Abstract
Turning to the topic of sexual vulnerability, this chapter offers a critical approach to a reductive naturalization of the functions of the human body. The chapter approaches the phenomenon of sexual arousal in terms of a process of sensemaking or cognitive and discursive accomplishment. Through a discussion of the different sexological accounts of James Giles, Robert Stoller, and Leo Bersani, focus is placed on the dynamic of sexual arousal as oriented around the oppositional pair of safety and danger. The chapter suggests that raising questions of safety and danger offers a way of articulating arousal as a relation of power in which the very boundaries of embodied subjectivity are at stake. In opposition to the predominant naturalistic doxa according to which sexual arousal is seen as a natural or physical phenomenon that only in a second step is framed by different discourses of regulation, arousal must be understood as always already discursive, normative, moral, and political. Shifting focus from an interrogation of how social norms and morality restrict sexual arousal, the author instead contends that arousal is inherently moral in so far as it reflects cultural beliefs about good and bad and feeds on specific moral situations tied to particular sexual economies and structures of regulation.
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Notes
- 1.
These two terms will be used interchangeably throughout this essay.
- 2.
When I speak of arousal as moral behavior, this is to be understood along the lines of Gayle Rubin’s discussions of moral norms which regulate sex (1984/2008).
- 3.
Even if one chapter of Giles’ book is devoted explicitly to the question of gender, I would argue that this part of his argument is only marginally interesting in this context insofar as it rests on a problematic idea of gender relations as complementary which, for instance, leads him to make assertions such as “[M]y gender presents itself as only half of an interlocking twoness” (Giles 2008, 123).
- 4.
This would, for instance, render the position of the masochist unethical insofar as it treats the subject as univocally vulnerable. The double moral standard of the masochist, according to which he gains moral superiority in relation to the sadist through the act of being violated, does not solve this but only shows the rigidity of the relation. On the manifest, physical level, it is the sadist which has the power and the masochist which is subordinated. On the latent, moral level, it is the masochist which represents the good and the sadist which is in the wrong. The weakness of this relation according to the ethics which Giles suggests would then be that activity and passivity – which of structural necessity belong to both parts of the sexual interaction – are split up and reduced to a rigid opposition.
- 5.
As such, the repeated drama of esthetic excitement parallels the emotive structure of ressentiment as a simultaneously cognitive and emotional repetition or reliving of harm which was once directed at the individual (Denzin 1993). Precisely as in resentment, the pervert is obsessed by the re-feeling of this once inflicted harm, as well as by the accompanying fantasies of revenge and of taking back what that act of violence once deprived him or her of. In the same manner, the subject of esthetic excitement in Stoller’s view is caught in an eroticized replay machinery – that is, in an imaginary scenario in which he or she gets even and where debts are cleared through the extraction of erotic enjoyment.
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Palm, F. (2016). Sexual Arousal, Danger, and Vulnerability. In: Käll, L. (eds) Bodies, Boundaries and Vulnerabilities. Crossroads of Knowledge. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22494-7_7
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