Thinking kink: Reflections on the cultural study of BDSM

When I was invited—as a senior scholar (!)—to write a reflection on my history studying BDSM for this special issue of Sexualities, I remembered attending a dinner about fifteen years ago to celebrate the publication of Charles Moser and Peggy J Kleinplatz’s edited volume, Sadomasochism: Powerful Pleasures (2006). My chapter in that volume was my first real publication in the field, and so I was eager to celebrate—Charles Moser had generously invited me to submit work to their special issue in 2002, while I was still a graduate student finishing up several years of dissertation fieldwork on BDSM in the Bay Area (late one evening at the San Francisco Noe Valley munch, if my memory is correct). At one point over dinner, the conversation turned to the possibility of beginning a BDSM research network, to advance academic work on BDSM. ¹ At the time, I was rather jejune about the whole thing: I didn’t want to be known as a “BDSM Researcher”, I remember thinking; I wanted my research on BDSM to be about something larger—neoliberalism, sex politics, capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy.

I think back to this moment now, as Sexualities devotes a special issue to the field of BDSM studies—the field then, and the field now. In what follows, I draw on my personal narrative to reflect on the multiple genealogies of something we could call “BDSM studies”.

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In 1998, when I started my PhD in Cultural Anthropology at Duke University, I knew that I wanted to research sexuality, continuing the work I had done in gay and lesbian studies with Gilbert Herdt while an undergraduate at the University of Chicago. But I wasn’t yet sure of a project. I wholeheartedly embraced the queer turn away from identity, and I knew that I wanted to center the intersections of sex, power, and American culture; I was especially taken by the “sex wars” arguments in feminist studies over the meaning of radical sexual politics. As I read and reread Patrick Califia, Gayle Rubin, and Michel Foucault’s interviews (Califia-Rice, 1994; Califia and Sweeny, 1996; Foucault, 1996; Rubin, 1987, 1991, 1997, 1998; SAMOIS, 1987), the outline of what would become my research project on BDSM slowly came into focus.

In the summer of 2000, I went to San Francisco to spend June and July doing preliminary research. I contacted the facilitators of discussion groups and munches, and sent out emails introducing myself and my project. By the end of July, I had joined The Exiles and the Society of Janus, interviewed ten people who played key roles in the Bay Area pansexual scene, and attended multiple play parties, celebrations, classes, and workshops—including the charity benefit “slave auction” and play party that I drew on to open the book my dissertation eventually became, Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality (2011). The people I talked to and the scene I participated in in the Bay Area gave me much to think about in terms of sex, power, and performance. But I was also taken by surprise by how important the political economy of the larger Bay Area was to the BDSM scene: how much gentrification and urban “redevelopment” had reshaped the erotic landscape of San Francisco, how critical the rise of Silicon Valley tech was to the growth of online pansexual BDSM sociality, how the diversification of niche markets and proliferation of consumer desires was reflected in BDSM gear and expertise. As I stood at the edge of the play party and watched a white man beat a Black woman, his submissive and partner, with a wad of the play money from the preceding auction (see Figure 1), I knew that to understand BDSM, I had to think across capitalism, race, sexuality, gender, and performance—and that it was in and across these multiple social relations and nexus of power that BDSM came alive both for practitioners and as an object of analysis.OPEN IN VIEWER

When I got back to North Carolina in the fall of 2000, I began to sketch out what would become my dissertation. My initial research question was focused on the relationship between BDSM and broader social norms; “how do BDSM practices, performances, and discourses reflect and/or contest normative understandings of sexuality based on race, class and gender?” I asked, in one of my first (unsuccessful) grant applications—funding for BDSM-related projects was then (as now?) a challenge. My goal was to contextualize BDSM within the Bay Area’s specific cultural and economic landscape. I wanted to think about sex politics and late capitalism and racialized performance—together. I began assembling my bibliography, for my qualifying exams. I defined my geographical area as “Cultures of the United States” and my two conceptual/topical areas as “Gender/Sexuality” and “Theories of Subjectivity and Power”. Gender/Sexuality included feminist and queer anthropology, feminist and queer theory, and, at the end, what I called “SM Literature”.

Looking at this list now I am struck by how disparate it was—an eclectic mix of psychoanalysis, sexology, philosophy, critical theory, sociology, and community studies “on BDSM”. For what “BDSM” (or, more likely, “sadomasochism” or “S&M”) meant in this work was wildly discordant. In social psychology, sexology, and some strands of psychoanalysis, I could trace BDSM studies back to Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis, forward through Sigmund Freud to mid-century American sexology with Alfred Kinsey and his colleagues, up to the important sexological interventions in the 1980s and 1990s by scholars like Charles Moser (Levitt et al., 1994; Moser, 1998). ² In this strand, newer work sought to de-pathologize BDSM practice, pushing clinicians and social scientists away from stigmatizing approaches to fetish and kink, and instead grounding knowledge about BDSM practitioners and etiology in empirical research methods. Meanwhile, in philosophy and critical theory, the “study of BDSM” was something quite different. In, for instance, Gilles Deleuze’s reading of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (1991) or in the literary criticism of the Marquis de Sade, “sadism”, “masochism”, and “sadomasochism” were understood less as individual paraphilias and more as abstracted social dynamics—relations variously understood as Oedipal, between reader and text, of the subject in language, of power in its broadest sweep. As Lynn Chancer put it at the conclusion of her book-length study of the fundamentally sadomasochistic nature of contemporary American culture, Sadomasochism in Everyday Life, this definition of “sadomasochism” is of such a different nature from community-based consensual BDSM play as to render the latter “almost nonsadomasochistic” (1992: 188, ital. in org.).

It was vertiginous to read a statistical study on the characteristics of women interested in pain play alongside Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain (1985). Vertiginous and frustrating: as a budding cultural anthropologist, I longed for more work that centered culture, particularity—work that neither individualized and data-fied BDSM, nor abstracted it as motif or paradigm. And so while I gathered many insights from this broad array of work, I did not find within it models for my own. For me, the scale was off—it was either too individual, psychological, etiological or else too general, abstracted, gestural—with very little in between.

Very little, but not nothing. Before mine, there was one dissertation on BDSM in anthropology: Gayle Rubin’s (1994) dissertation on gay leathermen in San Francisco, published as essays. Hers was a somewhat daunting but also inspiring precedent, linking leather culture to gentrification, urban “development”, HIV/AIDS, and other local cultural transformations. I turned, also, to sociologist Thomas Weinberg, who had long encouraged sociologists to study BDSM as a subculture. Weinberg’s tantalizing note that BDSM emerges in societies with “embedded dominance-submission relationships”, “unequal power distribution”, and “enough affluence for the development of leisure and recreational activities” (1994, reprinted in his crucial collection S&M: Studies in Dominance and Submission 1995: 300) was another starting place to connect BDSM to capitalism and social hierarchy. ³ And I read the by-then very large body of community and journalistic work on BDSM: practitioner-oriented reflections, guides, anthologies, and how-to books ⁴ —each containing crucial insights.

But my main inspiration remained queer and feminist analysis of BDSM: Rubin, Califia, Foucault, but also Lynda Hart (1998), Joel Brodsky (1995), and Karmen MacKendrick (1999). Searching for ways to theorize sex, gender, power, community and capitalism, race, class, I turned also to queer theory, queer anthropology, theorizations of US neoliberalism and late capitalism, and cultural and performance theory. I drew on Lynda Hart’s analysis of lesbian SM, power, and performance to think more about the “real world” and the “performed scene” in conversation with Miranda Joseph’s (2002) reading of the capitalist performativity of “community,” Judith Butler’s gendered performativity (1993), and Esther Newton’s (2000) ethnographic critique. I took up Audre Lorde’s (1982) and Alice Walker’s (1982) critiques of the racial politics of SM alongside Robert Reid-Pharr’s (2001) analysis of race and visibility, E Patrick Johnson’s (2001) quare studies, and Nan Alamilla Boyd’s (2003) history of San Francisco’s racial geographies. These triangulations helped me explore BDSM in terms of race and whiteness, class and consumption, feminist politics and queer performance—to rethink the sexual politics of BDSM as a problem of late capitalism, to ground questions of transgression and alterity in the specific context of the Bay Area, to articulate BDSM relationships between bodies, pleasures, and power as classed, gendered, and racialized, both performative and material. These authors, together, helped me theorize BDSM not as a paraphilia, captured or “entomologized”, as Foucault put it (1990: 43) nor as a lens through which to view “the body” or “power” on such a grand scale that local specificity and practice disappear from view—but rather as a social practice situated within a distinct historical and economic moment.

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“BDSM Studies” today is quite a different field than the one I initially encountered in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when I began my fieldwork. It is not only that field has grown enormously (although it has), but also that it has changed. Those two parallel tracks that I encountered in the late 1990s—the psychological/sexological study of BDSM and the philosophical/literary approach to BDSM as pattern—have not so much merged as they have generated a thriving field in between, energized by and drawing on both.

When I return to the question provoked by that long-ago dinner, I see things somewhat differently. For it seems less a question of the study of BDSM versus something larger, and more about understanding that the study of BDSM can be, has become, simultaneously particular and theoretical. I’m thinking about work that grapples with the racial politics of BDSM, like Ariane Cruz’s (2016), which is both an analysis of Black women in BDSM and pornography and a contribution to the ongoing conversation in Black feminist and queer studies on power, sex, and the erotics of racism (e.g. Holland, 2012; Nash, 2014, 2018). Or work that takes up the crip politics of BDSM play, opening up not only new ways to think about pain, masochism, and performance, but also body boundaries, queer forms of intimacy and care, and the desirability of disability (Howard, 2020; Reynolds, 2007; Sheppard, 2019). Or work that explores the embodied, fleshly, sensuous aspects of BDSM play to open up phenomenology, such as Susan Stryker’s reading of transsexual BDSM play (2008); Staci Newmahr’s ethnography of boundary transgression and intimacy (2011), Richard Martin’s depiction of pansexual BDSM in Berlin (2020), or Amber Musser’s reading of masochism as a way to ground Black female sexuality in the sensuous body (2014). Or work that turns to BDSM’s particularly dynamic reworkings of consent to challenge taken-for-granted understandings of agency and autonomy in legal, political, and psychoanalytic theory (Bauer, 2014; Fanghanel, 2019; Fischel, 2019; Saketopoulou, 2019). I should be clear that I do not intend this to serve as a review of all of the excellent new work on BDSM—but rather to provide some illustrative sketches of what strikes me as a new field of BDSM studies: one that grounds larger conceptual insights and interventions in the specificity of BDSM culture and practice and, in doing so, makes new theory possible. ⁵ And if it is the case that I still wish for more materialist work on BDSM and capitalism (I do, it’s true), it is not because this would not be at home within this new field.

Over these last 20 odd years, it strikes me that BDSM studies have learned from BDSM communities. I think about C Jacob Hale’s (1997) essay “Leatherdyke Boys and Their Daddies: How to Have Sex without Women or Men”, an essay I teach in as many courses as I can get away with for some of the reasons I am laying out here: because Hale’s essay, grounded as it is in the specificity of leatherdyke language and practice, opens up new ways to think about embodiment, trans narrative, sex and gender, kinmaking, performance and performativity. But I also teach it so often because it illustrates a central problematic of knowledge making. It reveals to my students a world they are (typically) less familiar with not as an invitation to voyeurism, but rather to show them—viscerally—how those worlds have theory and practice oftentimes more complex than our simple analytical categories can comprehend, that those worlds, rich with social imagination, make knowledges; they are not stagnant sources of data. How we might learn from and with those worlds is the core question Hale provokes.

I know that I have learned a tremendous amount from BDSM—not only about BDSM, but about intimacy and vulnerability; methodology, embodiment, and pleasure; race, gender, and power; autonomy, desire, and ideology. I don’t think it is too much to say that BDSM taught me how to think. Those initial questions of capitalism and intersectional queer theory never left me, it is true, but studies with BDSM gave them shape and form. And while I would not claim that my more recent work on queer politics in the neoliberal academy or queer left activism is “BDSM Studies”, I have no doubt that I owe to BDSM the refinement of a way to think about sex, power, knowledge, desire, and politics that I have brought to every project since my dissertation.

And so when I survey the field, I am energized by a new BDSM studies that points both outwards and inwards, that moves between bodies and ideas, between the individual and society, scaling up, and grounding down at once. From my vantage point, I see a field that hosts wider conversations and supports narrower questions—that neither studies BDSM practitioners as objects nor leaves the specifics of BDSM practice, language, and concepts aside, but instead thinks with and through BDSM to arrive somewhere new. As this special issue goes to press, that is what I most look forward to.