TY - JOUR
T1 - Femdom, the libidinal edge of interfacial heaven
AU - Jeong, Seung Hoon
N1 - Copyright:
Copyright 2020 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2016
Y1 - 2016
N2 - The sadomasochistic subculture of "female domination," namelyfemdom, has formed a conspicuous mode of digital carnality that prevails among new media interfaces while radicalizing interactivity. The submissive man's relationship with the dominant woman is never simple here, not just pornographic but symptomatic of complex phenomena regarding power and society, media and life that shape our techno-libidinal age. This paper sheds light on its sexual, psychological, psychoanalytic and socio-ethical implications, drawing on and reframing theories about masochism, abjection, biopolitics, nihilism and so on. Full of paradoxes, femdom embodies a formally structured governance of sensation and determination, an exceptional law beyond normal law by which submission to a sexual sovereign leads to both the slave's self-deprivation and regain of freedom. His failed desire for the unobtainable object then takes on the Lacanian drive, the instant satisfaction of circulating around the void as if to constandy "edge" without closure, as typified in the digital loop of gif images. More precisely, desire and derive mingle indiscernibly in the disintegration of the Symbolic and the Real, of the private and the public that characterizes the self-destructive addictive culture of capitalist hedonism. In this context the femdom wonderland turns out to be a permeable network of numerous Dom/subs' life-building communities, a self-modulating interactive heaven of the undead desire-drive without outside, without nirvana.
AB - The sadomasochistic subculture of "female domination," namelyfemdom, has formed a conspicuous mode of digital carnality that prevails among new media interfaces while radicalizing interactivity. The submissive man's relationship with the dominant woman is never simple here, not just pornographic but symptomatic of complex phenomena regarding power and society, media and life that shape our techno-libidinal age. This paper sheds light on its sexual, psychological, psychoanalytic and socio-ethical implications, drawing on and reframing theories about masochism, abjection, biopolitics, nihilism and so on. Full of paradoxes, femdom embodies a formally structured governance of sensation and determination, an exceptional law beyond normal law by which submission to a sexual sovereign leads to both the slave's self-deprivation and regain of freedom. His failed desire for the unobtainable object then takes on the Lacanian drive, the instant satisfaction of circulating around the void as if to constandy "edge" without closure, as typified in the digital loop of gif images. More precisely, desire and derive mingle indiscernibly in the disintegration of the Symbolic and the Real, of the private and the public that characterizes the self-destructive addictive culture of capitalist hedonism. In this context the femdom wonderland turns out to be a permeable network of numerous Dom/subs' life-building communities, a self-modulating interactive heaven of the undead desire-drive without outside, without nirvana.
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U2 - 10.4000/estetica.1269
DO - 10.4000/estetica.1269
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85014625217
SN - 0035-6212
VL - 63
SP - 68
EP - 86
JO - Rivista di Estetica
JF - Rivista di Estetica
IS - 3
ER -