In the second half of the twentieth century, American culture was characterized by a social and political climate that feared sexual non-normativity—from the Cold War’s Lavender Scare, to the 1970s New Right’s “Save Our Children” campaigns, and the 1980s AIDS epidemic—and, paradoxically, by an expansion of sexual freedom and the proliferation of newly visible sexual subcultures—as evidenced by a two-page Life magazine photo spread of a gay, San Francisco leather bar in 1964, the Stonewall Uprising, the creation of gay liberation groups across college campuses, and ACT UP’s nationally televised activism. Amidst these shifting attitudes towards sexuality there was a growing cultural fascination with sadomasochism in both high and low art. SM in Postmodern America, covers four decades of cultural and literary production, examining the rise of sexually explicit—in particular sadomasochistic—representations in two fields that have traditionally been kept separate: postmodern American fiction and the texts produced by and for queer SM communities. Through literary analysis, historical research, and deep archival work, this project demonstrates the interrelatedness of postmodern fiction and non-canonical queer texts, developing a practitioner-based theorization of SM that intervenes in queer theory, literary studies, and post-WWII history.
Beginning with an overview of sadomasochism in canonical texts that span the temporal, political, and aesthetic range of high postmodernism—William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1959, 1962), Robert Coover’s short story “The Babysitter” from Pricksongs & Descants (1969), and Kathy Acker’s Don Quixote (1986)—my analysis focuses on how pleasure is represented and the details of specific sexual acts. This study of postmodern fiction radically revises literary scholarship that desexualizes postmodern representations of SM by limiting its function to the level of metaphor. I further develop this new approach to SM and articulate how SM functions as a positive and productive force for queerness through close-readings of practitioner-produced, queer SM erotica by John Preston, Patrick Califia, and Carol Queen. By establishing how SM produces knowledge, community, narrative innovation, and new modes of relationality, this project reclaims SM from the antisocial turn in queer theory. Through archival research on key SM authors and organizations, as well as a study of foundational, practitioner-produced texts—Larry Townsend’s The Leatherman’s Handbook (1972) and Samois’s Coming to Power (1981)—I articulate the relevance of a positive-productive understanding of SM beyond the textual realm and demonstrate how SM is both produced by and productive of narrative. Finally, I return to canonical fiction and deploy a positive-productive understanding of SM in my reading of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), and in doing so, this reading illuminates how postmodernist poetics are themselves intertwined with SM narrative practices.
By recuperating a body of literature that has been overlooked in both literary studies and queer theory—the essays, pornography, educational texts, and memoir produced by and for queer SM practitioners from the 1960s through the late 1990s—and linking it to canonical representations of sadomasochism in postmodern fiction, this study initiates a new understanding of SM that emphasizes its queer potentiality and productive possibilities, as opposed to the disruptive and abstract qualities emphasized in previous scholarship. In doing so, SM in Postmodern America reimagines the significance of embodied erotic practice in literature, in queer theory, and in culture.