the Female Body GOVERNING

Feminism’s Sex Wars 261
Freud defi nes masochism as “feminine,” even though he fi nds it primarily
in men, which Gearhart correctly interprets as Freud’s understanding
of masochism as “essentially feminine” (p. 394). At the same time she
points out that Freud sees the real problem of a masochistic relationship
taking place between son and father. Freud (1961) reads the desire to
be beaten by the father as a desire “to have a passive (feminine) sexual
relation to him,” which, in turn, sexualizes the father (p. 169). Gearhart
argues that sadomasochism undermines patriarchal authority “because it
undercuts the desexualization at the basis of that authority” but because
Foucault does not take up the gendered model of masochism, he, in
turn, questions the Freudian assumption of patrocentrism (p. 393).
Since in the s/m fantasy of “Passion Play” (Alexander, 1981) the father
is absent, neither the Freudian nor the Foucauldian model of sadism
and masochism can account for the conversion of power between women
that structures the s/m scenario. The Freudian gendered structure of
sadism and masochism relies on the specifi city of gender that ascribes
essential qualities onto femininity and masculinity, whereas Foucault’s
understanding of masochism does not capture the specifi c transgressive
nature of s/m lesbianism and the implications for a relationship between
women (and ultimately the community of feminists) because Foucault
does not take gender into account. Even though governmentality, when
applied to gender, enables us to carve out normalizing forces, the term
itself, as Foucault’s reception of sadomasochism, does not take into
account the specifi c ways in which normalcy is produced as gender.
Foucault, however, despite his distrust for libratory movements to
escape governmentality, gave (lesbian) s/m practices a singular status
in an interview with The Advocate in 1984, the year of his death:
Well, I think what we want to speak about is precisely the innovations
that those practices imply. For instance, look at the S/M subculture,
as our good friend Gayle Rubin would insist. I don’t think that this
movement of sexual practices has anything to do with the disclosure or
the uncovering of S/M tendencies deep within our unconscious, and
so on I think that S/M is much more than that; it’s the real creation
of new possibilities of pleasure, which people had no idea about
previously. The idea that S/M is related to a deep violence, that S/M
practice is a way of liberating this violence, this aggression, is stupid.
We know very well what all those people are doing is not aggressive;
they are inventing new possibilities of pleasure with strange parts of
their body—through the eroticization of the body. 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. (pp. 27–28)