Department Member, School of Culture and Communication
Thesis Title: Sadomasochism as Aesthetic Sexuality: a Cultural History
|
David Bennett
Clara Tuite |
About
A summary of my forthcoming book, to be published by Continuum Press (New York) in 2013:
Foucault’s ars erotica, one of the most enigmatic concepts in the study of the history of sexuality, has been largely overshadowed by the study of scientia sexualis and its creation: sexuality constructed as a natural, inborn and permanent function of the body, a truth to be discovered and analysed, whereby sexual acts and desires became involuntary manifestations of a fixed biological cause. Foucault argues that modern Western society has only found room for the scientia sexualis whilst ars erotica belongs to Eastern and ancient societies, although in his late essays he suggests that reinvoking ‘sex as aesthetics’ may be a useful political strategy for marginalised sexualities. Ars erotica, then, is framed as preceding sexuality and as a possible replacement for it. In my book, I suggest that modern Western society has indeed witnessed a form of ars erotica, encompassed in what I term ‘aesthetic sexuality’, which I argue has existed since the eighteenth century.
To argue for the existence of aesthetic sexuality, I show how sexuality is constructed as having aesthetic value, a quality that marks this experience as a form of art. Value and meaning is located within sexual practice and in pleasure rather than in their underlying cause; sexuality’s raison d’être is tied to its aesthetic value, at surface level rather than beneath it. Aesthetic sexuality is a product of choice, a deliberate strategy of self-creation as well as a mode of social communication, and therefore is not a function of certain individuals but can be chosen and cultivated by potentially any individual on the basis of its intended aesthetic value. In contrast with the legal, medical, and psychiatric discourses and practices that composed the scientia sexualis, I suggest that aesthetic sexuality is founded upon discourses pertaining to aesthetic theory and philosophy.
I construct a cultural history of aesthetic sexuality through the case study of sadomasochism. Each chapter responds to my argument by demonstrating the evolving aesthetic value of sadomasochism, the different ways in which the practice is constructed as art, demonstrating how different aspects of aesthetic sexuality are emphasised in different historical periods. I begin this cultural history by examining novels by the Marquis de Sade using the aesthetic philosophy of Kant, Shaftesbury, Hutcheson, Hume and Burke, before using the aestheticism of Walter Pater to discuss the sadomasochistic poetry of Algernon Charles Swinburne and the novel Torture Garden by Octave Mirbeau. I then provide an exposition of Nietzsche’s aesthetics in order to show its influence on constructions of sadomasochism by Bataille, Réage and de Berg. The aesthetics of Baudrillard, Foucault, Jameson and Butler are used to examine American political and pornographic writing from 1981 to the early twenty-first century. I conclude this book by investigating what the model of aesthetic sexuality developed in the preceding chapters reveals about the most conspicuous articulations of sadomasochism in popular culture today, that is, in mainstream fashion and the subcultural forms defined against it.
