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queernuck · 6 years

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When discussing hierarchy, flows that are both evidentiary of and the sustaining current within arboreality, and the machines through which these flows pass, the prefix of “sub” becomes rather clear as a rather singular word within a larger vocabulary. While it is frequently subordinated to status as a simple prefix, one eventually comes across the prefix-as-identity, as not a prefix but in fact a term unto itself, one tied to a certain understanding of sexual identity, potentiality, and what actions represent both subordination and dominance within sexual exchanges. The repetition of submission through the illustrative power of fetish in the pornographic, the means by which submissive subjectivities are created through certain aesthetic relationships retained in the pornographic, certain flows of fetishistic contrast like those explained by Badiou, are a foundational part of codifying narratives of gender, race, sexuality, and the coloniality of these arbitrating structures.

First, one must understand a few aspects of “sub” as an identity and how it relates to phallogocentric concepts of sexuality. The phallus is not strictly a singularity of any one organ, as Žižek (and undoubtedly Foucault) have explored in discourses around acts such as fisting. Žižek’s account of the fist-as-phallus is that it allows for a sort of “pure” means of phallic transference, and thus sexual connection, because it does away entirely with the sexual act as embodied in a singularity of the genital as penetrative object, approximations of genital objects as penetrative, so on: it is specifically in the fist, the arm taking on the role of the phallus that the phallic significations at hand become clear. The phallus is realized as penetrative, as able to seize upon a certain aspect of the penetrated, and from there the clarification and restoration of how Butler describes the phallogocentric concept of desire: in the woman being the phallic object of desire and the man possessing the phallus that must be affirmed by an acquaintance with the woman, entering into a relationship of fist-fucking thus represents an extreme development of this exact transference, its full embodiment and a restoration of the signifiers as muddied by the postmodern confusion of genitals and their assemblage brought about by trans identity.

Conversely, the role of “sub” is not solely linked to penetrative acts, in that there can be submission without any penetration, penetration as an act of reversal either of phallic desire or of flows of dominant phallic embodiment, the structuring of certain realizations of biopower in identity part of how the submissive becomes clear. The creation of the “power bottom” as a position is one such example, in that a power bottom is penetrated as described by phallic accounts of desire, but in fact in being penetrated enacts a reversal of the previous ideation of phallic desire: rather than being a phallic object of desire seized by this penetration, the power bottom reverses this flow such that in penetration they become the phallic object, seizing it from the one penetrating, a mirroring of becoming-penetrated that results in a change in the penetrating partner, the “power” at hand flowing out of the top into the bottom as a certain machine of collection not at the disposal of the top, but in fact such that the top functions as a body of libidinal pooling from which the bottom draws. This is, then, an assertion that penetration itself is not submission, is not the creation of a submissive relationship in itself but rather an act that signifies certain submissive actions in one sense or another.

The Derridean opposition between Dom and Sub, one that would imply that there cannot be a sub without a dom or vice-versa, is not applicable in an immediate sense, as there are frequently doms without subs, bottoms without tops, identities related to an implied flow of libidinal desire with directions written on the machines of the body, but no operator to turn the machines on. This, then, leads to the expansion of these identities past their realization in simple oppositions (the strict Derridean sense) and into ones of larger rhizomal relations of power, the realization of a biopolitical claim in identity as a certain party within sexual exchanges. This is clear in the proliferation of lifestyles of fetish that describe themselves as engaging in BDSM roleplay 24/7: to call this roleplay rather than simply identity is to imply that the performative acts at hand are somehow less genuine than any other, despite having an affect identical to other expressions of sexual desire and phallogocentric concepts of potentiality once one translates the language of fetish. The notion of a continual dom/sub relationship, one that is played out without a strictly sexual component, is itself unnerving in numerous fashions, especially in that it offers the development of the nonsexual fetish as part of a paradigmatic aspect of identity and identification, how this makes clear that structures of fetishization extend far beyond acts of sexual expression in themselves.

The commonality of fetishwear in more mainstream circles is not the particular worry at hand, although it certainly echoes it to some degree: rather, it is a kind of postmodern resignification of already-present flows of tension much like those present in Alain Badiou’s description of French pornography in Black: the black of leather, as a kind of fetish clothing, “stands in” for the explicit such that it can come closer to showing the genuine article than the censored: whereas a rather skimpy piece of fetishwear (leather and latex alike) can reveal a great deal about the topology of the body in an image through its emphasis of skin, shape, the creation of an imaginable-object, the revelation, the taking-off of the same was required to be censored in the pornography that Badiou describes. Thus, the language of fetish describes flows of sexual exchange that are not themselves sexual but rather sexual in a second-order fashion, aesthetic machines of sexual signification. The way in which homosexuality as a structural taboo, as a kind of structure-of-subjectivity, leads to a poststructural sense of performative embodiment in dress, conduct, public relationships and displays of affection (and affectation) means that the already-sexual homosexual subject is not further sexualized in necessity by fetish apparel. Rather, the making-apparent of certain sexual subjectivities that play with the phallus of phallogocentric desire, the uncertainty created by the reversals of powerbottoms or the absence of an easily-found lesbian phallus means that fetish and fashion often overlap. Conversely, the means by which identities of homosexual taboo are found in their violation, the creation of homosexual aesthetics of athelticwear, workwear, uniforms of all sorts means that there can be a fetishistic interpretation of high-visibility gear, biker apparel of all different sorts, and indeed even police or military uniforms as codified in the fascist influenced worked of Tom of Finland. These all realize a signification beyond action, the reappropriation of fashion into fetish leads to a flow of fetish into fashion: ravers and goths and rappers wearing bondage pants, harnesses as high fashion, the kind of sexual ecstasy of an event like the 2018 Met Gala.

Of course, this can have yet another turn, whereby the structure of dominance and submission becomes a codification of already-nascent structures of violence and their continuation through sexualized acts of fetishized expression that are not sexual unless explained by fetish, but inextricably evocative of the fetish and thus a proxy for the sexual itself. The genre of “femdom” pornography is a subset of pornography that concentrates on men as subs and women as dominant figures, the arousal coming rather clearly from the way in which this represents a reversal of power. That in capitalist terms this often is embodied by an exchange in which the woman is the worker, the woman’s life and livelihood is contingent upon a certain experience of submission on the part of the man, the offering of a submissive performativity as part of capitalist performative exchanges of labor, means that gendered subjectivities are still very much in place, and their flow through the machines of femdom aesthetics are part of informing how sexual expression can resignify the relations of sexual and implicitly gendered subjectivity. A certain subgenre within femdom is “Clothed Female, Naked Male” in which the two subjects of the pornographic gaze are just that, a clothed female and a naked male. The juxtaposition uses an absence of the fetishistic (leather, whips, so on) in clothing in order to further enhance the fetish-as-such: it is a fetishization of the non-fetish, a display of power that reduces it to performative acts in a rather fundamental fashion. This, in turn, is reflected in pornography that evokes “forced feminization” along with other similar fetishes, where a kind of becoming-woman is undertaken in reflection of the woman’s own becoming-woman by the man, a mirroring that is not response but ironic mimicry, in order to further develop the submission at hand. The ideological position is clear, the way in which this is interpreted is clear. It is through fetish, submission, an arousal based in repeating and restructuring the dominance of men that men take on becoming-woman, and thus, trans women are not women but in fact are simply acting out this fetish more generally.

That trans women are themselves often realized not as women but as bottoms, as submissive men, understood as such in relation to men and women alike, is thus part of the creation of an ontology of sex and gender that understands trans womanhood as only legible in terms of sexuality. A trans woman is a fetish, is hypersexual, can only exist as a sexual body. She may be a woman during a flow of sexual exchange, but this is only as a sort of emergence. When the flow stops, when she is not engaging in a sexual act, she is no long emerging as such, is no longer intelligible as a woman, becoming-woman. Instead, she is collapsed into the body of something that is not a man but sexed as male, in order to create the violent subjectivity necessary to maintain transmisogynist violence. To posit that transmisogyny is a radical root that preempts other forms of violence is to misunderstand this process: it is part of a rhizomal act of gendering the body, a kind of knot of rhizomality within arborescent flows of sexual identification. The roles present within sex are not only present during sex, and in fact are merely a single act of realizing these sexual subjectivities. Instead of being sexual in isolation, one finds that it is through psychoanalytic flows of phallic desire, the expectation of certain sexual subjectivities, the play of phallic signification upon the bodies of women, of those subjugated through the formation of gender as a proscribing tool of white supremacist colonization, of pedophilic and incestual concepts of desire (concepts that can easily be, and often are, enacted on the bodies of adults) that these fetishes, these fetishistic processes of identification, become clear.

It is in submission, then, that certain forms of dominance are asserted. Submission as a modality of interaction is not solely submissive, then, but rather a means of continuing certain flows, is part of the emergence of a space where one order contrary to other flows of desire can take place. In submissive acts of BDSM, otherwise-unacceptable acts of sexual violence can be justified by men against women, simply because of their resonance as acts of fetish play, of signifying fetishistic irony. The distance that fetish creates, the way in which it allows for that ironic evocation, the play of phallic desire, is a foundational part of the way in which transness, homosexuality, identification that rejects heteronormative structures of the sexualized nonsexual, can be formed. Fetish as evoked and mocked in drag, as used to signify community within bars and parties, as part of a larger aesthetic vocabulary and identification with one’s role in the signification of wide assemblages of biopower and biopolitics is integral. Foucault would have been a very different thinker if he had been a top, a great deal of Foucauldian theory’s understanding of the creation and expansion of power comes from the intimacy with which he experienced power as a gay man, as a student of psychology, and indeed, as a bottom. However, the insistence upon kink as an unmarked neutrality, a pure neutrality, rather than a descriptor of various modalities of relating bodies, leads to the conceptualization of it as something unremarkable, something that can be engaged in freely and without shame so long as basic rules are followed.

Even within these rules, one sees the creep of practices of grooming: the use of BDSM as a normalization of control and violence as expressions of “love” rather than as actions that are transgressive by their nature, the means by which understandings of “kink” as a natural phenomena becomes a means to justify an uncritical acceptance rather than a rejection of “nature” as a coherent category, the extension of this into the notion of “nonsexual kink” as a kind of violent process of desensitization, the creation of kinks whose sexuality seems incoherent, these are processes of violent codification of power. Incoherent kinks are plentiful and seem harmless, except when properly resignified in their original conception: an exertion of control over vulnerable subjects (most often children) and the creation of certain actions and aesthetics that can be then shared by predators in order to groom victims. The proliferation of such kinks on social media and the generation of what is, effectively, child pornography through such efforts is a genuine problem, one that is part of the larger structure of incestual and pedophilic taboos within society and the Oedipal traumas they carry: a justification of their presence, their violation, the roles they play in basic acts of identification. The means by which processes of grooming are often exerted across gaps that are not covered in legal structures of recognition, the means by which incest is limited to certain strict concepts of family to deny the sexual abuse of family friends, relatives who do not “share” blood, how pedophilia is limited to a demarcation of age such that the same relationship is considered legal and defensible when a subject is past a certain age despite the relationship being predicated on grooming that occurred far before this passage, this is part of how fetish represents biopower coming to fruition.

The schizophrenic signification of fetish, the means by which it rests in the apparent-nonsexual, how it involves resignification as the core of its being, is part of how sex and roles of sexual restructuring are woven into the most mundane of interactions. A kind of marriage between Janelle Monae and Michel Foucault provides a fitting finish. Fetish is a field that goes far beyond itself, to the point where any and every object-subject relationship, every relationship between subjects, every object-based relationship is in some sense sexual, sex itself being an expression of pure power, power being, of course, a fundamentally sexual kind of ecstasy, agony, singularity: the recursive, denatured, schizophrenic realizations at hand are part of late capitalist understandings of sexuality.

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