Noyes, John K. The Mastery of Submission: Inventions of Masochism Cornell University Press, 1997. Amazon
The following images came from Noyes’ book on masochism. It became apparent early in reading that I was in the hands of an inveterate Foucauldian. It was part of a spate of inter-library loan requests, brought on by Google Books, which all arrived within a week or so. I had a thick stack of academic texts to read over the holidays, and there were no renewals either.
From The Tricky Business of Being Submissive:
I’m not going to go into the history of slaves as a being subjected to cruelties and hardships. We all know these things existed and exist today. It happened to every race and every generation has suffered in some way, either directly or by way of the trickle down effect. This sort of slavery has nothing to do with a woman or man who calls himself slave in the BDSM style.
I have to disagree somewhat. After reading Marcus Wood’s Blind Memory and Slavery, Empathy and Pornography, as well as the references to slavery in Robinson Crusoe and Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Krafft-Ebing’s case histories, I believe that the BDSM idea of slavery evolved out of reactions to the idea of real life slavery.
Pro-slavery groups tried to idealize slavery as a means of uplift or a more equitable social arrangement than living in market capitalism. E.g. Crusoe’s domination of Friday is seen as right and just, an example of natural order asserting itself.
On the other hand, abolitionist texts, which endeavored to communicate the horror of slavery, had a strange interaction with the cult of sensibility, what we today would call sympathy. This is the idea that a heightened capacity for vicariously experiencing the feelings of others was a sign of mental refinement.
For example, Walt Whitman in Leaves of Grass wrote:
All this I swallow, it tastes good, I like it well, it becomes mine,
I am the man, I suffer’d, I was there.The disdain and calmness of martyrs,
The mother of old, condemn’d for a witch, burnt with dry wood, her
children gazing on,
The hounded slave that flags in the race, leans by the fence,
blowing, cover’d with sweat,
The twinges that sting like needles his legs and neck, the murderous
buckshot and the bullets,
All these I feel or am.I am the hounded slave, I wince at the bite of the dogs,
Hell and despair are upon me, crack and again crack the marksmen,
I clutch the rails of the fence, my gore dribs, thinn’d with the
ooze of my skin,
I fall on the weeds and stones,
The riders spur their unwilling horses, haul close,
Taunt my dizzy ears and beat me violently over the head with whip-stocks.Agonies are one of my changes of garments…
Whitman’s passage and other abolitionist fiction become a kind of exercise in which the poet (and by extension the reader) exercises his/her capacity for sympathy by imagining a slave, the most abject of people, and projecting into that role. You could compare it to a person who practices transvestism, constructing an alternate social role which allows people a different range of personal expression.
Arthur Munby was a prime example of this, a minor poet and author man who spent a lot of time and mental effort studying and imagining the interior experience of women who were at or near the bottom of the social ladder, and who developed a master-slave relationship with Hannah Cullwick. Munby would sometimes imagine himself, the gentleman, as the decorative, effeminate, dependent counterpart to the unadorned, masculine, protective servant woman.
Munby and Cullwick were both imaginative, and understood that their roles of master and slave were interdependent. However, the particular details of their fantasy scripts grew out of the pro-slavery and abolitionist media that were prevalent during their lives: novels, poetry, abolitionist propaganda, “Tom shows” in the streets and theatres, and the lingering residue of slavery in Britain. I’d even go so far as to say that without Atlantic slavery, BDSM as we know it today would not exist. BDSM is one of those “trickle effects” mentioned above.
From Mr. Meow’s LJ, more thoughts on interracial fantasy and BDSM:
Is race play becoming common in our PC world? Or is it relugated to some fringe groups, with people who have obvious problems. Why would any self respecting black person want to be owned by a white master? And additionally be called derogatory names. They must be SELF HATING is the first thought that comes to mind. I Feel sorry for these misguided souls.
What white domme would admit in a public forum his desire to own a black slave in the 21st century.
Or is it perhaps something that is deeper. Maybe this so called “Race Play” as I’ve heard it called is actually just the tip of the ice berg for racializing sexual fetishism that only those few in the so called “fringe” groups are bold enough to admit to themselves and in public. Whereas a plethora of race and sex politics exist and coincide in relative isolation in the deepest recess’ of a modern first world persons’ brain. Too unpleasant to admit even to oneself.
There are those who say that race is color blind and that its the individual not the race that one sees. Most often such statements are spoken by those who not subjected to the treatment ‘otherness’ brings.
If the historical roots of BDSM are the reactions to Atlantic slavery, then it is unsurprising that there are people today who fantasize about racial stereotypes. BDSM fantasy is built in a legacy of colonial literature and art, among other things, and we still, to this day, see the same archetypes and scenarios played out, over and over again.
Will there ever be a day when, say, an Asian woman can be seen by white people without the lingering influence of Madame Butterfly or the Dragon Lady? I don’t know. Maybe those archetypes exist in the human psyche, independent of and prior to any specific historical context. Centuries from now, those archetypes could attach themselves to some other social division.
About 2/3rds of the way through through Marcus Wood’s Blind Memory, I’m convinced that the imagery of Atlantic slavery is a very important aspect in the evolution of BDSM. There are many, many written and visual examples of slaves being beaten and otherwise tormented in abolitionist texts. Frequently, these images become an opportunity to depict the black female body nude or semi-nude in extremis.
When I first started reading about the Munby-Cullwick relationship, I had assumed it was based on classical slavery, which I thought a well-educated English gentleman would have read about. Then, when I saw how Munby drew working class women to strongly resemble caricatures of black men, I decided it had more to do with a once-removed image of American slavery, transmitted across the Atlantic in books like Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe and blackface minstrelry.
I’m working through David Kunzle’s “World Upside Down: The Iconography of a European Broadsheet Type” in Barbara A Babcock’s “The Reversible World.” I’m not sure if I’m actually onto something, or just following a red herring.
WUD is a genre of broadsheet published all over Europe from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century (if not later). It was a grid of images with captions, and not a comic strip in that there is no narrative connection between the images. Kunzle identifies several inversion motifs:
1. human to human (e.g. husband to wife, master to servant)
2. human to animal (e.g. hunter to hare, peasant to ox, woman to draft horse)
3. animal to animal (e.g. cock to hen, cat to mouse)
4. animal to element (e.g. fish in air, beasts in water)
5. animal to object (e.g. horse to cart)
6. object to object (e.g. tower to bell)
7. human to object (e.g. smith to anvil)
Types 1, 2 and 7 turn up a lot in fetish porn: femdom, ageplay/adult baby, pony/dog play, dehumanization. If you look at the work of, say, the House of Gord, you can see all of these themes, particularly types 2 and 7. The “femcar” is a modern version of ponyplay, the woman transformed into a component of a machine.
I think WUD imagery is a kind of prototype of pornography, horror and other “low” cultural forms. Kunzle puts them in opposition to books of proverbs, which demonstrate conservatism and the status quo, rather than the liberation and imagination of the WUD broadsheets. They were a popular form, and were connected to the peasant revolts of the early 1500s.
So, what’s the connection to kink? Maybe, some of the people seeing these images must have interpreted them as arousing. When the 19th century rolled around, bringing mass literacy, photography and the possibility of self-created media, people who connected with certain WUD images created more of those kind of images: femdom, pony girls, etc.
So where does maledom factor into this theory. A man dominating a woman is not an inversion of normality for human history. True, but there’s an additional element of inversion. If you look at the webcomics of Dofantasy.com, there’s a strong element of class inversion:
“A gang of lifers escape from a high security prison taking a bunch of beautiful young women as hostages…”
“They are at the top. They are the most beautiful and sought after young women on Earth… They have everything: fame, money, beauty, social recognition and a brilliant future… Kidnapped at gun point, roughly shackled and obscenely manhandled they are taken into a truck full of brutal, dirty, sweaty insurgents.”
“He has spotted new prey – a rich girl who had humiliated his alter ego on the subway that very same day…. In seconds the girl is caught and smuggled into the city sewers, where the villain has his hideaway.”
“The year is 1850. The place, a cotton plantation in the deep south. Mrs Scarlet O’Hanna is a rich estate owner whose husband died recently. She has two daughters, both beautiful and both sought after by young men of marriageable age. But the O’Hannas are a proud family, too good for the other families in the district…
Mrs O’Hanna runs her estate with stern hand, punishing the black slaves with great cruelty and a certain degree of sadism…
Her husband left a lot of debts and the estate will be confiscated. The estate, according to the sheriff, includes Scarlet and her young daughters Jennifer and Melissa…”
The majority of DoFantasy’s stories map class and race onto gender. The women are generally rich, beautiful and leisured, aristocrats, professionals or celebrities. The men are convicts, rebels, or even apes with human intelligence, to add an extra dimension of inversion. This is, of course, an homage to one of the kinkiest movies ever, which is also the WUD motif turned into a feature film: Planet of the Apes and its sequels and spin-offs.
What seems to be about gender at first actually seems to be about class, and specficially class revenge fantasies, which is a key theme in WUD imagery. This is what was happening in the early 16th century peasant revolts:
“The peasant bands, supported by urban proletariats, roved freely over large areas of Germany, burning and looting monasteries and castles… Peasant leader Jacklein Rohrbach, after degrading and executing the cruel Count Helfenstein, had the Countess, a daughter of the Emperor, dressed like a beggar (that is, one of their own) and sent on her way in a dung cart…. Knights in rags were compelled to serve their fassals at table. The peasants dressed themselves in knightly raiment and mimicked rituals.” Pg. 63-64
