Introduction to the special issue: BDSM Studies

In recent decades, there has been an explosion of research on BDSM, spanning disciplines and methodological approaches. The growing body of research on BDSM unpacks many of the early assumptions in the field, including that BDSM is only or always a sexual or erotic interest, activity or identity, that interest in BDSM is pathological or indicative of mental illness, and many others. In this special issue, scholars of BDSM explore core questions in the field, including how best to understand the practices, identities, and communities that fall under the broad umbrella of BDSM, whether and how to disentangle the disparate subcommunities and identities that are often lumped under the category of BDSM, the urgent need to critically examine the role of whiteness, white privilege, and racism within both BDSM communities and BDSM scholarship, and the question of whether and when BDSM is appropriately understood through a sexuality lens. The introduction to the special issue highlights emerging themes and pressing gaps in the field of BDSM studies and provides an overview of the contributions to the special issue.

Keywords

BDSM, sadomasochism, leather, kink, S&M, bondage

Background and context

In the last several decades, there has been an explosion of research on BDSM—bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, and sadomasochism. As an umbrella category, BDSM includes a broad range of identities, practices, and communities related to bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, and/or sadomasochism (Langdridge and Barker, 2007; Moser and Kleinplatz, 2006; Simula, 2019). The term “BDSM” is sometimes used interchangeably with the related terms “kink” and “sadomasochism.” Kink is a broader category of sexual interests and practices that includes but extends beyond those involved in BDSM; sadomasochism is a specific subset of BDSM practices and identities. ¹ Across differing disciplinary and empirical frameworks, the emerging field of BDSM Studies centers around a number of shared approaches to the study of BDSM practices, identities, and communities, including: a shared agreement that BDSM is not in and of itself pathological; common recognition that the consensual nature of BDSM distinguishes it from abuse; and a collective understanding that BDSM is a complex social phenomenon deserving of serious academic study rather than titillating journalistic or deviance-oriented approaches.

Through the 1970s, BDSM was studied primarily through a sexual deviance framework, but in the last several decades has moved out of the margins of many disciplines as scholars have shown how BDSM can be productively used to better understand a wide range of social phenomenon from identities to citizenship to normative culture beliefs to embodiment—to name just a few. Not limited to a particular discipline, this explosion of scholarship has spanned numerous fields, including literature, media studies, counseling, history, law and legal studies, psychology, anthropology, game studies, leisure studies, sociology, health and medicine, women’s and gender studies, critical race studies, disability studies, and many others. Early assumptions in studies of BDSM—such as that only or primarily gay men participate in BDSM and that BDSM is always or exclusively a sexual practice or interest—have been overturned in recent decades. Additionally, while consent has long been taken as axiomatic within BDSM communities and practices, work in the last decade has more critically interrogated the assumption and workings of consent (Bauer, 2014; Fanghanel, 2020; Kaak, 2016).

Although sexuality remains among the most common analytic lenses through which BDSM is studied, recent scholarship has examined BDSM through lenses including serious leisure (Newmahr, 2010; Williams and Prior, 2015; Williams et al., 2016), spirituality (Baker, 2018; Beckmann, 2007; Fennell, 2018; Scofield, 2004), therapeutic experience or method for navigating trauma (Hammers, 2014, 2019; Lindenmann, 2011; Thomas, 2020), and ritual (Carlström, 2018; Klement et al., 2017; Sagarin et al., 2015). In addition to expanding the analytic frameworks for understanding BDSM beyond the focus of sexuality, in the last two decades, the field has begun to disentangle the various practices that fall under BDSM umbrella. Studies of BDSM are now beginning to examine the specificities of identities, practices, and communities within that umbrella including pupping (Langdridge and Lawson, 2019; Lawson and Langdridge, 2020; Wignall and McCormack, 2017), ageplay (Bauer, 2018; Tildenberg and Paasonen, 2019), spanking (Labrecque et al., 2020; Plante, 2006), and domestic discipline (Carmack et al., 2015; DeGroot et al., 2015; Hebert Deshotels et al., 2019) to cite just a few examples of this burgeoning area of work.

One of the most recent—and most urgent—areas of development in BDSM Studies is the long overdue attention to the ways that race (Bauer, 2008; Cruz, 2015, 2016a, 2016b; Kuzmanovic, 2018; Liang, 2020; Musser, 2014; Smith and Luykx, 2017) and disability (Jobson, 2020; Kattari, 2015; Sheppard, 2018) intersect with BDSM. Engaging with questions of how privilege and inequality influence who has access to BDSM communities and spaces (Sheff and Hammers, 2011) as well as how systems of oppression shape the experiences of BDSM participants (Bauer, 2008; Weiss, 2011), this emerging line of scholarship explores critically important questions about power relations within BDSM communities. As BDSM Studies moves forward, attention to the ways that race, ethnicity, racism, and white supremacy influence both the field itself and the experiences of BDSM participants is among the most pressing issues for scholars of BDSM.

Themes and contents

The contributors to this special issue wrestle with questions central to the continuing evolution of the field. What is BDSM? Is it a sexual practice? A spiritual, or even religious practice? Something else entirely? How does the naturalization of whiteness in BDSM communities shape participants’ experiences? How does the pillar of consent long taken as axiomatic in the study of BDSM play out in embodied experiences of BDSM? In responding to these questions, the contributors to the special issue show how the study of BDSM advances our understanding of sexualities, as well as of communities and intersecting identities.

Fennell advances our understanding of the complex relationship between BDSM and sexuality, showing that the social context in which participants engage in BDSM is strongly correlated with preference for sexual BDSM among participants in the U.S. Fennell also shows that participation in feminine dominance/masculine submission is correlated with preference for sexual BDSM, suggesting that it is not only the community social context but also the more local interpersonal context of a relationship dynamic that may shape experiences of BDSM as sexual or not. Importantly, Fennell further shows that level of involvement in the BDSM community is associated with how participants view the relationship between BDSM and sex, with greater involvement increasing the likelihood that participants frame their sexuality in relation to BDSM but simultaneously decreasing their likelihood of viewing BDSM through a sexual lens. Fennell’s piece lays the groundwork for much closer attention to social factors in future research on BDSM and sexuality.

Sprott, Vivid, Vilkin, Swallow, Lev, Orejudos, and Schnittman also explore the relationship between BDSM and sex in an interview-based study of BDSM participants in Northern California (US). Sprott and colleagues find considerable variation in how participants perceive the relationship between BDSM and sex, with some perceiving BDSM and sex to be separate, some perceiving the two to be blended, and others perceiving differences in the relationship between BDSM and sex across different encounters. Importantly, their work suggests that gender and sexual orientation may shape how participants view the relationship between BDSM and sex, with those who identify their sexual orientation as queer and those who identify as gender fluid or transgender being more likely to view BDSM and sex as separate experiences. Their work also identifies several patterns of meaning as participants negotiate the distinctions between sex and BDSM: emotional connection and intimacy; “spicing up” or intensifying sex; BDSM preceding sex; BDSM creating experience of freedom; BDSM as power exchange; BDSM and sex interacting as forms of erotic energy; and intersections between BDSM and sex in relation to spiritual experience. Sprott and colleagues argue that the ways in which BDSM participants understand the boundary between sex and BDSM represent a queer understanding of sex that resists normative understandings of sex.

Bauer examines queer BDSM technologies of negotiating consent, showing that in les-bi-trans-queer BDSM communities, participants eschew heteronormative and liberal understandings of consent in order to engage in communicative, negotiated approaches to consent. Unpacking BDSM community discourses on consent, Bauer’s work demonstrates the limits of safewords and negotiation, showing that participants in les-bi-trans-queer communities are moving toward approaches to consent that are sensitive to power dynamics and that emphasize the importance of collective spaces to creating a culture of consent. In this piece, Bauer shows how participants move beyond heteronormative consent scripts that follow assumptive touch cultural norms in favor of developing expectations that emphasize active collaboration and direct verbal communication in establishing consent. Bauer argues that the queer technologies of consent used by participants in les-bi-trans-queer BDSM spaces demonstrate that negotiating consent is a process that must be situated in specific social contexts and in relation to power dynamics among the individuals involved.

In a theory-building piece that moves forward our understanding of race and BDSM, Martinez explores how the naturalization of whiteness pervades BDSM communities and events. Drawing on interviews and blog posts by BDSM participants located primarily in the U.S., Martinez shows how white participants and identities continue to be centered in BDSM communities, functioning to marginalize and exclude participants of color. Using a conceptual framework that draws on Ahmed’s phenomenology of whiteness and Bonilla-Silva’s concept of racial grammar, Martinez shows how white BDSM participants construct the whiteness of BDSM communities as a result of lack of interest, money, or time on the part of participants of color, failing to recognize the ways that white privilege influences access to and participation in BDSM spaces. BDSM participants of color, on the other hand, describe experiences of being exoticized, marginalized, and fetishized in predominantly white spaces. Martinez’s analysis shows the whiteness of BDSM community spaces and how that whiteness is normalized in ways that lead participants of color to seek spaces they must create themselves.

Drawing on analyses of ritual and spirituality, Carlström examines similarities and differences between BDSM and Christianity. Using ethnographic fieldwork in BDSM communities in Sweden, Carlström shows how participants draw parallels between rituals of power and pain and experiences of entering altered states of consciousness across both BDSM and Christian contexts. While some of the specific experiences across BDSM and Christian practices are different, participants in Carlström’s study reflect on the ways that both contexts can lead to altered states of consciousness. Especially interesting in Carlström’s work is that the interviews did not ask about religion, Christianity, or spirituality, but instead interviewees repeatedly and independently brought up those experiences to describe and make sense of BDSM experiences. Carlström’s analysis suggests that in Western societies that are becoming increasingly secular, BDSM practices can provide alternate methods to achieving altered consciousness.

In addition to these full-length articles, the special issue includes reflections on the field of BDSM Studies from a number of scholars working across diverse disciplinary backgrounds, as well as an interview with Charles Moser, whose work has played an important role in moving forward the study of BDSM. The reflections in these pieces show how dramatically the field has changed in the last several decades. Yet these contributors also identify areas of persistent challenge for those studying BDSM, including the marginalization of BDSM scholarship, the lack of funding and support for research on BDSM, and the potentially negative career consequences, including experiences of harassment and marginalization that persist even in 2020.

Cruz’s piece takes up the current reckoning of BDSM Studies with its lack of attention to race, Blackness, and racialized bodies and sexualities. Yet, even while deftly outlining the failure of the majority of existing scholarship on BDSM to engage race and racialization in general and Blackness in particular, Cruz also traces how recent work has placed Blackness at the center of analysis, citing for example Amber Musser’s Sensational Flesh (reviewed in this special issue, as is Cruz’s The Color of Kink), as well as calling attention to the ways that Blackness and Black BDSM participants have been central to the evolution of BDSM Studies as well as to BDSM communities.

Weiss’s piece explores the intersections of sex politics, late capitalism, and racialized performance in relation to BDSM, tracing the disciplinarily disperse genealogies of the study of BDSM. Weiss shows how drawing together divergent disciplinary and theoretical strands can create an analytical framework for understanding BDSM not as a paraphilia nor as a lens through which to view grand scale power, but in a specific socio-cultural landscape and historical moment.

Taking up the question of consent and ethics both among BDSM practitioners and within BDSM research itself, Yuen Thompson and Couple write from the combined perspective of a scholar and a BDSM practitioner to explore the complexities of consent and ethics. Their piece demonstrates the limits of formal procedures for obtaining consent, arguing for a more nuanced and ethical approach to consent that works within—rather than against—the interactional process of establishing and sustaining meaningful consent.

Reflecting on 40+ years studying BDSM, Weinberg provides a portrait of the challenges and excitement of studying BDSM at a time in which studying sexuality—especially “deviant” sexualities—was undertaken largely in isolation and at significant risk to one’s potential career. Weinberg’s piece shows the fortuitousness of his own path to and through BDSM scholarship, and traces how some of the early assumptions in studies of sadomasochism (S&M) have shifted as the field has grown empirically in the last several decades.

Charles Moser reflects on the challenges of working to depathologize BDSM. Like other contributors, Moser also reflects on the ways in which a focus on BDSM can prove challenging for those interested in a traditional academic career path. Rachel Jobson’s interview with Moser builds on these themes, drawing out Moser’s perspective on how the field of BDSM Studies has changed over the last several decades.

Throughout the special issue, contributors reflect on power dynamics—within BDSM practices, within the field of BDSM Studies, and across the academic and intellectual terrain in which scholarship on BDSM is produced. In bringing together this collection of articles, it is my hope that this special issue contributes to the understanding of BDSM as a social practice and set of identities deserving of serious scholarly attention—both in its own right and for the myriad ways that studies of BDSM can help us better understand power, embodiment, sexualities, communities, and identities.

Postscript

As I write this introduction, we are entering the ninth month of the COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. For BDSM communities across the globe, the pandemic has meant the suspension of many community events—from regional, national, and international conferences to social munches to play parties to workshops and educational events. Given the necessarily physical aspects of many BDSM practices, social distancing has fundamentally changed what BDSM in the current moment looks like for numerous participants. In many communities, the community spaces and volunteer-run dungeons that have been created and sustained through decades of volunteering, organizing, and resource investment by community members have been decimated by the ongoing pandemic. In some communities, dungeons—which in many communities serve as the primary socialization, educational, and play space—have been forced to permanently close. Like many communities in which physical proximity is at the core of a shared interest, BDSM communities are undergoing significant—and likely long-term—loss and change. We urgently need studies of how COVID-19 has impacted BDSM communities and to document the myriad ways BDSM participants are innovating ways to be in community and to engage in BDSM in the context of the pandemic.