the Female Body GOVERNING

Feminism’s Sex Wars 267
implicit understandings of femininity constructed as defenseless vis-à-vis
public discourse and public space. While both volumes construct an
unacknowledged victim position in the “Introduction,” they explicitly
articulate resistance to women’s victimization and argue against
masochism understood as women’s desire to suffer. Both volumes rely
on a structure of disavowal, denying the existence of their own psychic
investment in victimhood that frames their argument, which, in turn,
argues explicitly against women’s victimization.
The claim to victimization and its accompanying gender essentialism
goes hand in hand with the preferred genre of the volume, the comingout
narrative, traditionally based on a notion of a coherent self. When
the pro-s/m lesbians create coming-out narratives around s/m identity,
according to Foucault (1984), they only reinstate coherent notions of
identity, falling behind their own practice of fl uctuating gender and
sexual power positions. Foucault explains:
But if identity becomes the problem of sexual existence, and if people
think that they have to “uncover” their “own identity,” and that their
own identity has to become the law, the principle, the code of their
existence; if the perennial question they ask is “Does this thing
conform to my identity?” then, I think, they will turn back to a kind
of ethics very close to the old heterosexual virility. (p. 28)
According to Foucault, neither anti-s/m feminists nor pro-s/m
lesbians can ultimately escape governmentality because their rhetorics
rely on liberal discourse, which folds back into disavowed concepts of
femininity.
We are still left with the fact that these individuals who constitute the
subculture of pro-s/m lesbians, situate themselves as abject, outside the
family, outside the economy, outside the proper state, outside heterosexual
reproduction, and, at that historical juncture, outside of feminism.
The fact that their discourse can be accounted for by governmentality
that reproduces itself in biopower but that they are simultaneously
radically juxtaposed to the interest of the state and the family points to
the entrenchment of Foucault’s concept of governmentality in a notion of
normativity. It is thus productive to analyze counterinstitutional practices
and sites of abjection where narratives of sexuality, power, and desire
emerge, in addition to feminist projects that study women’s and girls’
bodies and subjectivities under the regime of governmentality. Even
though the narratives of pro-s/m lesbians in many ways fall back onto
notions of coherent identity, confi gurations of essentialist femininity,
projections of domineering feminism, and sexologist defi nitions of