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I begin this book with an origin story to hint at my stakes in the topic at
hand. Hoping that my confessional will have a seductive effect on the
reader, I wrote a dramatization of a micro-battle in which I engaged
(both internally and externally) during the so-called feminist sex wars.
Both personal and biographical, the impact of the narrative relies on
memory to project the past onto a screen of truth. Yet such a documentation
of past experiences, as Hayden White has pointed out, “arises
out of a desire to have real events display the coherence, integrity, fullness,
and closure of an image of life that is and can only be imaginaryâ€
(White 1987, 24). The chronology of my screenplay offers a classic narrative,
complete with the initial set-up (establishing my affiliation with
the feminist community), catalyst (meeting Daphne, who challenges
my feminist understandings of sexuality), rising action (arguments
with Daphne and then Dragyn about the meaning of s/m), climax (attending
a fetish night), and denouement (doing legal research on sexual
rights). As White observes, “Where in any account of reality, narrativity
is present, we can be sure that morality or a moralizing impulse is present
too†(24). The story romanticizes sexual alterity, with an underlying
critique of the ideological constraints around sexual citizenship.1 In
short, accounts of s/m – including my own – always involve normative
storytelling. This book investigates some of the stories society spins
about the truth of s/m.
Practitioners tell us that s/m rests on appropriating social hierarchies,
restaging power imbalances, and/or re-signifying pain within a
consensual context. As such, s/m desires are based on the drive to retell a particular story, to replay a particular scene, but in a way that seeks to
transmute the social scripts from which it borrows (McClintock 1993,
89). But my focus here is not on s/m itself. Rather, I examine how three
major cultural discourses and frameworks about s/m – science, feminism,
and film – interact with one another, and with law’s construction
of s/m as an object of knowledge.
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