the Female Body GOVERNING

Feminism’s Sex Wars 259
At fi rst glance, then, S/M seems a servant to orthodox power. Yet, on
the contrary, with its exaggerated emphasis on costume and scene S/M
performs social power as scripted, and hence as permanently subject to
change. As a theater of conversion, S/M reverses and transmutes the
social meanings it borrows, yet also without fi nally stepping outside
the enchantment of its magic circle. In S/M, paradox is paraded, not
resolved. (p. 208)
“Girl Gang” (Bailey, 1981), a short story in Coming to Power, for
example, restages a paradigmatic heterosexist pornographic scene, in
which several men sexually and violently circulate a woman in gang rape,
as an s/m fantasy among women. “Girl Gang” borrows from traditional
heterosexual pornography a structure steeped in the power relations of
heterosexism and sexism and rewrites it for lesbian pleasure.
According to Julia Creet (1991), feminism is accorded a central role in
lesbian s/m fantasies. Creet offers a psychoanalytic reading of the casting
of feminism in lesbian s/m scenarios in her essay “Daughter of the
Movement: The Psychodynamics of Lesbian S/M Fantasy.” Creet suggests
that s/m lesbians staged themselves in an antagonistic relationship to
feminism casting feminism as dominant mother “within the economy
of a lesbian s/m fantasy” (p. 136). She suggests:
Charges on both sides of the “sex wars” are strikingly similar: both
the charge of repression (by the “pro-sex” side) and the charge of
replicating masculine desire (by the “anti-sex” side) carry with them
the symbolic weight of the father. . . . We are afraid of collapsing
into the very system from which we struggle to liberate ourselves. . . .
Although Lacan could only imagine an order created by a symbolic
father, what I propose in this paper is that, within the economy of the
contemporary lesbian s/m fantasy, feminism acts as a kind of symbolic
mother. (p. 138)
Her suggestion allows us to read another short story in Coming to Power,
“Passion Play” (Alexander, 1981), in which the dominant partner Carole
humiliates her friend Meg after she has attended a National Women’s
Studies Association (NWSA) Conference where she delivered a paper
entitled “The Redefi nition of Community as a Trend Toward Exclusion”
(p. 230). Meg’s sexual humiliation consists of Carole turning her into
a “girl” when Carole commands her to put on pink lace, ribbons, silk,
and frilly garters. In Foucauldian terms, the narrative is motivated by
converting the governing of the feminine body into pleasure. “Passion
Play” thus subverts processes of governmentality.