the Female Body GOVERNING

Feminism’s Sex Wars 257
archal power model a form of agency based on an ethics of resistance?
But what if the individuals to be governed create their own regime of
practices and what if those practices solely function to produce pleasure?
Does the insistence on s/m during the early 1980s foreground and simultaneously
deconstruct the process of governmentality by investing the
governing of bodies with unproductive pleasure or does the governing
of the body in s/m solely recreate the pleasures of governmentality
otherwise associated with normative heterosexual patriarchy? How
does the debate relate to older discourses on masochism and sadism
put in place by nineteenth-century sexology, such as by Richard von
Krafft-Ebing (1946)? What narratives emerge from the contemporary
discourse of sadomasochism and feminism?
Two collections from the early 1980s exemplify the two positions.
Coming to Power: Writings and Graphics on Lesbian S/M, edited by members
of SAMOIS (1981/1987), a lesbian/feminist S/M organization, takes an
explicit pro-lesbian s/m stance, and Against Sadomasochism: A Radical
Feminist Analysis, edited by Robin Ruth Linden, Darlene R. Pagano,
Diana E. H. Russell, and Susan Leigh Star (1982),takes an explicit
position against s/m. The two collections Coming to Power and Against
Sadomasochism articulate the positions at the most polarized point of
the controversy. Coming to Power was the second publication by SAMOIS,
and includes fantasies, interviews, confessionals, and political essays.
Against Sadomasochism is a collection of theoretical and political essays
that articulate positions explicitly against s/m. Thus, both collections
intend to persuade and convince feminists in general but are also aimed
at each other.
A cursory reading of the juxtaposition of Foucauldian thinking
and the feminist position against s/m could lead us to suggest that
those feminists were simply wrong in their understanding of power. In
contrast, however, Monique Deveaux (1994) points to “the tendency of
a Foucauldian conceptualization of the subject to erase women’s specifi c
experiences with power; and the inability of the agonistic model of power
to account for, much less articulate, processes of empowerment” (p. 224).
Deveaux traces the feminist reception of Foucault through three waves to
recent feminist theorists who have taken up his emphasis on discourses
of sexuality in a process of subjectifying (p. 223). Deveaux concludes:
If we agree with Hartsock’s suggestion that feminists need to envisage
a nondominated world, we should not slip into fatalistic views about
the omnipresence of power. This means rejecting Foucault’s assertion
that absolutely no social or personal relations escape permeation by
power. (p. 233)