Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism by Amber Jamilla Musser (review)

Amber Jamilla Musser’s Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism takes up masochism not as a sexual practice, nor a psychological or philosophical concept, but as a set of relationships between sensation and power. Beginning with turn-of-the-century sexology and ending with contemporary African American art, with a lengthy sojourn in mid-century French existential philosophy, Sensational Flesh gathers together an extraordinary range of theoretical texts to demonstrate that while “masochism is a mobile entity whose meanings shift depending on context” (167), it always serves as a pivot point between subjectivity, sexuality, and agency. The book is a rich intellectual history of the constellations of power organized as masochism in psychoanalytic, philosophical, feminist, postcolonial, and critical theory.

Musser begins with a challenge to the dominant theorists of masochism—Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, Leo Bersani, and (somewhat surprisingly) Lee Edelman—arguing that each, in different ways, sees masochism as a subversion, critique, or exception to prevailing social-sexual norms. For Musser, this emphasizes masochism as a “distinct lens for theorizing the ways that difference is embodied” (6) or “what it feels like to be enmeshed in various regimes of power” (2). Employing an additive, correlative method, the four central chapters of the book assemble different “structures of sensation” and map the dynamic relations between their conceptual parts.

Chapter Two takes up masochism as “a manifestation of patriarchal and colonial power” (31). Musser places the radical feminist critique of lesbian sadomasochism and butch masculinity alongside Frantz Fanon’s analysis of masochism as the pathology of racism/colonialism (in Black Skins, White Masks [1952]), and offers “distance” as a key metric of objectification. Chapter Three explores masochism as complicity, focusing on the aesthetics of self-objectification and coldness as feminized modes of compromised agency. Musser reads the chapter’s central texts—Pauline Réage’s The Story of O (1954) and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs (1870)—through Simone de Beauvoir’s analysis of female masochism (in The Second Sex [1949]) and Gilles Deleuze’s 1991 analysis of “coldness and cruelty.” Chapter Four moves from Fanon to Glenn Ligon’s text-painting Untitled (I Feel Most Colored When I am Thrown Against a Sharp White Background) (1990) to explore the temporality of masochism, in particular “becoming-black” as an atemporal primitivism—stagnant and stuck. Finally, Chapter Five explores masochism as an assemblage of pain, illness, and autonomy; Musser draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of “Body without Organs” to read the performance art of Bob Flanagan against and alongside Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals (1980).

In Musser’s reading, masochism sometimes serves to mask power and shore up racist, colonial, and patriarchal domination; at other times, masochism is a Foucauldian “technology of the self” that creates possibilities for agency and control. For example, in Chapter Two, the juxtaposition of Freud’s “A Child is Being Beaten” fantasy (1919) with Fanon’s “A Negro is Raping Me” fantasy, from Black Skins, White Masks, reveals masochism as the inversion of (white, colonial, racist) guilt. This structure returns in Chapter Four when Musser takes up Fanon’s analysis of the black body as an object of suffering that mobilizes (even as it masks) the masochism-as-domination of white, liberal subjects through the pleasures of empathetic comparison. In contrast, Chapter Three explores masochism as an agential technology of the self; O’s aesthetic practices and sensory coldness (in The Story of O) offer her “pockets of agency” in a patriarchal world (82). Musser describes both possibilities in Chapter Five. On the one hand, Flanagan, whose work took up links between desire, masochism, and the pain of cystic fibrosis, performs a “spectacle of suffering” that reinforces “his masculinity, domination, and whiteness” (123). On the other hand, chronic pain might decenter the (white) subject and instead “privilege a reorganization of corporeality so as to highlight new forms of affinity” (148). This reorganization is carried...