Summary :
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 imaginary” (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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