a few more thoughts regarding history of sexuality vol. 1:
in class we started talking about how the bourgeoises distinguished themselves from the working classes via sexuality, but then that line of thinking got dropped (?). i'm still uncertain how this process operated originally and then again (in a completely different way) as sexuality was disseminated to the laboring class. first sexuality was used to enable an "aesthetics of existence" (happy, health, normal, etc.) but then what happens when the working class adopts this too? is it then that that bourgeoises brings in the notion of a repressed sexuality? hmm...
also: S&M. thoughts? might we think of these practices as experimentations in bodies and pleasures that counteract the repressive hypothesis? (roxy, can you respond to this one in term of desire.)
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I think the practice of S&M can both fall into/reinforce the discourse of the repressive hypothesis, and also, at times, counteract it. S&M can be seen as more kinky (read: liberated -- in the context of repressive hypothesis) than "vanilla" sex, and therefore simply reinforce the R.H. However, I also think that the staging of the practice of S&M can be read as evading traditional ideas of desire (something that exists unaided by discourses and practices, something that can be repressed and liberated). In the "staging" of the S&M space, bodies are set up as tools of experimentation in physical pleasure, not as "merely" as agents of desire that must act out their play. (although the S&M space is not "pure" because it depends so much on roles associated with discourses of sexual desire).
ReplyDeleteNow, desire: because S&M games incorporate the gamepieces of top/bottom roles, I think I think that these practices are too intimately caught up in tropes from the world of hetero/homo sexual identity to be a true challenge to the repressive hypothesis. S&M seems to typically require bodies to assume fields of intensity / sexualization.. which again, may be repressed or liberated.
There are other forms of practices of bodily pleasure that seem to me to escape more fully the repressive hypothesis (but I think, in these practices, we may have succeeded in obliterating desire -- is this desirable? =) Take two (or more) naked bodies in proximity, stimulating of appropriate nerve endings, without involving necessarily gendered bodies/sexualized bodies/sex roles. In the practice there is no identification with any particular type of sexed identify: the practice does not make one straight, bi, gay, top, bottom, liberated... it is simply an economy of bodily pleasures.
On second thought - in this situation, I don't think we've necessarily obliterated desire at all. Perhaps what we've obliterated is desire for connection with / fulfillment of a sexed identify --- while what we are left with is desire for bodily pleasures, tingling of nerve endings, risings and fallings of intensities in the nether regions, climax or not.