not at issue.

Radical feminists’ collapsing of gender roles, sexual practices, and power dynamics produced a structure where domination, masculinity, and patriarchy were aligned with distance, voyeurism, and antisociality. While S&M and penetration offer glimpses of what happens on an individual level when patriarchy sullies the sphere of feminism and femininity, S&M also provides a template for understanding domination on a macro level using the same logic of sensation. In making their arguments about these connections, radical feminists linked both contemporary and historical patterns of global domination such as slavery, colonialism, and the Holocaust to S&M because these, too, were manifestations of a patriarchal relationship to power and distance. This scalar analogy had wide-reaching effects for radical feminism—it increased the stakes for taking S&M seriously as a danger to society and opened the conversation to race in an explicit fashion.

By connecting colonialism and fascism to S&M, radical feminists made a case that S&M was especially dangerous because, in contrast to submission on the part of the colonized or otherwise dominated, it required choice. Robin Ruth Linden writes: “For women and other oppressed peoples, the historical and pragmatic significance of oppression is that it is always a received rather than chosen condition. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine even having the option to embrace the conditions of oppression.”³⁷ Sarah Lucia Hoagland elaborates on the dangers of linking liberation with willful submission:

Aside from entrapment in patriarchal logic, the idea that trusting means submitting suggests we have not yet taken ourselves seriously enough. I do not find Blacks as a political group claiming that engaging in masochism (or sadism) is consistent with Black liberation. Nor do I find Jews as a group claiming the political right or necessity of engaging in masochism (or sadism) in the name of Jewish liberation. I do not mean by this that no blacks or Jews engage in sadomasochism. My point is that I see no one attempting to argue from within those political communities that submitting to (or dominating) another in the community is consistent with liberation.³⁸

By asking how liberation could look like submission, Hoagland highlights the difficulty that feminists encountered theorizing consent within patriarchy. Robin Morgan historicizes S&M by analogizing its harm to women with slavery and the Holocaust: “Here we can encounter the virulently anti-feminist thought of such Freudians as Marie Robinson, whose book The Power of Sexual Surrender is to women what a tome called Why you Know you Love it on the Plantation would be to Blacks or one titled How to be Happy in Line to the Showers would be to Jews.”³⁹ Her argument that S&M represented a form of subjugation similar to slavery or genocide implied that individual acts of S&M constituted a continuation of these painful legacies.

In these narratives, we can see that enlarging the scope of anti-S&M feminism from protecting femininity from contamination to protecting Others (the enslaved, the colonized, etc.) from the pernicious machinations of masculine power worked to feminize these groups and racialize the practice of S&M (both submission and domination) as white. In a moment of harmony between black feminism and antipornography feminism, sadomasochistic acts were read as racist and imperialist.⁴⁰ In her short story “A Letter of the Times or Should This Sado-Masochism Be Saved?” Alice Walker gives voice to a professor who experiences a sense of betrayal at viewing a documentary on S&M that features a black woman who calls herself a slave. In describing the documentary, Walker writes, “The only interracial couple in it, lesbians, presented themselves as mistress and slave. The white woman, who did all the talking, was mistress (wearing a ring in the shape of a key that she said fit the lock on the chain around the black woman’s neck), and the black woman, who stood smiling and silent, was—the white woman said—her slave.”⁴¹ This contemporary and willful reclamation of an identity (or nonidentity) that embodied generations of harm offends the professor in Walker’s story (and presumably Walker herself). Walker describes the hurt and pain that this representation of history inflicts, not only on her character, but on those whom she is trying to teach: “All I had been teaching was subverted by that one image, and I was incensed to think of the hard struggle of my students to rid themselves of stereotype, to combat prejudice, to put themselves into enslaved women’s skins, and then to see their struggle mocked, and the actual enslaved condition of literally millions of our mothers trivialized—because two ignorant women insisted on their right to act out publicly a ‘fantasy’ that still strikes terror in black women’s hearts.”⁴² Walker’s disgust with S&M has to do both with the perceived continuum between the institution of slavery and sadomasochism and with the residual trauma of slavery. She cannot separate the idea of the slave from its history of racism, especially when embodied by a black woman who submits to a white woman. Indeed, the black woman, further the black lesbian, was frequently figured as the position of absolute powerlessness within the framework of 1980s feminism.⁴³ This reading of black femininity as a site of perpetual duress and domination precluded the possibility of reading submission as anything but violent and painful. As Walker makes clear, S&M toggles between domination between individuals and domination on a macro scale.

Sullied States: Colonialism, Racism, and Masochism

The racialization of domination is one area where feminist arguments against S&M and patriarchy unexpectedly converge with Frantz Fanon’s exploration of the psychoanalytic dimensions of colonialism. While feminist arguments against S&M indict the racism of the practice, Fanon provides another perspective on the matter. In his explicit analysis of masochism as a product of colonialism, we are able to read around the radical feminist ethos of protectionism in order to explore the sensations that coalesce around distance in Fanon’s description of the experience of the colonized. Though this is a subtle inversion of the radical feminist framework, which situates S&M as the overarching structure of domination, it allows Fanon to argue that colonialism and racism (rather than masochism) are pathological. Through Fanon, we see colonialism as a performance of white submission, where the victim (the black man) is also produced as the feared specter of domination. The politics and sensations of distance are still very much at work in this narrative, but here these tactics are being mobilized against the perspective that we are privy to, that of the black man.

When the world is subject to Fanon’s gaze in Black Skin, White Masks, we are given the tools to experience what being a black man under colonialism feels like. Fanon describes many feelings and sensations of desubjectification, but most important to my narrative here is the painful separation that he describes between the colonizer and the colonized. Quite simply, “The black man is not a man.”⁴⁴ Central to this production of distance is “unconscious masochism.”⁴⁵

In a particularly evocative passage, Fanon describes the link between masochism and colonialism through an analysis of Uncle Remus stories. These stories focus on the heroic antics of Br’er Rabbit, who outwits his animal predators, Br’er Fox and Br’er Bear. White Americans, he argues, identified with Br’er Rabbit but then realized that they were problematically valorizing blackness and its aggression, since Br’er Rabbit was widely considered a stand-in for a slave. This allowed them to imagine that the Negro’s aggression was turned toward them, which gave them a reason to feel guilty for their domination. Central to this masochistic imaginary was the specter of the aggressive black man: “The Negro makes stories in which it becomes possible for him to work off his aggression; the white man’s unconscious justifies this aggression and gives it worth by turning it on himself, thus reproducing the classic schema of masochism.”⁴⁶ Like the domineering woman in Psychopathia Sexualis, this trope served two purposes. It allowed blacks to have access to agency, even if it was located in the imaginary; and, Fanon argues, it made whites feel both justified in their racism and punished for it. In articulating a connection between the treatment of blacks in America and Sigmund Freud’s notion of moral masochism, Fanon argues that white practices of domination are laced with the guilty pleasures of masochism.

The masochism that Fanon describes is a complex psychic formulation. In accounting for it, he argues that it is born from white America’s initial “sadistic” aggression toward the black man, which is swiftly “followed by a guilt complex because of the sanction against such behavior by the democratic culture of the country in question,” given that overt discrimination is recognized to be incoherent with the ideals of democracy.⁴⁷ Additionally, Fanon argues that this aggression is “tolerated by the Negro,” which is to say that he lacks the ability to combat it, and that in the white man it results in masochism (and produces guilt and shame at his behavior).⁴⁸ Though Fanon uses the term masochism, it differs from the moral masochism that Freud describes, which involves the reactivation of the Oedipus complex and guilt by potentially provoking parental (but now subsumed by the superego) ire. The initial violation committed by the white (American) man was that of wanting to unnecessarily punish the black man. This desire, which Fanon terms sadistic, thereby coding it as erotic, violates the white familial credo of democracy and equality. The result is guilt, which he terms masochism because of the pleasure this narrative of personal suffering evokes for the white man.

Fanon’s equation of the superego with a national character, democracy, is strikingly different from Freud’s description of the superego as a punishing parent. It raises the question—How, indeed, can democracy punish? The answer to this lies with understanding Fanon’s radical break from a family-centered psychology toward one centered on nationality and race. Democracy punishes the white man, Fanon seems to argue, by revealing him to be perverse and making him feel guilty. The white man’s desire to hurt the black man shows that he has failed to absorb the lessons of the family/nation while simultaneously revealing these goals to be impossible. There is a break in the system; but unlike Freud’s concept of moral masochism, this does not result in punishment from the superego. As a concept, democracy cannot act in this way; it becomes nothing more than an ideal that is not reached, and that becomes the new familial reality. Unlike Freud’s moral masochist, who becomes paralyzed by his inability to resolve his or her new Oedipal crisis and continually seeks punishment, Fanon’s white masochist is not particularly impeded by this guilt. Though he seeks to self-punish, this punishment does not occur at any actual social cost to the white man; the actual burden is felt by the black man through the production of various sensations of distance.⁴⁹

A Negro Is Raping Me: Fear, Masochism, and the Black Man

One of the tangible ways that the white man’s guilt manifests itself as a problem for the black man is through the creation and perpetuation of the myth of the dominating, threatening black man. Fanon analyzes this specter in his “explanation of the fantasy: A Negro is raping me [un nègre me viole].”⁵⁰ Fanon offers this as a twist on Freud’s “A Child Is Being Beaten.” In Freud’s narrative, a child fantasizes about another child being beaten because he or she wants paternal affection. Freud suggests that this fantasy about another child is actually a fantasy about the child’s masochistic desire to be beaten by his or her father as punishment for his or her Oedipal desires. Fanon replaces the child with an adult woman and argues that her fantasy of punishment is to be raped by a black man: “I wish the Negro would rip me open as I would have ripped a woman open” (Je souhaite que le nègre m’éventre comme moi je l’aurais fait d’une femme).⁵¹

Immediately it is clear that this fantasy is embedded within a discourse of naturalized female masochism. The woman does not just want to be raped but wishes violence upon her body. This voiced desire for evisceration defines the white woman in terms of her predisposition for pain. She is presented as voraciously sexual with an appetite for destruction. In addition to this characterization of her desires, Fanon’s analysis of this fantasy further naturalizes white femininity’s relationship to pain by making a link to the work of Hélène Deutsch and Marie Bonaparte, “both of whom took up and in a way carried to their ultimate conclusions Freud’s ideas on female sexuality,” which is to say, they argued for an innately female biological desire for pain.⁵² Fanon argues that this fantasy was “the fulfillment of a private dream, of an inner wish,” and that consequently “it is the woman who rapes herself.”⁵³ With these words, Fanon indicates that the fantasy is not about a fear of the black man but about the white woman’s subconscious desire to hurt herself. Fanon argues that she does this by imagining herself as a Negro and endowing that imagined man with violent, carnal desires, which she then imagines being turned on herself or any other woman. Noticeably absent from Fanon’s analysis is any suggestion of homosexual desire, despite the familiar transpositions of lesbianism onto blackness and masculinity. Fanon, here and elsewhere, places the possibility of lesbianism, as Ann Pellegrini writes, “beyond all imagining.”⁵⁴

As presented, “A Negro Is Raping Me” complicates our understanding of female masochism as described in “A Child Is Being Beaten.” The beloved father is no longer the locus of agency and desire; narratively, he has been replaced by the Negro. What does the white woman’s submission mean in this context? It is difficult to see this substitution of Negro for father as neutral. Though it is tempting to read it as a way to recuperate black agency, the narrative elides this possibility by reducing Fanon’s narrator to an always-willing, always-desiring, always-sexual body. In this situation, the Negro is equated with his penis, which looms larger than life in the racist imaginary. Fanon argues that this conflation of the black man with his penis is one of the main qualities of Negrophobia, which manifests as sexual panic that takes the form of fear and desire. The myth of the large black penis only serves to emasculate the black man.⁵⁵