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  • Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism by Amber Jamilla Musser
  • E. Hella Tsaconas (bio)
Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism. By Amber Jamilla Musser. New York: New York University Press, 2014; 254 pp.; $89.00 cloth, $24.00 paper, e-book available.

Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism exceeds the limitations of framing masochism solely as a formal and instrumental bodily practice. Instead, Amber Jamilla Musser pursues a tactical account of masochism as an assemblage in which an array of histories, figures, practices, and relationships interanimate to provide a critical space for investigating how the power structures of race are mediated through the physical and affective sensations of pain, suffering, sympathy, empathy, and guilt. Musser resists the commonplace assumptions that have attended SM scholarship, offering a unique approach foregrounding questions of race and sex and turning to sensation in order to account for difference without relying on the reification of identity.

The introductory chapter, "Theory, Flesh, Practice," traces masochism's theoretical, discursive, and historical trajectories with rigor. Musser narrates the scientific emergence of masochism in sexology under Richard von Krafft-Ebing and in psychoanalysis under Sigmund Freud, as well as its subsequent uptake by Michel Foucault and in queer theory. Musser devotes careful attention to the significant differences in each of these discursive formations—and what such distinctions have done to shape the critical deployments of masochism—but argues that they are fundamentally congruous. Musser highlights the shared attachment to framing masochism as an exceptional and subversive practice "that creates an outside to modernity" (17) while serving a crucial role in the production of an implicitly white and male liberal modern subjectivity it purports to oppose. Musser's refusal to ascribe inherent subversiveness to masochism, and her investment in demonstrating the ways that its dominant readings reify sexist and racist power relations, is a radical intervention that enables a profound reframing of what masochism might do politically. She asks, "What would it mean to see masochism not as a practice of exceptionalism or subversion but as an analytic space where difference is revealed?" (19).

Musser answers this question by assembling a wide-ranging archive of theoretical perspectives, historical sites, textual and aesthetic objects, and sexual practices that have more and less obvious relationships to her driving signifier. Many will be familiar to scholars working at the nexus of gender, sexuality, critical race, and performance studies, but Musser offers unique readings of and new relations amongst her objects through their unexpected pairings and placements and through the deployment of a methodological approach she names "empathetic reading" (19). Drawing from Gilles Deleuze's "reading with love" (1995:9), Elizabeth Freeman's concept of erotohistoriography (24), and Carolyn Dinshaw's "touch across time" (24), Musser's embodied methodology dwells in the intimate, sensational connections between reader, text, and object. Musser asserts that her goal of prioritizing sensation as a way to understand power structures "at a level beyond the discursive" (23) requires such a method. The result is an exceptionally constructive scholarship that avoids establishing for-or-against binaries even while enmeshed in long polarizing debates.

Chapter 2, "Specters of Domination," begins the work of establishing masochism as "a symptom of the normative" (26). Musser sets up an unexpected analogy between the figure of the black butch within feminist debates about sexuality in the 1980s and the figure of the black man under colonialism in Frantz Fanon's work, arguing that these two victims of white heteropatriarchy are nonetheless forced to serve as fear-mongering specters of domination within a white imaginary that disavows its own power by dwelling in the fantasy of a masochistic position. The third chapter uses The Story of O (1954) to ask after the structures of feeling that attend subjectivity within conditions of complicity and precarity. Musser focuses on the sensation of [End Page 184] coldness—a materialization of affective withholding—as one such strategy of feminine subject formation within conditions of constraint.

In the following chapter, Musser argues that "black subjectivity has been ignored in favor of the signifying power of the black body in pain" (113). Musser tracks the reduction of blackness to the biological in Fanon's work and delivers a stunning psychoanalytic...

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