But femsub is broken too! On the normalisation of BDSM and the problem of pleasure

Abstract

Abstract This article constitutes a theoretical critique of the limits by which BDSM is policed by law and psychiatry from a feminist jurisprudential perspective. In particular, it discusses types of female masochism that disavow narratives of 'safe, sane and consensual' and BDSM's transformative potential and instead makes an argument for a feminist ethics of female masochism. Through an engagement with psychoanalysis and Jacques Lacan's notion of jouissance, the essay makes a claim that criminal law in this context functions as a kind of 'pleasure principle' and that the notion of 'harmful' consensual sexual experiences relies upon a normative tendency to relate feminine masochism with compliance, not only to the will of another, but with the social order of 'reproductive futurity'. Keywords: feminine sexualitycriminal lawpsychiatryfeminist theoryJacques Lacanqueer theorysexual ethics Acknowledgement My thanks go to Lisa Downing for her determination that this article should be part of this special issue, her patience and her guidance; to my supervisors at Reading, Carl Stychin and Aleardo Zanghellini, for their notes and suggestions; and to my friend, Adrian May, for his. Notes 1. The compound acronym denotes the activities and identities involved in the following: Bondage and Discipline; Dominance and Submission; Sadism and Masochism. 2. BDSM practices that are considered 'extreme' or 'dangerous' are thus said to provoke the greatest risks of psychic and physical harm. As Downing (Citation2007) suggests, the very notion of 'edgeplay' suggests that such practices function as being close to a 'limit', which also valorises their prohibition. 3. See Cooper (Citation1996) for three clinical case studies of autoerotic asphyxiation. 4. See R v. Wilson [1996] 3 WLR 125 for a demonstration of the legal precedent for how female masochism beyond 'trifling harm' is prosecuted under the Offences Against the Person Act (1861) as victimhood and was successfully appealed only by valorising masochism as a function of heteronormativity. There is thus a legal differentiation between women's experience of masochism and the 'accomplice' role in which the homosexual men in R v. Brown [1994] 1 AC 212 were situated. Matthew Weait's essay in the volume Safe, Sane and Consensual explores this differentiation through a queer critique. 5. It must be remarked at this stage that the term 'femsub' has been chosen for the purposes of this piece to mirror the terminology used in Bitchy Jones's Diary: 'femdom'. Its definition, although (in mirroring Bitchy Jones) used more generically to describe paradigms of feminine sexual submission and masochism, must therefore be taken in this article only to describe theoretically the desires and experiences I suggest. Additionally, in attempting to destabilise normalising and pathologising narratives of BDSM it would seem appropriate to use a term that has not been handed down through psychopathology. 6. Some work in psychology from a non-Lacanian perspective has begun to deal with dissolution/disintegration as the aim of BDSM (see especially Langdridge, Citation2005).