the Female Body GOVERNING

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barbara mennel
Like the anti-s/m feminists, contemporary discourse on lesbian s/m
also poses a problem for a concept of governmentality because lesbian
s/m offers an exaggerated performance of negotiations of micropower
on the body in antagonistic relation to the state. Lynda Hart (1998),
in her book Between the Body and the Flesh: Performing Sadomasochism,
poses the question “why lesbian s/m has become the marginal center,
the paradoxical place around which much of this controversy has
circled” (p. 4; emphasis in original). Her own answer suggests that
this is the case “because it is the masochistic sexual desire that most
profoundly signifies a destabilization of ‘self’ that feminism so jealously
guards” (p. 60). Judith Butler’s (1990) influential emphasis on the
performative in gender formations seems to echo the significance
that lesbian s/m achieved both in the feminist movement, as well as
in feminist and queer theory in the early 1990s. 3 Lisa King’s (2003)
essay, “Subjectivity as Identity: Gender Through the Lens of Foucault,”
outlines Judith Butler’s reliance on Foucault’s understanding of
“power as productive” to “reveal the contingency of what she terms the
‘heterosexual matrix,’ the confluence of gender and sexuality in a way
that excludes and thereby oppression women and sexual minorities”
(p. 337).
The emphasis on performativity in s/m exaggerates iconic acts that
function in the production of power. Foucault (1980) explains his
project as:
. . . a study of power in its external visage, at the point where it is in
direct and immediate relationship with that which we can provisionally
call its object, its target, its fi eld of application, there—that is to
say—where it installs itself and produces its real effects. (p. 97)
However, lesbian s/m does not produce “real effects,” but pleasure.
Like Foucault’s (1982) claims about power, that it “incites, it induces,
it seduces,” s/m lesbians recirculate the signifiers of power and thereby
foreground the ways that power becomes (re)articulated in its physical,
bodily, psychological, and libidinal dimensions (p. 341). According to
Suzanne Gearhart (1995) in “Foucault’s Response to Freud: Sadomasochism
and the Aestheticization of Power,” Foucault considers power
to be “productive of pleasure,” meaning that inequality, subordination,
humiliation, or pain inherent in power can be converted from displeasure
into pleasure (p. 391; emphasis in original).
Since s/m, however, borrows the signifi ers of power for its performance,
it produces a paradox, which Anne McClintock (1993) described
in “Maid to Order: Commercial S/M and Gender Power”: