Sexualities

This article explores questions of sexual agency and consent in mainstream representations of BDSM using Pauline Réage’s Story of O and EL James’s Fifty Shades trilogy as examples. It addresses normalizing tendencies and explores to what extent BDSM can be represented before being rejected by mainstream readers. Based on critiques of both novels, I outline the degree to which the concept of consensual non-consent, that is, the illusion of suspended consent in order to facilitate erotic power play, works in both novels. A close reading reveals a return to more traditional notions of femininity and female sexual agency in Fifty Shades, as well as a growing tendency to normatively limit the depictions of sadomasochistic desires.

This article offers a critical reading of the Fifty Shades phenomenon by situating the novels as works of transgressive erotic fiction that stimulate circuits of female consumption and the production of sexual identity as commodity. It submits a novel contribution to current scholarship on the mechanisms of sexual transgression by acknowledging its neutral or even reactive qualities, and by laying bare its relationship with disciplinary regimes of social power. It demonstrates that, rather than a politically progressive utopian strategy that might delimit the parameters of sexual desire, transgression now primarily functions as a mechanism through which capitalism is reinforced and the institutions of heteronormativity maintained.

Whilst the Fifty Shades trilogy has increased public awareness of BDSM (bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, and sadomasochism), the understandings of consent depicted in the novels remain reflective of those prevalent in wider heteronormative culture. Responsibility for consenting is located within the individual (woman) and consent relates to sex rather than to the relationship as a whole. This contrasts with understandings of consent currently emerging on the BDSM blogosphere where the locus of responsibility is shifting from individuals to communities, and the concept is opening up to encompass awareness of intersecting social power dynamics and interactions beyond the sexual arena.

While some conservative religious women have rejected Fifty Shades of Grey as contrary to their values and beliefs, others have embraced it. This article analyzes commentaries and reflections on the book series in US evangelical Christian and Mormon women’s blog communities, and shows how many of these women find value in the books because of their personal, cultural, and religious significance. I argue that attention to the reading strategies employed by evangelical and Mormon women in relation to Fifty Shades demonstrates a complex set of responses to ‘secular’ culture as well as ongoing negotiations of gender, sexuality, and authority within these conservative religious traditions.

This article presents the results of survey data from readers of the Fifty Shades novel series. It is almost 30 years since Janice Radway’s (1984) Reading the Romance was published and audience studies have burgeoned. However, public discourse about E L James’s trilogy was couched in assumptions about ‘formulaic’ genre fiction, alongside debates about its ‘mainstreaming’ of BDSM, and little of this discussion drew upon the voices of readers. Our research reveals readers’ complex, often contradictory, responses to the novels. For these readers, the acts of reading and discussing the novels offer a range of (dis)pleasures, from erotic enjoyment to the amusements of critique; from self-gratification to participation in cultural dialogue.

Early work in fan studies examined fan activities as forms of resistance, enabling fans to reclaim ownership of popular culture. Jonathan Gray (2003) and Cornel Sandvoss (2005), however, argue that to fully understand what it means to interact with texts we must also examine anti-fans. This article builds on Gray and Sandvoss’s work by expanding on Francesca Haig’s (2013) discussion of ‘snark’ fandom. We suggest that the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy (2012) has generated an ironic, even guilty fandom, in which readers and viewers bemoan the series’ flaws, while enjoying (sometimes furtively) the texts. We structure this as an analysis of the anti-fandom’s denigration of Fifty Shades as ‘bad literature’ and ‘bad eroticism’ to be consumed by an imagined female reader. We argue that this cultural disavowal of Fifty Shades is based upon cultural distinctions of taste (Bourdieu, 1984) and suggest that the BDSM community’s rejection of the books’ sexual politics is founded upon its own distinction of taste.

This is a brief personal response to Fifty Shades of Grey which focuses on a male writer’s inability to finish the book and to comprehend the fantasies it embodies, despite his being a sympathetic ‘pre-reader’ eager to defend the book against its numerous critics. His failure to make sense of the book’s appeal is discussed in relation both to the writer’s masculinity and to a more general cultural snobbery towards ‘women’s texts’. The piece concludes with a tentative suggestion that the book’s decisive fantasy may involve submission to the dominant ‘overclass’ of triumphant contemporary neo-liberalism.

This article considers the success and widespread discussion of kinky sex practices in EL James’s book Fifty Shades of Grey in the broader context of legal developments in the UK around ‘obscene’ and ‘extreme’ sexual representations and practices. It examines how the legislation of sexual media is changing and in particular the relations between legislation and an apparent mainstreaming of both pornography and BDSM/kink. The article outlines the main legal provisions used to regulate sex media in English criminal law, and situates Fifty Shades in relation to these and to four key cases in which ‘obscene’ and ‘extreme’ materials came under scrutiny. What do these, taken together, suggest about the way that sex and sex media are regulated in the UK, and what are the key issues that emerge in public discussions about them?

This article proposes that the extensive sales and widespread popularity of the Fifty Shades trilogy has placed BDSM in the sexual spotlight and explores how this is being capitalized upon by some sex shops and sex toy retailers by encouraging consumers to bring the erotic fiction of Fifty Shades into their own sexual reality through the purchase of particular commodities and the acquisition of BDSM related sexual knowledge. This article argues that this is based upon a particular ‘Fifty Shades’ brand of BDSM that is constructed as fun, fashionable and exciting as opposed to extreme, marginalized and dangerous.