the Female Body GOVERNING

262
barbara mennel
Foucault idealizes s/m as a new invention of the late twentieth century.
Yet, the practices of s/m, and hence of masochism and sadism are not
inventions by subcultures in the late twentieth century. Instead, Richard
von Krafft-Ebing (1946) defined masochism and sadism as nongenital
and nonprocreative bodily pleasures in his Psychopathia Sexualis in 1890,
and thus imbricated in the definitions of normal and perverse sexuality
in governmentality. 4
The psychoanalytic discourse, beginning with the turn-of-the-century
sexologist Krafft-Ebing (1946) and later Freud (1961) defi ned masochism
as essentially female but only of interest to psychoanalytic discourse when
it affl icts men. Krafft-Ebing focused on the male masochist, casting him
as pathological. Normalcy exists for Krafft-Ebing when femininity is
aligned with masochism and masculinity with sadism. Perversion, which
is the condition for psychoanalytic discourse, occurs only when the roles
are reversed in the male masochist. The male masochist does not necessitate
a female sadist, but instead a woman who performs dominance.
Krafft-Ebing’s case studies, except three, are about men who visit dominant
women. Krafft-Ebing addresses “Masochism in Woman” only in a
later section, the fourth section in his chapter on masochism (pp. 195–
200). That section’s opening paragraph spells out the essentialist nature
of women’s masochism, based on the biological role of women:
In women voluntary subjection to the opposite sex is a physiological
phenomenon. Owing to her passive role in procreation and long-existent
social conditions, ideas of subjection are, in women, normally connected
with the idea of sexual relations. They form, so to speak, the harmonics
which determine the tone-quality of feminine feeling. (p. 195)
Thus, while Krafft-Ebing (1946) privileges the discussion of male
masochism, female masochism is integral to his explanation of the
nature of masochism because he sees female masochism as an extension
of specifi c female traits:
Thus it is easy to regard masochism in general as a pathological growth
of specifi c feminine mental elements—as an abnormal intensifi cation
of certain features of the psycho-sexual character of women—and
to seek its primary origin in that sex. It may, however, be held to be
established that, in woman, an inclination to subordination to man
(which may be regarded as an acquired, purposeful arrangement,
a phenomenon of adaptation to social requirements) is to a certain
extent a normal manifestation. (p. 196)