An exercise in ickiness.

But it is a beginning. This is the copy I submitted to the prospectus workshop last week. Nothing has changed, though folks recommended I re-arrange the order of some of the paragraphs, and Bruce Smith wanted me to focus more on what I mean by “erotics” . . . a good question, an important question, as all of the writing I’ve done in the past four years uses some version of “erotics” as a major guiding concept.

As for the order: all I can think is that I need to read more. Much more. And writing is so daunting at this stage of thinking.

***

First, please forgive the holes that exist in this proposal. I forced myself to let some of them, many of them, remain, in order simply to move forward with this first draft of the proposal, in order to see what would come of writing it all out, regardless of rightness and wrongness and the various leaps of faith and suspensions of disbelief required . . .

Second, please consider the following questions as you read:

• What doesn’t make sense?
• What needs more explanation and/or more sources (beyond the obvious gaps)?
• What parts of my language and style seemed forced and/or cheesy and/or inappropriate?
• Do any texts occur to you that I might add to my reading list?
• Is this at all what a dissertation prospectus should look like?
• Too ambitious?
• Any ideas for committee members?

Sadomasochism is a term that generates both an absence and excess of feeling, a blank look or a grimace or a spark. It is a term that does many things and no-thing. At once it is both common knowledge as the primary structuring of power in our daily lives, the reason we suffer for pleasure and suffer in the academy, forming the dismissive and self-evident language we use to talk about reading and writing, to analyze themes of pain and pleasure in literature and in our relationships; and also a dead-end kind of knowledge that, once invoked, appears to shut down possibilities: You’re so masochistic or That film is so sadomasochistic. It is both to be avoided and unable to be avoided. It is both perversion, and yet too common to be perversion. USE FREUD HERE. It is, decidedly, both / and, functioning in the movement of dialectic. SAY MORE. Sadomasochism is already known and yet never completely understood (recognized). It is misrecognition (??? a term used by Sedgwick and Miller, but I still haven’t exactly figured out what they mean, I think it might come to us from psychoanalysis . . . .). [I want to have some sort of introduction like this that doesn’t necessarily “tell a story,” but which does immediately introduce the complexity of the term I’ll be exploring. Something creative. The current state of this paragraph feels as if I am definitely making way too many assumptions . . . but is this inevitable? Je ne sais pas . . . ]

The primary goal of my project is to complicate the way sadomasochism is theorized among the disciplines of literary, cultural, and queer studies. My project will trace and create a genealogy between the sadomasochism burgeoning in nineteenth century British literature and culture through to the sadomasochism practiced in elite subcultures in the contemporary United States. I will trace sadomasochism as a passion, an obsession, an undercurrent and current; most importantly, however, I will trace it as a complex erotics manifested at both thematic and formalistic levels of texts and practices.

But this will not be a chronological tracing, rather a movement between and among moments, circular, turning in upon itself. This project will deal with three moments: one, the importance of sadomasochism as both theme and form in the nineteenth century; two, the obsession (direct and indirect) with sadomasochism by queer theorists of the nineteenth century; three, narrative theory that makes use, directly or indirectly, of forms and themes of sadomasochism [genre theory???]. Rather idealistically, perhaps, I envision this project creating a queer feminist narrative theory of the erotic from the forms and themes of sadomasochism, using nineteenth century British literature and culture as a place to begin, but not necessarily a place to remain.

INSERT PARAGRAPHS ON THE IMPORTANCE OF THIS PROJECT AND HOW VARIOUS COMPONENTS OF THE PROJECT HAVE ALREADY BEEN FRAMED BY OTHER SCHOLARS . . . .

• what the 19th c lit theorists say about sadomasochism
• what queer theorists say about it
• what narrative theory says about it
• how it is usually theorized from primarily a male perspective
• what I say about it!!!