I am semi-reading this book. I can’t read it in its entirety for another couple of weeks. Its Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest by Anne McClintock. She says some interesting things. It’s a different view, and one that I can handle as I dislike psychology. I prefer sociology. This book deals with a kind of micro/macro power.
At one point she says that it is “less a biological flaw, or in the pathological expression of natural male aggression and natural female passivity, than it is an organized subculture shaped around the ritual exercise of social risk and social transformation.”
“To argue that in S/M “whoever is the ‘master’ has power and whoever is the slave has not,” is to read theater for reality; it is to play the world forward. The economy of S/M, however, is the economy of conversion; master to slave, adult to baby, power to submission, man to woman, pain to pleasure, human to animal and back again. S/M, as Foucault puts it, “constitutes one of the greatest conversions of Western imagination; unreason transformed into delirium of the heart. S/M is a theater of transformation; it plays the world backward.”
“S/M is high theater; “beautifully suited to symbolism.” As theater, S/M borrows its décor, props and costumery (bonds, chains, ropes, blindfolds) and its scenes (bedrooms, kitchens, dungeons, convents, prisons, empire) from the everyday cultures of power. At the same time, with its exaggerated emphasis on costumery, script and scene, S/M reveals that social order is unnatural, scripted and invented."