Blowjobs with teeth: An alternative oral history of the sex wars

This article traces the development of the heterosexual blowjob as a symbol of the sex-critical thesis. I argue that the politics of this symbolism—as well as the materiality that sex-radicals used to combat it—is grounded in a Lockean concept of the rights bearing citizen, the Human, as inalienably in possession of a body and consent as the imprimatur of its contracts. These feminist investments in self-possession appropriate the abject position of the slave while disavowing the agency of dispossessed, sentient flesh. The second half of this essay turns to Gayl Jones's novel, Corregidora, to consider the lessons missed in the sex wars, still missing in the discourse of Sex Wars 2.0, when women's sexual subjectivity and agency is theorized from the self-possessed subject rather than the subject of its dereliction: the black woman/slave. Jones's novel explores the possibilities for agency that arise from the position of the slave, not as a metaphor to ground claims for civil rights but as a historical reality and a source of ongoing emergency for some women. Beginning from the sentient flesh possessed by someone else, Jones's novel depicts potentials for agency beyond the self-possession that seems to always lead to the impasse between “true” consent and our social, political and physical construction within and by patriarchy. How does Jones as an instance of black women theorizing compromised agency beyond its Human framing, revealing “something akin to freedom” in the choice to or not to enact the dictate of Andrea Dworkin's favourite “women's movement button”: “‘Don't Suck. Bite’”?