The theoretical models for this dissertation bring together Gilles Deleuze’s aesthetic of masochism with discussions of queer temporality such as Elizabeth Freeman’s to analyze masochistic narrative desire and its affects, especially masochistic time. This project begins examining how a novel produces a masochistic subjectivity by situating the topic of BDSM sexuality in the lesbian feminist public sphere. I build on language, rituals, and ethics of the ethnographic study of Margot Weiss and the genre analysis of Lewis Call to situate a the discussion of BDSM after lesbian SM in the feminist science fiction and fantasy novels of Califia, Piercy, Russ, and Butler. I examine examples of sadomasochism in pornography, feminist science fiction, and neo-slave narrative to develop the formal features of masochism in contemporary texts. I compare representations of BDSM to distinguish between the accelerated temporality of sadism and the slowed temporality of masochism. I intervene into recent scholarship on sadomasochism in African American Literature by comparing the historical performativity of sadomasochism in neo-slave narratives with queer models of thinking about past. I consider the formal features of masochism, the poetics of delay, and I consider how anticipation works in science fiction discourse to discipline the reader to this temporality. I compare Delany’s sadomasochism in the science fiction novel with the sadomasochism of his pornographic novel, where I examine the dynamics of BDSM within the context of queer bonds. I continue the analysis of narrative, language, and masochistic time in Acker. Finally, I analyze the social masochism as an aspect of the masochistic aesthetic at work in Ishiguro.
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