Open AccessLegacies of Tortured Sensibility; or, what Shakira learned from Sade
Author(s) -
Courtney Wennerstrom
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
romanticism and victorianism on the net
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 1916-1441
DOI - 10.7202/1013276ar
Subject(s) - sensibility , torture , race (biology) , human sexuality , voyeurism , aesthetics , politics , transcendence (philosophy) , resistance (ecology) , reading (process) , precarity , phallic stage , psychoanalysis , gender studies , sociology , art , philosophy , literature , law , political science , psychology , human rights , ecology , epistemology , biology
Apropos of the title, this essay traces the surprising connections between theeighteenth-century pornographer and the contemporary Latina superstar’s portrayals oferoticized torture, as well as elucidates the cultural significance of what I am calling alegacy of tortured sensibility. By illuminating how the gendered spectatorialpolitics of sensibility—particularly in its fetishization of the (female/feminized) body inpain—continues to inform the numerous interlocking discourses of race, gender, and sexualitywe have inherited from Sade’s Europe, and especially from the early sentimental novel, thispaper demonstrates how the transnational artist taps into a Sadean resistance to figurationsof distressed hearts and flayed skin as sites of geopolitical and individual transcendence.Finally, examining 120 Days of Sodom and “La Tortura” side by side revitalizesattention to the ethical crisis surrounding aesthetic voyeurism: where does the anguish ofreading Sade—with his relentless scenes of corporeal torment—go