‘Does this hurt?’: feminism, pain and the problem of reification

Abstract

Feminist debates around sex have often revolved around the vexed question of whether women can achieve genuine pleasure under patriarchy. Some ‘sex-negative’ feminists have claimed that the entire debate around ‘pleasure under patriarchy’ rests on an ontological mistake: when women say that they experience sexual pleasure with men, what they mean by ‘pleasure’ is actually pain. On this view, pain is assumed to have an objective existence regardless of whatever the subject is experiencing. Positing such a gap between ‘feeling pain’ as a subjective state of affairs and ‘being in pain’ as an objective fact presupposes a ‘detectivist’ theory of subjectivity, whereby the subject is taken to relate to her pain as a reified object. Examining how detectivism has haunted different feminist traditions – from 1970s feminist consciousness-raising and MacKinnon's anti-sex feminism, to contemporary feminist critiques of liberal consent – I argue that a detectivist theory of subjectivity limits the critical horizon of a feminist politics of pain: it ends up politicising marginalised pain only at the cost of falsifying the subjective nature of pain itself.