Care of the Self and the Politics of Pleasure: Foucault, S/M, and Resistance

Abstract

This study explores consensual sadomasochism (S/M) as a contemporary expression of Michel Foucault’s “care of the self ” (epimeleia heautou), Greco-Roman practices aimed at cultivating autonomy through conscious regulation of body, pleasures, and social relations. Though historically distant, S/M shares self-regulation, ethical codification, and the fusion of pleasure and discipline. Emerging in the 1980s within gay subcultures amid HIV/AIDS and growing institutional control over sexuality, it operates as a technique of subjectivation and micropolitics of resistance. Rather than merely opposing norms, S/M invents modes of life beyond institutional capture, making pleasure a formative, ethically governed dimension of existence.