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

This study explores consensual sadomasochism (S/M) as a contemporary expression of Michel Foucault’s “care of the self ” (epi-meleia heautou), Greco-Roman practices aimed at cultivating auton-omy through conscious regulation of body, pleasures, and social rela-tions. 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 in-stitutional control over sexuality, it operates as a technique of subjec-tivation and micropolitics of resistance. Rather than merely opposing norms, S/M invents modes of life beyond institutional capture, mak-ing pleasure a formative, ethically governed dimension of existence.