Date: Wed, 6 Jan 1999 13:32:46 -0700 (MST)
From: Jean M Hazell <jhazell-AT-U.Arizona.EDU>
Subject: Re: aesthetic bottoms



Robert,

I found your initial posting witty, humorous, critical and provocative.  I
looked forward to the ensuing theoretical discussion that could follow
upon the various threads you spun out into the ether of awareness. I was
consequently disappointed at the responses which simplistically focused on
the homosexuality in your posting.  I saw the homosexuality as a context,
not as the critical focus.  So thank you for once again twisting the
thread back to a critical exploration of sexuality, singularity, and
relationality

In exploring fetishism, William Pietz states, "Sensuous desire is the
direct 'aesthetic' expression and apprehension of purposes and intentions
within the subjectively objective world of immediate experience." The
'sensuous desire' then for 'aesthetic bottoms' is a growing
phenomenological experience along not only homosexual, but heterosexual,
bisexual, and asexual relationships as well. The BDSM 'subculture' (can it
still qualify as subculture when it enjoys bourgeois focus, attention,
financing and advertising?) has become the 'sensual desire' of Internet
participants/communicants (yes, religious overtones are infused
throughout), with a re-presentation of aesthetic and ascetic subjectivity. 

The aesthetics of bottoms, Tops, orifices, limbs, power, sexuality,
sensuality, pleasure, pain, sacrifice, and control has always been
delightfully complicated though the rhetoric of heterosexual subjectivity
has obscured or elided these layerings. In one effort to problematize the
normative notions of sexuality, Delueze highlighted the negation in Sade's
works and the disavowal in Sacher-Masoch's texts. Though most
self-identified S/Mer's don't theorize negation and disavowal, the
present-day BDSM culture does define itself along the masochistic
disavowal properties which 'consists neither in negating nor ever
destroying, but rather in radically contesting the validity of that which
it is" (Coldness & Cruelty). The growing (sub)culture's normativity of
bottoms as aesthetically pleasing,  functional, expressive, and desirous
complements the initial quest Robert stated for a new lively posting along
variant subjectivity lines.

Jean

ps. michelle, thanks for the hole/rim post. How do you read Piezt's
definition of sensuous desire?