Sadomasochism: Deconstructing Sexual Identity through Power

The notion of ‘power’ is one of the most difficult to define, especially in the field of political philosophy, in which any time we try to elaborate a model of political ‘order’ we cannot avoid the reference to ‘power’ and hence to its definition. I maintain that even power is to be understood as a ‘social institution’, in the sense that it is a pattern of order aiming at reducing contextual complexity by selecting the most widely diffused world descriptions. In this article I address the notion of ‘power’ by means of investigating the case of sadomasochism (S/M), at the aim to let a (provisional) definition of power emerge from the discussion of a concrete case. I chose S/M because ‘power’ plays a central role in shaping the frame in which the interactions between its practitioners occur. The S/M ‘scene’ is a context in which all features can be negotiated, including the individuals’ sexual/gender roles usually performed in everyday life. This is because what is relevant in an S/M scene is not the identity of the performers, but the acting out of a specific pattern of power relation by means of giving and taking specific practices. But this implies also that the role(s) the partners decide to assume within the negotiated and then performed scene is not necessarily the same assigned to them by their cultural and social context. It is in this sense that S/M is not the mere reproduction of the established patterns of power within one’s society, but the staging of those same patterns re-interpreted at the aim of (sexual) pleasure. It is just by means of this ‘appropriation’ that S/M reveals itself as a means to subvert those same patterns of power.