Michael Angelo Tata is an independent scholar, poet and essayist. He received his J.D. from Golden Gate University School of Law in San Francisco, California and his Ph.D.in English Literature from City University of New York. His Andy Warhol: Sublime Superficiality arrived to critical acclaim from Intertheory Press and has been translated into Turkish by Istanbul’s anarchist Sub Press. He has also been selected as a summer fellow at the New School for Social Research’s Institute for Critical Social Inquiry. He served as Editor-in-Chief of San Francisco’s Golden Gate University Law Review, which published his Comment “The Pleasure of the Contract: Legal Role Play from Leopold von Sacher-Masoch Through Noodles & Beef.” Most recently, his work on Constitutional Law and the visual arts appears in a special edition of France’s Revue Française d’ Études Américaines dedicated to nudity.
Michael Angelo Tata
Articles by Michael Angelo Tata:
The Sadomasochistic Cenote and Its Legal Upwellings
in Issue 100 | Holes (Jul 2022)Unenforceable sex contracts—the kind that establish distributions of power between dom and sub in SM role play—follow the same formula as regular old contracts. As an arena of performance, court proceedings also partake in sadomasochistic power play. None of this should be surprising. If sadomasochism can borrow from the legal sphere, why not the other way around?