Sadomasochism in Everyday Life: The Dynamics of Power and Powerlessness - Hardcover

Chancer, Lynn S.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0813518075 ISBN 13: 9780813518077

Publisher: Rutgers University Press, 1992

Synopsis

Lynn Chancer advances the provocative thesis that sadomasochism is far more prevalent in contemporary societies like the United States than we realize. According to Chancer, sexual sadomasochism is only the best-known manifestation of what is actually a much more broadly based social phenomenon. Moving from personal relationships to school, the workplace, and other interactions, Chancer uses a variety of examples that are linked by a recurrent pattern of behavior. She goes beyond the predominantly individualistic and psychological explanations generally associated with sadomasochism (including those popularized in the "how to" literature of the recent Women Who Love Too Much genre) toward a more sociological interpretation. Chancer suggests that the structure of societies organized along male-dominated and capitalistic lines reflects and perpetuates a sadomasochistic social psychology, creating a culture steeped in everyday experiences of dominance and subordination.

In the first part of the book, Chancer discusses the prevalence of sadomasochistic cultural imagery in contemporary America and examines sadomasochism through several perspectives. She develops a set of definitional traits both through existential analysis of an instance of S/M sex and by incorporating a number of Hegelian and psychoanalytic concepts. In the second part of the book, she places sadomasochism in a broader context by exploring whether and how it appears in the workplace and how it relates to gender and race.

About this title

About the Author:

Lynn S. Chancer is an assistant professor of sociology at Barnard College.

From Publishers Weekly:

In this engaging but not wholly persuasive book, Chancer argues that skewed societal structures like patriarchy and capitalism provoke nonsexual sadomasochistic relationships at work, in families and between groups. Alternately accessible and abstruse, Chancer, who teaches sociology at Barnard College in New York City, ranges from critiquing popular culture and reflecting on her experience as a secretary to delving into psychoanalysis and existentialism. She claims that writers of pop psychology books ignore the role society plays in pushing relationships toward sadomasochism. In a bureaucratically stratified society, Chancer argues, people can be both victim and victimizer, venting feelings of racism, sexism or homophobia to compensate for their own class oppression. But Chancer paints with too broad a brush; it makes little sense for her to toss in a half-baked examination of South African repression. She says Sartre's analysis of how the anti-Semite needs the Jew reflects a sadomasochistic dynamic; however, masochism implies that the victim also gains some benefit, and in too many of her examples, Chancer does not address this issue.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0813518075
• ISBN 13: 9780813518077
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 252