Date of Award

9-6-2024

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

Women's Studies and Gender Studies

First Advisor

Aqdas Aftab

Abstract

Over the past fifteen years, feminists have challenged the notion that sexual sadomasochism perpetuates racial and gender-based violence, and instead claim that the practice can be a powerful site to control and subvert oppression. In this thesis, I contribute to this growing discourse and argue that sensations experienced during practices of Black sexual sadomasochism and attention to the feelings and affects that arise from them can be used to mediate Black being in a violently antiblack United States. Through applications of Black feminist thought, Black anti-humanism, and phenomenology, I claim that antiblack oppression denies Black people the experience of tactile sensation, which mediates the body’s position as a perceiving subject. This denial of sensation, caused by colonial legacies of the transatlantic slave trade, commodification of the Black body, and by forced endurance of extreme violence, compromises Black ontology and ultimately denies access to the lived body and intersubjectivity. Close reading analysis of film pornography pieces Connection First (2023), and the written pornography piece “Reach” from the anthology Kink: Stories, demonstrates how attention to sensations experienced during Black sadomasochistic practice grants access to embodied subjectivity, and ultimately access to humanness. Additionally, recognition of Black sensation and embodied subjectivity breaks material, ontological, and epistemological histories that shape Black lives, allowing possibility for a fleeting existence outside of systems of antiblackness. Therefore, I argue that BDSM, a practice that is focused on sensation and evokes cultural memories of antiblack violence, may grant access to an ephemeral existence outside of these histories which dictate conditions of Black being. This movement, which I call transcendence, enables existence in a third-positionality between subject and object in which a person's existence is solely dictated by and for the self as opposed to being dictated amongst other subjects and objects. This shatters histories of antiblackness, and I suggest that this shattering makes BDSM a site which contains a kernel of liberatory power.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

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