one thing i find really fascinating about RESCUE HOUND is kione's initial reluctance to become sartha's new handler. when kione, out of passionate fury, takes sartha "off the leash" after their sparring session, she worries--perhaps halfheartedly--that she is no better than Handler herself: "This is what they did. The bad guys. Stripping her. Touching her. Kione isn’t like them if she goes through with this, is she?" however, this guilt is revealed to be a kind of self-defense mechanism of the ego when we learn a little later that: "She’s been rock hard ever since she dropped Hound’s trigger phrase." despite her conscience, her body is communicating something vital to her.
another interesting facet of this first violation is that kione forces sartha to top. although this is, we learn, the same arrangement they had prior to sartha's houndification, there is a decidedly different tenor to it now, for sartha is no longer happy to dom, exactly. what's striking to me about this moment is the way it seems to invert a trans woman's dysphoric humiliation at being the de facto top. when she forces sartha (cis) into an unwanted dominant position, kione (trans) is revisiting and reversing this originary transfeminine trauma.
in this light, then, we can read her subsequent guilt as a sort of gender dysphoria. kione asks herself:
"how could she have done that to Sartha? Why did she get so angry after their sparring session? Why hadn’t she been able to stop herself? And why had it all felt so fucking good? . . . after what she did, is she really any different [from Handler]?"
kione cannot express her own sadism consciously. she is genuinely baffled by the fact that she experienced physical pleasure this way. the pornographic logic of sartha's very existence seems to draw out an unconscious desire in kione. her obsession with "healing" or "curing" sartha's trauma through "roleplay," through rituals of erotic intensity, is therefore really also an unconscious way of trying to heal herself.
when sartha tries to seduce the guilty kione into another sexual encounter, kione notes that, "[Sartha's] voice is so breathy. Feminine, melodic, seductive. It’s so wrong for Sartha Thrace. But who could ever resist it? " in other words, where sartha was tomboyish before, she has since become almost cartoonishly cissexual. this causes kione to become erect: the embodied intensity of the scene bypasses the anxiety of the dynamic, which is after all somewhat silence of the lambs. the prose pays an almost transmisogynistic amount of attention to the physical difference between the two women, signalling the intensity of kione's dysphoria, as well as reminding the audience that this scene is occurring within the historical context of transphobia.
sartha and kione are both able to interact with the throbbing wound of their respective traumas (handler in the former and transphobia/dysphoria in the latter) through the deployment of sadism and masochism. indeed, in this most unconscionably unethical moment, sartha and kione sketch out a model of ethical cnc, the use of overhwelming sadism to heal or come to terms with the traumatized ego.
we might consider this an example of what the critic Avgi Saketopoulou calls "exigent sadism," which she defines in her book sexuality beyond consent:
This force is sadistic, in that it taps into the anarchic, unbinding properties of the sexual drive, and it is exigent, in the sense that it has to do with following without reserve the draw toward opacity. It entails a recognition that one has to do what is necessary (though not in the utilitarian sense) to intervene against mastery, exerting a certain violence on the ego’s tendency to bind. In exigent sadism, we enter into an adventure with all of ourselves, not to make something specific happen but risking the breaking down of our ego and/or curating aesthetic experience that may foster the other’s overwhelm.
kione thus marshals, wittingly or not, the full anarchic power of unrestricted sexuality to heal sartha's trauma as well as to encounter the full weight of her own in this sexual space unbounded by the ego.
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