n Techniques of Pleasure N

TECHNIQUESOFPLEASURE
b d s m a n d t h e c i rc u i t s o f s e x u a l i t y

n Margot Weiss

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS DURHAM & LONDON 2011

 ∫ 2011 Duke University Press
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Typeset in Chaparral Pro by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

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 CONTENTS N

A NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY vii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xiii
INTRODUCTION TOWA R D A P E R F O R M AT I V E
M AT E R I A L I S M 1
ONE S E T T I N G T H E S C E N E
sm Communities in the San Francisco
Bay Area 34
TWO B E C O M I N G A P R AC T I T I O N E R
Self-Mastery, Social Control, and
the Biopolitics of sm 61
THREE T H E TOY B AG
Exchange Economies and the
Body at Play 101
FOUR B E YO N D VA N I L L A
Public Politics and Private Selves 143
FIVE S E X P L AY A N D S O C I A L P OW E R
Reading the Effective Circuit 187
APPENDIX I N T E RV I E W E E V I G N E T T E S 233
NOTES 241
REFERENCES 269
INDEX 291
 A N OT E O N T E R M I N O L O G Y N

In bdsm , terminology matters. The community recognizes itself—its

practices, its desires—in and through a shared, yet contested, language.
In this note, I do not attempt to pin down this complex and proliferating
terminology with formalized definitions, but rather to give the reader a
few conceptual signposts—some bearings—within the shifting discur-
sive field that constitutes contemporary bdsm .
The terms sm and bdsm are used interchangeably to denote a di-
verse community that includes aficionados of bondage, domination/
submission, pain or sensation play, power exchange, leathersex, role-
playing, and fetishes. The community embraces a wide range of prac-
tices, relationship types, and roles, ranging from the more common (for
instance, rope bondage or flogging) to the less so (playing with incest
themes or playing at being a pony), yet all of these variations fit under
the umbrella term bdsm .
bdsm is of relatively recent (and, many suggest, Internet) coinage. It
is an amalgamation of three acronyms: b&d (bondage and discipline),
D/s (domination/submission), and sm (sadomasochism). The use of sm
(sometimes s/m or s&m ) as the inclusive term predates bdsm , but
bdsm is fast becoming the acronym of choice, especially in the pan-
sexual community—the mixed bdsm community, made up of practi-
tioners of various gender and sexual orientations. Leather, on the other
 hand, is used most often in gay and, in some cases, lesbian sm commu-
nities to describe an sm community that includes leather fetishism and
motorcycle clubs (see also Kamel 1995; Rubin 1997). Some practition-
ers use the acronym wiitwd (for ‘‘what it is that we do’’) to encompass
the entirety of bdsm practices; another inclusive linguistic term for the
community and its practices and practitioners is kinky (with its oppo-
site, vanilla). The community is also called the scene, which refers to a
network of bdsm -oriented people, organizations, meeting places, dun-
geons, web pages, e-mail lists, conferences, and so forth. The scene is
differentiated from a scene, which refers to a particular bdsm encoun-
ter. The sm scene stresses the modern mantra of bdsm : all bdsm
practices should be ssc (for ‘‘safe, sane, and consensual’’). bdsm prac-
tices are often called play, where play refers to any particular bdsm
scene (‘‘Jon and I played last night’’), as well as to general categories of
bdsm activities (‘‘Sara is really into hot wax play’’). bdsm gatherings
that feature designated play areas are called play parties.
b&d , D/s, and sm each have their own linguistic histories. The B in
b&d refers to bondage. Bondage has become an ever-more specialized
technique—a highly technical, even transnational, practice. A recent
craze for ‘‘Japanese rope bondage’’ (sometimes called shibari), an elabo-
rate, aestheticized form of bondage, is one example of this emphasis on
new techniques. Practitioners specialize in rope harnesses, suspension
bondage, bondage on a budget, leather bondage, encasement bondage,
and more. Classes, books, and workshops by San Francisco Bay Area
experts have proliferated, and bondage remains a typical sight at play
parties and events. The D refers to discipline or spanking, an outgrowth
of the mostly heterosexual fetish-bondage-spanking communities that
blossomed in the 1950s in the United States and Europe (Bienvenu II
1998). In many parts of the United States, the spanking community is
separate from the bdsm community, and many spanking devotees do
not identify with the sm community or its practices. Meanwhile, many
sm practitioners view spanking as ‘‘sm lite,’’ a sort of beginner activity.
Spanking communities tend to be interested in formal discipline; practi-
tioners are often heterosexual and married; and scenes involve minimal
toys, clothes, or other sm paraphernalia, which is one reason it is con-
sidered ‘‘beginner’’ by some in the sm scene. At the same time, however,
spanking, discipline, punishment, and caning—all classics of b&d —are
also very common forms of bdsm play.

viii TERMINOLOGY
 D/s, for domination and submission, refers to the explicit exchange of
power. The phrase power exchange emphasizes that D/s relationships are
explicitly about power (more than sensation, pain, or role play, for exam-
ple), but also that they are an exchange: although dominant and submis-
sive roles may be relatively stable, power is understood to be mobile,
shared, or routed between practitioners during play (see also Langdridge
and Butt 2005). D/s practices range from long-term, live-in M/s (Master
or Mistress and slave) situations (where one has ‘‘ownership’’ of another
in a variety of ways, sometimes including formal contracts of service) to
short-term scenes between play partners (for example, a scene where a
‘‘naughty schoolgirl’’ has to write ‘‘I will not touch myself’’ on a chalk
board, or a submissive must stand perfectly still while being tickled by
his dominant). D/s practices might be a component of a scene or an
overarching relationship structure; more specialized power exchanges
include the collared slave who organizes her Master’s business schedule,
the submissive who gratefully cleans his Mistress’s home, and the slave
who is an always-available demonstration model for his prodomme wife’s
sm classes (prodomme is a contraction of ‘‘professional dominant,’’ a
term, like dominatrix, used to describe women who work as paid domi-
nants. Men in this profession are called prodoms). These scenes and
relationships are primarily about symbolic power; they may or may not
involve physical contact or sensation.
D/s dynamics—the consensual exchange of power—are, as many ar-
gue, the foundation of bdsm play. As the sociologists Thomas Weinberg
and G. W. Levi Kamel write, contrary to mainstream perception, ‘‘much
s&m involves very little pain. Rather, many sadomasochists prefer acts
such as verbal humiliation or abuse, cross-dressing, being tied up (bond-
age), mild spankings where no severe discomfort is involved, and the
like. Often, it is the notion of being helpless and subject to the will of
another that is sexually titillating . . . At the very core of sadomasoch-
ism is not pain but the idea of control—dominance and submission’’
(1995, 19). Practitioners and other sm researchers agree that sexual
control, power exchange, or what Pat (now Patrick) Califia calls ‘‘the
power dichotomy’’ or ‘‘imbalance’’ between partners is central to all
bdsm (1994, 162; see also Alison et al. 2001; Langdridge and Barker
2007; Taylor and Ussher 2001).
In the community, sm has a double meaning: it can be used like
bdsm to refer to the entire scene, and it can also be used comparatively,
TERMINOLOGY ix
 to refer to more explicitly physical or bodily practices, also called sensa-
tion play or pain play. Sensation play can range from very mild (being
rubbed with a rabbit fur glove) to very intense (being struck with a
single-tail whip). Pain, here, is a tricky word; basic to the dictionary
definition of pain is its aversiveness, and thus no one who enjoys these
activities would describe them as ‘‘painful’’ in this sense. In the scene,
practitioners differentiate between ‘‘good pain’’ in sm and ‘‘bad pain,’’
like stubbing your toe. They also use analogies to describe these sensa-
tions: the feeling that results from a flogging is like the relaxation of a
deep tissue massage, the high of eating spicy food, or the cognitive
release of meditation. Common examples of sm sensation play include
flogging, caning, whipping, cutting, and temperature play. Most bdsm
practitioners engage in some bondage, some sensation play, and some
power play.
Although the term sadomasochism and the acronym s&m are more
common in mainstream usage, within the scene, practitioners tend to
use sm (and, less often, s/m ). This points to the ways contemporary
practitioners position themselves vis-à-vis the pathologization of sado-
masochism in sexology, psychoanalysis, and psychiatry. Coined in 1890
by the sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing and popularized in successive
editions of his Psychopathia Sexualis, the terms sadism (‘‘the desire to
cause pain and use force’’) and masochism (‘‘the wish to suffer pain and be
subjected to force’’) were classed as paraphilias, or sexual perversions
([1886] 1999, 119). Krafft-Ebing included ‘‘lust murder,’’ the dismem-
berment of corpses, and what we would now call marital rape as exam-
ples of sadism; he linked masochism with flagellation, abuse, foot and
shoe fetishism, and various ‘‘disgusting acts’’ (such as smelling ‘‘sweaty
slippers’’ or eating excrement). This late-nineteenth-century definition
remains remarkably current; the latest version of the Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the standard diagnostic guide for
mental health practitioners, defines ‘‘sexual sadism’’ and ‘‘sexual mas-
ochism’’ as psychopathological paraphilias, in which individuals ‘‘use
sexual fantasies, urges, or behaviors involving infliction of pain, suffer-
ing or humiliation to enhance or achieve sexual excitement’’ (American
Psychiatric Association 2000).∞ This history—and contemporary
reality—of pathologization is why practitioners today tend to use sm
and not sadomasochism: sadomasochism embeds the eroticization of pain

x TERMINOLOGY
within a psychiatric model of pathology, whereas contemporary practi-
tioners understand their sm to be about mutual pleasure and power
exchange.
Practitioners are also less inclined to use s&m . As the National Coali-
tion for Sexual Freedom (ncsf ; an advocacy group that serves bdsm
and related communities) advises, if you are talking to the press about
bdsm , ‘‘try to get the reporter to write sm , not s&m —that evokes the
old stereotypes and we are trying to get around that. s&m stands for
sadism & masochism while sm stands for sadomasochism; inherent in
the word is the mutual necessity for both as well as the consent in-
volved.’’≤ In this logic, s&m deemphasizes the relationality of sm power
exchange; similarly, s/m still separates sadism and masochism (al-
though it is preferred by some who see it standing for ‘‘slave/Master’’).
And, although theorists after Krafft-Ebing have debated whether sado-
masochism ought to be considered a single desire or drive, or separated
into two, many practitioners feel that sm brings the S and the M to-
gether, eliminating the slash.≥ This definitional complexity—where sm
both refers to and resists an originary pathology, and where it is both an
umbrella term for all dynamics of consensual power exchange and a
narrower term referring to pain play—is part of the reason why bdsm is
gaining adherents: for many practitioners, it seems more encompassing,
and less problematic, than sm .
As this note begins to demonstrate, these linguistic terms shift over
time; they refer to contested and contextual concepts used with differ-
ent shades of meaning by different practitioners. This shifting discur-
sive notation is representative of the ways such terms are used in prac-
tice. Because of this, I retain the notation my interviewees or sources
use (bdsm, s/m, s&m , and so on); I also retain the terms they use to
describe themselves. Some of these identity terms are more common:
top, for example, refers to the person on the giving end of any form of
bdsm ; bottom is the corresponding word for the person on the receiving
end. A dominant is the top in a more explicitly power-based relation-
ship; submissive refers to the bottom. A switch is a person who
enjoys both top and bottom, or dominant and submissive, roles. Other
terms are less common, and practitioners use creative combinations to
describe their interests and practices: a pain slut (a person who en-
joys particularly heavy pain play), a service top (a top who gets off

TERMINOLOGY xi
 on pleasuring, or otherwise servicing, a bottom), or a sam (a smart-
assed masochist or a bratty bottom), for example. Thus, rather than
providing a full glossary of terms here—an impossible task—I ask the
reader to allow these terms and their referents and contexts to accumu-
late over the course of this book.∂

xii TERMINOLOGY
AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S N

This ethnography, which began as my dissertation,

would have been impossible to write without the sup-
port of the Department of Cultural Anthropology and the
Women’s Studies Program at Duke University. Antonio
Viego’s seminar on queer theories started me on this proj-
ect, and Antonio remains one of the most compassionate,
careful readers I have ever encountered. Anne Allison has
been an amazing mentor, advisor, and friend, always man-
aging to combine laser-point criticism with true support.
Both Anne and Antonio have given me inspiring models of
queer scholarship. Other faculty members at Duke—in
particular Lee D. Baker, John L. Jackson, Ralph Litzinger,
Charlie Piot, Naomi Quinn, and Robyn Wiegman—offered
sage advice, a collegial atmosphere, and the critical sup-
port that made this project possible. I am lucky to have
been able to work with such talented, generous, and kind
scholars.
The Department of Cultural Anthropology provided
funds for preliminary summer research, and support from
my family made it possible for me to do this fieldwork. A
yearlong Women’s Studies Fellowship from Duke allowed
 me to stay in San Francisco and write, while visiting positions at Sweet
Briar College, Duke University, and the College of William and Mary
allowed me to revise the book manuscript. I owe thanks to all of these
institutions, as well as to solga , now aqa , the queer anthropology
section of the American Anthropological Association, which provided a
sense of institutional belonging at a critical time.
My students and colleagues at Wesleyan University provided the final
intellectual context to make the completion of the book possible. My
two departments at Wesleyan—anthropology and American studies—
alongside the larger intellectual community provided more insights and
inspiration than I can list. Thanks, most especially, to Henry Abelove,
Tricia Hill, Claire Potter, Mary-Jane Rubenstein, and Anu Sharma, as
well as the faculty members of the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality
Studies Program, who gave me the opportunity to present sections of
this book in a very helpful workshop. Many people have read pieces of
this book; others have offered insight and inspiration during the long
writing and revising process. For conversations and encouragement
along the way, I thank Liz Barnes, Robin Bauer, Evie Blackwood, Tom
Boellstorff, Nan Boyd, Mindy Chateauvert, Lisa Duggan, Katherine
Frank, Mary Gray, Bill Leap, Ellen Lewin, Martin Manalansan, Jeff Mas-
kovsky, Bill Maurer, Alice McLean, Scott Morgensen, Gayle Rubin, David
Savran, Susan Stryker, David Valentine, Brad Weiss, and Volker Wol-
tersdorff. For reading part or all of this book in its final form, I am
grateful to Gillian Goslinga, Naomi Greyser, J. Kehaulani Kauanui, Joel
Pfister, Betsy Traube, Laura Weiss, and most especially Matt Garrett, to
whom I owe more than gratitude. Thanks, too, to my two incredible
readers at Duke University Press, whose helpful suggestions made this
book far better than it would otherwise have been; to Ken Wissoker,
who was both patient and motivating; and to everyone else at the press
for shepherding this book along.
Most of all, I am forever in debt to the sm practitioners in the Bay
Area who shared their insights and stories with me. I want to thank, in
particular, the officers of the Society of Janus who facilitated my work
in countless ways; Paul, whose intellect was an amazing field resource;
Mollena, who was always both inspiring and fun; each of my inter-
viewees who opened their lives to me and my tape recorder; and every-
one else in the scene who made time for me, allowed me to come to
events, introduced me around, and helped me in small and large ways.

xiv AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S
This research would have been impossible without their generosity; it
would have been a lot less enjoyable without the wit, passion, and
spirited debates that make this community so remarkably rich.
Small portions of the introduction, chapter 3, and chapter 4 pre-
viously appeared in ‘‘Working at Play: bdsm Sexuality in the San Fran-
cisco Bay Area,’’ Anthropologica 48, no. 2, 2006. Portions of the intro-
duction and chapter 5 previously appeared in ‘‘Rumsfeld! Consensual
bdsm and ‘Sadomasochistic’ Torture at Abu Ghraib,’’ in Out in Public:
Reinventing Lesbian/Gay Anthropology in a Globalizing World, edited by
Ellen Lewin and William L. Leap (Chichester, England: Wiley-Blackwell,
2009). I thank Andrew Lyons, Harriet Lyons, Ellen Lewin, and Bill Leap,
along with the publishers, for their enthusiasm and support for earlier
versions of this project.

AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S xv
n Techniques of Pleasure N
INTRODUCTION N
TOWA R D A P E R F O R M AT I V E
M AT E R I A L I S M

I spent the summer of 2000 in San Francisco, trying to

figure out how to do ethnographic fieldwork on bdsm .
I started by looking up sm organizations online, slowly
summoning the courage to e-mail my request for inter-
views to local groups. But I wanted to do participant obser-
vation, to attend some bdsm community event and get a
sense of what was going on. I wasn’t sure what to expect:
black leather, for sure; motorcycles, tough women, chaps,
and radical sex practices. I had gone to the fetish-themed
night of a local club, Bondage-a-Go-Go, and, the next night,
to the Power Exchange, a sex club with a dungeon area. But
this, I thought, was ‘‘tourist’’ sm , so I was excited when I
was invited to the ‘‘Byzantine Bazaar and Slave Auction.’’
Held at the Castlebar dungeon in South San Francisco, the
auction was a combination charity fundraiser and shop-
ping and vending opportunity. As I browsed the website, I
learned that the event would feature the chance to buy
whips, floggers, canes, and other bdsm toys before a bene-
fit auction, during which one could bid on tops, bottoms,
and switches. A play party would follow the auction. We
were encouraged to dress appropriately.
 Since this was my first experience with the real sm scene, I scoured
the Upper Haight neighborhood for a suitably ‘‘Byzantine’’ outfit, set-
tling on a gauzy, shimmery nightgown. July in San Francisco is freezing,
so, as I walked down the sidewalk to the dungeon that Saturday after-
noon, I was cold as well as nervous. Inside, past the cashier (admission
to the auction cost $5, the play party an additional $20), I threaded
through a crush of people wearing leather vests and pants, corsets, slave
outfits, saris, pvc and latex, or regular T-shirts and jeans. A side court-
yard off the entry room served as a grill station for hot dogs and burg-
ers, smoking lounge, and small vending area; people sat around picnic
tables eating and chatting, while others browsed the toys. Past the entry
room and down a small hallway were two smaller rooms. One was billed
as a ‘‘harem room’’; I gave the woman at the door a dollar and watched
several belly dancers for a few minutes. A large table displaying all of the
items to be auctioned off dominated the other small room: donated
whips and floggers, paddles, canes, clothes, books, bondage parapher-
nalia, and the like.
Past the side rooms, I entered the dungeon proper. A huge room with
high ceilings, the dungeon featured rows of furniture—crosses, stools,
seats, cages, swings, and more crosses. Wedged between these stations
were more vendors. I wandered around, looking at items. At one table, I
examined a set of curved metal bars, neatly laid out in a zip-up, black
leather case lined with red satin. I could not figure out what they were
and finally asked. The vendor told me that they were sounds, for urethra
play. I felt sympathetic pain and put the sound down, moving on to look
at floggers, paddles, canes, cuffs. I bought a raffle ticket from a woman
who offered me the chance to oil up a female wrestler; she pointed at the
kiddie pool set up at the front of the dungeon room, where the oil
wrestling was about to begin. There were at least 250 people there that
afternoon, waiting for the auction to start. People chatted with vendors
and acquaintances, trying out new toys on friends and partners.
My field notes report that I found everyone there surprisingly ‘‘nor-
mal ,’’ which I rendered in all caps. By this I meant that the people at the
Byzantine Bazaar that day seemed nice and friendly. My notes stress
how ‘‘wholesome’’ the event felt to me: I was surprised that it was so
easy to talk to people at this event, people I would only later get to know
as members of the pansexual bdsm community. They all seemed excited
about the upcoming play party, and they were welcoming, just having

2 I N T RO D U C T I O N
fun. But I also meant that they did not look like the radical leatherfolk
I’d expected: they were middle-aged, overweight, professional-looking
people and, although many were wearing black leather, the vibe was
more afternoon barbecue and less biker bar.
When the slave auction began, I took a seat near the staging area,
where I could overhear the event coordinators shepherding the people
up for auction into neat lines, and making sure the index cards they
held—which explained their sexual and sm orientations and limits—
were in order. The auctionees approached the stage set up at the front of
the dungeon and, one at a time, climbed onto a chair: the auction block.
The emcee began the bidding: ‘‘Here is Darkstar! She is a het-flexible
bottom, into canes, a total pain slut—hey, it’s what she wrote! Limits:
dead people, kids. Willing to be sold to either [man or woman]. Let’s
start the bidding at one hundred Byzantine dollars—that’s ten bucks . . .
do I hear fifteen? Fifteen to this lady in the corner, twenty?’’ As all the
material for the auction and general community rules make clear, the
winning bidder was not, of course, buying the person auctioned, or even
the right to play with them. Rather, the winner bought the chance to
negotiate with that person for a scene later, at the play party following
the auction.
Forty-two bottoms, ten switches, and twenty-eight tops were auc-
tioned off that day. Some people—especially the older male bottoms—
were duds, receiving few bids. Others were superstars: one well-known
heterosexual white top from the South Bay was being sold as a bottom
for ‘‘one night only!’’ He prompted a frenzied bidding and strip show. As
he stood on the block, the audience and the emcee coaxed him to take
off his leather vest; his white shirt, revealing his white belly; and then
his leather pants. He faced us, blushing, while we took pleasure in his
discomfort, shouting for him to remove the final barrier: his tighty
whities. When he did, the crowd roared; I had tears in my eyes from
laughing along with everyone else in the room. He got some of the
highest bids of the evening, eventually going for $750. Most people, the
organizer told me later, sold for $50 (the auction raised $10,000 for the
Earle Baum Center of the Blind, in Santa Rosa).
About an hour later, a young African American woman with a round
face and closely cropped hair was led up to the stage by a tall, severe-
looking white man who held the leash attached to her collar. She was the
only person to appear on the stage with someone else, so the man

TOWA R D A P E R F O R M AT I V E M AT E R I A L I S M 3
 explained that he needed to tell us, the audience, a few things about his
slave. As she stood there, back straight, staring straight ahead, her
master, addressing us in a tight, steely voice, said that she was fit. As he
spoke, he yanked up her dress to display her shaved genitals, and he
then turned her around. Still holding her dress above her waist, he
smacked her ass so hard she pitched forward; the leash attached to the
collar around her neck stopped her fall. Turning her back around, he said
she was very submissive and guaranteed to make us happy. As he fin-
ished speaking, he stroked her head, petting and smoothing back her
short blond hair. The audience was quiet throughout this display. When
the bidding started, it was reserved; she did not sell for a lot of money. I
was uncomfortable during this scene, and I felt sure that the rest of the
crowd was, too. I strained to read the woman’s expression, to see if she
was all right at the front of the stage, but I couldn’t tell.
Then a very butch Latina took the stage, a lesbian top to be auctioned
off as a bottom. Though she was short, she stood tall on the chair, arms
folded, legs spread, a defiant look on her face. The crowd taunted her,
trying to get her to show her breasts. She smiled. She took off her
vest. More shouting, and the bidding went up; obligingly, she took off
an oxford shirt, revealing a long-sleeved T-shirt. Cheers and calls, and
she delayed, until finally, with another smile, she took off the T-shirt.
Underneath, another T-shirt. As the audience catcalled, she stood, re-
moving layer after layer, pushing the bidding higher and higher. Finally,
the last layer revealed a sports bra. We collectively held our breath as she
started to lift the bottom edge of the bra—and underneath was another
sports bra! The audience erupted into laughter; she had the last laugh.
Near the end, an Asian American man, young and tiny, cross-dressed
in a red velvet dress, Mary Janes, and white lace gloves, stood docilely
on the chair. The emcee announced that he wanted a mistress who
would gender humiliate him: force him to cross-dress and then insult
and mock him for this desire. The audience was not particularly recep-
tive to him; no one shouted, and the bidding was slow. Maybe it was
because we were tired, or looking forward to the play party, or maybe it
was just that he seemed sad and small and quiet, way up there in front.
I tell this arrival story to begin to flesh out the ways that sm names a
particular circuit between capitalism—the sexual marketplace and com-
munity entertainment of the Byzantine Bazaar—and performance—the
racialized, gendered scenes at the Slave Auction. As I quickly found out

4 I N T RO D U C T I O N
during my fieldwork, the bdsm community is not the sleazy, under-
ground scene portrayed on crime shows and made-for-TV movies; nei-
ther is it simply the transgressive zone of sexual emancipation that I
expected to find. Rather, it is a formally organized community with very
particular social and educational practices. This is not to say that there
are no longer any leathermen in San Francisco, or radical queer gender-
fuck play parties, or other more-fringe sm events and scenes. But it is to
say that the kinds of people at the Byzantine Bazaar represent a growing
community—what is called the ‘‘new guard’’—very different from both
the men’s ‘‘old guard’’ leather scene known as Folsom and the represen-
tation of sm in the public imaginary. The ‘‘fall of the Folsom,’’ as Gayle
Rubin puts it (1997, 107; 1998, 259), has given rise to a much larger
community of practitioners of various gender and sexual orientations
structured around sm educational organizations, classes, and work-
shops; semipublic dungeons like the Castlebar; and events like the Byz-
antine Bazaar.∞ During my fieldwork, practitioners, in an average week,
could choose from at least five classes or workshops, six regular social
meetings (called munches), several semipublic play parties, and two or
three other events, such as sm book-release parties, fetish balls, or
informal social gatherings. On average, the practitioners I interviewed
spent fifteen hours a week doing sm -related activities. This is, as I will
show, a technique-oriented community, made up of practitioners in
their forties and fifties who are as likely to live in the South Bay as they
are to live in the city of San Francisco. Most are involved in long-term
relationships, either married or partnered; most of the men are hetero-
sexual, while the women are bisexual and heterosexual. And the vast
majority of practitioners are white with the means—or the aspiration—
to buy the toys that, together with forms of self-improvement and
technique, link community belonging with often-invisible race and class
privilege.
At the Byzantine Bazaar, for me, the normal ness of these practi-
tioners stood in stark contrast to the performances that followed. Al-
though the politics of racialized, gendered, and sexed performance was
one of my original theoretical interests in this project, at the auction it
became clear to me that, as scholars have argued for some time, politics
could not be reduced to a dichotomy of transgressive sex radicals versus
hegemonic straights. For how do we read the political effects of such
scenes—of selling black bodies at a pretend slave auction in front of

TOWA R D A P E R F O R M AT I V E M AT E R I A L I S M 5
 an almost exclusively white audience, or of mocking a straight, white,
middle-aged man standing in his underwear in a ‘‘one night only!’’ inver-
sion of male privilege? The positionalities of these practitioners were, I
realized, linked in complex ways to the social and historical formations
of race and gender, but also, in a more obscure way, to the subject
positions produced within late capitalism. From the choice of scene, role,
and scenario to the use of particular toys, such performances are both
dependent on and productive of particular social, cultural, political, and
economic formations. In other words, I began to understand sm perfor-
mance as material. Rather than existing in a bracketed space of play, sm
performances are deeply tied to capitalist cultural formations; rather
than allowing for a kind of freedom from racial, gendered, and sex-
ual hierarchies, such spectacular performances work within the social
norms that compel subjectivity, community, and political imagination.
This is the community formation that I will trace in this ethnogra-
phy. Departing from a Foucault-inspired analysis of the radical alterity
of bdsm practice, I will show, instead, that bdsm sexuality—indeed,
all sexuality—is a social relation, linking subjects (individuals, desires,
and embodiments) to socioeconomics (social hierarchies, communities,
and relations of inequality). In the technology-driven, purportedly lib-
erated Bay Area, sm practitioners find a community where sex is seen as
a skill, an accomplishment, and an array of sometimes-rigid techniques.
It is somewhat ironic, then, that for many practitioners as well as social
theorists, sm practice is imagined to transgress, or lie outside of, so-
cial relations and social norms. Much of the pro-sm literature produced
by practitioners and theorists argues that bdsm is ‘‘transgressive’’ or
‘‘subversive.’’ Working from Foucault’s glorification of San Francisco’s
sm ‘‘laboratories of sexual experimentation’’ ([1982] 1996, 330), schol-
ars like Karmen MacKendrick (1999) and Jeremy Carrette (2005) see in
sm a ‘‘break’’ with both subjectivity and capitalist productivity. But to
imagine sm sex as a break from social relations is to accept a logic
that cordons sexuality off from the social real, variously imagined as
capitalism, social norms, or the regulatory ideals that produce intelli-
gible subjectivity. This creates the deep irony of a community organized
around explicit codes of conduct and techniques, but whose very rules
enable community members to imagine themselves, and their sex, as
free from social regulations. By elaborating their own rules and regu-
lations, bdsm communities simultaneously distance themselves from

6 I N T RO D U C T I O N
both a purportedly silent, ‘‘vanilla’’ (non-bdsm ) sexuality and broader
US social relations and regulatory norms.
The desire for sex to be free from social regulation characterizes not
only bdsm , but also sexuality more generally: confined to the private,
the deeply personal, or the psychological, sexuality often serves as a
symbol of freedom, rebellion, or intimacy unbound to—and an escape
from—structural social inequalities. This is phantasmatic but not incon-
sequential; imagining sex as resistance or opposition is one way that
capitalist social relations are instantiated and validated. So, for example,
these conceptions construct a private life that ought to ameliorate the
alienation of wage labor, or a sense of individuality and true desire
through which one might attain satisfaction (Hennessy 2000; Jakobsen
2005; Lowe 1995; Singer 1993). Thinking sexuality as a social relation,
then, means understanding that sexuality is resolutely social, rather
than private, or personal, or trivial. But it also means seeing the ways in
which sexuality is a relation. It is not enough to contextualize it within a
specific social, cultural, or historical moment; we must, instead, map
the complex and often contradictory social dynamics that produce and
are, in turn, reproduced within particular sexual cultures, practices,
and desires.
I call such dynamics a circuit to draw attention not only to the dense
connections between the bazaar and the slave auction—between capital-
ism and performance, public and private, socioeconomic and subjective
—but also to the functionality, the effects, of these connections. Like an
electrical circuit, which works when current flows between individual
nodes, the circuits of bdsm work when connections are created between
realms that are imagined as isolated and opposed. bdsm is a paradig-
matic case for understanding sexuality as a conduit between domains
that appear divided from each other: those conceptualized as subjective
or private, and those understood as social or economic. The elaborate
circuitry of bdsm energizes any particular bdsm scene, but it also
provides the productive charge that constitutes the bdsm scene itself.
As I will argue, the relations between capitalism, social inequality,
and sexuality are sometimes contested, sometimes contradictory, some-
times compensatory, and sometimes seamlessly enmeshed—but they
are always productive. To understand this dynamic relationship, I de-
ploy a broad reading of production, focusing on both relations of pro-
duction (in the economic sense) and gender, race, and sexuality as pro-

TOWA R D A P E R F O R M AT I V E M AT E R I A L I S M 7
 ductive performances. Bringing together the material/economic and
the cultural/performative, I show how sexual formations like bdsm
both compose and enact these social relations. The new bdsm commu-
nity developed alongside post-Fordist transformations in capitalism, in
concert with the neoliberal turn of the 1970s, when the first two bdsm
organizations in the United States were founded (the Eulenspiegel So-
ciety, or tes , founded in 1971 in New York City, and the Society of
Janus, founded in 1974 in San Francisco). bdsm is a form of social
belonging facilitated—even produced—by contemporary US capitalism,
especially consumerism and commodity exchange. At the same time,
this economic shift relies on the production of other social hierarchies;
differentiated subjects and niche communities are performatively pro-
duced in dynamic relation to capitalism. Following Miranda Joseph
(2002), I bring together an understanding of the production of sub-
jects through ‘‘performativity’’—the ‘‘reiterative and citational practice
by which discourse produces the effects that it names’’ (Butler 1993,
2)—with a materialist understanding of production as a dialectic of
social belonging and inequality.≤ This method reveals the supplemen-
tary relationship between bdsm communities and capitalism: the ways
in which community and capitalism depend on while also exceeding
each other.≥ At the same time, it illuminates the supplementary rela-
tionship between bdsm practice and broader US racial, gendered, and
sexual norms, norms that delimit the range of legible subject positions
along with the rationalities that naturalize this social landscape.∂
These relationships are not abstract or fixed; rather, the political, af-
fective, or material effects of such circuits are dependent, particular, and
variable. Indeed, because sm is a cultural, social, and historical mobiliza-
tion of social power, it requires an ethnographically inflected perfor-
mative materialism to track the on-the-ground dynamics that structure
relationships between subjects and power. Performative materialism
draws attention to relationships between the socioeconomic and the
culturally performative, linking historical social transformations to local
and subjective performances. The remainder of this introduction charts
the key theoretical terrains of this ethnographic method, tracing the
circuits between the subjective and the socioeconomic across different
registers, and pointing to the ways that the method can enrich our
understanding of contemporary sexual cultures like bdsm .

8 I N T RO D U C T I O N
PRACTICE CIRCUIT TECHNIQUES OF SELF-MASTERY IN COMMUNITY

As I concluded my fieldwork in 2003, the Society of Janus, the largest

bdsm educational organization in the Bay Area (often referred to as
Janus or soj ) instituted a cycle of introductory classes. Intended to
introduce the novice player to the most common forms of sm , the seven
classes, with suggested subtopics, were:

1 D/s (negotiation, collars and contracts, protocol, rituals, conflict

resolution, slavery, punishment, models of power exchange).
2 Bondage (leather, rope, metal, plastic, jackets, harnesses, Japanese
style, cages, predicament, suspensions, mummification/sensory
deprivation, emotional aspects, pain, escapism, temperature and
dis/comfort).
3 Impact (spanking, flogging, crops, canes, singletails, whips, Floren-
tine [double] flogging, ranges from light to heavy, sting vs. thud,
safety issues).
4 Electrical and medical (tens units, Folsom units, violet wand,
shock play, flyswatter, dog collars, cattle prods, light box,
genitorture and genital play, monopole versus dipole, safety issues,
piercing, catheterization, sounds, inflations, inspections, casting,
shaving, playing doctor, body mod[ification]s, labial and scrotal
inflations).
5 Sex play and sensation (fisting, anal, vaginal, cbt [cock and ball
torture], oral, genitorture, tit-torture, enema, wax, chemical/spice,
fire, ice, tickling, pinching, punching and kicking, biting, abrasion,
cupping).
6 Psychological aspects (negotiations, relationships, polyamory,
aftercare, violence, trust, land mines, personal fears).
7 Edge and fetish (fear and terror, breath, knife, cutting, branding,
abduction, interrogation, rape simulation, body worship, uniforms,
latex/rubber, foot fetish, corsetry and waist training, water
sports).

This list begins to document the enormous range of bdsm practices

and techniques—introductory or basic bdsm , no less—within the
community.
The seven classes were distinguished from Janus’s regular, more ad-

TOWA R D A P E R F O R M AT I V E M AT E R I A L I S M 9
 vanced classes, which, in the same few months, included ‘‘Total En-
closure Bondage,’’ ‘‘Co-Topping: Sharing Is Good,’’ ‘‘Erotic Knife Play,’’
‘‘Vaginal Fisting,’’ ‘‘When Someone You Love Is Vanilla,’’ and—my all-
time favorite workshop title—‘‘Tit Torture for an Uncertain World.’’ The
e-mail notice read that these classes were ‘‘not intended to make anyone
an expert in a specific area, but to give the student an awareness of the
spectrum of activities . . . and the basics of how to deal with it safely.’’
Instructors, the notice continued, will ‘‘convey to the students the com-
plexities of [each] area, the issues to be aware of, and where to go for fur-
ther information.’’ This expectation—that newcomers to bdsm will use
such classes to begin their training or education—is made explicit in the
following note: ‘‘The intention is that the twice-monthly Janus classes
[the regular, nonintroductory classes] will continue to delve deeper into
specific issues, techniques, styles and concerns while the Intro series will
help the newcomer navigate the overall world of bdsm and help them
integrate bdsm into their worldview.’’ This somewhat odd phrasing
begins to illuminate how becoming a bdsm practitioner requires not
only bdsm interests or desires, but also a set of skills or techniques with
which to navigate the bdsm world—a bdsm ‘‘worldview.’’ In other
words, becoming an sm practitioner, even if imagined to spring from a
core or essential desire, requires self-mastery and self-knowledge that is
bound to community rules, techniques, and perspectives.
One of my interviewees, Gretchen, a white, bisexual bottom/submis-
sive in her early forties, described coming into her identity as ‘‘part of
a journey toward self-mastering.’’∑ Similarly, Estrella, a white, lesbian
femme top in her late thirties, told me: ‘‘[bdsm ] is definitely an orienta-
tion in the same way my sexual orientation is not a sexual choice, it’s
just who I am, so that makes it an identity. And it’s a practice in the
sense that I do go to classes and I do take the practice of my craft
seriously on the level of activities.’’ At the same time, Estrella noted that
sm is also a community for her, pointing to the ways that identity and
practice merge with community: ‘‘It’s similar to the way I grew into my
lesbian identity: oh, this is who I am, other people do it, there’s a name
for it, and there are rules about it. And I can choose to learn those rules
or not, be part of that community or not, follow those rules or not, but
yeah, there’s a name and now I know what I am.’’ Estrella’s comments
reveal that bdsm is simultaneously an orientation or identity, a craft, a
practice, and a community or social scene. This complex constellation of

10 I N T RO D U C T I O N
meanings is typical for bdsm practitioners, and it is this mix of in-
formation and subject production— bdsm as technique or skill and
bdsm as worldview—that I understand as a Foucauldian ‘‘technique of
the self.’’
In The Use of Pleasure, Foucault defines these techniques as the work
‘‘one performs on oneself, not only in order to bring one’s conduct into
compliance with a given rule, but to attempt to transform oneself into
the ethical subject of one’s behavior’’ ([1984] 1990, 27; see also Foucault
[1984] 1988 and 1988; Mahmood 2004). Developed in the second and
third volumes of The History of Sexuality, this work on the self, or techne,
helps us think through the ways in which practitioners fashion them-
selves as sm subjects. This technique of the self is based on bdsm as a
practice: a set of skills or a craft that must be learned and mastered. So,
for example, many people see bdsm as something that they do (not
something that they are), a sexuality organized around practices. As an
obvious example, people who do bdsm are generally called ‘‘practi-
tioners’’ or ‘‘players,’’ not something like ‘‘bdsm uals.’’ sm practitioners
identify themselves in very specific and relational ways; my interview-
ees called themselves perverts, voyeurs, masters, masochists, bottoms,
pain sluts, switches, dom(me)s, slaves, submissives, ponies, butch bot-
toms, poly perverse, pain fetishists, leathermen, mistresses, and dad-
dies. For those who identified as tops, there were just plain tops, but
also service tops, femme tops, switches with top leanings, and domi-
nant tops. These sm orientations are typically modified with sexual ori-
entation, relationship style or dynamics, and interests: ‘‘I’m a bi poly
switch’’; ‘‘I’m a het, sensual top’’; ‘‘I’m a bondage bottom.’’ In these
combinations, the primacy of a fixed sexual identity as the ground of
subjectivity is destabilized; instead, bdsm is an identity in practice, a
deeply personal yet relational project of the self.∏
This form of self-fashioning is organized around community codes of
conduct. For sm is not simply a sexual activity; unlike most devotees
of oral sex, for example, bdsm practitioners participate in a commu-
nity that provides rules and techniques through which practitioners
forge sm orientations. Many of my interviewees distinguished between
‘‘real’’ sm practitioners (‘‘lifestyle,’’ ‘‘heavy,’’ or ‘‘experienced’’ players)
and ‘‘weekend’’ dabblers (‘‘bedroom,’’ ‘‘unsafe,’’ or ‘‘newbie’’ players). As
Jeff, a white, heterosexual, dominant top in his late thirties explained to
me, some people call bdsm ‘‘graduate school sex.’’ It is this kind of

TOWA R D A P E R F O R M AT I V E M AT E R I A L I S M 11
 educational mastery that differentiates—as Malc, a white, heterosexual
mostly dominant in his late thirties put it—‘‘people who are identified
as bdsm practitioners and people who just do rough sex.’’ Kinky people
become real bdsm practitioners through participation in a social, sex-
ual, and educational community that teaches techniques of the self
alongside rope bondage and flogging skills. Indeed, it is this commit-
ment to community, to sm as a form of social belonging, that differenti-
ates the bdsm I researched as a community practice.
Although in recent years a growing number of scholars have written
about sm , it remains the case, as Thomas Weinberg noted in 1987, that
very little work focuses on sm as a community. Instead, most work
on sm (or, often, sadomasochism) is interested in it as either an ab-
stract problematic or an individualized orientation.π The former—work
in philosophy, cultural theory, feminist theory, and literary criticism—
theorizes sm dynamics or explores the political or ethical dilemmas
posed by sm , but it does not locate sm practice in a particular socio-
economic or historical milieu.∫ The latter—work in social psychology,
psychoanalysis, and sexology—dispels some of the more pernicious ste-
reotypes of sm practitioners, but it does not link an individual’s desires
or practices to broader social formations.Ω In contrast, I build on Gayle
Rubin’s pathbreaking research on the history of gay male leathermen in
San Francisco (1997 and 1998) as well as Thomas Weinberg’s provoca-
tive suggestion that a large sm subculture will develop in a society that
has an unequal power distribution, that has enough affluence for the
development of leisure and recreational activities, and that values imagi-
nation and creativity (1995, 300; see also Gebhardt [1969] 1995). Flesh-
ing out this tantalizing yet overly broad sketch with ethnographic analy-
sis, I show how bdsm creates a circuit between self-mastery, technical
expertise, and community belonging. sm , in other words, is a social tech-
nique, a practice that—in concert with sm toys, rules, and rationalities —
simultaneously produces practitioners and community.

COMMUNITY CIRCUIT
FLEXIBLE SUBJECTS, COMMODITIES, COMMUNITIES

One evening in October 2002, I attended one of Mark’s bondage parties.

A white, heterosexual switch, Mark was one of the first people I inter-
viewed during my fieldwork. Unlike many residents of the Bay Area,

12 I N T RO D U C T I O N
Mark was born and raised in the region; like many of the pansexual
practitioners I would meet, Mark worked for a large computer company
down the Peninsula, in Silicon Valley. In his mid-forties, Mark was into
what he termed ‘‘serious bondage’’: bondage play with expensive, often
custom-made, leather and metal gear. Over the years, he had accumu-
lated an extraordinary array of bondage furniture: heavy cages, a full
leather table, a home-made bondage chair, a custom-sized leather body
bag, numerous eye bolts for suspension play, and customized horizontal
stocks. He began hosting regular parties for his friends in his Noe Valley
Victorian home, to give everyone a chance to play with these toys.
When I arrived at the party, I stationed myself in the kitchen by the
cheese and crackers and poured myself some wine. Leaning back against
the stove, I surveyed the scene: Lenora, a bisexual college student in her
early twenties in a Master/slave relationship, was laced into a very tight,
full-length black corset and bound upright to a rocking chair in the
living room, talking with other guests. Directly in front of me, between
the kitchen island and the living room, Chris swayed from two eye bolts
in the ceiling. He was strapped into a reinforced straitjacket and blind-
folded, his crotch at our eye level. I heard what sounded like a vacuum
cleaner in the front of the house, as the air was sucked out of a ‘‘vac
sack’’ (a bondage device consisting of two layers of latex stretched on a
frame eight feet by four feet, with a breathing tube for the person
inside). Lady Thendara and Latex Mustang, her husband, stood close
together off to the side, their eyes locked together as they cooed, post-
scene. They had tried out the vac sack, Thendara explained to me later,
completely sealing Mustang between the two layers of latex: a human
version of vacuumed-sealed food. Speaking for her husband, Lady Then-
dara explained that he’d loved it: the restrictive feeling of the latex as it
conformed to his entire body, and his feelings of helpless vulnerability
when he was inside. Suddenly, Mark ran through the kitchen, holding a
Hitachi Magic Wand vibrator aloft, its head covered with a latex glove,
empty fingers fanning out. Ever the considerate host, Mark was satisfy-
ing what appeared to be an urgent need for a vibrator from the bondage
scene participants in the back room.
Mark’s house, a techie’s shrine to the latest bondage toys and tech-
niques, begins to suggest the deep imbrication of capitalism and com-
munity in bdsm . The house party is both a space of community and a
site in which the very latest toys can be looked at, played with, and

TOWA R D A P E R F O R M AT I V E M AT E R I A L I S M 13
 desired; a space made possible by commodities, and thus limited in its
accessibility, but also a space where new bodies, desires, and relation-
ships can be created and explored. Proliferating forms of desire, sub-
jectivity, and embodiment like bdsm are themselves produced in and
through the interrelationships between capitalism (especially consum-
erism) and community. In her analysis of ‘‘the gay community’’ in San
Francisco, Joseph shows that community—often imagined as a more
romantic form of belonging via identity—is instead ‘‘deployed to shore
it up and facilitate the flow of capital’’ (2002, xxxii). Indeed, almost all of
the practitioners I spoke with had invested between $1,500 and $3,000
in their toy collections, wardrobes, and, in some cases, play spaces.
Commodities like bondage gear, sounds, and vibrators produce commu-
nity; in this way, sm communities are not oppositional to, but rather
complicit with, transformations in capitalism, particularly the consoli-
dation of what is variously called late, flexible, informational, or ad-
vanced capitalism. Although different scholars emphasize different as-
pects of this shift, late capitalism is characterized by flexibility, new
relations between production and consumption, a shift from Fordist to
post-Fordist production, and the rise of new technologies and informa-
tics (Castells 2000; Harvey 1997; Jameson 1992).∞≠
These economic changes produce large-scale shifts in social organi-
zation: new social and cultural logics; new forms of community; and
changed relationships between public and private, social and economic.
In the field of sexuality, this has enabled new sexual identities, as new
sexual practices, desires, and technologies have proliferated in the mar-
ketplace (Curtis 2004; Hennessy 2000; Lowe 1995; Pellegrini 2002;
Singer 1993). From reproductive technologies and sex therapy to sex
toys, phone sex, and pornography, the last few decades have seen a
proliferation of ever-more-specialized niche markets, a shift that also
heralds new possibilities for the generation and commoditization of
social difference. With its endless paraphernalia, bdsm is a prime exam-
ple of late-capitalist sexuality. The proliferation of commodities and the
community-based knowledge to use them creates an infinitely expand-
ing market for bdsm gear, which helps to produce both consumer-
subjects who exhibit flexible desires and commodity-oriented commu-
nities that serve as flexible marketplaces.
Late-capitalist relations of production and consumption have also
restructured bodies, subjects, and sociality. Linked to new forms of

14 I N T RO D U C T I O N
capitalism are more ‘‘adaptable’’ bodies, which absorb new techniques,
technologies, commodities, and proliferating sexual pleasures as ideal
consumers (E. Martin 1994). They also display a flexible tolerance of
difference (racial, cultural, gendered, bodily) that make them ideal work-
ers, especially in the technology and service economies (Hennessy 2000,
108–9; McRuer 2006, 2). This is not to say that such tolerant flexibility
does not reproduce social inequality, but rather that such regimes regu-
late social normativity through shifting and flexible attitudes instead of
rigid domination.∞∞ And a hallmark of such regimes is that they produce
a sense of community and belonging through exclusions—which are
often disguised or obscured through alibis of tolerance, class- or race-
neutrality, and diversity.
To return to Mark’s party, we can see sm as a community of con-
sumption, where the latest bondage toys are produced for and produce
flexible bodies, techniques of pleasure, and possibilities for the expan-
sion of bodily sensations and play. Such possibilities are more available
to those practitioners with access—material and social—to both the
means to purchase these toys and the hegemonic forms of subjectivity
that are normalized and reproduced by the sm community: the flexible
—often white, heterosexual, middle-aged, and professional—high-tech
workers of Silicon Valley. In this way, the bdsm community is produced
in and through transformations in capitalism, but this community for-
mation produces not only (commodity-oriented) belonging but also the
ideal members of a community, an exclusivity based on both class and
productive flexibility. The social hierarchies on which sm draws enable
new meanings and social relationships, but these experiments are more
possible and more accessible to those with class, race, and gender privi-
lege: heterosexual men playing with sexism, white bodies at a charity
slave auction, professional information technology (it ) workers with
several rooms filled with custom-made bondage toys. bdsm , then, cre-
ates a circuit between social norms (especially whiteness, maleness, and
heterosexuality) and socioeconomic relations (changes in class status,
leisure time, technology, and spatial mobility), but it does so in ways
that often disguise or conceal as much as they reveal.

TOWA R D A P E R F O R M AT I V E M AT E R I A L I S M 15
 PLAY CIRCUIT NEOLIBERAL RATIONALITIES OF PRIVATE AND PUBLIC

In 2002 I attended a workshop on incest play at qsm , a classroom space

and mail-order business in San Francisco. In the sm scene, although age
play (adult babies, Daddy or Mommy/boi [boy] or grrl [girl]) is a rela-
tively common form of play, age play with an incest theme is not.
Estrella’s workshop demo featured a ‘‘brother’’ and ‘‘sister’’ (adults per-
forming as children of about eight years old); Estrella was ‘‘Daddy,’’
arriving home from work. ‘‘He’’ sat on a chair at the center of the stage
and began speaking to his children, asking them what they had done
today and whether they would be nice to their Daddy this evening.
Daddy coaxed the girl over with the promise of reading her a story. After
the daughter sat on Estrella’s lap, he began reading to her from a chil-
dren’s book. As the reading progressed, Estrella began adjusting the girl,
positioning her more firmly against his crotch. Continuing the reading
as the girl squirmed, Daddy began rubbing himself against the girl’s ass,
holding on to her hips. As the audience watched, Daddy pushed against
the girl, cooing to his daughter (‘‘Daddy likes it when you sit on his
lap,’’ ‘‘be a good girl for Daddy now,’’ ‘‘stay still for Daddy’’). As Daddy
started touching his daughter between her legs (over her white cotton
panties), he moaned, telling her she was a good girl and to ‘‘give Daddy a
kiss now.’’
When I interviewed Estrella later, she told me that she had designed
the class to respond to people who ‘‘look at age play as light, like sm -lite,
because it’s thought of as role play, it’s thought of as pretend.’’ When I
asked her what about age play wasn’t ‘‘pretend,’’ she said, ‘‘Well, if you
pick up a stick and hit somebody, there is no way that that’s pretend.’’
But, she continued, because the adults in the bdsm community have all
been children, ‘‘those roles that we’ve all lived through can be very
profound and very deep and very real.’’ It is in part the fact that such
scenes build on real-life experiences, attitudes, and cultural dynamics
that lends them their intensity. But that is not all. Estrella is the mother
of three teenagers, who live with her and her wife in their Alameda
home. She explained:

There are experiences that are from my being a mother that I probably
use in age play, like that feeling of your kid going to sleep and you are
stroking their head—that bond, that love, I think I tap into that in my

16 I N T RO D U C T I O N
 acting that out with somebody. But I’ve certainly . . . I mean I wouldn’t
even think of, there is a line with your kids! It’s really separate. I don’t
know how to say it, but it’s separate. I’ve had plenty of bosses and never
had sex with them, but I can do boss/secretary seduction, easy . . . I
mean, things are separate because they’re just separate.

By building on the familiar to construct something new, Estrella can

create realistic play. But, at the same time, she emphasizes both that age
play is ‘‘separate, really separate,’’ from her real experiences as a mother
and that it is a ‘‘very deep and very real’’ form of play.
This seeming contradiction makes use of what Gregory Bateson in a
classic essay calls the ‘‘play frame’’ (1955). For Bateson, the play frame
carries the shared understanding that what the players are doing is ‘‘just
for play,’’ not for real. Further, the frame, which says on the surface that
what happens is just play, also enables what Bateson calls its opposite
(but what may really be its mirror): what happens in the play frame is
really much more than play. Like the anthropological concept of cultural
performance, these frames construct a boundary around a particular
performance so that it is, as Victor Turner puts it, ‘‘set-apart’’ from a
more everyday social field (1986, 24).∞≤
One primary way that bdsm practitioners create this framework of
set-apartness is by imagining the sm scene as a ‘‘safe’’ and separate
space: ‘‘safe, sane, and consensual,’’ the motto of contemporary sm ,
becomes ‘‘safe’’ from social reality. In this fantasized split between the
‘‘real world’’ and the scene, sm ’s paradigmatic theatricality becomes
important: sexual encounters are called ‘‘scenes’’; one ‘‘plays’’ with one’s
sm partners; and roles, costumes, and props are a crucial part of sm
play. But the way this disavowal via performance takes place is decidedly
more complex than a simple theater analogy might have it.
Instead, understanding sm as a cultural performance shows us the
ways in which such performances of social power can simultaneously
draw on and disavow their social referents. The fantasy of the scene
as separate, as set off or bracketed from the real world, acts as an
alibi that enables practitioners to dramatize—while also disavowing—
social hierarchies and institutionalized systems of domination, espe-
cially those of race, class, gender, sexuality, and imperialism. So, for
example, bdsm is often about polarized roles: top/bottom, dominant/
submissive, Master/slave. These roles are not fixed to a genital-sex-

TOWA R D A P E R F O R M AT I V E M AT E R I A L I S M 17
 gender matrix; the practitioners I spoke with were adamant that there is
no essential, generalizable, or immutable correspondence between one’s
body or genitalia, one’s gender presentation, and one’s bdsm practice.
Some people in the scene enjoy roles ‘‘opposite’’ to their ‘‘real life’’ roles:
the business man in bondage; feminized, cross-dressed heterosexual
men (called ‘‘sissy maids’’); female dominants with enormous strap-ons;
adults in diapers; lesbian women as butch bois. Practitioners believe
that gender in sm is ‘‘freely chosen,’’ in accordance with liberal ideas of
choice and agency; sm roles, in this analysis, have nothing to do with
forms of social inequality. However, such scenes also require these very
social norms to be legible; these performances are dependent on and
productive of particular iterations of gender, race, and sexuality.
In sm this disavowal of a scene’s dependence on social relations is
installed through a refiguration of the public and the private. For practi-
tioners, sm play happens in the private, a space of personal desire,
individual relationships, and freely chosen roles. This construction of
sm , then, is based both on a liberal subject—who knows its own desires,
acts with autonomy, and freely consents—and on neoliberal rationali-
ties that delimit this subject’s sphere of belonging, of self, to the pri-
vate. This private is not only opposed to the public, variously imagined
as the law, vanilla social norms, or social space; it is figured as an escape
from it.
This conception of neoliberalism is central to bdsm —neoliberalism
not so much as a strictly economic theory, but as a form of governmen-
tality, a contradictory and always local cultural formation that produces
and validates subjects with marketized understandings of the relation-
ship between public and private.∞≥ One crucial aspect of neoliberalism is
that it creates and relies on racial, gendered, and sexual inequality, but
justifies this social inequality as a logical outcome of purportedly neu-
tral economic choice: homo oeconomicus as universal man (Brown 2005;
Duggan 2003; Kingfisher and Maskovsky 2008; Manalansan 2005). A
neoliberal valorization of free choice, individual agency, and personal
responsibility works by obscuring the relationships between seemingly
private identities (such as race, gender, and sexuality) and more public
political and socioeconomic configurations; this can mask the ways that
community performatively produces and reproduces social inequality.
Neoliberalism is a cultural formation crucial to contemporary sexual
cultures. As a result, subject production is deeply tied not only to eco-

18 I N T RO D U C T I O N
nomic systems, but also to the shifting and culturally particular ra-
tionalities that justify the inequality produced by these systems. Imag-
ining a split between a public, social world of ‘‘real’’ power and a private,
individualized world of freely chosen fantasy can bolster the belief that
sm scenes with race and gender have nothing at all to do with sexism or
racism in the ‘‘real world.’’ This refusal obscures the way that sm scenes
like the incest scene are cultural performances that work by drawing on
shared and meaningful social hierarchies of age, family, race, and gen-
der. Moreover, just as late capitalism itself produces the transgressive-
ness of sex—its fantasized location as outside of or compensatory for
alienated labor—the fantasy of the scene as a safe space of private desire
justifies and reinforces certain social inequalities. Here, for example,
practitioners’ desire to escape the social ills of racism, denying that a
charity slave auction like the one that opens this introduction has any-
thing to do with historical slavery, reinforces the very whiteness of the
sm community. This is what Howard Winant calls a ‘‘neoliberal racial
project,’’ a form of whiteness that disavows social and structural racism
through a colorblind, individualist understanding of race (1997, 45; see
also Gordon and Newfield 1994; Lipsitz 2006; Omi and Winant 1994;
Wiegman 1999).∞∂ These disavowals use neoliberal rationalities of free
choice, individual autonomy, and personal responsibility to obscure and
sometimes reinforce forms of inequality. This can create opportunities
to transgress, or feel free of, oppressive social norms while simulta-
neously restricting these possibilities to—and fortifying the position
of—those with dominant class, race, and gender positions. When sm is
seen as ‘‘just play,’’ in other words, it can help obscure the dense cir-
cuitry between public and private, between oppressive social hierarchies
and free, individualized desires.
Considering the politics of sm play and performance requires an
examination of the ways in which bdsm acts within and on—appropri-
ating, reiterating, reinforcing—these larger social systems of domina-
tion, not an analysis that assumes the a priori transgressiveness of
alternative sexual practices. bdsm cultural performances can reproduce
material relations of inequality through mimesis or repetition; they can
also produce new racial, gendered, and sexual knowledges, positionali-
ties, and possibilities through resignification.∞∑ Techniques of Pleasure
reveals how sm scenes—and the sm scene—constitute and are con-
stituted by social hierarchies, drawing attention to the multidirectional,

TOWA R D A P E R F O R M AT I V E M AT E R I A L I S M 19
 awkward, and ambivalent circuits between social relations and sexual
performances as they are lived, debated, and imagined. In this way, I
explore bdsm as a series of sexual, social, and bodily practices that
provide opportunities to remake and consolidate forms of subjectivity
built both on capitalist practices of consumption and production and on
the regulatory normalization of race, gender, and sexuality.

READING THE CIRCUIT

THE POLITIC AL AND SOCIAL EFFECTS OF BDSM

This is the place to begin to read the politics of bdsm play. Cultural
performances like the slave auction or the incest scene play with ‘‘real
world’’—and particularly American—social hierarchies. This is, in part,
the reason why political, often feminist, critics of sm argue that sm slav-
ishly replays either individual trauma (such as abuse) or social trauma
(such as sexism), sometimes going so far as to argue that bdsm is simply
the same as the violence it mimes. On the other side, sm supporters
argue that sm is performed (thus not real), consented to (thus equaliz-
ing), or transgressive of normative vanilla sexuality and gender. Instead,
bdsm performances produce the sm community just as they produce
sm practitioners, but not in a ‘‘safe, sane, and consensual’’ vacuum—
rather, in relation to economic, social, and cultural regimes and embed-
ded systems of privilege and power. This moves us away from the bifur-
cation of power—performance as subversive versus performance as re-
enactment—and toward a dialectical reading of sm play as generated
through and within social norms, and linked to multiple productions
and disavowals of social power. In other words, sm play and perfor-
mance not only display—often spectacularly—social relations, they also
set these relations into motion, creating circuits between social norms
and social power. These scenes are differentially productive and require
an ethnographic eye to parse the multiple effects of sm scenes on dif-
ferently situated practitioners, players, even readers.
Take, for my final example, a workshop I attended titled ‘‘Interroga-
tion Scenes.’’ The description of the class, circulated via e-mail, began
with this teaser: ‘‘Do you enjoy having your bottom ‘fight back’ during
play? Do interrogation scenes in war movies turn you on?’’ It continued:
‘‘Domina will explain what to do and what to avoid . . . See the ways you
can make a scene like this believable.’’ As is typical in bdsm classes and

20 I N T RO D U C T I O N
workshops in the Bay Area, the class began with a lecture. Domina, a
white, bisexual, dominant/sadist prodomme in her late forties, stood in
the front of the room wearing a California Department of Corrections
shirt and jeans. She began by describing ‘‘consensual nonconsent’’ play
—play with forcing themes—and suggested prisoner of war, rape, the
Spanish Inquisition, and the Salem witch trials as potential themes for
such play. Domina urged us to use a real-life context or historical event
to create more exciting scenes; both setting and costuming choices are
critical, she said: Nazi uniforms, for example, are ‘‘not pc , but they
are powerful.’’
For interrogation, she told us, one can find a lot of very useful mate-
rial on the Internet: Amnesty International’s documents, an Israeli in-
terrogation site, and—what she said was the treasure trove of technique
—the declassified 1963 cia manual known as kubark . Domina waved
a printout of kubark at us while giving advice from its pages: the best
way to stage an arrest, different kinds of sensory deprivation, how to
create conditions of heightened suggestibility. It was 2002, and I had
not yet heard of the manual; I was skeptical about this whole scene: that
the document was real, that it was not just sm fantasy. Now, of course,
in the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib controversy and several years of
dispute about the legality of ‘‘no-touch’’ interrogation—torture—tech-
niques, I know much more about kubark and its place in US imperial
histories.∞∏
As Domina talked, Richard and Denise jumped up from the audience
—they had been sitting in the first row of folding chairs—and ran
onto the stage where Domina stood; it was a surprise demonstration.
Richard and Domina subdued Denise and tied her to the floor, cutting
off her clothes. For the rest of the class, Richard, transformed into
a slow, Southern ‘‘bubba,’’ sat by Denise, leering with slack jaw, wet
lips, and droopy eyes. Periodically he reached over to bound and naked
Denise, grabbing at her nipples as she tried to kick him away. With this
scene playing out behind her, Domina began to describe various tor-
ture techniques: water torture, breath play, electricity, making someone
stand still without moving. ‘‘Threatening rape or body cavity searches is
good,’’ she said, as is anything that dehumanizes the bottom: give them
a number, deny them bathroom privileges or toilet paper, deprive them
of sleep, keep the room cold, don’t feed them, or feed them tasteless or
disgusting food, like boiled white bread or oatmeal mixed with peas.

TOWA R D A P E R F O R M AT I V E M AT E R I A L I S M 21
 Domina also gave us a few tips on how to maintain the fantasy of
interrogation while ‘‘checking in’’ on the bottom. Staying in character as
mean cop, for example, Domina might hold Denise’s feet apart, a humil-
iating display for Denise, but one that would also allow Domina to check
the temperature of Denise’s feet to make sure that the rope around
her ankles was not cutting off her circulation. Domina also told us we
should have a prearranged signal with the bottom for something dan-
gerous, which we should work out during negotiation. Before she put a
real knife up to Denise’s throat, for example, Domina grabbed her neck,
their signal that the knife blade was sharp and that Denise should not
move too much or struggle too hard.
These tactics allow for the management of real risk within the scene
without breaking the fantasy. Using realism—real contexts, histories,
emotions, and relationships—the scene becomes believable for both
participants and audience. These spectacular scenes, like those that
replay hierarchies based on gender, class, race, or age (often called ‘‘cul-
tural trauma play’’), use social or historical structures of exploitation as
fodder for sm eroticization. In these scenes, the intensity of the play or
performance is directly related to a shared national imaginary, a cultural
backdrop of entrenched social power. Here, the interrogation scene
works with forms of state power available as historical or cultural sign-
age. These signs are flexible, mediated, and both public and personal:
antique torture devices on display at a museum, war movies, familial
military experiences, and photojournalist war coverage are all potential
resources for creating an interrogation scene. bdsm scenes rely on this
realistic quality—effective and believable, if not real.
How might we read a scene such as this, a mimetic performance of
the kind of state terror that would come to light two years later in the
Abu Ghraib scandal? Rather than stage an abstracted or formalized
political reading, we might first linger on the question of effectiveness
and effects. Drawing on Jon McKenzie’s (2001) innovative theoriza-
tion of performance, in which he argues that the contemporary regime
of power/knowledge is organized around effective performance rather
than Foucauldian discipline, I develop a method of reading that empha-
sizes the performative efficacy of sm scenes.∞π This method highlights
performance as and of power: both the way power is performatively
produced through flexible circuits and the way flexible circuits incite
politicized performance. This conception draws attention to power as

22 I N T RO D U C T I O N
an injunction to perform creatively, quickly, and well, an injunction that
is no more liberating than a rigid, modernist disciplinary power, but
that is linked to the flexible subject formation and social organization of
late capitalism. Performativity is productive, in other words, through
flexibility—a flexibility tied to forms of capitalist production and con-
sumption, as well as to social values and norms such as diversity and
tolerance. Linking the material effects of a performance and the produc-
tion of evaluative criteria through which effectiveness is measured, an
analysis of performative efficacy thus focuses both on sm as a produc-
tive cultural performance (performatively producing sm subjects and
communities) and on the political effects of such performances (the
politics of performative productions). The key question is not ‘‘What are
the politics of sm ?’’ with its rote answer of ‘‘kinda hegemonic, kinda
subversive’’ (Sedgwick 1993a, 15). It is, rather, ‘‘What is produced in
this particular scene?’’—a question that requires us to analyze how (and
why) any particular scene works, for whom it works, and what the
effects of a performance are for variously positioned participants.
I found the interrogation scene effective. Playing on and with my
fears of Deliverance-style Southern men and drawling authority, it made
me angry; I wanted to stand up and yell at Richard to get off Denise, to
stop touching her, to leave her alone. I believed that Richard was this
dangerous kind of man, even though I had met him before this scene, as
he is Domina’s husband. Yet the playing effectively produced real—
although sometimes contradictory—bodily, emotional, and relational
responses: fear, hatred, rage, arousal, trust, and betrayal. In this scene,
the elaborate care taken to ensure consent and safety puts into place a
circuit between a real or social referent and a scene realistic enough to
be effective: arousing and involving for both participants and audiences.
An effective scene creates a particular circuit that connects bodies and
toys, subjects and histories, players and audiences through exchange:
energy, commodity, affective, and power exchanges.
By dramatizing power in often spectacular ways, effective sm con-
nects individuals with social and national imaginaries, and private fan-
tasies with culturally legible social hierarchies. In so doing, it produces
new sexualities, socialities, embodiments, and subjectivities, and it often
reproduces not only the economic, cultural, and social regimes that are
formed from and give form to sm performance, but also the unresolved
contradictions and complexities within these regimes. Although such

TOWA R D A P E R F O R M AT I V E M AT E R I A L I S M 23
 scenes are effective, they are not necessarily political, much less eman-
cipatory. The interrogation scene, replaying imperialism in the name of
eroticism, asks us to think through some of the political stakes of an
analysis of sm , as it focuses attention on the nexus of sexuality and
power that is both the source and product of bdsm . The impact of such
involvement—whether an interrogation scene prompts a political cri-
tique of war, for example—must be explored at ground level, based on
the social positionalities and epistemological frameworks of the partici-
pants. Particular sm scenes might, by making sex public, disrupt under-
standings of sex as private, of desire as asocial, offering practitioners and
analysts a new vantage point on the contradictions of current social
relations. They might also, by reprivatizing sex, create possibilities for a
reentrenchment of subjects within such power structures, especially
those that bolster the class, race, and gender inequality that is justified
through neoliberal rationalities. sm scenes have differential effects; we
cannot rest a political reading of sm on a formal dichotomy between
transgression and reification of social hierarchies, but must rather ask
about a particular scene’s productive, performative effects on players,
audiences, readers, and anthropologists like me.
At the Byzantine Bazaar and Slave Auction that first day of my real
fieldwork, I was surprised by the kinds of people gathered at the event
and the intensity of the staged slave auction. I struggled to make sense
not only of the particular dynamics of desire and economics, and perfor-
mance and positionality, that produced these practitioners and this
event, but also of the relationships between the Bazaar as a sexual
marketplace and the Slave Auction as racialized, gendered sexual perfor-
mance. The performative materialism of Techniques of Pleasure is the
result of this complicated arrival story, an approach that foregrounds
bdsm sexuality as a social relation, a dynamic circuit between the sub-
jective and the socioeconomic. Performative materialism enables me to
link the proliferation and commodification of desire to the production
and reproduction of social norms. Through this method, bdsm emerges
as one of the ways that processes of subjectification are bound to nor-
malized systems of inequality within contemporary capitalism. As I
began to understand, sm is a practice of the self, a form of community
and belonging, an impetus to consumption and lifestyle, and an erotici-
zation of social inequality. Techniques of Pleasure both accounts for and
disrupts what, at first, confounded me: the nondichotomous relations

24 I N T RO D U C T I O N
between normative and nonnormative embodied by computer program-
mers in leather, marketplaces of desire, and play scenes that dramatize
and display—to uncertain political ends—US social hierarchies of race,
gender, class, and sexuality. What I was seeing that first day, in other
words, was the ways in which the performative or discursive is always
deeply bound to the economic and the political, the ways in which
subject formation is deployed within and alongside, but cannot be re-
duced to, forms of commodification. sm allows us to think anew the
work these circuits do as they link sexuality with subjectification and
desire, with leisure and consumption, with social difference and power,
with economic relations and political rationalities—to rethink, in short,
the socioeconomics of contemporary sex.

ETHNOGRAPHY AND PERFORMATIVE MATERIALISM

Techniques of Pleasure instantiates this performative materialism through

ethnography. Combining socioeconomic and performative analytics,
performative materialism insists on a method of reading that pays care-
ful attention to the dynamic ways subjects are produced in and through
social power. In order to read the effects—political, ethical, social, mate-
rial, and affectual—of bdsm scenes, from the sm interrogation scene
and the charity slave auction to the biotechnologies of flogging, we
must analyze the rationalities, the cultural formations, that link a par-
ticular scene or individual practitioner with the larger social landscape.
We need, in other words, an ethnographic reading that can illuminate
the social relations condensed in everyday life, the thickness of social
life on the ground, and the ambivalent effects of performance on multi-
ply situated participants. My fieldwork method combined participant
observation with open-ended interviews with diverse practitioners
across the Bay Area. This combination of interviews and community-
based fieldwork gave me a sense of the bdsm community as a whole—
its internal debates, tensions, practices, pressures, and shared knowl-
edges—as well as how differently situated individuals negotiate and
make meaning within this community framework.
Between 2000 and 2003, I lived in San Francisco, attending, observ-
ing, and participating in a wide variety of community events. I served as
the archivist for the Society of Janus, and so I attended organizational
business meetings; I attended munches across the Bay Area, in San

TOWA R D A P E R F O R M AT I V E M AT E R I A L I S M 25
 Francisco, Palo Alto, Berkeley, Fresno, and Vacaville; and I spent as
much time taking workshops on sm techniques and reading e-mails as I
did going to dungeon play parties. I did, of course, attend play parties,
ranging from large, semipublic gatherings hosted by organizations to
small private parties, as well as other community-organized events such
as film previews, book-release parties, charity events, flea markets, fe-
tish store sales, slave auctions, fetish art openings, Christmas and Hal-
loween parties, and the Folsom and Dore Alley Street Fairs. I occasion-
ally went to fetish clubs and balls like the Exotic Erotic and Club sin !, as
well as local sex clubs (like the Power Exchange) and sm -themed club
nights (like Bondage-a-Go-Go). As bdsm has grown, it has developed
regional and national networks that are increasingly important in defin-
ing practitioners’ sense of belonging. Therefore, I also attended contests
and conferences both local and national (San Francisco Dyke Boi/Grrl
contest, San Jose’s Folsom Fringe, Washington, DC’s Black Rose, and
Boston’s Leather Leadership Conference). As part of my fieldwork, I
read e-mails from local, regional, and national mailing lists, and online
and print sm magazines; and I watched movies, documentaries, TV
programs, and ads that had some—sometimes tenuous—relation to sm .
This array of events, attractive to different practitioners, gave me an
overall picture of the new guard bdsm scene—its dynamics and its
social networks.
To think through bdsm with the practitioners for whom this com-
munity is meaningful, I also conducted sixty-one interviews of two to
four hours with diverse bdsm practitioners who have made this com-
munity a significant part of their lives (see the appendix).∞∫ My inter-
viewees ranged from age twenty to fifty-eight, with an average age of
forty-one; most were professional-class white people in long-term rela-
tionships (both monogamous and polyamorous). Because I focused on
the organized sm scene, my interviewees were primarily pansexual prac-
titioners who join Janus and women who join the Exiles (the women’s
or leatherdyke organization); this means that most of my male inter-
viewees were heterosexual (although I did interview bisexual and gay
men), while the women were more evenly divided between bisexual,
lesbian, and heterosexual orientations (including two transwomen). Al-
though racial dynamics within the sm community were a central inter-
est for me, and I made an effort to interview nonwhite practitioners, the
vast majority of my interviewees were white, and many worked in the

26 I N T RO D U C T I O N
South Bay as computer programmers or it consultants. My interview-
ees did range dramatically in how long they had been in the sm scene:
I interviewed dungeon owners, well-known prodommes, and leading
writers and community experts, some in the scene for over thirty years;
I also interviewed newcomers, who had been involved for one or two
years. The interviews were open-ended. I typically began by asking when
the person had gotten involved with the organized bdsm scene and
proceeded to discuss, among other things, the sm community and its
tensions and dynamics, the politics of bdsm performance, and the local
histories of bdsm . My interviews gave me an opportunity to try out my
ideas and refocus my understanding; they also allowed my interviewees
to direct and open lines of inquiry.
Combining participant observation with interviews gave me a deeper
understanding of both the community (and its practices) and prac-
titioners (and their narratives) than either one alone would have—
enabling me to see how, for example, individual interpretations and
community debates intersect, and how community pressures play out
differently for practitioners depending on their race, class, and gender.
It also allowed me to depart from the two most common frameworks for
representation of minoritarian sexual practices like bdsm : the etiologi-
cal and documentarian approaches. Neither approach pays enough at-
tention to sexuality as a social relation, and thus neither can uncover
the dynamic relationships between communities or subjects and the
larger socioeconomic milieu.
The etiological approach, focusing on the causation of or motivation
for bdsm desires, begins from the supposition that bdsm (and other
marginalized sexualities) must be explained and diagnosed as individu-
alized deviations. sm sexuality is commonly understood as pathological
in both clinical and popular settings, but I am not the first to suggest
that questions of etiology are, in the end, less interesting for what they
tell us about so-called perversions than what they tell us about catego-
ries of normativity and the power those categories wield. Such vanilla-
normativity does violence to sexual practices and desires like bdsm by
cataloging, diagnosing, and, as Foucault puts it, ‘‘entomologizing’’ them
([1976] 1990, 43).
Like the etiological lens, a documentarian or voyeuristic approach
also reentrenches a psychologizing, asocial approach to sexuality, in
which personal proclivities and individual dynamics are severed from

TOWA R D A P E R F O R M AT I V E M AT E R I A L I S M 27
 their social formation. Whereas in the former, bdsm is presented as
individually pathological, in the latter, it is presented as a strange set of
exotic practices. As Kath Weston notes, this approach partakes of the
fantasy of the ethnographer as empiricist, as a ‘‘documentarian, a pur-
veyor of distilled data’’ on what ‘‘ ‘the X’ really do in the privacy of the
shack, the hut, or the boudoir’’ (1998, 12, 25; see also Weston 1995b).
Both etiological and documentarian approaches, then, not only belie the
dense connections between bdsm and other social practices—sexual
and otherwise—but they also construct a gap between sm practitioners
and the researcher, author, and reader of this ethnography.
Both approaches simultaneously flatten out the tremendous range of
meanings, motivations, interpretations, and desires within the bdsm
scene (homogenizing the category of kinky)∞Ω and construct a chasm
between the ‘‘normal’’ and the ‘‘nonnormal’’ or perverse (dichotomizing
the categories bdsm and vanilla; see, for example, Rubin 1984). During
one of the first classes I attended, Cleo, the instructor and a well-known
prodomme, wrote a list of reasons why people play on a dry-erase board
in the front of the classroom. Her list included: to fulfill a fantasy; to
please a partner; to get ‘‘done,’’ get high, have a big orgasm; to let go
of control; to experience emotional catharsis or release; and to increase
intimacy. Notably, reenacting a foundational trauma (of childhood sex-
ual abuse, usually)—a common mainstream perception of bdsm ’s
origin—is absent from this list. Instead, the list is not fundamentally
different from the reasons people have vanilla sex. Indeed, the parallels
between vanilla and bdsm sex, or the ways in which bdsm practice may
resonate with other professional-class leisure pursuits like rock climb-
ing, is further evidence of the fact that bdsm is not an individualized
(and pathological) compulsion or a distinct set of exotic practices.
Rather, in bdsm we see broader social, political, and economic forma-
tions: the links (and tensions) between leisure and labor; consumerism
and desire; race, class, and neoliberalism; and politics and privilege. In
this way, my ethnographic approach to bdsm neither psychologizes
practitioners nor exoticizes these practices; instead, I pay attention to
the multiple, variable, and complex meanings, interpretations, and ef-
fects of bdsm . Yet the durability of these two dynamics gestures to the
way that representations of sexual difference effectively differentiate
the us (good, vanilla subjects) from the them (the pathological or the
perverse).

28 I N T RO D U C T I O N
 This problem of difference and distance besets most ethnographers,
but perhaps especially those of us who work with alternative sexual
communities. My field site—the familiar spaces of cafes and conference
halls and the unfamiliar space of a dungeon—and my informants—
white professionals who sometimes far exceeded my comfort zone—
were both close to my home and far away. For example, my own discom-
fort during slave auctions and other cultural trauma play motivated my
readings in the latter half of this book. But at other times, my posi-
tionality led to blind spots; because I am intimately familiar with some
kinds of ‘‘technique’’ (I have bought more ‘‘how to’’ kits from Good
Vibrations over the years than I care to admit in writing), I was initially
simply bored by endless talk about the finer points of bdsm technique
and toy craftsmanship. It took some degree of time and analysis before I
was able to see just how important these conversations really were to
the production of bdsm practitioners and community.
Similarly, my own relationship to bdsm practices draws attention to
the insider/outsider border in fieldwork; as with most ethnographic
projects, these dynamics were sometimes uncomfortable. One day, while
giving me a ride to a women’s play party at the Scenery, a semipublic
dungeon, Lady Thendara—a white, bisexual top in her early forties—
asked me, ‘‘So you aren’t into sm yourself?’’ ‘‘No,’’ I answered. ‘‘Hm. I
would get so bored if all I had was vanilla sex.’’ I doubt anyone thinks all
they have is ‘‘vanilla sex’’—sex that is bland, devoid of power exchange,
technique, skill, and, usually, fun. Nonetheless, playing around the edges
of bdsm does not make you ‘‘into sm ’’; instead, as I will argue, becoming
an sm practitioner is about commitment, practice, and belonging to this
social, sexual, and educational community in a serious way. Thus, when
sm practitioners asked if I was ‘‘into sm ’’ I always said no, as I hung
around people who, unlike me, have made the sm community in the Bay
Area home in a variety of ways. Some practitioners felt that I could never
truly understand sm without doing it, but most appreciated my stance
as a queer, sm -friendly nonpractitioner (often because they felt that it
would give my research more scholarly legitimacy). And although I was
sometimes the butt of semi-joking prodding or encouragement to try
out some new toy or technique, or even plan a scene (usually with the
person to whom I was talking), I found that the lose-lose situation of
being, on the one hand, too close to or overinvested in sm or, on the
other hand, too distant from or incapable of understanding it was more

TOWA R D A P E R F O R M AT I V E M AT E R I A L I S M 29
 easily negotiated with sm practitioners than my academic colleagues. As
Ellen Lewin and Bill Leap note, for anthropologists, ‘‘although doing
research in New Guinea, for example, does not lead to the assumption
that one must be a native of that region, studying lesbian/gay topics is
imagined as only possible for a ‘native’ ’’ (2002, 12; see also Weston
1998). In sexuality studies, even in queer studies, these assumptions
about the researcher’s identity are prevalent and problematic, continu-
ously reproducing an imperative to either identify or disidentify with
and as one’s research.
My ethnographic approach resists the false dichotomies of distance
as difference and closeness as sameness. Instead, I have placed the imag-
inations and experiences of my interviewees and their scenes at the
center of this book in order to convey some of the appeal of sm practice
and community for these practitioners—an appeal I locate in a par-
ticular social, economic, and cultural formation. And rather than high-
lighting individual practitioners’ sexual narratives, I explore community
debates, tensions, and points of convergence as openings to broader
configurations of sex, money, and power, thinking critically about the
dynamic relationships between subjects—their stories, narrations, and
disagreements—and the socioeconomic relations that form and inform
this community. My goal is to simultaneously convey the feel of the
bdsm scene in San Francisco in the early 2000s (albeit in a nontotaliz-
ing, incomplete, and partial manner) and, perhaps more important, to
use this depiction as a launching point to reflect on larger, US configura-
tions of neoliberalism, community, commoditization, flexibility, and ef-
fectiveness. My ethnographic method, in other words, places the words
and worlds of sm practitioners within our shared social landscape, high-
lighting the modes of subjectivity, the political and economic rationali-
ties, and the cultural and community formations that make up everyday
dimensions of social power in the contemporary United States.

CHAPTER OUTLINE

Techniques of Pleasure analyzes how sm community, practice, and per-

formance produce a conduit between individual and social bodies, a
circuit between the subjective (private desire, identity, individual auton-
omy, fantasy) and the socioeconomic (public community, social reality,
collectivity, social power). In these circuits, bdsm names the specific

30 I N T RO D U C T I O N
ways in which practitioners situate themselves within and simulta-
neously reproduce larger social relations: iterations of public and pri-
vate, community and commodity, self-mastery and technology, identity
and social hierarchy. Each chapter traces these circuits as they operate
in different cultural locations: cultural geographies of the Bay Area;
contested terrains of bdsm community belonging: practices of self-
improvement and technique; marketplaces of toys; exchanges of inti-
mate bodily sensation; scenes of bdsm play and performance; and na-
tional discourses and ideologies of gender, race, and liberal subjectivity.
The first chapter, ‘‘Setting the Scene: sm Communities in the San
Francisco Bay Area,’’ shows how the current bdsm scene has developed
in relation to large-scale regional, labor, and technological shifts in the
Bay Area. Interweaving the cultural history of the new pansexual bdsm
community and its practitioners with the economic history of the Bay
Area, the chapter shows the supplemental relationship between the
community and Bay Area (San Francisco and Silicon Valley) capitalism.
In particular, I explore the tension between San Francisco’s image as a
tolerant, ‘‘queer’’ city and the reality of class and race inequality, includ-
ing economic bifurcation, racial exclusions, and neoliberal redevelop-
ment and gentrification. This tension resonates with neoliberal justifi-
cations of inequality within the bdsm scene; thus, this first chapter
shows, at a regional level, the supplementary relationships between
sexual community, economic policy, and ideological rationality.
Chapter 2, ‘‘Becoming a Practitioner: Self-Mastery, Social Control,
and the Biopolitics of sm ,’’ focuses on the production of sm practi-
tioners through techniques of the self. Analyzing the rise of sm organi-
zations like the Society of Janus; classes and workshops on technique;
and the proliferation of community rules focused on safe play, I show
how these rules are ways that sm practitioners master themselves, be-
coming subjects of themselves. However, I expand this Foucauldian
framework to show that concepts of risk and safety are also expressions
of social privilege; they produce and justify the assumptive race and
class locations (whiteness and professionalism) that the rules encode. In
this way, I read the nostalgia that practitioners have for the old guard
sm scene—when sm was more of an outlaw sexuality—less as a desire
for transgression and more as a practice of the self, where the self is
socially produced in accordance with both social relations and social
privilege. Through an analysis of practitioners’ ambivalence—their at-

TOWA R D A P E R F O R M AT I V E M AT E R I A L I S M 31
 traction to and concerns with the new guard scene—the chapter shows
how the production of sm practitioners relies on the simultaneous pro-
duction of social inequality.
As much as this nostalgia is a site of privilege, it is also an index of sm
practitioners’ desires for social connection, for the pleasure of play.
Chapter 3, ‘‘The Toy Bag: Exchange Economies and the Body at Play,’’
takes up this desire through an examination of the importance of—and
community anxiety about— sm toys and other paraphernalia. The time
and money required for such toys is yet another mark of the class
privilege of sm ; toys give practitioners access to new bodily pleasures
and sensations, along with new possibilities for prosthetic social con-
nections. Reading toys as a fetishistic displacement of social contra-
dictions onto an object, I argue that the anxiety engendered by com-
modities shows us the primary place of the toy as a means of social
connection, a contradictory relationship that requires broadening our
understanding of exchange to include both commodity and power ex-
change. This account links the production of consumer subjects and
communities to the creation of new, flexible pleasures, pleasures engen-
dered by commodities.
Chapter 4, ‘‘Beyond Vanilla: Public Politics and Private Selves,’’ inves-
tigates the neoliberal narratives of free choice and personal agency that
sm practitioners use to justify play that parallels social inequality. Tak-
ing male dominant/female submissive gender play as the primary exam-
ple, I analyze how the desire to transgress social norms enables practi-
tioners to imagine a split between the public (oppressive social norms:
white privilege, heteronormativity, and sexism) and the private (per-
sonal desire). This reading departs both from the anti-sm feminist argu-
ment that sees sm as a faithful copy of gendered inequality and the
pro-sm argument that sees sm as fully consensual, fantasy, or queer
play that transgresses normative gender. Instead, I explore the ambiva-
lence generated by the mimetic relationships between gendered, racial,
and sexualized social norms and sm roles, between the social real and
the sm scene or play. This dichotomy relies on a narrative of self-
empowerment, in which the freedom to sidestep or remake oppressive
social norms depends precisely on the forms of social privilege instanti-
ated through such norms. The ambivalence I track in this chapter is a
method of reading the politics of sm play, attentive to the uncanny
disavowals that structure the way practitioners know and do not know,

32 I N T RO D U C T I O N
name and fail to name, the social relations of power—grounded in mate-
rial relations—that produce sm play.
The final chapter, ‘‘Sex Play and Social Power: Reading the Effective
Circuit,’’ sets my performative materialist method into motion with a
series of close readings of the political effects of particular sm scenes.
Focusing on cultural trauma play—specifically, play around race and
ethnicity—I provide an ethnographic reading of slave auctions, Nazi
play, an interracial mugging scene, and the ‘‘sadomasochistic’’ Abu
Ghraib photographs. Although practitioners, like other Americans, are
inclined to disavow the linkage between play with race and real racial
inequality, I argue that these cultural performances are both based on
and productive of material social relations. I foreground the performa-
tive efficacy of a scene, showing how and why a scene might work. This
effectiveness, however, is politically multivalent; such scenes produce
differential, variable, and uneven affective responses that link individ-
uals with social and national imaginaries. These circuits between the
social and the individual create opportunities for practitioners to both
reaffirm and disrupt the fantasized break between the erotic and the
political. Political effectiveness, then, is about whether practitioners
connect their individuated, privatized erotic attachments to national
histories of racialized belonging, and what happens when they do. Tech-
niques of Pleasure ends not with a single, final analysis of the social
politics of bdsm , but rather with an invitation, an opening—to explore,
to linger on, the productive effects of sexual circuits.

TOWA R D A P E R F O R M AT I V E M AT E R I A L I S M 33
ONE N
SETTING THE SCENE

sm Communities in the
San Francisco Bay Area

According to bdsm community legend, the very first

munch took place in Palo Alto in April 1992. STella, a
Stanford University student, posted an invitation to the
Usenet newsgroup alt.sex.bondage: she would be at the
outdoor patio area of Kirk’s Steakburgers later that eve-
ning, and anyone who wanted to socialize offline should
join her. This ‘‘burger munch’’ became the model for the
munch: a social event usually involving food, held in a
public place, open to newcomers, and with regular meet-
ing times. During my fieldwork, there were over twenty
regular munches, held not only in the cities of San Fran-
cisco, San Jose, and Oakland, but also in small towns,
suburbs, exurbs, and newly created small cities across the
Bay.
The largest munch, the Janus/San Francisco munch,
attracted between fifty and a hundred people to a popular
tapas restaurant on the second Saturday of each month.
One of the smallest, the Mahogany Munch, a munch for
‘‘people of color and the people who like them,’’ usu-
ally drew between eight and twelve people to a Mexican
restaurant in Oakland on Saturday evenings. There are
munches across the United States, in small towns and big cities, and in
other countries like Canada, England, Scotland, and Israel. All munches
are social events held on weekday evenings or weekend afternoons in
public places, most often a restaurant. They are held weekly, biweekly,
or monthly, and involve lunch, brunch, dinner, or drinks. They are
publicized via e-mail lists and online calendars. And they are designed to
be friendly, open, and welcoming to newcomers: sm play, fetish outfits,
and nudity are prohibited.
The direct descendant of STella’s original ‘‘burger munch’’ was held
every Wednesday and Thursday night at 8:00 p.m., in a cafe in down-
town Palo Alto. One night I arrived early and, seated with a few students
working on their laptops, I watched as the cafe staff pushed large tables
together and put out ‘‘Reserved for Munch’’ folded signs on each table.
Around 8:00 people began to trickle in and sit at the tables; by 9:30
there were more than forty people, taking up most of the cafe. Sitting at
one of the bigger tables, I looked around me. Most people who attend
the Palo Alto munch live and work in the South Bay or Peninsula, so the
people I saw there were middle-aged techies wearing khakis and T-shirts
with dot-com logos. Everyone at the Palo Alto munches I went to was
white; many were heterosexual and married.
The munch epitomizes the new guard pansexual bdsm community.
This chapter explores the change from Folsom Street to Palo Alto, from
the old guard to the new, providing a cultural history of this new scene
and its practitioners in relation to the socioeconomic contours of the Bay
Area. Developing Miranda Joseph’s argument that communities are
‘‘complicit with capitalism’’ (2002, xxxiii), I show how the new bdsm
community developed in relationship with—not just in the context of—
economic changes in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. The rise of the
Internet and Internet connectivity, the spread of informational capi-
talism and the development of Silicon Valley, new housing and settle-
ment patterns across the wider Bay Area, and neoliberal city policies
were crucial to the development of the new scene. At the same time,
San Francisco remains the symbolic center of leather and sm : a queer
homeland and a ‘‘wide-open town’’ (Boyd 2003). This symbolic mean-
ing persisted even after the demise of the old guard scene, as San Fran-
cisco turned into a postcard city that few—and ever fewer of its queer,
working-class, and nonwhite residents—could afford. This chapter
shows how the production of this image is tied to material changes, such

SETTING THE SCENE 35

 as escalating costs of living, redevelopment and gentrification projects,
and racial housing segregation. As economic production moved from
the city of San Francisco to the South Bay, the exurbs and suburbs
outside the city grew, and tourism became San Francisco’s primary
economy. Tourism in the city (as elsewhere) relies on the spectacular
display of difference, often racialized and sexualized difference. Thus,
these material changes have produced an urban space that reproduces
and solidifies class and racial exclusions through policies designed to

36 CHAPTER ONE
make the city more ‘‘tourist friendly’’ (friendly to the flow of capital)
and the display of—yet lack of support for—difference.
This is the material underpinning of the new pansexual community.
The ‘‘fall of the Folsom’’ did not signal the end of bdsm in the Bay Area
(Rubin 1997, 107; 1998, 259). Rather, these socioeconomic changes
have transformed the sm scene. As I will describe, the new scene is net-
worked and online, located in nebulous, diffuse, often suburban spaces:
burger restaurants, cafes, online chat rooms, and e-mail lists. The new
spaces of bdsm are less territorially defined than the Folsom leather
and sm neighborhood. At the same time, bdsm organizations have
transitioned from predominantly gay to predominantly heterosexual:
new practitioners are more likely to be heterosexual or bisexual, middle-
aged, white professionals than urban leather daddies and boys who
populated the Folsom neighborhood. Of course, there are still leather
daddies in San Francisco, and my interviewees included practitioners
who are primarily identified with queer or more alternative scenes.
However, the shifts of the 1980s and 1990s produced a flourishing new
guard scene; and this scene, with its more normative practitioners, has
become the organizational center of Bay Area sm .
In tracing this history, I show how, as Joseph puts it, ‘‘capitalism and,
more generally, modernity depend on and generate the discourse of
community to legitimate social hierarchies’’ (2002, viii). Reading the
cultural history of the new pansexual scene reveals that the scene is
compelling to its practitioners in part because it enables a particularly
‘‘neoliberal rationality’’ of privacy and privatization, personal respon-
sibility, free choice, and individual agency and autonomy (Brown 2005).
These discursive constructions, based as they are on material condi-
tions, legitimate the social hierarchies of race, gender, sexuality, and
class within capitalist social relations that form the subject of this eth-
nography. In brief, this chapter shows not only that the new sm scene is
a community dependent on economic changes in a postindustrial Bay
Area (just as this economy needs communities like bdsm ), but also that
this scene—as well as its practitioners—perpetuates race and class in-
equality as it fosters social belonging.

SETTING THE SCENE 37

 THE DEMISE AND REDEVELOPMENT OF
FOLSOM STREET LEATHER

The history of sm in the Bay Area is epitomized by the story of the rise,
fall, and redevelopment of the Folsom neighborhood. This neighbor-
hood, known as Folsom, South of Market (Street), or South of the Slot,
was the geographic home of the old guard leathermen. The old guard—
the leather scene of the 1950s through the 1970s—describes a commu-
nity of men who returned to the United States after the Second World
War and settled in cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York.
In the 1950s, these men created the first social space devoted to leather
sexuality in San Francisco. Leathermen, as Gayle Rubin argues, had their
own sexual and cultural style: a kind of butch masculinity, a fashion
based on black leather and denim, and a sexuality that featured rough,
often kinky sex (1997; see also Kamel 1995). Many belonged to motor-
cycle clubs, and the myriad bike runs and social events that the clubs
organized formed the first backbone of the gay leather social world.∞
Throughout the 1960s, bars and clubs devoted to leathersex opened
in the South of Market neighborhood. The Tool Box, the first leather bar
in the neighborhood, opened in 1962. The bar was ‘‘wildly popular’’ with
leathermen and even attracted national media: the mural inside the
Tool Box was the two-page opening photograph in Life’s 1964 ‘‘Homo-
sexuality in America’’ cover story (Rubin 1998, 258). It was followed in
1966 by Febe’s (a gay biker bar), a Taste of Leather (a leather and sex toy
store), and the Stud (a leather-turned-gay hippie bar). In 1968, the Ritch
Street Baths and the Ramrod, a bathhouse and a leather bar, respec-
tively, opened. These bars and clubs were followed by others in the
neighborhood: the Barracks, the Red Star, the Slot and the Ambush all
opened between 1966 and the mid-1970s on Folsom Street; all were
between Sixth and Eleventh Streets (Brent 1997; Rubin 1997 and 1998;
see also Brodsky 1995 for details about similar clubs in New York).
South of Market was a dense network of gay leather bars, stores, bath-
houses, sex clubs, and cruising spots that lined Folsom Street—a leather
‘‘capital’’ (Rubin 1998, 258). By the mid- or late-1970s, the Folsom area
(sometimes called ‘‘the Valley of the Kings’’) was one of San Francisco’s
largest and most prominent gay neighborhoods.
First targeted for redevelopment in the 1960s, the neighborhood

38 CHAPTER ONE
came under sustained attack by the San Francisco Planning and Urban
Research Association (spur ) in the 1980s when it was labeled a ‘‘skid
row neighborhood’’ and an ‘‘industrial wasteland’’ (quoted in Wolfe
1999, 708; see also Hartman 2002). In 1981, spur observed that Fol-
som Street had ‘‘a city-wide and national reputation of a particular
segment of the gay population’’: the leathermen (quoted in Wolfe 1999,
718). As they wrote in 1985: ‘‘The oddest assortment of business ac-
tivities share space, are neighbors, and do business with one another.
It is not uncommon for artists, metal fabricators, restaurants, whole-
sale beauty supplies, bakeries and musical instrument repair shops
to share the same building space. Neon artists, food processors, pawn
shops, tourist hotels, auto repair shops and jazz and gay ‘leather’
clubs are oftentimes neighbors on the same block, particularly along the
Folsom Street corridor’’ (quoted in Wolfe 1999, 722). This ‘‘blighted’’
neighborhood was the center of San Francisco’s leather community, but
it was also populated by Filipinos, senior citizens, Latinos, artists, and
casual laborers who worked and lived in the mixed-use neighborhood.
This is the historical context in which Mayor Dianne Feinstein, ap-
pointed after the 1978 murders of Mayor George Moscone and Super-
visor Harvey Milk, advocated the redevelopment of the area in the late
1970s and 1980s.
Following on the heels of the redevelopment of Hunter’s Point, the
Western Addition, and the waterfront, this redevelopment was met
with protest. Resident and neighborhood coalitions in South of Market
fought against forced displacement, inadequate housing subsidies, and
the lack of low-income housing available in the city (where public hous-
ing had a waiting list of thousands, many of whom had been displaced in
previous redevelopment schemes). Yet in spite of this activism, several
thousand residences were razed for the construction of the Moscone
and Yerba Buena Convention Centers, displacing approximately four
thousand households in the area. The Moscone Center opened in 1981
as a convention center. The plan for Yerba Buena was more elaborate; it
included hotels, restaurants, high-end shops, plazas, museums, a sports
arena, apartment buildings, parking lots, and office buildings. Located
on top of the underground Moscone Center, Yerba Buena opened in
1993 with gardens, an arts center, children’s play area, skating rink,
food courts, and a Sony Metreon theater. For these two large projects,

SETTING THE SCENE 39

 the city tore down residential hotels, eateries, bars, shops, light indus-
tries, warehouses, and artists’ studios between Third, Fourth, Market,
and Folsom Streets.
Several other factors combined with this urban redevelopment to
destroy the Folsom leather scene by the mid-1980s. In 1981, a large
neighborhood fire ravaged many leather spaces. Throughout the early
1980s, hiv / aids devastated this generation of leathermen (Rubin
1997) and public hysteria over hiv / aids forced the closure of all of San
Francisco’s bathhouses in 1984 (Bérubé 1996). Losing the sex clubs,
including sm and fisting clubs like the Catacombs (in 1983), meant
losing one of the most visible outposts of San Francisco’s leathersex
culture, along with the bars and clubs that supported the old guard
leathermen’s community. The combination of neoliberal urban develop-
ment policies with misguided public health crusades (sex panics) made a
potent and deadly combination—at least for public, street-level sex-
ual culture. The golden age of Folsom came to an end by the early to
mid-1980s (Baldwin 1998; Brent 1997; Rubin 1998).
As this short history makes clear, the demise of Folsom must be seen
in relation to the economic transformation of San Francisco: the alloca-
tion of resources to tourism, downtown development, and office and
residential high-rises, and away from art culture, local neighborhoods,
and lofts and other spaces for low-income housing, work, and industry.
This neighborhood, like New York City’s Times Square before its re-
development, was a diversified zone of sexualized contact across races
and classes. As Samuel Delany observes, the redevelopment of Times
Square for middle-class tourists demolished the porn theaters that had
provided spatial support for rich social exchanges, amounting to a ‘‘vio-
lent suppression of urban social structures’’—‘‘economic, social and sex-
ual’’ (1999, 153; see also Berlant and Warner 1998).≤ And, as Martin
Manalansan argues, such projects are neoliberal; they ‘‘seek to delimit
governmental intervention, increase privatization, and remove the safe-
guards of welfare services, creating a virtual free-for-all arena for eco-
nomic market competition’’ (2005, 141). Privatizing public spaces has
the greatest impact on the marginalized: poor, nonwhite, and queer
residents and their less institutionalized communities, which become
targets of anticrime and ‘‘quality of life’’ campaigns. Such projects, in
other words, actively produce the city’s citizenry as business owners and

40 CHAPTER ONE
tourists, not renters or people who use the city’s streets and dwindling
public spaces.
In the 1990s, South of Market, now called soma , faced a new round
of redevelopment in the form of the promotion of Multimedia Gulch, an
area south of Folsom Street between Second and Seventh Streets, cen-
tered on the small city park called South Park. The buzz around Multi-
media Gulch heralded new forms of labor in an increasingly information-
based economy; the city promoted Internet services, publishing, and
marketing along with interactive media such as graphic and computer
arts, virtual communities, digital entertainment, and film postproduc-
tion. This sector accounted for 40 percent of San Francisco’s new jobs in
1998. As George Raine notes in a San Francisco Examiner article, however,
‘‘the price of all this wealth, of course, is prohibitively expensive home
prices for many, along with traffic congestion that saps energy and
productivity and erodes the environmental quality that made the area
desirable in the first place’’ (1999). Indeed, according to the San Fran-
cisco Redevelopment Agency, commercial rents increased from $6 to $60
a square foot during the 1990s (Borden 2000). Over one thousand
‘‘live/work lofts’’ with median sale prices of $270,000 were constructed
in the neighborhood, driving out the few remaining low-income artists
and blue-collar workers. New restaurants, the Museum of Modern Art
(opened in 1995), and new luxury hotels also appeared, along with large
numbers of media and it businesses, including Wired magazine and
Macromedia.
Although the end of the dot-com boom in the early 2000s gutted
many of these Internet companies, soma bears the mark of this de-
velopment. The area is known primarily for Yerba Buena Gardens, the
Moscone Convention Center, and the Museum of Modern Art. Newly
constructed high-rise ‘‘luxury lofts’’ and condos in soma and Mission
Bay—such as Arterra, ‘‘San Francisco’s first leed -certified, green high-
rise building,’’ or the Infinity, two high-rise towers at Folsom and Main
Streets—have been largely successful in wooing new residents ‘‘despite
the sagging economy,’’ as Judy Richter writes in the San Francisco Chron-
icle in 2009. In a NewGeography.com article, Adam Mayer notes that if
South of Market seems ‘‘impervious’’ to the economic crisis of 2008,
‘‘part of this can be attributed to the continuing popularity of the city as
a tourist destination for foreigners. Also keeping the local economy

SETTING THE SCENE 41

 afloat is the investment in luxury real estate from those with disposable
wealth purchasing second homes in this geographically desirable locale.
Unfortunately, this does not spell good news for the city in terms of
middle class aspiration and sustainable socio-economic diversity.’’≥ Cur-
rent redevelopment plans for the area promise further privatization and
rezoning, a continuation of neoliberal redistribution projects from the
1970s through the first decade of the 2000s.
Throughout these socioeconomic transformations, however, Folsom,
now soma , has remained the symbolic center of sm and leathersex in
San Francisco and beyond. This symbolism is partly anchored by a few
remaining stores and bars: Mr. S, a large leather and sm store and
manufacturer that first opened in 1979; Stormy Leather, a woman-
oriented leather shop; and Leather Etc. But a Taste of Leather closed in
2008; and the Eagle bar, founded in 1981 and the oldest leather bar in
San Francisco, is rumored to be closing in 2011. And these remaining
outposts are nestled between big-box stores—an OfficeMax store abuts
the Eagle—a situation Rubin describes as ‘‘ruptured territorial mem-
branes’’ (1998, 266). There is still a strong gay leather scene in San
Francisco. But, as Rubin argues, it is ‘‘thinner and more dispersed’’ than
it was (1998, 268; see also Rubin 1997).
Folsom as the homeland of leathersex and sm is most visible during
the two large street fairs held every year: the Dore Alley Street Fair (also
known as the Up Your Alley Fair), which takes place in July, and the
Folsom Street Fair, which takes place in September and is the largest
leather event in the world.∂ Indeed, New York City’s leather fair is called
‘‘Folsom Street East,’’ and Folsom Street Events—the San Francisco–
based nonprofit organization that runs the Folsom and Dore Alley
Street Fairs—has licensed the name ‘‘Folsom’’ for street fairs in Ger-
many (‘‘Folsom Europe,’’ in Berlin), Australia, and Canada. Begun as a
neighborhood coalition devoted to anti-redevelopment activism, today
the Folsom Fair is the culmination of Leather Week. The fair typically
attracts 300,000 to 400,000 people to the area bordered by Seventh and
Twelfth, and Howard and Harrison Streets; it is the third largest public
gathering in California, after San Francisco’s Gay Pride and the Rose
Parades (Altine 1998, 6; Rubin 1997, 134). Tourists flying in for Folsom
Fair can receive a discount on travel from American Airlines, as well as a
special Folsom Street Fair rate at the Marriott in soma . Yet in spite
of the neighborhood-specific history of Folsom, the leather pride flag

42 CHAPTER ONE
flown above the city during the week is raised outside the Diesel store at
Market and Castro Streets—in the Castro, not on Folsom Street or in
soma . Turning now to a wider San Francisco context, I explain the
origin of this situation—in which the devastation of a multi-use, demo-
graphically mixed neighborhood produced the Folsom Street Fair as a
tourist event; and the image of San Francisco as urban, environmental,
and progressive motivated the purchase of luxury condos by Silicon
Valley workers and wealthy urbanites, even in an economic crisis.

SAN FRANCISCO A QUEER SODOM BY THE SEA

We [San Francisco] were a sanctuary for the queer, the eccentric, the
creative, the radical, the political and economic refugees, and so they came
and enforced the city’s difference.
— rebecca solnit and susan schwartzenberg, Hollow City

San Francisco has, throughout its history, cultivated a reputation as a

‘‘wide-open town,’’ as Nan Boyd titles her history of the city, a ‘‘town
where anything goes’’ (2003, 2). Since the days of the gold miners who
flooded the Bay Area before California became a state in 1850 and the
development of the Barbary Coast (the stretch of hotels, saloons, and
brothels on San Francisco’s waterfront that gave the city the nickname
‘‘Sodom by the Sea’’)∑ at the turn of the twentieth century, sexual license
has been a key feature of San Francisco. Through waves of internal
‘‘countercultural’’ migration—the bohemians, Beats, hippies, and punks
—San Francisco solidified its national reputation as a haven for alter-
native people, cultures, and communities.∏
The queerness of San Francisco, suggested by the male miners, Bar-
bary Coast, and the homosexuality of many of the Beats, was solidified
by the end of the Second World War.π Servicemen and women who were
stationed at military bases around the Bay or who worked in the ship-
building, refinery, and other military industries in the Bay Area in-
creased the city’s population to 825,000 by 1945, over 48,000 more
than its 2000 population.∫ After the war, many of these men and women
remained in San Francisco, joining the city’s nascent urban homosexual
networks and frequenting designated cruising spots (D’Emilio 1983, 12,
22; see also Stryker and Van Buskirk 1996).Ω Spatially, these networks
relied on the queer nightclubs and bars that had blossomed in San

SETTING THE SCENE 43

 Francisco after the 1933 repeal of prohibition in the old Barbary Coast
area. Areas along the waterfront, in the Tenderloin, and in North Beach
became primarily (although not exclusively) gay and lesbian spaces. The
scene was mixed; for example, bar-based butch-femme lesbian culture
included many sex workers (Boyd 2003, 40). Yet with lax alcohol regula-
tion and tremendous graft, San Francisco’s gay and lesbian—and sex
worker and transgendered—bar scene along the waterfront was larger
than any other US city at the time. San Francisco’s prominence as a port
city combined with these urban homosexual networks to make it espe-
cially attractive to gay men and lesbians after the war.
By 1959 The San Francisco Progress designated the city ‘‘the na-
tional headquarters of the organized homosexuals in the United States’’
(quoted in D’Emilio 1983, 121). The gay bars and clubs combined with
political organizations like the Mattachine Society and Daughters of
Bilitis to make gays and lesbians in the Bay Area visible as commu-
nities.∞≠ They were not, as Boyd points out, unified: bar culture and the
homophile movements differed in style, goals, and political strategies.
However, these overlapping components of gay and lesbian life—bars,
organizations, magazines, and books—fostered a recognizable commu-
nity even before the 1970s; Boyd argues that the gay community had
become a self-aware political and social constituency by the mid-1960s.
New activism (especially the formation of sir , the Society for Individual
Rights, in 1964) and highly publicized scandals involving payouts for
liquor licenses in gay bars (called ‘‘gayola’’) brought homosexuality into
newspapers and election campaigns. By 1965, facing unified political
pressure, the police halted their bar raids. This nearly tripled the num-
ber of gay bars in the city between 1963 and 1968, bringing the total to
fifty-seven—more than Chicago, Los Angeles, or New York (D’Emilio
1983, 121). The 1964 Life cover story ‘‘Homosexuality in America’’
solidified San Francisco’s reputation as the ‘‘gay capital’’ of America.
The story, which featured Chuck Arnett’s mural from the Tool Box
leather bar, encouraged thousands of readers to move to San Francisco,
seeking a better, gayer life. Kath Weston describes the flight of gay
men and lesbians across the United States to San Francisco in search
of gay community in the 1970s and 1980s as the ‘‘Great Gay Migration’’
(1995a).
Today, San Francisco remains a homeland for queers. Gays and les-
bians are estimated to make up between 10 and 20 percent of San

44 CHAPTER ONE
Francisco’s population, a higher percentage than in any other US city.
But more than this, for nonresidents, the city—as Cymene Howe argues
—functions as a symbolic homeland: ‘‘Queers, who often experience
exile from, and ostracism living in, their places of origin (nation-state,
community, family, and so on), here [in San Francisco] find their ‘return’
in a pilgrimage to a homeland’’ during events like the Gay Pride Parade
(2001, 44). Howe’s work shows how the queerness of San Francisco
draws on nationalistic ideas of identity and political community for
queers near and far, while this queerness is mobilized during events to
generate the tourism on which the city depends.
This is a complicated and contradictory queerness: San Francisco’s
image as progressive, free, and sexually liberated is produced by and for
queer tourism. And even before tourism became San Francisco’s pri-
mary industry in 1980, bars and clubs in the city capitalized on its
reputation as America’s Paris—a city of sexual freedom—with tourist-
oriented entertainment designed to showcase sexual, gendered, and
racial difference. At places like Finocchio’s in North Beach, a former
speakeasy operating from the 1930s to 1999, drag entertainment fea-
tured both queer and racialized performances. Exotic Chinese danc-
ers, cross-race performances, and female impersonators were entertain-
ment, while prostitution and companionship, purchased with drinks,
were also available. These bars, clubs, and theaters showcased early drag
king performers, but also geisha acts, hula, and Latin dance. Similarly
Mona’s, which opened in 1934 in North Beach, was the first lesbian bar
in San Francisco. A bohemian bar, it featured male impersonators, sing-
ers, and, in the 1940s, Gladys Bentley, a black lesbian singer and piano
player who became famous during the Harlem Renaissance (Boyd 2003,
68). Early tourism—so critical to San Francisco’s economic development
—was organized around the production and display of racial, gendered,
and sexual difference for an audience consisting mostly of whites. This
tourism fostered both the erosion and the reentrenchment of racial,
gendered, and sexual social boundaries; it solidified a nascent queer
community around these bars and clubs, and it also provided a spectacle
of free and easy difference for the city’s visitors and white patrons.
I describe these scenes of early touristic commodification because
their echoes persist today. The city of San Francisco is itself a tourist
attraction, besting Disneyland in the ranking of California attractions
(R. Walker 1996). Tourism depends on San Francisco’s reputation as the

SETTING THE SCENE 45

 queer capital of the ‘‘Left Coast.’’ It is part of the city’s marketing: until
recently, the city’s official tourism website listed the Power Exchange (a
sex club) under ‘‘mature fun,’’ and ‘‘gay travel’’ is listed alongside ‘‘where
to eat’’ and ‘‘maps.’’ San Francisco is an important symbolic center of
gay/lesbian culture in the United States, as was seen in the 2004 Valen-
tine’s Day issuance of thousands of same-sex marriage licenses, fol-
lowed by marriage performances, in city hall. For this, Mayor Gavin
Newsom, until then widely criticized (at least within San Francisco) for
his probusiness, antihomeless policies, received national attention dur-
ing the 2004 presidential election, portrayed as either the poster child
of gay equality or the whipping boy of liberals gone too far, and standing
in for the city as a whole.
San Francisco’s sexual freedom is not simply symbolic; the city boasts
the nation’s first unionized peep show (the Lusty Lady, now a coopera-
tive), a late-1990s development in the city that claims to have origi-
nated topless dancing with Carol Doda at the Condor Club, in North
Beach in the 1960s. There are ongoing attempts to decriminalize pros-
titution, although the latest measure, Proposition K, was voted down in
2008. By 1980, Bay Area cities had the highest percentage of unmarried
adults, single-person households, and divorced people, and the low-
est percentage of family households, in the United States (Wollenberg
1985, 305). Many newcomers to the city were gay men and lesbians, but
many were not; tolerance and (at least certain forms of) freedom made
the city attractive to nontraditional people with a variety of lifestyles. It
is for these reasons that Richard DeLeon argues that San Francisco
is ‘‘progressive,’’ citing domestic partnership laws, affirmative action,
smoking bans, and safety standards as examples of San Francisco’s pro-
gressive agenda (1992, 2–3). Indeed, the Bay Area is at the forefront
of many progressive causes: curbside composting, surcharges for plas-
tic bags at the grocery store, protection against gender discrimination
for city employees, coverage of gender-reassignment surgery for San
Francisco city employees, urban car sharing, and—in Berkeley—organic
school lunches.
At the same time, however, these freedoms are part of the city’s
brand. San Francisco, as a 2008 NBCBayArea.com article put it, is a
‘‘live-and-let-live town, where medical marijuana clubs do business next
to grocery stores and an annual fair celebrates sadomasochism.’’ Here,
again, San Francisco looks ‘‘tolerant’’—the kind of place where ‘‘the

46 CHAPTER ONE
sadomasochism fair draws thousands of tourists and a pornographic
video company is housed in a former armory.’’∞∞ But the ‘‘progressive-
ness’’ of San Francisco is bifurcated: San Francisco is an important
symbolic location for countercultural communities, while this symbol-
ism conveys material benefits in terms of redevelopment and tour-
ism. Meanwhile, in socioeconomic terms, the high cost of living in the
city puts it out of reach for even middle-class residents, much less the
young people who made the city queer. Indeed, a cover story in the San
Francisco Bay Guardian questioned whether San Francisco is still a ‘‘gay
mecca,’’ since many queer people migrating to the city would not be able
to afford the rents or find work (Rapoport 2005).
Further, as the brief history of San Francisco’s tourist industry sug-
gests, the city has long combined its sex-positivity with crippling racism.
The extermination of Native Californians,∞≤ Chinese ghettoization, Jap-
anese internment, and fierce labor and housing discrimination against
African Americans sit uncomfortably with the city’s long history of
sexual tolerance.∞≥ Racism continues in the form of multiple id require-
ments for patrons of color at gay bars in the Castro, most famously at
S.F. Badlands (Buchanan 2005; see also Han 2007; Howe 2001; Ramirez
2003). Postcards of San Francisco feature the endlessly reproduced row
of ‘‘painted ladies’’ on Alamo Square, in the Western Addition. This
neighborhood, where I lived during my fieldwork, was one of the origi-
nal targets of redevelopment in the 1950s and 1960s: the city’s initial
A-1 redevelopment project relocated 4,000 primarily Japanese and Afri-
can American families, many out of the city proper, inspiring the name
‘‘Negro removal.’’ Another 13,500 people were displaced in the A-2 proj-
ect. San Francisco’s black population has been in decline since, falling
more than 14 percent during the 1990s. This gap between sexual toler-
ance and race and class exclusion—between symbolism and material
inequality—relies on what Marina McDougall and Hope Mitnick call
‘‘theme park thinking,’’ which transforms ‘‘the city into a series of pic-
turesque facades’’ (1998, 153; see also Hannigan 1998; Judd and Fain-
stein 1999; Sorkin 1992). ‘‘Theme park thinking’’ often involves the
staging of sexual license and racial or ethnic difference for an audience
of tourists: Fisherman’s Wharf with its chain stores and crabbers; North
Beach with its Beat history and strip clubs; Chinatown, the largest in the
United States; the Castro, with its enormous gay pride flag. These fa-
cades obscure, while depending upon, racial and class inequality.

SETTING THE SCENE 47

 San Francisco’s famous quality of life—its openness, tolerance, and
diversity—is, in other words, virtually unavailable to those who built the
city, while its queerness has become a brand, used to attract affluent
tourists and patrons while substantially undercutting social services
and economic support for marginalized residents. In this neoliberal
development, San Francisco has been remade into a city for large, multi-
national corporations; tourists; and suburban commuters—not the di-
verse people of San Francisco. Residents continue to be forced out of the
city by a deadly combination of redevelopment and the rapidly changing
Bay Area economy. It is this economy, located not in the postcard city of
San Francisco but in the South Bay, that I turn to next.

SILICON VALLEY ECONOMIC POWER

San Francisco is the iconic center of the Bay Area, but Silicon Valley is
the economic center. And it is these areas outside the city—less permis-
sive, more family friendly, and even whiter than San Francisco—that
have experienced major population and economic growth in the 1990s
and 2000s and have driven larger socioeconomic changes throughout
the Bay Area. The ‘‘capital of Silicon Valley,’’ San Jose is the tenth largest
city in the country; its population exceeds San Francisco’s by at least
100,000.∞∂ From 1950 to 1980, while San Francisco’s population de-
clined by 12 percent, Santa Clara County gained a million inhabitants.
This period of rapid suburbanization, produced, as elsewhere, through
financial and federal public policies (urban renewal projects, federally
funded highways, and home loan and business tax policies [see Brodkin
1998; Lipsitz 2006]), has transformed the spatial and economic land-
scape of the greater Bay Area.∞∑
The movement of capital from San Francisco to Silicon Valley began
in the mid-1940s and intensified throughout the next decades. Silicon
Valley began with a combination of defense contractors, other indus-
tries related to the Second World War, and electronics companies—such
as Hewlett-Packard, famously started in a Palo Alto garage in 1939 by
two engineering graduates of Stanford. A naval station, Lockheed and
Westinghouse plants, and housing, shopping, and factories followed,
supplanting almost all of the orchards and farmland in the region. In
the years following the war, Stanford University established industrial
parks that lured ibm and ge , among other companies, to the area.

48 CHAPTER ONE
Combining research facilities, universities, venture capital, and land, the
Peninsula started to boom in the 1950s.
In the 1970s, high-technology jobs and companies began to domi-
nate employment in the Bay Area. The rapid pace of consumer elec-
tronic development and the invention of the microchip made San Jose
one of the fastest growing cities in the United States. Silicon Valley
in the 1970s had 20 percent of the nation’s high-tech jobs and was
the ninth largest manufacturing area in the United States (Wollen-
berg 1985, 309). By 1980, Santa Clara’s population was 1,300,000—ten
times its 1950 population. By the early 2000s, about a third of all the
Internet businesses in the United States were based in Silicon Valley:
more than 6,600 technology companies, including Cisco, Adobe, Apple,
nasa Ames, and eBay, employing more than 254,000 people (Solnit
and Schwartzenberg 2000, 14; see also English-Lueck 2002, 18). The
it industry—especially computer programming, software development,
and network technology—grew at double the rate of other industries
starting in the mid-1990s; in 2000, Internet and high-tech businesses
accounted for 38.9 percent of new jobs—and 21.7 percent of all jobs—in
the Bay Area. Even with the economic downturn, the US Bureau of
Labor Statistics anticipates continued growth in these sectors: employ-
ment of computer scientists and database administrators, for example,
is expected to increase 37 percent from 2006 to 2016 (US Department
of Labor 2008).
These shifts resulted in the polarization of the US economy, espe-
cially in cities and metropolitan regions such as the Bay Area. As in
other parts of the country, the service economy in the Bay Area has both
high-paying and low-paying employment, but little in between. On the
high end, computer and technology workers make well over $100,000
before their yearly bonuses; on the low end, workers scrape by in retail
and service jobs (child care, personal care, and cleaning). The housing
market reflects these economic changes. Highly paid technology jobs,
combined with the influx of workers to these new jobs, led to the rapid
escalation of housing costs in the Bay Area (Chapple et al. 2004); by the
1980s, the Bay Area had the highest housing prices in the United States.
The dot-com boom of the late 1990s ratcheted up housing and other
costs in San Francisco. In 1997, for example, the median monthly rent
for a two-bedroom home was $1,600; two years later, it had swelled to
$2,500 (Hartman 2002, 325). That increase, coupled with the rapid

SETTING THE SCENE 49

 growth of Silicon Valley, has dramatically altered the Bay Area’s eco-
nomic and spatial landscape. In 2003, only 15 percent of San Francisco’s
residents could afford a median-priced home (median home prices in
the city rose 40 percent between 1996 and 2000, to $328,000).
This growth, however, was uneven across the Bay Area. In the late-
1990s, home prices increased more than 185 percent in San Francisco
and across much of Silicon Valley, but in Solano and Contra Costa Coun-
ties prices rose less than 51 percent. San Francisco, Atherton, Menlo
Park, Palo Alto, and Redwood City had among the highest home appre-
ciation rates; Oakland, Concord, Richmond, San Rafael, and Vacaville
had among the lowest. As elsewhere in the United States, changing
housing patterns also produced and solidified racial and class segrega-
tion. Suburbanization across the Bay Area encouraged many middle-
class whites to leave center cities and move to the suburbs, like Los
Altos, Los Gatos, Walnut Creek, and Menlo Park. As a result, the Bay
Area of the last decade of the 1990s exhibited clear racial and class
segregation. In 2000, Richmond, for example, was 31 percent African
American, 27 percent Latino, and 31 percent white, with a median
household income of $44,210; Atherton was less than 1 percent African
American, 3 percent Latino, and 85 percent white, with a staggering
median household income of more than $200,000.∞∏ The white, profes-
sional class composition of new suburbs and exurbs around the Bay Area
has been disrupted only by such factors as the immigration of highly
trained computer professionals, often from India and China, on H1-B
visas (Wolf-Powers 2001).
Silicon Valley’s bifurcated economy drives housing, residence, and
labor patterns across the Bay Area. As jobs and people relocate away
from San Francisco, less expensive ‘‘edge cities’’ (Garreau 1992) and
outlying counties have experienced tremendous growth. Between 2000
and 2002, for example, San Francisco lost 92,900 jobs; many of the
11,929 residents who left the city between 2001 and 2002 moved ‘‘to
more affordable communities in neighboring San Mateo, Alameda and
Contra Costa counties’’ (Hendrix 2003; see also Armas 2003). Between
2000 and 2004, critical dot-com bust years, San Francisco’s population
declined by more than 32,000, while Contra Costa County’s population
increased by more than 55,000 (Marcucci 2005). San Francisco bears
the mark of gentrification, skyrocketing housing costs, and urban re-
development; it is a city that few but Silicon Valley programmers can

50 CHAPTER ONE
afford to live in. Fortune, naming San Francisco one of the five best cities
for business, notes that ‘‘some people even refer to San Francisco as a
suburb of the Valley’’ (Borden 2000). On the other hand, the edge city
of Vacaville—a fifty-five-mile drive east of San Francisco past patchy
growth, big-box landscapes, and browned weeds—experienced a 19 per-
cent population growth between 1990 and 2000. The four outlying Bay
Area counties—Contra Costa, Napa, Solano, and Sonoma—also grew;
the population of Solano County, for example, grew 93 percent between
1980 and 2000.
These socioeconomic changes impact the social landscape of bdsm .
It is perhaps not surprising, then, that the munch was founded in Palo
Alto, or that there are munches in Vacaville, Hayward, Petaluma, Rohn-
ert Park, El Cerrito, Walnut Creek, Fresno, and Yuba City, small cities
and towns miles away from San Francisco. There are still munches in
San Francisco, of course, but although the city remains the symbolic
center of sm , it is no longer the spatial center. Many of my interviewees
believe that San Francisco is more permissive and less conservative than
the South or East Bay. Walking out the door in a collar or latex outfit
might be less likely to result in social reprobation in San Francisco than
in other areas, including San Jose. Similarly, the push to reinstate a
semipublic dungeon in San Francisco proper after the Castlebar closed is
also based on the sense that the city is the true home of sm and leather.
But at the same time, a nearby, easy-to-park-at munch at Fuddruckers
or Round Table Pizza makes much more sense for new suburban and
exurban practitioners like Latex Mustang and Lady Thendara, whose
lives—both work and play—are far from the city itself.

THE NEW GUARD BDSM ACROSS THE B AY AREA

Lady Thendara and Latex Mustang live in San Mateo County, on the
Peninsula. They are married, in their early forties. Both are white pro-
fessionals: Thendara is an insurance adjuster; Mustang is a manager in
the computer industry. She is a bisexual top; he is heterosexual and
identifies as a bottom/pony. Mustang has a child from a previous mar-
riage who lives with the couple part of the time. They had been married
one year when I interviewed them in 2002, having had a ‘‘kinky wedding
ceremony’’ at an sm retreat where Mustang was in full pony regalia.
They attend parties in San Francisco on the weekends, but they are

SETTING THE SCENE 51

 regulars at the Palo Alto munch, just a few minutes from their home and
offices. As Latex Mustang explains, they live in Menlo Park because:

latex mustang: it’s wonderfully central: from Menlo Park, you can
go to activities in San Francisco, in San Jose, or the
East Bay without thinking about it. It’s a thirty-
or forty-minute drive to just about anything you
want to do. So that’s true for cultural things, vanilla
things, or kink things. You really have access to just
about everything. And yet you’ve got a wonderful,
safe bedroom community to go home to, where
there’s parking and . . .
lady thendara: Good schools.
latex mustang: . . . good schools. So it’s really a wonderful com-
promise.

Thendara and Mustang are representative of the new guard sm practi-

tioners in the Bay Area. Typically white, professional, and middle-aged,
these practitioners often live in the suburbs or exurbs, and many work
in tech jobs. Indeed, of the sixty-one people I interviewed, over a quarter
worked in computer fields, most of them as computer programmers,
software developers, or it consultants; this was more than any other
category of employment, including ‘‘other.’’ The average age of my inter-
viewees was forty-one, and many were in their fifties. Most were in-
volved in long-term relationships (both monogamous and polyamo-
rous): 25 percent were married, and 38 percent were partnered. The
majority of the men were heterosexual, and the majority of the women
were bisexual, although many bisexual women, like Thendara, were
married to men. Eighty-seven percent of my interviewees were white, in
spite of my effort to interview nonwhite practitioners. Finally, only
about a third lived in San Francisco, while a quarter lived in Alameda
County (in the East Bay), and another third lived on the Peninsula, in
either Santa Clara or San Mateo County.∞π Although my interviewees
were not, by any means, a controlled sample, their demographics reflect
the people I commonly saw at parties, classes, and other pansexual
events around the Bay Area. As Mollena—an African American, bi, sub-
missive bottom in her mid-thirties—explained to me in a tone of regret,
at a munch you find ‘‘Palo Alto people . . . middle-aged, middle-class
white people’’ in ‘‘couples that are established.’’

52 CHAPTER ONE
 But Thendara and Mustang are representative in more than demo-
graphic ways; they are the normative center of this community. These
new practitioners and their scene are linked not only to the broader
socioeconomic changes across the Bay Area, but most importantly to
new technology: the rise of the Internet throughout the 1990s. The
munch, for example, begun in Palo Alto, both epitomizes this scene and
is a catalyst in the growth and increasing popularity of bdsm . Public,
open to newcomers, and listed online, the munch makes it easy to find
and join the sm community, in stark contrast to the closed, word-of-
mouth old guard scene. The number of people joining sm organizations
boomed in the mid-1990s, coinciding with the release of the first graph-
ical (not text-based) web browser—Mosaic, released in 1993—and the
increasing popularity of personal modems. Many practitioners were
first exposed to an sm community on the Internet. They described first
finding the community in aol chat rooms, or by searching for ‘‘kinky
sex’’ or ‘‘bondage’’ on the web. As Jay, a white, heterosexual switch with
top leanings in his mid-fifties, explained, in 1994 when ‘‘the cyber era
began . . . s&m [was] much more easy to find. It was the start of the
munches, and . . . things really changed . . . when computer manufac-
turers started routinely putting modems in personal computers, more
and more people started getting on the Internet.’’ And once online, they
found sm .
Like STella, founder of the munch, these practitioners were early
Internet adopters, reflecting the wider public use of the Internet (or
Usenet discussion forums) in the Bay Area. Although Internet use in-
creased rapidly in the 1990s across the country, its growth was par-
ticularly intensive in the Bay Area. In part, this was because the Bay
Area—primarily San Francisco and San Jose—already had dense Inter-
net connectivity.∞∫ In 2000, for example, 72 percent of people in the Bay
Area used the Internet, compared with 60 percent of Americans as a
whole (English-Lueck 2002, 21). And today, in the Bay Area sm scene,
there are hundreds of sm -related e-mail lists; my interviewees typically
belonged to no fewer than ten. During my fieldwork, I joined twenty,
including dungeon lists, a national activist list, lists for local organiza-
tions and workshop instructors, and party and other event lists. When I
became a Janus officer, I joined that list; when I went through Dungeon
Monitor training, I joined another. I do not think I was unusual; almost
all community information, event locations, and news stories are com-

SETTING THE SCENE 53

 municated online, through online calendars, e-mail announcements,
and web pages.
Facilitated by these social and economic changes, the growth and
range of classes, workshops, organizations, munches, and play spaces
available to bdsm practitioners is astounding. As Jay exclaimed, ‘‘There
are leather stores, sm clubs in virtually every city . . . there are munches
across the country, for God’s sake! That this [bdsm ] has become a social
movement is something I never anticipated when I came into the com-
munity in 1975. I would have been happy if I had had one or two
compatible sex partners and a small group that I could have gone to . . .
Nobody anticipated that the community would get this big. I mean, for
years there was one store and one club, you have your real minimal
landscape, you had to know where to go to find people. Now look—it’s
huge and it’s still getting bigger!’’ Part of this ‘‘hugeness’’ is the range of
events a pansexual practitioner can attend throughout the Bay Area:
munches, classes or workshops, play parties, bdsm book-release parties,
fetish balls, charity slave auctions, kinky flea markets, organizational
business meetings, and local contests. There are also events and venues
positioned between this local community and what is understood as a
more commercial, fashion-oriented scene: the weekly Wednesday fetish
night at a San Francisco nightclub (Bondage-a-Go-Go) and a commercial
sex club (the Power Exchange, with large basement dungeon area), open
Thursday through Sunday. But the scene is also simply larger; as one
index of this growth, the membership of the Society of Janus, the largest
sm organization in the Bay Area, grew from 35 in 1975, to 250 in 1980,
450 in 1990, and 700 in 2000. And it is now just one of several similar
educational, social, and political organizations in the Bay Area.
These new spaces of bdsm —the Internet, the suburban home dun-
geon, the national conference, the workshops on toys and techniques—
are spaces accessible to, populated by, and produced for new white
professional practitioners. In her ethnography of the culture of Silicon
Valley, J. A. English-Lueck argues that the it explosion has transformed
everyday forms of life, from communication to subjectivity. Her eth-
nography highlights some of the key themes of this rapid change, espe-
cially new understandings of work as creative, technical, and personal:
the center of one’s life (2002, 22–23). Not only do people work at home,
on weekends, and at night, but work itself structures their time and
lives: as English-Lueck puts it, ‘‘life is a series of projects’’ (33), ‘‘work

54 CHAPTER ONE
defines worth . . . based on producing technology, and embracing a fast
pace and an open attitude’’ (25). This produces an intense commitment
to work under the guise of flexible, casual, nonhierarchical structures
(see also E. Martin 1994; McKenzie 2001).
These workers—casual, flexible, but always on call—make ideal sm
practitioners. The casual dress code and flexible work schedule accom-
modate the many gamers, Dungeons & Dragons or Magic players, and
Renaissance fair goers who work in the Peninsula’s vast acres of cubicles,
and head to munches and play parties after work and on weekends. For
them, sm ’s combination of work and play, where working at sm practice
is part of the pleasure of participating in this community, is attractive
(as I discuss in the next chapter). And the influx of these practitioners,
in the post-1990 Internet scene, has transformed the sm community
into a different kind of community: one organized around and respon-
sive to the desires of these professionals.
In the 1990s, the old guard cross-class Folsom scene, anchored by
bars and clubs, was supplanted by a mediated, networked new guard
pansexual scene. The story of sm in the Bay Area is part of a larger story
about the relationship between San Francisco and San Jose, about San
Francisco’s sexual permissiveness—a haven for queer and alternative
sex communities—combined with its declining role in the Bay Area
economy. Bay Area sm communities have developed alongside the rise
of it industries in Silicon Valley, a high-tech culture that celebrates
innovation, technique, and progress; a work (and play) culture orga-
nized around the productive demands of the information economy. And
even after the dot-com downturn, the cultural changes wrought by late-
capitalist economic shifts, especially in information technology and
changing relations of consumption and production, have endured. As
scholars like Donald Lowe (1995) and Linda Singer (1993) argue, the
increased commodification of sexuality, the marketing of sexual identi-
ties, and the promotion of sexuality as a consumption-based practice
have produced and nurtured various forms of sexuality, of which bdsm
is but one example. Many bdsm community events are deeply tied to
consumerism: workshops to learn new toy techniques, expensive parties
that forge a sense of community. These changes are more durable than
the ups and downs of any particular sector of the economy.
bdsm communities have also developed in the context of a ‘‘Left
Coast’’ city and region—a center of progressive, tolerant diversity—that

SETTING THE SCENE 55

 reflects an American belief in meritocracy and the California dream,
even as it obscures material gender, racial, and class inequalities. This
complex situation—in which the symbolic or discursive weight of San
Francisco is dependent on material relations of production as well as on
social inequality often masked through neoliberal rationalities—pro-
duces an sm community that, as I will demonstrate throughout this
ethnography, perpetuates some forms of social inequality in the name
of ‘‘community’’ belonging.

SOCIAL BELONGING, SOCIAL PRIVILEGE BDSM AS COMMUNITY

There is no doubt that sm functions as a space of belonging, a community

with all of the vexed striving toward an ultimately failed inclusion that
this term conveys.∞Ω Accompanying the profusion of sm clubs, e-mail
lists, classes, and other social organizations is a substantial investment
that most practitioners make in their sm community. In addition to
spending much of their discretionary income on toys, practitioners also
spend a tremendous amount of time being sm practitioners. For many
participants, most or all of their friends and social circle are involved in
the scene. Many people talk about ‘‘giving back to the community’’
through publications, websites, or classes; or by volunteering as officers
of organizations or munch leaders. Even the nonstop complaining about
the ways that the bdsm community has changed, always for the worse,
indicates that sm practitioners view the scene as their community: a
home or space of belonging. bdsm —along with online or virtual com-
munities, hobby communities, and even exurban churches—is one of the
new forms of community that have replaced the older forms Robert
Putnam (2000) looks back at, nostalgically.≤≠ As Paul—a white, hetero-
sexual, dominant top in his early forties—puts it, sm is a way ‘‘of being
together,’’ maybe to meet a partner, ‘‘but more so that I don’t feel alone.’’
He continues: ‘‘What’s so funny is how frequently you will get a group of
perverts and you will talk about almost everything except it [sm ] . . . the
joke is, of course, it’s always computers: get six perverts together and
watch five conversations start about the new operating system of such
and such or handheld device, wireless whatever, interfaces, and all that.
You know, we talk about politics, we talk about art, we talk about every-
thing, movies, all kinds of crap.’’ For Paul and other practitioners, the sm

56 CHAPTER ONE
community is a place to get together and feel a sense of belonging, even
when there is no sex involved.
At a munch, for example, sm play is prohibited. The Walnut Creek
munch in Contra Costa County meets at Fuddruckers, a ‘‘casual dining
chain.’’ The e-mail note announcing the munch reads: ‘‘Fuddruckers is a
family style restaurant. We will have reserved a private room for the
munch but this is still a totally vanilla venue. Please respect the at-
tendees and patrons by dressing appropriately for a vanilla venue and
maintaining our confidentiality.’’ Similarly, the tgif —The Group in
Fresno—munch instructs attendees to ‘‘leave your fetishwear and fe-
tishgear at home. This is not a play party. It’s a get-together for folks
who share a common interest in bdsm . If you’re shy or unsure of
yourself, this is the perfect place to be . . . everyone is friendly and non-
judgmental.’’ Robert, a heterosexual, white top in his early forties, de-
scribed the first time he attended the Palo Alto munch: ‘‘Somehow or
other, I met someone who told me about the munches. So I went to a
meeting in a coffee shop somewhere in Palo Alto . . . a lot of these people
are computer geeks so they were talking about what new chip is coming
out and what research is happening, and language like this is really
boring . . . It wasn’t my optimal idea of a party. If it was a party, it was
pretty damn dull.’’ Yet Robert went on to start his own munch in Berke-
ley, rather than dropping out of the scene. Similarly, Phil—a white,
heterosexual switch/bottom/slave in his mid-fifties—remains a fixture
in the scene, although he is no longer interested in playing himself. He
tells me: ‘‘It’s a home; it’s the only home I really have. I’m known, and I
walk down the street in the community and people know who I am’’ (see
also Newmahr 2008).
The ubiquity of silicon chip discussions in a sex-based community
might seem odd, but it is one more example of the ways community
does not exist outside of the relations of production, forms of leisure
and labor, spatial geography, and other configurations of capitalism
that it both depends on and reproduces. Indeed, it is precisely because
this community is so bound to social and economic relations that it
functions as a community. New media networks—Internet chat rooms,
e-mail lists, and online calendars—and print media like organization
newsletters, fliers, and cards posted on bulletin boards produce this new
pansexual sm community and, with it, spaces of shared, imaginative

SETTING THE SCENE 57

 belonging. It is not uncommon, for example, for people to request a ride
to a doctor’s appointment or help moving, advertise household goods,
or announce upcoming weddings on local e-mail lists or at munches and
other events.
At the same time, it should be clear that the word community does
not refer to an idyllic, touchy-feely, or ‘‘romantic’’ homogeneous unit.
Rather, forms of belonging institutionalized by community are them-
selves products of, and productive of, social relations. In sm , these
cultural and material formations of community solidify and legitimate
some forms of social privilege. Some sm practitioners—heterosexual,
middle-aged, white professionals—are enabled to achieve a version of
freedom that is constituted through participation in the sm commu-
nity. However, as Manalansan puts it, ‘‘this kind of freedom is predi-
cated on the abjection of other groups of people who are not free to
consume’’ (2005, 143–44). Such versions of freedom are neoliberal;
neoliberalism justifies inequality by discursively constructing the ‘‘we’’
of community as those who have the right to possess the city, defined in
opposition to those ‘‘fenced out of these extremely private and privat-
ized domains’’ (Manalansan 2005, 151). Neoliberalism—the solidifica-
tion of understandings of privacy and privatization, personal respon-
sibility, free choice, and individual agency and autonomy within market
logics—simultaneously produces social belonging via community and
legitimates social hierarchies of race, gender, sexuality, and class within
communities organized in this way.
The sm community I describe in this book demonstrates just this
dynamic. Consider the ‘‘public’’ play party. During my fieldwork, the
Castlebar dungeon, in South San Francisco, closed, and the Scenery, in
Hayward, opened (having moved from San Jose).≤∞ Many lamented the
loss of a big dungeon in San Francisco, the symbolic home of sm and
leather. At the same time, the Scenery’s East Bay location was con-
venient and significantly cheaper. The public dungeon, alongside the
munch, is a key site of sm community, one of the few places large
enough to attract practitioners from across the Bay Area for play par-
ties, grounding community in particular places as well as in play.
The public nature of such parties, however, deserves a second look.
The new sm scene is, for practitioners, public in two ways. First, practi-
tioners call sm play in community spaces public; it happens in front
of other people who are playing, watching, and socializing. The Sce-

58 CHAPTER ONE
nery, located in a commercial warehouse in a Hayward industrial park,
had open play parties every Friday and Saturday night. To attend, you
looked up the Scenery web page and e-mailed Larry, the owner, to
request permission. Without much screening, Larry would respond with
an e-mail containing an invitation, the address, and directions from
across the Bay Area. You could also attend with a current member acting
as your sponsor; that was how I went the first time. Entering the non-
descript building, you first met Martha, Larry’s submissive, sitting be-
hind a desk. If you did not already have a Scenery membership card, you
could sign up on the spot by paying a $10 membership fee, and then the
party fee ($20 per person). As Larry—an American Indian, bi domi-
nant/master in his late forties—explained: ‘‘because of e-mail, we are
able to advertise to targeted groups—and when I say targeted, I’m talk-
ing about the leather community in particular—while we maintain a
reasonably low profile within the general community as a whole.’’ He
continued: ‘‘We’re able to keep it out of the—if you’re not looking for it,
we’re not going to send it to you.’’ The publicness of public play parties is
thus immediately unraveled: the dungeon operates as a private member-
ship club—you pay to join and attend parties. Furthermore, because of
the assumption that everyone at the space is interested in, or at least
supportive of, sm , the space is private in the sense of restricted, se-
cluded, and safe from a (hostile) public world (see Leap 1999). Here,
public sm has been ‘‘rezoned’’ as private through its function as social—
public in the colloquial sense—belonging.
Second, practitioners see themselves as public when they have ‘‘come
out’’ into the scene. This is not quite the same as the gay and lesbian
coming out model; practitioners are generally closeted about their sm
practices. Only a third of the people I talked with were out to people in
their families, nonscene friends, or work colleagues; almost half were
not out to anyone at all. Instead, outness, for many, was about being
part of the organized sm community: attending classes, munches, par-
ties, and community events, even with a scene name.≤≤ As Panther,
an Asian American, heterosexual, dominant top in his mid-forties, ex-
plained, ‘‘I started getting a lot more active . . . that’s when I really
started coming out publicly. I started attending munches’’ as well as play
parties, sm conferences, and classes. This kind of outness—‘‘coming
out’’ into the scene or being ‘‘out there’’ about sm (by teaching, organiz-
ing, even posting on e-mail lists)—does not happen after a ruptural

SETTING THE SCENE 59

 move to the city, away from family, but rather by attending munches
and parties near work and home, in strip malls or in dungeon spaces in
industrial parks. In other words, in private—and nonurban—spaces.
For these reasons, I understand the sm community as semipublic, a
term that draws attention to the ways a discourse of publicness can
obscure the neoliberal privatization that produces and legitimates com-
munity belonging. As the next two chapters show, the new guard has
transformed sm in the Bay Area, moving it from the city to the suburbs
and exurbs; building a more professionalized, technique-oriented scene;
developing formal classes and workshops; and working at sm as work on
the self. These forms of belonging also reinforce social inequalities—
obscuring the overwhelming whiteness of the sm scene and its attrac-
tion to play with racial inequality, and the social privileges that allow
white, heterosexual men to play with gender norms—as my final two
chapters reveal. sm is a community, but one that organizes social be-
longing through neoliberal governmentality. In the late-capitalist trans-
formations of the Bay Area economy, it is not only the gentrification or
redevelopment described in this chapter that has transformed the cul-
tural geography of bdsm ; it is also the cultural and political rationalities
engendered by these changes. These rationalities are neoliberal: con-
cepts of the public and private have been realigned, producing new
subjects, new communities, and new inequalities. Neoliberalism enables
social belonging through the production of certain visions of commu-
nity, a belonging that rationalizes freedom as freedom to consume, and
social inequalities like racism or sexism as either a thing of the past
(especially in the purportedly tolerant Bay Area) or due entirely to indi-
vidual actions or beliefs—not to social relations of power. Reading the
cultural history of the Bay Area’s sm scene, in other words, we can see
the dense circuitry between capitalism and community, between spatial-
ization and belonging: the ways in which the production of these new
community practices and new queer freedoms rely on—and generate—
material social inequalities.

60 CHAPTER ONE
TWO N
B E C O M I N G A P R AC T I T I O N E R

Self-Mastery, Social Control, and

the Biopolitics of sm

This is a sample question from the website of the Dun-

geon Monitors Association (dma ):

A top is doing a cutting on the bottom. They are using a

tarp, containing the blood properly and the top appears
to be exhibiting proper technique. The party rules say no
blood play. You:
a) interrupt the scene and politely tell the top that
blood play is not allowed at the party and that they
will have to stop.
b) let it finish since they are doing it correctly, but
when they are done inform them that they have
violated party rules.
c) bring the top some bandages to use when they are
done.
d) do nothing. They have already started so stopping it
would be rude.

Founded in 1998 to ‘‘improve the quality of dungeon moni-

toring through education and the promulgation of stan-
dards,’’ the dma trains and certifies individuals to work at
play parties as dungeon monitors, or dm s, across the Bay
 Area. dm s become dungeon monitor trainees after successfully com-
pleting the full-day Beginning Dungeon Monitor Training Course: scor-
ing at least 80 percent on a twenty-five-item multiple-choice test, with
questions like the one above.∞ They become fully certified dm s after a
six-month period as a trainee, during which they must log fifteen one-
hour dm shifts at parties and take ten qualifying skills classes (docu-
mented and signed-off on in the log book given to trainees), obtain first
aid and cpr certification, and maintain membership in the dma . dm s
patrol the play area at parties, watching to make sure that safe-sex and
other party rules are being followed, and are on hand for any emergen-
cies that may occur.
The dma is an example of some of the social and structural changes
that have taken place in the sm scene since the 1980s. Along with the
socioeconomic and demographic changes I described in the previous
chapter, the new pansexual scene is also much more formally organized
than the network of old guard leathermen. Educational organizations
and a vast repertoire of classes and workshops on sm technique; prac-
tices, like negotiation and the use of safewords, that stress safety and
risk reduction; prohibitions on ‘‘edge play’’ and policing of the boundary
between the safe and the dangerous; and the establishment of a ‘‘police’’
body of dungeon monitors are all recent developments in a community
that, in contrast to the outlaw image of sm , appears almost obsessed
with rules and order, safety and security.
Interestingly, as I interviewed practitioners and attended events,
complaints about this obsession were ubiquitous: many in the scene feel
that sm today is an overly rule-oriented, regulative community. This
chapter analyzes the emphasis on rules and regulations, classrooms
and guidebooks, safety procedures and dungeon monitors, as well as
the community debates that such changes have engendered. Tracking
the circuits between self-mastery or individuation and social control
or community norms, I flesh out the ways in which people become
sm practitioners by producing, policing, mastering, and debating the
boundaries between safe (acceptable or correct) and dangerous (unac-
ceptable or wrong) play.
These binaries rely on the social construction of risk. As Nikolas Rose
argues, in the late twentieth century, ‘‘individuals, families, firms, orga-
nizations, communities’’ have been asked to ‘‘take upon themselves the
responsibility for the security of their property and their persons, and

62 C H A P T E R T WO
that of their own families’’ ([1999] 2007, 247; italics in original). This
shift both individualizes (via logics of choice, autonomy, and respon-
sibility) and collectivizes (into newer ‘‘communities,’’ each responsible
for ‘‘ ‘its own’ risk management’’) risk and responsibility (248). The
privatization of risk—coupled with what many have argued is a broader
US ethos of anxiety, fear, or insecurity—has generated a range of prac-
tices organized around warding off or managing risk: body practices like
going to the gym and dieting; hobbies like extreme sports and adven-
ture tourism; spatial forms like the gated community and exurb; the
growth of prediction and insurance markets; social shifts like self-help
and life-coaching; and legal changes, like tort reform or bicycle helmet
laws (see Ekberg 2007; Grewal 2006; Low 2003). Risk practices are also a
potent generator of consumption: purchasing books, videos, services,
and other commodities to make one (and one’s family) safer and more
secure both activates and alleviates a sense of vulnerability. This link to
commodification is a reminder that safety is also a sign of social privi-
lege; it is, of course, the people who live outside gated communities who
are truly at risk. In this way, like the privatization of space I described in
the last chapter, the displacement of health and safety onto private or
privatized communities is one way that neoliberalism functions to jus-
tify material inequalities.
Risk management is biopolitical: a form of power ‘‘whose operation is
not ensured by right but by technique, not by law but by normalization,
not by punishment but by control, methods that are employed on all
levels and in forms that go beyond the state and its apparatus’’ (Foucault
[1976] 1990, 89). As Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose argue, biopower
combines ‘‘a form of truth discourse about living beings and an array of
authorities considered competent to speak that truth; strategies for
intervention upon collective existence in the name of life and health;
and modes of subjectification, in which individuals can be brought to
work on themselves, under certain forms of authority, in relation to
truth discourses, by means of practices of the self, in the name of
individual or collective life or health’’ (2006, 203–4). Rabinow and Rose
call for further analysis of biopower within particular cultural, histori-
cal, and social configurations. This chapter begins that work by explor-
ing concepts of risk within the sm community. It highlights biopower as
the ‘‘power relations that take humans as living beings as their object’’
and the ‘‘modes of subjectification through which subjects work on

B E C O M I N G A P R AC T I T I O N E R 63
 themselves qua living beings’’ (215): the self-mastery of becoming an
sm practitioner.
Drawing on Foucault’s work in The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the
Self, I analyze this self-mastery as a form of subjectification, a ‘‘stylis-
tics of existence’’ or ‘‘cultivation of the self.’’ Self-scrutiny, self-control,
and self-mastery are techniques that ‘‘one performs on oneself, not
only in order to bring one’s conduct into compliance with a given rule’’
but also to constitute ‘‘oneself as the ethical subject of one’s sex-
ual behavior’’ (Foucault [1984] 1990, 27; Foucault [1984] 1988, 240).
Through techne, or ‘‘practices of the self,’’ sm practitioners ‘‘monitor,
test, improve and transform’’ themselves in relation to the sm commu-
nity (Foucault [1984] 1990, 28). This technique of the self encourages
practitioners to become subjects of themselves, to master themselves,
even as it solidifies particular—white, professional—iterations of sm
community.
As Foucault reminds us, practices of risk and safety are always tied to
social power: techniques of the self were for men, and only slave-owning
and married men ([1984] 1990, 22). These ethics, he argues, were not
concerned with disciplining social inferiors (such as women) but were,
rather, an ‘‘elaboration of masculine conduct carried out from the view-
point of men in order to give form to their behavior’’ (22–23; italics in
original). Although the time period that Foucault is considering—Greek
and Roman antiquity, from the fourth century bce to the second cen-
tury ad —is obviously quite different from today, thinking about sm
practice as a technique or care of the self is crucial to understanding how
sm practitioners become practitioners by mastering rules of sexual con-
duct. As I will show, however, mastering the rules does not mean blind
submission to community standards. Rather, as Foucault argues, ‘‘in
this form of morality, the individual did not make himself into an ethi-
cal subject by universalizing the principles that informed his action; on
the contrary, he did so by means of an attitude and a quest that individ-
ualized his action, modulated it, and perhaps even gave him a special
brilliance by virtue of the rational and deliberate structure his action
manifested’’ (62). An emphasis on mastery and distinction places com-
munity or social norms and individuation or self-mastery in tension.
Social norms, as Judith Butler argues, provide a foundational horizon of
recognition: ‘‘the subject forms itself in relation to a set of codes, pre-
scriptions, or norms . . . that precede and exceed the subject . . . setting

64 C H A P T E R T WO
the limits to what will be considered an intelligible formation of the sub-
ject within a historical scheme of things’’ (2005, 17). Yet even though
such norms ‘‘set the limits’’ of intelligibility, norms and subjectivity are
supplementary; social norms and subjects constitutively depend on, but
also exceed, each other. One of the key ways this works is through the
individualization—not the internalization—of the rules.
The irony of this particular configuration in bdsm is twofold: ideo-
logically, sexuality is imagined as a locus of freedom from the self, from
social norms and conventions, from the state and other apparatuses of
social control. Of course, as scholars have long argued, rather than a
mode of freedom, sexuality is a primary form of social control, a way of
locating individuals and relationships within grids of social meaning.
Here, then, is a second irony: sm is perhaps the paradigmatic example
of a sexual community organized around practices of safety and self-
control, yet one that imagines itself (and is, in turn, figured) as radical,
transgressive, out(side the)law. In this chapter, this irony takes the form
of argument: read biopolitically, community rules and regulations—
themselves dependent on neoliberal cultural formations—produce sm
subjectivities by inciting certain forms of self-mastery. And in turn,
practitioners resent the rules.

‘‘KUMBAYA KINK AND BARNEY BDSM’’

(BITCHING ABOUT) THE BDSM SCENE TODAY

In a speech Gayle Rubin gave at a graduation ceremony for the Journey-

man II Academy on October 4, 1997, she argues against the popular
bdsm dichotomy between old guard and new guard.≤ In this dichotomy,
the old guard is formal, strict, apprentice style, and rigid, while the new
guard is informal, casual, flexible, self-taught, and permissive. However,
as Rubin puts it, ‘‘much of what is described when people talk about
changes in the leather community comes down to more people, more
money, and more commercialization.’’ She continues:

I began to notice some of these shifts in the mid-1980s, when the

energy at public play parties seemed to change for the worse. Before
then, many of the parties had been informal rituals of solidarity, plea-
sure, celebration and connection. People cared most about having a
good time. Even in casual or recreational play, the focus seemed to be on

B E C O M I N G A P R AC T I T I O N E R 65
 the quality of the connection between the players themselves and on
building and sharing an energy that whole rooms could get high on
together. At some time in the mid-1980s, it seems that many people
began to care more about what the audience saw than what their part-
ners experienced. Leather had become trendy and popular rather than
despised and stigmatized. Others seemed to merely go through the
motions— sm too often became a mechanical exercise rather than an art
form or a form of intimate communication. I’m not saying that there is
no great public play today, but I often see a community that lacks some
of its former style, grace, and values.

Rubin is describing changes she witnessed in the gay men’s leather scene
in San Francisco, but some of her observations can be generalized to the
bdsm scene as a whole. For example, there is no denying the main-
streaming of sm fashion and style, or the large number of newcomers
who came into the scene in the 1980s and 1990s. And although some
might argue that sm is still plenty stigmatized, it may be less so as it
becomes more mainstream (this is not, however, a simple dynamic; see
Weiss 2006a). In lamenting these changes, Rubin also notes that play
has become a ‘‘mechanical exercise,’’ less intimate than it once was. Here
she advances what is a common distinction among sm practitioners—
between role-playing or public performance and authentic energy shar-
ing or imitate connection—a distinction that I take up in more detail in
the next chapter.
Many of the practitioners I spoke with agreed with these claims, even
those who had never experienced the old guard scene. For example,
Lady Hilary—a white, lesbian femme top in her mid-thirties—explained
to me:

lady hilary: [The community] changed, and it needed to probably

change . . . but I don’t really support exactly what’s
happening now.
margot: Do you have anything in particular that bothers you
about . . .
hilary: We’re back to rules . . . the concept of safe, sane, and
consensual was designed to throw the rest of the world
off of our track, that’s all. Have I ever brought harm to
anyone? Never. Would I ever want to harm anyone? No.
But part of that whole . . . mantra that everything has

66 C H A P T E R T WO
 to be really sanitized is . . . it cuts the edge. It’s not as
hot, it’s not as erotic, it’s not as fun, edgy—and in turn,
it’s not as intense. The ritual of it is gone, and I saw
that even when I first came into leather that there were
people . . . [who] ran incredible teams to see, incredi-
ble power dynamics, and really good service and great
hot beatings and great sex and then they’d get up and
they’d be talking about the weather or the kids or the
dog or whatever and there was no sacredness to what
had just transpired. And I have a very hard time with
that . . . with the lack of sacredness in sex . . . what’s
happening currently is sanitized, it’s whitewashed, it’s
about how to do it right.

Hilary’s complaints—that there are too many rules and too little inti-
macy, or that the scene today is ‘‘sanitized’’ or overprocessed in ways
that detract from the connectivity of sm —are common. One memo-
rable expression of this came from a leather conference I attended in
Boston in 2003, where a presenter in a workshop on whether the influx
of new practitioners was ‘‘diluting the sm community’’ called the cur-
rent scene ‘‘kumbaya kink and Barney bdsm .’’ Similarly, as one partici-
pant on a national sm e-mail list suggested: ‘‘Scene people are no lon-
ger sexual outlaws, nor a radical elite, nor the brave adventurers of
the 60s and 70s. And, yes, instead of encouraging people to explore their
sm sexuality on their own, today’s community encourages them to ex-
plore it in the context of clubs; and clubs need rules; and rules restrict,
even deaden, spontaneity. I see the Scene these days more like a kinky
Kiwanis Club.’’≥ In my analysis, what ‘‘more people, more money, and
more commercialization’’ have wrought is a different form of commu-
nity: one less like a secret passion and more like a hobby with specialized
magazines, websites and mailing lists, publishers, books, how-to films,
classes, discussion groups, commercial and noncommercial locations,
formal and informal organizations and networks, conferences, para-
phernalia, tools and toys, clothing, technologies, tips, and rules and
regulations.
Although practitioners today—even the newcomers—romanticize
the old guard scene in ways that do not correspond to historical reality,
these practitioners are correct that the scene today is very different

B E C O M I N G A P R AC T I T I O N E R 67
 from the scene in the 1970s.∂ J.—a white, heterosexual top in his early
forties—told me: ‘‘I think the community’s grown a lot . . . I have some
concerns about that because the old guard had rules and they had a way
of being and they had steps that one took, and you came up and you
worked through a system, almost, to become a top and you had to know
something to be a top.’’ Before books, how-to classes, and the like, the
old guard relied on networks to share skills and knowledge, and a system
of training and apprenticing. As one old guard leatherman explains,
‘‘since there were no popular leather magazines, porn videos, or even
books to inform the novice, everything was passed on by legend and
word-of-mouth tradition’’ (Magister 1991, 96). The plethora of guides
to negotiation, affect care (such as aftercare, or postscene emotional
soothing), limits, and guidelines—combined with the formal rules and
regulations of play at semipublic parties—have resulted in a scene that
is more formalized in its knowledge production than it was in the 1970s
and before.
This network of social rules and regulations is tied to the growth
and popularity of sm , the changing demographics of sm and the Bay
Area, shifts in the organization of leisure and the sexual economy, and
hiv / aids and legal and state intervention into sm . For example, as
sm organizations like the Society of Janus developed, the network of
classes and workshops, experts and guides, has also grown. Teramis, an
Arab American, lesbian slave in her mid-forties, explained to me that,
when the scene was smaller, ‘‘closed-door word-of-mouth networking’’
controlled access to the community so that ‘‘the abusive idiot wouldn’t
be let in the door.’’ Now, because the scene is so much larger and easier
to find, ‘‘these self-control mechanisms have fallen by the wayside.’’ ‘‘I
see the community now struggling to find a substitute’’ form of regula-
tion, ‘‘because the need to be self-policed is still there.’’ In this vacuum,
then, community-imposed rules and regulations perform the word-of-
mouth policing functions on which the earlier scene relied.
The rules are also a community response to hiv / aids . The leather/
sm scene in San Francisco was decimated by hiv in the early and
mid-1980s. The second incarnation of the Catacombs, for example—the
famous San Francisco sm and fisting club that many remember as the
‘‘community center for the s/m population’’ (Rubin 1991, 122)—closed
during the bathhouse sweep of 1984, a public health/sex panic spurred
by fear of aids (see also Rubin 1997).∑ bdsm parties and organizations

68 C H A P T E R T WO
responded to the aids crisis by requiring safer-sex practices and barrier
protection at semipublic parties. These rules were subject to tremen-
dous community debate; within Janus, this debate is known as the
‘‘great safe sex fight.’’ In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Janus’s safe-sex
debates were also tied to how the organization would be perceived as
responding (or not responding) to hiv / aids , and thus to the plight of
gay leathermen in San Francisco. The tenor and form of this debate
solidified Janus’s reputation as a primarily heterosexual organization.∏
Implementing safer-sex rules at dungeon parties was the first codifica-
tion of party rules and a more formal monitoring of sex play at parties.
Paul, who entered the scene in 1987, explained to me: ‘‘my sense is that
in the old days practically anything goes . . . aids obviously stopped
almost all sex in dungeons.’’
A final critical issue is state and legal intervention. As play parties
became larger and sm more visible, the chances of police busts and
other legal interference increased. In 2001, for example, the National
Coalition for Sexual Freedom (ncsf ) reported that it responded to 461
complaints regarding child custody or divorce proceedings in which sm
was an issue, and 392 cases of job discrimination based on sm prac-
tices.π A survey that the ncsf conducted in 1998 and 1999 indicated
that, among the 1,017 respondents, 36 percent had experienced vio-
lence or harassment and 30 percent had experienced discrimination
because of bdsm practices.∫ Add to this the high visibility of several
police raids and arrests at semipublic play parties, and the desire for a
more formally organized community becomes understandable. As Paul
commented, ‘‘when things go public,’’ the perception in the community
is that ‘‘the state comes in and says, ‘you damn well better organize this
or we’re going to do it for you.’ And then some do-gooder with their
heart in the right place will start saying, ‘Well, we don’t want that
happening. Here, let me set up some rules.’ ’’ Intended, then, to protect
community members from harsh legal intervention, some of the rules
and regulations of the new scene are a response to the state.
Yet these new rules and regulations, this formalization and control,
as Paul’s words make clear, also reflect a neoliberal shift from state
responsibility (for security, safety, and health) to individual and commu-
nity responsibility for safety (Brown 2005; Duggan 2003; Lemke 2001;
Rose [1999] 2007). As Thomas Lemke argues, summarizing Foucault’s
analysis of neoliberal governmentality, ‘‘neo-liberal forms of govern-

B E C O M I N G A P R AC T I T I O N E R 69
 ment . . . characteristically develop indirect techniques for leading and
controlling individuals without at the same time being responsible for
them. The strategy of rendering individual subjects ‘responsible’ (and
also collectives, such as families, associations, etc.) entails shifting the
responsibility for social risks such as illness, unemployment, poverty,
etc., and for life in society into the domain for which the individual is
responsible and transforming it into a problem of ‘self-care’ ’’ (2001,
201). Security, here, is about producing and controlling subjects (mak-
ing sure that the sm community is not accessible to ‘‘abusive idiots’’),
bodies (making sure that physical risks like hiv transmission are con-
trolled), and citizenship (making sure that the community is organized
in consistent, ideally legal, ways). These changes have important social
effects; in regulating safety, for example, the scene also produces knowl-
edge about acceptable practice and play. By offering classes on tech-
nique, the community has transformed the form of knowledge and
learning from person-to-person to formalized education. By canonizing
rules and regulations for safe play—negotiations, safewords, dungeon
rules, play prohibitions—and by forming the dma , the scene is also
attracting and producing certain kinds of practitioners. In these ways,
the production, regulation, and control of safety and risk produce sm
practitioners and further reinforce the kinds of people—white, profes-
sional, suburban—who find a home in this sm community.

JANUS ENTERING THE SCENE

Janus is considered an entry organization into the community because they

teach people rules, they teach people how to act, how to do things.
— marcie

The story of these technologies of sm —organized around training and

knowing oneself, maximizing one’s bodily pleasures and capabilities,
and organizing one’s relationships and intimacies in particular ways—
must begin with the Society of Janus. Janus, founded in 1974 by Cyn-
thia Slater and Larry Olsen, is the second oldest bdsm organization in
the United States (after tes , founded in 1971 in New York City) and has
transformed the social organization of sm in the Bay Area (for its his-
tory, see Truscott 1990; Weymouth and Society of Janus 1999). Before
its founding, there were bars, motorcycle clubs, and informal networks

70 C H A P T E R T WO
of sm , fetish, and leather practitioners throughout the United States;
there were also professional ‘‘session’’ (prodomme) houses and a few
combination clubs like Backdrop, a club started by Robin Roberts in
1966 as a school of bondage photography, a social and educational club,
and a professional domination house.Ω But from its beginning, Janus
was an educational organization: Slater formed it to provide support
and education on how to do safe sm .
Today, Janus sees itself as ‘‘an educational and support organiza-
tion for adults interested in sexuality based on a safe, consensual, non-
exploitative transfer of power between partners . . . We exist as an
organization to learn more about sm, to share information among our-
selves, to help build the sm community by providing a supportive atmo-
sphere for ourselves, to get to know and enjoy one another, and to reach
out to other interested, friendly groups and individuals.’’∞≠ In order to
join Janus, one must attend an orientation session. The current struc-
ture of orientations was established in the 1980s, and remains much the
same today. I attended the orientation session in June 2000, which was
held at San Francisco’s Fort Mason Center (a former military base now
operated by the US Park Service). The orientees that day included one
heterosexual couple in their sixties and four heterosexual dominant
men in their fifties, along with eight Janus members as presenters (in
2004–5, monthly orientations attracted from seven to twenty-eight
potential members). The presenters covered Janus’s history and mis-
sion, and then each explained his or her interest and involvement with
Janus and sm . Next we broke into small groups to discuss our experi-
ences with sm and our interest in Janus. We were each given a member-
ship form to fill out on the spot or to take home and mail in (between 65
and 80 percent of people who attend an orientation session end up
joining Janus). After the meeting, the Janus members met to discuss
whether anyone at the orientation should be denied membership. The
orientation session is supposed to keep undesirable people out of the
organization, although it is rare that anyone is denied membership.∞∞ As
one member explains, ‘‘in the time since I have attended orientations, I
have not seen anyone who was denied entry. We look for outright socio-
paths and deviants of the wrong nature.’’∞≤
Here Janus—fittingly—is balancing two goals: access (its desire to be
supportive and welcoming to new members, and to build the commu-
nity) and restriction. Of course, having to pass an orientation screening

B E C O M I N G A P R AC T I T I O N E R 71
 is not the only form this restriction takes; rather, as will become clear, a
community organized around both formalized institutions (like Janus)
and discourses of safety, risk, and security produces sm practitioners in
particular ways and simultaneously reinforces ideal community mem-
bership. Taken together, this amounts to the formal organization of
certain social norms.
Janus has almost always had a formalized organizational structure.
In 1975, two years after its founding, the group began holding regular
business meetings, electing officers, and producing a newsletter. It has
formal bylaws that detail procedures for electing officers, running busi-
ness meetings, and the types of program meetings Janus should have,
among other organizational details. After I became the archivist for
Janus in March 2003, I began attending the monthly business meetings,
most often held in an upstairs room at a men’s bathhouse in the Cas-
tro.∞≥ The first time I attended, I was surprised at the formal motions;
Janus follows Robert’s Rules of Order. Lady Thendara felt the same way:
‘‘I went to a Janus business meeting . . . I had never been to one before.
They follow all these rules, I mean, there’s all these kinky people and
they’re like ‘No, you can’t speak. He’s got the table. He’s made a mo-
tion.’ It’s very formal!’’ The members elect officers by secret ballot at
the annual meeting; in addition to archivist, the officers include busi-
ness meeting moderator, cashier, communication secretary, editor of
Growing Pains (the newsletter), librarian, membership secretary, munch
director, orientation director, outreach director, postmaster/mistress,
program director, recording secretary, social activities director, trea-
surer, and webmaster.
Janus and the organizations modeled on it that followed in its wake
—especially smo dyssey, but also the gay and lesbian organizations that
developed out of, in response to, or alongside Janus—have transformed
the sm scene into one that is much more structured, formal, codified,
and institutional than the old guard scene. As John Preston, author of
the classic old guard leather novel Mr. Benson complains, the ‘‘sense of
brotherhood among s/m ers’’ has been ‘‘replaced by a whole series of
formal clubs, all directed by Robert’s Rules of Order’’ (1991, 215), like
Janus.∞∂ Even those who play key roles in Janus, like Jezzie and Anton,
express some disappointment in this codification. Anton, a white, het-
erosexual master, and Jezzie, his white, bisexual wife and slave, both in
their mid-twenties, explain:

72 C H A P T E R T WO
 anton: You have support groups and everything is very open and
there’s a lot of communication . . . People are trying to reduce
the barriers to entry as much as possible, to be welcoming and
friendly, and all in all, I must say it’s a good thing. But there is
something that you lose. There’s this mystery and potency
of something that is hidden and—and somewhat forbidden.
Janus is, I think, the best educational organization that we
have around . . . [It] is a wonderful networking resource and is
very well organized and does a lot of great outreach, but it’s
not the slightest bit sexy. There’s nothing sexy about Janus. I
mean, you know, we meet in well-lit rooms in a circle of chairs
and everyone introduces themselves and . . .
jezzie: Wear[s] name tags.
anton: Before it even starts, you come to an orientation where they
tell you everything’s going to be safe and you’re okay. If you
want to have a sexy group, a little clandestine advertisement
in the back of the newspaper, meet in a dark room . . .
jezzie: Everybody act shady. Make it sound a little dangerous.
anton: I suspect that most of the people in the scene have at least
some degree of [wanting] the forbidden or the dangerous.
That’s part of why it’s interesting, and that’s fading over time
as things become more acceptable.
jezzie: It’s a trade-off. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t be totally
open and accepting and accessible and [also] be dangerous and
edgy and forbidden.

This disappointment—that sm isn’t as dangerous or dark or sexy in an

era of formal rules and organization—is nostalgia for a time when sm
was more outlaw. I explore this desire further below; here I want only to
note that Janus, and organizations like it, have produced a new scene
organized around, as Marcie—a white lesbian switch in her forties—
puts it, teaching people ‘‘rules,’’ ‘‘how to act,’’ and ‘‘how to do things.’’
And in this kind of training, Janus led the way with classes.

B E C O M I N G A P R AC T I T I O N E R 73
 THE OTW (ONE TRUE WAY) SM AS TECHNE

From its beginning, Janus focused on classes: ‘‘dungeon tours, ene-

mas, uniforms, role-play scenes, negotiation, dungeon safety, whipping/
flogging technique, and basic rope bondage’’ were some of the work-
shops and classes taught in its first few years (Weymouth and Society of
Janus 1999, 7). Since the 1990s, alongside the growth of the commu-
nity and the increased availability of sm toys, there has been a prolifera-
tion of classes and workshops. There are how-to classes on techniques
and skills, but there are also classes on aftercare, setting the scene, and
negotiation. Although the proliferation of classes in the Bay Area is
related to the appearance of new organizations, it is also tied to the late-
capitalist expansion of self-help, training, and guidance industries fo-
cused on sex and romance.
During my fieldwork, I attended a variety of classes, including ‘‘The
Art of Negotiation,’’ ‘‘Hot Wax Play,’’ ‘‘Spanking,’’ ‘‘Fire and Ice Play,’’
‘‘Aftercare,’’ ‘‘Processing Pain,’’ ‘‘Spirituality in the Scene,’’ ‘‘Terror Play,’’
‘‘Resistance Play,’’ ‘‘When Someone You Love Is Vanilla,’’ ‘‘Beginning
Rope Bondage,’’ ‘‘Caning,’’ and ‘‘How to Co-Top.’’ Most classes follow a
basic structure: introductory and safety material, more-detailed infor-
mation, a demonstration, and q&a . They are held after work during the
week, or on weekends, at local dungeons, stores, spaces rented by orga-
nizations, and at qsm . The classes cost up to $25 dollars a person, and
typically run about two hours. At most of the classes I attended, there
were between eight and twenty-five people present, most in work or
casual clothes—unless it was a weekend class before a party. This pro-
liferation of formal classes marks a shift away from person-to-person,
apprentice-style learning (where, for example, a potential top would
first be trained as a bottom by an experienced top, and later learn
various skills from masters recognized in the community) toward the
institutionalization of bdsm education. Guy Baldwin, one of the origi-
nal Janus members, writes of the old guard scene: ‘‘None of these rules
[for example, on what to wear or how to do sm ] is taught or explained to
anyone except by innuendo, inference, or example. Erotic technical in-
formation is only shared among peers’’ (1999, 77).
In contrast, in the new scene, as Latex Mustang explains:

74 C H A P T E R T WO
 There’s this huge tension about something that’s supposed to be so
driven by energy and so spontaneous, and so coming from the inside of
you, and in some ways happens so organically—and then having to
bring it under the structure of a classroom. But I think that’s what
separates us out from the unsafe, bedroom players who try to experi-
ment with this on their own and then sometimes kill themselves. Some-
times they don’t really have the opportunity to experience this to its
fullest because to get to that next level takes a level of education for
sufficiency, equipment, that you can’t get without learning from the
masters. And it used to be that that stuff was taught in the gay commu-
nities back in family houses, where there was a whole structure to the
family. And I think the heterosexuals have evolved a much more open
system of, basically, you want to do it, you pay your money, you get in,
you can go to the conference.

The institutionalization of sm technique, a more open system according

to Mustang (as long as you can pay your money—the subject of the next
chapter), is both regulated and standardized.
As Paul puts it, all of the bdsm books, manuals, how-to videos, and
classes exert a ‘‘normalizing influence’’ by ‘‘teaching everybody how to
do X’’ in the same way. This turns sm practice into a technique, a skill for
which there is ‘‘otw ’’—one true way that things are supposed to be done
(‘‘Keeper of the otw ’’ is a mocking community shorthand for a person
who is excessively invested in this viewpoint). Preston argues that these
workshops and classes, along with what he describes as ‘‘ ‘objective’
means to establish someone’s accomplishment or level of achievement,’’
have destroyed what was an ‘‘anarchistic,’’ ‘‘anti-establishment,’’ and
experimental leather scene (1991, 215–16). He writes: ‘‘Leathersex has
. . . lost its edge. It’s been codified, measured, and packaged. The magic of
trusting one person, a mentor, and letting those one-on-one bondings
spread out until a brotherhood was formed has been replaced with
impersonal how-to manuals’’ (214).
Many argue that, because the classes emphasize toys and techniques,
the new sm scene allows people to engage in sm without feeling, just by
following the rules (and buying the toys). An overemphasis on tech-
nique instead of the old guard understanding of intimacy, energy, or
magic between players has produced, as Baldwin remarks, ‘‘the era of
the tyranny of technique,’’ what Gayle Rubin calls ‘‘paint by number’’

B E C O M I N G A P R AC T I T I O N E R 75
 bdsm .∞∑ Mocking the ‘‘swelling curricula’’ as formula without heart,
Baldwin argues that the energy of sm organizations is directed toward
teaching how to do sm ‘‘ ‘properly’ which meant technically correct.’’
The nostalgic view that condemns the new scene sees ‘‘the rules’’—
classes, workshops, organizations, play regulations—as an impediment
to freedom and authentic social connection or intimacy. Instead, I read
‘‘the rules’’ as inciting certain forms of self-mastery: the mode of subjec-
tivity that is being practiced alongside one’s rope-tying skills.
As bdsm has become more mainstream, more organizationally fo-
cused, and more professionalized, practitioners work on their sm in self-
conscious ways, mobilizing American discourses of self-improvement
and education that dovetail with the emphasis on self-cultivation of
Foucault’s practice of the self. Today sm practitioners learn how to
be practitioners by attending a discussion group for newcomers, going
through an orientation like Janus’s to become a card-carrying member
of a bdsm organization, and taking classes on basic topics such as flog-
ging, spanking, and aftercare. They graduate to more advanced topics
(for example, edge play, suspension bondage, and Master/slave rela-
tionships), attending play parties and munches as they become more
involved and integrated into the scene. Eventually they may become
teachers, munch leaders, recognized experts, or officers in sm organiza-
tions. As Hailstorm, a white, heterosexual top in his mid-fifties, explains:

As a top, you have to know what you’re doing. It’s like going to driving
school. You have to learn how to do it because number one is: you could
hurt somebody. But the other thing is: it shows you’re serious. Like, if
you go to college, get a degree—well, you may be a smart person, but you
went the nine yards to be certified and got the sheepskin to prove that
you’re a player, you’re serious. That’s what it’s like in the dom world. If
you’re serious, your confidence will show it in front of everybody. You do
the workshop and then, of course, you get to the level where you can
become a teacher and teach a workshop, which I’ve done, and then, of
course, you’re way up there: ‘‘Oh, this guy’s a teacher, he’s a master, he’s
a guru. He’s the person you go to on the top of the mountain to learn
how to do all this stuff.’’ You’re on top.

Indeed, teaching classes is one way to gain status as an expert or author-

ity. Many people I interviewed told me about the classes they taught as a

76 C H A P T E R T WO
way of establishing themselves as local bearers of knowledge. One per-
son bragged about how he attends the same munch as the ‘‘guy who
wrote the book’’ on electrical play and a ‘‘guy who teaches classes nation-
ally on role-play.’’ Lady Thendara explained that after teaching classes,
she and Mustang are ‘‘known’’ in the community. And almost everyone
told me about the classes they planned to teach.
This kind of community expertise positions some practitioners, as
Rabinow and Rose put it, as ‘‘authorities considered competent to speak’’
the truth ‘‘in the name of life and health’’ (2006, 203). So, for example,
Jay Wiseman—a local safety guru, author, and expert—actively cam-
paigns against breath play (play with breathing restrictions) in the scene.
He has posted numerous essays on the subject on local and national
e-mail lists, in addition to the essays in his books and on his website.
Wiseman, a former emt , believes that breath play is never safe: ‘‘As a per-
son with years of medical education and experience, I know of no way
whatsoever that either suffocation or strangulation can be done in a way
that does not intrinsically put the recipient at risk of cardiac arrest’’ (see
also Downing 2007).∞∏ Wiseman argues that there is no precaution one
can take to make breath play safe (unlike bondage, which is safe as long as
the bond is not tight, or electricity play, which is safe as long as it’s not
above the waist). During my fieldwork, Sara told me that Wiseman pick-
eted a class offered by a South Bay woman on breath play. In her descrip-
tion of what had happened, Sara, a friend of the teacher, mocked Wise-
man’s concern with health and what she called his ‘‘middle-class mores.’’
Here again, not everyone agrees with the experts or masters. Some ar-
gue that the proliferation of classes and how-to books and films means
that almost anyone can become an ‘‘instant expert.’’ Some worry that
one cannot learn proper technique from reading a book or watching a
demo in a class. For example, Meg’gan—a white, lesbian butch bottom/
sometimes switch in her late twenties—told me that she was less com-
fortable as a bottom now that there isn’t ‘‘that same kind of hierarchy
that there was,’’ and a woman can ‘‘just get a flogger and start flogging’’:
‘‘You don’t know anything about flogging. Are you going to throw your
wrist out? How badly are you going to bruise someone? Are [they] going
to throw their back out? I mean, there’s a lot of things that can happen.’’
Others, like Stephanie and Anthony, both white, bisexual dominants in
their mid-fifties, simply mock this aspirational sm :

B E C O M I N G A P R AC T I T I O N E R 77
 stephanie: You want people to recognize you as some sort of expert
or fount of knowledge . . . it brings prestige and status to
you . . .
anthony: . . . Bob is the guy that I think about . . . because he’s
walking around in the scene kind of quiet and shy . . . and
then he goes to Black Rose [a large conference/convention
in Washington, D.C.] . . . and comes back with a T-shirt,
and the next thing you know, he’s teaching a singletail
class and he’s, you know, Mr. Singletail . . . It looked like
there was a career path for him, and he seemed very
ambitious about doing all this stuff. For some people, it’s
not just a hobby and something to do on the weekend.
For some people, it really is like they are really serious
about this.
margot: How would you describe that?
stephanie: A career pervert.

Although it is easy, as Stephanie does, to snicker at this ‘‘career path’’—a

career, I should note, where income is limited to cultural capital—the
transformations in the scene extend beyond those practitioners inter-
ested in becoming community leaders or experts. Rather, sm practice
provides an opportunity to fashion oneself in relation to these social
norms, where ‘‘relation to’’ does not entail blind adherence, but rather a
form of work on the self, a testing, monitoring, and transformation that
can, as we will see, include rejecting the rules.

BECOMING AN (SSC) PRACTITIONER

COMMUNITY RULES AND SELF-MASTERY

Mollena described her initial foray into bdsm to me: ‘‘I became really
geeky about it; I was on the ’net, I researched everything, I found the
books and went out and bought them . . . I really spent a lot of time and
did a lot of personal research and introspection and a lot of writing
about it.’’ After finding the Society of Janus and the Exiles, Mollena at-
tended an orientation session and started going to classes and munches.
She continues: ‘‘At the Berkeley munch I met a bunch of other people,
and I was invited to my first play party, and it sort of blossomed from
there. The involvement purely is not enough; to get you really, fully

78 C H A P T E R T WO
involved, you have to really work at it. It’s like a project, you know?’’
Similarly, Chris, a white, heterosexual dom in his mid-thirties, explains
that he and his wife use their relationship ‘‘as an opportunity for general
work’’ on their marriage and their individual ‘‘growth and development’’
as sm practitioners. To achieve this, they set up explicit goals, monitor
their progress, and make daily plans, such as ‘‘daily affirmation, daily
motivation, exercises that we do,’’ each designed to work on actualizing
specific goals (such as behavioral training) in the context of their bdsm
relationship.
For these and other practitioners, bdsm is a project, a practice of
developing oneself as a skilled practitioner, of learning how to be a
practitioner (see Weiss 2006b). Becoming a practitioner takes work on
the self: finding the community, attending events, learning techniques
and skills, and educating oneself. These practices are forged in relation
to the community norms and rules, but—as Foucault emphasizes—it is
not a question of complying with the rules, but of transforming oneself
through one’s own interpretation of the rules. As he argues, the proper
use of pleasure, one’s self-mastery in relation to pleasure, produces a
‘‘solid and stable state of rule of the self over the self’’ ([1984] 1990, 69;
see also 91–92). This rule is less a strict rule of conduct and more about
individualizing, moderating, and elaborating conduct, subjecting the
self to his own moral mastery. Foucault’s understanding of self-mastery
in relation to the rules of pleasure is useful here, as sm practitioners
also learn to elaborate codes of conduct, to subject themselves to a
kind of self-mastery that is supplementary to, rather than in strict
compliance with, social and community norms. As Foucault argues, in
time, these practices of the self ‘‘evolved into procedures, practiced and
taught. It thus came to constitute a social practice, giving rise to rela-
tionships between individuals, to exchanges and communications, and
at times even to institutions’’ ([1984] 1988, 45).∞π The rules, worked on
as part of the labor of becoming an sm practitioner, also produce this
particular sm community and the circuits and exchanges it endorses.
Working at bdsm play is also work on the self: it produces and
consolidates subjectivities and communities. It is deeply class-inflected,
relying not only on the income and time to attend courses and confer-
ences, but also on shared forms of community recognition—education,
expertise, and mastery—that are most available to professional-class
practitioners. This exclusivity, however, is displaced and obscured in

B E C O M I N G A P R AC T I T I O N E R 79
 community discourse; these forms of recognition are hegemonic pre-
cisely because they construct an ideal, class-restricted community mem-
ber (the professional practitioner with sufficient means and proper
education) toward which other, nonaffluent practitioners aspire. Univer-
salizing ideologies, therefore, normalize such careful work on oneself
and one’s pleasures. Bailey, a white, heterosexual bottom in her mid-
forties, explains that she got into the scene after joining a local sm e-mail
list: ‘‘I found out about munches. I started showing up, and from there I
just networked the hell out of it. So I’ve been active in the public commu-
nity in the Bay Area going on six years now. Two years ago I did six
national events. Last year I probably did four . . . [although this seems
like a lot], more-educated people, more-knowledgeable people, more-
affluent people tend to be at the national conventions. And I’m like,
‘Well, I want to learn more. That’s why I’m going.’ ’’ Thinking of the rules
in this way focuses attention on self-mastery and knowledge as an active
practice of modulation, testing, analysis, and self-cultivation.
This form of self-mastery, of techne as crafting or practicing oneself,
is articulated especially strongly around the rules, especially rules—like
Safe, Sane, and Consensual—that require practitioners to forge their
own practices of safety. Safe, Sane, and Consensual (ssc ) is the mantra
of sm in the United States today. Coined in 1983 by david stein, as part
of the statement of purpose of gmsma (Gay Male s/m Activists), the
slogan was popularized across the country and is now widely endorsed
by bdsm organizations.∞∫ Stein notes that the slogan was originally
understood to distinguish ‘‘defensible’’ sm , practiced on ‘‘willing part-
ners for mutual satisfaction,’’ from ‘‘harmful, antisocial, predatory be-
havior,’’ ‘‘the coercive abuse of unwilling victims.’’ Beyond being a motto,
however, Safe, Sane, and Consensual has become critical to the social
organization of sm ; it is the primary way practitioners distinguish be-
tween good, safe, acceptable sm and bad, unsafe, unacceptable practice.
To ensure that the community of practitioners corresponds to ssc rules,
several practices have become standardized; the two largest, most in-
stitutionalized are negotiation and using safewords.
Although it is likely that old guard scenes involved some sort of
negotiation, today, all bdsm scenes are supposed to involve fairly for-
mal negotiation.∞Ω Like the infamous Antioch College rules that re-
quired explicit and specific verbal consent for every sexual act, negotia-
tion ensures that there will be informed consent throughout the play,

80 C H A P T E R T WO
and that each player’s desires and fantasies will be responded to in the
course of the scene.≤≠ Unlike the Antioch rules, negotiation is supposed
to be done before the play, thus requiring anticipatory foresight. During
negotiation, one should divulge any emotional, physical, or sexual infor-
mation that may be important (for example, one should tell one’s part-
ner about the child abuse that may crop up and force the scene to end
abruptly, or how one’s carpal tunnel syndrome might impact bondage,
or that the word slut is acceptable, but whore is not). One should also
explain the kinds of sm play one particularly likes. Finally, one should
describe one’s limits; the most common limit is ‘‘dead people, kids, and
shit,’’ although there are many other limits.
sm guidebooks explain how to negotiate with a partner in excruciat-
ing detail; Wiseman’s sm 101, one of the most popular, has a ten-page
‘‘long form’’ for negotiation that lists sixteen categories with spaces so
that practitioners can fill in the blanks with their own desires, limits,
and protocols. The categories include people involved; place; how long
the scene will last; emotional and physical limits; presence and kind of
sex and safe-sex procedures; presence and kind of bondage and pain;
what, if any, marks can be left; and safewords (Wiseman 1998, 58–62).
Many people rely on verbal negotiation, but many others use these
highly formalized checklist negotiation forms to plan a scene.
Similarly, the use of safewords—words like red or safeword or pine-
apple that are unlikely to come up during a scene—was introduced in the
1970s and has now become a crucial part of contemporary sm . Wise-
man recommends having two safewords, ‘‘one for ‘lighten up’ and one
for ‘stop completely.’ ’’ He adds, ‘‘I also strongly recommend using the
‘two squeezes’ technique. If the players will use a gag or a hood, they
must agree upon non-verbal ‘safe signals’ ’’ (1998, 62; italics in origi-
nal).≤∞ Semipublic play parties almost always have a house safeword,
usually safeword or red. Viewed as a last resort, safewords function as an
out for when the scene has gone too far—when it has exceeded the
boundaries of either player. Thus, like negotiation, safewords have be-
come an institutionalized procedure of safety.
Many practitioners find this level of planning and negotiation ridicu-
lous. Lady Hilary, for example, explained that ‘‘rules now are for safety.’’
‘‘Not that safety’s not important, but . . . none of the rules enhance the
dynamic. ‘Oh, let’s over-process how we’re going to play. So you want to
be spanked five times—okay, fine, but six I can’t do.’ And then I have to

B E C O M I N G A P R AC T I T I O N E R 81
 do this, so that’s how some people negotiate a scene. It’s now lost the
tension.’’ Pam, a white, bisexual slave in her fifties, described coming out
into the scene in her twenties, when ‘‘it wasn’t a bunch of negotiation.’’
‘‘I found who he [gesturing to Vince] was as a person and his character
and everything else and that was enough to serve him.’’ With the new
players, she explained, you sit down and negotiate ‘‘an hour and a half
for a twenty-minute scene.’’ ‘‘And I’m just like . . . ‘you’re boring the shit
out of me.’ ’’ Pam is in service to her master Vince, a white, gay man in
his mid-forties; they play without safewords or negotiation because, as
she explains, ‘‘he knows just where I am at every moment, and plus if
something does happen that he’s not aware of, I can just say it. I don’t
have to go ‘beige’ or ‘yellow’ or ‘green’ or whatever the hell they’re all
doing.’’ Vince agrees: ‘‘I think that we can think about sex or we can have
sex. And so my question and my process has always been ‘Is this some-
one that I can connect with? Can I sense you? Can I feel you?’ . . . If that’s
possible, then I don’t really need to negotiate because all I really need to
do is pay attention.’’
Here, practitioners’ concern that the more mechanical exercise of
negotiation destroys the heart of modern bdsm parallels the main-
stream press’s response to the Antioch rules. Like the excessive zeal of
mandatory bicycle helmet laws, the rules were seen as political correct-
ness gone awry. These critics of both safewords and negotiation argue
that by codifying very specific ways of doing sm , the intense connection
that sm can create between partners is destroyed, that excessive nego-
tiation will diminish interpersonal intimacy. Taking sex, a practice that
is supposed to be spontaneous and magical, and delineating and codify-
ing it seems counterproductive to many. Indeed, this is one of the most
common vanilla responses to sm that I hear: how can a scene that is
negotiated ahead of time be hot, believable, or fun?
There are two related ways to approach this question. The first is to
note the pleasure that inheres in the rules. So, for example, in a front-
page news story in the New York Times on the Antioch rules, Jane Gross
reported that students liked the policy. They thought that talking about
sex was erotic, that it was more about setting up ‘‘ground rules’’ than a
rigid checklist, and that the policy effectively addressed rape (1993). In
this case, negotiation is a practice that carries with it some unintended
pleasures: the pleasures of describing one’s desires in detail, for exam-
ple, a pleasure (bound to safety) that many people—especially women

82 C H A P T E R T WO
who have sex with men—emphasized when contrasting sm sex with
vanilla sex.≤≤ The second approach, which I follow here, is to note that
community pressure to be safe, sane, and consensual does not ask prac-
titioners to blindly follow the rules, but rather to negotiate their own
relationship to these rules, to define safety and risk for themselves.
This work creates a relationship between individual subjects and social
norms, a relationship in which one’s enactment, disavowal, or disregard
of the rules is a form of self-subjugation and self-mastery in accordance
with professional-class standards. This provides one way to read ssc sm
and the rules as technique, allowing us to see the community debates
about the rules and their pleasures as themselves part of the construc-
tion of sm practitioners.
For example, many of the bdsm practitioners with whom I spoke
agreed that Safe, Sane, and Consensual was a simplistic slogan, but they
had varying opinions about its value. Most thought that ssc was a good
policy, but that it couldn’t really be followed to the letter. Many also felt
that it was, as Teramis puts it, ‘‘an easy sound bite for newbies to
digest . . . a good tone to strike for the masses,’’ or ‘‘created as outreach
or propaganda, and I think it’s best in that role,’’ in Anton’s words.
Others liked it for its usefulness in conveying to medical professionals,
psychologists, or the police the difference between bdsm and abuse,
rape, torture, or violence—as well as between bdsm practitioners and
psychopaths.
A few unconditionally liked the phrase. For example, Monique Alex-
andra—a Latina, bisexual bottom/submissive/masochist in her mid-
thirties—thought that the use of negotiation and safewords in the com-
munity made her feel comfortable and, more important, safe: ‘‘I want
things that are exciting, but I want to know I decided to have that done,
and that at any point I can say whatever the codeword is and it will
stop . . . Safety is very important to me; I would not play with anyone
who has the attitude ‘I won’t negotiate because it’s boring.’ ’’ For some,
the emphasis on safety reduced the fear that people coming in to the
scene may experience, but it didn’t make bdsm any less erotic. As
Mustang explains: ‘‘Safe doesn’t mean you’re driving around in your
Suburban . . . Some of these people are pretty far out on the edge . . . It’s
people doing things safely and yet still getting what they need.’’ For him,
community resources, experts on things like ‘‘rope or whipping or elec-
tricity,’’ and medical doctors and lawyers who are ‘‘kink aware,’’ are all

B E C O M I N G A P R AC T I T I O N E R 83
 aspects of community development ‘‘not available ten years ago.’’≤≥ This
development means that there is ‘‘community support to say, ‘here’s
what edge play is, here’s what it means, here’s the things you need to do,
here’s what you can’t do, and here are the risks you’re taking when you
do it,’ so there’s informed consent.’’ ‘‘I think that’s a wonderful thing . . .
It’s what saved me.’’
Yet many people pointed out that there was no way to be truly safe,
sane, or even consensual. For example, Chris told me that ‘‘we need
some way of distinguishing this [sm ] from abuse.’’ ‘‘[But] my opinion is
also that we’ve picked the wrong three words. I can’t think of any
activity . . . that I would wholeheartedly call safe . . . [and] the definition
of sanity is actually a legal issue.’’ He continued, half joking: ‘‘Now if it
were something like informed, consensual, and involving a level of risk
that was comparable to, say, everything that everybody on the planet
does, I’d be all for that.’’ For this reason, many prefer rack (risk-aware
consensual kink), a term coined by Gary Switch of tes in the late
1990s.≤∂ Teramis argues: ‘‘You can’t define for somebody what’s safe for
them. You can’t define if what somebody’s doing is sane for them. [What
matters is] that I’m aware of the risks, I’m informed, I’ve given consent,
and it’s making me happy.’’
Practice—being ‘‘informed,’’ learning the risks, being educated—
leads here to less safe, sane, and consensual sm , but this is not sur-
prising. Rather, it is through these community practices of education,
classes, orientations, and the like that practitioners take responsibility
for their own practices of safety, that they map out their own relation-
ship to the rules. So, for example, Domina and Hayden told me that they
play without limits or safewords, as do Jezzie and Anton. Jezzie ex-
plained that she initially needed ssc to feel comfortable in the scene,
but then she ‘‘kind of outgrew it.’’ ‘‘Safe, well, what if I knowledgeably
want to do something risky? Sane, what the hell does that mean? I
mean, I’m in the mental health profession!’’ For her, ssc is ‘‘like training
wheels.’’ Once one is a part of this community, having learned social
norms through educational structures, one should ‘‘outgrow’’ or culti-
vate one’s own rules.
This is why many, like Annalee—a white, bisexual genderqueer/per-
vert/voyeur in her early thirties—insisted on their own definition of the
terms. Annalee explains: ‘‘I’m a fan of consensual sex, however you each
consent with your partner. You can each consent like, ‘okay, I consent to

84 C H A P T E R T WO
having you push my boundaries until I say red,’ which might not be
somebody else’s definition of safe, sane, and consensual, which would be
like, ‘we will agree on ten acts to be performed in this order.’ I’m not a
fan of the ‘ten acts in this order.’ I just think it’s too much to remember
. . . If I’m playing with friends, or partners, we know each other well
enough that we can push these limits and [do] whatever the hell we feel
like doing. There’s a lot of safety built into it, and that’s how I define
safe, sane, and consensual.’’ All of these debates point to the ways practi-
tioners work with and customize the rules and definitions of safe, sane,
consensual, and negotiated. The rules provide a social structure, a scaf-
folding, within which people cultivate their own ways of being practi-
tioners with—and against—the rules.

RISK AND SOCIAL PRIVILEGE

In a speech critiquing the ssc mantra of contemporary bdsm , Alison

Moore argues that ‘‘when we invent these sorts of simplistic slogans to
differentiate our behavior from nonconsensual violence, what we end
up with is often a set of definitions that do not reflect anyone’s way of
doing sm .’’ She continues: ‘‘For me the whole beauty of sm play is that it
doesn’t always make sense, that it does take us outside our ‘safety-zone,’
that it is frightening; it taps into the purest essence of sex which is
ultimately chaotic, chthonic, exhilarating, exuberant, a dizzying abyss,
an electrifying scream . . . There is no political slogan to describe this.’’≤∑
Moore neatly summarizes the desire that many people have: to have sex
that is unsafe. sm sex is already edgy sex, in that it is—to the general
public, at least—forbidden, dark, and prohibited. It is also risky, al-
though generally no more physically risky than football, rock climbing,
or other sports. Maintaining this allure of the clandestine, outlaw, or
dangerous is important to practitioners, and this is one reason they
remain ambivalent about the rules, as well as the cultural mainstream-
ing of sm fashion and, to some degree, practice.
At the same time, practitioners are quick to rely on precisely the
binaries established by ssc to assert that sm is not what stein referred
to as ‘‘harmful, antisocial, predatory behavior,’’ and what many would
call simple, sociopathic sadism. The rules, then, solicit a complex tech-
nology: they create a social context within which sm practice is under-
standable—as sexual and as desirable—and they also demand that indi-

B E C O M I N G A P R AC T I T I O N E R 85
 vidual practitioners chart their own relationship to that edge between
safety and risk, control and the ‘‘abyss.’’
Here, risk must be understood as productive and desirable, not merely
aversive. This is, in part, a critique of the ‘‘risk society’’ thesis of An-
thony Giddens and Ulrich Beck, which—in the words of Merryn Ekberg—
suggests that societies like the United States are characterized by a
‘‘collective consciousness of anxiety, insecurity, uncertainty and ambiva-
lence’’ that produces ‘‘an ethos of risk avoidance’’ (2007, 346, 344). As
Ekberg puts it in a review essay, these understandings posit the risk
society ‘‘in contrast to primary, industrial modernity, which was charac-
terized by the safety, security, predictability and permanence of inherited
traditions, such as class location, gender roles, marriage, family, lifetime
employment and secure retirement.’’ The risk society, however, ‘‘is char-
acterized by a dislocation, disintegration and disorientation associated
with the vicissitudes of detraditionalization’’ (346).
Although many scholars agree that risk, anxiety, and security are key
discourses in the contemporary United States, this universalizing meta-
theory has come under attack in recent years (Zaloom 2004; see also
T. Baker and Simon 2002; Mythen 2007). First, as Ekberg notes, ‘‘com-
munities have not disappeared [due to social dislocation], rather they
have reformed around risk and safety . . . risk is now the collective bond
holding communities together as imaginary risk communities’’ (2007,
346). Second, imagining a ‘‘collective consciousness’’ of risk aversion
‘‘negates the possibility of a risk-seeking culture’’ (362). The desirability
of risk—its pleasure and benefits—is part of this ethos and combines
with the community- and subject-producing aspects of risk. As Caitlin
Zaloom argues in a essay about risk in the Chicago Board of Trade
trading pit, risk produces Chicago traders as subjects: ‘‘In the pit, a
particular kind of self is manufactured in relation to financial action.
Risk is the key object for traders in their individual projects of self-
creation and re-creation . . . these practices encourage the production
of subjects who can sustain themselves under high-stakes conditions’’
(2004, 366). Practices of risk ‘‘describe a capitalist ethic that centers on
the mastery of the self under conditions of hazard and possibility’’ (366;
see also Celsi, Rose, and Leigh 1993). Risk enables the production of
self-mastery, but these forms of self-creation also rely on an evaluative
community. As Zaloom notes: ‘‘Trading provides the opportunity to

86 C H A P T E R T WO
develop and perform self-control and determination for all who are
watching’’ (2004, 379).
In sm , risk is similarly productive; building and mastering bdsm
skills produce new subjects in relation to an evaluative community. The
community evaluates one’s education, trustworthiness, experience, and
skill. So, for example, Bailey explained to me that a dm at a party once
stopped her friend: ‘‘One of the things he’s very good at and he teaches
is Japanese rope bondage, in particular suspension bondage. And . . . the
last two years in a row they stopped the scene before he [had finished
the] suspension because they didn’t think he was safe. And if there’s
anyone I would trust to do that, it would be him. He knows his stuff.’’
Here trust is based on knowledge and skill, in terms of one’s public
persona. Waldemar, a white, bisexual mostly top in his early thirties,
explains that he has no problem making play dates: ‘‘I’m well known,
and people trust me and they like what I do.’’ Francesca, a white, bi-
sexual, pain slut bottom in her late forties, explains that if she were
playing with a friend, she ‘‘could probably take a lot more stressful
[forms of play].’’ ‘‘It’s a matter of trust, how much do I trust this person?
And trust is based on knowledge for me.’’
Concepts of risk also entail ‘‘edgework,’’ or ‘‘the personal exploration
of the limits of both the context and the individual’s ability to control it’’
(Celsi, Rose, and Leigh 1993, 16). Here, as Richard Celsi, Randall Rose,
and Thomas Leigh note, in an essay exploring the motivations of sky-
divers, ‘‘many high-risk performers learn to like working at the edge of
their abilities, ‘to push the envelope’ ’’ (16). Skydivers want ‘‘thrills,’’
but also ‘‘high-risk performers seek controllable risk contexts where
their abilities can be challenged’’ so that they can ‘‘attain mastery, self-
efficacy, and flow’’ (16). Of course, the edge is not a fixed limit; it
changes based on ability, knowledge, experience, and confidence level.
Hence risk is not to be avoided but managed; not a static relationship,
but a boundary of self-improvement and skill.
In sm , edgework might be productively discussed in terms of edge
play, a category of play that is physically or psychologically risky or
dangerous (see also Henkin and Holiday 1996, 66). Examples of edge
play include suspension bondage, electricity, cutting, piercing, brand-
ing, enemas, water sports, scat, breath play, knife play, blood play, gun
play, terror play, intense humiliation, race and cultural trauma play,

B E C O M I N G A P R AC T I T I O N E R 87
 singletails, and fire play—all kinds of play in which the risk of physical or
emotional damage are fairly high. Patrick Califia adds to this list mind
games, consensual nonconsent, abduction and kidnapping, catheters
and sounds, and scarification (2002, 193–215). The management of
risk is central to the classification of edge play. Some of these play forms
are edge play because they risk unintentional physical harm, such as
falling during suspension bondage. Some risk long-term bodily damage,
death (for example, heart stoppage with electricity play and suffocation
during breath play), disease, or psychological trauma. Yet these defini-
tions are not stable; familiarity changes what counts as risky sm . For
example, many participants think play piercing is no longer edge play
because so many people do it, and the techniques have become stan-
dardized. Single-tail whips, too, became trendy during my fieldwork,
and there were many classes on how to throw or crack them correctly;
this made the use of singletails at semipublic parties much less edgy.
Breath play, on the other hand, is widely prohibited, at least for now.
The desirability of managed risk, in edge play, is an opportunity to
fashion oneself as a person with skills and knowledge in relation to sm
as a risk community. This is why many people told me that they do
breath play, but not that kind of breath play. Domina, for example, told
me: ‘‘I don’t do much in the way of breath play. I might put a gas mask
on somebody and put my hand over the intake, but I don’t believe in
breath play because you can kill people doing it.’’≤∏ Anthony described a
scene in which a woman was encased in Saran Wrap: the top wrapped it
around her body, over the top of her head, and finally across her face.
The top then ‘‘ripped it off [from the roll] and walked away and left her
there flopping and struggling for breath, and then finally when the
thing [Saran Wrap] started sucking way in [to her mouth], he pops his
finger in it.’’ Anthony has adapted this scene for himself, using a latex
mask that he rips off just in time. But then, he tells me, ‘‘in reality I’m
only holding her nose for maybe twenty or thirty seconds; it’s not really
that long at all. It’s not really breath play.’’ For Anthony, the scene had
what he termed ‘‘symbolic value,’’ but it wasn’t ‘‘really all that edgy.’’ ‘‘I
do some knife play, but I don’t really slice anybody up. I’ll cut a couple
layers of epidermis and then blood will pool up on the cut.’’ These
practitioners, by claiming that their play isn’t really dangerous, are ac-
tively redefining their practices as manageable— ssc —risk.
Other practitioners enjoy imaginatively violating community stan-

88 C H A P T E R T WO
dards. There are community jokes and T-shirts that say ‘‘unsafe, insane,
nonconsensual,’’ an homage to the outlaw quality of sm play. In our
interview, Vince explained that he and Pam ‘‘play with the edges, we play
with that monster.’’ Pam clarified the point: ‘‘It’s kind of like running a
marathon or climbing a mountain, it’s like ‘Can I do it? Where are my
edges? Where do I stop? Where do I start?’ . . . If you always stay in your
safety zone, how do you know what you can do?’’ sm play, for these
practitioners, should be unsafe, a place where boundaries and limits can
be pushed outside of a personal safety zone.
Yet these practitioners also forge an ethical relationship with the
self based on techniques, self-mastery, and community norms or rules.
Sybil—a white, bisexual dominant/mistress in her mid-fifties—told me:
‘‘This whole thing about ‘edge play’ is a joke. Edge play is not heavy, it’s
what’s heavy to you. So edge play is . . . blood and heavy whipping . . . to
some people, [but] that’s not all there is to edge play. If you have a
phobia of needles, that’s edge play. If you’re freaked out because you’re a
woman and I don’t want you to wear pink lingerie, that’s edge play.
Whatever makes you nervous and you don’t want to go there, I want to
go there ’cause that’s where the exchange of power comes from.’’ Sybil’s
comments show how community rules incite individual or personal
responses: the self-cultivation of practice. The point here is not that
breath play or edge play is strictly prohibited, thus inciting the desire to
do it. Rather, self-mastery as a practitioner requires the production and
subsequent personal refinement of community rules.
As Liz Day notes, all the authors in the sm essay collection Leather-
folk (Thompson 1991) claim that sm is transgressive (of nature, culture,
materiality, and discourse) because it is ‘‘outlaw’’ (Day 1994, 243). These
essayists, like the practitioners who argue that sm is (or should be, or
used to be) outlaw, read the limitations imposed by community rules as
a coercive form of disciplinary power, forcing practitioners to choose
between replication (obeying sm community rules) or transgression
(operating outside of, or in violation of, these rules). Rather, these
community debates about edge play, risk, and safety produce knowl-
edges that, in turn, encourage practitioners to position themselves in
relation to these rules and thus this ethical community. In edge play,
then, pleasure comes from defining and marking the boundaries and
limits of what can be done; in policing and enforcing these boundaries in
the community and in one’s own play; and in mastering the rules—the

B E C O M I N G A P R AC T I T I O N E R 89
 knowledge, skills, and techniques of self-improvement—that make be-
ing a practitioner possible.
Here, risk is not aversive, nor does it stand outside of or serve as an
escape from the demands or ‘‘constraints of modern social routines’’
imagined as boring, banal, or routinized (Zaloom 2004, 365). Although
these practitioners—like high-risk hobbyists such as rock climbers and
skydivers—imagine their practice as a break from the ‘‘real world’’ that
is simultaneously closer to their authentic selves, the management of
risk is actually a way of aligning their play selves with ‘‘real life.’’ Indeed,
imagining a risk community as a break from the real world is, as I will
discuss in the last two chapters, a way of bracketing off sm play as a
priori ‘‘safe’’ and ‘‘fantasy.’’ This bracketing works as an alibi to screen
off sm as safe precisely when it is most productive—of selves, commu-
nities, and social inequalities.
In this way, rather than a general ethos or collective consciousness,
risk functions to produce differentiated subjects. As Bruce Braun writes,
white, middle-class people ‘‘constitute themselves as middle-class and
white precisely through the externalization of as many risks as pos-
sible . . . and through barricading themselves from many others . . .
hence, if you are white and middle-class, ‘risk’ is something you take
on voluntarily, not something you are subject to’’ (2003, 199). There-
fore, he argues, adventure-sport advertisements both construct the
‘‘proper’’ risk-taking subject and naturalize racialized and classed hier-
archies (199; see also Simon 2002). Representations of risk and ability
do not passively reflect but rather justify social inequality. In sm , the
ability—or desire—to take on a socially constructed risk is one way in
which the community is produced as white and middle class, and, cycli-
cally, continues to appeal to—and produce—these same practitioners.
Thus, for example, Wiseman’s ‘‘middle-class mores’’ position him as an
expert or authority, able to prohibit or permit certain behaviors. But
other practitioners’ ability to disregard his (and others’) expertise is
based on their own attainment of knowledge, their self-cultivation as
professionalized community members.

90 C H A P T E R T WO
(DUNGEON) MONITORING MAKING PRACTITIONERS RESPONSIBLE

The plethora of rules and regulations in the community is related, in

part, to the legal challenges that bdsm play presents. Part of the social
context for this is the transfer of responsibility from the state to com-
munities and individuals. This transfer owes its legibility to a neoliberal
cultural formation that is part and parcel of the new sm community—
the privatization of risk, responsibility, and safety. As Wendy Brown
argues, neoliberalism produces subjects ‘‘controlled through their free-
dom’’ (2005, 44; italics in original). This freedom is the freedom to take
risks, but it is also, critically, the freedom to be held responsible for
one’s choices and one’s own health, well-being, and safety. Managing
risk therefore emerges as precisely the responsibility of the sm com-
munity and its practitioners. House rules—rules for semipublic play
parties—are a good example of these shifts.
The first private party I attended was held in Vallejo, a small city
forty-five minutes east of San Francisco on I-80. The party was held in a
brown ranch home in a cul-de-sac, in the middle of a new housing
development. The house had a large back deck with a pool, and a beauti-
ful view of brown California hills. The party was a regular, once-a-month
event called ‘‘the Valley.’’ From noon to 7:00 p.m., guests—who had each
paid $20 for the afternoon—ate hot dogs and burgers on the deck,
socialized, and played in one of the several rooms open in the house.
I secured an invitation by e-mailing the organizer, and she sent me
the house rules as well as an indemnity form to sign and bring along to
the party.
The Valley’s house rules are quite similar to those presented at the
door of the Castlebar, the Scenery, and every other semipublic play
party I attended. Critical to the rules are concerns with safety, both
physical and emotional; consensuality, safewords, and informed con-
sent; propriety, privacy, and secrecy; and separation of play and social
areas. The Valley’s rules also prohibit certain forms of play and behavior
(drugs and alcohol, sex without barriers), and require participants to
notify the Dungeon Monitor before starting others (blood play, water-
sports, and wax play). This is similar to the Castlebar, where the rules
require that dm s be informed before any ‘‘loud, disruptive, or messy
scenes,’’ full suspension, blood play, or fire play; prohibit uncontained
blood, scat, and piss play, unsafe behavior, professional (paid) scenes,

B E C O M I N G A P R AC T I T I O N E R 91
 drugs or alcohol, audio or video taping, and firearms; and require barrier
protection (condoms, gloves, plastic wrap) for all insertions. Janus and
Scenery parties have similar rules and requirements.
In our interview, Larry explained the Scenery’s prohibitions on breath
play: ‘‘Breath play to me is asking to kill someone . . . I’ve lost several
friends to breath play. I don’t want that to happen in my space, [and]
neither would my insurance company.’’ Larry’s concerns centered on the
legal risks of these forms of play. Interestingly, given that many commu-
nity debates have focused on requiring safer-sex practices, Larry did not
require the use of barrier protection. When I asked him why, he ex-
plained that the California state legislature had changed a law so that
now ‘‘consenting adults have the right to consent to expose themselves
to other folks without leaving liability on a third party.’’ Although the
Scenery makes condoms, dental dams, and gloves readily available, he
said, ‘‘if they choose to play together unprotected, that is their own
personal decision . . . I don’t think that’s my choice. I don’t think that’s
my business.’’ Larry’s concerns about insurance and third-party liability
are informed by his understanding of consent: a shift from a broader
social configuration of risk and responsibility to a ‘‘personal decision’’
based on negotiated consent to risk.
In response to widely publicized raids on semipublic parties, commu-
nity organizers are increasingly concerned with establishing their in-
demnity, as legally as possible, in order to protect the party space, the
owner, and the players from police and legal action. Most semipublic
play parties include an indemnity statement in the house rules and con-
sent form you sign when entering the party. When you sign the mem-
bership application form at the Scenery, for example, you are agreeing
to a series of statements, beginning with declarations that you are of
legal age and that you understand that the party focuses on bdsm and is
sexually explicit. The next four statements are: ‘‘I am not offended by
this conduct’’; ‘‘I am freely and voluntarily choosing to attend and par-
ticipate in this event’’; if I am ‘‘touched, hit, penetrated, spanked’’ and so
forth, it is because ‘‘I have specifically and freely and voluntarily con-
sented to these acts’’; and finally, ‘‘my feelings are not and will not be
hurt’’ by any of these acts. These statements move from the establish-
ment of personal interest to statements about consensuality and free-
dom from force or coercion, and finally to the management of ‘‘feelings.’’
The last part of the document affirms that sm is a form of acting or

92 C H A P T E R T WO
fantasy; done for entertainment, sport, or hobby; a ‘‘time-honored form
of performance art’’; activities with psychological and therapeutic value;
and an ‘‘important political statement’’ about sexual freedom. This doc-
ument does not only lay out the party rules; it is intended to protect the
Scenery from legal action. For example, the statement that sm is perfor-
mance art with ‘‘serious artistic and literary value’’ seems to be a direct
response to legal definitions of obscenity as materials lacking ‘‘serious
literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.’’≤π Other statements are
concerned with spelling out, in detail, that all activities are freely and
voluntarily chosen and specifically requested, and that no one is being
forced to participate. These statements seem designed to ward off pros-
ecution in the event of a raid.
The Valley is unusual in that the organizers ask partygoers to sign a
separate indemnity form. This form, titled ‘‘Agreement and Release of
Liability,’’ contains five sections. The first is a paragraph on voluntary
participation (‘‘I am freely and voluntarily choosing to attend’’) that is
similar to other party forms. The next four sections establish, with
increasing specificity, the house owners’ indemnity. The second section
requires you to initial after a statement that reads, ‘‘I assume full re-
sponsibility for any and all risks of property damage, personal injury or
death’’; the third is a statement that you ‘‘release, waive and forever
discharge’’ the party hosts and anyone connected to the Valley from any
legal claims, actions, or suits. The fourth section asserts that you agree
to ‘‘indemnify and hold harmless’’ everyone connected to the party,
while the fifth and final section states: ‘‘I am aware that this is a release
of liability and a contract between me and the Valley and/or its entities
and that I am giving up many legal rights and remedies by signing it.’’
Whether such forms would actually stand up in court is a matter of
debate, since the basic legality of consensual bdsm is uncertain. In part
because of developments in laws concerning domestic violence and rape,
it is unclear in most states whether ‘‘victims’’ can legally consent to
‘‘abuse.’’≤∫ Just before I started my fieldwork, police raided semipublic
play parties in San Diego and Attleboro, Massachusetts. The cases—the
San Diego Six in 1999 and ‘‘Paddleboro’’ in 2000—energized practi-
tioners and activists across the United States.≤Ω And although most of
the charges were eventually dropped, the cases demonstrated the tenu-
ous legal ground of semipublic bdsm parties and dungeons. Club X—the
San Diego club that was raided—rewrote its ‘‘Agreement and Release of

B E C O M I N G A P R AC T I T I O N E R 93
 Liability’’ form to more explicitly assert voluntary participation, as well
as personal responsibility for risk, liability release, and indemnity.
Consensual here, as a key term of contemporary sm , means more
than free from coercion; consent becomes, in these rules, a way to insist
on the voluntary participation in, and thus participant’s own respon-
sibility for, sm play. This logic has produced the current situation, in
which practitioners are asked to be responsible for their own behavior
and any risks they take on, and thus resent ‘‘the rules.’’ So, for example,
Stephanie complains: ‘‘We used to be able to do a lot more than we can
do now. Now, you draw blood, there are fourteen dm s all over you. Or
you’ve broken the house rules or . . . you’ve got your hand in somebody’s
cunt, [a] dm is right there: ‘Get a glove on.’ I’m like, ‘Just back off!’ I
understand the need for dm s, but I think there’s a little policing thing
that’s happening more and more, and I think that that’s changing and
that’s one of the reasons we don’t play at some places. I mean, I just
don’t want to have the police on me all the time . . . it ruins the scene if
somebody is there with a magnifying glass of rules and regs over my
shoulder all the time.’’ Stephanie is resentful because she is already
educated. She has, in a way, outgrown the rules: ‘‘We do play on the
edge, we do do breath play, and we do use knives and needles and all that
stuff. We’re very competent with it, and we know exactly what we’re
doing.’’ ‘‘There are a million rules for what you can do in public spaces,’’
she continues, but ‘‘I also don’t feel like I have any responsibility to have
to protect anybody from themselves.’’ This is because Stephanie, like
many other participants, does not want the people who make or enforce
the rules to try to protect her or her partners. But even those who
complain about the community rules are taking it upon themselves to
‘‘self-police.’’ As Mollena puts it: ‘‘When you play like that [do edge play],
you take that risk, so you have to police yourself to a certain extent.’’
This resentment is of a neoliberal form of governmentality that shifts
responsibility onto practitioners even as it demands that they master
themselves in relation to an evaluative community.
In this way, personal responsibility merges self-cultivation (a govern-
ing of the self) with personal rationality (individual autonomy). Lemke
argues, following Foucault, that ‘‘the key feature of the neo-liberal ra-
tionality is the congruence it endeavors to achieve between a respon-
sible and moral individual and an economic-rational actor. It aspires to
construct prudent subjects whose moral quality is based on the fact that

94 C H A P T E R T WO
they rationally assess the costs and benefits of a certain act as opposed
to other alternative acts. As the choice for action is, or so the neo-liberal
notion of rationality would have it, the expression of free will on the
basis of a self-determined decision, the consequences of the action are
borne by the subject alone, who is also solely responsible for them’’
(2001, 201). This is part of a neoliberal configuration that encourages
practitioners to negotiate with informed—properly educated—consent
and take responsibility for their risky sm practice. But it also imbues
this new community with ambivalence, highlighting the tension be-
tween self-mastery and community norms, between individual and col-
lective responsibility.
This tension is rendered most dramatically in the Dungeon Monitors
Association. Some people speculate that the reason Jerome Bambrick
founded the dma was to reduce smo dyssey’s liability and play party in-
surance costs—he also runs smo dyssey’s parties in the South Bay. But
today the dma must contend with a broad-based community perception
of paternalism, the social price of the requirement to master the self. I
attended an all-day ‘‘Beginning Dungeon Monitor Training Course’’ in
January 2003. The course’s prerequisites were one year of active involve-
ment in the scene, attendance at no fewer than twenty semipublic play
parties, and having a basic understanding of common play techniques
(in addition to being over eighteen, interested in ‘‘continuing education’’
on play styles, and being able to deal with emergencies). The bulk of the
all-day class was devoted to safety (especially safer-sex procedures and
issues of contamination and disease management—for example, what to
do if a flogger gets bloody, or how long hepatitis A takes to die in the air)
and judgment (for example, what to do if you are uncomfortable with
some form of play, or how to deal with a difficult player), as we were
expected to already have basic knowledge of sm and dungeon equip-
ment. At least an hour of the class was devoted to etiquette—proper
ways of handling various hypothetical situations, such as when barrier
protection is not being used (this case also included practical instruc-
tions in how to check for the presence of a condom, dam, or glove
without being overly intrusive), when prohibited play is taking place, or
when the scene is too loud and disturbing other party guests. Phil and
Domina, our teachers, stressed that at all times, we should smile, be calm
and polite, and facilitate the guests’ enjoyment of and safety at the party.
This etiquette training was combined with instructions about assem-

B E C O M I N G A P R AC T I T I O N E R 95
 bling a dm kit (a personal bag of safety and emergency items such as
latex gloves, a flashlight, emt scissors designed to cut through all mate-
rials, Band-Aids, and condoms), what to check before beginning our
shift (the location of emergency exits, fire extinguishers, and phone),
what information to pass on to our replacement at the end of the shift,
how to file an incident report (a description of any potential conflict),
and what to do in various emergencies (power outage, earthquake, and
fire). We learned how to operate a fire extinguisher and how to re-
move latex gloves without getting ‘‘blood’’ (in this case, ketchup) on
our hands. We also learned how to catch a person who falls off a cross.
All this led up to the final portion of the class, the test: twenty-five
multiple-choice questions on basic safety, the etiquette training we had
learned, fundamentals of sm play, and ‘‘what should you do if’’ ques-
tions, like the epigraph to this chapter. If we passed the test, we were
accepted as dma trainees; we joined the group’s e-mail list and were
expected to begin further training.
During the lunch break, Phil came over to talk to me about the dma .
Although he was now on the group’s board, he remained ambivalent
about the dma : the safety training is important, he said, but he wasn’t
sure how to counter community perception that the dm s at parties are
power mad and taking themselves too seriously. Almost everyone I
spoke to had at least one story about an overzealous dm who stopped a
scene because it was too edgy, went too far, seemed unsafe, or—most
galling of all—was an approved play style with which the dm was un-
comfortable or unfamiliar. In response to this criticism, the dma is
trying very hard to train dm s to be objective, calm arbiters of safety and
not, as Phil and Domina said over and over during our training, police-
men: ‘‘A good dm is a lifeguard, not the police, the host, or the security’’;
‘‘dm s facilitate play; they are not police and they do not interrupt a
scene unless absolutely necessary!’’; ‘‘you are there to help and to take
care of people’’; ‘‘you need to be flexible within the rules; be a facili-
tator’’; ‘‘you are not a cop.’’
In spite of the dma ’s best efforts, there is still a community per-
ception of dm s as homegrown, deputized police. It is the monitor-
ing of safety, safe play, and safe sex, combined with the insistence on
party—and community—rules, that make dm s into police, no matter
how much they smile. Lady Hilary, for example, argues that simply
teaching people how to be dungeon monitors involves a quantification

96 C H A P T E R T WO
of play and play styles that alienates her. She comments: ‘‘I play hard
[and] I can’t play hard in public anymore’’ because the ‘‘dungeon moni-
tor police . . . [are] going after me.’’ Bailey, who is supportive of the dma ,
explains: ‘‘I’ve been to dm training, I’ve dm ed at parties, [and] I decided
that was not something I really wanted to do’’ because ‘‘I just didn’t
want to be part of the condom police.’’ Tom, a white, bisexual switch in
his fifties, says: ‘‘What’s happening now is that there is actually an
attempt to formalize becoming a dungeon monitor . . . and so as part of
this formalization there will be two levels of dungeon master—they’re
even talking about the first level having to go and get this first-aid
training and man, I got enough regulations! I got enough law in my life; I
don’t need to go into what is a fringe sort of outlaw community to be
told I have to qualify to be under another law to be a dm !’’ Tom’s anxiety
about the ‘‘rules and regulations’’ stems from his concern that requiring
first-aid training would ‘‘legally obligate you to offer assistance.’’ He
explains: ‘‘As somebody who is an old-time player, it’s an absolutely
horrific concept that somebody would bring into bdsm a hurdle or a
loop . . . that would require you to be subservient to government inter-
vention. I mean, that would [have been] . . . anathema five years ago.’’ If
first-aid training legally obligates dm s to offer assistance, this would
involve the state in bdsm and thus leave dm s open to liability if some-
one got hurt.
Further, the debate over dm s as police crystallizes the tensions be-
tween a vision of the individual as rational agent and a social absorption
of risk. This is why Preston mockingly writes that sm politics are orga-
nized around a ‘‘plea for social acceptance’’ (1991, 212), ‘‘asking to be let
in [to polite society] as exemplars of good citizenship’’ (215; see also
Weiss 2008). Being a good citizen of the sm community means several
things in this analysis: the proper management of sexual bodies (es-
pecially bodily barriers and risk avoidance), the proper management
of relationships (being ssc and friendly, and maintaining etiquette),
and the proper management of oneself (modes of self-regulation and
cultivation). In addition, a good sm citizen is professional (and im-
plicitly white), responsible, free-thinking, and agentic. It is not so
much state interference that is the problem here, but the bdsm com-
munity’s taking on the responsibility for sm practitioners and their
health and safety.
Each of these developments—the class structure; the emphasis on

B E C O M I N G A P R AC T I T I O N E R 97
 negotiation, safewords, and ssc play; the definitions of edge play; the
prohibitions on certain forms of play; and the development of formal
party rules—are ways in which the sm community has canonized and
codified rules for play, transforming itself into a risk community. By
producing, regulating, and controlling the meanings of safety, risk, vul-
nerability, and security, the community also enables the production of
particular sm practitioners: new sm practitioners become practitioners
in relation to these rules. Yet rather than simply internalizing the rules,
practitioners are asked to make the rules their own, to cultivate their
own rules of conduct. This practice of the self requires self-mastery in
the Foucauldian sense: sm practitioners who are subjects of themselves.
But it also requires self-mastery in the neoliberal sense: sm practition-
ers who are responsible for themselves, and who thus operate within
discourses of consent, choice, agency, and personal freedom that legiti-
mate and reproduce social hierarchies. Practitioners reproduce neolib-
eral cultural formations that sustain certain social stratifications: the
social privilege of the ‘‘more-educated, more-knowledgeable, and more-
affluent people’’ that Bailey, and many others, seek out when they join
the sm community. Here, community responsibility stands in ambiva-
lent opposition to the project of self-control that the community re-
quires, pitting self-cultivation and autonomy against social control.

THE PLEASURE OF THE RULES

This practice of the self contrasts with the way Karmen MacKendrick
theorizes sm as a form of subjective rupturing or unmaking.≥≠ Mac-
Kendrick’s work—inspired by readings of Nietzsche, Bataille, Barthes,
and Foucault—is one of the few philosophical treatments of sm practice
and subjectivity. She theorizes sm pleasure as jouissance, as ‘‘destabiliz-
ing and threatening not only to the political and cultural orders but to
all manner of orders’’ (1999, 6). Practices of restraint (bondage) and
pain, she argues, ‘‘throw the subject outside itself’’ and ‘‘break the limits
of subjection’’ (156). This is the case because these practices give a
subject a barrier or limit ‘‘against which to push herself past herself’’
(107); opening the possibility for the ‘‘pleasurable abandon of the sub-
ject, in which the subject freely breaks its own limits and is lost in
pleasure’’ (121). sm practice, for MacKendrick, allows us to ‘‘surpass

98 C H A P T E R T WO
our subjectivity’’ (108); sm ‘‘breaks the subject’’ (111) and ‘‘implode[s]
subjectivity’’ (115).
This argument relies on Foucault’s understanding of ‘‘desexualiza-
tion,’’ a concept based in part on his reading of San Francisco’s 1970s
leather scene as heralding a ‘‘real creation of new possibilities of plea-
sure’’ ([1984] 1996, 384). Desexualization, for Foucault, is pleasure
beyond sexuality: pleasure that spreads beyond the genitals to other
parts of the body. As Foucault famously, if controversially, argues at the
end of the first volume of the History of Sexuality: ‘‘It is the agency of sex
that we must break away from, if we aim—through a tactical reversal of
the various mechanisms of sexuality—to counter the grips of power
with the claims of bodies, pleasures, and knowledges, in their multi-
plicity and their possibility of resistance. The rallying point for the
counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-
desire, but bodies and pleasures’’ ([1976] 1990, 157). For MacKendrick
and Foucault, unlike sexual pleasure mediated through disciplinary re-
gimes (‘‘sex-desire’’), sm ’s pleasure is bodily pleasure, a disruptive or
disorderly pleasure that might open the possibility for desubjectifica-
tion (Foucault [1983] 1996, 378).
However, elsewhere Foucault claims that sm is an ‘‘art of sexual
practice’’ devoted to exploring ‘‘all the internal possibilities of sexual
conduct’’ ([1982] 1996, 330). This emphasis parallels his work on prac-
tices and care of the self, a technique fundamentally about subjectifica-
tion—the self as subject—rather than desubjectification; about tech-
niques of the self rather than techniques of domination. Interestingly,
however, the pleasure of such work is also, for Foucault, opposed to
disciplinary ‘‘sex-desire.’’ Instead, it is biopolitical: the pleasure one can
take in oneself, in the self as an object, in the care of the self. Such self-
subjectification produces ‘‘pleasure without desire’’ (Foucault [1984]
1988, 66). This is, in short, the pleasure of the rules: not pleasure in
rules externally imposed by fiat, but pleasure in inhabiting, embodying,
cultivating, elaborating, and individualizing the rules (see also Mah-
mood 2004).
The new guard sm scene is, of course, quite different from the scene
that Foucault experienced in the 1970s, and I suspect he might have
agreed with Baldwin that today’s scene is ‘‘oversupervised,’’ ‘‘sanitized,’’
and ‘‘flat.’’≥∞ However, practitioners’ nostalgia, a longing for the past of

B E C O M I N G A P R AC T I T I O N E R 99
 authentic intimacies, also signifies the desire for pleasure to rupture,
desexualize, or desubjectify—or, in practitioners’ terms, to be raw, edgy,
and real. In parallel to Miranda Joseph’s (2002) argument against the
‘‘romance’’ of community, which positions community outside of and in
opposition to capitalism, this nostalgia for rule-less sm practice imag-
ines the rules, or social norms, in opposition to the freedom and au-
thentic intimacies of play. As I read it, however, rather than producing a
break, pleasure works in concert with the rules to produce sm subjects.
If sm is a form of desexualization, it achieves this state through the
subject’s self-mastery of the rules. Yet here the role of the community as
the generator of social directives that compel such self-making projects
is ambivalent. Rather than standing outside of power—or outside the
law— bdsm is a form of incitement, urging practitioners to construct
themselves as practitioners in relation to, if not through obedience to,
the rules. In this way, the very establishment of the new sm scene
produces, together with these practitioners, their sense of autonomy—a
circuit that consolidates social power and class privilege and simulta-
neously illuminates the deep tensions between such self-mastering proj-
ects and collective social norms.

100 C H A P T E R T WO
THREE N
T H E TOY B AG

Exchange Economies and the Body at Play

s/m is high-technology sex.— pat califia, Public Sex

It’s a Saturday night, and I am going to a pansexual play

party at the Castlebar. I drive, since there is always lots of
parking in the industrial neighborhood in which it’s lo-
cated, and walk through the light rain to the door. The door
has no sign, just a large number on the square, frosted-
glass window set into solid metal. I knock; a head peeks out
and asks, ‘‘Are you here for the play party?’’ ‘‘Yes,’’ I answer,
wondering as usual if my outfit is all right.∞ The door opens,
and I squeeze into a short hallway. There are four or five
people in the hall, queued up before the pay station—a
folding table staffed by a party volunteer. The men and
women in front of me are wearing jeans, black leather
vests, and black leather jackets. We are tightly packed in
the hallway, out of the rain; as I press against the man in
front of me to close the door, I almost trip over the large,
black wheeled luggage he has on the floor behind him.
The luggage is a toy bag, filled with personal bdsm
toys: a couple of floggers, rope, clamps and clips, leather
restraints, cuffs, a cane or two, crops, a paddle, a blindfold,
 lube and safer-sex supplies, an emergency pouch with first-aid supplies,
and perhaps a vibrator or dildos, or toys for medical, piercing, or electri-
cal play. It’s a lot of stuff to cart around. And, although some people
have stylish toy bags (like a man who does a lot of medical play and
carries a scary black doctor’s bag), most have basic black duffel bags and,
increasingly, black wheeled luggage. Some also carry black plastic tubes
with straps, made for carrying architectural plans or other large docu-
ments, that hold canes and crops. As Hailstorm tells me: ‘‘When people
come in [to a party], they come in with luggage. There’s carry-on lug-
gage, they’ve got backpacks, and there’s stuff they’re pulling on wheels
and . . . [it’s] like their recreational vehicle opens up and it’s full of stuff.’’
Toys are an integral part of contemporary sm . In concert with the de-
velopment of a more formalized, professional, and rule-oriented scene,
there has been a tremendous expansion in the market for sm parapher-
nalia and the techniques that these new toys engender. And in the same
ways that this new scene produces sm practitioners and communities in
accordance with classed and racialized understandings of risk, safety, and
subjectivity, buying and using sm toys produces certain kinds of sub-
jects in accordance with larger social, political, and economic relations.
The ‘‘tyranny of techniques’’ and proliferation of sm toys—combined
with the codification and regulation of the body, its boundaries, and its
mobilization—has transformed the subjectivity and sociality of sm prac-
titioners. As I showed in the previous chapter, the contours of the new
pansexual sm scene and the institutionalization of community rules pro-
duce sm practitioners in ways deeply resonant with late-capitalist forms
of biopower. I continue this exploration here, taking up the develop-
ment of a particular form of sm community and sociality—of intimacy—
dependent on, but not defined exclusively by, commodity exchange.
Forms of subjectification are linked to forms of knowledge. Indeed,
as Foucault argues in his seminar, ‘‘technologies of the self’’ are often
combined with technologies of production, sign systems, and power
(1988). For example, neoliberalism’s emphasis on responsible and ra-
tional individuals brings together self-subjectification (self-care, per-
sonal responsibility) with homo oeconomicus (rational, agentic, economic
[hu]man). As Thomas Lemke explains, summarizing the critical work
that has been produced after the publication of Foucault’s neoliberalism
and biopower lectures, neoliberalism’s economic rationality—and its
emphasis on economic efficiency—has ‘‘colonized’’ domains previously

102 CHAPTER THREE

understood as outside the economic, like leisure, the family, and the
body (2001, 202; see also Brown 2005; Lowe 1995). So, for example,
flexible work hours or performance reports are not only ‘‘intended to
transform the organization of production’’ but are ‘‘aimed at the very
relation between individuals and their labor,’’ their ‘‘self-fulfillment.’’ As
he puts it, ‘‘the transformation of structures of production is possible
only if individuals ‘optimize’ their relation to themselves and to work’’
(203). In these ways, neoliberalism functions as a ‘‘technique of power’’
in which ‘‘not only the individual body, but also collective bodies and
institutions (public administrations, universities, etc.), corporations
and states have to be ‘lean,’ ‘fit,’ ‘flexible,’ and ‘autonomous.’ ’’
Such an emphasis on flexibility, fitness, and efficiency echoes Emily
Martin’s analysis of the circuit between iterations of flexible late capital-
ism (such as just-in-time production, specialization, and flexible ac-
cumulation) and those of the body (such as immunology). As she argues,
just as corporations must thrive and grow as if a biological organism,
the human body must also become ‘‘a complex system that is in con-
stant, anticipatory, flexibly adaptive change’’ (1994, 111). However, as
Martin’s analysis makes clear, there is a cost to workers required to be so
flexible: the loss of stability, support, and security. She concludes: ‘‘It is
no wonder that moving gracefully as an agile, dancing, flexible worker/
person/body feels like a liberation, even if one is moving across a tight-
rope. But can we simultaneously realize that the new bodies are also
highly constrained? They cannot stop moving, they cannot grow stiff
and rigid, or they will fall off the ‘tightrope’ of life and die’’ (247–48). By
calling attention to the circuits of exchange between the body and the
subject, relations of production and signification, analysts like Martin
and Lemke, via Foucault, point to the ways that late capitalism, together
with neoliberal rationality, reconfigures the body’s flexibility and adapt-
ability, a shift that heightens the differentiation between ‘‘able’’ and
nonproductive bodies. Indeed, productivity is a key way to understand
these new demands on the subject-worker, as well as the relations of
inequality they inscribe as embodiment. As Jon McKenzie (2001) ar-
gues, efficient performance is our dominant form of power/knowledge.
In this chapter, I consider the place of toys in these circuits between
capitalism and embodiment. I explore the relationship between toys
and consumer-players in terms of technological prostheses, broadening
both terms to include not only technology but also the knowledge prac-

T H E TOY B AG 103
 tices of techne, and not only literal prostheses but also changing forms
of embodiment. I focus on the exchanges between bodies, subjects,
techne, and toys, and I argue that these circuits produce a body in play: a
body that is simultaneously divided into parts and extended through
objects, both produced and transformed through consumption. Track-
ing the ways in which sm consumerism transforms subjectivities and
produces relationality and community, I show how this sexual circuit
creates multiple bodily potentials within social dynamics of privilege
and inequality. In short, this chapter focuses on sm toys and their
handlers in order to think through the biopolitics of consumerism.

‘‘IT TAKES MONEY TO PLAY’’ THE MARKET IN BDSM

Several cultural critics have analyzed bdsm as a paradigmatic consumer

sexuality because of its tremendous market appeal, its ever-expanding
paraphernalia, its nonreproductive nature, and its affinity with the lei-
sure demands of late capitalism (Brooks 2000; Ehrenreich 1986; Lowe
1995). Indeed, the growth of the bdsm scene is related to a more
general proliferation of sexualities and sexual services, commodities,
and purveyors (Hennessy 2000; Singer 1993). The proliferation of sex
boutiques and stores—as well as online resources like stores, services,
web pages, and chat rooms—has transformed the practice of sm . And al-
though sexual services and technologies have increased throughout the
United States, in the Bay Area, the high concentration of Internet jobs
and workers, combined with San Francisco’s general support for alter-
native sexualities, make the region an epicenter of the sexual commerce
industry. sm in San Francisco, then, magnifies these bodily and social
transformations—technological and commodified intimacies—just as it
does the high price of belonging to such communities.
The cooperative, feminist sex toy store Good Vibrations now has four
stores in the Bay Area (three in San Francisco and one in Berkeley), as
well as an online and print catalog; they also hold classes and work-
shops, publish books, and produce and package some of their own sex
toys. Several sex-related presses are located in the Bay Area, including,
until its sale in 2010, Greenery Press, which has published many of the
nationally known sm books. Online bondage photography and sm porn
and other online sites also thrive: paintoy.com, CyberNet Entertain-
ment, beautybound.com, and seriousbondage.com are just a few located

104 CHAPTER THREE

in the Bay Area and run by practitioners.≤ And sm and leather stores of
various kinds are scattered throughout the city, as well as in the East
and South Bay. For example, Mr. S, the gold standard of pricey, cus-
tomized, well-crafted bondage and sm toys, equipment, and clothing,
has been in the South of Market neighborhood since 1979. Run by
Richard Hunter and his son, Mr. S opened a women’s and pansexual
store, Madam S, across the street in 2001.
One day in March 2002, I went to Mr. S to meet Mark, the bondage
aficionado described in the introduction, and some of his friends. They
were late, so I walked into the store alone. Entering Mr. S is overwhelm-
ing: there is a huge, room-size cage immediately to the left, with body
bags, harnesses, slings, gags, hoods, black boots, manacles, and spreader
bars in black leather or metal strung up on the cage and the back walls.
In the back of the store, a larger room contains gay and sm porn (includ-
ing a vintage Drummer display) and some assorted sex toys (plugs, dil-
dos, and cock rings), but mostly clothes: leather, vinyl, lots of latex, even
wetsuits, and a small collection of polar fleece sweatshirts carrying the
Mr. S logo. When Mark arrived, he showed me around, pointing out the
bondage equipment and telling me how it is used. He asked Jess, one of
his friends, if she wanted to demonstrate a body bag, and we all stepped
into the cage. Mark laid out a large black leather bag with a double
zipper and laces running across the front. Jess wriggled in and put her
arms in the sleeves inside the bag. Mark zipped her up, cinched the laces,
and then fetched six long leather straps to tighten the bag further. He
added a black leather hood with pinprick eye holes, a collar that at-
tached the hood to the body bag, and a blindfold. The bag itself cost
$1,395; adding the straps, hood, collar, and blindfold meant that Jess
was in bondage gear worth about $2,700. As he added the straps, Mark
told me: ‘‘If you’re going to spend this much, you might as well get the
custom bag,’’ since a customized body bag costs only 30 percent more
and, obviously, fits the body perfectly. Mr. S prides itself on manufac-
turing and selling the highest quality toys and equipment, and much of
its business is custom leatherwork.
The wide availability of sm and leather toys, clothes, and equipment
has transformed the community. The ease of browsing in stores, online
or through catalogs, has meant that many practitioners have large col-
lections of toys and clothing; items that they might not have searched
out or made themselves are now easy to find. Although sm has its

T H E TOY B AG 105
 imagined roots in a gay motorcycle scene—a decidedly working-class
scene in both origin and image—today the community is, as Annalee
puts it, ‘‘a middle-class preoccupation, because it’s all about acquiring
stuff. It’s a consumer sexuality.’’ Teramis tells me: ‘‘When I was coming
out . . . there were no expensive toys. People were using clothespins
from the laundry bag and laundry line for bondage and making their
own floggers out of five dollars of stuff from Tandy Leather. People
weren’t precluded from playing because of economic issue[s].’’ But now,
as Annalee observes, ‘‘if you wanted to be part of the fetish community,
it would be extremely difficult to do without money . . . the bdsm
community puts such a premium on your clothes.’’
Most of the practitioners I spoke with were professionals who had
disposable income to spend on sm . Those who were not acquired what
Annalee called ‘‘access to middle-class money’’ in a variety of ways:
receiving support from friends, being ‘‘adopted’’ into a leather family,
buying items on sale, working at sm stores, or doing sex work. For
example, Bonnie—an Asian American, heterosexual masochist in her
mid-twenties—worked at Madam S; she used the ‘‘funny money’’—store
coupons—she earned as part of her pay to buy fetish clothing. Meg’gan
had been adopted as a houseboy by a large leather family in the South
Bay, and they provided for her. But although most of my interviewees
were at first quite adamant that the scene was open to all, many later
conceded that, as Carrie—a white, bisexual bottom/submissive in her
mid-forties—put it, ‘‘it takes money to play.’’
When I asked interviewees to estimate how much money they spend
on bdsm during a year, many were surprised and horrified as they
began to add up their expenses. Play parties (without doing work shifts
in exchange for reduced or free admission) cost $25; classes cost be-
tween $3 and $25, depending on the location and one’s membership
status; and munches cost between $15 and $25—the price of lunch,
dinner, or drinks. Since many people attend several events each week, it
is not unusual for a practitioner to spend $100 to $150 a week attending
events. And almost all of the practitioners I interviewed spent far more
on their toys, clothing, and, in some cases, play spaces (or home dun-
geons) than they did attending events. Hailstorm notes:

There are organizations you can join and pay $20 a year and all the
parties are free. That’s not very expensive for the participants. The

106 CHAPTER THREE

 other places you go like pe [the Power Exchange], and you’re going to
drop forty, fifty, sixty bucks per person just to go there . . . The expense
comes in the clothes, obviously, the toys, and that’s where you can drop
some big bucks. I went out and I bought a leather jacket from Harley
Davidson, two hundred bucks; leather vest, a hundred bucks; set of
floggers, two to three hundred bucks. You have hundreds and hundreds
and hundreds of dollars, sometimes thousands of dollars, if you shop at
Stormy Leather, if you want to dress you and your partner up and look
nice. And leather’s expensive and the toys are expensive . . . It’s impor-
tant . . . that you arrive in fetish attire. If you come in street clothes, it’s
like ‘‘You’re an amateur. What are you doing here?’’

Spending hundreds and hundreds, or even thousands, of dollars on toys

is not unusual. Don, a white, straightish service top in his early forties,
told me that he has spent $2,500 to $3,000 on his toy bag. Bailey told
me she ‘‘may have spent $5,000 or $10,000 over the last five years’’ on
clothes, floggers, canes, paddles, and piercing needles, among other
items. Floggers, especially desirable handcrafted ones, cost between
$150 and $300, depending on their size, number of tails, and material
or type of leather.≥ Leather or wooden paddles are between $30 and
$150. Other toys are less expensive; one can purchase rattan (to make
canes) in bulk at garden-supply stores for $1 a foot. Clothing also ranges
in price, but leather pants, vests, and jackets; corsets; and fetish cloth-
ing, made of vinyl, latex, or rubber are uniformly expensive. Madam S,
for example, carries latex dresses in a range of colors and styles for
between $200 and $1,000. Dark Garden, a corset store, will make a
customized leather corset for between $500 and $600. The de rigueur
black leather jacket can be a gift, scrounged from an area thrift store, or
purchased at one of the ‘‘lower-quality’’ leather emporiums in the Bay
Area, but, as in most matters of style, clothing of high quality—rendered
in price—is much more desirable. Carrie comments: ‘‘When you add it
up like that, it really does take money to play. I don’t think that a lot of
people who are wondering where they’re going to buy their next milk
and bread from are going to do that . . . It takes money to play, a certain
amount anyway, and you think about the toys, the clothes, the social
events and all that—it really does.’’
People buy their toys and clothes online, through mail order, at local
leather stores, at the kinky flea market held four times a year, and at

T H E TOY B AG 107
 various leather fairs, especially the Folsom Street Fair. Estrella has a
larger-than-average collection because she works as a prodomme.

estrella: I have thousands of dollars worth of toys, and I still don’t

have everything I want . . . There are definitely things I’d
like to have that I can’t afford, like a vacuum bed [vac sack],
a cage—some of those things I don’t have space for. I mean,
I could theoretically put them on a credit card, but where
would I put them? My daughter’s room? ‘‘Honey, can I
store this in here while I’m not using it?’’ But yeah, all the
other toys—I have fifteen floggers and fifteen canes, maybe
twenty canes, paddles, electrical equipment. I have some
big leather [items] like bondage toys, miles of rope, corsets,
fetish wear, shoes and all that . . . I always go to Folsom
[Street Fair] with a budget and a list of things I definitely
want.
margot: What’s your budget?
estrella: For Folsom, at least $300. I’ve spent as much as $800. But
yeah, $300, that’s a couple floggers, or a flogger and a
couple of toys.

Some items can be found at specialized stores: tack and crops for pony
play at saddle shops, or medical-play equipment at medical supply stores.
Some people make their own toys; Domina, for example, makes and sells
canes, and Panther does leather work. Organizations in the Bay Area also
offer classes in do-it-yourself (diy ) toys, usually on leather working and
‘‘Make Your Own Folsom Unit,’’ an electrical-play toy.
Although nearly everyone I interviewed insisted that one could get
by without pricey toys, there are certain toys considered standard for
toy bags and players. Annalee told me that she doesn’t collect ‘‘expen-
sive Mr. S–type toys,’’ but she does have the ‘‘basic implements that
you’re supposed to have in order to participate in bdsm .’’ I asked her
what that included, and she listed a flogger, ‘‘spanky toy,’’ riding crop,
nipple clamps, canes, restraining devices, wrist and ankle cuffs, chains,
hooks, and nylon rope. This is a pretty abbreviated list, but even so,
Annalee commented that if she were to ‘‘put all my toys together, [she]
probably would have quite an assembly.’’ In The Topping Book, Dossie
Easton and Catherine Liszt list the following toys as a ‘‘basic starter
set’’: rope (four or more twelve-foot lengths, plus shorter pieces), re-

108 CHAPTER THREE

straints (wrist and ankle cuffs), a blindfold, a collar, clips or clamps,
candles (for hot wax play), a soft flogger, a slapper (a stiff, folded leather
paddle) or jockey bat (short riding crop), sex toys (vibrators, dildos, and
butt plugs), safe-sex supplies (condoms, gloves, dams, and lube), and
emergency supplies (shears and a flashlight; 1998b, 103–9).
Many practitioners’ toy bags evolve from this ‘‘starter set.’’ Lady
Thendara describes this as she complains:

If I go somewhere [to play], then we have to plan. I

have to decide what I’m going to put in the toy
bag . . . I used to be able to put everything in the toy
bag [when I had] . . . three or four floggers and a
couple of canes and a couple of paddles and some
rope, and that was it. I could easily fit all that in the
toy bag and not get a backache. But we’ve got like
three body bags and . . .
latex mustang: . . . twenty floggers and fifteen canes, and it goes on
and on and on.

This is by no means unusual. As Bailey remembers, ‘‘For a while there, I

was buying shit every month. Or if I see something at a dungeon, I’m
like, ‘I want to try that!’ ’’ Gretchen tells me that a novice ‘‘can start
to play without having expensive toys at all.’’ But then, of course, ‘‘if
you really decide that you like the lifestyle and you like playing, so
it’s a commitment for you, then you can start to put money aside for
buying that really special flogger and that latex body suit or whatever
you’re into.’’
Gretchen’s comments reveal how buying (one’s own) toys signifies
one’s commitment to, or deepening involvement with, the scene. In
addition to spending much of their discretionary income on toys, practi-
tioners also spend a tremendous amount of time being sm practition-
ers. In a half-joking, anxious exchange, Stephanie tells me she devotes
fifty hours a week to sm or sm -related activities. Anthony, her husband,
says: ‘‘I spend at least forty hours a week doing scene-related stuff.’’
Stephanie laughs and says: ‘‘Oh my God, honey . . . do you get health
benefits with that? You should get a raise. You’ll be employee of the
month!’’ For many practitioners, fifteen hours a week is typical if they
attend one munch and one class or organizational meeting, and play
once or twice. In addition to these organized events, practitioners spend

T H E TOY B AG 109
 time online (looking at online magazines and web pages of stores, per-
sonal ads, and political groups); follow the latest news on sm in the
media; read and watch (and, in some cases, write and produce) books,
magazines, and videos on bdsm ; and go to local bdsm stores. Partici-
pants who are officers of various clubs spend time performing their vol-
unteer tasks as well: updating the online calendar of events, collecting
money at the door, or making calls to arrange rental spaces for work-
shops. Mark, for example, is developing a bondage website and spends
at least sixty hours a week on that alone. Dylan—a white, bisexual/
lesbian submissive in her mid-thirties—estimated spending eight to
fifteen hours a week, then added a few more hours to account for the
pornographic writing she does. Hailstorm estimated three hours a day,
every day; Don estimated between ten and fifteen hours a week. I sus-
pect, based on the sheer size and volume of several very active local
e-mail discussion lists, that my interviewees underestimated the time
they devote to reading and responding to e-mail.
Finally, for many participants, most of their friends and social circle
are people involved in the scene, so time spent going to movies, celebrat-
ing events, or having friends over for dinner is part of bdsm sociality.
Gretchen, for example, estimates that 80 percent of her friends are in
the scene; she is not at all unusual. sm sociality is certainly not confined
to the bedroom; it includes attending classes and workshops, meeting
scene friends for a drink, volunteering as membership secretary for an
sm organization, and planning yearly trips to bdsm conferences or
retreats, as well as having sm sex.
It should be clear by now that sm practitioners spend much of their
time, money, and energy being—and becoming—practitioners. The time
and energy that they devote to sm is connected to the understanding
that bdsm is—or should be—a form of work or labor. As Jezzie put it: ‘‘I
don’t like people trying to convince us that what we’re doing is play and
fun because we put so much work into it, so much work. It’s not easy.’’
When I asked Jezzie and her husband, Anton, what they meant by
‘‘work,’’ he answered: ‘‘Emotional, intellectual, also just thinking day-to-
day, how do you do it? . . . How does one set up your life so that it’s—so
that it will work? You know, we do a lot.’’ He went on to describe the
kind of ‘‘work’’ he meant: talking, being honest, self-examination, or-
ganization, planning, and perseverance, even though ‘‘there’s a lot of

110 CHAPTER THREE

times when you just don’t feel like putting forth the effort.’’ As I ex-
plored in the previous chapter, this ‘‘work’’ is work on the self, a form of
self-mastery and self-knowledge that produces sm subjectivities and
communities in deeply class- and race-inflected ways. For these practi-
tioners, bdsm practice is a biopolitical project: a time-consuming, ex-
pensive, formalized mode of working at sex, gaining expertise, learning
skills and techniques, and mastering the self in relation to a community.
And one primary way in which sm produces both subjects and commu-
nities is through practice—not only sm techniques, but also consumer
practices.

PRODUCING CONSUMER-SUBJECTS
THROUGH BODILY KNOWLEDGE

Much recent work on consumerism suggests that in new forms of capi-

talism, the increased distance between sites of production and those of
consumption, the rise of service and knowledge work, and the spread of
insecure, temporary labor, has, as Jean and John Comaroff argue, re-
sulted in an ‘‘eclipse of production’’ (2000, 295; see also Harvey 1997).
This is not to claim that production no longer matters, or that global
capitalism itself depends more on consumption than production. In-
stead, these critics draw attention to the increased importance of con-
sumption in identity formation, especially in places like the United
States.∂ As the Comaroffs write, such global shifts produce a ‘‘culture
that re-visions persons not as producers from a particular community,
but as consumers in a planetary marketplace: persons as ensembles of
identity’’ (2000, 304). Daniel Miller writes: ‘‘To be a ‘consumer’ as op-
posed to being a producer implies that we have only a secondary rela-
tionship to goods. This secondary relationship occurs when people have
to live with and through services and goods that they did not themselves
create. The consumer society exists when, as in industrial societies to-
day, most people have a minimal relationship to production and dis-
tribution such that consumption provides the only arena left to us
through which we might potentially forge a relationship with the world’’
(1995, 16). Taken together, these critics point to the increased signifi-
cance of consumerism and commodities in the production of identity,
community, and attendant social relations; as Debra Curtis argues, con-

T H E TOY B AG 111
 sumption practices are a form of self-production, a ‘‘means by which
individuals construct their own lives’’ (2004, 120). In this way, buying
practices solidify social belonging and create community.
It is for this reason that most practitioners have their own pricey toy
bag, since toys serve as both emblem and means of achieving status,
identity, and community belonging. Gretchen, for example, tells me
that after her divorce, she went out and bought her own toys: ‘‘a couple
of leather floggers and a horsetail flogger and a rubber flogger, and some
canes and paddles, and my own needle kit.’’ Although she is primarily a
bottom, having her own set of toys helped her assert her independence
and reclaim her identity in the scene. Toys are also a shared ritual of
belonging. Like mastering the rules, buying one’s own toy bag produces
the self in relation to community ideas about growing expertise, mas-
tery, and technique. Panther told me that he thought many couples
start off in the scene by spanking: a simple otk (over the knee), open-
hand spanking, ‘‘no equipment needed! No toys, didn’t have to wear
leather, didn’t have to do anything, just bend ’em over and spank ’em!’’
But because ‘‘bdsm is so open here, it’s easy to get sucked in and start
finding out about other things . . . All of a sudden, they see somebody
with a really cool paddle, and they say they got it at Mr. S, and so you go
there, and pretty soon you graduate.’’ In this way, toys are also an entry
into the scene, or into increasingly advanced scenes and scenarios.
Toys convey status and seriousness; they are concrete signs of the
skill and expertise of the top (and, sometimes, the bottom). Hailstorm
explains that there is a ‘‘pecking order where the doms will try to achieve
a certain status within the community . . . Their technique with their
toys and the way that they perform is a way of demonstrating to other
people that they’re competent.’’ The toys themselves, combined with
one’s technique, become useful tools. As Estrella tells me: ‘‘There’s a lot
of stuff I know how to do . . . I’m good with a flogger, I can throw a
singletail, I’m good with a cane, I know about safety, I know how to
brand, I know how to cut, I know how to slap, pull hair, punch . . . It gives
me a lot of tools at my disposal.’’ This combination of knowledge of tech-
nique, combined with consumerism, produces an educated, informed
sm practitioner. Consuming, in other words, is crucial to the identity
formation of sm practitioners, in relation to community standards.
The value of toys has as much to do with the toy’s quality and crafts-
manship as it does with the ‘‘discursivity of the commodity’’—a signified

112 CHAPTER THREE

value based on the labor of the consumer (Joseph 2002, 41). Being a
discerning consumer is linked directly to the production of oneself as a
skilled and knowledgeable sm practitioner. Don, for example, describes
himself as a ‘‘tech casualty’’ of the ‘‘dot bomb’’; he was having a hard
time finding enough consulting work to stay afloat. When he is ‘‘finan-
cially solvent again,’’ he tells me, there are several floggers he will buy
immediately: ‘‘I’ve gotten to the point where now the specific nature and
quality and design and materials and everything all matter to me be-
cause I can tell the difference with what I’m trying to accomplish.’’
Similarly, Gretchen asserts: ‘‘There’s a big difference between a leather
flogger made by Happy Tails and a leather flogger made by some other
people . . . it’s almost like the piece itself has an artistic value or an
intrinsic value in being so well made. And people will swear by certain
singletails . . . It does matter whether you buy something quality or not
because otherwise the tails won’t go where you want them to go, no
matter how hard you practice.’’ Crucial here is customization: the pos-
sibility for perfect technique or practice based on the synchronization of
a toy and the body. For example, the customized body bag produces
more intense sensations than a body bag a bit too large or too small for a
user. Hailstorm boasts that he ‘‘didn’t pick [his] floggers, they were
made for [him]’’ by a friend: ‘‘We went down and we picked out this
deerskin hide at the hide shop,’’ and then ‘‘I went to his home and saw
him make it. He custom-sized it for me in weight and balance.’’ This is
critical, of course, since Hailstorm wants properly balanced floggers
both to perfect his throw and because he is known in the scene as a
master of a difficult double-flogging technique (called ‘‘Florentine flog-
ging’’)—this is the origin of his scene name. Dependent for their value in
part on the skilled and educated consumer, toys enable social belonging
through technique and training—in short, knowledge.
These kinds of exchanges rely on what Arjun Appadurai calls ‘‘con-
sumer knowledge’’: ‘‘the knowledge that goes into appropriately con-
suming the commodity’’ (1988, 41). In a discussion of the ‘‘prestige
economies of the modern West’’ (such as the art market), Appadurai—
drawing on Baudrillard and Bourdieu—writes that these forms of con-
sumption rely on ‘‘good taste, expert knowledge, ‘originality,’ and so-
cial distinction’’ (45). Consumer knowledge enables people to construct
themselves as active subjects through differentiated consumption: by
buying a Happy Tails whip and knowing how to use it. For it is not

T H E TOY B AG 113
 enough to simply buy toys; the production of sm subjects as educated
and masterful consumers relies on their appropriate and skilled use of
these commodities.
Consumer knowledge in bdsm is both a repertoire of technique and
bodily knowledge. One of the critical functions of sm toys (and the
techniques that go along with them) is to expand and reconfigure bod-
ies, making novel sensations, positions, and relations possible. sm toys
are carefully designed to amplify, prolong, or expand bodily sensations;
toys are cataloged as stingy, thuddy, sharp, soft, cutting, surface, deep,
intense, and so forth. The web page of Heartwood Whips, a highly
respected purveyor, reads: ‘‘A whip which excites us is elegantly crafted.
The passion which we feel for the erotic consensual exchange of power is
translated into our creations. Beautiful leather feels wonderful not only
in our hands as we work with it, but also in your hand when you play
with it . . . each whip will express the unique power, and love of its
owner.’’ Their catalog of floggers is organized by material: deerskin,
lightweight cowhide, elk, horsehair, rubber, regular cowhide, oil-tanned
cowhide, bison, bull hide, lightweight buffalo, moose, and rabbit fur.
Each material is capable of a different sensation. Deerskin floggers, for
instance, are described as the softest: ‘‘This light velvety hide makes a
perfect warm-up whip. It makes lots of noise but delivers a limited
amount of impact. Deerskin is ideal for caressing the body like many
erotic fingers.’’ Bull hide is described as ‘‘the leather for whips with solid
thud. It is a superior top-grain hide with an even surface texture. It is
heavy, supple, and consistent in thickness.’’
In addition to materials, Heartwood floggers come in varying sizes
(length of tails), densities (number of tails), colors, and styles of handle
(which vary by length, thickness, color, braid pattern, type of knot, and
type of loop).∑ Each of these variables determines the kinds of sensa-
tions a flogger can deliver; of course, the technique of the person throw-
ing the flogger also makes a difference. About the length of the whip,
Heartwood notes: ‘‘If you usually play in confined spaces, or like to whip
in close proximity to your subject, then the short length whips will work
best. If you like to whip with maximum impact, then the longer tail
whips will deliver more force because of their additional weight and the
fact that the ends of the tails will be traveling in a longer and, therefore,
faster arc. But remember, if you are a heavy player, upper body strength
and conditioning will play a part in how the bottom experiences your

114 CHAPTER THREE

impact. Each type of whip has potential to deliver a specific kind of
feeling, within a given range of intensity. For example, no matter how
heavily you apply a deerskin whip, you will never turn it into a heavy-
weight flogger.’’ Similar contrasts apply to the density or number of tails
in a flogger, and the tail lengths; the tails of a particular flogger may be
good for dragging over bodies, good for tall people, or good for people
with less upper-body strength.
All major categories of toys—floggers, whips, canes and rods, paddles,
and spankers—have their own specifications and sensation ranges.∏ They
are designed to impart particular sensations to the skin of the bottom;
they are also designed with the top’s body in mind. A paddle, for example,
allows a top to prolong a spanking without the top’s hand getting sore. A
cane produces sharp, stingy, cutting sensations and straight-lined marks
or welts, all with minimal effort from the top since the cane is so light.
Other categories of paraphernalia—clamps and clips, ropes, restraining
devices, electricity, bondage devices, sex toys, gags, and hoods—are also
designed to convey certain sensations to the body, amplifying or altering
a top’s capacity. Some sensations are possible using only the body, but
they can be easier, stronger, more intense, or of longer duration using
toys (compare, for instance, a strong pinch and the use of a clamp); some
sensations are not possible with the body alone (for example, the shock
of an electrical current). Either way, toys have a dramatic impact on the
body at play, relying on and also rezoning and producing new knowledge
of the body’s range and potential.
In this way, sm is a body of knowledge about techniques and skills,
mediated through toys. Easton and Liszt describe the toys that a top
who has already acquired the beginning toy bag might want to consider.
Their categories—helplessness toys, toys for hitting, toys for pinching,
toys for poking, toys that heat or cool, toys that zap, toys for turning on
and getting off, toys for role-playing, and toys for the road (1998b, 109–
18)—are notable in that they rely both on knowledge of technique and
attention to the body. For example, under ‘‘toys for hitting,’’ Easton and
Liszt write: ‘‘Long stiff rods fall under the category of canes. Bottoms
mostly either love canes fanatically or hate them passionately—they
hurt a lot, and the pain comes in two waves, one when the cane strikes,
and another a few moments later when the tissue decompresses’’ (112).
This begins to show the ways that sm relies on, and produces, particular
bodily knowledge. To do sm , Atheris—a white dominant in her mid-

T H E TOY B AG 115
 thirties—tells me, ‘‘you just have to know a lot about the body’’: basic
anatomy; the location of bones, organs, nerves, muscles, and fat; the
way bruising and other skin damage works; blood flow; and other bodily
systems. This knowledge of the body—about its organs, muscles, skin,
and tissues—is one way sm functions as a form of biopower, operating
through technique, cultivation, and education.
Vince described asking a lesbian friend for more information on how
to flog his partner Pam’s breasts or play with her labia: ‘‘As I learn to play
with it [Pam’s female body] more, part of it is anatomy . . . The first time
I ever beat her tits I had to call up one of my friends and go ‘Okay, so I
heard this rumor . . . you know fibroid breasts’π . . . so I had to go get
information . . . because [gesturing to Pam] your anatomy is different . . .
The first time that I had your labia spread, it was only because I talked to
someone and I found out that . . . it’s really tough down there and you’re
not really going to tear it off, ’cause I really thought, okay it’s thin, it’s
going to tear off!’’ Although Vince consulted a friend, classes on tech-
nique and sm skills always include a discussion of the body and anatomy
as they bear on the topic at hand. Binding, suspension, flogging, and
piercing require a repertoire of bodily knowledge about blood flow, body
temperature, weight and pressure, tendons and connective tissue, organ
tenderness, and skin depth. At a Janus caning class in April 2003, Brian,
the instructor, explained that canes can do a lot of bodily damage, from
welting, bruising, and breaking skin to breaking bones. Focusing on the
skin, he said: ‘‘You can’t hit someone very hard on places that are bony,
but you can pretty much whale away on someone’s ass. The skin is tight
on the backs of the thighs, so it’s easy to split the skin with a very hard
hit . . . Be careful of the tip of the cane; the greater force can break the
skin.’’ ‘‘Also,’’ he told us, ‘‘people with more melanin in their skin mark
more, so be careful about that if you don’t want to leave marks’’ (Brian
was demonstrating with his African American partner, Charlotte).
Although it might be obvious that techniques for using toys, discus-
sions of positions, and health and safety issues involved in different
forms of play rely on explicit bodily knowledge, it is also true that less-
technical training also invokes this anatomized body. Negotiation, for
example, covers not only desires and limits but also specific bodily is-
sues, problems, and needs. Both players are expected to know enough
about bodies to know how weaknesses (for example, an old knee injury)
might affect play. Aftercare, too, although frequently presented in psy-

116 CHAPTER THREE

chological or affectual terms, is also about the body. Aftercare includes
eating (most often some protein), drinking water, and resting the body,
both immediately after a scene and for days afterward. From negotia-
tion to aftercare, sm practice relies on and constructs various forms of
bodily knowledge. This scientific, anatomical-physical knowledge con-
structs the body as a set of parts, each with its own needs, uses, and
potential injuries.
Take, for example, the ass. Even a technique as simple and introduc-
tory as spanking requires a tremendous amount of bodily knowledge.
Lady Green, a local expert, taught an Exiles spanking class I attended;
she is also the author of The Compleat Spanker (1996). In her class, she
covered such issues as how to safely support various body weights,
problems people might have bending over, and how to protect the top’s
wrist when spanking.∫ Different techniques and positions for spanking
(over the knee, bent over, lying face down, or standing), as well as the
flow or rhythm of the spanking itself (warming up, varying blows, and
pacing), are integrated into knowledge about the body and its skin,
muscles, organs, and strong and weak spots.
Lady Green devotes a chapter of her book to anatomy. The pelvis and
the femur, she tells us, are ‘‘large, sturdy bones’’ that are ‘‘buried in fat
and muscle,’’ so ‘‘unless you are spanking someone extremely elderly, you
don’t need to worry about injuring’’ them (18). However the coccyx
(tailbone) is ‘‘fragile and quite sensitive to pain’’; Lady Green recom-
mends various techniques to ensure that the top is not spanking the
coccyx. In the Exiles class, she suggested cupping the nonswatting hand
around the bottom’s tailbone, just to be safe. Moving on to the nerves,
Lady Green explained that the body’s largest nerve, the sciatic nerve,
can be damaged from heavy paddling. Reminding us that the nerve is
least protected when the person being spanked is bent over, she recom-
mended a flat position (standing or lying down) for heavy paddling and,
if the bottom is bent over, restricting the toys to lighter, ‘‘stingier imple-
ments.’’ The large muscles of the ass (the gluteus maximus) and the thigh
muscles are fair game, she writes: ‘‘Most people of normal size and
fitness have very strong muscles in this area, that do an excellent job of
protecting underlying structures’’ (21). However, one should avoid strik-
ing the lower backs of the thighs and knees, where the tendons, liga-
ments, and blood vessels are too delicate, as well as the kidneys, which
are easily damaged. Finally, Lady Green discusses the skin: marking

T H E TOY B AG 117
 (caused by breaking tiny capillaries, and more likely when the bottom is
using blood-thinning drugs), welting, bruising, blistering, and abrasion
(more likely with rougher toys) are usually undesirable, whereas warm-
ing (increasing the circulation of blood to the ass area) is desirable; both
entail careful technique.
This ass is subject to such anatomizing, clinical scrutiny that it nearly
becomes a free-standing object. In Beyond Vanilla, Claes Lilja’s 2001
documentary on bdsm , a man explains to the camera where one should
aim when flogging a bottom’s ass. He divides the ass in question into
‘‘quadrants’’ and tells us that we should focus most of the force on the
lower, inside quadrant, an area commonly called the ‘‘sweet spot.’’ Lady
Green also recommends hitting the sweet spot: ‘‘The lower inner por-
tion of the butt is fed by a nerve group called the ‘posterior S4 derma-
tome,’ ’’ which is ‘‘shared by the genitals. Many spanking fans refer to
this ‘low and inside’ area as the ‘sweet spot’ because being spanked there
feels so good’’ (1996, 20). Combining toys and technique, bodily and
technical knowledge, these practices divide the body in play into parts,
pieces, and zones of pleasure and potential. These divisional zones apply
to parts of the body, but also to the body as a whole: there are commonly
agreed-upon red (unsafe), green (safe), and yellow (use caution) zones of
the body. The red zone is out of bounds; it includes bony or unprotected
areas like the spine, feet, and head, or areas with sensitive organs like
the kidneys. The green zone is almost always safe: fatty or especially
muscular areas—the upper back, ass, and thighs. The yellow zone in-
cludes legs and arms, locations that are safe for certain things but not
others. These zones or parts are objectified, detached from the whole
body through this medicalized gaze. The goal of this anatomical knowl-
edge is twofold: to minimize bodily damage (inciting the management
of risk) and to maximize bodily pleasure or sensation across these zones
of play.
This body bears a striking similarity to the body that Foucault de-
scribes as ‘‘desexualized,’’ the counterattack (to ‘‘sex-desire’’) that con-
cludes the first volume of his History of Sexuality ([1976] 1990, 157). For
Foucault, desexualization diffuses sensuality and pleasure across the
entire surface of the body, so that desire does not adhere in genital
pockets. In his interviews, Foucault suggests that sm , in particular, can
create this sort of diffusion: ‘‘It’s a question of multiplying and burgeon-
ing of the body, an exaltation, in some way autonomous, of its least

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The safe zone is (1) butt cheeks, (2) thighs, and (3) upper back. The caution zone is (4) arms,
(5) calves, (6) genitals and pelvis, and (7) breasts. The unsafe zone is (8) hips, (9) tailbone,
(10) kidney area, (11) spine, (12) head, (13) soles of the feet, (14) hands, (15) abdomen,
(16) neck and throat, and (17) shoulders.
 parts, of the least possibilities of a body fragment . . . It’s the body
made entirely malleable by pleasure: something that opens itself, tight-
ens, palpitates, beats, gapes’’ ([1975–76] 1996, 186–87; see also [1982]
1996, 331; [1983] 1996; [1984] 1996). For Foucault, such experiences
require both the generalization of sensation across the body and the
fragmentation of the body.
Yet this body also depends on consumption and knowledge practices.
As Miranda Joseph argues, capitalism and community have a supple-
mentary relationship: each depends on the other for completion and
coherence (2002, 2). Yet, as Joseph notes, this relationship is obscured
through a romantic discourse of community, in which community is
imagined to humanize the social relations lost with capitalism. There is
a similar relationship between toys and subjectivity: sm subjectivity
produces and is produced by the market for sm toys and paraphernalia.
Here, as Miller argues, there is a tendency to oppose consumption to
authentic sociality or culture (1995, 30). Instead, capitalism, and con-
sumption in particular, is productive; people become practitioners with
a sense of collective belonging to the sm community by developing such
technical and bodily knowledge and buying and using toys.
The ever-expanding market for toys and other sm accouterments
means that sm practice and, critically, sm desire are also proliferat-
ing. This is acknowledged via a joke in the sm community: ‘‘never say
never’’ is a common warning, and one not infrequently directed at me,
that refers to the ways in which exposure to new toys or techniques might
produce new desires. Yet like flexibility, proliferation is double-edged:
it opens possibilities for subjects (new pleasures, desires, sexualities)
but it is dependent on commodity exchange. I am not simply arguing
that commodity exchange generates inauthentic desires (desires that
cannot be satisfied, desires that drive consumption as opposed to more-
authentic desires). Desires—demands or needs in an exchange relation—
are socially produced. Rather, such desires are produced within hierarchi-
cal social relations where some have much more access than others to
these commodities, education, and, thus, pleasures. What is being pro-
duced in bdsm is both new forms of pleasure and new forms of social
privilege. That desire endlessly proliferates means that new pleasures are
continuously made possible through new knowledge, toys, and tech-
niques. That these proliferating desires are dependent on toys, however,
gives practitioners differential community access to such pleasures.

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 The development of sm subjectivity and belonging as a practice of
consumption is experienced within a cultural formation of neoliberal
rationality. This means that the dependence on commodities is seen less
as a social problem and more as a reinforcement of neoliberal ideas of
freedom, where ‘‘freedom is reduced to choice: choice of commodities,
of lifeways, and, most of all, of identities’’ (Comaroff and Comaroff
2004, 190). In this exchange of freedom to consume for other forms
of freedom, social regulation and hierarchy—based on race, gender,
class, and sexuality—are reinvigorated and enforced. As I will describe
in more depth in the following two chapters, the neoliberal rationality
that pervades the Bay Area also justifies these social hierarchies, en-
abling practitioners to imagine that racial, classed, and gendered in-
equalities are, instead, freely chosen positionalities for which one must
take personal responsibility. The belief in the ‘‘free,’’ unfettered market,
and more flexible and mobile forms of capitalism, locates autonomy in
consumption.
But not for all: these changes have not gone uncontested within the
sm community. Indeed, with nostalgia that parallels the criticism of the
rules, many in the sm community imagine the past—the old guard
scene—as a lost space of social belonging that was not mediated through
commodities. In this telling of the unregulated old guard days, a time
before ‘‘more people, more money, and more commercialization,’’ toys
were, instead, tools.Ω Community historian david stein writes that the
rise of the new sm scene ‘‘occurred during the same period that s/m
activity came to be almost universally referred to as ‘play’ [instead of
‘work’], s/m practitioners as ‘players,’ and the tools we use as ‘toys.’ ’’ He
continues, sarcastically: ‘‘The same revolution that decoupled heterosex
from procreation and gave us sport-fucking has turned s/m into a sex-
optional form of recreation . . . Less hazardous than football but almost
as strenuous, it even has aerobic benefits’’ (2002, 5; see also Magister
1991, 98). Toys are commodities, always threatening to fall into an in-
authentic, because too easily purchased, ‘‘Stand & Model’’ s&m . Tools,
on the other hand, are valued for what they can do. Turning now to
community debates about what has been lost in the transition to a more
commodified scene, I explore how toys, and toy consumption, produce
subjectivity and community in complex and contradictory ways, gener-
ating belonging but also social anxiety.

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 STAND & MODEL BDSM THE TOY AS FETISH, THE BODY IN PARTS

Community anxiety centers around lost social connections, the shift

from an sm based on passion to an sm based on purchasing ability. In a
dialogue on class in the now-defunct sm zine Brat Attack, Toni notes: ‘‘A
lot of the ‘stars’ are people who have—they have a dungeon, they have
toys . . . there’s this whole movement to have the newest, strangest toy,
or the strangest talent. I think it’s really sad sometimes, because you
can take someone out there with your hands and a belt. Or just your
hands . . . It seems like as it becomes more chi-chi to be a pervert, we are
also becoming more commodified, and consumerized. And that offends
me because I find a lot of things that are spiritually important to me
about sm getting lost.’’∞≠ In addition to the loss of authentic connection,
Toni’s comments suggest that, although ‘‘cheaper’’ leathers and toys are
available, the inability to buy the latest or best toy relegates one to a
second-tier belonging in the community. In the same discussion, Chris-
tine argues: ‘‘There’s something about work exchange [working at a play
party in exchange for door fees] that’s humiliating. Why do I have to give
up some time and do this work exchange to get in—’cause I’m not good
enough, I don’t have enough money to just pay and not think about it. So
I think about it long and hard and then go, ok ok, it’s worth it to me, I’m
going to pay the money so I don’t have to deal with that. And that’s
considering that I even have the money to do it.’’ For Christine, it is
‘‘worth it’’ to pay for the party to become a good enough practitioner: a
person who belongs at the party. Jeneieve points out the practical down-
side of work exchange: ‘‘It’s tiring, too. If I go and I work a [party] shift at
six o’clock that means I’ve got to be dressed and I’m going to figure out if
I’m going to play, like all the stuff that I play with, I’ve got to bring all
that. So we’re talking an all-day thing, right, then I’ve got to get there at
six and work there for three hours if I want to play. Otherwise if you try
to play around eleven o’clock there’s no way you’ll get any dungeon
space. And then you’re tired by then, and I’m a top, so . . . you know, it’s
like I’ve got to have energy.’’ Even if one accepts this exchange of work for
‘‘free’’ play as a reasonable accommodation (and not a way that the
community creates tiers of classed belonging), this discussion shows
that belonging to the sm community and being a recognized practitioner
is bound to income: the assumption that one has the money to play.

122 CHAPTER THREE

 Of course, some practitioners contest this. Teramis, for example, is
adamant that ‘‘sm itself doesn’t cost jack shit . . . A tone of voice and a
hand is more than sufficient for a scene that can last for days, and
clothespins from the laundry bag. sm doesn’t have to be expensive.’’
But, she notes, ‘‘if you’re new and that’s your introduction to the com-
munity, you’re going to be inclined to [say,] ‘Oh, I want leather cuffs just
like that!’ You could also use a bandana tied correctly, but you don’t
think about that when everybody around you has leather cuffs.’’ Edward
—a white, heterosexual dominant in his mid-thirties—tells me he has
between $600 and $700 in toys and equipment, a comparatively low
number (most practitioners estimated owning between $1,500 and
$3,000 worth of toys), in part because he is willing and able to make his
own furniture (like his homemade St. Andrew’s cross), and in part be-
cause he likes what are called ‘‘pervertables,’’ vanilla items that can be
converted into an sm toy.∞∞ He explains: ‘‘You can spend $150 on a
custom-made paddle, but why, when a $5 paddle does the same thing?
I’m not in it for the looks. I’m not in it for a fashion show. [If] a $5 pad-
dle does the same thing as a $200 paddle, I’m happy.’’
Yet, as I discussed above, many people believe that a $5 paddle does
not do the same thing as a $200, customized paddle. This drives a kind
of toy collecting in which, as Annalee puts it, people can ‘‘really get into
the technicality of’’ sm toys: ‘‘ ‘How many size canes do you have?’ ‘Well,
I have size three, size five-inch, and size twelve-inch, and each one has
its own special properties’ . . . that [relentless consumerism] appeals to
the middle-class person who has six kinds of frying pans—they also
have six kinds of cat-o’-nine tails.’’∞≤ Some of my interviewees had the
room for a serious home dungeon; during my interviews, Lady Then-
dara, Mark, and Mark F., a white, gay top in his late forties, each took me
on a tour of their home dungeons. I left the tape running during my tour
of Lady Thendara and Latex Mustang’s space; the transcribed tour is
twenty-pages long. Throughout the tour, Thendara made comments like
‘‘This is really embarrassing . . . that we would have this much stuff!’’
and ‘‘You can have too many toys!’’—comments that betray a familiarly
anxious stance toward consumerism. But at the same time, they showed
her pleasure: her toys and furniture were obviously loved and cared-for
objects, carefully cataloged and arranged.
One wall was mostly taken up with clear plastic storage boxes filled

T H E TOY B AG 123
 with color-coordinated goods, the boxes neatly labeled: ‘‘clamps,’’ ‘‘gags,’’
‘‘latex,’’ ‘‘pain,’’ ‘‘crops.’’ As she narrated the tour of her home dungeon,
she gave each object a story, explaining how she likes to use it, where she
got it, and what it means for her play:

Here’s some different floggers. . . . This is actually a Happy Tails one . . .

This is a Sarah Lashes—you know how when you shop you can say this is
Donna Karan’s? [Well], this is a Sarah Lashes, this is a Happy Tails, this
one we got at a Taste of Leather and I don’t know who makes it . . . This
is a horsehair flogger. It’s very light—if you used it very hard, it would
cut skin. I’ve never used it that hard . . . This is a natural rattan cane.
This I got at Cost Plus ages ago, it’s really good, it’s really stingy . . . This
is a very mean cane. It’s very stingy, carbon fiber . . . We’ve got a couple
of these long whips . . . This is a buggy whip . . . and then this is my very
favorite flogger. This is called Butter. I don’t usually name my toys, but
that one gets a name ’cause it’s so soft . . . This is one of his [Mustang’s]
favorite collars, especially ’cause it locks on . . . This is stuff that we were
playing with the other night, so I like to keep it all nice and neat. It’s a
really good blindfold, it’s a $30 blindfold. Most of them are about ten
bucks, but it really blocks out all the light and it’s very comfortable to
wear for long periods of time . . .

Thendara told me that she and Mustang have never done the same
scene twice; part of the appeal of sm for them is novelty and variability.
This couple has more disposable income than most, and their dungeon
and toys reflect this. In addition to standard toys, Thendara and Mus-
tang have an assortment of very expensive toys: a vac sack, body bags, a
variety of bondage and restraining equipment, and the specialized para-
phernalia for pony play (hooves, saddles, reins, knee pads, tails, Then-
dara’s riding outfits, curry brushes, headdresses, and even a cart that
Thendara sits in and Mustang pulls). Mustang explains that they typi-
cally spend between $1,500 and $2,000 a year on toys, but, he points
out: ‘‘It’s no different than owning a boat. It is my major interest in my
life and I have very specific and very unique interests, not only to play
with certain things but to collect them . . . I have disposable income and
it’s one of the things I’ve decided to spend it on.’’
The consumption that drives this collecting is not, of course, unique
to sm . Paul, like many, told me that sm is more about ‘‘emotional
connection and intensity’’ than toys, but then flippantly remarked: ‘‘You

124 CHAPTER THREE

know, I’m a hetero guy, I like collecting things.’’∞≥ When I asked him
about the size of his collection, he said: ‘‘It’s never large enough! Jesus
my Lord, what are you saying? For God’s sake, woman! We live in a
consumer economy; there’s never enough. There’s no such thing as
enough!’’ Paul, here, is mocking the compulsion to buy, collect, pack,
display, and organize toys (and, to a lesser extent, clothing); he is also
pointing to the compulsory nature of such consumer practices. Con-
suming is a primary mechanism through which sm practitioners solid-
ify their identities and their belonging within the sm community.
Yet both Paul and Thendara also highlight the anxiety that such
reliance on toys engenders. For example, Don admits that ‘‘it gets really
expensive if you decide you want to get esoteric about it,’’ buying spe-
cialty floggers, or tools for electricity play. But he continues: ‘‘I guess I’m
just a toy whore. I like sensation and I like having a broad palette to
work with. In just floggers alone, I probably have six or seven, all dif-
ferent sizes, different materials, and there’s a couple more that I want
’cause they’re unique.’’ A comment like this one points to the ways in
which the desire for newness and diverse sensations fuels consumerism,
while at the same time, the joking disavowal of ‘‘I guess I’m just a toy
whore’’ shows Don’s discomfort or unease.
Part of this anxiety stems from a concern with being just a consumer,
where consuming is understood as an inauthentic social relation. Like
the rules that are seen as eroding authentic connections between practi-
tioners, toys produce some anxiety about a possible overreliance on
commodities and the concomitant forsaking of social ties. Participants
in the Brat Attack roundtable discuss this in terms of the ability to
‘‘purchase an identity’’ or buy the lifestyle, instead of doing the neces-
sary labor to become a practitioner:

toni: I have a real hard time not getting pissy about that, espe-
cially when I see people who can just walk out and buy it.
Like someone I know who has a lot of money . . . she
decided she was a pervert one day and she [snap] had the
pants, had the jacket—
jeneieve: Just went out and bought everything, right? . . .
toni: And I was so annoyed . . . I think, ‘‘This doesn’t mean any-
thing spiritual to you!’’ And who am I to judge that—but of
course I do. I think, ‘‘Ok—you’ve been a perv for 8 hours.’’

T H E TOY B AG 125
 roe: But even if they go out and they have all their stuff custom
made, I know that I can tell. It’s the way they wear it, the way
they conduct themselves. They can put everything on, they
can have it all custom made, they could posture, they can
have the whole array of toys, and not really have a clue in a
sense . . . I’m sorry, but they just don’t have a clue. Because
it’s not coming as an intrinsic part of their personality.

This discussion suggests that the ability to purchase sm paraphernalia

so easily, and have these purchases signify one’s sm identity or commu-
nity belonging, will destroy the spiritual center, heart, or something else
authentic about sm relationality. If people can simply buy into this
community, then a community of practitioners with authentic desire
and identity is in jeopardy. The anxiety is that class status gives one an
unearned, free (from labor) ticket into social belonging via toys: bdsm
as ‘‘Stand & Model.’’
As Lady Hilary explained, when she first came out, you had to work
to earn your boots, vest, chaps, and jacket, and now you just ‘‘go out and
buy it. And there’s nothing wrong with that but there’s nothing special
about it either . . . It meant something, and now people just show up. It’s
good that people can show up and see that they have choices, but the
ritual or the sacredness of it is gone.’’ She continues, describing the new
scene in contrast to the old guard rituals: ‘‘It’s no longer a private club.
It’s no longer a secret. It’s no longer sacred . . . anyone can walk in . . . Do
I want new people to learn? Yes. Is it a good venue for them to learn?
Sure. But it still has watered down the intensity that you found when
you had to search for the answers . . . It’s too accessible, it’s too easy, no
one has to work for it anymore, you’re not expected to work for any-
thing.’’ This emphasis on ‘‘work’’ focuses attention on the ways practi-
tioners want other people to ‘‘earn’’ their identity as practitioners, not
just buy it from a store; toys might short-circuit the necessary labor
involved in becoming a practitioner.∞∂ At the same time, however, Hilary
explained that although she could live without toys, she wouldn’t want
to: ‘‘Toys, for me, are about giving in to the moment . . . [it’s] part
of the ritual. It moves my head space into finding and focusing inten-
sity.’’ There is a fine line between becoming a practitioner through the
(tainted, inauthentic) buying of an identity versus the (skillful, master-
ful) use of toys to create scenes.

126 CHAPTER THREE

 One way to read this anxiety explores the toy as a fetish, a reading
that corresponds to some of the ways practitioners relate to their ob-
jects. Vick—a white, lesbian daddy/top in her mid-forties—explains why
leather is appealing: ‘‘Some of this stuff is just really pretty to look at
and nice to play with. I mean, I saw a guy wearing a bondage suit and . . .
your mind starts going off on what you can do with it, ’cause it’s really
cool. But you could just take Saran Wrap, too. I mean, it doesn’t quite
have that black leather look to it or smell, but it works. I think part of
the intensity, part of why people are into leather, is the smell of it.
There’s something about the feel of it; it’s very sensual.’’ Hailstorm
expresses similar feelings when he describes how he gets ready to play:
‘‘You open up your toy bag with all of your implements, and then you
take out your toys and you line them all up . . . You have restraints, so
you might have leather restraints, they might be fleece lined, and then
you might have little locks on them . . . And then you have the other
paraphernalia, which I love and I don’t know why—you have the snap
hooks and the chains and the quick release, and I just love all that kind
of stuff. The shininess and the sound it makes when it clicks together, it
just—there’s something about it I really like.’’ Chris comments: ‘‘There’s
almost a fetish around the toys themselves, and switching among the
toys, and the anticipation of the toy or the threat of a toy. That’s pretty
big, that’s hot.’’ For these practitioners, it is not only the use of toys
but the toys themselves—their material, feel, smell, look, and sound—
that matters.
Taking Chris literally, then, toys are a kind of fetish, a way to plan or
prepare for a scene, to mark one’s intentionality, and to transport play-
ers out of mundane reality. Anne McClintock argues that imbuing ob-
jects with fetishistic power enables such a transformation; it also en-
ables a production of the scene as safe and separate. She writes: ‘‘By
scripting and controlling the frame of representation . . . the player
stages the delirious loss of control within a situation of extreme con-
trol’’ (1995, 147). As I will discuss in the following chapters, toys along
with the rules help to produce this controlled scene, figuring the sm
scene as a ‘‘safe space’’ through the bracketing function of the sm play
frame. The toy as fetish is one reason why pervertables like Saran Wrap
aren’t as desirable as leather cuffs and metal chains: toys enable and pro-
duce an sm scene that is imagined as safely outside real social relations.
But thinking of the toy as fetish also allows us to parse some of

T H E TOY B AG 127
 the practitioners’ anxieties about the role of toys in the scene. Loosely
following both Freud’s and Marx’s understanding of the fetish, we can
see toys as stand-ins or substitutes for missing social relations—sexual
relations for Freud∞∑ and social relations (of production) for Marx∞∏ —in
such a way as to produce social relationships between people and things,
or things and things, instead of between people and people. Linda Wil-
liams argues that ‘‘for both [Freud and Marx], fetishization involves the
construction of a substitute object to evade the complex realities of
social or psychic relations’’ (1989, 105; see also Allison 2000; Appadurai
1988; Apter and Pietz 1993).∞π The saturation of bdsm communities
with things seeming to stand in for authentic relationships between
practitioners occasions both pleasure and anxiety.
I attended a Janus class in September 2002, right before the Folsom
Street Fair, called ‘‘Shopping at Folsom.’’ The class was intended to help
people find quality toys and not get too caught up in a ‘‘buying frenzy’’
at the fair. The presenters reminded us: ‘‘There will be other oppor-
tunities to buy toys!’’ As one put it: ‘‘When you’re surrounded by all
those vendors, your wallet is burning a hole in your pants!’’ They pro-
vided tips on differentiating a hobbyist toy seller from a reputable one,
on determining whether something is a reasonable price, on negotiating
a discount, and on how to judge the quality of toys. In his presentation,
Charles told us: ‘‘You have to remember you are buying the item, not the
fantasy. You are buying a ball gag, not the pretty girl in the catalog
[modeling the gag].’’ He was reminding us that the slippage between ball
gag and girl means that the gag is standing in for both the desired girl
and a shared social relationship; he was simultaneously pointing to and
distancing himself from the social relations imagined to be eclipsed in a
consumer’s ‘‘frenzy’’ for an object.
Eroticizing the smell or look of leather, the sound of restraints or
whips, or the knife rather than the hand that wields it provokes both
pleasure and anxiety, which must be read culturally and historically.
Following McClintock, we can read the fetish as the ‘‘historical enact-
ment of ambiguity itself,’’ where social contradictions—in the organiza-
tion of race, sexuality, and gender; between the private or domestic and
the public or market; and between the personal and the socioeconomic
and historical—are displaced onto an object (1995, 184; 1992). She
notes, however, that such a displacement does not resolve these contra-
dictions or crises of meaning, but rather imbues the object with those

128 CHAPTER THREE

tensions. In this way, we might see this displaced ambiguity as enabling
both the fetishization of objects within sm and the dense pleasure/
anxiety nexus that such displacements perpetually generate. Toys, in
this reading, function as a fetish as long as they are imbued with the
displaced contradictions of contemporary social relations. It is not sur-
prising, then, that practitioners are ambivalent about the saturation of
commodities in the scene, or that they express this concern by simulta-
neously celebrating consumerism (along with connoisseurship) and ex-
pressing anxieties about its effect on social and sexual relations.
This reading, emphasizing the ambivalence of the toy as fetish, al-
lows us to depart from the more one-sided understanding of bodily
commodification as necessarily alienating, or productive of a violent
dehumanization. In anthropological work on, for example, the global
market in human organs, the divisibility of a body into parts detached
from a whole person not only objectifies the body, but, as Leslie Sharp
writes, can also ‘‘dehumanize individuals and categories of persons in
the name of profit’’ (2000, 293; see also Scheper-Hughes 2002b, 78, and
2002a). For Sharp, bodily fragmentation disrupts an organic wholeness
or an integrated, noncommodifiable person. Of course, the kinds of
divisions that these authors discuss entail very different power inequali-
ties and ethics than those at work in the sm scene. Taking this compara-
tive risk, however, I do want to argue that, to think through sm play, we
must avoid a critique of technology undergirded by a desire for an
authentic wholeness of the person or the body. One can see this techno-
phobic reading in Sharp, who writes: ‘‘Especially unsettling is the now
routine use of a host of artificial, mechanical prostheses that extend life
and enhance bodies. Heart valves, pace makers, artificial hip joints,
prosthetic arms and legs . . . are now regularly implanted in human
bodies. Furthermore, the monster now has a legitimate (and unstig-
matized) medical label: ‘chimera’ ’’ (2000, 311). Like the romance of
community and the nostalgia for the old guard past, such imaginings
fail to see that the circuits between technology and techniques produce
new possibilities for the production of subjects and communities, even
as these possibilities are constrained through such knowledge practices.
sm bodily knowledge can be understood as part of the ongoing cy-
borgification of human bodies. The wired, technicalized body is bisected
with biotechnological knowledge; this produces the body in play as a
cyborg body (Haraway 1991).∞∫ Driven as they are by sm toys and the

T H E TOY B AG 129
 techniques to use them, as well as the formalization of sm knowledge
practices, these bodies are deeply embedded in flexible late capitalism.
But the risks of such hybridization lie less in the creation of a mon-
strous, artificial, enhanced body, and more in the reentrenchment of the
class inequalities that enable such transformative experiences to begin
with. Donna Haraway calls on us to recognize both the risks and the
potentials of technological relationality; she insists that we must refuse
the dream of wholeness as we take responsibility for new networks of
domination. This is the biopolitics of capitalism; sm ’s bodily knowl-
edge is produced, in part, by new biotechnological knowledge (see also
E. Martin 1994; Rose 2007). These knowledges receive careful attention
as practitioners augment and analyze their own bodies and bodily tech-
niques in the service of ever-better play. As new toys and techniques are
developed, practitioner knowledge about the body and its parts grows,
and this cycle of commodity-body-knowledge is transformative—and
productive. The body in parts is also a body in play. It is at once a
commoditized and an objectified body, opened to diverse sensations and
pleasures that are enabled, if not bound, by toys: Foucault’s desexual-
ized body as a consuming subject. In this way, these flexible, agile bodies
are reconstituted in fragments, open to pleasures provided by new tech-
niques and new commodities.
Technophobic readings obscure the ways in which forms of exchange
(including the objectification and commodification of the body) pro-
duce social relations, along with new forms of subjectivity, embodiment,
and community. Paying attention to technological prostheses, we can
see the social relationships produced by toys: buying and collecting toys
produces good capitalist citizens—consumer-subjects—a position coer-
cively normalized as well as anxiety-generating and pleasurable. Belong-
ing to the sm community and being a real sm practitioner are deeply tied
to practices of consumption, while the class basis of leisure time and
money enable some more than others to take on this identity (leaving
others to ‘‘work harder’’ for it). In this way, exploring the pleasure and
anxiety discursively produced at this nexus illuminates the social fetish-
ization of the toy: toys are necessary for sm social connection and, at the
same time, toys might deprive us of social connection—a contradictory
relationship that requires us to broaden our understanding of exchange
to account for both commodity and power exchange.

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CONNECTION
DYNAMICS OF EXCHANGE AND THE TOY AS PROSTHETIC

If the toy refigures the body as an object of knowledge but also of

pleasure through techniques, what about the actual playing? For one
does not only collect, smell, fondle, buy, choose, label, and lay out one’s
toys; one also plays with them. And it is here, in the playing, that toys
reveal a different relationality. The body in play—divisible in pleasure—
points to the circuits between person and object, body and subject; each
version connects the flesh to exchanges of commodities, knowledge, and
power. The interconnectivity of toys and bodies in play requires and
produces productive, flexible subjects but also possibilities for connec-
tion and intimacy.
The social connectivity of sm play is an interesting object of commu-
nity debate, since ‘‘connection’’ is one of the primary motivations for sm
play. Many people I spoke with described sm as producing a special kind
of intimacy or connection; some modified this with ‘‘energy’’ or ‘‘spiri-
tual.’’∞Ω Larry explains: ‘‘About half the people come into the leather
scene looking for sex . . . [but] generally what they find, the longer time
they spend in a true sm dungeon, their reason for being in the dungeon
isn’t sexuality, it’s spirituality and the exchange of energy with other play
partners. The longer they’re in the scene, the closer that becomes to
truth with every visit they make, because they soon learn that there’s a
lot more to power exchange than just having sex with a bunch of dif-
ferent people. You can go to an orgy for sex. That’s not what a dungeon’s
about. A dungeon’s about power exchange, the spirituality of power
exchange and the spirituality of energy that resides within us and how to
exchange that energy with other people.’’ Larry’s comments make it
clear that real sm is not about ‘‘sex’’ (Foucault’s ‘‘sex-desire’’), nor is it
about commodities; real sm is about ‘‘energy’’ or ‘‘power exchange.’’
In her Exiles class ‘‘Setting the Scene,’’ Cal told us that an emphasis
on toys can be distracting: you can’t get to your erotic center if you’re
too busy fussing with toys. So, she said, ‘‘even though I work at Mr. S,
you should reduce your toy bag’’ and focus instead on giving your energy
to the moment. This critique of toy fetishism was echoed in Doris’s class
on sensual domination, called ‘‘Bringing Them to Their Knees.’’ At one
point in the class, Doris, seated at the front of the room, slowly and

T H E TOY B AG 131
 sensually fed strawberries to an audience member, who knelt at her feet.
‘‘These are just strawberries, not fancy toys from Mr. S,’’ she told us.
‘‘When shared with passion, things that might seem boring are trans-
formed into something exciting and special.’’ sm , she said, is about
closeness, intimacy, pleasure, and seduction, not about the toys them-
selves: ‘‘It’s not about your skills with a flogger, or how many knots you
know; it’s about caring and crafting a scene.’’ When you play, she con-
tinued, make sure that your bottom is subbing to you, not to the music
or to your flogger. Doris and Cal emphasized that sm play requires
practitioners to be in the moment, to care, and to create intimacy, forms
of exchange that might be blocked when you are ‘‘fussing’’ with toys or
expecting toys to do the work of connection for you.
Like the concern that toys provide an unearned, class-based shortcut
for the labor of becoming a practitioner, the concern here is that imag-
ining that sm requires nothing more than technique and a toy bag
places too little emphasis on authentic connection. As Stephanie notes,
there are some people, especially newcomers, who think: ‘‘Oh, if I had
the technical skill, that’s really all I need. If I learn how to use a sin-
gletail, if I learn how to wield a knife . . . that’s what this [sm ] is.’’ They
are wrong, of course; sm is ‘‘about confidence and it’s about respect and
it’s about understanding people . . . It’s such an important thing, it’s
such a deep, profound connection to people.’’ Similarly, Paul tells me:
‘‘things have an appeal for me. But, you know, my ideal isn’t to have lots
and lots of toys and lots and lots of beautiful girls to put in the toys . . . I
really want to be in love with someone.’’≤≠ Of course, and importantly,
very few of the people I interviewed felt that their own use of toys
distracted them from their partners. Skillful players use toys (thus, toys
become tools), as well as techniques and bodily knowledge, to create a
connection between players.
These concerns show how the toy contains multiple social contradic-
tions, including those between objects and people, and between inau-
thentic and authentic intimacies or social relations. In part, this is
because the toy is also a prosthesis. In an essay on how the Guatemalan
nation—as a body politic—uses the mujer Maya (Mayan women) to prop
itself up, Diane Nelson argues for something she calls ‘‘prosthetic rela-
tionality’’: the ways the body ‘‘changes through its articulation with the
prosthetic which must be incorporated by the body that relies on it’’
(2001, 305; italics in original).≤∞ Nelson is building on Elizabeth Grosz’s

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argument in Volatile Bodies, where Grosz writes: ‘‘Anything that comes
into contact with the surface of the body and remains there long enough
will be incorporated into the body image—clothing, jewelry, other bod-
ies, objects . . . External objects, implements, and instruments with
which the subject continuously interacts become, while they are being
used, intimate, vital, even libidinously cathected parts of the body im-
age’’ (1994, 80). The prosthetic mediates across binaries (especially
mind/body, self/other, and public/private) but also connects disparate
parts. It challenges an articulation of the liberal subject as independent
and autonomous by stressing the connections between bodies, and be-
tween bodies and machines via incorporation.
In a discussion of body image and phantom limbs, Grosz quotes Paul
Schilder: ‘‘The body image can shrink or expand; it can give parts to the
outside world and can take other parts into itself. When we take a stick
in our hands and touch an object with the end of it, we feel a sensation
at the end of the stick. The stick has, in fact, become part of the body
image . . . it then becomes part of the bony system of the body’’ (quoted
in Grosz 1994, 80). Similarly, sm tools, clothing, objects, and instru-
ments become attached to the body, become a part of the body when
they are used. Sometimes this is exceedingly obvious, as is the case with
Panther and his fangs. Panther has a set of fangs that were ‘‘custom-
made specifically for my mouth and the shape of my teeth.’’ He was
wearing them during our interview but took them off to eat, explaining
that he didn’t want to risk breaking them and have to go through the
time and expense of replacement (there is only one man who makes
them, and they cost $170). But he wore them to meet me because he
was breaking them in: ‘‘I want to get to the point where I’m totally
comfortable with them in. I’ll probably wear them for a month or so,
until my mouth is really comfortable with them.’’ His fangs, which are a
key part of his sm identity, are also a part of his body. Jewelry such as
collars and piercings (along with brandings, scars, and tattoos) are also
relatively clear cases of bodily transformation. I met many submissives
and slaves who wore collars all the time; sometimes the collars were
decorative (they looked more like vanilla necklaces), but sometimes
they were not. In either case, the collar becomes a part of the body in
much the same way that a tattoo does: it transforms one’s body in the
image of one’s desire. Similarly, wearing piercings, handkerchiefs, or
rings on the left side of the body signifies one is a top, while wearing

T H E TOY B AG 133
 them on the right side signifies one is a bottom. Wearing markers like
this is yet another way that clothes, jewelry, or accessories might be-
come part of the body, thus transforming an unmarked body into a
particular sm body (a top, a bottom, a slave, a panther) as part of a
process of identity making via the incorporation of objects.
Like Schilder’s stick, toys can also become a part of the body through
their use, and this use transforms the body. A flogger can be incorpo-
rated into a top’s body through rhythms, sensations, and muscle move-
ments. As a prosthetic, toys do not fill a gap or lack but rather work as an
extension: they allow the top to reach out two or more feet beyond the
end of the hand; they give the top access to a wide range of sensations—
scratching, biting, cutting, petting, and belting—that may not be pos-
sible to inflict with the body alone; they transform the bodies of both
top and bottom. In this use, toys—detached objects—become tools.
Grosz notes: ‘‘It is only insofar as the object ceases to remain an object
and becomes a medium, a vehicle for impressions and expression, that it
can be used as an instrument or tool’’ (1994, 80).
In this way, tools convey and carry the intentionality of their users;
they are inalienable. Doris’s strawberries are ‘‘not fancy toys from Mr.
S,’’ but, ‘‘shared with passion,’’ they are ‘‘transformed into something
exciting and special’’; Heartwood’s whips ‘‘express the unique power and
love of its owner’’ because the whip maker’s ‘‘passion’’ is ‘‘translated into
our creations.’’ This language of translation and transformation sug-
gests that these tools contain and express their users and their makers.
We could read this in terms of the fetish, where floggers are imagined to
contain the identities of their consumers—their passion or desire. We
could also read this in terms of the gift or the tool, where floggers serve
as an inalienable medium for the users’ and makers’ (and, perhaps,
recipients’) desire. But reading toys as prostheses does more than blur
or transfer the site of relationality from objects to people; it also shows
that when toys become tools, incorporated into bodies, they become
vehicles for connection.
This kind of exchange—the community definition of power exchange
—relies on commodity exchange to produce something practitioners call
‘‘connection.’’ Here, Appadurai’s emphasis on the social dynamics of
exchange relationships encourages us to see these exchanges as densely,
and complexly, social (1988, 48). Appadurai argues that ‘‘consumption is
eminently social, relational, and active, rather than private, atomic,

134 CHAPTER THREE

or passive’’; it is not based on universalized or naturalized needs, but
on culturally specific processes of negotiation, an active location of
‘‘sending’’ and ‘‘receiving’’ ‘‘social messages’’ (31). Thinking culturally
about this exchange encourages us to see that what is being exchanged
varies; my interviewees used words like ‘‘control,’’ ‘‘trust,’’ ‘‘respect,’’
‘‘energy,’’ ‘‘love,’’ ‘‘safety,’’ ‘‘protection,’’ ‘‘sensation,’’ ‘‘pain,’’ ‘‘authority,’’
and ‘‘responsibility’’ (see also Moser and Madeson 1996, 27–30). But it
is through this exchange that practitioners feel connection when they
play. Hailstorm tells me: ‘‘When I hit somebody, I feel it . . . I can relate
to where they are if I’m feeling their pain, if I’m up there with them,
then I can do a better job at what I’m doing. I don’t believe in standing
back and whaling on somebody. I’m always up there and I’m always
touching.’’ Feeling through the flogger—or, more precisely, incorporat-
ing the flogger into his body’s nervous system—Hailstorm is describing
the density of connections in a circuit between top, flogger, and bottom.
There is an exchange at work in sm : toys became a medium not only of
sensation, but of intimate connection to others. Similarly, Francesca
tells me, when her partner is flogging her, ‘‘I’m working with my part-
ner . . . it’s like wanting to plow through something . . . together.’’
Mediated through commodities, such play creates intimate connections
between people; the toy as prosthetic becomes a social prosthesis—a
way to produce connection and intimacy.
Indeed, at these moments, there is little differentiation among
the top, toy, and bottom—the skin surface does not contain the body.
Instead the body is desexualized, transformed into a medium or recep-
tacle of sensation that is often not sexual or genital. In her auto-
ethnographic account of San Francisco’s links sm parties in the early
1990s, Susan Stryker writes of taking over for another top during a
flogging scene:

Something serene and paradoxically solitary can be found in the experi-

ence of giving oneself over to the inhabitation and enactment of a
shared pattern of motion—a contemplative solitude born of one’s ec-
static displacement into a space where the body actively receives and
transmits the movements of others . . . a whip strikes flesh with suffi-
cient force to blossom the creature’s skin red and welt it back toward the
leather. The young thing moans a low moan, transforming the kinetic
energy of the blow into an audible frequency by passing breath over

T H E TOY B AG 135
 slack vocal chords, and my attention is drawn toward the physicality of
the assemblage we cohabit . . . this is not, for me, primarily a sexual
experience. (2008, 41)

Instead, as Stryker reflects on this space of embodied exchange, she

writes: ‘‘I envision my body as a meeting point, a node, where external
lines of force and social determination thicken into meat and circulate
as a movement back into the world . . . [in] proprioceptic awareness, as I
flog, of the role of my body as a medium in the circuit of transmissions,
and of the material efficiency I process in my subjective ability [to
pattern, to flog, to choreograph]’’ (42). The body in play is attuned to its
own motion. But it is also connective, through the flogging: Stryker
flogs; the whip meets flesh, which welts ‘‘back toward the leather’’; a
moan draws attention to ‘‘the assemblage we cohabit.’’ This circuit, in
Stryker’s lyrical writing, enacts—produces—a shared space of embodi-
ment; the exchange of motion, pain, and sound is embodied as well as
productive. Stryker concludes: ‘‘s/m had become for me . . . a technol-
ogy for the production of (trans)gendered embodiment, a mechanism
for dismembering and disarticulating received patterns of identifica-
tion, affect, sensation and appearance, and for reconfiguring, coordinat-
ing and remapping them in bodily space’’ (43).
That this exchange isn’t ‘‘sexual’’ draws attention, again, to the Fou-
cauldian distinction between what Jeremy Carrette terms ‘‘pleasure-
intensity’’ and ‘‘sexuality-desire.’’ In an essay on theology and sm , Car-
rette argues that, because pleasure is nonproductive, sm ‘‘becomes a site
of resistance because it seeks to reconfigure pleasure in its intensity
of exchange rather than through its productive or commercial value’’
(2005, 23). This exchange, which Carrette opposes to capitalist exchange,
is nonproductive because it requires ‘‘a pleasure generated through an
exchange of deep trust and intense intimacy’’ (23): love rather than
labor. For Carrette, sm ’s exchange (pleasure and intensity) is not only a
form of Foucauldian desexualization, but it is also opposed to capital-
ism, commodity exchange, and ‘‘economies of lifestyle’’ (21).
But if sm play is not about ‘‘sex-desire,’’ genitally focused, or oriented
toward orgasm, it is productive of more than love. For example, Maxx—a
white, bisexual switch/bottom in his mid-twenties—compares sm play
to marathon running or lifting weights, telling me: ‘‘A lot of the s&m
stuff isn’t really sexual, just more like an endorphin high. Pain doesn’t

136 CHAPTER THREE

arouse me sexually . . . I just have a very high pain tolerance, and I’ve
found that the more I could take the better I feel.’’ Similarly, Bonnie
explains: ‘‘Play for me does not necessarily have to be sexual. Play for me
can be a number of different things . . . I like to learn about technique and
I like to feel how the different techniques feel and I enjoy the sensations,
but it’s not necessarily always sexual for me.’’ She continues: ‘‘It becomes
meditative for me just as a test to see how much I can handle, how much I
can take, what hurts, what doesn’t, how much it takes to mark, and so it
becomes for me an exploration of my body: its tolerances, its abilities
to not be injured, what positions I can get into, how long I can stay
there, how I can be dommed.’’ For Bonnie and Maxx, sm practice is not
(strictly) about sex-desire—orgasm or genital sensation—but a way to
craft a new relationship with the body, a relationship that for Maxx is
about an endorphin rush (see also Mains 1991), and for Bonnie is a way
to experiment with technique and sensation, a test of the flexibility and
limits of the body.
This kind of pleasure cannot be opposed to commodity exchange.
Instead, we need to see these forms of exchange as operating together:
the exchange of commodities and the exchange of intimacies, together
producing forms of identity, subjectivity, pleasure, relationality, and
community. Consider the circuit created through pain. Teramis describes
an intense flogging: ‘‘She put me in a chair and started to flog me and
flogged the skin off my back . . . We channel energy on purpose . . . I don’t
like to play with someone who can’t get energy connected. So there was
actually a feedback, consciously flying between us. I need that so I can
process that level of pain. I’m grounding a lot of it . . . I’ll be in certain
positions with my palms flat to the ground, and I’m running energy
through my body [and] breathing and [finding] the rhythmic way to flow
with it.’’ In Karmen MacKendrick’s argument, pain (along with bondage)
is one way that sm practice enables practitioners to surpass or break
subjectivity through the ‘‘useless and excessive nature of deliberately
invoked pain and restraint’’ (1999, 110; italics in original). Further, for
MacKendrick, these dynamics are profoundly anti-economic: subversive
of a libidinal economy, unproductive and inefficient, an ‘‘absurd expendi-
ture of energy’’ with no gratification (114). She writes: ‘‘Pain’s play with
pleasure can explode our exchange-oriented economic sensibility’’ (121).
Instead, as I read it, sm exchange is both social and material, productive
and technological: it enables intimacy, connecting bodies through the

T H E TOY B AG 137
 incorporation of toys, relying on differentiating techniques, and produc-
ing both—as Stryker writes—‘‘embodied knowledges and knowledges of
embodiment’’ (2008, 38).
In a class titled ‘‘Spirituality in the Scene,’’ which Dossie Easton and
Janet Hardy held to gather material for their book, Radical Ecstasy: sm
Journeys to Transcendence (2004), they began by talking about how it
was almost impossible to find words to describe the mysterious connec-
tion or intensity of sm , especially because Janet is not a fan of ‘‘spiritu-
ality talk.’’ People in the audience began volunteering descriptions and
terms: it’s ‘‘what makes me real,’’ ‘‘it’s about being a part of something
larger than yourself,’’ ‘‘it’s unfiltered,’’ ‘‘it’s being present, in the mo-
ment,’’ or it’s ‘‘about a heart connection.’’ Everyone who spoke agreed
on the basic terrain: love, energy, ecstasy. ‘‘It’s the radical potential for
connection,’’ someone said. Hayden—a white, lesbian masochist/slave
in her late twenties—notes: ‘‘If you’re with someone that you connect
with, it’s not—I’m not going to say it doesn’t hurt, but it doesn’t hurt as
much because there’s this energy going on . . . Some people describe it as
connecting. I don’t know, I don’t have words for it. It just works.’’ This
kind of connective body is transformed through a medium of social
connection called ‘‘energy.’’ Or, in less new-age-y language, a prosthetic
relationship develops between partners in sm through a toy-mediated
exchange.
These kinds of connections are complex: reliant on toys, they create
both commodity and energy exchange. Rather than being inefficient,
they rely on, as Stryker puts it, a ‘‘proprioceptic awareness’’ of the
‘‘material efficiency I possess in my subjective ability’’ (2008, 42)—in
other words, on skill, technique, and education. And rather than be-
ing useless or nonproductive, they produce forms of bodily knowledge,
techniques, and the kinds of players, bodies, and communities to use
them. Such energy is interpersonally connective; toys forge a pathway
through feedback, connection, and channeling energy between bodies
newly connected with such circuitry. This play is effective when it con-
nects bodies to other bodies, creating an assemblage—a circuit. Lady
Hilary explains: ‘‘I don’t like to see just a body being beaten when there
is no emotion attached to it . . . I like to see things that . . . show passion
and the wow-ness of it, the excitement and the joy of it, and not sort of
this strange boredom.’’ There are several jokes in the scene to describe
this; bottoms can, for example, view tops as the ‘‘life-support system for

138 CHAPTER THREE

the whip’’ or ‘‘the pain delivery device.’’ But this ‘‘strange boredom,’’ the
boredom of commodity fetishism, is not because of the saturation of
toys but rather because of the ways toys have taken on, as a fetish, the
contradictions within broader social relationships—contradictions be-
tween authentic and inauthentic, intimacy and commodification, hu-
man and object. Focusing on the body at play, then, reveals two impor-
tant effects: toys divide, remapping the body as object of knowledge;
and they also connect, serving as prosthetic extensions that reach out,
and fill, spaces between players or bodies. This accounts for the pleasure
and anxiety generated around toys and their handlers in relation to a
desired social connection.
Thus, although the objectification of the body, its divisibility into
parts, and the commodification of bdsm all herald new forms of power
and knowledge—of technique—they also suggest new possibilities for
connection. For players, this happens when a toy can be transformed
into a prosthetic tool, incorporated into the body in order to create con-
nection. Yet this is an unstable and anxious endeavor; in the pleasure/
anxiety nexus, the very solidification of sm community and identity
through commodities—toys—also enables those same toys, transformed
into tools, to prosthetically bridge and reconfigure the bodies and rela-
tionships of the players in ways that are deeply connective. It does so,
however, not by transgressing the social relations that demand effi-
ciency and productivity from worker-subjects, but by embracing these
demands—producing bodies in line with new technologies of knowledge
and power.

PLEASURABLE BODIES OF SILICON VALLEY

In this way, I am arguing against the most common reading of sm

practice as transgressive. As I have discussed above, this perspective sees
in sm the loss of or an escape from individuated selves, rigid identities,
knowable subjects, fixed Freudian aims, and economies of exploitation.
It is the perspective of MacKendrick, writing of the ways that pain and
bondage rupture subjectivity: ‘‘pain and restraint . . . throw the subject
outside itself . . . break the limits of subjection’’ (1999, 156). For Mac-
Kendrick, ‘‘freedom from subjectivity is freedom from the forces of
subjection, and the body knows such things are possible’’ (120). This
knowing body is aligned against a more fixed subjectivity, just as sm ’s

T H E TOY B AG 139
 desexualized pleasures are aligned against the rigid normalization of
‘‘sex-desire.’’
Moreover, Carrette and MacKendrick position sm pleasure against
capitalism. Carrette, for example, writes that sm practice can ‘‘bring
about the fracturing of hegemonic capitalist sexuality’’ (2005, 26) and
‘‘free our gendered bodies from the market of global exploitation’’ (27).
MacKendrick writes: ‘‘The counterpleasures [such as sm ] are conspicu-
ously resistant to absorption by exchange value’’ (1999, 11). She con-
tinues: ‘‘In our time, with subjectivity constructed by the orderly divi-
sions and controlling gaze that strive to make us both more efficient and
more knowable—the subjectivity of individuating discipline in the mar-
ket demographics of late capitalism—sadomasochistic pleasure plays
with the control, movement, sensations, and possibilities of the body to
turn carnality to its full, postsubjective power’’ (20). It should be clear by
now that, although sm ‘‘plays with the control, movement, sensations,
and possibilities of the body,’’ it does not do this through desubjectifica-
tion, inefficiency, unknowability, or uselessness. The pleasurable body in
sm is not, it is true, a genitalized body. But at the same time, these bodily
experiments, while not genitally focused, rely on technique and knowl-
edge of the body, which have everything to do with self-mastery and
community production, rather than transcendence; pleasures that come
from taking one’s self (and body) as an object of knowledge and cultiva-
tion, rather than desubjectification. This is an ‘‘efficient’’ body, as Mc-
Kenzie would put it, the body made into a useful and technical thing.≤≤
And rather than transgressing economic rationality—the demand that
one be productive and efficient in one’s labors and one’s pleasures—this
body is produced in and through the demands of late-capitalist produc-
tion. Indeed, this is precisely the flexible body available to and required
for the computer, service, and informational workers who swell the
ranks of the new guard bdsm scene; a laboring body, not a body that can
overthrow or move beyond subjectivity.
These bodies and pleasures are based on exchange: circuits of com-
modities and of energy, both of which produce forms of subjectivity,
embodiment, and community in accordance with the flexible and adapt-
able subjects of late capitalism. As Emily Martin (1992) argues, the body
in late capitalism is no longer the Fordist body (regimented, steady, and
regulated) that corresponds to Foucault’s disciplined, ordered modes of
production and identity, but rather a flexible body that corresponds to

140 CHAPTER THREE

flexible capitalism. We can see the tremendous flexibility of the sm body,
open and adaptable to new toys, tools, and techniques as they are mar-
keted. These are also able bodies: able to expand and contract along with
the demands of new economies, based on relations of both production
and consumption. These subjects, the new service and knowledge work-
ers, as Rosemary Hennessy argues, are required to have ‘‘habitual mobil-
ity, adaptability in every undertaking, the ability to navigate among
possible alternatives and spaces, and a cultivation of ambivalence as a
structure of feeling’’ (2000, 108). It is therefore not surprising that, as
Hennessy puts it, these subjects experience their sexualities in ways that
are mobile, unfixed, open, fluid, and ambivalent. This sort of subject goes
along with the flexibility and adaptability required of both workers and
consumers today. Yet, as both Emily Martin and Robert McRuer (2006)
caution, these dynamics produce—and require—flexibility for some bod-
ies and inflexibility—exclusion—for others. These demands, as well as
their proliferating possibilities, reproduce and solidify some forms of
social hierarchy: freedom as freedom to consume; belonging mediated
through consumption. As Hennessy summarizes: ‘‘Postmodern sexuali-
ties participate in the logic of the commodity and help support neo-
liberalism’s mystifications’’ (109).
Late capitalism doesn’t so much discipline or exile erotics as strate-
gically use pleasure for market proliferation and subject differentiation.
This dynamic relies on, as Linda Singer puts it, ‘‘the market’s way of
producing a ‘revolutionary’ development and sustaining a sense of ap-
parent freedom through the proliferation of a range of erotic options,
styles and scenes’’ (1993, 48). In this way, sexualities like sm ‘‘function
as . . . compensatory indulgences, selective circumscribed sites of trans-
gression’’ (39). In sm , commodity and power exchange links together
social norms and social hierarchies as differential economies within
social relations of class: agile and flexible bodies, coding in the South
Bay by day and practicing elaborate suspension bondage in the dungeon
by night.≤≥ These new intimacies, socialities, and knowledges are un-
evenly accessible. Sufficient leisure time and money are, if not prerequi-
sites, ideals, making it easier for some people to become practitioners,
to participate in this community, and to experience the new connec-
tions made possible through these exchanges. Practitioners negotiate
such exchanges with ambivalence and anxiety. Indeed, unpacking the
toy bag as a social fetish focuses attention on the contested ways that

T H E TOY B AG 141
 consumption relies on and produces social relations. In this way, produc-
tion does not simply stand in for relations of production but rather
opens out to encompass the biopolitical formation of subjects and com-
munities. sm sexuality requires reading the relationships between capi-
talism and community, consumerism and subjectivity, and flexibility
and bodily pleasures as ambivalent and anxious: capable of both creat-
ing and limiting possibilities for new bodies and new relationships. I see
ambivalence as a location of conflict, but conflict in terms of both social
norms and social relations (of production and consumption), where the
constraints are simultaneously the potentials. This contradiction, like
that around the rules, is itself a crucial aspect of contemporary sm ; it
reflects and provides some relief from the bodily demands of contempo-
rary capitalism. In the end, these moments of cultural ambivalence
reveal the fetishistic displacement—onto people, objects, and toys—
of the social contradictions of late-capitalist social relations. In other
words, even as we see commodity exchange and bodily objectification as
more than lack or asocial destruction, we must also recognize that these
bodily and relational potentials are produced within social dynamics of
privilege, exclusion, and power.

142 CHAPTER THREE

FOUR N
B E YO N D VA N I L L A

Public Politics and Private Selves

Calling an s/m person sexist is like calling someone who

plays Monopoly a capitalist.
— dear aunt sadie, Coming to Power

For a lot of people, bdsm is not about whips and chains,

it’s about control, it’s about power exchange. I think there
are a lot of people who can relate to the power exchange:
losing control, who holds the remote, who holds the
checkbook, who chooses the radio station, who is
driving, who decides where we’re eating, where we’re
going on vacation. It’s like the classic joke: ‘‘we know who
wears the pants in that family’’ or ‘‘she knows her place.’’
— panther

On a Sunday evening in mid-September 2002, I showed

up at Paul’s house for what we were half-facetiously calling
a ‘‘focus group.’’ At the San Francisco munch the day be-
fore, Paul, a former graduate student, key informant, and
friend, had asked me if he could do anything to help me
with my research and proposed organizing a group inter-
view at his house. We had been sitting with several noted
Bay Area sm authors, various community leaders, and
other participants in the upstairs room of a tapas restau-
 rant as the munch was clearing out; when they seemed willing to go over
to Paul’s for cocktails and conversation, I was thrilled. So, at 5:30 p.m.
the next day, I showed up with my mini tape recorder in hand.
When Jeff, Malc, and Rachel arrived, we ordered pizza. As Paul
fixed drinks for everyone at the tiki bar in his living room, Jeff looked
around the room. ‘‘Not much diversity here,’’ he remarked, in the semi-
embarrassed tone that I recognized from the standing introductions at
munches across the Bay Area. When men there rise and say some ver-
sion of ‘‘Hi! I’m Bill, and I’m a het male dom,’’ their tone anticipates their
audience’s knowing, slightly mocking amusement; it betrays a half-
joking discomfort with being a heterosexual, male dominant. Tonight,
the three men were all ‘‘het male doms,’’ or ‘‘hmd s’’ for short (Rachel is
a white, bisexual pain fetishist/submissive in her early twenties who
lives with Jeff and his wife as their submissive). That they were also all
white is a lack of diversity unremarked upon, but one I will return to
below. Throughout the four-hour group interview, as well as in other
interviews with hmd s, the men seemed painfully aware of, and almost
embarrassed by, their sexual/ sm orientation. They seemed to think
that—in what is supposed to be a subversive, alternative, and under-
ground sex community—some might find their orientations clichéd,
conservative, the very opposite of transgressive.
Why Paul, Jeff, and Malc want to be transgressive, and what they
want to transgress, are the subjects of this chapter. These quasi-joking
comments point to a desire for sex to be transgressive—not only, as I dis-
cussed in the previous chapter, of capitalism, but of social norms more
broadly. As Linda Singer argues, sexuality is imagined as ‘‘a mechanism
for resistance, transgression, opposition to the sphere of demand . . .
Sexuality functions in a late-capitalist economy as a prototype or em-
blem . . . of freedom, and that in the name of which demands can be made
of an alienating social system’’ (1993, 36–37). Of course, sex is not
oppositional to capitalism, as the preceding chapters have made clear.
Indeed, as Singer notes, capitalism produces sex as liberatory; inciting
and managing ‘‘excessive’’ pleasures is central to profit making in late
capitalism. But sex is also positioned in opposition to social normativity:
to both the private/reproductive and the public/productive spheres.
In this construction, sm , despite its obvious commercial value, comes
to stand in for authentic pleasures and freedom from vanilla social
norms. But the very desire for sm as transgression produces the fantasy

144 CHAPTER FOUR

of sex as outside of or in opposition to economic and hierarchical social
relations. This both guarantees profit (especially through the prolifera-
tion of commodities) and strengthens some forms of social normativity
by differentiating legitimate vanilla sexuality from policed and demon-
ized sm . Singer notes: ‘‘Regulation works through the installation of a
set of binary relations that entail the legalization and normalization
of some practices at the same time that others are criminalized. This
binary system of regulation functions to fetishize and target specific
institutional forms for regulation by leaving the larger structures of
power to circulate and proliferate’’ (1993, 42). Not only are social norms
and the market intertwined, but the very production of a split between
sexual norms and sexual labor, private and public, simultaneously gen-
erates the fantasy of sex as liberatory and bolsters the supplementary
relations between profit and social normativity.
Thus, the desire to transgress social norms through sm practice—the
quasi-joke of the hmd s—sets up a complicated circuit. On the one hand,
sm is figured as outlaw: as transgressive of normative sexual values. On
the other hand, sm is dependent on social norms: practitioners draw on
social hierarchies to produce sm scenes, just as such norms perfor-
matively produce subjects. bdsm scenes ‘‘play with’’ real power to pro-
duce legible scenes; dungeon parties commonly feature scenes based on
police interrogation, rape, slavery, teacher-student relationships, and
race or cultural trauma dynamics. These scenes draw on socially mean-
ingful, and powerful, historical relations of inequality, the same ‘‘regula-
tory ideals’’ that performatively produce subjects and, at the same time,
reproduce social norms (Butler 1993, 1; Foucault [1976] 1990, 155–56).
This chapter takes up the desire for sm sex to stand outside of so-
cial relations by focusing on cases of a resemblance between an in-scene
role and the social reality of gendered, racial, and sexual inequality.
For heterosexual male dominants and female submissives, the fact that
their bdsm seems to replicate normative constellations of sex-gender-
sexuality appears problematic; that this normalized gender is also ra-
cialized and classed does not. Exploring the imagined connections be-
tween ‘‘real-world’’ social norms and the ‘‘safe’’ world of the scene, I
contrast the two most common analyses of sm play: the radical feminist
anti-sm position, and the queer pro-sex position. In the radical feminist
argument, this seeming replication means that the politics of sm roles
and play scenes are the same as the social relations of domination

B E YO N D VA N I L L A 145
 (patriarchy, racism) that give them form. In the queer argument, sm
scenes flout hetero- and vanilla-normative conventions and thus trans-
gress or subvert social norms. This debate, stated baldly, is the sm ver-
sion of the familiar dichotomy between replication/reenactment and
subversion/transgression.
Yet the ambivalence voiced by these hmd s suggests another reading,
in which the desire to be transgressive relies on the construction of a
boundary between the ‘‘real world’’ (of capitalism, exploitation, unequal
social relations, and social norms) and the ‘‘sm scene’’ (a pretend space
of fantasy, performance, or game). Unpacking this boundary-making
project, we can see the ways in which gendered performativity produces
subjects who view their sm practice as private and individual, as a form
of self-cultivation and self-mastery. However, this sense of personal
autonomy, agency, and choice also relies on liberal (sometimes inflected
as libertarian or neoliberal) ideologies of agentic individualism and free-
dom, formulations that are complexly bound to both material and dis-
cursive formations. Thus, the fantasy of sex outside material relations,
the desire to transgress social norms of gender, produces a split between
the public space of the law and the private space of desire that simulta-
neously creates opportunities to transgress social norms and restricts
those opportunities to those with privilege. The ambivalence of practi-
tioners whose sm desires seem to match up with their social locations,
then, illuminates a complex and contradictory social field in which the
topography of social power, the justifications of social hierarchy, and the
dense interconnections between gender, race, sexuality, and class are
produced, reproduced, disavowed, and embodied.

REENACTMENT LOC ATING THE SM REAL

In my joint interview with Stephanie and Anthony, Anthony gave me an

example of sm ‘‘reenactment’’:

anthony: There’s a woman that I play with who has a terrible

traumatic history. Her father started having sex
with her when she was ten. It was all in the family
and the mother used to send her to the basement
after dinner, and it’s a big fucking horrible story.
Her thing in the scene is daddy rape.

146 CHAPTER FOUR

 stephanie: Basically reenacting.
anthony: Kind of reenacting that whole scene. Well, what I
do is: I go—in my mind, I can hold that as some-
thing horrible, and I can go, ‘‘Okay, fine. That was
horrible. What a fucking shit low life her dad is.
Her mom, what the hell was she thinking?’’ And
then place that somewhere else, and go, ‘‘Okay, I’m
daddy. What do I do? And what is it about doing the
daddy thing with her that’s going to get her where
she lives?’’ Somewhere in that scene, I hit on, ‘‘Your
daddy spoiled you.’’ And that was the trigger. And I
went, ‘‘Daddy spoiled you all night,’’ and that was
the hot thing for her all night, and that scene went
places from there that it couldn’t have gone [other-
wise]. But just one little line was the hook that
turned that scene into something that was really
fabulous. So that’s what I look for . . .
stephanie: And at that point it is not play.
anthony: Yeah . . . [to find out] what is it she wants from me
in that, and beyond that, where is the big button for
me to push? I know there’s a big button there for
me to push; where is it?

I want to pause at this story—even though raising the specter of child

abuse among sm practitioners is dangerous for its potential to replay
sm stereotypes—because here Anthony articulates some of the connec-
tions between repetition and transformation that guide this chapter and
the next. First, for Stephanie and Anthony, ‘‘reenactment’’ means mim-
icking an originary trauma. Second, in order to do this, Anthony has to
separate the trauma from the sm scene; he has to put his horror over
this woman’s real incestuous rape ‘‘somewhere else’’ in his mind. Third,
he needs to find the ‘‘button’’—the hook, line, or trigger—that ‘‘get[s]
her where she lives,’’ that accesses her desire to do, and her eroticization
of, this scene. Fourth, when this ‘‘big button’’ is pushed, the scene ceases
to be ‘‘play’’ and instead becomes ‘‘fabulous,’’ somehow real.
Many practitioners who play with trauma such as rape understand
their play as recoding or remaking a traumatic experience into a pleasur-
able one; indeed, this is the reading of sm as therapy proffered by many

B E YO N D VA N I L L A 147
 (for example, Baumeister 1988; cf. Hart 1998 and Barker, Gupta, and
Iantaffi 2007). Mollena explains that she doesn’t ‘‘want to have to deal
with horrible racists.’’ ‘‘I don’t really ever want to be abducted and gang
raped by ten guys.’’ But she does want to do rape and race play to ‘‘tap
into’’ the feelings of helplessness, loss of control, and terror that these
experiences produce (experiences, I should note, that she hasn’t had,
disrupting any simplistic reading of sm as essentially repetitive). As
she explains, such play might help people ‘‘get past the guilt over the
fact that perhaps they had a level of eroticism’’ about such scenes, or
might turn something horrible ‘‘into something that’s erotic’’; both, she
thinks, might enable practitioners to gain control over trauma by eroti-
cizing it.
The relationship between what is understood as an originary trauma
and sm ’s replication of trauma in an erotic scene has occupied a central
place in feminist debates about sexuality and power since the late 1970s.
It is, of course, precisely this realness that raises ethical and political
questions about sm play. Does sm , as some radical feminists would have
it, simply reproduce real-world relations of inequality, particularly rac-
ism and patriarchy? Or does sm enable the transgression of such social
hierarchies through their staging or dramatization—does it matter that
sm is consensual, fictional, just pretend?
Published in 1982, at the height of the feminist sex wars, Against
Sadomasochism still stands as the major radical feminist critique of sm .∞
As Robin Ruth Linden writes in her introduction: ‘‘Throughout Against
Sadomasochism it is argued that lesbian sadomasochism is firmly rooted
in patriarchal sexual ideology . . . There can be no doubt that none of us
is exempt from the sphere of influence of patriarchal conceptions of
sexuality and intimacy . . . Sadomasochism is as much an irreducible
condition of society as it is an individual ‘sexual preference’ or lifestyle:
indeed, sadomasochism reflects the power asymmetries embedded in
most of our social relationships’’ (1982, 4). Linden further specifies that
‘‘sadomasochistic roles and practices attempt to replicate the phenome-
nology of oppression through role playing,’’ an oppression that is ‘‘al-
ways received rather than chosen’’ (7).
The authors in the collection argue that such ‘‘replication’’ means
that sm is morally wrong, that it strengthens these inequalities—or,
even more reductively, that it is actually the same as rape, torture,
slavery, or Nazi concentration camps. For example, Bat-Ami Bar On

148 CHAPTER FOUR

writes: ‘‘The eroticization of violence or domination, and of pain or
powerlessness, is at the core of sadomasochism, and consequently . . .
the practice of sadomasochism embodies the same values as heterosex-
ual practices of sexual domination in general and sexually violent prac-
tices like rape in particular’’ (1982, 75). Marissa Jonel argues plainly: ‘‘I
know that sm is very dangerous . . . The danger is that our society puts
women in the kind of space where we respond sexually to being second-
class, less than good. There’s something wrong with a woman who has
an orgasm while beating or fist-fucking another woman. There’s some-
thing wrong with pleasure derived from degrading nicknames like ‘stu-
pid cunt’ and ‘fucking whore’ ’’ (1982, 19). For these radical feminists,
sm is the product of internalized oppression wrought by patriarchy, one
place where individual desires express and reproduce the fundamental
oppression of women.
It is not only that sm is ‘‘a conditioned response to the sexual imag-
ery that barrages women in the society,’’ but also that this is true
‘‘whether a woman identifies with the dominant or submissive figure in
the fantasy.’’ Either way, ‘‘she is still responding to a model of sexual
interaction that has been drummed into us throughout our lives,’’ a
model, of course, we should be committed to eradicating (Nichols, Pa-
gano, and Rossoff 1982, 139). Making explicit the connection between
male/female, butch/femme, and top/bottom, Jeanette Nichols, Dar-
lene Pagano, and Margaret Rossoff argue that ‘‘sexual polarization justi-
fies passivity and glamorizes domination, reinforcing the legitimacy of
power imbalances outside the bedroom’’ (140). Or, as almost all of the
contributors argue, by replicating toxic patriarchal heterosexism, les-
bian sm strengthens it: ‘‘By replicating the dominant patriarchal model
of heterosexuality, lesbian-feminists are . . . practicing and validating
the system in which one person has power over another, which is the
basis of patriarchy. Why don’t they see this behavior as contrary to
feminism?’’ (Wagner 1982, 34). Thus, it is not only that sm is the
expression of internalized oppression but that the replaying of these
roles actually reproduces patriarchy. These are strong claims; the per-
formance of sm power exchange, for these writers, is the performa-
tive production of racism, sexism, fascism, and inequality—not just its
internalization.≤
These claims have been refuted by a number of feminists in the last
twenty-five years, but, as Patrick Hopkins argues, many of these refuta-

B E YO N D VA N I L L A 149
 tions take essentially libertarian positions, arguing that sex is primarily
a private issue, divorced from political considerations. This line of argu-
mentation cannot respond to the radical feminist claim that sex prac-
tices, under patriarchal conditions, are a primary cause—and a primary
effect—of domination. Instead, Hopkins argues that sm does not (or
cannot be assumed to) ‘‘replicate’’ patriarchy; it ‘‘simulates’’ it: ‘‘Replica-
tion implies that sm encounters merely reproduce patriarchal activity in
a different physical area. Simulation implies that sm selectively replays
surface patriarchal behaviors onto a different contextual field. That
contextual field makes all the difference’’ (1994, 123). In Hopkins’s
work, a rape scene, for example, is desirable because of the social con-
text of the scene, whereas real rape is not; such conditions as ‘‘negotia-
tion, safe words, [and] mutual definition’’ produce a ‘‘self-defined com-
munity,’’ and it is this context of community that makes the rape scene a
scene (124).
Yet, as Melinda Vadas notes in her radical feminist reply to Hopkins,
sm scenes remain dependent on the violent referents that give them
form. The pleasure of sm , she argues, ‘‘is a direct function of the actual,
historical occurrence or existence of the death camps, rapes, and racist
enslavements they simulate. If these historical events had never oc-
curred or could not occur . . . the simulation would not only not be
thrilling to the sm er, there would be no simulation at all because there
would be nothing to simulate’’ (1995, 160). In other words, a reliance on
‘‘context’’ is unstable: Hopkins’s defense relies on a distinction between
the ‘‘real world’’ (where the ‘‘source-event’’ occurs) and a ‘‘scene world’’
(where the event is simulated, but ‘‘in no way replicates any of the
injustice of the source-event’’) (Hopkins 1995, 166). In contrast, Vadas
argues that a new, sm context cannot sever historical inequalities from
their simulations. This debate on the ethics of sm play from various
feminist positions takes two opposing stances regarding the relation-
ship between the scene and social systems of domination. In the radical
feminist argument, these ‘‘spaces’’ turn out to be fundamentally linked,
even the same; in the defense of sm , these spaces are held apart, sepa-
rated, through social mechanisms such as consent, community forma-
tion, simulation, and performance.
This latter understanding was shared by many people I spoke with in
the sm scene. For example, Annalee and I discussed the politics of race
play. She explained that she thinks ‘‘it’s healthy to have a scene where

150 CHAPTER FOUR

you obviously step into a role, you’re playacting, there’s an end to it,
and it’s contained.’’ This bracketing, for Annalee, is like ‘‘going to the
movies’’: ‘‘There’s a space that you go into where you suspend [dis]belief
and then you leave.’’ Annalee understands these more limited scenes as
allowing a ‘‘critical perspective,’’ without which a scene becomes ‘‘just a
reenactment of slavery or historical traumas like women being subju-
gated by men.’’ The difference for Annalee between ‘‘just a reenactment’’
and a scene that is ‘‘play’’ has to do with the ways in which practitioners
are enabled to bracket, or fail to bracket, the scene from the everyday,
the ‘‘play’’ self from the ‘‘real’’ self, the space of fantasy from reality (see
also Stear 2009).
For many practitioners, sm play happens inside what Gregory Bate-
son calls the play frame. Bateson’s example of the play frame is this: ‘‘the
playful nip denotes the bite, but it does not denote what would be
denoted by the bite’’ (1955, 41). In sm , bracketing or framing play as
inside a play frame can become an alibi or a cover that allows partici-
pants to play with race or gender in ways that would be impossible
outside of the frame. In this analysis, play with Mr. S–brand shackles
denotes slave shackles, but it does not denote what would be denoted, in
a nonplay frame, by the shackles: slavery. At the same time, like the nip
and bite, the Mr. S shackles might ‘‘really evoke that terror which would
have been evoked by a real’’—slave—shackle (Bateson 1955, 43). Hence
the effectiveness of these objects and dynamics: the shackle, slave auc-
tion, or flogging simultaneously incites and denies the realness of these
historical or socially meaningful scenes of power (a point I take up again
in the next chapter).
It is this tension that distinguishes bdsm . In sm , the play frame— sm
as a safe space—can function as an alibi, allowing practitioners to recode
or experiment with familiar experiences of power in new ways. Because
the scene is ‘‘just play,’’ play with these forms of social power is possible.
This construction produces the scene as a bracketed space, inside of
which there are no outside social hierarchies. Patricia Duncan summa-
rizes her analysis of lesbian sm : ‘‘The respondents were very aware of
s/m as play. Although they recognized the way power differentials are
based in reality and in our culture, they also made it very clear to me
that power, in their s/m practices, is a dynamic process, exchanged
between two or more partners within the parameters of a scene’’ (1996,
102). For the women Duncan interviewed, sm practices are ‘‘sites of

B E YO N D VA N I L L A 151
 transformation,’’ a way to play with real, structural inequalities in safe
and pleasurable ways: in ways that make such play play (103). Similarly,
the dyke/trans bdsm practitioners in the United States and Western
Europe whom Robin Bauer interviewed emphasized that sm play hap-
pens within a ‘‘safe space,’’ a ‘‘playground,’’ defined by bdsm commu-
nity standards such as negotiation, consensuality, and rules (2007, 179;
2008, 233). This frame promises, as Anne McClintock notes, symbolic
mastery over the social hierarchies from which sm objects, props, and
scenes are borrowed (1995, 147); in this way, the production of a safe
space can also serve as a phantasmatic mastery over social inequality.
This is not to say that sm play doesn’t feel real to practitioners. The
sm persona, even in different clothes, is, of course, real. And conversely,
as Lynda Hart argues, ‘‘the controversy about whether s/m is ‘real’ or
performed is naive, since we are always already in representation even
when we are enacting our seemingly most private fantasies.’’ She con-
tinues: ‘‘The extent to which we recognize the presence of the edge of
the stage may determine what kind of performance we are enacting, but
willing ourselves to forget the stage altogether is not to return to the
real, as s/m opponents would have it’’ (1998, 91).≥ In this complicated
dynamic, all sex and subjectivity—not just sm —is performative; at the
same time, such performances are real, in the sense of being social,
compelling, authentic, and material. For example, many practitioners
distinguished the serious play that they did from ‘‘fantasy role-playing’’
or ‘‘acting.’’ Jezzie explains: ‘‘I’m really turned off by fantasy role play . . .
because to me that detracts from the reality of what’s going on . . . If
you’re pretending that he’s a pirate and I’m a captured whatever, then
might not the power also be pretend? If he has to pretend to be a pirate
in order to have control over me, then the control is pretend.’’ Bailey
also feels that thinking of sm as a performance diminishes the ‘‘reality’’
of the scene: ‘‘I’ve never been much into role play, you know, ‘you’re the
pirate and I’m the captain.’ I am just into down and dirty emotional and
sensation exchange with my partners . . . It all becomes real to me. It’s
not a fantasy.’’
For these practitioners, the ‘‘scene world’’ is very real—sometimes
even more real (in the sense of authentic) than the ‘‘real world’’—and
the majority of my interviewees described sm as a deep, almost innate,
part of themselves. Hailstorm puts it this way:

152 CHAPTER FOUR

 The reality is, that’s [sm ’s] your reality. This is the fantasy out here, this
is where we put the mask on and go battle the world. This is where you
follow the rules. This is a trite fantasy world where you conceal who you
are, where you conceal your feelings, where you conceal the truth be-
cause you have to get along with people. And the fantasy world, that’s
the reality because that’s where people come out, that’s where you see
who people are and people see who you are. And you live for that world,
you live for those few hours that you play in the evening. That’s what
drives you if you’re a player, if you’re a part of the community, that’s the
serious part of it. Everything else is paying the rent, getting by, but
that’s where you live. That’s where the masks come off. That’s where
you become yourself, and that’s why it’s important to people to play—
because that’s their reality.

Gretchen feels the same way: ‘‘The real me is the life outside of work
versus the one that goes to the engineering office and solves complex
engineering problems.’’
However, both the real and scene world are bound together; sm
works more as a circuit than a stage, more as an exchange than a toggle.
Carrie explains: ‘‘What I’m doing when I’m playing is acting out a role.
Even though it feels like it is coming from inside of me, it’s still a play,
it’s still an act. I am an actress playing this role. And so it’s not real . . .
But let me tell you, when I do it, it sure feels real then. When I’m deep in
the middle of it, there’s no acting, it’s definitely so intense and it’s so
good. It just makes me feel so complete.’’ Bracketed from the real (just
for play) but also based on and reconnecting to the real (in order to be
effective), sm play creates a circuit in which the scene is first set apart
and marked as safe, not real—and then, in play, becomes real, in the
sense of authentic and transforming. Indeed, as what Sherry Ortner
calls a ‘‘serious game,’’ sm pretends to be ‘‘only a game,’’ even as it—and
social life in general, in her argument—is a game played for extraordi-
narily high stakes (1996, 12–13). Following Clifford Geertz’s (1973)
analysis of the Balinese cockfight, this tension between only a game and
more than a game, or just play and for real, enables practitioners to play
games with higher stakes through the alibi-setting production of the
scene as a safe and separate space.∂
This is one place to begin to answer the questions of why the hmd s
with whom I opened the chapter want to be transgressive and what they

B E YO N D VA N I L L A 153
 want to transgress. These men, and many others in the scene, want to
transgress normative social power, and they are aided in this by imagin-
ing that the sm scene is a space outside social norms and structures
of inequality, a safe and separate space, bracketed from the real. This
boundary-producing work creates anxiety, since keeping the scene sepa-
rate from the social real of male dominance, white privilege, and hetero-
normativity can only ever be a partial—even failed—endeavor. Here,
then, is the radical feminist insight that I will retain, while jettisoning
the anti-sm rest: the understanding that sm is produced through social
power, that sexuality (scenes, erotics, desire, and fantasy) is always
social, and that ‘‘none of us is exempt’’ from this condition. In this, sm
sexuality is like all sexuality: it is not possible to sever sexuality from
power; sexuality is a social relation within an already existing social
world. At the same time, the spectacularity of sm ’s play with social
power makes its politics more visibly problematic; such a crowded social
field demands ethnographic consideration. The radical feminist argu-
ment can begin to reveal how the construction of the scene as a safe or
bracketed space is itself a way of pushing aside the social relations of
power that form sm desires, and that sm communities and scenes
produce.

TRANSGRESSION AND SOCIAL NORMS

For radical feminists, sm is politically and ethically wrong because the

reenactment of social inequality produces it. Whereas radical feminists
conceptualize social norms as patriarchal (and sm as reflecting or re-
producing sexism), for most pro-sm feminist and queer theorists, sm is,
rather, transgressive of the norms of vanilla heterosexuality. This diver-
gence is illustrated clearly in Coming to Power: Writings and Graphics on
Lesbian s/m (Samois [1981] 1987), the first widely read anthology of
lesbian sm . For Samois, the San Francisco leatherdyke organization that
put together the volume, Coming to Power represented not only an at-
tempt to provide more information for leatherwomen, but also a ‘‘femi-
nist examination’’ of the politics of sexuality in response to feminist
‘‘anti-s/m attitudes’’ like those in Against Sadomasochism (Davis 1987,
8). The writers in Coming to Power understood lesbian sm as transgres-
sive: writers described practitioners as ‘‘radical perverts,’’ ‘‘erotic dissi-
dents,’’ ‘‘heretics,’’ and ‘‘sexual outlaws’’ (Califia 1987, 253, 277; Davis

154 CHAPTER FOUR

1987, 8; Rubin 1987, 226). This transgression, for many of the essayists,
was a response to the vilification of sm practice in both mainstream and
feminist—especially radical feminist—views. For example, Samois’s
statement of purpose read, in part: ‘‘We believe that sadomasochists are
an oppressed sexual minority. Our struggle serves the recognition and
support of other sexual minorities and oppressed groups’’ (quoted in
Rubin 2004, 4). As Ann Ferguson argues, writing in 1984, the ‘‘anti-
prude’’ or ‘‘libertarian’’ feminist position (she cites Rubin and Califia
as examples) celebrates sm as ‘‘oppositional practices’’ that transgress
‘‘socially respectable categories of sexuality’’ (1984, 109). In this argu-
ment, sm is seen to transgress heteronormative, vanilla sexuality as well
as the normative lesbian-feminist sexuality endorsed by anti-sm radical
feminists.
This position is neatly articulated in Gayle Rubin’s classic essay
‘‘Thinking Sex.’’ She writes of the ‘‘charmed circle’’: ‘‘According to this
system, sexuality that is ‘good,’ ‘normal,’ and ‘natural’ should ideally be
heterosexual, marital, monogamous, reproductive, and non-commercial.
It should be coupled, relational, within the same generation, and occur at
home. It should not involve pornography, fetish objects, sex toys of any
sort, or roles other than male or female. Any sex that violates these rules
is ‘bad,’ ‘abnormal,’ or ‘unnatural’ ’’ (1984, 280–81). These rules legiti-
mize some sexualities and delegitimize others; the circle—linking sm
with sex for money, same-sex sex, and cross-generational sex—reflects a
series of binary oppositions that position some sexualities as good and
moral, and others as hated, feared, and policed (sm , here, is opposed to
‘‘vanilla sex’’). Rather than tolerating or accepting ‘‘benign sexual varia-
tion’’ (278), Rubin argues that the social control of sexuality makes sex
and sexual practice ‘‘a vector of oppression’’ (293). Or, as she argues in
her essay in Coming to Power, ‘‘contrary to much of what is said about
straight sm in the feminist press, heterosexual sm is not standard het-
erosexuality’’ because sm practitioners are ‘‘stigmatized’’ and ‘‘perse-
cuted’’ as ‘‘perverts’’ (1987, 221).
Many queer and sexuality studies scholars following Rubin have ar-
gued that sm practice flouts or even subverts gendered norms; others
have argued that sm ’s public performances transgress heteronorma-
tive sociosexual relations (Bauer 2008; Day 1994; Langdridge and Butt
2005; MacKendrick 1999; Reynolds 2007). In the first argument, sm is
understood to disrupt the heterosexual logic that animates sex-gender-

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 sexuality binaries because roles are chosen, rather than naturalized
(based on sexed bodies). This allows practitioners, as Karmen Mac-
Kendrick puts it, to ‘‘destabilize rigidly identified subjectivities’’ because
sm is not limited by gender (as in object choice or sexual identity) but is
instead fluid (1999, 96). Writers drawing on this argument emphasize
sm ’s play with gender norms, the way it can create a space that appears
to avoid ‘‘predefined power relations in regard to gender and sexuality’’
(Bauer 2008, 234; italics in original).
These theorists see sm as subverting gender roles not only through
play but also through reversal; sm ‘‘reverses and transmutes the social
meanings it borrows’’ (McClintock 1993, 89). For McClintock, this re-
versal is based on sm ’s particular ‘‘economy of conversion: slave to mas-
ter, adult to baby, pain to pleasure, man to woman, and back again’’ (87).
In ‘‘playing the world backwards’’ (87, quoting Weinberg and Kamel
1995), sm , McClintock argues, ‘‘inhabits the anomalous, perilous border
between the Platonic theory of catharsis and the Aristotelian theory of
mimesis, neither replicating social power, nor finally subverting it, veer-
ing between polarities, converting scenes of disempowerment into a
staged excess of pleasure, caricaturing social edicts in a sumptuous dis-
play of irreverence’’ (112). Thus, although sm cannot, in the end, disrupt
the social order, or ‘‘finally [step] outside the enchantment of its magic
circle’’ (89), the work it does do—conversion, caricature, transmutation
—comes from the mobilization of crossings, roles that are decoupled
from a sexed (or otherwise imposed) body and instead performed and
enacted. Foucault’s comments are similar: ‘‘the s/m game is very inter-
esting because it is a strategic relation, but it is always fluid. Of course,
there are roles, but everyone knows very well that those roles can be
reversed. Sometimes the scene begins with the master and slave, and at
the end, the slave has become the master’’ ([1984] 1996, 387–88).
Although this perilous border between the real and a role is, indeed,
precisely the problem of sm , these theorists emphasize oppositionality:
role reversals of slave to master, man to woman, and so on.
This analysis is fitting for the heterosexual prodommes and business-
men submissives who are the subjects of McClintock’s essay. Like much
queer work on gender transgression based on Judith Butler (especially
her analysis of drag [1990]), the ability to reverse social power—in
play—is critical to the celebration of such play as transgressive.∑ So, for
example, in some work on butch-femme, butches can seem more trans-

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gressive than femmes because a butch exposes the noncontinuity of
sex and gender (cf. Halberstam 1998; Hollibaugh and Moraga 1992;
Lapovsky-Kennedy and Davis 1993; B. Martin 1994b; Nestle 1992).
This kind of analysis locates the transgression of binary gender roles
(and the system of opposite-sexed bodies—heterosexuality—that ani-
mates these forms) in the figure that most clearly represents the split
between the sexed body and performative gender. In sm , this would
apply to the businessman in bondage or the female top—roles in which
real power and scene power are discordant. And, although important,
this focus can lead to an analysis in which it is the fact of this seeming
discord that produces a political reading—in which crossing itself is
transgressive, irrespective of its material context, audience, or effect
(see also Glick 2000).
I am not arguing that such counternormative scenes are absent from
sm . For example, the First Annual Iron Dom contest that I attended in
March 2003 featured a competition based on the television show Iron
Chef. The organizers gave each top a grab bag containing a two-liter
bottle, a belt, plastic forks, a scrubbing pad, dowels, two potatoes, a
child’s tambourine, an inner tube, socks, a zucchini, tongue depressors, a
lemon reamer, a piece of leather, and a plastic chair mat (with sharp little
prongs on one side).∏ Contestants had two hours to turn the items into
toys; they were then matched with a bottom and given ten minutes to
demonstrate their toys in a scene in front of the large crowd. The tops
(four men and five women) drew the names of their bottoms (four men
and five women) from a hat; the rules specified that ‘‘you do not get to
choose your sub (what if the only sub on the Island were of a non-
appropriate gender?’’). The final couplings included one male top with a
female bottom, one female top with a male bottom, and four all-female
and three all-male couples. The pairs performed very different scenes—
some rough and grunting, some cool and detached, others sly and erotic.
At the end of one scene between a female top and female bottom, the
top, dressed in a girdle, had the naked bottom suck her ‘‘cock’’: a zuc-
chini penis and two potato balls, held together with a dowel. One judge
noted that it was ‘‘great to see a lady in a girdle doing cock worship!’’ The
scene was sexy and cruel; the top had placed the plastic fork on the
bottom’s clavicle, prongs nestled under the woman’s jaw, so that the
bottom couldn’t lower her head during the zucchini fellatio. Displacing
both the fleshly penis and phallic mastery, it is not difficult to analyze

B E YO N D VA N I L L A 157
 these scenes in terms of gender transgression. Taking Butler’s famous
question in Gender Trouble—which possibilities of doing gender ‘‘repeat
and displace through hyperbole, dissonance, internal confusion, and
proliferation the very constructs by which they are mobilized?’’ (1990,
31)—we can read these scenes as displacing gender through reiteration,
illustrating how subjectivity, identity, sex, and gender come together by
performing their coming apart.
But what about a submissive woman, bound and flogged by a male
master? What about sm play that does not entail such oppositional
reversals? A political analysis of sm scenes must be based on the condi-
tions of a performance—its performers, audience, and ideological and
material effects—not its abstracted or formal structure. Otherwise,
such a reading necessarily bifurcates the real (of oppression) and the
performance (of a role). This follows from Foucault’s analysis of sm
politics: ‘‘Even when the roles are stabilized, you know very well that it
is always a game. Either the rules are transgressed, or there is an agree-
ment, either explicit or tacit, that makes [the participants] aware of
certain boundaries’’ ([1984] 1996, 388; see also Plant 2007). These
boundaries produce, for the practitioners I interviewed, the sm space
as a bounded site of personal desire and freely chosen roles. Through
its boundaries, rules, and constructions of consent, the sm community
produces an understanding of sm as a marked-off, delineated space
of play oppositional to and outside of real power—in short, a queer
counterpublic.π
This is the second queer reading of sm : as subversive of—through
public performance or counterpublics—hetero- or vanilla normativity.
For example, Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner conclude their ‘‘Sex in
Public’’ essay with a description of an ‘‘erotic vomiting’’ performance at
a ‘‘garden-variety leather bar’’ (1998, 564). In this performance, they
suggest, ‘‘sex appears more sublime than narration itself, neither re-
demptive nor transgressive, moral nor immoral, hetero nor homo, nor
sutured to any axis of social legitimation.’’ Instead, they write,

in these cases . . . paths through publicity led to the production of non-

heteronormative bodily contexts. They intended nonheteronormative
worlds because they refused to pretend that privacy was their ground;
because they were forms of sociability that un-linked money and family
from the scene of the good life; because they made sex the consequence

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 of public mediations and collective self-activity in a way that made for
unpredicted pleasures; because, in turn, they attempted to make a con-
text of support for their practices; because their pleasures were not
purchased by a redemptive pastoralism of sex, nor by mandatory am-
nesia about failure, shame, and aversion. (565–66)

The oppositionality to heteronormativity is based on a queer counter-

public, a queer world-making project that develops, fosters, and elabo-
rates collective, nonprivatized (publicly accessible), and nonheteronor-
mative intimacies and relations (Berlant and Warner 1998, 558; see also
Muñoz 1999; Rudy 1998; Warner 2002).∫ For these theorists, queer sex,
in combination with the community developed around it, can produce a
sexual and social world that opposes the ‘‘majoritarian public sphere’’
and its gendered and raced relations of heterosexuality (Muñoz 1999).
Before the erotic vomiting scene, however, Berlant and Warner de-
scribe ‘‘riding with a young straight couple we know, in their station
wagon,’’ a couple whose ‘‘reproductivity governs their lives, their aspira-
tions, and their relations to money and entailment, mediating their
relations to everyone and everything else’’ (1998, 564). This couple,
it turns out, has begun experimenting with vibrators, an experiment
that Berlant and Warner describe as ‘‘queer sex practices’’: when they
begin using sex toys, their bodies ‘‘become disorganized and exciting to
them’’ (564). I detail these two examples because they show how work
on queer counterpublics can reaffirm a static hierarchy of sex practices
based on oppositionality. In Berlant and Warner’s essay, the conflict
between a reading of the couple as straight (defined by and through
their heteroreproductivity) versus as queer (via their use of sex toys)
solidifies both the ‘‘queer’’ and the ‘‘counter’’ in this public through a
series of comparative oppositions: erotic vomiting versus hetero-repro-
ductive penis-vagina sex versus using vibrators; male-male bdsm prac-
tice versus straight couples; leather bars versus station wagons. Through
such condensations, internal differentiation within the categories of
hetero and queer—and, most important, the differential relationships
to power held by variously positioned people within these categories—
drops out of the analysis (see also Cohen 1997; R. Ferguson 2004;
Schlichter 2004).
As Biddy Martin argues, this kind of analysis can produce ‘‘superficial
accounts’’ in which ‘‘to be radical is to locate oneself outside or in a

B E YO N D VA N I L L A 159
 transgressive relation to kinship or community’’ (1994a, 123), a queer
counterpublic opposed to a rather undifferentiated mainstream public.
For Martin, this ‘‘radical anti-normativity and a romantic celebration of
queerness or homo-ness’’ posits ‘‘the very demise of current forms of
societalization’’ (123)—a constitutive outside seen, in different ways, in
queer antisocial arguments (Bersani 1995 and 1987; Edelman 2004).Ω
Beyond the ‘‘romance’’ in this construction, however, is a tautological
argument in which both queer (as oppositional to heteronormative) and
counterpublic (as oppositional to normative public) function with prior
political designations: we know what heteronormative is, and thus its
opposite queer; and thus all queer sex practices are oppositional to
heteronormative social institutions.
In this analysis, as Tom Boellstorff notes, queer studies can veer into
‘‘a self-congratulatory exercise where the cast of characters is settled
and the conclusion known in advance’’ (2007, 15). These analyses risk
this a priori politicization precisely where they contrast an almost im-
possibly straight world—the mainstream public and its social norms
and institutions—with an expanding set of queer counterpublics pro-
duced through sexual practice. As Warner, for example, writes, sexual
practice produces some heterosexual people as queer; prostitutes and
leatherfolk are his key examples, although ‘‘fairly conventional hetero-
sexual married couples’’ who ‘‘find they enjoy anal play, sex toys, sex in
public places, sadomasochism, etcetera’’ are also included (1999, 37).
Categorizing sexual practices in this way both requires and produces an
oppositional relationship between queer and heteronormative, resis-
tant and consolidating, counterpublics and straight society.
This oppositionality is more challenging to sustain when there is no
clear discordance between sm and ‘‘standard’’ heterosexuality, as, in-
deed, is often the case in the pansexual community. For example, among
the practitioners I interviewed, the majority of heterosexual couples
were male dominant/female submissive.∞≠ Although most people I spoke
with insisted that there is no necessary relationship between gender and
sm role—that anyone can be submissive or dominant—Hailstorm ex-
plains: ‘‘The typical breakdown is male top and female bottom; that’s
mostly what you see. You do see some female top/male bottom. It’s
out there, but it’s not as common. Male subs do not have a lot of re-
spect in the community, for whatever reason.’’ Although almost every-
one will immediately point out that so-and-so is a female dominant, or

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so-and-so is a male submissive, my observation in the pansexual sm
scene supported this generalization: most male/female couples are male
dominant/female submissive.∞∞
Furthermore, rather than reporting a scene free of gendered assump-
tions, many practitioners complained about sexism in the scene. Some
explained that male submissives are sometimes treated with scorn;
women of all sm orientations reported that some men assume they
must be submissive. Lenora and Gretchen both told me that others have
accused them of not being ‘‘real submissives,’’ or have expressed sur-
prise about their sm orientation because they have strong opinions and
are articulate and socially assertive—or, as Lenora puts it, ‘‘basically
because I’m not a doormat.’’ These assumptions are also racialized; Bon-
nie explained: ‘‘[As an Asian American,] I get a lot of men talking to me
as if I’m supposed to be quiet and submissive, and I’m not necessarily
quiet nor submissive; that can be really frustrating. Or people brushing
me off because I happen to be female, even.’’ These assumptions rest on
a supposed congruence between the sexed body and the sm role—on
naturalized gender. For example, Don, simultaneously distancing him-
self from and endorsing the assumption that women are naturally sub-
missive and men naturally dominant, told me that ‘‘if you walk[ed] into
the Castlebar on the night of a party and you stripped everybody naked
so nobody had collars on or wore their floggers . . . the vast majority of
the people there would assume that men are tops and women are bot-
toms. It’s just the way it usually plays out. There are notable exceptions
on both sides, lots of beautiful bottom boys, lots of really interesting
top women. But, you know, stereotypes and generalizations exist for
some purpose. So the sexism itself might come . . . if a woman walked
in clothed but not wearing a collar and a stereotypical heterosexual
dominant male were to notice her: he would probably assume she was
submissive because she was female.’’ It is not only that the sm scene
reflects—especially for heterogendered couples—normative gendered
arrangements, but also that sexism is not a phenomenon located safely
outside the scene. Rather, sm both requires and reproduces these social
relations of inequality.
This analysis relies on Butler’s reading of the productivity of social
norms, with one crucial departure. Butler argues: ‘‘The category of ‘sex’
is, from the start, normative; it is what Foucault has called a ‘regulatory
ideal.’ In this sense, then, ‘sex’ not only functions as a norm, but is part

B E YO N D VA N I L L A 161
 of a regulatory practice that produces the bodies it governs, whose
regulatory force is made clear as a kind of productive power, the power
to produce—demarcate, circulate, differentiate—the bodies it controls.
Thus, ‘sex’ is a regulatory ideal whose materialization is compelled, and
this materialization takes place (or fails to take place) through cer-
tain highly regulated practices’’ (1993, 1). ‘‘Sex’’ has, as Butler puts it,
‘‘the power to produce’’ bodies and subjects through social regulation—
somewhat rigid ideological structures that compel recognizable per-
formances of sexed body/gender/sexuality, which then form the basis
for subjectivity. In this way, these practices are densely social. In Butler’s
work, intelligibility provides a horizon of recognition for subjectivity
itself, within which all subjects are either recognizable or unrecogniz-
able as subjects (2005, 17–18). These norms are contextual, social,
variable; even as sex-gender-sexuality assumes structural force and
coherence through heteronormativity, it is only in particular perfor-
mances that these norms are produced and reproduced. In this way,
social norms are critical to subjectification: subjects are produced by
social norms, and the performativity of this production reproduces so-
cial norms.
This understanding provides one way to think about the coherence
and productive intelligibility of social norms within the sm scene. Yet, as
Saba Mahmood points out in her graceful critique of Butler, within much
feminist and queer work following Gender Trouble (1990) and Bodies That
Matter (1993), performances are read as either solidifying or eroding
social norms. Mahmood observes that Butler not only privileges those
moments when norms are resignified or subverted (a point also made by
Glick 2000; McKenzie 2001; and Morris 1995), but also that Butler’s
‘‘analysis of the power of norms remains grounded in an agonistic frame-
work, one in which norms suppress and/or are subverted, are reiterated
and/or resignified’’ (Mahmood 2004, 22).∞≤ The focus on discord be-
tween the sexed body and performed gender not only reproduces a poli-
tics of oppositionality based on visibility or discordance between fig-
ure and ground, but it also requires and produces an opposition between
the safe/queer/counterpublic and the hegemonic/heteronormative/
public, the ssc scene world and the oppressive real world.
Instead, and following Mahmood’s turn to Foucault’s techniques of
the self, I explore the much more mundane, and more common, work of
normative embodiment. This kind of work on the self—the cultivation,

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monitoring, and transformation of the self as an ‘‘object of knowledge
and a field of action’’ (Foucault [1984] 1988, 42)—focuses attention
on performance less as a subversion of social norms and more as the
norm’s embodiment: the ways social norms are ‘‘lived and inhabited,
aspired to, reached for, and consummated’’ (Mahmood 2004, 23). Em-
bodiment, as Mahmood argues, does not take the body as a ‘‘signifying
medium,’’ but rather ‘‘as a tool or developable means through which
certain kinds of ethical and moral capabilities are attained . . . the
process by which an experienced body is produced and an embodied
subject is formed’’ (2001, 844). This analysis extends Butler’s under-
standing of social norms as the necessary ground for the production of
the subject toward the lived embodiment of social norms themselves.
This is not, to be sure, the radical feminist argument: that there is
nothing but social power endlessly replicated, internalized, and repro-
duced.∞≥ Nor does it rely on the creation of a safe, bracketed space of
play, a space where real-world inequality can be set aside, played with,
rebelled against, or parodied. Instead, rather than continue this binary
debate between the performative transgression and the performative
production of material inequality, I turn to other relationships between
privilege and social power produced in these scenes. An emphasis on the
anxiety and ambivalence with which many of my interviewees expressed
the overly close resemblance between their scene role and their ‘‘real
life’’ role shows how neoliberal ideologies actively encourage practi-
tioners to position themselves vis-à-vis community and social norms, at
the same time that such performances produce community. The debates
over the generative role of oppression or power in sm begin to reveal
how the sm community imagines a split between real power and play
power along private and public lines, and how this split further produces
the ambivalent politics of sm play.

EMBODYING SOCIAL NORMS FREEDOM, CHOICE, AND GENDER

The political problem of sm —whether it is feminist or antifeminist,

how or whether to politicize sexuality, how to describe the relationship
between the personal and the social—has received the most attention
from feminist theory. But this problem is not only theoretical; for sm
practitioners of all (political and sexual) orientations, these questions
remain vital. Many people with whom I spoke—male-, female-, and

B E YO N D VA N I L L A 163
 trans-identified—experienced difficulty trying to reconcile their (often
feminist) politics and their sm practice. And, as they narrated stories of
reconciliation, they relied on, and simultaneously constructed, the con-
cepts of choice and freedom as freedom from social norms. As I will show,
this tension between public politics and private practice is often re-
solved through a fantasized split between the ‘‘real world’’ of power and
sm as a pretend game. Critically interrogating the creation of these
divisions between inside and outside the scene illuminates the way the
sm community stands within and in relation to—not magically or ro-
mantically outside—social inequality and hierarchy. Indeed, it is pre-
cisely the ways in which practitioners navigate and produce a split be-
tween real and fantasy, coerced and freely chosen, and replication and
subversion that reproduces the divide between compelled social norms
and performative, consensual selves—public and private—that lies at
the heart of neoliberal cultural formations.
Critical to contemporary sm , as I have discussed above, is the concept
of consent, with its liberal understanding of free choice. Guides, essays,
and analysis intended for the pansexual community emphasize that sm
is a consensual fantasy. For example, William Henkin and Sybil Holiday
begin the ‘‘Myths, Fears and Stereotypes’’ section of Consensual Sado-
masochism: How to Talk about It and How to Do It Safely by explaining
that ‘‘sm does not necessarily replicate reality’’ (1996, 33). They go on
to discuss the nature of consent, stressing that consensuality is one of
the fundamental principles of sm . Similarly, the majority of my inter-
viewees resolved any potential conflict between feminism and bdsm
with a liberal analysis, arguing that sm is consensual, that sm practices
and roles are freely chosen, and that sm is empowering, and thus com-
patible with feminism. Teramis, for example, tells me:

I see no conflict at all between being a slave and being a feminist. Slave is
about choice. Feminism is about choice. That’s what makes me happy,
you know, that’s that. So to me the whole issue boils down to something
that’s very simple in that regard, and I don’t have to tear my hair over it
and go through all the gyrations to come to terms with it. I feel sorry for
women who do—for some people it seems to be a big hurdle. Also, I
think it’s easier when you’re gay because in my little world paradigm, if
somebody’s beating someone else in a kinky scene, it’s a woman beating
on a woman. I don’t [feel] I’ve sold out to the patriarchy because I’m

164 CHAPTER FOUR

 letting my husband beat me. It’s a nonissue. We both chose to do the
kinky thing: I like to be the catcher, you like to be the pitcher, and we’re
both happy.

Teramis’s response is interesting in that she is simultaneously arguing

for free choice (as the definition of feminism), and noting that this
freedom to choose might be more of a problem for women in heterosex-
ual sm relationships, where relations of inequality might be more fixed
or rigid.
For women who play with men, however, choice was similarly fore-
grounded. Gretchen told me that, while she doesn’t experience any per-
sonal anxiety over feminist politics and being a bottom, her best friend, a
lesbian, wanted her to ‘‘turn the tables’’ and top the men with whom she
was playing. She explained: ‘‘I was having all these really wonderful
experiences and I was exactly where I wanted to be—which was on the
bottom—and there didn’t seem to be any conflict for me . . . but for her
it was really important . . . not letting a man have power over you.’’
Gretchen dismissed this concern: ‘‘If I have a choice about it, then it’s not
really about ‘you’re a man and I’m a woman’ . . . [If] I’m choosing to do the
submission thing, it’s not that I’m making myself less powerful or less of
a whole person.’’ Similarly, Lenora compared her 24/7 (full-time) D/s
relationship with her male partner to a ‘‘traditional fifties marriage,’’
where the wife was ‘‘obedient’’ and the ‘‘roles were defined.’’ When I
asked for clarification, she replied: ‘‘The main difference would be the
choosing. Nothing is happening because of society’s prescribed roles. We
have said we want this to be this way and that to be that way. I’m very
big on choice and on personal accountability.’’ ‘‘Choice’’ and ‘‘personal
accountability’’ in these narratives operate to ensure that the fact that
Lenora’s and Gretchen’s relationship dynamics appear to echo norma-
tive gender roles does not mean that their relationships are actually
based on social norms of gender. For these women, and many others,
ssc sm (based on consent and free choice) is enough to make sm femi-
nist, or at least make sm —in particular, female submission—politically
neutral.
Like choice, many practitioners understood freedom within a liberal
framework: subjects as rational agents who exercise free will and free
choice. Vicki—a white, lesbian dominant in her early fifties—explained
when I asked her about consent: ‘‘I was taught to follow very closely the

B E YO N D VA N I L L A 165
 precepts that are in the Bill of Rights that formed this country. So, for
example, there are people out there who do some really strange things in
the bdsm world. My reaction to that is: I don’t want to know, but
everybody there agrees they are consenting, they are able to consent,
[so] I’m happy, let them have fun.’’ Later she said:

Let’s say I went over and tied a girl up on that table over there. These
people [other people in the cafe] didn’t consent, but my freedom of
expression is protected in the Constitution. Let’s pretend that this is a
public place, not a private restaurant. Let’s say it’s out in a public street.
I have the right to express myself. She has the right to be expressed on,
whereas other people have a right not to know. As adults . . . the solution
is very simple: the people who don’t want to know, don’t look. You’re
looking this way and go, ‘‘Oh, I don’t want to see that.’’ Don’t look this
way. Now, as adults, she and I should figure out we shouldn’t do this
every day at noon when people are going out to lunch. We need to be
courteous toward people who don’t want to see that but do want to go
out to lunch.

This argument brings liberal humanist and free-market libertarian con-

ceptions of personal responsibility, choice, freedom, and individual
agency together with a strict opposition between public/political and
private/domestic spheres.∞∂ For Vicki, consent must be negotiated be-
tween sm practitioners and an audience, each of whom is an indepen-
dent stakeholder. This construction of a subject who makes free, indi-
vidual choices relies on a separation between the private and public
spheres—where all private (coded as consensual) decisions have no ef-
fect on others or on the social world, and where lone individuals make
rational choices based on maximizing personal freedom. In other words,
the emphasis on consent, negotiation, and free choice on which this
defense of sm relies—in ideological opposition to the radical feminist
critique—produces an unbreechable boundary between the private, con-
sensual scene and the public, social world.
Further, this reconfiguring of the public and the private recasts the
private as the space of authenticity, of freedom and choice, and the
public as the space of control, of inauthenticity, of oppressive norms
and values. Here again sexuality is critical, since, as Singer argues, sex-
uality ‘‘has already been constructed as that which is or belongs to the
realm of the private, i.e., opposed to the social’’ (1993, 59). Singer links

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this situation—in which desire produces the individuation of pleasures;
individuals expect fulfillment in the private, not the public, realm; and
change or something like politics is grounded in the individual, not in
social relations or institutions—to both neoliberalism and late capital-
ism. The construction of one’s identity as a private matter works to
ensure the reproduction of unequal social relations with ‘‘a minimum of
capital or social investment’’ (59). Or, as Berlant and Warner argue, US
‘‘citizens have been led through heterosexual culture to identify both
themselves and their politics with privacy. In the official public, this
involves making sex private . . . replacing state mandates for social
justice with a privatized ethics of responsibility, charity, atonement,
and ‘values’; and enforcing boundaries between moral persons and eco-
nomic ones’’ (1998, 553–54; see also Berlant 1997; Duggan 2003).
Conjoining social norms and capitalist social relations, this dynamic
relies on neoliberal cultural conceptions of freedom, choice, and privacy
to both justify and help reproduce this formation. Key to this is the
figuration of the individual as free within that subject’s private space—
which also, as I will show, works to justify certain forms of privilege in
the name of self-empowerment and self-improvement. In these narra-
tives, reconciliation takes place when practitioners solidly locate bdsm
practice in a private, apolitical, and asocial space of personal desire and
use neoliberal rationalities to justify this retreat from a shared social
and political landscape.
Other practitioners, however, found such reconciliations more diffi-
cult; this was especially true for those who strongly identified as femi-
nist. For these practitioners, reconciliation took the form of an em-
powerment story; their narratives detailed how they came to terms with
their identities and eventually arrived at personal freedom. Although
this argument similarly emphasizes self-determination and liberal un-
derstandings of consent and personal freedom, it also understands sex-
uality as bound up in politics, sociality, and power. For example, Dylan
argues against what she describes as the ‘‘lesbian-feminist nonpenetra-
tion, no sex’’ version of ‘‘good’’ sex: ‘‘It’s so judgmental and oppressive in
and of itself, and it’s not allowing the person a choice.’’ Dylan’s compli-
cated navigation of ‘‘choice’’ is instructive. She explains that she was
able to wear lingerie and ‘‘be sexy in the bedroom’’ with her male part-
ner only after she had dated women: ‘‘When I started dating women, it
was my choice. I found out how much I liked it just for me and how

B E YO N D VA N I L L A 167
 much it was my thing. And so now I can come back to a relationship with
a guy and wear lingerie and do things and not at all feel that kind of
oppression.’’ Dylan’s narrative simultaneously relies on a construction
of free choice and acknowledges that these choices are not free from
gender as a social form. Describing how she plays differently with men
than women, she explains that although Daddy/little girl play is her
‘‘favorite thing’’: ‘‘With a guy, there’s a certain reality to it. So that is a
lot more playing with fire, I think, but it’s also less appealing. The whole
Daddy/little girl thing with women has a different background to it
than it does with men, and it has a different connotation.’’
This ‘‘different connotation’’ is the social force of gender norms and
roles, the ‘‘reality’’ that Dylan simultaneously recognizes and would like
to avoid. Her narration shows that gender and power permeate desire,
identification, and power exchange in ways beyond the control of an
individual, articulated most strongly at precisely the moments when the
individual imagines herself to be free from these norms. Similarly, KB—a
white, het/bi prodomme in her late fifties—tells me: ‘‘when I was in the
het community, I felt ashamed to bottom.’’ She ‘‘didn’t like the certain
rigid roles and stereotypes’’ about submissive women and dominant
men. For KB, ‘‘a lot of the het men and het women . . . tend to have this
one channel [tuned] to the heterosexual way to do it. Sometimes it
pushed really horrible buttons: this is the heterosexual society, and its
value system [sucks].’’ The homophobia, sexism, and ageism KB recounts
is, as she comments, ‘‘what we all—what I was born into and wanted to
walk out of,’’ not re-experience in the bdsm scene. KB found ‘‘the het
scene’’ of the Backdrop club ‘‘very limiting. It was like staying in kinder-
garten, whereas going into this other scene [the gay men’s and pansexual
early Janus scene] was like grades one through—it seemed endless,’’ a
‘‘way to get out of’’ heteronormativity. These responses highlight the
enmeshment of desire and erotics within social relations, even as they
also cast individuals as navigating such norms with agency. Rather than
deny that sexual desires are formed from social relations of inequality,
these practitioners map out the complicated ways that sm both relies on
and re-encodes relations between sex, gender, and sexuality.
Some women told me that it was much harder to ‘‘come to grips,’’ as
Gretchen puts it, with their submissiveness than it was with their mas-
ochism.∞∑ Masochism—a technique of the body—is, in some ways, safer
(to norms of gender, at least) than explicit power play is. Gretchen

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explains that, when she began playing with submission, she wanted to
do resistance or takedown play: ‘‘I think that there’s something about
projecting your desires on somebody else and letting them be respon-
sible for them that’s comfortable.’’ Gretchen describes coming to terms
with her submission as a ‘‘progression’’ and ‘‘part of a journey towards
self-mastering’’ when she started to ‘‘admit that this is something that
[she wanted] and that [she] could choose’’ for herself. This ‘‘journey,’’ as
I described in chapter 2, is part of the way sm practitioners become
practitioners through techniques of the self, through modulating, refin-
ing, and developing their own sense of themselves as practitioners.
Chris, for example, a dominant man with a ‘‘strong feminist’’ submis-
sive partner, told me that they both struggled with the sense that bdsm
was politically wrong. He explains: ‘‘I think that she has some demons
around that to get worked out and I have some demons around—I like
hurting people, and how can somebody actually respect me when they
know that about me? And she loves me completely with just an amaz-
ingly powerful love and yet I—there’s still a part of me that can’t quite
figure it out. That is, I’m still conditioned to think that that part of me is
wrong.’’ Chris had what he describes as a ‘‘huge breakthrough’’ when he
realized that ‘‘there’s a way of holding this all, that you can kind of do
some real alchemy and make it very empowering, very empowering and
very pleasurable and fulfilling . . . of course, as long as it’s consensual.’’
For Chris, because the power dynamics in sm are consensual, they
are freely chosen; sm can be empowering to individuals through self-
actualization and cultivation with, not in opposition to, norms.
These subjects are forged and remake themselves through the em-
bodiment of various social norms, not through their internalization (à
la radical feminism) or their subversion (à la queer transgression). This
kind of embodiment requires self-cultivation, but—especially for those
whose sm roles match social norms of gender—navigating these norms
produces anxiety. For example, Carrie also describes her difficulty ‘‘com-
ing to grips’’ with her submission, because of the similarities between
submission in the scene and vanilla femininity: ‘‘Part of me still thinks
it’s wrong . . . it still feels shameful . . . In my vanilla neighborhood life I
am in charge of the house, I’m in charge of some of the school events.
I’m in charge of my work, my massage therapy . . . I have to be very
strong and independent and [a] businesswoman and all that. So recon-
ciling that with . . . this other part of me who . . . doesn’t want to be in

B E YO N D VA N I L L A 169
 control, who wants to have somebody else tell me what to do . . . I kept
thinking to myself, ‘How can I?’ ’’ Carrie’s shame points to an anxiety
that being submissive or bottoming to men reinforces the gendered
roles and stereotypes that she spends much of her vanilla life combat-
ing. But rather than viewing Carrie as either a dupe of gender or, via her
sm practice, as standing radically outside normative gendering, focus-
ing on this anxiety or ambivalence reveals that social norms are per-
formed, inhabited, and experienced in what are often politically ambiva-
lent ways (Mahmood 2004; see also Muñoz’s [1999] understanding of
‘‘disidentification’’).
Understanding sex as a form of biopower enables us to see how
subjects form and work on themselves in relation to social norms of
gender, race, and sexuality, while moments of ambivalence and anxiety
show us some of the places where these constellations generate conflict.
For the remainder of this chapter, I focus on two practitioners who do
not appear immediately transgressive: two white, heterosexual, male
dominants I interviewed, J. and Paul. Their narratives illuminate how,
on the one hand, resisting social norms (of white privilege, hetero-
normativity, and sexism) can produce a narrative of self-empowerment
and, on the other hand, how such freedom to sidestep or remake oppres-
sive social norms relies on precisely these forms of privilege.

J. AND PAUL WHITENESS, MASCULINITY, HETEROSEXUALITY

J., a man who had been involved with left-wing politics in the 1970s,
and Paul, a political theorist informed by feminist and postcolonial
theory, both told me that they had difficulty resolving their feminism
and their dominance. J. told me: ‘‘[I] had a lot of internalized values
around the feminist critique and tried to live my life accordingly.’’ In this
analysis, polarized power dynamics were unacceptable, and so J.’s sm
fantasies ‘‘went underground.’’ When he met a woman who wanted him
to dominate her, ‘‘it was a crisis of identity’’ as well as a ‘‘crisis between
feminist values and my personal and internal values of wanting to play
this role.’’ In this relationship, J. explains how he felt: ‘‘externally I was
this feminist man, but internally and in secret, I was playing with s&m .’’
Paul also described this sense of having a secret, unacceptable fantasy
life. As he was coming out as an sm practitioner, Paul had ‘‘incredible
guilt about trying to reconcile being a sadist and having been raised as a

170 CHAPTER FOUR

feminist man.’’ Paul said: ‘‘[It took more than ten years] to make my
politics and my libido fit together because in my mind for a long time, I
felt like one or the other had to go. I couldn’t reconcile being a dominant
male sadist and being a feminist. It just seemed like I was living this lie.’’
He continued: ‘‘I’m not asking for anyone to cry tears for us or anything,
but there’s a problem with being a sort of sensitive guy who nonetheless
has very serious feelings of sexual dominance and sadism, yet being
someone who’s been raised . . . feminist and who doesn’t want to sort of
act like that. It’s tricky.’’
For both J. and Paul, the conflict between feminism and dominance
or sadism was cast in terms of a crisis between political commitments
and personal desires, between a social good and individual pleasure. In
these terms, being a male dominant feminist was impossible: the reso-
lution of the conflict between the political/social and the personal/
individual was to abandon either the political (feminism) or the per-
sonal (male dominance); otherwise, one had to ‘‘live a lie.’’ Paul and J.
resolved their crises differently.
Once J. found the sm community and began learning its values and
norms, he started to reconfigure his feminism from a radical critique of
patriarchy to a more liberal feminism that focuses on ‘‘liberating our-
selves from our traditional ways of having sex . . . and allow[ing] women
to choose their sexuality.’’∞∏ Critical to this shift was a valuation of the
consciousness and consent of sm dynamics within the ssc community.
J. explained: ‘‘Once I learned about the community, the community’s
values, the consciousness that goes into this, I came to a place where I
can go, ‘Oh, so if I have a partner who’s consenting to this, who enjoys
this, who finds it tantalizing, then I’m not violating her.’ Then what I’m
willing to do is engage in a sexual play, a role play that is comfortable for
both of us. So we’re pretending to be doing this rape thing, but what
we’re doing is we’re connecting in a sexually particular way.’’ Having
established this redefinition of value and ethics, J. began to see sm as
not only acceptable, but empowering for women:

There’s actually more equality and more consciousness brought to

[bdsm ] sexuality than most relationships ever have, because people are
talking about what their needs are. They’re talking about their desires.
They’re talking about their fantasies. They’re talking about their limits,
and they bring that all into the sexual or relationship experience and

B E YO N D VA N I L L A 171
 that allows for [a] greater level of actual equality. Even if it’s a tradi-
tional male top/female bottom, I think the female is still more em-
powered than she would be in a standard heterosexual relationship be-
cause her desires and wants are more clearly identified and talked about
and expressed than her [non-sm ] sexual relationships ever are, and
because there’s so much more consciousness brought to that process.

J.’s story points to anxiety about the interconnections between the social
world and one’s interior sexual/psychic world. Yet his reconciliation en-
tailed a shift from a radical feminism to a liberal feminism, resolving this
conflict through an emphasis on free choice, self-awareness, and self-
empowerment in accordance with neoliberal rationalities.
This resolution recreates a binary between the social or political
sphere and the private, personal sphere. Insisting on individual agency,
self-mastering, and personal freedom, J.’s self-cultivation and political
process entails severing the relationship between his sm play in the
consensual community and larger social systems of inequality. For J.,
the fantasy of consensuality and freely chosen sexual roles is critical to
an eventual resolution (even if only partial) between feminist politics
and bdsm practices in the shift from radical to liberal feminism. In this,
he is aided by community discourse on the scene as a safe space of con-
sensual desires and private exploration, along with liberal feminism’s
emphasis on the personal rights of the individual (not the good of
society), individual agency (not the structuring structure of patriarchy),
and free choice (not false consciousness). In this way, liberal feminism
corresponds to both a free-market ideology and a particularly American
emphasis on individualism, personal agency, and freedom.
However, this resolution also depends on the coconstruction of gen-
der with race, sexuality, and social power. Individualism and choice are
not equally available across the social landscape, but rather are tied to
the particular ways that masculinity and heterosexuality intersect with
whiteness. In an era of what Howard Winant calls the ‘‘neoliberal racial
project’’ (1997, 45), racial discourse focuses on individual agency and
bars a consideration of larger social structures. As George Lipsitz notes,
this project figures race as the ‘‘sum total of conscious and deliberative
individual activities,’’ as ‘‘individual manifestations of personal preju-
dice and hostility. Systematic, collective, and coordinated group behav-
ior consequently drops out of sight’’ (2006, 20). The emphasis on indi-

172 CHAPTER FOUR

viduality reinforces, by both justifying and concealing, an investment in
whiteness as a material, structural, and economic advantage (see also
Wiegman 1999; Winant 1997). In other words, neoliberalism as ra-
tionality guides practitioners in thinking about the sm community as a
safe space unrelated to and disconnected from material reality or social
norms—a space where, crucially, an individual’s social location (as a
white, heterosexual man) has nothing to do with racism, heteronorma-
tivity, or sexism as intersecting institutionalized systems of inequality.
These intersections create opportunities for some to feel empow-
ered, to remake themselves, as precisely the normative subjects of
bdsm community. Like a focus on the agentic individual, an emphasis
on choice can obscure the larger social dynamics of racial inequality.
During a dialogue about race and sm in Against Sadomasochism, Rose
Mason notes that the ability to play with power inequality itself betrays
racial privilege: ‘‘How dare you take the privilege at my expense. I’ve
never had a choice as to whether I want to deal with power issues around
my life. And there are white women in the movement who are very
unaware that that’s what it is, that it is a privilege that goes along with
your skin color, being able to make that choice and then to make it in a
decadent way is disgusting’’ (Sims and Mason 1982, 103). This resis-
tance to liberal ideology suggests not only that social positionality mat-
ters (‘‘choice’’ plays out differently for those with and without racial
privilege), but that the construction of ‘‘race play’’ as choice itself relies
on racial privilege. McClintock notes: ‘‘Privileged groups can, on occa-
sion, display their privilege precisely by the extravagant display of their
right to ambiguity . . . In short, the staging of symbolic disorder by the
privileged can merely preempt challenges by those who do not possess
the power to stage ambiguity with comparable license or authority’’
(1995, 68–69; italics in original). Here, the very rhetoric of choice not
only displays privilege, it also allows people with privilege (of race, class,
or gender) to sidestep the fact that they are beneficiaries of that privi-
lege, to position themselves as lone individuals, outside of the material
relations of power that give form to both privilege and oppression,
opportunity and constraint.
In contrast, Paul’s commitment to feminist theory precluded this
resolution. Paul told me that when he read Coming to Power it was the
first time he thought that there might be ‘‘ways that one can reconcile
this kind of libido with that kind of politics,’’ although he remained well

B E YO N D VA N I L L A 173
 aware that, as a white, male dominant, he was not in the same position
as a leatherdyke. Paul also struggled with his attraction to ‘‘more darkly
complected’’ women: not only did he want to dominate women, he
wanted to dominate nonwhite women. He explained: ‘‘Of course, for me,
it wasn’t that I wanted to cause pain to someone who looked like that
[wasn’t white]; it was that I was attracted to these types of people and
when I’m attracted to someone and get intimate with them, these are
the sorts of things psychosexually that excite me.’’ But Paul was also
aware that ‘‘you can’t just divorce your own desires’’ from a patriarchal,
imperialist, racist history.
Paul’s comments are provocative because they draw attention to the
ways in which race and gender—whiteness and masculinity as forms of
domination—structure our ‘‘private’’ desires. Further, they emphasize
how this split between the outside of power and the inside of desire is
produced. Paul explained:

All my life as far back as I can remember . . . my primary attraction to

women has always been to women who are more darkly complected
than I am . . . It caused me years and years and years of very serious
conflict . . . I have this part of my sexuality that—and I know I went to
the capital of pc dom in the world, [uc ] Santa Cruz in the eighties—it
was really hard if you take feminism at all seriously as I do and did then,
to reconcile. People in the scene are kind of quick, just like Americans
everywhere, kind of quick to try and eliminate disturbing ambiguities
and dichotomies and to resolve it into binary oppositions and choose
the good one, right? And I went through this myself, for years and
years—and I mean literally like ten years—I thought that I had to either
choose my libido or my politics because they seemed to be antagonistic.

Paul first split apart what he calls his ‘‘guilt on the one hand and de-
sire on the other’’—politics and libido—and could not ‘‘choose the
good one.’’
But, he continued, ‘‘it would be foolish for me and intellectually
dishonest to deny there is something about the fact that I am a hetero-
sexual white man [that] has something to do with my object choices,’’
and further, that ‘‘my identity as a hetero white man is part of being able
to fulfill that role [as ‘the historical oppressor’] in the scene.’’ Instead, he
explained, ‘‘I think people in the scene are much too fast to wash that

174 CHAPTER FOUR

away and say ‘Well, you know as long as everybody consents and as long
as you’ve actually thought about it, then it’s all okay.’ No, it’s really not
because it’s foolish . . . and dishonest to deny [that] the social identities
of the people involved in an interaction like that are massively impor-
tant and present, and I don’t think—no matter what anybody says they
can do—I just don’t believe that you can wash that out. So I think it’s
always present when I’m playing with someone who is not white.’’ As an
antiracist white man, Paul is avoiding the kinds of moves facilitated by
neoliberal whiteness. This is not to say that antiracist whites do not
receive the material benefits of whiteness, but rather that Paul’s words
help us understand what Winant calls ‘‘white racial dualism’’: the ‘‘con-
tradictory, as well as confused and anxiety-ridden’’ current situation of
white identity, as a result of the continuing ‘‘deep structures of white
privilege’’ combined with antiracist aspirations (1997, 41). This ‘‘dual-
ism’’ is reflected in Paul’s reference to ‘‘guilt’’ and ‘‘desire’’: a toggling
between the social (site of oppression) and the individual (site of per-
sonal desire) that showcases some of the unresolved contradictions of
whiteness as racialization. As Winant argues, the disavowal of white
supremacy and concomitant commitment to formal equality is, itself, a
product of neoliberal racial projects (see also Omi and Winant 1994).
The dualism and internal ambivalence of masculinity is also critical
to these narratives. For example, Paul described ‘‘two archetypes of male
dominance’’ in the scene: the ‘‘hairy caveman guy, the brute who will
sort of grab you by the hair and just have his way with you, a sort of
ravishment,’’ and ‘‘the cold, steely, icy, controlling, domineering dom
who is emotionally unavailable.’’ He continued: ‘‘I’ve spoken with a num-
ber of other hetero men here in the San Francisco scene who feel like we
don’t really fit’’ because, for Paul, ‘‘that’s never going to be [him].’’ Paul
described himself as too ‘‘emotionally labile’’ to be properly dominant;
he told me, ‘‘sometimes I feel like I’m pretending’’ when he claims he is a
male dominant.
These models of heterosexual male dominance in the scene clearly
reflect ‘‘real world’’ social norms of gender, norms that are racialized as
well as thoroughly heterosexual. Paul went on: ‘‘A lot of derision is
correctly heaped upon men who have a very narrow idea of what they
are looking for in a submissive: ‘I want a large-breasted blonde with
an iq measurable in the low double digits who calls me master and

B E YO N D VA N I L L A 175
 has dinner ready for me.’ Those of us in the scene laugh at guys like
that . . . they’re jokes, they’re pathetic. They’re out there, but no one
takes them seriously. I wish that there was the same kind of derision
cast upon women who want to look at men in a similarly stereotyped
way.’’ For Paul, it is the heterosexual woman’s demand for these types of
men—types that are not only socially normative but erotic—that drives
the reproduction of ‘‘narrow’’ ideas of masculinity. sm forms of white
heterosexual male dominance promise the deep satisfaction of the ful-
fillment of these polarized roles—dashing men, strong men, cold men,
withholding men—while simultaneously producing fantasies of mas-
culinity that many—or even all—men could never embody. As Homi
Bhabha argues, masculinity is mired in ‘‘compulsion and doubt’’ (1995,
59); its essence is an ‘‘ambivalent identification’’ with and against the
universal and natural (58). For Bhabha, this is psychoanalytic; ‘‘anxiety,’’
he reminds us, ‘‘is a ‘sign’ of a danger implicit in/on the threshold of
identity, in between its claims to coherence and its fears of dissolution’’
(60). What Bhabha terms ‘‘anxious ambivalence’’ (60) is a product of
masculinity’s complicated relationship to both ‘‘personal and institu-
tional power’’ (Berger, Wallis, and Watson 1995, 3), an ambivalence
marked by the awkward—both desired and disavowed—relationship of
masculinity to domination.
In this dynamic, the hmd is opposed to the white heterosexual sub-
missive man, who, in some way, disavows his very masculinity. Stephanie
and Anthony, both dominants, discuss prejudice toward submissives,
Stephanie arguing that being submissive is ‘‘equated with weakness.’’
Unlike the assumptions made about dominants (or in contrast to the
lack of pathologizing assumptions made about dominants), people in the
scene assume that there must be ‘‘some reason’’ for being submissive,
reasons that Anthony elaborates as ‘‘you’re fat or you were abused as a
child . . . or there’s something missing or there’s something that’s not
quite right . . . or that you can’t say no.’’ Although Stephanie and Anthony
intend their comments to refer to men and women, as Stephanie con-
tinues, her example is of a male submissive: ‘‘There are all sorts of—
you’re right—this pathologizing thing, ‘Well, why would he want to do
this? Why would he want to crawl around on his hands and knees and
kiss the feet of this woman and have his dick chained or something?
What kind of man would want to do that sort of thing?’ ’’ The implicit
answer, of course, is that the kind of man who might be submissive isn’t a

176 CHAPTER FOUR

real man, isn’t a masculine man. There is nothing ‘‘wrong’’ with a woman
who enjoys submission (and it is this that disturbs feminist, submissive
women). However, a submissive man risks his masculinity.
In part, this assumption is based on the linking of the abject position
—submissive—with women, although it also reflects the fear/disavowal
of homosexuality that forms the basis of dominant masculinity; both of
these mechanisms are policed by other men.∞π Tom explains: ‘‘there are
party groups in which I’m marginally tolerated because I’m a sub.’’ He
blames this on the ‘‘Internet crowd,’’ arguing that ‘‘starting in about ’94,
the web probably quadrupled the rate of influx and completely elimi-
nated the mentoring process.’’ Many practitioners agree with Tom that
heterosexual men new to the scene—the Silicon Valley practitioners
who entered the scene in the 1990s—are most likely to presume these
kinds of parallel and naturalized gender roles. These men are ‘‘clueless
male tops’’ who, lacking a more subtle appreciation of the art of sm ,
think sm is, as Tom put it, ‘‘slap, slap, ‘down on your knees, bitch,
and suck me off.’ ’’ The clueless men have an acronym in the scene:
chudwah —clueless het-dom wannabes. A chudwah is a new het
male dom who doesn’t ‘‘get it’’; high on the list of things he doesn’t get is
that not all women are submissive—and its far scarier corollary: not all
men are dominant.
Phil explains that it is other men who act as the enforcers and arbi-
ters of masculinity and of access to power:

phil: I was a 24/7 bottom to [his wife]: we had a monogamous re-

lationship for three years, I was her slave and she was my
mistress, and we had very formal things going on, like con-
tracts . . . I enjoyed it a lot—that intensity of 24/7 . . . After I
became known as a submissive, a lot of my male friends who
were switches or tops didn’t like me now. There’s a lot of
prejudice [on the part] of male tops—even gay male tops—
against submissives. You don’t see it unless it’s right there in
front of you . . . It was funny, I lost a lot of apparent respect
as soon as they found out I was a male bottom. I still find
that . . . I still find it a lot with the newbies, especially the
het male tops, they can’t even conceive of a woman being
dominant . . .
margot: I wondered about that.

B E YO N D VA N I L L A 177
 phil: Well, it’s true! Some of the closest people would suddenly
walk right off from me. I lost some very good male friends. I
tried to help them, ‘‘I’m not any different than I was a month
ago’’ . . .
margot: Do you think it’s a gender thing?
phil: . . . Yeah, in a way, it’s something that—men seem to have
trouble with it, but I think it’s because of the social station
that society puts men at.

This masculine anxiety, gay or straight (or otherwise), is formed around

the submissive male, showcasing the dense connections between het-
erosexuality (as ideology) and power. But at the same time, invisibility—
what you see or don’t see—is structured around dominant fictions of
gender, which are exposed in their inversion; this helps to illuminate the
slide from sexual submission to gender inversion hinted at in Phil’s
comments.
Submissive men—unlike dominant women—are not celebrated as
transgressing gender norms. For Phil, this is because of men’s ‘‘social
station,’’ their social power and privilege, which renders masculinity
more fraught, more precarious, and more heavily policed than feminin-
ity. These issues show that gender in the scene is deeply connected to
gender outside the scene, and to the ways in which heterosexuality,
whiteness, and dominance produce possibilities for intelligible gender-
ing. The male bottom, in other words, experiences a sort of double bind
produced not through abstract gender roles, but through the particular
meanings of masculinity bound to race and sexuality that are perfor-
matively produced in the scene.
Here, then, is another place where the relationship between social
norms and sm performances cannot be reduced to internalization or
subversion. Instead, unlike the anti-sm feminist version of heterosexual
relations, gender is a source of conflict, tension, and anxiety over being,
seeming like, performing, and resembling. Men do not walk into the
role of dominant with phallocentric ease or comfort; similarly, submis-
sive women take care to differentiate their in-scene submission from
their intelligence, competence, assertiveness, and equality outside the
scene. At the same time, although the discordant figure here—the male
bottom—can, indeed, show us some of the obligations of masculinity, so
too can the gender-normative hmd . It is he who reveals the ambiva-

178 CHAPTER FOUR

lence around the denial and enforcement of male privilege (founded on
heterosexuality and whiteness), a privilege he is keen to resist (or at
least deny) in this purportedly transgressive, nonnormative scene. The
anxiety of the hmd is based on wanting to escape or break free from
these oppressive social norms—to disidentify with the oppressor—while
simultaneously recognizing yet disavowing that his very positionality,
his role as a ‘‘strong, dominant man’’ (and hence his effectiveness in the
scene), is based on these norms. In this way, hmd s show that the desire
for transgression is not to transgress normative gender roles, but rather
to transgress or disavow the social force of gender while at the same
time maintaining a desired and desirable masculinity.

AMBIVALENCE, MIMESIS, AND MASTERY

Analyzing the ambivalence of the hmd is one way to track the ‘‘dualism’’
Winant describes in relation to whiteness, in which sexism is deemed
irrelevant and the firm affixture of masculinity to structural inequality
is denied. These forms of white, dominant, heterosexual masculinity
produce ambivalence or dualism at precisely the moments when prac-
titioners simultaneously consolidate gendered, racial, and sexualized
positionalities and enact a barrier between these ‘‘roles’’ and ‘‘real life’’
power or oppression. Understandings of the scene as completely outside
social reality, as not a part of gendered relations of inequality, help
construct this barrier, which has as its corollary the idea that—because
roles are freely chosen by free, agentic individuals—such burdensome
contexts as gendered inequality have no bearing on the sm scene. The
kinds of self-cultivation or techniques that sm practitioners enact—
glossed as self-empowerment—work simultaneously to provide a (fan-
tasized) out from privilege (and with this, the possibility of remaking
gender roles into something perceived of as more free) and to justify
certain forms of inequality.
This split itself is produced by a circuit between the body and the
social body, a deeply productive exchange that both produces subjects
with neoliberal ideas of agency and choice and creates anxiety around
the social contradictions embedded, and not resolved, in these dynam-
ics. In particular, these debates reveal that the tension between aspira-
tion (to be antiracist, feminist, even queer—in short, transgressive)∞∫
and anxiety (over being white, male, dominant, heterosexual—in short,

B E YO N D VA N I L L A 179
 privileged) is critical to the ambivalence that these hmd s articulate.
Focusing on these men’s ambivalence is one way to think about places
where neoliberalism as a cultural formation intertwines with forms of
social dominance—whiteness, masculinity, and heterosexuality—to pro-
duce a contested relationship between social norms, social oppression,
and social privilege.
For example, J. credited a form of feminist-inspired sm with ‘‘liberat-
ing [him] from the constraints of sexuality that society says you can
have and expand that to a wide variety.’’ ‘‘So if I wish to have vanilla sex,
I can have vanilla sex. If I want to have kinky sex, I can have kinky sex. If
I wanted to do role play one night, I do that. And if I want to be a bottom
one night, I could be able to do that.’’ For J., radical feminism limited his
choices; it wasn’t politically acceptable for him to be married to his ex-
wife, a woman of color. He explained: ‘‘One of the things that I had to
come to terms with was . . . to accept that I was a man and that I had
male energy and male desires and [a] male use to the world and [that
this wasn’t] all bad.’’ J. wanted to ‘‘question gender roles’’; feminism, for
him, means that ‘‘we should look at these things and we should allow
women to be who they are in our society. And the other component of
that is we need to liberate men from the social roles that [are inflicted
upon them] by society and allow them to be who they are.’’
This new masculinity was enabled through sm in a way that made J.
feel less trapped by social norms of gender. J. explains his sm desire:
‘‘[it] allows me to be a man or allows my sexual attraction to be present,
but it also recognizes that she’s a woman and she has rights and I should
respect her and not objectify her.’’ He told me that sm toys and sce-
narios enable ‘‘you to connect in a different way than we may be right
now [gesturing to S.], holding hands and seated side by side talking to
you.’’ ‘‘For me it’s more about [how] it allows the whole person to be
present because sm allows things to be expressed that often you don’t
do or allow in relationships. You know, for her to struggle against me
and for me to overpower her, it’s not appropriate, it’s not appropriate in
the Hollywood version of lovemaking. But love allows us to do that.’’ For
J., sm permits the full person—including dominance and submission, or
more aggressive forms of love and sex—to be present, a kind of authen-
ticity denied in Hollywood movies. sm power exchange can enable this
wholeness, however, only as long as it remains in the private space of
desire, and not the social world of power.

180 CHAPTER FOUR

 A focus on ambivalence shows us that these categories are not mono-
lithic by foregrounding the tension between transgressive aspirations
and privileges: individuals resist the oppressive social norms from which
they simultaneously benefit.∞Ω Such stagings or self-cultivations can
produce a sense of freedom from oppressive social norms, especially for
practitioners who occupy privileged social locations. But this authentic
masculinity—men being ‘‘who they [really] are’’—is always mediated
through oppressive social relations, produced in the intersections of
systems of social power and local and individual discourses, practices,
and techniques of the self. This is a form of masculinity that feels free,
but where freedom depends on a fantasized escape from social norms of
gender, race, class, and sexuality. As Robyn Wiegman argues, developing
Winant’s concept of white racial dualism, even as it is ‘‘attuned to racial
equality and justice,’’ liberal whiteness is ‘‘self-empowering’’ by ‘‘aggres-
sively solidifying its advantage’’ (Wiegman 1999, 121). This dualism
creates the opportunity for self-empowerment narratives that echo a
‘‘national [American] narrative of democratic progress’’ based on tran-
scending fixed, unequal social hierarchies through an alignment with
the universal. Yet such purportedly universal subjects turn out to be
quite particular: white, middle-class, heterosexual men. In sm , this du-
alism invigorates a supposedly neutral, authentic individual by requir-
ing practitioners to distance themselves from their own performative
investments in masculinity, whiteness, and heterosexuality, even as it is
their recognizable—intelligible—white, male, heterosexual masculinity
that makes them attractive play partners and effective tops.
The anxiety expressed by these practitioners shows us the fundamen-
tal impossibility of either embodying social norms or of living outside
them, and reveals the performativity of social norms themselves—the
mimetic structure of gender, race, and sexuality. Mimesis, as Michael
Taussig argues, ‘‘sutures the real to the really made up’’ (1993, 86). By
this charming phrasing, Taussig means that mimesis structures a rela-
tionship with reality in which we can pretend that gender or race are not
social constructions or inventions, but rather are immutable, natural
facts: it is via mimesis that we are able to pretend ‘‘that we live facts, not
fictions’’ (xv–xvi). Moreover, Taussig emphasizes the transfer of power
from the original to the copy, the way mimesis grants ‘‘the copy the
character and power of the original, the representation the power of the
represented’’ (xviii).≤≠ This conception of mimesis accounts, in part, for

B E YO N D VA N I L L A 181
 the effectiveness—the power and desire—of the hmd and other perfor-
mative sm genders. At the same time, as Butler puts it, mimesis shows us
the performative construction of the ‘‘so-called original’’: for example,
‘‘categories like butch and femme were not copies of a more originary
heterosexuality, but they showed how the so-called originals, men and
women within the heterosexual frame, are similarly constructed, per-
formatively established’’ (2004, 209). Mimesis (or performativity) not
only denaturalizes—by exposing the constructedness of—the original, it
also undermines the binary and unidirectionally dependent relationship
between original and copy. This conception of mimetic performance
accounts, in part, for the anxiety—the disavowal and discomfort—of
white, heterosexual masculinities inside (and outside) the scene.
In this dynamic, sm gender does not occupy the status of the original
(as in the radical feminist version of these relations), nor is sm gender
merely a copy of the original (as consented to, performed, and thus fully
differentiated from ‘‘real’’ gender, in the liberal rejoinder). Rather, ra-
cialized and sexed gender is itself a mimetic performance, a copy that
can only ever seek to replicate a phantasmatic original. Mimesis is al-
ways a flawed, incomplete, or partial repetition, ‘‘almost the same, but
not quite’’ (Bhabha 1984, 127). In Bhabha’s formulation, this marks
colonial authority with profound ambivalence; authority ‘‘can neither
be ‘original’—by virtue of the act of repetition that constructs it—nor
‘identical’ by virtue of the difference that defines it. Consequently, the
colonial presence is always ambivalent, split between its appearance as
original and authoritative and its articulation as repetition and differ-
ence’’ (1985, 150). In the bdsm context, sm gender roles retain the
ambivalence of all gender, in that it is impossible to faithfully replicate
heterosexuality, masculinity, dominance, or whiteness as though these
categories occupy the status of ‘‘real originals.’’ Instead, repetition, a
partial mimesis, marks every process of subjective embodiment.
At the same time, the need to stage a culturally recognizable perfor-
mance relies on these originals—the originals that are themselves per-
formatively produced through their repetition within the sm scene just
as much as at work, in the club, driving the car, or in the bedroom, as
Panther’s epigraph highlights. Mimetic performance produces subjects
who embody and cultivate social norms, even more than they subvert or
consolidate them, at the same time that it produces the ‘‘regulatory

182 CHAPTER FOUR

ideal’’ of these norms themselves. In this way, sm ’s gendered and ra-
cialized performances participate in the forms of mimetic performativ-
ity that forge all subjects; it is only the fantasized break from the real of
power—the scene as a safe space—that enables practitioners, and theo-
rists, to imagine that in-scene gender is only a copy or a performance,
that it has no social effects.
This contradiction—between gender as fundamentally mimetic and
mimesis as that which makes gender real—is useful for thinking through
how such performative roles produce social relations via social norms.
The concept of mimesis accounts for the mimicry, the repetition, in-
volved in gender play and at the same time points to at least one critical
reason for my interviewees’ ambivalence about this so-called imitation.
Chris, another hmd , told me in our interview that, although he had
been interested in sm since high school, he ‘‘basically thought that what
[he] was doing was wrong.’’ ‘‘I had it in my head that there was a way of
interacting that was all right, and anything that didn’t fit into that
[feminist] form was wrong. And the idea that you could sort of do an ‘as
if’ kind of interaction somehow never occurred to me.’’ Echoing Bhabha,
Chris was explaining that his male dominance can be read as mimetic of
heterosexist gender relations, a copy that is ‘‘almost the same, but not
quite.’’ Here, mimesis structures an emotional relationship of ambiva-
lence: the scene world of play as an imitation or copy of an impossible
real. The impossibility of the real of gender (or race, or sexuality) is
expressed in the language of anxiety, an anxiety that marks the desire
for, and the impossibility of, actually subverting or transgressing these
social norms: of mastering social power.
In this way, the production of the ‘‘seems-like’’ space of sm relies on
the separation of public and private that cannot but replicate certain
forms of privilege as it opens opportunities to cultivate new, seemingly
nonoppressive, masculinities. Yet to return to Malc, Paul, and Jeff’s
‘‘lack of diversity,’’ the whiteness of these hmd s—and indeed of vanilla
social power—is critical to this freedom; these performances empower
some (men, whites) both materially and discursively, while at the same
time strengthening cultural narratives that justify these unequal rela-
tions (such as the emphasis on personal responsibility or agency pro-
vided by neoliberalism). In these projects of self-cultivation, the sm
community plays a critical role: the ssc scene enables this bracketing,

B E YO N D VA N I L L A 183
 relying on economic, cultural, and political rationalities to justify the
reproduction of forms of inequality that are anything but safe, sane, and
consensual.

THE POLITICS OF FREEDOM

As James Ferguson (2002) argues, an anthropologist reading the cul-

tural performance of imitation can read it either as parody (and thus
subversive rebellion) or appropriation (and thus covert resistance). Ei-
ther way, we must celebrate the miming. Of course, ‘‘anthropology’s
disciplinary identification with powerless people’’ is more complicated
in the case of sm practitioners, who are simultaneously excluded from
the norm via sexual practice and privileged via race, gender, and class
(Kulick 2006, 933). In this case, rather than valorize the queer or con-
demn the seemingly normative, we must locate bdsm within social
categories of power, which I have done in this chapter by investigating
the ways these performances produce ambivalence through mimesis.
The mimetic performance of gender captures the crisis over the status
of copies and originals that is the basis for arguments against sm ,
but also for the production of sm scenes themselves. This move gets us
well beyond the either/or structure of transgression/consolidation, as
well as beyond the twin poles of freedom/oppression produced by prac-
titioners (freedom as freedom from social inequality) and by radical
feminist analysis (oppression as the unbearable weight of patriarchy in
structuring everyday lives), both limited forms of binary thinking that
can’t quite get at the ways that social relations structure and are struc-
tured by subjects. Instead, we must investigate the politics of race, gen-
der, and sexuality as they are intertwined and embodied, enacted and
practiced, lived and resisted by practitioners navigating social norms
and political rationalities produced in simultaneously discursive and
material ways.
As a circuit between the individual and social body, sexuality is a
social relation produced by and bound up with other social relations
of power, and it thus requires a reading that refuses the economic/
material and performative/discursive split. If we can do this, we can
start to understand the transgressive desires—the desire to transgress—
of the hmd . The desire of these men to reconcile their politics with
their desires is a way to make themselves politically acceptable, to de-

184 CHAPTER FOUR

fend sm against its critics, and to opt out of the social hierarchies of
whiteness, heterosexuality, and masculinity that these progressive men
fight in their non-sm lives. Though an understandable goal, this desire
also produces an imaginary in which individual desires and actions can
be separated from social systems and power. It re-encodes the safe, sane,
and consensual scene as a playground of equality, sm play as ‘‘only a
game,’’ and racialized and sexualized gender as individually chosen and,
thus, mastered. ssc sm locates players in social worlds at precisely the
moment when it enables practitioners to fantasize about the break or
gap between the sm scene and the real world.
At the same time, the ambivalent desires for and of white, heterosex-
ual, dominant masculinity open up new horizons—for sm practitioners
and for cultural analysis. Ambivalence should encourage us to examine
more closely the dense interconnections between race, class, gender,
and sexuality; the points of conflict between social norms and social
relations; and the contradictions of normative constructions and per-
formances as they are embodied and cultivated. In this way, the binary
options for a cultural critic reading such scenes—Subversive or reenact-
ing? Political or personal? Feminist or queer?—fails to consider the
particular productivity of these relations. To understand sm play, we
must instead pay more careful attention to what is being produced at
such moments—a production that includes privilege and power, in addi-
tion to nonnormative self-cultivation and practice.
I will end this chapter with Paul’s words, words that to me summarize
the necessary, if painful, work of ambivalence and a refusal to ‘‘opt out’’
of either one’s responsibilities for social relations of dominance or the
ethnographic complexities of these on the ground:

What I eventually came to was what should have been obvious to me in

the beginning as a good poststructuralist, which was that trying to
choose one or the other [bdsm or feminism, sexual or intellectual satis-
faction] was a false choice. That the intellectual honesty consisted in
living in the middle, living in the tension. I think that my position as a
hetero white man has something to do with my sexuality. It has some-
thing to do with everything. It has something to do with my politics. It
has something to do with my economic place in the world, the way I can
speak, the privileges that I have, the abilities that I have, the choices
that are open to me, and I think it’s just crazy for people to try and

B E YO N D VA N I L L A 185
 pretend that sexuality is this magical realm that is somehow natural and
is unaffected by anything social, economic, or political. You can see that
I had tied myself up; the greatest act of bondage I was doing in those
years was with myself in my own head.

We should take seriously the radical feminist contention that sexuality,

desire, and fantasy are bound up in real-world structures of inequality,
that we cannot separate the private/bedroom from the public/social
world. Indeed, it is precisely the strain with which the private and public
are held apart that reveals the ways in which subjects and communities
—through practice and play—are bound ever more closely to the real
world of power that makes subjects of us all.

186 CHAPTER FOUR

FIVE N
S E X P L AY A N D S O C I A L P OW E R

Reading the Effective Circuit

I do not believe that sexuality is separate from living.

As a minority woman, I know dominance and subordination
are not bedroom issues . . . s/m is not about sex but about
how we use power. If it were only about personal sexual
exchange or private taste, why would it be presented as
a political issue?
— audre lorde and susan leigh starr,
‘‘Interview with Audre Lorde’’

I do not believe that sex has an inherent power to transform

the world. I do not believe that pleasure is always an anar-
chic force for good. I do not believe that we can fuck our
way to freedom.— pat califia, Macho Sluts

The difficulties for nonsadomasochists have been primarily

with sadism and with psychodrama that appears to make
light not only of rape and incest but also of histories of op-
pression, such as American slavery and the Nazi Holocaust,
drawing upon those histories to construct sex-games.
— claudia card, Lesbian Choices

s/m is more a parody of the hidden sexual nature of fascism

than it is a worship or acquiescence to it. How many real
Nazis, cops, priests or teachers would be involved in a kinky
sexual scene?— pat califia, Public Sex
 As these four epigraphs make clear, sm play with social power, especially
cultural—and national—trauma like slavery and the Holocaust, is con-
tested and politically complex. Such play echoes and plays off traumatic
histories; indeed, it is this dramatization of historical structures of
exploitation in the guise of fantasized or performed display that makes
sm play erotic. As I argued in the previous chapter, sm ’s play with such
historical referents is a challenge to read without falling into one of two
positions. In the first, sm play is a matter of private desires, just a
consensual game or parody, and thus we might read these scenes as
transgressive, as remaking the social world, as a form of resistance
through reiteration. This reading relies on a fantasized split between
the real (social inequality, norms, oppression, politics—the public) and
the scene (radicalness, transgression, equality, desire—the private) that
can serve to ‘‘excuse’’ some practitioners from their privilege while con-
cealing the generative force of social norms on sm play. The second
reading is the converse: sm is a public and political problem, a form of
racism, sexism, or fascism, and thus we ought to read these scenes as the
violent reinforcement or production of social inequality, or, at the very
least, as appropriative of real human suffering. This reading, too, relies
on a simplification of the social world, making the conditions of any par-
ticular performance—the social context, audience, or effect—irrelevant
to analysis. The politics of such scenes are, in this reading, the same as
that of their referents. Indeed, in both of these readings, it is an a pri-
ori determination— sm as an ssc scene or sm as a mimicry of social
inequality—that determines a scene’s politics.
Instead of this binary analysis, this chapter marshals the perfor-
mative materialist methodology developed in this book to read the poli-
tics of bdsm scenes. This entails considering the material conditions of
sm performance, alongside the material—although often discursive—ef-
fects of sm play. A political reading of sm must, as David Savran puts it,
emphasize ‘‘the conditions of performance: the multiple social posi-
tionalities of the performer (rather than his or her intentions), the
discursive strategies put into play by the performance, and the reception
of said performance’’ (1998, 9). These conditions—social location, audi-
ence reception, and discursive and ideological production—are central to
an analysis of any particular scene. But these particularities are also
central to the way scenes work: the effects of a scene, political or other-
wise. In this chapter, I focus on the performative efficacy of sm ’s play

188 CHAPTER FIVE

circuits, bringing Jon McKenzie’s (2001) theorization of performance to
the forefront. For McKenzie, performance draws attention to the effi-
ciency or functionality of flexible circuits, to how subjects and scenes are
linked through complex feedback loops and series of exchanges. De-
veloping the concept of effectiveness, I explore when and why scenes
work: when, as Anthony put it in the last chapter, players find the
‘‘button’’ or ‘‘trigger’’ that accesses the erotic power of a scene—and
what happens when they do.
This form of efficacy is material as well as performative: sm scenes
are cultural performances that reflect and produce larger social rela-
tions.∞ Although sm practitioners imagine a split between the scene and
real life, I argue that effective sm scenes connect the real (the social) and
the scene (the performance) via hot-button issues. This connection cre-
ates a circuit that not only produces hot sm sex but also possibilities for
consolidating, reimagining, or responding to the national imaginaries
of racialized, gendered, sexualized, and classed belonging from which
sm draws both its scenes and its erotic power. Such imaginaries are
unevenly accessible; as I have shown, the neoliberal rationality that
pervades the sm scene functions to justify social inequality (based on
race, class, and gender) through purportedly neutral subjectivity: the
rational, autonomous, responsible, self-mastering individual. This cir-
cuit can create the opportunity for privileged subjects—subjects who
correspond to the ideal sm practitioner—to imagine themselves free
from oppressive social norms, a situation that reinforces their very
privilege. But the circuit can also challenge the division of private de-
sires and public politics, opening opportunities for recognizing, and
responding to, these ideologies.
This chapter takes up the performative efficacy of the circuit by
reading several scenes of what some call ‘‘taboo’’ or ‘‘cultural trauma’’
play—play with racial, ethnic, and national themes. Through ethno-
graphic readings of the slave auction, Master/slave play, Nazi play, a
black/Latino mugging scene, torture/interrogation play, and the ‘‘sado-
masochistic’’ Abu Ghraib torture photographs, I argue that such ef-
fective circuits put into place complex workings: some, for example,
enable the further disavowal of white privilege and racism, while others
enable more ambivalent, open-ended readings of social power; some
make visible, and thus available for reimagining, the normally invisible
construction of racialized belonging, while others make spectacle, and

S E X P L AY A N D S O C I A L P OW E R 189
 thus detach the audience from such productions. Crucial here are the
personal, social, and national imaginaries available for play; the social
tensions—between the visible and invisible, known and unknown, and
public and private—that animate sm dynamics; and the effect of affec-
tive involvement, an emotional attachment to particular scenes and
dynamics, for players and audiences alike.
Juxtaposing and contrasting these scenes, this chapter invites you,
the reader, into these readings, to ask what each circuit enables and
disables, what social relations are produced (emotionally, politically, and
discursively) in these exchanges, and what sorts of political claims can
be made about sm play. For a political reading relies not on a purely
discursive—nor a purely formal—analysis of social power, but instead
on the mobile and contested performative circuits that produce national
belonging alongside social, often racialized, difference; on the mate-
riality of social relations that we call sexuality.

THE SLAVE AUCTION THE VISIBILITY OF RACE

Recall the auction stage at the Byzantine Bazaar and Slave Auction.
Picture the effeminate Asian American man, gender humiliated in a
complex racial performance; the Latina dyke resisting the audience’s
demand for feminine sexualization; the white hmd , mocked and objec-
tified in his tighty whities; and the African American slave, displayed
by her icy, controlled white male master. The performances I watched
that day were uncomfortable and disturbing, but also funny and light-
hearted. I laughed along with the audience; I was also profoundly trou-
bled. This scene—the first of my real fieldwork—captivated and also
frustrated my political readings; I could not account for the gap between
the specificity of these particular bodies and the larger racial, gendered,
and sexual implications of this display.
My first approach to the auction I saw that day came in the form of a
conference paper in 2001—the first paper I gave at the annual American
Anthropological Association meetings. In the paper, I read the scenes
through Butlerian performativity; I analyzed the politics of the slave
auction in terms of the uncontrollability of a performance’s effects, and
the instability of what is reiterated and what is excluded. So, the white
top ‘‘one night only’’ bottom could be read, I argued, as a failed citation
of the law of heteropatriarchy. Displayed in his underwear, sexualized,

190 CHAPTER FIVE

and mocked, this man stood as the absurd token of a masculinity, a
heterosexuality, and a whiteness that must, to perform, exclude this
very performance. I offered a similar reading of the butch Latina; the
slave auction, I argued, offered the possibility for the displacement of
racial, sexual, and gendered categories because of the inherent instabil-
ity of social norms.
Of course, I was not alone in this analysis; this reiteration reading is
common to most queer, feminist, and performance studies scholarship.
It is also shared by some in the sm scene. In a presentation at a panel
discussion and workshop on the experiences of people of color≤ in the
scene, for example, Midori (a well-known Japanese-born sm educa-
tor) described some of the ways she disrupts stereotypes about Asian
women in the United States as either delicate flowers or dragon ladies.
She told us she liked playing with some of these stereotypes and used as
an example an East Asian prisoner-of-war scene, in which she was a
cruel ‘‘dragon lady’’ imprisoning, torturing, and interrogating a prisoner
in a tiger cage. Doing such a scene, she said, can ‘‘take away the negative
power of stereotypes’’ through hyperbole. She also pointed to the possi-
bilities of discordant moments, telling us that she enjoyed being par-
ticularly sadistic while wearing a traditional kimono, thus mixing the
‘‘delicate flower’’ image with hard-core sadism. She felt that this presen-
tation challenged racial expectations, in much the same way as the
gender discordant readings I discussed in the previous chapter.
Similarly, during a conversation about Nazi uniforms in the scene,
Bonnie, an Asian American masochist, told me that she had a friend
who planned to get a latex burka made: ‘‘Not a traditional burka because
she wanted it in clear latex, so it would be—it’s like satire.’’ For Bonnie,
satire means that ‘‘we bring things that make us uncomfortable into our
everyday lives’’ in order to ‘‘poke fun’’ at them. Lady Hilary, a white
mistress, told me that she thinks latex Nazi regalia is hot because ‘‘we’re
taking it and cartooning it.’’ In these readings, satire, parody, or hyper-
bole can displace norms, exposing the non-naturalness, noninevitable-
ness, or indeterminacy of social power. So, in a series of similar moves, I
read the slave auction as performative resignification.
Yet even when I wrote that conference paper, the Asian man and the
black slave refused this pat analysis, remaining stranded, as Roger Lan-
caster puts it, between ‘‘parody or praise, subversion or intensification,
deviation or norm, resistant or enabling’’ (1992, 568). In part, this is

S E X P L AY A N D S O C I A L P OW E R 191
 because theories of performativity—especially as they are used by most
cultural critics—do not easily lend themselves to a more materialist
analysis of social structures or embodiment. In part, this is because
anthropological, performance studies, and queer and feminist analysts
want to validate the subcultural performances of our informants as
countercultural. But these frameworks also mean that, as Saba Mah-
mood’s critique of Butler makes clear, when these binary choices are our
only critical options, we cannot see the more everyday ways in which
norms are embodied, lived, and cultivated, as well as contested (2004).
This point is made by Deborah Elliston, who argues that ‘‘ ‘sex’ is not a
free-floating signifier available for any social project that comes along. It
is structured, embedded, and motivated’’ (2002, 306; see also Allison
2000). Elliston points out that anthropologists are ‘‘ideally positioned’’
to analyze the specific social relations, cultural contexts, and symbolic
logics through which sex is produced. This is where an embedded, ethno-
graphic reading is critical. For it is impossible to talk about the politics of
this slave auction—to make claims about what these performances actu-
ally did—without understanding the social relations, tensions, and di-
vergent positionalities of the various players, people I did not know that
first day at the auction but later met, socialized with, and could locate
within a social space. Thus, departing from the more discursive reading
that I first attempted, this chapter reads the auction—and other ra-
cialized performances—as a cultural performance based on and produc-
tive of material relations.
The first significant condition of this performance is audience: the
auction was performed in front of an audience that was overwhelmingly
white. In the classes, munches, and other events I attended, unless the
event was specifically focused on people of color or taught by a person of
color, there were generally no more than one or two people of color in a
room full of whites. Yet white people rarely noticed how white their
scene was—or, if asked to notice, did not feel that this was a community
problem. In each of my interviews, I asked practitioners about the racial
diversity of the scene, generally by asking: ‘‘Why do you think the scene
is so white?’’ Most of my white interviewees gave a version of one of the
following answers: people of color aren’t into bdsm because they are
repressed (by their culture) or can’t afford it; there are lots of people of
color in the scene (followed by the naming of two or three of the five or
so highly visible people of color: ‘‘Midori, Mollena, and . . . you know . . .

192 CHAPTER FIVE

Cathy, that black woman John was dating?’’); or people of color have
their own scenes, so they don’t need to be in ours. Very few white
interviewees felt that racism within the scene, or the construction of
the scene as white, might be the reason that there were so few nonwhite
practitioners.
These analyses were not, of course, expressed by any people of color
with whom I spoke. Much more often I heard that racism made par-
ticipating uncomfortable, or that people of color were treated like to-
kens or exotic play partners. Some found the politics of cross-racial
playing too difficult to negotiate. Others, including many of the panel-
ists at the people of color panel discussion I describe below, felt trapped
between a racist white bdsm community and a kink-phobic racial or
ethnic community. Instead, some play only with other people of color in
the mostly white scene, or find scenes for people of color only. Yet these
scenes are quite limited in size and scope. The Mahogany Munch, a
munch ‘‘for people of color and the people who like them,’’ was the one
pansexual people of color munch in the Bay Area while I was doing
fieldwork. It was usually held at a Mexican restaurant in Oakland; fewer
than twenty people typically attended. The day I went, I was one of four
white people, out of a total of ten attendees. The founder, Darrell, told
me he started the munch because, when he entered the scene in the
early 1990s, there were only one or two other people of color. He wanted
to bring more people out and provide a safe space for them within the
larger scene. Darrell does not exclude white people from the munch, but
it is tricky for him to balance being inclusive and responsive (to, for
example, mixed-race couples) and creating a safe space (for example, he
explained that some white men attend the munch to prey on black
women). With few exceptions, then, practitioners of color must negoti-
ate the white scene: the organizations, classes, munches, parties, and
other community structures that produce and simultaneously justify
white, but unmarked, participation and belonging.
Here, whiteness is not merely a demographic issue; whiteness is a
nonracial, universal subject position in relation to the visibility of raced
—nonwhite—practitioners. For example, the standardization of sm
bodily techniques presumes that the body is white: in classes on brand-
ing, differences in skin scarring and pigmentation are rarely discussed.
This impacts the legibility of what counts as race play, or even play that
references race. I was continuously surprised during my fieldwork to

S E X P L AY A N D S O C I A L P OW E R 193
 find that participants did not connect the slave auction to race. Ouchy—
a white, bi top/sadist in his early forties—and I were discussing why, as
he put it, the scene was ‘‘superwhite,’’ and why there were not more
people of color involved in sm . I asked him whether he thought that
things like slave auctions, or Master/slave play, might be related to the
whiteness of the scene. He replied: ‘‘To be honest with you, I’ve never
even thought about it in that way. I’ve never thought about it being
racial. Master/slave seems to be kind of transcending—racism in Amer-
ica is bad, but . . . that doesn’t seem particularly race-oriented to me.’’
Ouchy is not ignorant of racism; indeed, he works at an organization
founded by radical black activists. Instead, he is voicing a common white
perception: slave auctions and sm in general are about abstract or neu-
tral, not racialized, power.
This is in part due to the ubiquity of the slave auction, which is a
common fundraising and party event in pansexual communities across
the United States. The Society of Janus holds one every year: it is one of
the three major yearly parties (the other two are for Valentine’s Day and
Halloween). At many of the national sm conferences, auctions are a
special event; major teachers and well-known players are auctioned off
for either the host organization or for charity. During the eighteen
months of my fieldwork, I attended six or seven auctions, including a
Santa’s Slave Auction hosted by a leather bar in the East Bay, and I
missed perhaps the same number. Because of this ubiquity, and because
the events are simultaneously fun (most are held right before a large
play party) and philanthropic, many white people attending such events
do not view them as race play, or even referencing race.
Annalee, a white, genderqueer pervert, said to me as we discussed a
couple in a 24/7 Master/slave relationship: ‘‘I mean, they’re both white
so there’s no racial aspect to it.’’ Talking about Master/slave terminol-
ogy, Stephanie, a white dominant, explained: ‘‘So much of the scene is
based on Master/slave with men and men, with women and women,
with white people and not white people, and nobody really thinks about
it until it’s a people of color panel.’’ She was not alone in crediting the
Janus-sponsored People of Color Panel Discussion, held in March 2002,
with bringing racial issues into view. It appeared to me that, before the
panel, most of the white practitioners I interviewed had never really
considered the racial overtones of toys, relationships, and scenes that
obviously (to me) mimed racialized slavery. At the same time, however,

194 CHAPTER FIVE

it is the presence of visible, marked nonwhite bodies that makes this
connection: a Master/slave scene between whites is ‘‘not racial.’’
This, oddly, makes almost all interracial play scenes race play by
default. Mollena, an African American bottom who is very interested in
race play, explained that her first public play, with a white top, was
perceived as race play, even though ‘‘it was a straightforward fuckin’
rope scene with whips and shit.’’ Because Mollena often plays with white
men, ‘‘I do race play by default in the eyes of most people.’’≥ Estrella
explained, as a white top who has had several black partners, even
without ‘‘overt name calling or plantation scenarios, just the whole idea
that me, a white person, was beating a black person—that’s race play
right there with our history.’’ In this construction, race play does not
refer only to scenes, roles, or dynamics that reference racialized history,
such as slave auctions or Master/slave terminology. Because bdsm is
fundamentally about power, and because the vast majority of sm prac-
titioners in the semipublic scene are white, sm sex play reanimates
racialized social structures of dominance and submission that them-
selves forge racial and gendered subjectivities.
This creates divergent racialized social positionalities, with white
practitioners seen as simply sm practitioners (and their scenes as ‘‘just’’
about power exchange), and nonwhite practitioners excluded from the
scene in both mundane and more fundamental ways. Nonwhite practi-
tioners, in other words, cannot participate in a (or, indeed, the) ‘‘neu-
tral’’ scene, nor are they the normalized subjects of such a scene. This
exclusion means that people of color rarely experience their sm practice
—or politics—as disconnected from embodied racialization. Tijanna—
an African American, lesbian bottom in her late thirties—tells me that
she ‘‘won’t even go’’ to a slave auction because, in her words, ‘‘it’s just
too’’: ‘‘Oh yeah, I’d be a great notch on somebody’s belt, but I’m not
going up there for that. A slave auction! Can’t they think of another
word? You know, a ‘sub auction’? Slave auction! Come on! Shit.’’ Tijanna
emphasizes the ways in which race bears on her sm practices:

margot: So is it difficult to play with white women?

tijanna: Yeah, for me. I’m mostly a bottom, and I just don’t want to bot-
tom in public to white women . . . There’s certain things I won’t
do, any of that Master/slave stuff, I don’t think so. I don’t
want to be flogged on the back. It’s just too much like slavery.

S E X P L AY A N D S O C I A L P OW E R 195
 margot: . . . When you play, do you avoid things that have that
[racialized] meaning?
tijanna: . . . As far as the Master/slave stuff goes, yes, definitely
yes . . . I suppose I’m always conscious of race and my posi-
tion when I’m playing—when I’m bottoming, I guess I am
very conscious of that . . .
margot: Would you top a white woman? I mean, would that be
easier?
tijanna: Sure that’d be easier, oh yeah. I could do that in a minute,
yeah, that’s no problem . . . I wouldn’t top her like mali-
ciously or meanly or in retaliation, but yeah, I’d be much
more open to that, much more open to that.

Tijanna’s unwillingness to be flogged on the back, do Master/slave play,

or bottom to a white woman in public illustrates that sm play and power
in the scene is based on larger, national meanings and histories of race.
Her concern is both over her own positionality and, crucially, how she
would be read publicly: she needs to be conscious of the racial ramifica-
tions of bottoming to a white woman in the context of this history. And,
for Tijanna, this kind of dilemma cannot be overcome by distancing the
scene (where all power is in flux and negotiable) from the real of social
inequality (a space of hierarchical social and institutional racism) but
must instead be worked out in practice, based on audience, context, and
positionality (public or private scene, white or nonwhite partner, kinds
of scenes and toys used).
In contrast, many of my white interviewees felt that the safe, sane,
and consensual scene worked precisely to disconnect the social real (of
racism) from power exchange. Atheris, a white dominant, explained: ‘‘I
personally don’t think there’s anything wrong with emotionally charged
or racially charged [play], even though I have personal issues in the real
world about that [racism].’’ She continued: ‘‘Let’s say a black person
really wants to be in that scene and be called a nigger—it’s not real. I
mean, it’s just not real. You’re taking a part of history that happened
that you know is not going to—you’re not going to [be] oppressed again.
And you can play with it; I think it’s safe now. It wasn’t safe when it was
real.’’ Like Ouchy, these practitioners felt that Master/slave play and
slave auctions ‘‘transcended’’ racism in America: they could be seen as a
neutral script for sm play—emptied of any specific historical or social

196 CHAPTER FIVE

meaning, or rendered ‘‘not real’’ by the bracketing function of the safe,
sane, and consensual scene.
Other white practitioners could understand that people of color
might be sensitive to these racialized connections but felt that the
scene, in concert with the United States as a whole, had progressed
beyond these meanings. In our interview, Anton and Jezzie, whites in a
Master/slave relationship, discussed the implications of their own lan-
guage. I asked if anyone had ever suggested that the terms might be
racially problematic, and Anton told me: ‘‘Once or twice I’ve seen the
attitude that using the term slave evokes black racial slavery in the
United States and hence, it’s inappropriate and instead you should use
submissive or something like that. But . . . this is an educated person’s
sport, and most people . . . are sophisticated enough to realize that that’s
a very superficial connection and isn’t really terribly relevant.’’ For An-
ton, the ‘‘educated’’ and ‘‘sophisticated’’ sm practitioner (a universalized
white, professionalized practitioner) knows that trans-Atlantic chattel
slavery isn’t relevant to sm Master/slave play. Although others (espe-
cially people of color) might have a problem with the evocation of ‘‘black
racial slavery,’’ for Anton and other practitioners, the ssc scene works
to separate out the fantasy of Master/slave from any real referents. This
enables white practitioners to imagine their play divorced from and
irrelevant to racial inequality, as play with no politics.
In these understandings, whiteness is not only social context and
unmarked universal, but also a social logic that both produces and justi-
fies unequal social relations, a discourse made material through play.
This is the logic of race ‘‘colorblindness.’’ Most white people in the scene,
like many Americans, subscribe to a colorblind attitude toward racial
difference, an attitude commonly understood as antiracist. As Lee Baker
cogently argues, this logic denies institutionalized racism in favor of
American cultural mythologies of meritocracy, autonomy, personal re-
sponsibility, and individualism (2001). For example, Vicki, discussing
her ‘‘initial reaction’’ to the word slave told me: ‘‘I was a little bit worried
about the word because it would cause people to think of historical evil
instead of what is [today].’’ But then, she thought: ‘‘First Amendment,
freedom of expression. So [to] the people who find it upsetting—get
over it.’’ This argument is, as Howard Winant argues, part of a neoliberal
racial project, a white dualism where such ‘‘colorblindness’’ gives white
people the fantasy of an escape from racism without giving up the

S E X P L AY A N D S O C I A L P OW E R 197
 material benefits of whiteness (1997, 45–47). In this racial project,
claims that a white social context doesn’t matter bolster whiteness as
the basis for universal, individual agency, simultaneously justifying rac-
ism inside and outside the scene.
Gretchen told me: ‘‘I really believe in freedom of exploration . . . I
firmly believe that people have the right to play with Nazi interrogation
or Master/slave type scenes.’’ The emphasis here on choice, free will,
and individual agency simultaneously separates the scene (and the space
of individual desires) from social structures and inequalities and gives
some (white) people the privilege of being progressive, sophisticated, or
at least tolerant and open to difference. This language of ‘‘transcen-
dence,’’ as Ouchy put it, splits apart the bad racism in America and the
race-neutral—thus race-free—scene. Because of larger mythologies of
neoliberal whiteness and American progress, sm practitioners are, like
most whites, inclined to endorse this reading: that there is no relation-
ship between Master/slave play and racism or racial history. For these
practitioners—most, but not all, white∂ —the politics of this scene is
moot: racial roles can be freely chosen and thus are politically neutral.
My interview with Anton was conducted with his wife and slave,
Jezzie, who disagreed with him: ‘‘I’ve had more of a problem with the
term [slave] than he has . . . I’m not crazy about that word at all.’’ She
continued: ‘‘It does seem in a way to kind of dismiss the trauma of
somebody who’s taken into slavery against their will, and I wish there
were a comfortable way around it . . . I think there’s a common thread
that makes it legitimate for us to use the term, but it’s such a vast
difference that it’s not comfortable. And I can certainly see how, in this
context—with modern America, with racism as it is—a black person
would be uncomfortable with the term. I wouldn’t begrudge them that. I
wouldn’t tell them that they shouldn’t be uncomfortable with it.’’ For
Jezzie, M/s terms within the sm scene raise the specter of appropria-
tion, an appropriation that is not ‘‘comfortable’’ for her. In other words,
she partially accepts the argument made by radical feminists and others
who suggest that, by co-opting or appropriating the traumatic experi-
ences or histories of people of color in the United States, sm perfor-
mances trivialize real social power.∑
These kinds of borrowings simultaneously rely on a referent of racial
inequality and obscure this referent through a language of choice. Like
Eric Lott’s reading of blackface minstrelsy, such borrowing simultane-

198 CHAPTER FIVE

ously depends on and obscures ‘‘the material relations of slavery’’ (1993,
3; see also Klesse 2007). In Lott’s analysis, this obfuscation worked
not only by ‘‘pretending that slavery was amusing’’ (1993, 3), but also
through the racial fantasies and emotional connections that motivated
working-class whites to appropriate African American cultural forms in
the nineteenth century (a dynamic central to race and class boundary
making). In contrast, in sm play with race, although such appropriations
consolidate whiteness, they are typically either disavowed or refused—a
refusal that takes its most banal form in the refusal of many white
people to play with people of color for fear of acting the part of a racist.
Tina Portillo, an sm dyke of color, writes: ‘‘Frankly, it surprised me that
some white leatherdykes didn’t want to play with me unless they were
bottoming for me . . . whenever a white butch is ‘worried’ about topping
me and isn’t sure if she can hit me because she doesn’t want to ‘hurt’ me,
I hasten to calm her fears and convince her just how badly I would like
her to hurt me’’ (1991, 50; see also Berlinger 2006; V. Johnson 1999). As
Portillo notes, many white people are uncomfortable topping, but not
bottoming to, people of color; as with gender play, race play that mimics
social power is more difficult for practitioners than play that reverses it.
Mollena explains that ‘‘reverse race play’’ is empowering ‘‘for people of
color who are stepping outside of roles. I mean for a black woman to
submit to a white man, well that’s just the way it’s been,’’ whereas a black
male top with a white female bottom, that’s a ‘‘big score, considering that
they’re doing something that fifty years ago might have gotten them
killed.’’ This mapping of scene to social power combines with the desire
of most white people to be—and to be seen as—good, antiracist white
people, creating the desire to simply avoid such loaded scenes (at least
in public).
Refusing to play with nonwhite people and simultaneously deny-
ing the racial referents of sm play produces a situation in which well-
meaning white people are exempted from the politics of sm racial proj-
ects. The concern about the public politics of such scenes is also a desire
for unmarked sex—sex outside of politics—that relies on the universal-
ization of whiteness. So, Annalee, like Jezzie, sees many of the ‘‘trap-
pings of sm ’’ as ‘‘reminiscent of American slavery’’ and tells me that she
thinks it might ‘‘feel creepy’’ for people of color to come into a commu-
nity ‘‘where people are playing with roles that are a little too close to
the truth sometimes.’’ That ‘‘truth’’ is a truth of racialized embodiment:

S E X P L AY A N D S O C I A L P OW E R 199
 it is people of color who may feel uncomfortable, not the white people
planning and performing these scenes. In this fantasy, white people
transcend racism in neutral scenes, while people of color—cast, most
often, as black∏ —are materially excluded by becoming the bearers of
race and racism. And the production of the scene as separate from the
social real is another way in which the whiteness of the sm community
is performatively produced, and neoliberal whiteness as social privilege
maintained.
With this, I will return to the slave auction. The single most disturb-
ing picture I have from that day was the African American female slave,
displayed by her white master. His hand, holding her dress to display her
shaved genitals, smoothing back her hair, smacking her ass; the audi-
ence’s discomfort—or was that my fantasy?
Juxtaposed to the banality of software engineers and toy vendors,
hot dogs and small talk, I was drawn to the uncomfortable production of
racialized, gendered, and sexual difference—my own, just as much as
anyone else’s. After the auction, I came back again and again to these
scenes, scenes that became so critical to my fieldwork and this book.
My desire to understand the politics of such spectacular visibility was
continuously frustrated, impotent, insufficient. The spectacular tab-
leau, the enactment and dramatization of hierarchies of race, sexuality,
and gender alongside the normalness of these white practitioners, chal-
lenged me, again and again, to account for—in a richer way than my
analytical framework allowed—what was happening in these scenes.
These reworkings, however, eventually pushed me past a concern for
this woman’s well-being to what I came to recognize as my well-meaning
whiteness disturbed by the scene. And instead of taking refuge in these
dynamics, I looked again at how whiteness is produced as a universal
background for the scene: producing privilege along with the trans-
gressive performances and sexual radicalness to which I was already
attuned.
In these moments of performative play, the sudden, spectacular hy-
pervisibility of race reveals, as Robert Reid-Pharr (among many others)
has argued, whiteness as a racial position (2001, 88–89). In the context
of a community so defined by whiteness, it requires a certain spectacular
dramatization to unsettle whiteness as the universal basis of commu-
nity belonging, of normalness. And so, for me, focusing on the social,
economic, and political investments in maintaining the invisibility of

200 CHAPTER FIVE

whiteness—the forms of privilege, power, and knowing and not know-
ing that enable whiteness (and other forms of social privilege) to func-
tion as universal and thus unseen—finally dislodged my concern for the
black slave and my discomfort with her white master’s commanding
grasp on her hair, and instead prompted a closer look at my simulta-
neous attraction to and revulsion from such loaded scenes.
My responses are not, to be sure, those of everyone who was at the
auction that day or who is reading these words now: particular sm scenes
produce differential political effects. But the conditions of a performance
are more than context; rather, they begin to unfold the complex circuit
between an sm scene and a ‘‘real life’’ referent, a circuit that—depending
on how public/private, social/fantasy, real/scene are mapped, produced,
and received by practitioners and audiences—produces differential social
relations. In what follows, I unfold the thickness of such loadedness in
terms of personal, community, and, crucially, national imaginaries. I
chart the effectiveness of these social tensions—between the banal and
spectacular, visible and invisible, public and private, consensual and
nonconsensual—when they are preserved, in fetishistic form, in sm
scenes, objects, and dynamics.π And finally, I show the effect of emotional
engagement—disgust, desire, discomfort—in both producing and draw-
ing attention to the typically unmarked, even disguised, production of
difference and power.

NAZI AND OTHER PLAY

AFFECTIVE RESPONSES AND NATIONAL IMAGINARIES

On July 24, 2008, the British High Court ruled in favor of Max Mosley,
then the president of the International Automobile Federation—the
international governing body of motor sports, including Formula One
racing. Mosley had sued the News of the World for ‘‘breach of confidence
and/or the unauthorized disclosure of personal information’’ after the
tabloid published an illustrated story about Mosley with the headline
‘‘F1 Boss Has Sick Nazi Orgy with Five Hookers’’ in March 2008. Mos-
ley is the son of Britain’s 1930s fascist leader, Sir Oswald Mosley; as
most newspaper stories noted, Mosley’s parents married in 1936 at the
home of the Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels, and Adolf Hitler
was a guest of honor (Burns 2008b). The story included phrases like:
‘‘the son of infamous British wartime fascist leader Oswald Mosley is

S E X P L AY A N D S O C I A L P OW E R 201
 filmed romping with five hookers at a depraved nazi-style orgy in a
torture dungeon . . . barks orders in german as he lashes girls
wearing mock death camp uniforms and enjoys being whipped until
he bleeds .’’∫
In the case, Mosley argued that his rights to and expectation of
privacy for his consensual, private sm parties were violated by the story
and the secret video recording paid for by the newspaper. The paper
countered that revealing Mosley’s sexual activities was necessary for the
public interest because, as the News of the World’s editor, Colin Myler,
stated, ‘‘taking part in depraved and brutal s&m orgies on a regular
basis does not, in our opinion, constitute the fit and proper behaviour to
be expected of someone in his hugely influential position.’’Ω Key to this
depravity, of course, is the alleged ‘‘Nazi role play’’ in what was variously
characterized as an sm scene, a party, and an orgy. In other words, a
‘‘Nazi theme’’ or ‘‘quasi-Nazi behaviour,’’ in the paper’s argument, ren-
dered this scene both public and political.∞≠ Thus, part of the case for the
judge, Justice David Eady, to decide was whether there was a Nazi or
concentration-camp theme to the scene, which could deprive Mosley of
his right to privacy.
In the judgment, over twenty pages are devoted to this question. If
there was a Nazi theme, Eady reasons, the paper’s allegation that Mos-
ley was ‘‘parodying Holocaust horrors’’ and ‘‘mocking the humiliating
way Jews were treated’’ could constitute a public interest question—or,
at least, it ‘‘would be information which people arguably should have the
opportunity to know and evaluate’’ in terms of his public role in the
International Automobile Federation.∞∞ Thus, the judge proceeds me-
thodically through the video, discussing whether, for example, shaving
or medical examinations are particularly Nazi or just, as Mosley’s at-
torney James Price argued, ‘‘standard’’ in sm prison scenes. Eady notes
that ‘‘in the first scenario, when the Claimant was playing a submissive
role, he underwent a medical inspection and had his head searched for
lice. Again, although the ‘medical’ had certain unusual features, there is
nothing specific to the Nazi period or to the concentration camps about
these matters. Moreover, no German was spoken at this stage.’’ Later he
writes: ‘‘The Claimant was ‘shaved.’ Concentration camp inmates were
also shaved. Yet, as Mr. Price pointed out, they had their heads shaved.
The Claimant, for reasons best known to himself, enjoyed having his
bottom shaved—apparently for its own sake rather than because of any

202 CHAPTER FIVE

supposed Nazi connotation.’’∞≤ The fascinating contortions in the case—
is speaking German during a ‘‘juridical’’ scene necessarily Nazi? What
constitutes a ‘‘routine’’ sm prison scene?—are intended to separate
‘‘regular’’ sm from sm that mimics, and thus mocks, instances of his-
torical trauma like the Nazi concentration camps. Or, as John Burns,
the New York Times reporter, puts it, was the scene’s theme ‘‘a Nazi
concentration camp . . . or, as the participants say, an occasion when
the use of guttural commands in German, an old Luftwaffe jacket and
military-style caps and boots had nothing at all to do with Nazi fan-
tasies?’’ (2008c).
The judge decided that ‘‘there was no such mocking behaviour and
not even, on the material I have viewed, any evidence of imitating,
adopting or approving Nazi behaviour’’; thus the public interest portion
of the case was dismissed.∞≥ However, Burns’s question lingers, resisting
a resolution into the either/or required by a court ruling and much
critical theory, where the question to be settled is whether Mosley is or
is not a Nazi (or at least an anti-Semite), or whether this scene is or is
not about concentration camps. Indeed, this story is haunted by the
disingenuousness of the claim that there might be a ‘‘standard’’ or neu-
tral German prison scene, that the eroticism of such a scene at this
particular historical moment is not already dependent on a collective
memory of the Third Reich.
In an essay about the relative normalization of the swastika as an
icon in gay leather pornography, Arnie Kantrowitz argues that such uses
cannot but glorify Nazis. Criticizing his fellow gay leathermen who see
and use the symbol as ‘‘just part of the look’’ or ‘‘only an image of
power,’’ Kantrowitz writes: ‘‘The private romanticization and trivializa-
tion of Nazism is not merely a sexual matter. It is political’’ (1991, 206–
7). This critique suggests that imagining Nazi symbols as emblems of
power—neutral forms—is a denial of the historical meaning of the swas-
tika; such use can never be merely private/sexual but is always public/
political. Indeed, such a mechanism works by evacuating historical spec-
ificity (the Holocaust) while retaining its sinisterness by way of an alibi.
The disavowal of the connections between the emblem and its social
meaning is facilitated by a split between desire and politics: imagining
that the swastika is an empty signifier of power, imagining that its use
in private and sexual scenes has nothing to do with the Holocaust.
We can read Nazi play—in Mosley’s case and otherwise—through this

S E X P L AY A N D S O C I A L P OW E R 203
 lens and argue that the way such scenes work is to draw on racialized
history to make hot scenes, while simultaneously emptying the specific-
ity out of them, allowing the charge to be smuggled back into a scene
that, on the outside, is only a prison scene. Such scenes affirm a break
between the private (a space of sexual desire, to which one has a right)
and the public (a place of real social violence, in which political claims
might be made). When this circuit—put into place and then denied—is
active and effective, it allows people to experiment with more than they
own up to: to play with and also disavow the specific histories upon
which such scenes rely. This seems to account for the epistemological
attachment to not knowing about race voiced by many white people.
Here, as in white racial dualism, freedom is also the freedom to trans-
gress oppression, to be beyond racial or ethnic trauma. As Kantrowitz
writes, the swastika is erotic in part because it conveys ‘‘the stigma of
the forbidden,’’ an appeal especially attractive to those ‘‘who perceive
themselves as sexual outlaws’’ (1991, 197). For these men, ‘‘the power-
ful oppressor is perceived as hot sex because of his willingness to tran-
scend the limits of morality’’ (194–95). This kind of transcendence is
the ability to use, appropriate, or borrow signs of oppression in order to
achieve the status of outlaw: a person who transgresses the bounds of
normal/vanilla morality via a depoliticized, privatized sexuality.
My interviewees, however, often voiced much more complex and
ambivalent positions on Nazi play than that allowed for by this reading:
they simultaneously emptied out and acknowledged the specificity or
particularity of these referents. Annalee notes: ‘‘I’m Jewish, and even
though I know that Nazi fantasies are totally disconnected from real life,
when I go to a party and I see someone in a Nazi uniform, I totally would
never want to play with them. Even though I have plenty of fantasies
about domination and plenty of ways of eroticizing [power].’’ Annalee
cannot quite separate that uniform from its social and historical mean-
ing, even though she knows that sm community rules and rationalities
require this bracketing. This shows the more complicated ways in which
practitioners understand the relationships between the real and the
pretend, the known and not known, the dependent and the disavowed.
These relationships have to do with charting the ambivalence that
practitioners feel about their expression of individual rights and social
rights—about, in other words, collective responsibility for the commu-
nity and broader social norms. Take, for example, two fantasies of a

204 CHAPTER FIVE

realistic slave auction offered by very differently positioned practition-
ers during my interviews. The first is from Edward, a white top, who
explained to me that he’d ‘‘always wanted to do a slave-ship scene, but
there’s not enough African American people in the scene to carry [it]
out.’’ I asked him about the politics of such a scene, and he responded:

edward: Inside the community, I don’t think it’d be a big problem. If

somebody caught wind of it outside the community, it’d
probably be a problem . . . They’d see it as promoting, you’re
disrespecting slavery or the things that happened to the
African American people in our country. I’m just doing it for
a kink, ’cause it actually happened and I think parts of it may
be erotic. Reenacting some of it—but I wouldn’t go so far as
to tell somebody to clean my yard and ‘‘you’re going to be my
slave for an entire month.’’ I don’t do stuff like that. I don’t
promote racial violence or anything like that; I’m not that
kind of person. I don’t think I am. But I would definitely
want to see a scene of a slave being taken down off a ship
and slaves hung up in the market square and people bid-
ding on them. They had slave auctions all the time in San
Francisco . . . it may touch a raw nerve with people, but . . . I
think people, there’d be a lot of people in the scene that are
kinky enough to want to do that.
margot: Do you think it’s exciting because it’s historical?
edward: Well, it’s exciting because you’ve got bondage and you’ve got
the drama of it. You’ve got everything all in together and it’s
just—it’s tailor-made for a fantasy. And then the best part of
that is: when you’re done, you’re done. It’s not like some-
thing [that]’s going to be around for 400 years, like they
actually had to go through. At the end of the night . . . when
everybody’s packed up and done, it’s done.

In this scene, the realism of such an auction is a defining characteristic.

Unlike the typical charity auction, here the resemblance between, on
the one hand, contemporary, in-scene bodily technologies like bondage
and D/s dramas and, on the other hand, historical slave ships, auction
blocks, and human bondage is center stage.
However, for Edward, when the scene is done, ‘‘it’s done’’; this means
that he can play with the erotics of such a scene without ‘‘promoting

S E X P L AY A N D S O C I A L P OW E R 205
 racial violence’’ or ‘‘disrespecting’’ black people or the history of slavery.
He does not see a real-world impact of creating such a scene ‘‘inside the
community’’; as long as everyone has consented, the scene would enact
racial history fully within the play frame (the ssc scene), and the effects
of such a scene would be limited to the erotic, defined in opposition to
and outside the political or the social.
This circuit—drawing on but obscuring the real—is more complex
than simple appropriation, in which such bracketing vacates the specific-
ity of the cultural trauma that is set into play. As bell hooks argues, white
appropriation of black cultural experience is a way of ‘‘getting a bit of the
Other,’’ ‘‘wherein whatever difference the Other inhabits is eradicated,
via exchange, by a consumer cannibalism that not only displaces the
Other but denies the significance of that Other’s history through a pro-
cess of decontextualiztion’’ (1992, 31). Appropriation, in this way, ‘‘de-
nies the specificity of’’ the Other when ‘‘it recoups it for its own use.’’
Paralleling Kantrowitz’s reading of the swastika, this kind of cultural ap-
propriation not only trivializes slavery; it simultaneously produces and
justifies the privilege of appropriating white subjects who might treat
systematic, historical trauma as a choice, or as a playful game.
Yet the fantasy that the specificity of the real referent—slavery, the
Holocaust—can be stripped away, and the scene might stand only for
power qua power, a neutral form of power, is itself riven with contradic-
tion. To unpack this, I’ll focus on one part of Edward’s statement: ‘‘I’m
just doing it for a kink, ’cause it actually happened and I think parts of it
may be erotic.’’ This complex, ambivalent statement simultaneously
avows and disavows Edward’s larger point: playacting, or miming slav-
ery for an erotic kink, is not racist (or racial appropriation); at the same
time, ‘‘it actually happened’’—a comment that seems out of place unless
we acknowledge that the materiality of slavery is absolutely critical to
the production of the kinky slave auction. In this way, the reenactment
that Edward wants to stage is uncanny in the Freudian sense: the un-
canny as a familiar scene that had been repressed and then returns
(Freud [1919] 1955), but also as an epistemological effect of the un-
stable relationship between fantasy and reality. The circuit at work re-
lies on a known unknowingness that makes enacting such a scene pos-
sible: the difference between reenacting the bondage, the drama, and
the narratives of slave auctions as a scene or a performance and the real
thing—‘‘slavery or the things that happened to the African American

206 CHAPTER FIVE

people in our country’’—is that between copy and original, performance
and real. At the same time, the erotics of the scene serve to obscure
what are, in fact, the necessary links between both kinds of slave auc-
tions, the past and the present.
This takes us beyond the epistemology of whiteness that many peo-
ple in the scene voiced about Master/slave play and charity slave auc-
tions, an unknowingness that imagines that power can be neutral and
detached from its social meanings. Edward’s comments illustrate how
this unknowingness encapsulates the known. Yet through these machi-
nations, the alibi remains in place, keeping the politics of such a scene
firmly in the private space of ‘‘just . . . a kink.’’ At the same time, like the
German prison scene, these scenes require enough of the real to work—
black bodies or German commands and uniforms. This requirement is
obscured, leaving a formal outline with a broken link to its real: a histor-
ical moment as the perfect setting, ‘‘tailor-made for a fantasy.’’ This
dynamic continuously produces and dissolves a split between the fan-
tasy and the real, which maps on to the split between private (neutral)
desires and public (particular) politics.
This sort of private—a depoliticized space of personal desires—is also
the crucial issue in Nazi play. Unlike Master/slave play or fundraising
slave auctions, which facilitate denial or disavowal and are read as ra-
cially neutral (and thus politically neutral), both the realistic slave auc-
tion and Nazi play are seen as political. However, the politics of such
play is centrally about publics and privates: what can be done in private,
in semiprivate (‘‘inside the community’’), or in public. Larry, the owner
of the Scenery, explained to me that although ‘‘we [the Scenery] have
had people come in and do Nazi uniform takedowns, police uniform
takedowns . . . we’ve never had a kkk cross burning kind of scene.’’

margot: Right. Would that be okay?

larry: I doubt it. I doubt it. It would depend on who it was, how it
was set up, and if it was intended to intimidate anyone other
than their play partner. If it was strictly between them and
their play partner, I would probably not have a problem with
it . . . if someone came in to do a ‘‘Nazi Germany, we’re go-
ing to round up the Jews and persecute them’’ [scene] in
the Scenery, I’ll probably not have a problem with that if
they come in with an entourage of their own to have that

S E X P L AY A N D S O C I A L P OW E R 207
 scene between themselves and the players they brought with
them . . . simply because their scene is not my business, even
though I might have a personal point of view on that type of
activity. I’m [of] American Indian descent so I’m probably
more sensitive to racial issues than most people . . . [but ] I’m
probably not going to interrupt their scene provided they
keep it within themselves and [are] not disturbing the other
people in the dungeon. As soon as it becomes a disturbance,
something is going to be done to ensure that it’s no longer a
disturbance.

Larry stresses that the critical thing is whether a scene would ‘‘disturb’’
someone else; otherwise, there is nothing inherently problematic about
a Nazi scene. The disturbance potentially created has to do with the
boundaries between public and private space, which maps onto tensions
between social and personal rights and responsibilities.
Community debate over Nazi play or the use of Nazi paraphernalia
tends to cluster around two positions: a libertarianism that resents rules
against edgier forms of play and a liberalism concerned that Nazi play
might violate other people’s rights. The former should be familiar by
now; it is the rationality of practitioners who, like Vicki, subscribe to a
fiercely individualist understanding of rights: ‘‘Let’s say you want to wear
a Nazi uniform. Let’s say I’m offended by that. I take offense that you’re
wearing this uniform. Bummer for me; not your problem, not your fault.’’
The latter position was also couched in the language of rights, but here,
practitioners were concerned with an audience’s right to consent. Bailey
explained that Nazi play is considered ‘‘edge play in the community.
There are people [who] cannot handle the fact that other people want to
play that way. In general, people who want to play that way are aware this
can push other people’s buttons and tend to do it at invite-only parties or
in private.’’ For these practitioners, since sm must be consented to and
bystanders cannot consent, it is not safe, sane, and consensual to do
public scenes that are likely to upset an audience (this was also the
common argument against playing in busy public spaces).
Thus, unlike slave play, Nazi play does not operate on an axis of
visibility/invisibility, nor is it disguised as private and sexual. Instead,
since such play is already marked as political, the critical distinction is
whether such scenes are ‘‘private’’—in the sense of one’s right to one’s

208 CHAPTER FIVE

desires—or ‘‘public’’—in the sense of violating a larger community’s
right to consent. Crucial, in other words, is a tension between rules and
freedom, a construction, as I explored in chapter 2, that is less about
whether practitioners follow or flout the rules, and more about how the
rules incite a certain kind of self-subjectification, a way of becoming
an sm practitioner. Formulating one’s own political position on Nazi-
themed scenes is simultaneously a means of self-cultivation and a way
of producing a community organized around a particular distribution of
individual (private) and social (public) rights.
This distribution of rights, couched as self-work, has to do with the
desire to be and to appear to be a particular kind of antiracist, progres-
sive person. Thus the key question for many practitioners is what kinds
of scenes they would do ‘‘in public’’ and what kinds of scenes they would
do ‘‘in private.’’ Public, here, is semipublic; it means in front of other sm
practitioners. With the community as audience, practitioners often felt
that they had less control over a potential interpretation of themselves
as racist, an interesting recoding of the ssc scene as unsafe, risky, or
dangerous to self-presentation, as I discuss below. Paul, for example,
explained that, although Mollena has asked him to play with her (by
‘‘screaming ‘nigger’ at her in a scene), ‘‘one reason why I wouldn’t do it
with her is because I don’t know how people out there are going to
[react]. I mean I’d do it private maybe . . . But in public, no fucking
way. There’s no way.’’ Estrella explained, while discussing race play, that
‘‘when I do really edgy stuff, I make sure to inform people around me, or
do it in a private room, or in my private home.’’ Although Estrella voiced
a concern with ‘‘offending’’ or nonconsensually harming other people,
like Paul she also worried that such play might amount to a public
acknowledgment of one’s racism, or at least one’s desire for or eroticiza-
tion of racialized dynamics. Annalee commented: ‘‘I think that there is
such a taboo in our public culture against being racist that even if people
might be fantasizing in their heads about these things, they wouldn’t
say out loud, ‘I’m imagining that you’re my nigger slave’ or whatever.’’
Instead, because of white people’s desire to be antiracist, postracial, or
maybe just pc , these scenes rarely happen in public: although many
practitioners discussed the politics of Nazi play, I did not witness a Nazi
scene during my fieldwork. But the complex forms of attachment and
disavowal at work in such scenes make them ideal fodder for commu-

S E X P L AY A N D S O C I A L P OW E R 209
 nity debates about the relationships between personal/erotic desire and
political/social good.
The other realistic slave auction, imagined by Mollena, frames this
tension between the political and the erotic, expressed in terms of public
social norms and private desires, quite differently. Her scene also draws
on the iconography—the real, material history—of the slave trade. She
explained: ‘‘A lot of [sm ] toys have their origins in stuff that was de-
signed to subjugate people, like spreader bars, but they’ve been modi-
fied . . . and I see [‘the traditional trappings of slavery’] when I look at
them.’’ But she wondered if others do, too; the ubiquity of the charity
slave auction made her wonder ‘‘if people think about the idea of what a
slave auction in the Americas might actually have been like’’ when they
attend a kinky slave auction. She continued: ‘‘What would it be like if you
walked into a Society of Janus auction and had the usual people chatting
and then suddenly someone was dragged in from outside kicking and
screaming and crying and pleading for mercy, and then stripped naked
and inspected by a crowd of four or five people? And then sold off, while
personally begging for this not to happen? And the idea that they don’t
want to be pulled away from their children—how shocking would that
be? . . . I think it would be a profound political and social statement, and
it would rock people’s worlds. And maybe not in a good way, but I think
sometimes a smack upside the head is not a bad thing.’’ Mollena’s desire
is to make the resemblance between racialized history and sm dramati-
cally visible. For her, the realism of the scene—dragging in unwilling
slaves, stripping, and inspecting them while they scream not to be sepa-
rated from their children—would ‘‘rock people’s worlds’’: intervene in
the social world by smacking it ‘‘upside the head.’’ This sort of perfor-
mance, a spectacular enactment that neither denies nor occludes racial
history, is a way of contesting, through the dramatization of, the preser-
vation of such histories in sm play dynamics.
Calling attention to the real referent of these scenes—the material
basis of slavery—Mollena sees her scene as a way of getting people to
‘‘think about the idea of what a slave auction in the Americas might
actually have been like,’’ to think about historical referents as ambiva-
lent presences that haunt the sm scene today. This visibility, in other
words, is epistemological. By dramatizing, often spectacularly, the social
meanings of race, the invisibility of whiteness (as race), and the trace of
a US history of slavery, this play provides an opportunity to challenge

210 CHAPTER FIVE

the colorblind white social logics that produce and justify the commu-
nity. She imagines that such play would not only dramatize but also
disrupt the veil of invisibility that enables and produces forms of racial
privileging, creating a shocking or jarring reminder of racial history and
disturbing the scene’s placid whiteness. When this resemblance is nei-
ther denied nor effaced, these scenes have the potential to replay power
in ways that are neither appropriative (because they are decontextual-
ized or departicularized) nor parodic (because they exaggerate or display
forms of inequality). Instead, Mollena hopes that such a scene might
transform players and audiences by putting into place a circuit that
shocks the ‘‘usual people’’—the professional, privileged Society of Janus
crowd—into a recognition of the connection between the social and
the scene.
Moreover, the circuit not only strives to expose the traffic between
the charity slave auction and US slavery. It also strives to address the
invisibility of people of color and the racism in the sm scene. Disrupt-
ing the invisibility of race, Mollena’s scene makes sure that racism can-
not be denied through neoliberal fantasies of being postracial or color-
blind—about being a certain kind of white person (the good, antiracist
kind) in relation to a progressive (postracial) America. Instead, this
exposure would also intervene into the ways that people in the scene see
their own stakes in and production of racialized social belonging, dis-
rupting white American fantasies of universal citizenship. Mollena’s
play, in other words, relies on making these ongoing racial projects
public in the sense of collective and political. This entails making public
not only racialized history, but also sm ’s current and disavowed erotic
attachment to such dynamics. She plans scenes that will get race, rac-
ism, and racialization ‘‘out into the open,’’ making them visible to vari-
ous publics and demanding a reaction to such play. Crucially, Mollena’s
play asks audiences and players to reflect on the eroticization of racial
history, connecting personal desire to social history and thus resisting
the privatization of sm that situates the erotic outside collective social
dynamics.
During our interview, Mollena told me a story: She was sitting around
with some people, and they were talking about their favorite fantasies.
Half joking and half serious, she said to them: ‘‘Unfortunately I don’t
think I’ll get to have one of my most heavy fantasies acted out, because I
don’t think they’ll let someone into a party wearing [a] Klansman’s

S E X P L AY A N D S O C I A L P OW E R 211
 outfit. Dressed up as the grand dragon, the imperial wizard guy.’’ People
were uncomfortable during this exchange, and later Mollena was taken
to task on a people of color e-mail list she is on. She was accused, she told
me, of ‘‘betraying people of color’’ and ‘‘being an Uncle Tom’’; ‘‘[her]
commitment to [her] race’’ was questioned. I said, in response to this
kkk fantasy, ‘‘but you know it would be quite shocking at a play party.’’
She answered: ‘‘Yeah, no one would like that. No one would like it. It
would just be cool, and I can’t even say if I would like it. I just wonder what
would happen. Part of what’s fascinating about it is the fact that it’s so
huge a thing for everybody. It’s not just me, and part of that energy, that
revulsion or that horror or that disgust or that shock—that’s a big deal.
That’s the type of energy I’m very serious about.’’ Crucial to such a
scene, for Mollena, is the way that it would prompt an affective re-
sponse. She isn’t even sure she would like this scene—that it would be
erotic for her—but she knows it would be a ‘‘huge thing for everybody.’’
She explained: ‘‘I’ve heard stories of people being asked to remove Nazi
emblems and stuff from outfits at parties [because] it’s going to upset
people . . . so doing that kind of thing privately, sure. But my curiosity is
to how everyone else would react around it.’’ Here, it is not a realistic
scene that Mollena is after, but a scene with enough charge—that’s ‘‘so
huge a thing for everybody’’—to generate a kind of reflective political
energy. This type of scene is targeted not at people of color, but at the
larger sm community, calibrated to its disavowed—because privatized—
erotic attachments to nationalized racial hierarchies. Crucial to these
scenes is an audience’s affective response, a kind of emotional involve-
ment that prompts some sort of reconfiguration or reaction. Crucial too
is some public recognition of the referents of what becomes simulta-
neously taboo or publicly off limits, and densely erotic.
Mollena classifies race play as part of a larger set of play styles she
calls ‘‘taboo play.’’ For her, rape play, incest play, religious play, and race
play are all forms of taboo play, ‘‘play around . . . traditionally abused or
victimized groups.’’ In a class called ‘‘Playing with Taboos’’ that she
taught at the Black Rose Conference in Washington, D.C., in November
2002, Mollena explained to her audience that with taboo play, you are
‘‘taking years of experience and putting it into a scene.’’ What I found
interesting about this remark is that, with the word experience, Mollena
is talking not only of her own personal history but of larger, social
relations. In a recent online interview, she explained that, of course, she

212 CHAPTER FIVE

has ‘‘never lived in the South on a plantation and felt the terror of [her]
life every moment at the hands and whims of an owner or of another
slave with an agenda.’’∞∂ However, because she has experienced racism,
‘‘in a very real emotional sense, [she has] tasted what that is like.’’
Mollena’s introduction to her 2002 class was followed by one of the
strangest demonstrations I saw. Mollena had traveled to Washington
with a friend from San Francisco, James. As Mollena talked, James—a
Latino man dressed in a hairnet, a blue flannel shirt buttoned only at
the top, gold chain, and sunglasses—appeared at the side of the stage,
and suddenly, taking Mollena by surprise, rushed onstage. She called
him a ‘‘wetback,’’ and he began shouting ‘‘Yo, bitch, yo nigger!’’ right in
her face. Mollena began to cry: ‘‘I’m sorry. What are you doing? Please
don’t!’’ James pushed her onto the floor, kicking her side and yelling
at her. He called her a ‘‘black bitch,’’ a ‘‘Jemima,’’ and threatened to
cut her with the knife he produced from his pocket if she didn’t give
him her money. As he leaned over her, she looked terrified; she was
crouched down, covering her head and pleading with him: ‘‘I don’t have
any money . . . please don’t hurt me.’’ The audience was silent through
this mock mugging, watching but unresponsive. There was none of the
excited whispering, laughing, or gasping that usually happens during a
class demonstration.
I found the demo odd in part because I had witnessed James’s trans-
formation in the hotel bar after Mollena left to prepare for her class.
James had gone out to a local strip mall in search of his outfit and, as he
dressed in the bar while we chatted, I couldn’t help but laugh at his
transformation from serious San Francisco guy to Latino gang banger.
But when he strutted onstage and took Mollena down, I was uncomfort-
able for several reasons: it wasn’t so much that I was watching a mug-
ging filled with racial epithets, but my nagging suspicion that the per-
formance wasn’t working. The juxtaposition between Mollena’s jovial
presentation and this Latino-on-black everyday kind of crime was awk-
ward. I was also intrigued that Mollena had chosen such an everyday
taboo to play with and on—intrigued theoretically, but not moved. It
was a scene of the urban present, and, although it was about crime, fear,
gender, race, and class all at the same time, I suspected that it was too
mundane to make good erotic drama.
The Klansman scene, the realistic slave auction, and Nazi play and
paraphernalia contrast with this mugging scene in interesting ways.

S E X P L AY A N D S O C I A L P OW E R 213
 sm scenes do not just draw on material social relations; they draw se-
lectively, seeking deeply affective, culturally shared scenarios. Indeed,
effective scenes find and push hot buttons, buttons that access the
power that coheres within national imaginaries that structure citizen-
ship, belonging, and subjectivity through affective relations (on na-
tional imaginaries see Appadurai 1996; Bell and Binnie 2000; Berlant
1997; Povinelli 2006).∞∑ A hot-button issue is one that links individuals,
through affective involvement, with cultural and national imaginaries.
Not every scene is available for such dramatization; there are many
forms of racial and ethnic play—Native American play, for example—
that I have never heard described as such. And this, surely, is not be-
cause these dynamics are not crucially American, but rather because the
selection of racialized inequality for sm scenes relies on broader na-
tional constructions of race, most crucially a black/white racial dichot-
omy. Effective race play, in other words, generates a complex circuit be-
tween affective response, erotic attachment, and national imaginaries,
tapping into complex veins of shame and desire—the ‘‘charge’’ that
animates national belonging.
These racialized belongings, of course, also intersect with other axes
of power: sexuality, gender, age, and so forth. In the sm scene, cultural
trauma play is tightly focused on black/white race play, Nazi play, rape
play, and incest play. Interviewees, when describing one, would slip
smoothly into another; they seemed to be structurally related. As Larry
explained to me, this kind of play ‘‘triggers primal buttons.’’ ‘‘They are
looking to press someone’s trigger to get a specific reaction: ‘Okay, you
are a (button) slave. You will do as you’re told.’ ‘Yes, Massa!’ They are
looking to push that button to put them into that head space. You see
women do it to men a lot. Maybe not necessarily racially mixed, but
you see women tops tell men, ‘You’re a worthless male worm, and you
will worship me as a worm should worship a goddess.’ They are pushing
that same button, and I don’t care if it’s male over female, black over
white, white over black, Nazi over Jew—to me it’s all the same button.’’
These forms of play re-encode particularly loaded, culturally meaningful
power inequalities. These cultural performances work when they tap
into complex and dynamic circuits of affect and social power. They work
particularly well when they reference a real (of racism, if not slavery; of
exploitation, if not incest) that is shared and elaborated as trauma safely

214 CHAPTER FIVE

in the past—a mimetic performance of a durable, if disavowed, structure
of inequality.∞∏
Such fantasies organize self-cultivation around an affective response
to national imaginaries. Sometimes, this affirms a privatized relation to
power, as Edward’s narrative reveals, in part because facing one’s per-
sonal issues is a community norm—part of the project of becoming a
practitioner. Atheris, a white prodomme, explains to me that she knows
a regular client who likes being called ‘‘nigger’’ and being forced to be a
slave. Although she isn’t willing to play with this client, she explains: ‘‘I
think exploring things that make you uncomfortable is a good thing . . . I
think people that go, ‘oh my God, that’s horrible,’ and walk away are
not—don’t really know themselves or don’t want to know something
about themselves. And I’m not afraid to look at myself; if something
makes me uncomfortable, I want to know why.’’ Atheris voices the value
that the community places on knowing oneself, on exploring one’s own
desires, boundaries, and rules. Understanding and learning about one-
self and one’s sm desires, communicating one’s individual desires in
clear and direct terms, and examining and moderating one’s own affec-
tive responses—especially shame, disgust, and desire—is a crucial way
practitioners become practitioners.
This kind of work on the self lies in the personal labor of figuring out
one’s individual relationship to sm , structured through affective re-
sponse and individual self-cultivation. When sm pushes individuals be-
yond their comfort levels or personal boundaries, it can enable practi-
tioners to reexamine, explore, and create new versions of themselves as
practitioners. Stephanie explained: ‘‘One of the things that’s enthralling
to me [about sm ] is that it is so real . . . I mean, it’s a whole different life
afterward . . . as I always say to them [submissives]: ‘You will look at
yourself differently in the mirror tomorrow morning when you’re shav-
ing. You’ll remember what happened at our house last night.’ ’’ But
even as a project of self-cultivation and mastery, the value of personal
discomfort as a path to self-knowledge is ambivalently connected to
broader social imaginaries. Gretchen, discussing race and other cultural
trauma scenes, explained: ‘‘I think that they’re sort of revolutionary.
They’re really on the edge of exploring who we are, and the people
who are exploring those issues are the ones who are really strong be-
cause they’re willing to expose themselves to that vulnerability. I admire

S E X P L AY A N D S O C I A L P OW E R 215
 them.’’ I asked her why such scenes were ‘‘revolutionary,’’ and she said:
‘‘It gives you the opportunity to say, ‘I have a violent response to this, a
violent emotional, personal, psychological response.’ What’s that about?
What does that say about us as a culture, then, and who I am as a person,
and what power do I have over that versus what power does that have
over me?’’ In these cases, rather than simply reaffirming one’s sense of
self or one’s boundaries, pushing buttons can initiate a more recogniz-
ably collective racial project.
During our interview, Anthony, a white dominant, told me that he
had been asked to ‘‘dress up in a Ku Klux Klan outfit’’ for a scene. He
would not do the scene partly because he would be concerned that people
might think he was a real racist. Because he has a Southern accent, grew
up in the segregated South, and, as a boy, acted ‘‘overtly’’ racist, this kind
of play is, as Stephanie put it, very close to ‘‘where we live literally and
figuratively.’’ But for Anthony, although such play is ‘‘dangerous in terms
of my identity’’ (in the scene), it also has the potential to connect the
personal/affective with the social/national. He explained: ‘‘Public scenes
now for me are less about the scene itself, although I’m totally into my
partner when I’m doing it. The scene to me has to include the onlookers,
and I have to do something—I’m compelled to do something—that will
touch them somewhere . . . with the racial thing, it would be more to
touch their buttons in terms of their own racial issues and their racial
taboos and make it [public] . . . That would be something I would want to
achieve in a race scene.’’ For Anthony, like Mollena, race play can push
buttons by tapping into hot-button issues, social issues that interface
complexly with the particular positionalities and experiences of individ-
uals. As with Anthony’s story of reenactment I discussed in the previous
chapter, part of the way this works is by finding someone’s button,
the trigger that ‘‘get[s] her where she lives.’’ Finding someone’s trigger
means creating an effective circuit between their individual eroticization
and the social charge of loaded play.
Race and ethnicity, as well as gender, are hot buttons or triggers be-
cause they are central conduits between the affective/subjective and the
social/structural/national. These themes in play provoke emotional and
affective individual responses to sm scenes. This kind of self-cultivation
enables forms of self-mastering (especially for white practitioners to
‘‘overcome’’ race and racism through choice, consent, and so on), but it
also creates the possibilities for this play to transform practitioners,

216 CHAPTER FIVE

giving them new ways to understand themselves and, crucially, the social
relations they produce and reproduce. This, then, is another way to read
the self-cultivation of sm practice: as generating particular affective
responses within players and audiences, responses that might transform
what is a fundamentally individual project of self-making into collective,
or public, politics.
In her introduction to the demonstration in Washington, Mollena
explained that there is always shame involved in taboo play, both for the
people involved in the scenes and for the communities and histories
that such scenes reference. ‘‘I’ve been accused of setting the race back by
doing race play,’’ Mollena told us. This collective shame is one index of
the way that sexual desires are produced through discomforting power
relations, racist histories, domination, and inequality; it reveals a collec-
tive, rather than a personal, responsibility for racialization. In our inter-
view, Mollena told me that she was particularly interested in scenes that
‘‘push that envelope with people’’ and ‘‘freak people out.’’ I asked her
what she wanted out of such scenes, and she explained: ‘‘I know that
there are some people who I’ve talked to personally who said, ‘I’ve never
seen that type of play done before. It made me really uncomfortable. I
had to kind of examine why.’ And so I do and say some things that make
people think outside of their lives and that, for me, is again educational
and that’s the push that I like to get.’’ Educational scenes ‘‘challenge
people to observe and think about their own history that they bring into
the scene, their own prejudices they bring into the scene.’’ In this way,
Mollena’s sm is less about sex-desire as a personal, private, affective
relation and more about sexual performance as a social, cultural, and
public dramatization of power, a dramatization that forces sm practi-
tioners to reflect on their eroticization of and reliance on racialized
national belonging. Making the referents of a scene public and generat-
ing an affective response can, she hopes, be educational; her desire is to
create scenes that demand a public recognition of what is normally
unspoken or unseen, by making people connect what they do in a scene
with their own history, a larger national history.
Crucial to an effective cultural performance is audience involvement:
an ambivalent, affective connection. Mollena’s scene with James failed
as a cultural performance, at least for me, because we did not have to
become involved. In contrast, doing a hard resistance scene with a white
top with a Southern drawl or enacting a realistic slave auction or a kkk

S E X P L AY A N D S O C I A L P OW E R 217
 scene stages race in ways that make other people uncomfortable—and
here I mean people watching such a scene, but also the people at Mol-
lena’s classes, the people she talks to about this, me, and you, the reader.
This discomfort can, she hopes, force an audience to become emotion-
ally involved in a social, political, and collective way; can allow the
disruptive force of the social to erupt in the privatized scene. As she
explained, ‘‘making a private act like that that involves sex . . . to have
that shared with people . . . to me, that’s a pretty profound political
statement.’’ The audience, ‘‘whatever their reaction is,’’ makes possible
the ‘‘politicization of gender and race and sex and all those things.’’ This
affective involvement is ambivalent; Mollena names many forms of
emotional reactions including energy, revulsion, horror, disgust, shock,
and becoming upset—and I would add the more typical desire, lust, joy,
and pleasure. This circuit means that political sm play involves the
audience in a way that can disrupt the obfuscation of race and racism,
and open up new ways to think about, and challenge, the links between
individual erotic attachment and more-collective racial dynamics.
The forms of disavowal we can see in the Mosley case are ways of
bracketing or shielding the ‘‘tensive social issues’’ on which sm depends
through a ‘‘protective veneer of the performative’’ (Alexander 2004,
502). As long as this veneer or barrier—what Bryant Alexander calls the
‘‘prophylactic’’ of performance (503)—is in place, racialized spectacle
can be emptied of its referent, becoming neutral or just play. This form
of denial can also take a more ambivalent turn; when it is confined to
the consensual, private, and individual, such play can simultaneously
reveal and conceal the real stakes of such performances. Both of these
effects can further the disavowals of privilege and power under the guise
of neutral subjectivity. However, when sm play touches players and
audiences where they live—connects individual (private, sexual, affec-
tive) buttons with social (public, political, national) imaginaries—such
play exposes practitioners and audiences to the vulnerability of play, to
the shared responsibility we have for producing unequal social relation-
ships. When this happens, when sm play creates a way for practitioners
to reimagine the responsibility they have for social relations, the play
breaks down the split between personal desire and public politics that
obscures, via neoliberal rationalities, a collective sense of responsibility
for the ways that race structures and restructures subjectivity, commu-
nity, and belonging.

218 CHAPTER FIVE

 At these points, bdsm scenes are troubling or discomforting because
they disrupt certain ideological constructs—what I have been calling
alibis—that separate the social and the sexual. They suggest that, con-
trary to community ideology, sm isn’t equally available to everyone, an
unmarked, universalized practice; rather, racial, gendered, and classed
difference is at the center of sm practice. They disrupt the idea that
sexuality springs from a private, innate, sexual essence deep inside the
body, and instead insist that desire is forged in the crucible of history,
community, and nation. And they challenge a narrative of historical
progress, where we (urban, progressive, alternative white people) are
beyond race, along with America itself—instead showing that we remain
affectively and erotically bound to precisely the forms of difference that
we might desire to overcome. This discomfort is the effect of seeing, and
of being jarred by one’s complicity in, the violence of whiteness. bdsm
play produces political possibilities when it encourages—even forces—
practitioners to take responsibility for erotic practice as part of a larger
community. This responsibility is what is effaced in neoliberal denials of
the circuit between the scene and the social. And so this form of discom-
fort can be transformational when it capitalizes on the density of affec-
tive responses to bring into relief a wider social world, when it connects
an individual’s self-making project with the social responsibility we all
share. When this happens, sm play puts into place a circuit that can
challenge a neoliberal prioritization of personal responsibility in favor
of one much more resonant with a social responsibility to others.

THE SCENE THAT WORKED ALL TOO WELL

THE MATERIALITY OF DISCOURSE

Lynndie England . . . [is] not just the face of Torturegate; she’s the
dominatrix of the American dream.
— richard goldstein, ‘‘Bitch Bites Man!’’

My final scene—the Abu Ghraib torture photographs—shifts from ra-

cialized politics in the sm scene to the ‘‘sadomasochistic’’ imaginary of a
larger US nationalism. But, like the slave auction or the Nazi scene, this
scene must also be read in terms of the fetishistic tensions embedded
within mimetic performance, the relations between public/private and
social/individual that guide a political reading of performance. And

S E X P L AY A N D S O C I A L P OW E R 219
 here, too, audience, positionality, and discursive productions set up the
complicated circuits of affect and effect upon which power—not only of
the safe, sane, and consensual variety—relies.
In spring 2004, I read a scene report—a written description of a con-
sensual bdsm play scene—in the Janus newsletter. The scene took place
at a San Francisco dungeon in late March 2004. It was an interrogation
scene, involving a colonel, a captain, a general, and a spy. The spy was
hooded, duct-taped to a chair, and slapped in the face. As she resisted, the
spy was threatened with physical and sexual violence, stripped naked, cut
with glass shards, vaginally penetrated with a condom-sheathed hammer
handle, force-fed water, shocked with a cattle prod, and anally penetrated
with a flashlight. The scene ended when the spy screamed out her safe-
word: ‘‘Fucking Rumsfeld!’’
Ending a neutral interrogation scene—with its stock characters of
colonel and spy—with this particular safeword illuminates the complex
politics of sm scenes. I read the ‘‘joke’’ of Rumsfeld-as-safeword as both
a gesture to the real of imperialist power from which sm draws much of
its symbolism and a mockery of that power. Like the interrogation scene
I described in the introduction, many sm play scenes rely on the iconog-
raphy of torture and military or imperial dynamics. Indeed, practices
focused on the breasts and genitals are called both play and torture: tit
torture, nipple play, genitorture, cbt (cock and ball torture), genital
play. Play themes like interrogation, military, torture, terror or fear, and
abduction are common topics for sm classes and workshops. These
scenes work through mimetic resignification; they draw on forms of
state power available as historical or cultural signage, staging military,
imperial, or colonial relations of power in performative ways. In this
scene, co-opting the extraordinary power of the name while subverting
its claims to rule (Rumsfeld can be exchanged with other safewords, like
red and pineapple), Rumsfeld-as-safeword is a form of political critique
in which one can get off on and enact power at the same time.
bdsm scenes work, as I have argued, by tapping into something
powerful or realistic enough to be effective; to touch people where they
live. These scenes—along with many other scenes in this book—worked
for me and for practitioners because they effectively produced emo-
tional responses, forcing players and audiences to get involved with the
play. By restaging military techniques, or performing violent intimacies
between guard and prisoner, or cop and victim, interrogation scenes

220 CHAPTER FIVE

might be parodic: they might undermine the remote power of authority
through creative reenactment. They might be a redeployment, allowing
us to reimagine on our own terms our lack of power over the war, over
state power, and over intimate violence like rape, incest, or racism. They
might make a mockery of imperial power, recostuming or camping it up;
they might give the lie to such power (in the humor-as-politics of a
scene in which Rumsfeld means stop). They might reproduce a structure
of feeling, an attachment to authority, that can be harnessed by the
state to ensure our compliance. I do not want to close down the com-
plexity of such scenes; sm play with imperialism is not always, or nec-
essarily, politically interventionist. However, by dramatizing power in
often spectacular ways, satisfying sm play effectively creates a circuit
between the individual, private, or erotic and the social, national, or
public routed through affective response.
If this, as I have been arguing, is how we might begin to read the
political effects of sm play scenes with cultural or national trauma, what
about actual torture practices? This question was prompted by a flurry
of e-mail messages on sm mailing lists in late May and early June 2004,
two months after I read about that Rumsfeld scene. bdsm practition-
ers were both offended by and anxious about the way the media con-
tinuously linked sm to the torture practices and photos from the Abu
Ghraib prison after Seymour Hersh broke the story in the New Yorker
(2004). For example, the San Francisco Bay View billed Lynndie England
the ‘‘cigarette smoking, dominatrix prison guard’’ (Damu 2004). After
members of Congress viewed an additional 1,800 photographs that
were not released to the public, the Los Angeles Times reported Repre-
sentative Barney Frank’s comment: ‘‘It had nothing to do with trying to
break them . . . It was sadomasochistic sexual degradation’’ (quoted in
Serrano and McDonnell 2004). Joanna Bourke wrote in the Guardian
that ‘‘the pictures of American soldiers humiliating Iraqi detainees are
reminiscent of sadomasochistic porn’’ (2004).
In this context, practitioners were eager to claim that consensual
bdsm had nothing at all to do with nonconsensual torture, that bdsm
was not sadism. And, of course, bdsm is not the same thing as tor-
ture. Still, what do we make of the uncomfortable similarities between
bdsm play and prison torture? Of the easy slippage from guard to domi-
natrix, from torture and interrogation to sadomasochistic sex play?
These crossings point to an uncanny resemblance between the photo-

S E X P L AY A N D S O C I A L P OW E R 221
 graphs and sm scenes: similar body technologies (hooding, bondage,
sexual humiliation, emotional manipulation) and similarly careful stag-
ing (the arranged bodies, the props, the audience). It is politically ap-
pealing, although ultimately dishonest, to argue that these scenes are
unrelated, that they exist outside of or can be fully bracketed from real
torture, military interrogation, or imperialism. sm , as I have argued,
depends for its erotic power on precisely these real-world relations,
within which it is given form and content.∞π
Such scenes, then, are neither precisely the same nor completely
unrelated, but instead might be productively juxtaposed in order to
reveal not only their contrasting contexts, but also their different dis-
cursive and material effects. Both the sm interrogation scene and the
Abu Ghraib photographs create circuits or exchanges between the real
(the social, public, political) and the scene (the performance, private,
erotic). And both bdsm play and the photographs of torture at Abu
Ghraib spectacularize power inequality; they both render relations of
domination in dramatic, staged, and framed ways. Yet politicized sm
practice strives to be more than just play; politically effective sm sutures
performance to the social, creating social and relational exchanges be-
tween players, and between players and audiences, that force recogni-
tion of and reflection on the social basis of subjectification. The pho-
tographic representation in Abu Ghraib, on the other hand, destroys
relational exchange, transforming a political and national real—torture
—into an individuated, sexual fantasy.∞∫ In this way, the relationship
between these two performative events is more properly chiasmic: sm
scenes can enable an intervention into the social world through affec-
tive involvement, while the Abu Ghraib photographs close off a social
response to torture through affective disengagement.
Take, for example, the notorious photograph of Lynndie England
holding a leash attached to a naked Iraqi detainee, a photograph that
reminded many of a dominatrix pose. In the Telegram and Gazette,
Dianne Williamson called England a ‘‘deranged dominatrix’’ (2004); the
Toronto Star used ‘‘diminutive dominatrix’’ (‘‘Sex, Sexism Drive Prison
Coverage’’ 2004). Susan Sontag wrote in the New York Times Magazine
that ‘‘the pictures seem part of a larger confluence of torture and por-
nography: a young woman leading a naked man around on a leash is
classic dominatrix imagery’’ (2004, 27). Though diminutive, England is
no dominatrix; describing her in this way facilitates a disavowal of

222 CHAPTER FIVE

institutionalized torture by framing the abuse as her personal psycho-
sexual predilection, even as she (and thus this slippery mechanism)
became the circulated and recirculated image of the scandal at Abu
Ghraib. This commentary borrows from the icon of the dominatrix (a
figure usually encased in skintight black leather or latex, not military
fatigues) to pathologize England, offering us the story of a woman with
individuated deviancy.∞Ω
This discourse of sadomasochistic pathology is also at work in the
final independent panel report on the scandal, the Schlesinger report.
The opening sentences of the report read: ‘‘The events of October
through December 2003 on the night shift of Tier 1 at Abu Ghraib prison
were acts of brutality and purposeless sadism . . . The pictured abuses . . .
represent deviant behavior and a failure of military leadership and disci-
pline’’ (Schlesinger et al. 2004, 5; see also 43). Even as the report places
responsibility on the chain of command, the environment, and the re-
classification of interrogation techniques, it also states: ‘‘The aberrant
behavior on the nightshift in Cell Block 1 at Abu Ghraib . . . [has] a unique
nature fostered by the predilections of the noncommissioned officers in
charge. Had these noncommissioned officers behaved more like those on
the day shift, these acts . . . would not have taken place’’ (13; see also 29).
‘‘Deviant’’ ‘‘predilections’’ and ‘‘purposeless sadism’’—these repetitions
throughout the document refigure torture as sadistic, personal pathol-
ogy, decontextualized and atomized: ‘‘Some individuals seized the op-
portunity provided by this environment to give vent to latent sadistic
urges’’ (29).
The slippage between dominatrix and military guard, between ‘‘de-
viant’’ behavior and military plans, shows us the effectiveness of nam-
ing this violence ‘‘sadomasochism.’’ This discursive production has two
important political effects: it pathologizes bdsm practitioners, and it
works to shield US military operations. Calling the practices depicted in
these photographs sadism instead of torture draws attention to the
sex in these pictures, and then frames this sex as the depraved prac-
tices of individuals, rather than institutionalized military practice. This
mechanism is made possible through the discourse of sadomasochism
as individual perversion: a discursive production with terrifying mate-
rial effects.
‘‘It’s not a pretty picture,’’ then–Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
commented shortly after the photographs were released (‘‘Rumsfeld

S E X P L AY A N D S O C I A L P OW E R 223
 Testifies Before Senate Armed Services Committee’’ 2004). The acts
depicted, Rumsfeld goes on to say, are ‘‘acts that can only be described as
blatantly sadistic, cruel and inhuman’’; they are ‘‘fundamentally un-
American.’’ Contesting these statements to document the Americanness
and unexceptional nature of sexualized forms of torture, as well as the
context of a much larger US war strategy, is not enough. Rather, we
should recall that the problem is the efficacy of the framing and staging
of these photographs as sadomasochism: the materiality of sadomas-
ochism as a discursive production.
In a context where viewers have very little information about Iraq, the
war there, or international politics, the reception of these photographs
as sadomasochistic perversion simultaneously produced patriotic Amer-
icans and screened off torture as a technique of imperial power. Mark
Danner writes that the ‘‘aberrant, outlandish character of what the
photographs show—the nudity, the sadism, the pornographic imagery—
seems to support’’ President Bush’s statement that the behaviors do not
represent America (2004). On May 24, 2004, on a visit to the Army War
College, Bush dismissed the prison scandal as ‘‘disgraceful conduct by a
few American troops who dishonored our country and disregarded our
values’’ (Bush 2004). The argument that the photographs are the rogue,
late-night actions of a few bad apples is more than disavowal; it is also a
way of pressing the pathologization of sadomasochism into imperial
service, and using this taint to shield the workings of power. Danner
argues: ‘‘Behind the exotic brutality so painstakingly recorded in Abu
Ghraib . . . lies a simple truth, well known but not yet publicly admitted in
Washington: that since the attacks of September 11, 2001, officials of the
United States, at various locations around the world . . . have been tortur-
ing prisoners . . . [T]he bizarre epics of abuse coming out of Abu Ghraib
begin to come into focus, slowly resolving from what seems a senseless
litany of sadism and brutality to a series of actions that, however abhor-
rent, conceal within them a certain recognizable logic’’ (2004). Rather
than the sadistic actions of a few bad apples, the torture was part of a
much larger course of action carried out around the world as part of US
military and political strategy.≤≠ Yet focusing attention on the particular
bodies of the perverse guards instead of on the larger US military and po-
litical strategy was effective on multiple levels. Indeed, in the aftermath
of the scandal, although nine of the reservists who served at Abu Ghraib
were convicted at a court-martial or pled guilty to charges of abuse (eight

224 CHAPTER FIVE

were sentenced to jail time), the only officer charged, Lieutenant Colonel
Steven Jordan, was cleared of all criminal responsibility in 2008 (White
2008). No senior US civilian or military officer—Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld, cia Director George Tenet, Lieutenant General Ri-
cardo Sanchez (the top US commander in Iraq), and Major General
Geoffrey Miller (commander at Guantánamo Bay)—was investigated.
The effectiveness of the images from Abu Ghraib relies on a spec-
tacularization that pins an audience’s attention to the surface of a pho-
tograph, obscuring the geopolitical reality of US military imperialism.
This is not because the photographs did not incite affective response;
even as the viscerality of the images fades, the photographs’ circulation
and reproduction elicited shock and outrage. For some, this galvanized
demand for intervention in the war because a ‘‘line was crossed,’’ an
argument that had political effects. Yet perversely, the ‘‘line crossed,’’ as
Jasbir Puar notes, is one of sexuality, not death or violence—or, more
important for my purposes, torture (2005, 13). As others have shown,
the production and refiguring of a split between what Brian Keith Axel
terms ‘‘national-normative’’ and ‘‘antinational’’ sexuality (2002, 420)
yokes together gender and sexuality to secure empire on the backs of
racialized Others. But what these critical commentaries miss is the
discursive use of sadomasochism to transfer our feelings of discomfort
or disgust with torture onto the perverse practices of individual US
soldiers.≤∞
Mobilizing this sadomasochism performatively produces an Ameri-
can public that is unified and good and decent, as Alphonso Lingis
puts it, in contrast to the ‘‘visual fascination’’ or ‘‘voluptuous anxiety’’
aroused by the photographs (2006, 85). This is fascination in Baudril-
lard’s sense: a state of ‘‘narcoticized’’ spectatorship, in which being mes-
merized by the visible surface dissolves meaning into sheer spectacle
(1994; see also Debord [1967] 1995). Through this mechanism, torture,
dehumanization, and imperialism are transmuted into the ‘‘sadomaso-
chistic’’ practices of US soldiers, closing down a social or political re-
sponse. This mechanism allows the spectator to remain insulated from
these photographs—safely distant through our disembodied viewing,
denied an access point or a means of intervention. And, although this is
the risk of all photographic representations, the photographs from Abu
Ghraib make a performance phantastical, moving torture from a space
of the real (the prison) to the space of fantasy (sadism). The US audience

S E X P L AY A N D S O C I A L P OW E R 225
 for these photographs from Abu Ghraib is enabled, through these cir-
cuits, to think about the scandal (and its larger geopolitical context) in
terms of a particular, pathological relationship between sex and violence
called ‘‘sadomasochism,’’ rather than torture. The sex—blurred out
anuses, naked bodies, thumbs-up signs—an overwhelming, sensational-
istic, and outrageous surface—leaves only the echo or shadow of what it
displaces.
At the press conference for the release of the report, Schlesinger said:
‘‘It was kind of Animal House on the night shift’’ (Graham and White
2004). This reference parallels some of the comments in the media that
the torture had been for the ‘‘amusement,’’ ‘‘entertainment,’’ or ‘‘fun’’ of
the guards (Higham and Stephens 2004; Scelfo and Nordland 2004,
41).≤≤ Yet describing torture as ‘‘fun’’ requires the trivialization of sex
rendered as merely individual: an inability to see the relations produced
or destroyed by sexuality as both deadly serious and deeply embedded in
national modalities of power—as social and political problems, rather
than pathological, private desires.
How, then, do we make sense of the relationship between consensual
sm and photographic representations of torture?≤≥ Effective sm can put
into place circuits that force audience involvement, that can serve as
performative interventions into and productions of social relations. Yet
it can also put into place circuits that facilitate disavowal, that enable
practitioners to imagine themselves as outside—exempt from—the so-
cial relations on which they depend (and that they create), especially
when such circuits reproduce material and social relations of whiteness,
individualism, and personal rights and responsibility. Similarly, the pho-
tographs from Abu Ghraib show us that these other circuits depend
not only on a disavowal, facilitated through alibis and fantasized sepa-
rations, but also on the materiality of discourse: sadomasochism as
individual—and not social, military, or structural—perversion. This re-
lies, in turn, on the figuration of sexuality as personal, private, and
trivial, as opposed to the real of political, economic, and international
relations.
It is for these reasons that we should read sm scenes and their
referents as neither parallel nor oppositional—not a case of original and
copy—but rather in terms of their specific performative effects. And
here, with the case of the interrogation scene and the photographs of
torture, we see a chiasmic relationship between socialized power in sm

226 CHAPTER FIVE

and sexualized power in imperialism. In her reading of the torture in
Abu Ghraib, Rosalind Morris (2007) argues that the sexualization of
torture techniques produces dehumanization—a nonrelation, a social
unmaking—that is grounded in the racialization of religious otherness.
This opens up one way to differentiate torture from sm : effective sm
produces social relations through affective involvement; effective tor-
ture destroys them. sm can be transformational when it connects the
scene to the social real—when, even in the safe space of a classroom
demo, and even for me, the anthropologist in the room, the ‘‘just for
play’’ becomes real, and the audience must risk identification with the
bodies and social imaginaries at play. In contrast, the Abu Ghraib photo-
graphs work when they disconnect the scene from the political real.
Reading Lynndie England as a sadistic dominatrix forecloses identifica-
tion and relationality: she becomes sick, and we (the audience) are
shocked by what human beings—other human beings—can do. This
distancing from England’s particular body is, crucially, a distancing from
the United States as body politic, and an effective veiling of the military
and imperial scene in Iraq.
These insights allow us to refigure the relationship between sm and
torture, moving beyond the liberal distinction: that of consent. In late
2002, several newspapers breathlessly revealed that Jack McGeorge, a
munitions analyst deployed to Iraq to find weapons of mass destruction,
is also a leader in the bdsm scene (McGeorge is a founder of Black Rose
and an officer in the ncsf and the national Leather Leadership Confer-
ence). McGeorge became the butt of jokes on late-night talk shows, in
cartoons featuring him in a leather harness, and in news articles with
clever pun-titles like ‘‘The UN’s Foray into Saddamasochism’’ (Steyn
2002)—each analogizing bdsm practices and Saddam Hussein’s torture
techniques. In an essay supporting McGeorge, David Steinberg argues
that ‘‘enjoying pain is not the same as getting beaten up on the street’’
and that ‘‘consensuality is the defining difference between empower-
ment and abuse’’ (2003). My interviewees agreed. Jezzie explained that
her discomfort with Master/slave terminology has to do with the ‘‘fun-
damental differences’’ between nonconsensual and consensual slavery:
‘‘Nonconsensual is so fundamentally destructive and horrifying, and
consensual in my life is so fundamentally constructive and wonderful
that it’s not a comfortable connection to draw.’’ Yet this dichotomy, as I
have shown throughout, is inherently unstable. The Abu Ghraib photo-

S E X P L AY A N D S O C I A L P OW E R 227
 graphs, as Morris argues, produce ‘‘consent’’ retrocitationally: ‘‘The de-
tainee’s submission to the torturer’s very command is made to appear
as the source of the detainee’s own enjoyment’’ (2007, 112; see also
Mirzoeff 2006, 26). The fantasized sexual and racialized deviancy of
the detainees transformed torture into consensual sex, a performa-
tive abjection that produces deviant, masochistic objects. In contrast,
sm ’s claim to consent relies on, and simultaneously disrupts, the lib-
eral, autonomous subject. Requiring nonconsensual social inequality and
power differentials for erotic charge, but also the fantasy of a subject free
to choose and perform in such scenes without social consequence, sm ’s
unstable and ambivalent relations between consent and nonconsent
highlight social tensions between agency and coercion. In the bdsm
community and in particular scenes, this relies on the construction and
validation of a kind of neoliberal subject—a race-, gender-, and class-
neutral rational agent enacting its own private, empowered desires in
the sexual marketplace—whose very production belies its dependence
on social hierarchy.
Thus, although we can contrast these two scenes in terms of their
modes of operation, as well as their social, performative, and ideological
contexts, the interrogation scene, with Rumsfeld as the safeword, re-
minds us that the efficacy of sm scenes is dependent on violent refer-
ents, unstable relations, and social audiences—just as the spectacular
performance of the photographs as and of torture shows us new, dis-
turbing forms of organizational efficiency and representational efficacy.
We should not valorize minoritarian performances in terms of trans-
gression, imagining a split between those performances that enforce
social power and those that uproot it. Rather, both scenes, through
repetition, encode or coalesce bodies both individual and social; both are
performances that produce and respond to power organized around ef-
fective performance. We must, then, trace the complex circuits that sex-
uality travels as it connects private selves and social power—revealing,
distorting, connecting, involving.

READING SM PERFORMATIVE MATERIALISM

The stories with which I opened this book—the charity slave auction,
Mark’s bondage party, Estrella’s incest play scene, and the juxtaposition
of the Abu Ghraib photographs and consensual interrogation scenes—

228 CHAPTER FIVE

reveal the dense connections between materiality and performance that
are crucial to sm sexuality, subjectivity, community, and belonging. To
read these scenes, I have moved beyond typical analyses of performative
politics, resisting the question, ‘‘Which sm performances subvert social
power?’’ to ask instead, ‘‘What political effects are produced in the
complicated circuits between bodies, players, audiences, and readers
created by sm ?’’ Performance and materiality must be read together
through a performative materialism that neither ignores the materiality
of discourse nor effaces the performativity of material inequality.
sm is a social practice that links bodies and subjects, selves and
communities, private desires and public politics. When we parse the cir-
cuits that sexuality creates between individuals and social relations—in
the history and economy of the Bay Area, in commodity and energy
exchanges between sm bodies, and in gendered and racialized power
exchanges dependent on larger systems of inequality—we see the dy-
namic relationship between subjects and social hierarchies. Such cir-
cuits are productive: they draw on and reproduce the social horizon
against which subjects, communities, and political imaginations gain
force and legibility. The complicated circuits put into place through sm
sex connect the embodied subject and the social body through com-
modity exchanges, through creative embodiments, through the ambiva-
lences of gender and sex, and through the hierarchies of racial visibility.
Not always subversive nor always capitulative, these exchanges are al-
ways productive; performances both depend on and produce material
relations.
Communities like bdsm are dependent on capitalism; changing forms
of community, identity, and commodity exchange produce bdsm and its
pleasures. The economic underpinnings of bdsm are both consolidated
—legitimized—and disavowed by neoliberalism as a cultural formation, a
political rationality that champions market logics of personal respon-
sibility, free choice, privacy, and individual agency. Imagining the scene
as a private public, play as privatized desire, risk or safety as personal
responsibility, and sm roles as freely chosen and personal proclivities
both produces this new sm community and justifies a neutral or univer-
salized social belonging within it. In other words, replaying social norms
in the privacy of our home dungeon might obscure the institutionalized
systems of domination in and through which such scenes arise.
At the same time, such scenes are mobile, multiple, and ambivalent.

S E X P L AY A N D S O C I A L P OW E R 229
 As I have argued, effective performances work when they connect in-
dividual with social and national imaginaries, when they touch you
‘‘where you live.’’ What happens next, however, depends. Sometimes, as
I have shown, making sex public can disrupt fantasies of autonomous
individualism, personal pathology, individuated responsibility, the pri-
vateness of desire, or sex removed from the social. Sometimes, too,
circuits can reproduce, reinforce, even establish forms of disavowal and
unknowing that enable social privilege and help to justify it. There is no
single reading of the sm scene, because scenes depend on the active
production of the materiality of social differentiation by players, audi-
ences, and readers.
In this way, I have sought to reframe the analysis of sm away from a
binary—transgressive, queer, counterpublic practice versus hegemonic,
heteronormative lifestyle—and toward, instead, the ‘‘contingent yet
foundational ways in which practices of everyday life rework, within a
range of limitations’’ larger economic, political, and institutional forces
(Boellstorff 2007, 15). To read the political effects of performances that
produce social relations requires a lens trained on ambivalence, on what
is uneven, contradictory, and multiple in both sm performances and the
material social relations that form and are formed through such scenes.
Following Bhabha, Lott shows that the cultural performance of black-
face is ‘‘less a repetition of power relations than a signifier of them—a
distorted mirror, reflecting displacements and condensations and dis-
continuities between which and the social field there exist lags, uneven-
ness, multiple determinations’’ (1993, 8). Similarly, sm performance is
not a repetition of social power; it carries and produces the complexities
of social relationships, relationships shot through with contradictions
unresolved—indeed, erotically and politically powerful precisely because
they remain in tension.
And here, although sexuality is imagined as a break from material
social relations, sexuality is, instead, the raw material of these circuits,
the route through which these bodies—individual, social, national—link
and join; where ideologies of public and private, of rights and respon-
sibilities, are produced and contested. Reid-Pharr argues: ‘‘What we
think when we fuck is not so much dictated by race, gender, and class
but instead acts itself as an articulation of the structures of dominance
—and resistance—that create race, gender, and class’’ (2001, 92). In-
deed, the ‘‘fantasy of escape is precisely that which marks the sexual act

230 CHAPTER FIVE

as deeply imbricated in the ideological process by which difference is
constructed and maintained . . . the task that awaits all of us, then, is to
speak desire plainly, to pay attention to what we think when we fuck . . .
the work before us is precisely to put our own bodies on the line’’
(98). The task for audiences, readers, and critics is to attend to our in-
volvement, our affective responses, our investments in the study—and
the politicization—of sexuality. If we can do this, we can understand
sexuality as a social relation—interarticulated with hierarchies, institu-
tions, national imaginaries, and local spaces of practice—rather than
an escape. And we might also begin to see how our own commitments,
subjectivities, and communities—sexual or otherwise—are constituted
through social relations of power.

S E X P L AY A N D S O C I A L P OW E R 231
APPENDIX N
I N T E RV I E W E E V I G N E T T E S

Each person chose a name and provided the following biographi-

cal information. All ages and dates are at the time of the inter-
view.
annalee is a thirty-two-year-old white woman. She is bi-
sexual, partnered, and poly, and she identifies as a genderqueer/
pervert/voyeur. She works as a newspaper columnist and free-
lance writer and lives in San Francisco. She moved to the Bay
Area fourteen years ago, from Southern California. She has been
in the sm scene for three years. Interviewed 2002.
anthony is a fifty-six-year-old white man. He is bisexual,
married, and poly, and he identifies as a dominant. Retired from
the military, he lives in Solano County with his wife, step-
hanie . He moved to the Bay Area fourteen years ago, from
Florida, and has been in the semipublic scene for four years.
Interviewed 2002.
anton is a twenty-five-year-old white man. He is heterosex-
ual and married, and he identifies as a master. He works in the
it industry and lives in San Francisco with his wife and slave,
jezzie . He moved to the Bay Area three years ago, from Penn-
sylvania, and has been in the semipublic scene for three years.
Interviewed 2002.
atheris is a thirty-five-year-old white woman. Partnered
and monogamous, she identifies as a dominant. She works as a
 professional dominant and lives in Alameda County. She moved to the Bay Area
four years ago, from Florida, and has been in the semipublic scene for six years.
Interviewed 2002.
bailey is a forty-three-year-old white woman. She is heterosexual and
single, and she identifies as a bottom. A technology consultant, she lives in San
Mateo County. She moved to the Bay Area eight years ago, from North Carolina.
She has been in the semipublic scene for about six years. Interviewed 2002.
bonnie is a twenty-six-year-old Asian American woman. She is heterosex-
ual, partnered, and monogamous, and she identifies as a masochist. An office
manager, she lives in Alameda County. She moved to the Bay Area four years
ago, from Southern California. She has been in the semipublic scene for three
years. Interviewed 2002.
carrie is a forty-four-year-old white woman. She is bisexual, married, and
poly; she identifies as a bottom/submissive. A massage therapist and mother,
she lives in Santa Clara County. She is from the Bay Area and has been in the
semipublic scene for seven years. Interviewed 2002.
cathy is a thirty-nine-year-old white woman. Pansexual and partnered, she
identifies as a dominant/switch. She works in retail and lives in San Mateo
County. She moved to the Bay Area three years ago, from Washington, D.C. She
has been in the semipublic scene for two years. Interviewed 2002.
chris is a thirty-five-year-old white man. He is heterosexual, married, poly,
and he identifies as a dom. He works as a market researcher and lives in Santa
Clara County. He has been in the semipublic scene for about eight years. Inter-
viewed 2002.
covenant is a forty-five-year-old white man. Heterosexual and partnered,
he identifies as a top. He works in software development and lives in Santa Cruz
County. He moved to the Bay Area from Massachusetts. Interviewed 2002.
domina is a forty-nine-year-old white woman. She is bisexual, married,
and also partnered with her submissive, hayden ; she identifies as a dominant/
sadist. She is a professional dominant and lives in Stanislaus County. She has
been in the semipublic scene for eight years. Interviewed 2000.
don is a forty-year-old white man. He is straightish and poly and identifies
as a service top. A computer consultant, he lives in San Mateo County. He
moved to the Bay Area thirty-nine years ago, from Colorado. He has been in the
scene for eleven years. Interviewed 2002.
dylan is a thirty-five-year-old white woman. She is bisexual/lesbian and
single and identifies as a submissive. A web designer and student, she lives
in Alameda County. She moved to the Bay Area thirteen years ago, from South-
ern California. She has been in the semipublic scene for seven years. Inter-
viewed 2002.
edward is a thirty-three-year-old white man. Heterosexual and single, he
identifies as a dominant. He is a warehouse manager and lives in Alameda

234 APPENDIX
County. He moved to the Bay Area five years ago, from the East Coast. He has
been in the semipublic scene for six years. Interviewed 2002.
estrella is a thirty-nine-year-old white woman. She is lesbian, married,
mostly monogamous, and identifies as a femme top. She works as a prodomme
and lives in Alameda County. She moved to the Bay Area four years ago, from
New Mexico. She has been in the semipublic scene for fourteen years. Inter-
viewed 2003.
francesca is a forty-eight-year-old white woman. She is bisexual and
single, and identifies as a pain slut bottom. She works as a consultant and lives
in San Mateo County. Born in the Bay Area, she has been in the semipublic scene
for eleven years. Interviewed 2002.
gretchen is a forty-one-year-old white woman. She is bisexual, partnered,
monogamous, and identifies as a bottom/submissive. She is a civil engineer and
lives in San Mateo County. She moved to the Bay Area twenty years ago, from
Southern California. She has been in the semipublic scene for six years. Inter-
viewed 2003.
hailstorm is a fifty-three-year-old white man. He is heterosexual and
single, and identifies as a top. A network administrator, he lives in Napa County.
He grew up in the Bay Area. He has been in the semipublic scene for seven years.
Interviewed 2002.
hayden is a twenty-eight-year-old white woman. She is lesbian, collared to
domina , and she identifies as a masochist/slave. She works in the computer
industry and lives in Alameda County. She moved to the Bay Area four years ago,
from Texas. She has been in the semipublic scene for four years. Interviewed
2000.
ikandi is a thirty-five-year-old white woman. Married and monogamous,
she identifies as a voyeur. She works in public relations and lives with her
husband, ouchy , in Alameda County. She moved to the Bay Area six years ago,
from North Carolina. She does not consider herself a part of the sm community.
Interviewed 2002.
j. is a forty-two-year-old white man. He is heterosexual, partnered (with s. ),
and monogamous, and he identifies as a top. He works in the mental health
field, is a student, and lives in Santa Cruz County. He moved to the Bay Area
four years ago, from Hawaii. He has been in the scene for two years. Interviewed
2002.
jay is a fifty-three-year-old white man. He is heterosexual, single, and iden-
tifies as a switch with top leanings. A student, he lives in San Francisco. He
moved to the Bay Area thirty-five years ago, from Indiana. He has been in the
semipublic scene for twenty-eight years. Interviewed 2003.
jeff is a thirty-eight-year-old white man. He is heterosexual, married,
poly, and identifies as a dominant top. A student, he lives in San Francisco
with his wife and their 24/7 submissive, rachel . He moved to the Bay Area

I N T E RV I E W E E V I G N E T T E S 235
 four years ago, from Texas, and has been in the semipublic scene for six years.
Interviewed 2000.
jezzie is a twenty-four-year-old white woman. She is bisexual, married,
and poly; she identifies as a slave. She is in graduate school and lives in San
Francisco with her husband and master, anton . She moved to the Bay Area
three years ago, from Pennsylvania, and has been in the semipublic scene for
three years. Interviewed 2002.
kb is a fifty-seven-year-old white woman. She is het/bi and partnered. She is
a professional dominant and lives in San Francisco. From the Bay Area, she has
been in the scene for twenty-five years. Interviewed 2002.
kc is a fifty-eight-year-old white woman. She is married (with two primary
partners and one M/s relationship) and poly; she identifies as a submissive/
slave. She is the housemother of a domination house and lives in Contra Costa
County. She moved to the Bay Area thirty-seven years ago, from Southern Califor-
nia. She has been in the semipublic scene for twenty-five years. Interviewed 2002.
lady hilar y is a thirty-three-year-old white woman. A lesbian in a 24/7
Master/slave relationship, she is poly and identifies as a femme top. She works as
a nurse, attends school, and lives in Santa Clara County. She was born in the Bay
Area and has been in the scene for thirteen years. Interviewed 2002.
lady thendara is a forty-one-year-old white woman. Bisexual and mar-
ried, she identifies as a top. She is an insurance adjuster and lives with her
husband, latex mustang , in San Mateo County. She moved to the Bay Area
twenty years ago, from New York, and has been in the semipublic scene for
seventeen years. Interviewed 2000.
larr y is a forty-seven-year-old American Indian man. He is bi, life-
partnered, poly, and identifies as a dominant/master. He owns the Scenery
dungeon, and lives in Santa Cruz County. He is from the Bay Area and has been in
the scene for thirty years. Interviewed 2002.
latex mustang is a forty-year-old white man. He is heterosexual, mar-
ried, and identifies as a bottom/pony. He is a manager in the computer industry
and lives with his wife, lady thendara , in San Mateo County. He moved to the
Bay Area about ten years ago, from New York. He has been in the semipublic
scene for three years. Interviewed 2002.
lenora is a twenty-year-old white woman. She is bisexual, partnered in an
M/s relationship, monogamous, and identifies as a switch/slave. She is a college
student and lives in Santa Clara County. She is from the Bay Area and has been in
the semipublic scene for two years. Interviewed 2002.
lily is a twenty-nine-year-old white woman. Heteroflexible and partnered,
she identifies as a bottom/sub. She is an editor at a technology magazine and
lives in San Mateo County. She moved to the Bay Area six years ago, from
Southern California. She has been in the semipublic scene for three years. Inter-
viewed 2000.

236 APPENDIX
 malc is a thirty-eight-year-old white man. He is heterosexual, single, and
identifies as a dominant, mostly. He works in intelligence/computing and lives in
San Francisco. He moved to the Bay Area six years ago, from England. He has been
in the semipublic scene for six years. Interviewed 2002.
marcie is a white transwoman in her forties. She is lesbian, partnered, and
poly, and she identifies as a switch. She works in the computer industry and
moved to the Bay Area eight years ago, from Nevada. She has been in the
semipublic scene for ten years. Interviewed 2000.
mark is a forty-six-year-old white man. He is heterosexual, single, and
identifies as a switch. He works as a marketer in the computer industry and lives
in San Francisco. He grew up in the Bay Area. He has been in the sm scene for
fourteen years. Interviewed 2002.
mark f. is a forty-eight-year-old white man. He is gay, multiply partnered,
and poly, and he identifies as a top. The manager of a sex club, he lives in
San Francisco. He moved to the Bay Area seventeen years ago, from New York.
He has been in the leather and motorcycle scene for thirty years. Interviewed
2003.
maxx is a twenty-four-year-old white man. Bisexual and single, he identifies
as a switch/bottom. He goes to college and lives in Alameda County. He is from
the Bay Area and has been in the semipublic scene for three years. Interviewed
2000.
meg’gan is a twenty-nine-year-old white woman. She is lesbian and single
and identifies as a butch bottom/sometimes switch. She is in college and works as
a housecleaner. She lives in Alameda County. She was born in the Bay Area and
has been in the scene for three to four years. Interviewed 2002.
miguel is a Latino man in his fifties. Gay and partnered, he identifies as
versatile. He is an artist, theater designer, consultant, and landlord and lives in
San Francisco. He moved to the Bay Area twenty-two years ago, from Florida. He
has been involved in the men’s leather and motorcycle scenes for twenty-two
years. Interviewed 2002.
mollena is a thirty-three-year-old African American woman. She is bi,
single, poly, and identifies as a submissive bottom. She is an administrative
assistant and an actress, and lives in San Francisco. She moved to the Bay Area six
years ago, from Southern California. She has been in the semipublic scene for five
years. Interviewed 2002.
monique alexandra is a thirty-three-year-old Latina woman. She is
bisexual, partnered, and monogamous, and identifies as a bottom/submissive/
masochist. A student, she lives in Santa Clara County. She moved to the Bay Area
eight years ago, from Maryland. She has been in the semipublic scene for one
year. Interviewed 2002.
noni is a fifty-two-year-old white woman. She is bisexual, single, dominant,
and polymorphously perverse. She is a poet. She moved to the Bay Area twenty-

I N T E RV I E W E E V I G N E T T E S 237
 eight years ago and lives in San Mateo County. She has been in the semipublic
scene for twenty-four years. Interviewed 2002.
ouchy is a forty-year-old white man. Bi, married, and poly, he identifies as a
top/sadist. He is a professional dominant/clown, an asset manager, a meeting
facilitator, and a dj /performance artist, and he lives in Alameda County with his
wife, ikandi . He moved to the Bay Area from Texas. He has been in the scene for
five years. Interviewed 2002.
pam is a white woman in her fifties. She is bisexual, in a Master/slave
relationship with her master, vince , and identifies as a slave. She is from the Bay
Area and has been in the scene since her twenties. Interviewed 2000.
panther is a forty-four-year-old Asian American man. He is heterosexual
and single, and he identifies as a dominant top. He works in healthcare and lives
in Alameda County. He moved to the Bay Area fifteen years ago, from Wash-
ington State. He has been in the semipublic scene for six years. Interviewed 2003.
paul is a forty-year-old white man. He is heterosexual, single, monogamous,
and identifies as a dominant top. He is currently unemployed, on disability; he
lives in San Francisco. He moved to the Bay Area twenty-one years ago, from
Southern California. He has been in the semipublic scene for fifteen years.
Interviewed 2003.
phil is a fifty-five-year-old white man. He is heterosexual, married, monoga-
mous, and identifies as a switch/bottom/slave. He is unemployed, on disability,
and lives in Alameda County. He moved to the Bay Area thirty-six years ago, from
Utah. He has been in the semipublic scene for twelve years. Interviewed 2003.
rachel is a twenty-one-year-old white woman. She is bisexual, bi-
partnered, and bi-amorous; she identifies as a pain fetishist/submissive. A
teacher, she lives in San Francisco with jeff . She moved to the Bay Area from
Southern California. She has been in the semipublic scene for three years. Inter-
viewed 2002.
robert is a white man in his early forties. He is heterosexual, single, and
identifies as a top. A financial planner, he lives in Alameda County. He moved to
the Bay Area five years ago, from Southern California. Interviewed 2000.
robert d. is a forty-four-year-old white man. He is gay, partnered, and
identifies as a leatherman. He is a writer and publisher, and lives in San Francisco.
He moved to the Bay Area six years ago, from Wisconsin. He has been in the men’s
leather scene for twenty years. Interviewed 2002.
s. is a white woman. Heterosexual and partnered (with j. ), she identifies as a
bottom. She is an administrative assistant in healthcare and is also in graduate
school. She lives in Alameda County and is from the Bay Area. She is not in the
public scene. Interviewed 2002.
stephanie is a fifty-four-year-old white woman. She is bisexual, mar-
ried, and poly, and she identifies as a dominant/sadist. A consultant, she lives
in Solano County with her husband, anthony . She moved to the Bay Area

238 APPENDIX
twenty-six years ago, from New York, and has been in the semipublic scene for
close to thirty years. Interviewed 2002.
sybil is a fifty-three-year-old white woman. She is bisexual and single, and
she identifies as a dominant/mistress. A prodomme and therapist, she lives in
San Francisco. She moved to the Bay Area thirty-three years ago, from Mas-
sachusetts. She has been in the scene for thirty-three years. Interviewed 2002.
teramis is a forty-six-year-old Arab American woman. She is lesbian and
single, and she identifies as a slave. She is a student and lives in San Francisco. She
moved to the Bay Area seven years ago, from Southern California. She has been in
the semipublic scene for eighteen years. Interviewed 2002.
tijanna is a thirty-seven-year-old African American woman. She is lesbian
and single and identifies as a bottom. She works in the biotech field and lives in
San Francisco. She moved to the Bay Area seventeen years ago, from Oregon. She
has been in the semipublic scene for six years. Interviewed 2002.
tom is a white man in his fifties. Bisexual, partnered, and mostly monoga-
mous, he identifies as a switch. He is semiretired from computer work and lives in
Napa County. He moved to the Bay Area twenty-one years ago, from New York.
He has been in the semipublic scene for about twenty years. Interviewed 2000.
uncle abdul is a white man in his sixties. He identifies as a bi techno-
sadist. An electrical engineer, he lives in San Francisco. He has been in the
semipublic scene for about twenty years. Interviewed 2002.
vick is a forty-five-year-old white woman. She is lesbian and single, and she
identifies as a daddy/top. An environmental consultant, she lives in San Fran-
cisco. She moved to the Bay Area thirty-nine years ago, from Iowa. She has been
in the semipublic scene for eight years. Interviewed 2002.
vicki is a fifty-two-year-old white transwoman. Lesbian and single, she
identifies as a dominant (who occasionally bottoms). She works as a software
engineer and lives in Santa Clara County. She moved to the Bay Area when she
was a teenager, from New Mexico, and has been in the semipublic scene for ten
years. Interviewed 2002.
vince is a white man in his mid-forties. He is gay and in a Master/slave
relationship, with pam . Originally from Texas, he is unemployed and lives in San
Francisco. He has been in the scene for about thirteen years. Interviewed 2000.
waldemar is a thirty-two-year-old white man. He is bisexual and single,
and he identifies mostly as a top. He works for a computer company and lives in
Santa Clara County. He moved to the Bay Area eight years ago, from Massachu-
setts. He has been in the semipublic scene for five years. Interviewed 2002.

I N T E RV I E W E E V I G N E T T E S 239
N OT E S N

TERMINOLOGY

1 The current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Dis-

orders: dsm-iv-tr (American Psychiatric Association 2000)
defines ‘‘sexual masochism’’ as:
a Over a period of at least 6 months, recurrent, intense sex-
ually arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors involv-
ing the act (real, not simulated) of being humiliated, beaten,
bound, or otherwise made to suffer.
b The fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors cause clinically
significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or
other important areas of functioning.
‘‘Sexual sadism’’ is:
a Over a period of at least 6 months, recurrent, intense sex-
ually arousing fantasies, sexual urges, or behaviors involv-
ing acts (real, not simulated) in which the psychological or
physical suffering (including humiliation) of the victim is
sexually exciting to the person.
b The person has acted on these sexual urges with a non-
consenting person, or the sexual urges or fantasies cause
marked distress or interpersonal difficulty.
An updated version, dsm-v , is due in 2013. According to the
American Psychiatric Association, the proposed revisions for
‘‘sexual sadism’’ and ‘‘sexual masochism’’ involve striking the
phrase ‘‘real, not simulated’’ and adding a threshold number
(‘‘two or more nonconsenting persons on separate occasions’’) to
 criteria ‘‘B’’ for sexual sadism. The Paraphilias Subworkgroup spearheading the
revisions has also proposed a diagnostic change that would distinguish between
a paraphilia (just the ‘‘A’’ criteria) and a paraphilic psychiatric disorder (both ‘‘A’’
and ‘‘B’’), where only the latter would necessitate psychiatric intervention. As
the working group specifies, ‘‘this approach leaves intact the distinction be-
tween normative and non-normative sexual behavior, which could be impor-
tant to researchers, but without automatically labeling non-normative sexual
behavior as psychopathological’’ (American Psychiatric Association, ‘‘dsm -5
Proposed Draft Revisions to dsm Disorders and Criteria,’’ ‘‘Proposed Revision
to Sexual Sadism,’’ http://www.dsm5.org/; see also Krueger 2010a and 2010b).
This is a mixed blessing, in my view: in the new edition, sexual sadism could be
either a paraphilia (‘‘sexual sadism’’) or a paraphilic disorder (‘‘sexual sadism
disorder’’), but in either case, it would be classified as deviant sexuality under
the broad diagnostic heading ‘‘Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders.’’ bdsm
practitioners are divided on the inclusion of sadism and masochism in the
dsm : some feel it is helpful to differentiate nonconsensual, violent sadists from
the ssc community, while others feel that it can only entrench the pathologiza-
tion of any form of sadomasochism, consensual or otherwise (see also Moser
and Kleinplatz 2005).
2 National Coalition for Sexual Freedom, ‘‘Sound Bites for the sm -Leather-Fetish
Community,’’ June 17, 2007, http://ncsfreedom.org/.
3 For example, Freud ([1924] 1961) argues that sadism/masochism is a dual
drive, while Deleuze ([1967] 1991) argues that, based on their literary, psychic,
and cultural differences, Sacher-Masoch’s masochistic ‘‘universe has nothing to
do with that of Sade’’ (13).
4 Readers with a particular interest in this lexicon and its variations can refer to
one of the very informative sm guidebooks, such as Bound to Be Free (Moser
and Madeson 1996), Consensual Sadomasochism (Henkin and Holiday 1996),
Different Loving (Brame and Brame 1996), sm 101 (Wiseman 1998), The Bottom-
ing Book (Easton and Liszt 1998a), or The Topping Book (Easton and Liszt
1998b), as well as the countless online dictionaries of bdsm terms.

I N T RO D U C T I O N

1 I want to clarify that I am not claiming that the number of people who engage
in bdsm sex practices has changed. Statistics on sexual practices are at best
uncertain, but the latest Kinsey Institute estimate of the number of people
practicing some form of bdsm in the United States is between 5 percent and 10
percent (Reinisch 1990). Charles Moser, a sexologist and physician specializing
in bdsm , estimates that ‘‘about ten percent of the general population are
actively involved in sm with some recognition that their interests are spe-
cifically sadomasochistic; another twenty to forty percent may engage in sm
behaviors without knowing their activities could be so defined’’ (Moser and
Madeson 1996, 44). Although this estimate may seem high, sm behaviors span

242 N OT E S TO I N T RO D U C T I O N
 quite a range. Some practices are about erotic pain; others, like bondage or
dominance, are about erotic power; and still others are about a fetish (like feet
or leather) or invoke a role (like headmistress or pony). Pinning one’s partner to
the bed, sexual taunting, wrestling, wearing blindfolds, spanking, pinching, and
biting are all forms of sm play, as are the more iconographic practices like
flogging, chaining, whipping, bondage, and caning.
2 Another way to frame this conjoining is by bringing together what Nancy
Fraser terms a politics of ‘‘redistribution’’—class and economic justice—and
‘‘recognition’’—status and visibility/identity politics (1997a). Judith Butler’s
contestation, along with Fraser’s reply (1997b), guide my analysis here.
3 My analysis is indebted to Joseph’s understanding of the Derridean supple-
ment: the structure ‘‘constitutively depends on something outside itself, a
surplus that completes it, providing the coherence, the continuity, the stability
that it cannot provide for itself, although it is already complete. But at the same
time, this supplement to the structure supplants that structure; insofar as the
structure depends on this constitutive supplement, the supplement becomes
the primary structure itself’’ (2002, 2).
4 There is a long tradition of theorizing the relationship between sexual norms,
intelligibility, and subjectivity. In Lacanian work, for example, the subject
comes into being through a regulatory ideal of binarily sexed materiality: the
sexed body (Butler 1997b; Grosz 1990; Lacan 1977; Lacan, Mitchell, and Rose
1985). In the Foucauldian tradition, modern Western subjectivity itself de-
pends on the regulation of sex and sexuality; the subject emerges through a
disciplinary mode of identifiable and thus regulatory fixed sexual identity.
Foucault argues that ‘‘it is through sex—in fact, an imaginary point determined
by the deployment of sexuality—that each individual has to pass in order to
have access to his own intelligibility . . . to the whole of his body . . . to his
identity’’ ([1976] 1990, 155–56). Butler emphasizes the role of cultural intel-
ligibility within social norms: ‘‘ ‘Sex’ is, thus, not simply what one has, or a
static description of what one is: it will be one of the norms by which the ‘one’
becomes viable at all, that which qualifies a body for life within the domain of
cultural intelligibility’’ (1993, 2). In this way, sexuality (as a discourse) simulta-
neously enables and restricts the possibilities for subjectivity; it is, in Foucault’s
terms, a necessary ‘‘stumbling-block’’ ([1976] 1990, 101; see also Butler 1991).
Foucault writes: ‘‘There are two meanings of the word subject, subject to some-
one else by control and dependence, and tied to his own identity by a con-
science or self-knowledge’’ (1983, 212).
5 At the first mention, I identify my interviewees with the name and bdsm terms
they use to describe themselves, along with their general age, sexual orienta-
tion, and race or ethnicity. More biographical details, including relationship
status, type of employment, county of residence, and how long they had been in
the scene when I interviewed them, can be found in the appendix. I give
pseudonyms to practitioners I did not formally interview, unless they are public
figures.

N OT E S TO I N T RO D U C T I O N 243
 6 In this way, bdsm challenges sexual identity understood as a stable taxonomy
based on dimorphously sexed bodies, complementary gender, and binary sex-
ual orientation. Scholars from Freud and Foucault to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
have highlighted the centrality of identity—a binary identity as man or woman,
heterosexual or homosexual—in Western conceptions of sexuality and, even
more critically, subjectivity. At the same time, these scholars also point out that
identity, as a stable, fixed, and essentialized form of being, is not a particularly
accurate description of sexuality as it is lived across time and place (see, for
example, Sedgwick 1990; Weeks 1977 and 1995). I think here of Sedgwick’s
classic list of the various elements ‘‘that ‘sexual identity’ is supposed to orga-
nize into a seamless and univocal whole,’’ a list that includes biological sex,
gender assignment, personality, appearance, procreative choice, preferred sex-
ual acts, sexual organs, fantasies, emotional bonds, and cultural and political
identification (1993b, 7–8).
Anthropologists have made strong contributions to this project by docu-
menting the tremendous range of sexual practices, roles, and identities across
cultures; the diverse connections made—and not made—between sexual acts
and sexual identities; and the ways that sexuality responds to and shapes local
and global conditions of change (Allison 1994 and 2000; Altman 2001; Black-
wood and Wieringa 1999; Boellstorff 2005, 2007; Cruz and Manalansan 2002;
Elliston 1995; Herdt 1984; Kulick 1998; Kulick and Willson 1995; Lancaster
1992; Lewin and Leap 1996; Padilla 2007a, 2007b; Patton and Sánchez-Eppler
2000; Rofel 2007; Wekker 2006). This work has produced an exciting new
perspective on the cultural, economic, and historical linkages between sexual
subjectivity and desire. Yet these rich problematics are rarely applied to sex-
ualities in the United States (notable exceptions include Frank 2002; Gray 2009;
Lapovsky-Kennedy and Davis 1993; Lewin 1993; Manalansan 2003; Newton
1979, 1993; Valentine 2007; Weston 1991). And, as David Valentine argues,
ethnographies on sexuality in the United States not organized by identity—gay
and lesbian identity, in particular—are even scarcer (2003, 124).
7 Some notable academic exceptions include essays in three collections (Lang-
dridge and Barker 2007; Moser and Kleinplatz 2006; Weinberg 1995a) and
several essays (in particular, Bauer 2008; Duncan 1996; Hale 1997; Langdridge
and Butt 2005; Taylor and Ussher 2001; M. Weinberg, Williams, and Moser
1984; Woltersdorff 2011). Staci Newmahr’s (2011) sociological study of pan-
sexual bdsm communities, Playing on the Edge: Sadomasochism, Risk, and Inti-
macy, was published too late for me to incorporate here. There is also a large
body of journalistic, essayist, and practitioner-oriented texts; those that focus
on sm community and politics include Mains (1991), Samois ([1981] 1987),
Scott (1993), and Thompson (1991).
8 For example, philosophers have linked sadism and masochism to Western ra-
tionality and explored sm in terms of the transgression of, and resistance to,
unified subjectivity and identity (see, for example, Deleuze [1967] 1991; Fou-
cault [1975–76] 1996 and [1984] 1996; MacKendrick 1999). Cultural theorists

244 N OT E S TO I N T RO D U C T I O N
 and literary critics have examined sm as a narrative convention in fiction (see,
for example, Barthes 1989; Sawhney 1999). These studies are valuable, yet the
meaning of sm in these fields is wildly discordant, standing at once for prob-
lems of Oedipality and object relations, modern relations between writer and
readers, and celebrations of bodily excess. In feminist theory, sadomasochism
has been a generative object of political and ethical debate (as I explore in
chapter 4). See, for example, Chancer’s (1992) and Bartky’s (1990) work on
power relations of dominance and submission applied to American culture and
gender oppression, respectively, as well as the deep archive of writing on sm in
the context of the feminist ‘‘sex wars’’ (Califia 1987; Hart 1998; Linden et al.
1982; Reti 1993b; Rubin 1987; Samois [1981] 1987).
9 Work in social psychology and psychoanalysis—the largest body of work on
sm —tends to focus on individual etiology and sm as a pathological perversion.
From Freud onward, psychoanalysts have explored sm in terms of pathology,
deviance, and the inherently paradoxical nature of pleasure (see, for example, J.
Benjamin 1988; Ellis [1905] 1942; Freud [1924] 1961; Stoller 1991). More-
recent work on sm from this post-Freudian perspective has focused on sado-
masochism as a pathological, destructive, or dangerous drive or perversion
(see, for example, Grossman 1986; Hanly 1995; Person 1997), not as a consen-
sual, community-based practice. In part, this is because it is unlikely that a
client who engages in consensual sm as part of her sexuality (and has no desire
to rid herself of this activity) will generate a clinical paper on sadomasochism.
But it is also because these psychoanalytic analyses of masochism and sadism
tend to pathologize sm practitioners, reifying a normative, heterosexist con-
ception of sexuality and sexual practice.
The sexological literature tends to emphasize easily quantifiable data, like
the percentages of practitioners with particular sexual and sm orientations, or
the average age of ‘‘coming out’’ or first awareness of sm interests. See, for
example, work on the differences in sexual arousal between male and female
college students (Donnelly 1998); demographic and psychosocial characteris-
tics of sm practitioners (Breslow, Evans, and Langley 1985; Levitt, Moser, and
Jamison 1994; Moser and Levitt 1987; Richters et al. 2008); and differences in
preferred sm activities between women and men, and between gay and hetero-
sexual men (Alison et al. 2001). These researchers tend to generalize from very
small samples and across subject populations, comparing, for example, results
from a study conducted in Finland to a study based on questionnaires handed
out at sm organizations in the United States, without emphasizing the likely
differences between these findings.
10 I do not mean to collapse all of these theories into one, as there are critical
differences that these terms encode. David Harvey (1997), for example, draws
attention to new systems of flexible accumulation (the creation of new systems
of production and marketing, based on flexible labor processes and markets,
geographic mobility, and rapid shifts in consumption) and space-time compres-
sion (the acceleration in exchange and consumption, as well as the horizontal

N OT E S TO I N T RO D U C T I O N 245
 speeding up of time bound to capitalist accumulation). Fredric Jameson (1992),
drawing on Ernest Mandel, understands late capitalism as the third industrial
revolution, a shift to electronic technology, media and spectacle, and multi-
national capitalism (from earlier market and monopoly capitalisms). Although
these are important differences, I am less interested in debates around period-
ization and terminology and more interested in the transformation of the
relationships between commoditization, consumerism, technology, sociality,
and the body—a transformation that many theorists of contemporary US capi-
talism have noted (see also Castells 2000; Fischer 1998; Fraser 2003; Rose
2007).
11 Deleuze argues that contemporary societies operate under ‘‘control’’ (1995b),
not Foucauldian ‘‘discipline’’ (Foucault [1975] 1995; see also Deleuze 1995a;
and Foucault 2003, for his later analysis of biopolitics). Discipline, Deleuze
explains, is about discrete sites of confinement—a prison, hospital, school, or
family—each with their own laws; a modern set of techniques, methodically
calculated, for administering, controlling, and training people and bodies to
make them useful, productive, and docile. Instead, he argues, we live in a
control society in which, rather than fixed sites, we have networked, diffused,
flexible, digital modes of control that operate in dispersed, open circuits with
continuous control and instant communication (1995a, 174; see also Hardt
and Negri 2001). Discipline is about limiting and regulating bodies; control is
flexible and modulated, generative. This shift corresponds to changes not just
in networks of power, but also in capitalism and social organization. One can
map a ‘‘discipline society’’ onto modernist or Fordist production, and a ‘‘control
society’’ onto late capitalism. Fraser begins this work in ‘‘From Discipline to
Flexibilization? Rereading Foucault in the Shadow of Globalization,’’ arguing
that just as Foucault was theorizing a ‘‘disciplinary normalization,’’ a new re-
gime of what she terms ‘‘flexibilization’’ was taking shape. She argues that
discipline is a Fordist mode of social regulation: ‘‘totalizing, socially concen-
trated within a national frame, and oriented to self-regulation’’ (2003, 164).
‘‘Flexibilization,’’ on the other hand—the regime of a neoliberal, globalized,
post-Fordist economy—is ‘‘multi-layered as opposed to nationally bounded,
dispersed and marketized as opposed to socially concentrated’’ (166). Taking
inspiration from Jon McKenzie (2001), I explore this shift to flexibility in
terms of performative efficacy.
12 The phrase cultural performance was used by the anthropologist Milton Singer
in the 1950s to describe a performance (a drama, ritual, or dance) that is
marked off from the social field and that communicates and builds social mean-
ings with the audience (cited in Turner 1986, 22–23). As Victor Turner and
others have expanded the concept, cultural performance now includes a broad
range of events, ranging from more formal dramas to everyday gestures that
are set apart in imaginative and spatial—not only, or even primarily—temporal
terms. The cultural performance is critical to Turner’s exploration of the social
drama (see also Schechner 1985; Turner 1980).

246 N OT E S TO I N T RO D U C T I O N
13 Neoliberalism is not only an economic theory that, as Harvey writes, ‘‘proposes
that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepre-
neurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by
strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade’’ (2005, 2). It is
also, as scholars like Lisa Duggan and Wendy Brown, following Foucault (2008),
have argued, a form of governmentality aimed at ‘‘extending and disseminat-
ing market values to all institutions and social action’’ (Brown 2005: 39–40;
see also Duggan 2003). As Catherine Kingfisher and Jeff Maskovsky argue,
neoliberalism ‘‘desires’’ to ‘‘remake the subject, reassert and/or consolidate
class relations, realign the public and the private, and reconfigure relations of
governance—all with direct implications for the production of wealth and pov-
erty, and for raced, gendered and sexualized relations of inequality’’ (2008,
118). There has been much debate among scholars on the likely demise of
neoliberalism, given the recent economic collapse. I steer clear of these predic-
tions not only because neoliberalism, as anthropologists have shown, is a cul-
turally variable formation with durable social effects (Ong 2006; Rofel 2007),
but also because the formation is crucial to understanding the particularities of
the sm scene in San Francisco in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
14 I am drawing on Omi and Winant’s concept of ‘‘racial formation,’’ the ‘‘socio-
historical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed
and destroyed’’ (1994, 55) through ‘‘racial projects,’’ an approach that brings
together representation (ideology) with structure (the organization and dis-
tribution of resources). They write: ‘‘A racial project is simultaneously an inter-
pretation, representation or explanation of racial dynamics, and an effort to
reorganize and redistribute resources along particular racial lines’’ (56).
15 See chapter 4 for a discussion of the relationship between mimesis (the imita-
tion of an original by a copy) and resignification (repetition with a difference),
drawing on queer, critical race, and feminist theories of performativity (Butler
1990, 1991, 1993, and 2004; Jackson 2001 and 2005; E. Johnson 2003; Muñoz
1999; Reid-Pharr 2001) and cultural and social theories of mimesis (W. Ben-
jamin [1966] 1986; Bhabha 1984 and 1985; Taussig 1993).
16 For further discussion of the parallels and disjunctures between the sm inter-
rogation scene and the ‘‘sadomasochistic’’ torture at Abu Ghraib, see chapter 5
and Weiss 2009.
17 McKenzie argues that, since the close of the Second World War, we have en-
tered what he calls an ‘‘Age of Performance’’: ‘‘Performance will be to the
twentieth and twenty-first centuries what discipline was to the eighteenth and
nineteenth, that is, an onto-historical formation of power and knowledge’’
(2001, 18). In McKenzie’s account, performance has become increasingly im-
portant across a range of fields, from academic theories of performativity (and
performance studies) to employee performance reports, on-the-job perfor-
mance, high-performance computing, and technological performance. These
various iterations of performance are bound by linked conceptualizations of
efficacy, efficiency, and effectiveness: performance studies, the academic field,

N OT E S TO I N T RO D U C T I O N 247
 investigates the efficacy of cultural performances in relation to social norms;
organizational performance, a field of management, is concerned with corpo-
rate efficiency managed by maximizing employees’ satisfaction, creativity, and
innovations; and technological performance, a military and industrial field,
seeks to build more effective products and technologies for both the United
States as a nation-state and for consumers.
18 As part of a shorter project on mainstream understandings of bdsm , I also
conducted twelve interviews with nonpractitioners, which are discussed more
fully in Weiss 2006a.
19 For every possible scenario, play scene, behavior, or role there are a wide variety
of interpretative frameworks and motivations. For some practitioners, the idea
of being in tight, restrictive bondage is arousing because of the loss of control;
for others, it is about the feel of latex or leather against bare skin; for some, it is
about imagining how one’s body looks encased in tight material; for others, it is
about doing something difficult as a test for oneself or because it gives someone
else pleasure. Female-on-male fellatio can be an expression of submission and
service, but it can also—as a class called ‘‘Tooth and Nail: A Femdom [female
dominant] Perspective on Fellatio’’ promises—be an expression of control,
power, and dominance (see also Hale 1996; Langdridge and Barker 2007; Taylor
and Ussher 2001). Similarly, just as there is no single interpretation of bdsm
roles or behavior, neither is there a single motivation. People who get off on
incest play, for example, may have been abused as children, or they may simply
enjoy the frisson of socially unacceptable play. They may be parents or childless;
they may view such play as healing, therapeutic, shocking, performative, excit-
ing, disorienting, or just fun. During my fieldwork, practitioners provided a
wide range of personal reasons for doing sm . Some people I talked to said that
they ‘‘always knew’’ that they were into bdsm : they liked to tie their childhood
friends to trees, or lock themselves in their bedrooms, devising self-bondage
techniques. Others said that they felt like something was missing for them,
sexually, but they didn’t know what it was until they found bdsm . Still others
were introduced to bdsm through a partner or friend, or just by living in the
Bay Area. They found the social and sexual scene exciting and appealing, so
they stayed.

ONE SETTING THE SCENE

1 There was also a dispersed heterosexual fetish and sm network (or imagined
community) formed through professional dominants and the circulation of
pornographic films and fetish booklets. This network dates from the 1930s, but
it was not localized in a community until recently (see Bienvenu II 1998).
2 As much work on the development of gay and lesbian communities shows, small
community businesses (like bars) have helped solidify alternative, sexuality-
based enclaves or counterpublics (see, for example, Berlant and Warner 1998;
Bell and Valentine 1995; Dangerous Bedfellows 1996; D’Emilio 1983; Herdt

248 N OT E S TO C H A P T E R O N E
 1992; Ingram, Bouthillette, and Retter 1997; Lapovsky-Kennedy and Davis
1993; Leap 1999; Newton 1993; Warner 2002; Weston 1998).
3 ‘‘The Great Exception: San Francisco’s SoMa Neighborhood,’’ NewGeography
.com, August 8, 2008.
4 The Folsom Street Fair originated with Kathleen Connell and Michael Valerio,
two gay/lesbian activists who met while advocating for affordable housing,
community-centered development, local school renovation, small business as-
sistance, and social services in the soma area. In 1983, Connell and Valerio
began to plan a soma street fair modeled on the Castro Street Fair, which
Harvey Milk had successfully transformed into a political mobilization tool for
the gay community. The new fair, initially called ‘‘Megahood,’’ was intended to
support local businesses, as well as to bring the diverse soma populations into
contact with each other and to give the public a sense of the local residents as
something other than disposable slum dwellers. The first fair was held in 1984;
30,000 people attended. Through the 1980s, the fair became increasingly
leather focused with the increased involvement of gay community activists and
businesses, as well as aids organizations (see Connell and Gabriel 2001 for a
more detailed history of the fair).
The Up Your Alley Fair began in 1985 and moved to Dore Alley in 1987; it
now draws about 10,000 to 12,000 people to soma for an early summer
leather street fair. In 1990, the Folsom Fair and the Up Your Alley Fair merged
into smmile (South of Market Merchants’ and Individuals’ Lifestyle Events),
the precursor to Folsom Street Events. smmile continued to emphasize com-
munity issues and local quality of life. The funds raised by the fairs go to charity
and community organizations; in 2000 the fairs raised $250,000 for aids
agencies, clinics, homeless shelters, and the local elementary school, in addi-
tion to the charities designated by the San Francisco Police and Fire Depart-
ments (Connell and Gabriel 2001).
5 Barbary Coast ran along Pacific Avenue from Kearny Street to the Embarcadero.
The area’s establishments provided residences, entertainment, and labor con-
tractors for the ship workers and dockworkers of the time. By the beginning of
the twentieth century, Barbary Coast was packed with bars and clubs, including
several gay and drag bars, clubs, baths, and hotels. Boyd notes that there was
one saloon for every ninety-six residents, twice the ratio for either New York or
Chicago (2003, 26). Barbary Coast was the home of many single immigrant
men who worked as seasonal laborers; the boarding rooms, bars, and brothels
provided work, a place to live, and a social environment. Burlesque shows, strip
shows, and brothels; gambling houses; and bars and dance halls lined the
streets until 1917, when several years of antivice legislation pushed the sex
workers west into the Tenderloin and closed the brothels.
6 This is not to downplay the role of immigration in San Francisco’s history.
In 1880, for example, more than 60 percent of the population was foreign born
or first-generation American; 10 percent were Chinese (see Wollenberg 1985,
142). Migrants from East and Southeast Asia and from Latin America have

N OT E S TO C H A P T E R O N E 249
 settled in the Bay Area in successive waves; the 2000 US Census estimated that
37 percent of the city’s population was foreign born. Yet, as the history of
Chinese exclusion shows most strikingly, immigrants to San Francisco were not
celebrated as ideal citizens of the city (see, for example, Shah 2001). In con-
trast, progressive intellectuals and writers—from the bohemian writers and
artists of the 1860s through the early 1900s (including Ambrose Bierce, Jack
London, Frieda Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Upton Sinclair) to the Beats of the
1940s and 1950s (such as Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
and Allen Ginsberg)—are central to the city’s national reputation as eclectic,
radical, and tolerant (see Peters 1998).
7 Queerness, here, refers not only to gay and lesbian communities and cultures
but to a more general sense of sexual license aligned against a straight or
mainstream norm.
8 All population figures are from the 2000 US Census unless otherwise indicated.
The era also saw the first large migration of African Americans to the Bay Area
from the South to work in the shipyards and other industries. In addition,
Chinese, Central Americans, and Mexicans were recruited to work alongside
women in jobs related to the war, or formerly held by white men who had been
deployed.
9 As D’Emilio argues, a combination of enlisting young, unmarried men with no
children; asking questions about homosexuality; and providing crowded same-
sex housing, sleeping, and living situations made the military both a feasible
escape from small towns into same-sex companionship for men who identified
as homosexual, and a breeding ground for same-sex emotional, physical, and
sexual exchanges for men who did not. The same was true for women, although
to a lesser extent, as fewer than 150,000 women served in the Second World
War (D’Emilio 1983, 27). More salient, for women, was the possibility of inde-
pendent wage labor during the war, which often meant moving away from
family and hometowns to live in boarding houses with other women.
10 In 1953 the Mattachine Society, begun in Los Angeles, spread to the Bay Area,
with branches in Berkeley, Oakland, and San Francisco. Del Martin and Phyllis
Lyon formed Daughters of Bilitis in San Francisco in 1955 as a social club for
lesbians. Martin and Lyon were issued the first same-sex marriage license in
San Francisco in February 2004.
11 ‘‘Now That’s a San Francisco Treat,’’ NBCBayArea.com, October 21, 2008.
12 In 1776 local Coast Miwoks and Ohlones together numbered about 10,000, but
there were fewer than 2,000 of them by the 1830s, due largely to crowded living
conditions, disease, dramatic diet change, and regimented labor. Throughout
the gold rush (1848 through the mid-1850s), Native Californians were openly
exterminated: public hatred, the rapid influx of miners, and local, state, and
federal bounties on Native scalps—as well as paid expenses for the posses that
hunted Native Californians—decimated Native populations in the area.
13 The Bay Area also has a long history of radical antiracist activism. It is a central
node in radical black activism (the Black Panther party was formed in Oakland

250 N OT E S TO C H A P T E R O N E
 in 1966), Asian activism (for example, the yellow power movement in Berke-
ley), Latino activism (such as the farm-labor organizing of Cesar Chavez), and
Native American red power activism (including the Indian take-over of Alcatraz
in 1969).
14 Population figures from 2000 put San Jose at 894,943 residents, San Francisco
at 776,733, and Oakland at 399,484.
15 The development of new access roads and bridges encouraged the suburban
development of the Bay Area. In 1940, Santa Clara County, for example—
formerly wheat, fruit, and vegetable farmland—had a population of 50,000
who lived primarily in Palo Alto (around Stanford University, founded in 1891)
and San Jose (the old pueblo, now the commercial center of the region). The
area between these towns was largely rural until the late 1940s and 1950s,
when a combination of industrialization related to the Second World War,
Stanford University land grants, and the mass suburbanization taking place
across the country transformed the area into what is now the Bay Area’s most
populous county.
16 For purposes of comparison, the census estimates that the Bay Area population
is 7.5 percent African American, 58.1 percent white, 19 percent Asian, and 19.4
percent Hispanic/Latino (of any race).
17 Others lived in outlying counties—Solano, Contra Costa, and Napa—and Santa
Cruz and Stanislaus, neighboring counties not officially part of the Bay Area.
18 By 1999, the Bay Area accounted for 8.9 percent of all Internet hard links in the
United States (Townsend 2001, 49). In addition, the Bay Area is home to the
first nodes connected by arpanet , which began in 1969 as a project of the
Department of Defense (in 1995 it was decommissioned and privatized, be-
coming the backbone of today’s Internet).
19 Academics and sm practitioners alike find the word community vexing. Some
practitioners reject the word because the gay men’s and pansexual scenes are
rarely in the same place, others because they see gaps between what they want
from ‘‘the community’’ and what they get (see also Rubin 1995). Indeed, except
during the Folsom Street Fair, the ‘‘leather community’’ is in many places at
once, or no place at all. But at the same time—through national, regional, and
online networks of teachers, conferences, contests, and activists—there is also a
sense of shared belonging, commonly referred to as community. I retain the word
in the spirit of Joseph’s critique of the ‘‘romance’’ of community belonging.
20 In an influential and problematic book, Putnam (2000) bemoans the decrease
of voluntary organizations like the Kiwanis or bowling leagues in the United
States. Although the number of US voluntary organizations has grown steadily
since the 1960s, the time and energy people devote to these groups is declining.
Putnam links this to a decline in civic or community engagement. Like many, I
contest this reading of community throughout.
21 The Scenery closed at the end of 2003 and a new dungeon in San Francisco—
the SF Citadel—opened. It moved to its current soma location in 2005.
22 This produced the ambivalent position of being ‘‘out’’ but ‘‘not out.’’ Panther

N OT E S TO C H A P T E R O N E 251
 says: ‘‘I’m not going to call [my family] and say, ‘Hey, Dad, guess what? I’m
kinky!’ ’’ Others explained that ‘‘there’s no need to advertise’’ (Chris), or ‘‘a lot
of my friends would not care for that at all so I don’t see why I should irri-
tate them’’ (Waldemar), or ‘‘I don’t think it’s appropriate to talk about sex at
work . . . it’s not professional . . . and so it makes no sense for me to be out at
work because I’d never get into that discussion’’ (Latex Mustang). Some practi-
tioners told me that they were ‘‘selectively out,’’ or that their sm involvement
was an ‘‘open secret,’’ and many used ‘‘don’t ask, don’t tell’’ as a metaphor. For
example, Bailey told me: ‘‘I don’t hide what I am, and if somehow [my parents]
caught wind of it, I would be happy to discuss it with them. But it also feels like
it’s not right for me to rub’’ their noses in it.

T WO B E C O M I N G A P R AC T I T I O N E R

1 The first answer (a) is correct.

2 The Journeyman II Academy was a two-year training program held in San
Francisco. Old—or at least older—guard sm practitioners, well known in the
San Francisco scene, taught classes to trainees, called cadets. The classes were
held over two full days, one or two weekends a month, and designed to give
students some training in sm , old guard style. Gayle Rubin’s speech is titled
‘‘Old Guard, New Guard.’’ The speech was reprinted in Cuir Underground issue 4
(2) (Summer 1998); an excerpt of the speech is archived at the Black Rose
website: http://www.black-rose.com/cuiru/archive/4–2/oldguard.html.
3 E-mail confidentiality requires that this comment remain unattributed.
4 For example, many practitioners believe that the new guard is much less rule
oriented, with a loose, anarchistic, hippie style, while the old guard was quite
rigid about roles (top or bottom, not both), apprenticing, leathers (and when
one earned the right to wear them), and other markers of community. Yet, as
I will show, what characterizes the new guard—at least in its most recent
iteration—is a commitment to a certain kind of formal and rigid training
method. The new guard is not less rule oriented; rather, what have changed are
the kinds of rules, who issues them, and their social effect. The shift is from a
strict hierarchy and apprentice system located within a small community to a
formalized, professionalized organizational structure located within a larger,
diffuse community.
5 Opened for Saturday night fisting parties in 1975, the Catacombs was a private
house converted to a sex club in San Francisco’s Mission district. Cynthia Slater
(a Janus founder) was one of the first women involved in this space primarily
devoted to men; she brought in several other prominent lesbian and bisexual
women (including Rubin, Pat Califia, and Cleo du Bois) who were later involved
in the founding of Cardea and Samois (see the next note) and critical to the
development of the San Francisco scene. As Rubin put it, the Catacombs was
‘‘home and clubhouse for the nascent San Francisco lesbian s/m community’’
(1991, 131). The Catacombs was known for its massive quantities of Crisco,

252 N OT E S TO C H A P T E R T WO
 excellent fisting and flogging music, cleanliness, diversity, and warmth (see also
Mains 1991, 125–41).
6 The original Janus meetings drew heterosexual couples and professional domi-
nants (cofounder Cynthia Slater was a prodomme). In its first year, however,
Janus restructured itself and became a primarily gay male organization. Jay
told me that back then, Janus ‘‘was mostly gay. I went to my first Janus
presentation sometime in 1977, and it was like 85 percent gay men, in the
classic black leather biker thing, and about 13 percent leatherdykes, and liter-
ally a sprinkling of heterosexuals and bisexuals—we sort of stood out.’’ In the
early to mid-1980s the population of Janus shifted from mostly gay male to
mostly heterosexual: more and more heterosexual men started attending Janus
meetings, while hiv / aids and the formation of the 15 Association in 1980 (a
gay men’s sm group) decreased potential gay male members. In a parallel
development, when Cardea—the women’s sm group formed in 1975 to bring
more women into Janus—folded, several other groups rose in its place: first
Samois (formed by Califia and Rubin in 1978), then the Outcasts (formed by
Rubin in 1984), and now the Exiles (formed in 1996; for women’s sm history,
see Califia 1987; Rubin 1996). These groups were more attractive than Janus to
many lesbian and queer-identified bisexual women. Thus, although Janus still
claims to be a pansexual group, much of the true pansexuality—the mix of
lesbian, gay, bi, and straight—of the early Janus has been lost.
7 In 2008, ncsf received 489 requests for assistance: 27 percent had to do with
criminal charges based on sm practice, 4 percent with employment discrimina-
tion, 31.5 percent for child custody or divorce issues, and 15.5 percent were
related to sm , leather, or fetish group issues, such as police busts.
8 ncsf , ‘‘Violence and Discrimination Survey,’’ 1999, https://ncsfreedom.org/.
ncsf conducted a follow-up survey in 2008: out of 3,058 respondents, 37.5
percent had experienced discrimination, harassment, or violence based on
bdsm ; and 11.3 percent had been discriminated against by service providers
(doctors, for example). The 2008 survey is available at https://ncsfreedom.org/
resources/bdsm-survey/.
9 Some argue that the Backdrop Club is actually the first sm organization in the
Bay Area. Many people who played active roles in the founding and develop-
ment of Janus and the pansexual San Francisco scene began their sm ‘‘ca-
reers’’ at Backdrop. Backdrop was almost exclusively heterosexual; it empha-
sized male-dominant/female-submissive fantasy play. This is part of the reason
why many people left Backdrop, and possibly the reason Slater started Janus.
Fantasy Makers is the current incarnation of the ‘‘sessions’’ part of Backdrop.
10 From Janus’s bylaws, excerpted in the group’s bimonthly newsletter, Growing
Pains.
11 In fact, I heard about only one instance during my fieldwork, which involved a
man who said at his orientation that he was interested in beating up women.
This seemed to be a nonconsensual desire, and thus, given Janus’s policy of
‘‘safe, consensual and non-exploitive’’ sm , this man was denied membership.

N OT E S TO C H A P T E R T WO 253
 12 Michelle Zornes, ‘‘Interview with the Society of Janus.’’ The interview was
posted at http://www.lashtales.org/LinkSpotlight/Janus.htm but is no longer
available.
13 As the organization’s archivist, I arranged for Janus to donate its archival
material (a full run of Growing Pains, organizational materials, ephemera such
as flyers and photos, taped interviews, and other material) to San Francisco’s
Gay and Lesbian Historical Society so that it might be cared for and preserved.
14 Mr. Benson was first published serially in Drummer in 1979 and later released as
a novel by San Francisco’s Alternate Publishing in 1983.
15 Guy Baldwin, ‘‘The Leather Restoration or Sacred Cows Make the Best Ham-
burger,’’ speech at the Sixth Leather Leadership Conference, Los Angeles, April
14, 2002. The speech is available at Madoc’s Place website, http://www.madoc
.us/sacredcows.shtml.
16 Jay Wiseman’s two essays, written in the late 1990s, ‘‘I Want My ‘Precaution
B’!’’ and ‘‘The Medical Realities of Breath Control Play,’’ are available in updated
and edited form on his website: http://www.jaywiseman.com/.
17 Here, sm both is and is not an institution: its more nebulous spatial charac-
teristics, for example, and its alternative ethos, locate it outside the bounds of a
normative social institution. At the same time, the development of the new sm
scene is not, as Foucault argues, ‘‘fluid.’’ He writes: ‘‘What strikes me with
regard to s/m is how it differs from social power,’’ because social power ‘‘has
been stabilized through institutions,’’ and thus social relations of power are
limited, fixed, or rigid ([1984] 1996, 387). sm , on the other hand, is a ‘‘strategic
game’’ of power (388). I take up this purported fluidity below and in chapter 4.
18 David stein’s essay ‘‘Safe, Sane, Consensual’’ was presented in a workshop at the
Leather Leadership Conference in Washington, D.C., in April 2000 and is ar-
chived at the Leather Leadership Conference website: http://www.leatherleader
ship.org. An updated version was published in 2002 as ‘‘Safe, Sane, Consensual:
The Making of a Shibboleth’’ in vasm Scene 20 (September/October).
19 This is not to say that all people negotiate; for example, most people in 24/7
(full-time) or M/s relationships do not use safewords or negotiate with each
other, although they may use safewords, limits, and negotiation when they play
with others. Many people also cease using safewords and negotiation when
they know their partner well. For example, Bailey, who is usually a bottom, told
me that she decided to top her partner: ‘‘It was awesome because I knew him
long enough that I knew he didn’t want to negotiate. He just wanted it to
happen. I wouldn’t normally do that with people if I didn’t know them really
well, but that’s the cool part about really knowing your partner. You can make
judgment calls like that.’’
20 The Antioch rules were created in 1992 in response to the crisis of consent in
legal and social definitions of rape, especially date rape (see Soble 1997). Anton
reminded me of this link when he said he thought that ssc ‘‘has sort of infected
the community with . . . this sort of safety-first mentality that I don’t agree
with at all . . . There are some people who I think take [it] too far. You have to go

254 N OT E S TO C H A P T E R T WO
 through a rigorous checklist before you do anything—you know, this sort of . . .
what is that college, the university that put those rules for dating in place where
you had to ask people before you could—‘May I touch your breast?’ ’’ ‘‘Antioch?’’
I asked, and he replied ‘‘Antioch, yeah, these sort of Antioch rules for bdsm .’’
21 ‘‘Two squeezes’’ is a way for a top to check in on a bottom. The top squeezes the
bottom’s arm or leg twice; if all is well, the bottom gives two squeezes in return.
A ‘‘safe signal’’ or ‘‘drop safe’’ is a non-verbal safeword, such as an object that
the bottom can drop on the floor.
22 For example, Lady Thendara told me: ‘‘It’s [sm ] different than anything else.
Relationships and discussions that we have, you never have—can you imagine
on a vanilla date saying to someone ‘Now, if you want to kiss me, you can kiss
me. But if you want to touch me under my shirt, you can’t do that.’ Nobody
would ever do that, but you really do [in sm ] . . . You might say ‘I’m going to tell
you at the outset, tonight I just want to get to know you. I don’t want there to
be any sex or sexual overtures or anything.’ . . . I mean very explicit discussions
go on and they’re the norm, and I think that’s really neat. . . . It’s really
important to talk about and I love that. The men in the scene really understand
if you say ‘You can do this but you can’t do that.’ ’’
23 Mustang is referring to an online community service managed by Race Bannon
called ‘‘Kink Aware Professionals,’’ a list of kink-friendly doctors, therapists,
and lawyers across the United States.
24 Gary Switch’s essay, ‘‘Origin of rack ; rack vs. ssc ,’’ was originally posted on
the Eulenspiegel Society’s (tes ) e-mail list in the late 1990s. An archived ver-
sion of the post can be found at http://www.leathernroses.com/generalbdsm/
garyswitchrack.htm.
25 Alison Moore’s speech, ‘‘Out of the Safety Zone: Codes of Conduct and Identity
in sm Communities,’’ was presented at the Bob Buckley memorial discussion
for Sydney Leather Pride Week, April 25, 2002. It is currently archived at:
http://tngc.org/tngc/NCesafetyzone.html.
26 This is similar to what Califia advises in his section on breath play: ‘‘Avoid any
activity that may injure or kill someone . . . on the other hand, it’s very common
for a top to briefly cut off the bottom’s air with the palm of their hand. I think
this can intensify excitement in a low-risk fashion. So please don’t call the s/m
police if you see this being done’’ (2002, 203).
27 The wording is based on Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15 (1973). Challenges to
the Communications Decency Act (cda ), which regulates pornography on the
Internet have recently tested US obscenity law (see Nitke v. Gonzales, 547 U.S.
1015 [2006]), and a federal case brought against the distribution of ‘‘extreme
pornography’’ (Extreme Assoc. v. United States, 547 U.S. 1143 [2006]).
28 In one case in New York, the Columbia University graduate student Oliver
Jovanovic was charged with kidnapping, assaulting, and sexually abusing a
Barnard undergraduate on a date the two had arranged after exchanging sm
interests via e-mail. His defense was that she had consented; the judge, invok-
ing the Rape Shield Law (which prevents a consideration of the victim’s prior

N OT E S TO C H A P T E R T WO 255
 sexual conduct), barred the consideration of e-mail evidence and instructed the
jury that consent is not an available defense on a charge of assault (People v.
Jovanovic, 176 Misc. 2d 729 [N.Y. Supp. 1997]; see also ‘‘Memorandum of Law
of Amicus Curiae’’ filed by the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom and
available on their website: https://ncsfreedom.org/). Jovanovic was convicted
and sentenced to fifteen years. In 1999, the Appellate Division reversed his
conviction, finding that this was an erroneous invocation of the Rape Shield
Law, and in 2001, just before his retrial, the New York District Attorney moved
to dismiss the charges (People v. Jovanovic, 263 A.D.2d 182 [N.Y. App. 1999];
Fritsch and Finkelstein 2001; see also Hanna 2001 for a legal discussion of
consent, including the Jovanovic case).
29 In October 1999 the San Diego vice squad raided a pansexual play party held by
Club X and issued misdemeanor citations for lewd behavior and/or nudity in a
public space to six attendees. The first of the six to be tried was unanimously
found not guilty in February 2000, and charges against the remaining five were
then dropped (see Ridinger 2006; ‘‘Club X Legal Defense Fund and Informa-
tion’’ from October 1999, archived at http://www.madoc.us/sd6.shtml). In July
2000, Attleboro, Massachusetts, police raided a private play party and arrested
the host, Benjamin Davis, and one guest, Stefany Reed. Davis was arraigned on
thirteen counts (ranging from keeping a house of ill fame to possession of a
dangerous weapon), while Reed was charged with assault and battery with a
dangerous weapon: a wooden kitchen spoon (hence the incident’s nickname,
‘‘Paddleboro’’). The prosecution dropped all but two charges a year later (see
Lawrence 2000; Parker 2001).
30 This is linked to, although differentiated from, Roy Baumeister’s (1988) expla-
nation of masochistic sm practice as a cathartic escape from the pressures of
modern identity. MacKendrick eschews this kind of systematic analysis, in-
stead arguing that sm practice is itself a form of rupture. See Hart (1998) and
Barker, Gupta, and Iantaffi (2007) for a critique of the healing or therapeutic
narrative of bdsm .
31 Guy Baldwin, ‘‘The Leather Restoration or Sacred Cows Make the Best Ham-
burger,’’ speech at the Sixth Leather Leadership Conference, Los Angeles, April
14, 2002. The speech is available at Madoc’s Place website, http://www.madoc
.us/sacredcows.shtml.

T H R E E T H E TOY B AG

1 I am wearing one of my two standard pansexual play party outfits: black jeans
and a dark maroon T-shirt that has a vaguely Indian squiggly circle design on
the chest (the other outfit is jeans with a dark red, long-sleeved velvet shirt);
both are Renaissance Faire–lite. I also have a leatherdyke-lite look (clas-
sic Levis, a fitted black T-shirt, and black boots) and two fetish-lite looks
(latex pants, a black shirt, and a latex jacket, and a black, lace-up dress and
biker boots).

256 N OT E S TO C H A P T E R T H R E E
 2 CyberNet Entertainment (Kink.com) runs several specialty websites, including
fuckingmachines.com, whippedass.com, and hogtied.com. Kink.com’s studios
are headquartered in San Francisco’s former National Guard Armory and Arse-
nal, which the company purchased in 2006 amid city-wide controversy (Free-
denberg 2008; Rubenstein 2007).
3 Whip makers in the 1980s, especially Jay Marston and Fred Norman, intro-
duced many of the artisanal techniques common today, such as quality leather,
finishing knots, and balanced handles (Rubin 1994).
4 For a critique of the emphasis on consumption rather than production in queer
studies, see Jeff Maskovsky (2002). He argues that an emphasis on identity
based on consumerism—the urban gay men who, as Michael Warner puts it,
‘‘reek of the commodity’’ (1993, xxxi)—erases class.
5 These variations determine the price. The least expensive flogger—a short
(fifteen-and-one-half inch), lightweight (deerskin), standard (with 24 tails)—is
$135; the most expensive—a two-foot mop (with 150 tails)—is $300. Heart-
wood’s customized floggers cost even more.
6 And price range: Mr. S’s paddles range from $27 to $198 and have names like
‘‘The Belter,’’ ‘‘Thumper,’’ ‘‘Thwacker,’’ and ‘‘Abrasive Slapper.’’ These descrip-
tions evoke both the sensations and the intended uses of the paddles.
7 There is concern in the scene that beating a woman’s breasts increases her risk
of developing lumps, tumors, or cysts.
8 Although not usually the primary focus of classes, top injuries are impor-
tant. The top risks carpel tunnel and other repetitive injuries, as well as
muscle straining and pulling and fatigue, which can be minimized with certain
techniques.
9 From a speech Gayle Rubin gave at the graduation ceremony for the Journey-
man II Academy on October 4, 1997. Rubin’s speech is titled ‘‘Old Guard, New
Guard.’’ The speech was reprinted in Cuir Underground issue 4.2 (Summer); an
excerpt of the speech is archived at http://www.black-rose.com/cuiru/archive/
4–2/oldguard.html.
10 From a two-part dialogue edited by Christine titled ‘‘Talking Class: Working
Class SM Dykes Shoot the Shit.’’ The dialogue was printed in issues 3 (1992) and
4 (1993) of the zine Brat Attack: The Zine for Leatherdykes and Other Bad Girls.
Parts of the zine are archived at http://classic-web.archive.org/web/200302
02100658ree/home.earthlink.net/≈devilfishtattoo/brat/.
11 Paddles sold for table tennis or other games, purchased at a game or toy store,
were frequently mentioned as good pervertables, whereas floggers and whips
are harder to find in vanilla form. Many people told me that Home Depot
(jokingly called ‘‘Home Dungeon’’) was a great resource, not only for diy dun-
geon furniture, eye bolts, and rope, but also for various kinds of sensation toys.
Hayden says: ‘‘Those little wooden paint stirrers? Great, stingy paddles!’’ Latex
Mustang and Lady Thendara are fans of the portable clothing bars sold at
Target: ‘‘If you attach ankle restraints,’’ she tells me gleefully, ‘‘they make great
spreader bars!’’

N OT E S TO C H A P T E R T H R E E 257
 12 A ‘‘cat-o’-nine’’ or just ‘‘cat’’ is a whip with nine rounded, braided tails.
13 Some practitioners thought that since women, in general, have less money to
spend on toys than men, the leatherdyke community was not as toy-centered as
the pansexual scene. Teramis argues that ‘‘men have more economic power and
they like toys: boys and their toys . . . when you go to pansexual parties . . . you
are going to see more widgets.’’ Although this comment points to differential
gendered access to toys, I found that the saturation of and desire for toys (and
the concomitant anxiety about connection) was common across these linked,
albeit distinct, communities.
14 In an essay on adultery, Laura Kipnis (2000) argues that modern marriage is
about extracting labor, and that marriage-type relationships are about work.
Her essay makes explicit the sense that there is something bad about working
so hard at sex. For Kipnis, following Marcuse, sexuality should be free from
labor, work, and capitalist regimentation. In contrast, bdsm practitioners are
concerned that toys eliminate the labor or work necessary to sm .
15 The sexual fetish is an object or a part of the body that has been objectified;
detached, it stands in for sexual relations between people. For Freud, ‘‘a certain
degree of fetishism is . . . habitually present in normal love,’’ but it becomes
pathological when ‘‘the longing for the fetish passes beyond the point of being
merely a necessary condition attached to the sexual object and actually takes the
place of the normal aim, and, further, when the fetish becomes detached from a
particular individual and becomes the sole sexual object’’ (Freud [1905] 2000,
20; italics in original). Freud theorized that the fetish stands for the lost penis
of the mother; the boy, upon seeing the missing penis, is threatened with
castration, and so the fetish stands in for, while disavowing, the lack. In its
most mechanistic form, the fetish (fur or feet) is the part of the mother’s body
seen just before the fearsome gap (see also Freud [1927] 1961).
16 For Marx, a commodity is an object that masks the realities of its own produc-
tion. The ‘‘mysterious’’ and ‘‘mystical’’ character of the commodity is fetishistic
because the object ‘‘reflects the social characteristics of men’s own labour as
objective characteristics of the products of labour themselves, as the socio-
natural properties of these things. Hence, it also reflects the social relation
between objects, a relation which exists apart from and outside the producers’’
(Marx [1867] 1990, 164–65). In commodity fetishism, social relationships
appear to form between commodities, not between people: ‘‘The definite social
relation between men . . . assumes . . . the fantastic form of a relation between
things’’ (165).
17 Appadurai argues that the substitution of things for social relations is subject to
a second substitution: a situation, as with advertising, in which ‘‘the images of
sociality (belonging, sex appeal, power, distinction, health, togetherness, cama-
raderie)’’ are focused on the ‘‘transformation of the consumer to the point where
the particular commodity being sold is almost an afterthought.’’ This ‘‘double
inversion of the relationship between people and things,’’ he continues, ‘‘might
be regarded as the critical cultural move of advanced capitalism’’ (1988, 56).

258 N OT E S TO C H A P T E R T H R E E
18 Haraway defines the cyborg as a ‘‘hybrid creature, composed of organism and
machine’’ (1990, 1). The cyborg marks the blurring of boundaries between
human and animal, organism and machine, and physical and nonphysical.
19 Thinking about sm as a form of connection or spiritual exchange resonates
with the bdsm literature on euphoria, transcendence, and spirituality. Patrick
Califia, among others, has described sm as transcendent: ‘‘There’s the oppor-
tunity to worship, in the person of the beloved, a representation of the divine.
One can see sexuality as a form of ministry which generates joy [and] . . . that
joy is often a conduit into a transcendental state which can lead one to experi-
ence a sense of unity with the divine’’ (Sensuous Sadie, ‘‘Interview with Patrick
Califia, Author and Activist,’’ scene profiles, 2003. The interview is archived
at http://www.sensuoussadie.com/interviews/patrickcalifiainterview.htm. See
also Califia and Campbell 1998; Mains 1991; Thompson 1991). Mira Zussman
writes that sm play ‘‘results in feelings of transcendence, absolute faith, trust,
safety, protection, and euphoria . . . Play gives practitioners a feeling of union
with the divine, or even a sense of having achieved divinity oneself, and it is, for
the most part, ineffable’’ (1998, 35). Zussman argues that this spirituality is
more articulated in lesbian and gay sm than in heterosexual communities. I did
not find such a division; people of all sexualities with whom I spoke described
sm as spiritual in some way. In San Francisco, the ‘‘modern primitives’’ commu-
nity explicitly spiritualizes forms of sm ; Fakir Musafar, ‘‘father’’ of the modern
primitives movement, demonstrates his practice in many pansexual spaces. For
example, I saw a ball dance ritual at Black Rose, the large, pansexual Wash-
ington, D.C., sm conference. Seventeen dancers were hooked through the chest
with large piercing hooks attached to ropes. Partners held the ropes, and—to
the accompaniment of drumming, rattle shaking, invocations to various god-
desses, and burning incense—the dancers were pulled through the room. Fakir
replays these rituals, drawn from Native American and Asian religious rites, in
sm and other spaces (see Klesse 2007 for a critique of such appropriations).
20 Similarly Patrick Califia, not a romantic when it comes to sm , opens his book
Sensuous Magic: A Guide to s/m for Adventurous Couples with the line: ‘‘This is a
book for people who love each other’’ (2002, 1).
21 Nelson argues that the prosthetic device fills a gap or lack. Her master meta-
phor of amputees and artificial limbs positions the prosthesis as a substitution,
something grafted to the body or body politic to fill an absence. In contrast, the
prosthesis in sm does not require a lack; instead, it is about creating new
possibilities for, and extending, connection.
22 For example, some practitioners argued that there is more fat acceptance in the
sm scene than in the vanilla world. The value of being fat in the scene has to do
with the usefulness of flesh: fat bodies have better padding, are more protected,
and can do more than thin bodies. This is because the fat body is not evaluated
only on the basis of technique (how much or how well it can take or give), but
also as a larger, better canvas or object (for a bottom) or as a heavier, more
powerful top.

N OT E S TO C H A P T E R T H R E E 259
 23 There is a semiserious opinion in the scene that computer programmers make
the best bondage tops because they have the (human) engineering knowledge
necessary for the mastery of bondage, especially technically difficult suspen-
sion bondage.

F O U R B E YO N D VA N I L L A

1 I define radical feminism as the theory that the oppression of women, as a sex-
class, is the fundamental form of oppression. In this way I am marking the
continuity between antipornography feminism and earlier radical feminism,
which flourished from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s; both were centrally
concerned with individuals’ sex practices, nonegalitarian fantasies, and desires
in the context of the oppressive structure of heterosexual patriarchy. For more
on the history of radical feminism, see Alice Echols, who argues that early
radical feminism saw sexuality as a source of both pleasure and danger, while
later antipornography feminists saw only the danger. Both, however, argued
that compulsory heterosexuality or heterosexual patriarchy conditions sex-
uality and desire (Echols 1989, 290).
The ‘‘sex wars’’ centered on the politics of sadomasochism, pornography,
and lesbian butch-femme dynamics. In 1980 the National Organization for
Women (now ) passed a ‘‘Delineation of Lesbian Rights’’ that declared that
both sadomasochism and pornography were issues of ‘‘exploitation’’ and ‘‘vio-
lence, not affectional/sexual preference’’ (this resolution was not amended
until 1999, after years of pressure from the now s/m Policy reform proj-
ect. See Lynda Hart [1998] for the text of now ’s resolutions). Between 1980
and 1981, several key antipornography texts were published, including Andrea
Dworkin’s Pornography (1981). In 1982 the infamous Barnard conference ‘‘To-
wards a Politics of Sexuality’’ was picketed by antipornography feminists; radi-
cal feminist papers covered the conference, including an unrelated women’s sm
play party (for the papers from this conference, see Vance 1984; see also Dug-
gan and Hunter 1995; Love 2011; Rubin 2011).
In 1993 an updated radical feminist critique of sadomasochism appeared,
titled Unleashing Feminism: Critiquing Lesbian Sadomasochism in the Gay Nineties
and promising to address the ways that ‘‘virulent racial and sexual violence . . .
[has] permeated the lesbian community’’ and to question ‘‘to what extent . . .
sadomasochism itself power[s] this racism’’ (Reti 1993a, 2). Echoing the earlier
critique, sm is seen to ‘‘replicate’’ existing racist and heterosexist structures of
domination; this replication strengthens these structures of domination be-
cause the sexual is also the social. The volume is also, as Irene Reti writes, ‘‘an
earnest plea for a revitalized, powerful feminism—in an era where earnest-
ness is caricatured more and more as old-fashioned and silly, uncool, uptight’’
(1993a, 2). This echoes many contemporary debates about queer theory and
feminism, which are often cast, as Biddy Martin puts it, as a battle between
‘‘dull, literal-minded, uptight’’ feminism and the ‘‘sexually-ambiguous, fun, per-

260 N OT E S TO C H A P T E R F O U R
 formative’’ queer theory (1994b, 104; see also Butler 1997a; Wiegman 2002).
There are, of course, many other anti-sm perspectives, some feminist and some
not (for example, psychoanalytic and psychiatric, philosophical, and ethical).
See Hart’s excellent analysis of anti-sm feminist critiques (1998, especially
chapter 2).
2 This Butlerian language is intentional. Writing as Judy Butler, Judith Butler
was one of the contributors to Against Sadomasochism; she argued that sm
lesbians fail to problematize and historicize consent and desire (1982).
3 Hart’s use of ‘‘real’’ is the Lacanian Real; she argues that sexuality is a striving
for this real-impossible—not realism, classical mimesis, reality, or truth.
4 For Geertz, the cockfight, because it is ‘‘only a game,’’ allows the activation of
kin and village rivalries and status tensions in play form (1973, 440). ‘‘Deep
play,’’ for Geertz, drawing on Bentham, is play with dangerously high stakes,
capable of dislocating actors from the social field. Yet expressing status ten-
sions (which could not be directly expressed) in game or play form also has an
impact on ‘‘real’’ social structures: ‘‘It is this kind of bringing of assorted experi-
ences of everyday life to focus that the cockfight, set aside from life as ‘only a
game’ and reconnected to it as ‘more than a game,’ accomplishes’’ (450; see also
Weiss 2006b).
5 For Butler, drag is able to expose the nonunity of sex and gender because of a
disconnection or rupture between the sexed body and gendered presentation.
Similarly, for Judith Halberstam, female masculinities (drag kings, butches, or
ftm s) reveal the multiple forms of masculinity that are ‘‘actively denied to
people with female bodies’’ (1998, 269). She argues that masculinity becomes
visible as a social and cultural construction when its naturalized, hegemonic
status is disturbed; female masculinity is one site of such disturbance. In these
theorizations, analysis is focused on the potential for a discord between sex and
gender to expose or disrupt a naturalized sex-gender linkage. For critiques of
these relations of (crossing, gendered) figure to (embodied, sexed, and raced)
ground, see B. Martin (1994b), Namaste (1996), Samuels (2003), and Walters
(1996).
6 The e-mail description of the event taunted: ‘‘Do you have what it takes to be an
Iron Dom? If you were stranded on a desert island, with only those things that
washed ashore with you, would you still be able to do a scene, or would you sit
on the shore and mourn your lost toys? . . . Can you do it? Are you dom
enough?’’ This is another demonstration of real sm : not about toys, but rather
about technique, skill, and creativity.
7 Nancy Fraser defines ‘‘subaltern counterpublics’’ as ‘‘parallel discursive areas
where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counter-
discourses, which in turn permit them to formulate oppositional interpreta-
tions of their identities, interests, and needs’’ (1990, 67). Key to this definition
and its use today is what Fraser terms ‘‘conflict’’ or oppositionality: counter-
publics ‘‘contested the exclusionary norms of the bourgeois public’’ by creating
alternative social and political arenas (61).

N OT E S TO C H A P T E R F O U R 261
 8 See also work on queer space and queer publics, especially Bell and Valentine
(1995); Dangerous Bedfellows (1996); and Ingram, Bouthillette, and Retter
(1997).
9 See Caserio et al. (2006) for a debate, and Halberstam (2008) and Muñoz (2007,
2009) for elaboration and critique of the antisocial thesis in queer studies.
10 Among my interviewees, 71 percent of the heterosexual women identified as
bottom/submissive (14 percent identified as top/dominant) and 75 percent
of the heterosexual men identified as top/dominant (6 percent identified as
bottom/submissive).
11 This could be because my research centered on Janus, the primary pansexual
organization in the Bay Area. Some feel that Janus is currently, as Cathy, a
white pansexual dominant/switch in her late thirties, puts it, ‘‘a het dom group.
Every single presentation I’ve ever been to, every class I’ve ever taken . . . across
the board—het dom male.’’ I am uncertain as to the orientation of Janus’s
membership, but it is true that most presentations are offered by male and
female dominants because of the emphasis on technique.
This may also reflect a historical change. Almost all my interviewees who
had participated in the scene before the early to mid 1990s commented that
there were many more men than women then, and that the few women who
showed up at a party or event would be overwhelmed with requests to top these
men (see also Weymouth and Society of Janus 1999). It is sm common sense
that the majority of practitioners are submissive or bottoms, regardless of
gender. In 1987, Rubin argued that most heterosexual sadomasochists are male
bottom/female top. However, this claim was based in part on the understand-
ing that heterosexual practitioners are primarily involved with professional
domination—most of the female professionals are tops, and most of the male
clients are bottoms. However, within the professional community, many female
dominants are not heterosexual.
Since Rubin published this analysis, the pansexual, nonprofessional sm
scene in the Bay Area has grown tremendously, but there is next to no work on
this community. One key text, Gini Graham Scott’s Erotic Power: An Exploration
of Dominance and Submission (1993), is based on her research in the (now mostly
defunct) Bay Area female dominant organization sm Church of Mankind and
so, obviously, reflects this orientation. A quantitative study from 1978 found
that 11.7 percent of women and 43.6 percent of men were tops; 47 percent of
women and 42.5 percent of men were bottoms (Levitt, Moser, and Jamison
1994; Moser and Levitt 1987). A 1982 study found that 27.5 percent of women
and 33 percent of men were tops, while 40 percent of women and 41 percent of
men were bottoms (Breslow, Evans, and Langley 1985). I am unaware of any
more-recent quantitative studies in the United States (see Richters et al. 2008
for data from Australia, and Alison et al. 2001 for data from Finland).
12 An emphasis on transgressive potential holds true across performance studies
more generally. Richard Schechner argues that performance studies scholarship

262 N OT E S TO C H A P T E R F O U R
 emphasizes how ‘‘performances mark identities, bend and remake time, adorn
and reshape the body, tell stories, and provide people with the means to play
with the worlds they not only inhabit but to a large degree construct’’ (2001,
162). ‘‘Play with the worlds’’ draws attention to performance as actively pro-
ducing social relations. Yet work in performance studies is most often con-
cerned with the transgression, rather than the affirmation, of social norms.
Even for Victor Turner, whose work on performance and ritual set the terms of
the anthropological engagement with performance studies, the ways cultural
performances might ‘‘re-establish’’ power receives less emphasis than the ways
performances might, instead, ‘‘radically critique’’ it (1986, 81). For example, he
argues that it is not the case that performance ‘‘merely ‘reflects’ or ‘expresses’
the social system or the cultural configuration’’ but rather performances are
‘‘reciprocal and reflexive—in the sense that the performance is often a critique,
direct or veiled, of the social life it grows out of, an evaluation (with lively
possibilities of rejection) of the way society handles history’’ (22).
13 See David Savran for a thoughtful analysis of how anti-sm feminism relies on a
contradiction between, on the one hand, a social system so strong as to be able
to thoroughly colonize individuals (internalized oppression) and, on the other
hand, individuals with enough free will or autonomy (‘‘bourgeois individual-
ism’’) to resist this oppression and forge new, nonpatriarchal relations (1998,
217; see also Hart 1998).
14 This iteration of libertarianism emphasizes individualism and personal respon-
sibility, free-market freedom, and the right to privacy and personal property.
For the white, heterosexual computer professionals in the South Bay, libertar-
ianism matches some of their concerns: it is seen to protect intellectual prop-
erty and copyright, support rights to sexual privacy and the decriminalization
of sex work, and stress noninterference with pornography and other forms of
sexual expression. Not all practitioners are libertarian, of course; I discuss
libertarianism here because it is in ideological opposition to radical feminism,
and because these belief systems are aligned with neoliberal rationalities. But
justifying the freedom to do sm (or to own guns, for that matter) on libertarian
grounds depends on the ability to separate the desires of an isolated individual
from any larger social context or consequence, and on the production of sub-
jects who act according to free will and free choice, who make decisions as fully
autonomous rational agents.
Libertarians in the scene tend to follow mainstream libertarian politics,
with a bit more emphasis on sexual freedom. For example, during my fieldwork,
Theresa A. Reed (Darklady), an sm practitioner and erotic writer, ran for the
Oregon House of Representatives as a Libertarian. She ran for the Oregon
Senate in 2004, the same year she won the title of Ms. Oregon Leather, and she
currently runs several bdsm parties, including an annual Portland Masturbate-
a-thon for charity. This suggests that a ‘‘free-sex’’ libertarian may rely on
a different nexus of privacy/propriety/the public than a ‘‘free-market’’ liber-

N OT E S TO C H A P T E R F O U R 263
 tarian. Some of the people I interviewed described their politics as libertar-
ian, and modified the term with ‘‘anti-authoritarian,’’ ‘‘iconoclastic,’’ ‘‘open-
minded,’’ or ‘‘broad-minded.’’
15 There is overlap here between sexism and what Gretchen called ‘‘domism,’’ the
sense that ‘‘dominants are somehow more valid people than submissives.’’
Teramis agreed, noting that it was sometimes unclear if someone was being
sexist or ‘‘D/s presumptive’’: do ‘‘you think you can order me to get you a drink’’
because I am submissive ‘‘or is it ’cause you’re a sexist pig anyway, and you
would do it to any woman who was standing there’’? There are similar tensions
in the leatherdyke scene around butch and femme, expressed as sexism (al-
though with a different valence): butch tops who don’t take femme tops seri-
ously, women who look down on switches, butches who try to ‘‘roll’’ (flip)
femme tops.
16 I am using the common definition of liberal feminism here: an equality feminism
that aims at reform (not revolution); accepts a private/public, sexual/social
dichotomy, rather than undermining such binaries; and, like libertarianism,
emphasizes the right to noninterference in sexual matters. As Lisa Duggan
(2003) argues, new social movements—including feminist, antiracist, and
queer activism—have taken increasingly liberal forms since the 1980s, moving
away from the Left, radical, and liberationist paradigms that were more com-
mon in the 1960s and 1970s.
17 These issues revolve around both sexism and heterosexism. Several interview-
ees explained that some heterosexual men were also homophobic (about men,
not women); for example, Carrie told me that her husband (and other men)
enjoyed being in a group of all male dominants and female submissives because
‘‘they feel uncomfortable’’ and ‘‘would rather not be around’’ different kinds of
couples: ‘‘he would not want to be next to a woman topping a guy or a gay male
couple.’’ Both of these dyads challenge the parallel construction of gender/
sexuality. The homophobia of some heterosexual men in the pansexual scene
reflects the way that heterosexual masculinity is founded on the simultaneous
disavowal of femininity and homosexuality; it is the community expression of
what many have theorized about masculinity. If proper masculinity fundamen-
tally requires the disavowal of both homosexuality and femininity, then gay
male sexuality and heterosexual female dominant sexuality are two related
scenes of horror.
18 As Annette Schlichter (2004) argues in an analysis of ‘‘queer straightness,’’
heterosexual writers who take on a queer identity have a sort of aspirational
queerness, linked to a desire to be a ‘‘potentially transgressive, queer subject’’
(544; see also Thomas, Aimone, and MacGillivray 2000). This, Schlichter ar-
gues, is based on a problematic ‘‘identification with an oppressed or minority
position’’ (2004, 545). In her analysis, the need for recognition and the ‘‘self-
legitimizing’’ these authors do can undermine queer critique by instead foster-
ing ‘‘an individualist and volunteerist endeavor’’ of dissociation with the privi-

264 N OT E S TO C H A P T E R F O U R
 lege of heterosexuality (555). Like Robyn Wiegman’s critique of whites in white-
ness studies, this move ‘‘renders the formative and regulatory effects of power
invisible’’ (Schlichter 2004, 555; Wiegman 1999). See also Christian Klesse, who
argues that ‘‘dominant (white) subjects may construe themselves as ‘transgres-
sive’ through racialized forms of embodiment,’’ especially the cross-racial queer
identification of practitioners of ‘‘neo-primitive’’ body modification (2007,
276). I discuss racial appropriation in chapter 5.
19 John Hartigan argues that ‘‘seeing emphatic links between whiteness and dom-
inance has generated analyses that powerfully delineate the vast, diffuse scope
of white privilege while unproblematically presenting white people as a collec-
tive order with a common cultural identity’’ (1997, 498). However, it is not
necessary to see whiteness as a monolithic category in order to see that it is
fundamentally constituted by racial domination (see, for example, Frankenberg
1997).
20 Taussig notes that mimesis does not require a good or realist copy; here he
draws on Freud, who argues that an effigy does not have to resemble its subject
(Taussig 1993, 52). From this, Taussig suggests that, especially in a colonial
space, it is nearly impossible to distinguish the copy from the original, the
imitator from the imitated (78).

F I V E S E X P L AY A N D S O C I A L P OW E R

1 Some of the play scenes I explore exist only in fantasy, some were told to me
during one-on-one interviews, and some are circulated stories. In reading sm
play as cultural performance, I am extending the concept to include event
scenes, fantasy scenes, and performative scenes in language (and not only ritual
events), in line with theorizing about subjectivity itself as a performative (pro-
ductive) endeavor.
2 I use the problematic term people of color throughout this chapter in part
because this is the term used in the scene. But I also use it because, although the
phrase has been critiqued for collapsing all difference into one difference from
white, this dynamic is critical to the ways practitioners understand, talk about,
and enact race in race play. Thus, I am retaining this phrasing in part because of
its problematic reference to a white/nonwhite racial duality.
3 Andrea Plaid, ‘‘Race Play Interview—Part IV (Conclusion),’’ interview with Mol-
lena Williams, April 9, 2009. The interview is available on Mollena’s website, the
Perverted Negress: http://www.mollena.com/2009/04/race-play-interview-
part-iv/. It is also available on the blog Racialicious: http://www.racialicious
.com.
4 Because this is a larger social logic, some nonwhite people share this analysis.
Bonnie, for example, explained that in a gay male couple she knows, the master
‘‘happens to be white and the submissive happens to be black.’’ ‘‘They get a lot
of people shaking fingers at them because he is black and the top is white and

N OT E S TO C H A P T E R F I V E 265
 people are like ‘that’s just not right’ . . . But that’s their thing, that’s their
kink . . . I mean when I see two people, I don’t see their color, I just see their
kinks or what they like or what they don’t like.’’
5 For example, many of the contributors to Against Sadomasochism: A Radical
Feminist Analysis critiqued a scene featuring a lesbian, interracial Mistress/
slave couple in a documentary on sm (‘‘One Foot out of the Closet’’) that aired
on kqed in 1980. Alice Walker argues that the scene between the white woman
and her ‘‘smiling and silent’’ black slave ‘‘trivialized’’ ‘‘the actual enslaved condi-
tion of literally millions of our mothers . . . because two ignorant women
insisted on their right to act out publicly a ‘fantasy’ that still strikes terror in
black women’s hearts’’ (1982, 207). Hilde Hein argues that ‘‘to treat with levity
a self-chosen condition of humiliation which is a hated oppression to multi-
tudes of other people is to reduce their suffering to a mockery’’ (1982, 87). See
also Reti (1993b).
6 This underscores a national imaginary of race and visibility. In San Francisco,
even though the city is 8 percent African American and 30 percent Asian or
Asian American, race means black, and Asian Americans are invisible as people
of color. In our group interview, Rachel, Paul, Malc, and Jeff were trying to
remember all of the people of color they knew in the scene. After dialogue back
and forth (‘‘Wasn’t Jared’s last bottom Asian?’’ ‘‘Oh—remember that black guy
who used to come to the munch?’’), Rachel said, ‘‘I don’t notice the Asians, only
the blacks.’’ This remark struck me as typical—race means black and white, a
reflection of a larger American construction of race, rather than the demo-
graphics of the Bay Area.
7 As Anne McClintock notes, the fetish is ‘‘haunted by historical memory . . . [it]
embodied the traumatic coincidence of historical memories held in contradic-
tion’’ (1992, 72). I use this expanded definition of the fetish to track the ways in
which unresolved social contradictions and tensions are grafted onto objects
and dynamics that, in turn, come to stand in for this displaced ambivalence.
8 Max Mosley v. News Group Newspapers Ltd. ewhc 1777 (qb ); [2008] wlr
(D); [2008] wlr (D) 259, 8. See also Burns (2008a) and two articles posted on
the bbc News website: ‘‘Mosley Wins Court Case Over Orgy,’’ July 24, 2008,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7523034.stm, and ‘‘Tabloid Editor Reacts to Libel
Defeat,’’ July 24, 2008, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/ukenews/7523313.stm.
9 bbc News, ‘‘Tabloid Editor Reacts to Libel Defeat,’’ 2008.
10 Max Mosley v. News Group Newspapers Ltd. 2008, 12.
11 Ibid., 30.
12 Ibid., 12, 13.
13 Ibid., 30.
14 Andrea Plaid, ‘‘Race Play Interview—Part II,’’ interview with Mollena Williams,
April 7, 2009. The interview is available on Mollena’s website, the Perverted
Negress: http://www.mollena.com/2009/04/race-play-interview-part-ii/. It is
also available on the blog Racialicious: http://www.racialicious.com.
15 Elizabeth Povinelli explores social imaginaries within what she terms ‘‘liberal

266 N OT E S TO C H A P T E R F I V E
 settler colonies’’—Australia and the United States (2006, 3). This is an impor-
tant link to the forms of liberalism and whiteness at work in settler colonies,
where a national origin story and subsequent national belonging require the
disavowal of an originary imperialist domination, instead, as she shows, pro-
ducing discourses of ‘‘individual freedom.’’ See also Goldstein (2008) for an
analysis of the often obscured relationships between settler colonialism, white
colorblindness, and American Indian rights claims.
16 Some practitioners explained that a good scene will draw on events that are
both culturally meaningful and safely in the past. For example, after the 2002
interrogation scene class (which I described in the introduction), I asked Dom-
ina if she thought there have been September 11 scenes. She said she didn’t
think so, because it’s ‘‘too soon.’’ Using Nazi uniforms as an example, she
explained that for her, the uniforms are too far in the past for her to feel
personally connected to them. Outside of her personal history, they stand as
historical signifiers of power and fear, able to be reappropriated within the
scene. Her counterexample was Klan uniforms, which—because her father was
a Klansman—are too bound up in her own personal history to be available for
resignification. This is a reminder of the importance of both personal and
national histories, shedding light on the temporality of eroticism and its links
to cultural trauma.
17 Similarly, in her analysis of the relationship between Hannah Cullwick and
Arthur Munby in Victorian London, McClintock argues that their sm dynamics
were grounded in ‘‘the central transformations of industrial imperialism’’: ‘‘It is
no accident that the historical subculture of s/m emerged in Europe toward the
end of the eighteenth century with the emergence of imperialism in its mod-
ern, industrial form’’ (1995, 142).
18 This contrast between sm and torture relies on Elaine Scarry’s definition of
torture (1985, 51). Scarry differentiates torture from other forms of pain, such
as therapeutic pain, based on duration, control, and purpose (34–35). Unlike
torture, bdsm is of limited duration, bracketed, controlled, chosen, and con-
sensual. Furthermore, in torture, pain is radically antisocial, while pain in the
context of the bdsm scene is relational: pain marks a social exchange between
practitioners. This contrast is further explored in Weiss (2009).
19 England’s gender, race, and class are also crucial to the story. See Kumar (2004)
for a comparison of ‘‘masculine’’ England and the fragile, feminine Jessica
Lynch; Sjoberg (2007) for an analysis of Lynch’s white hypervisibility in rela-
tion to the invisibility of military women of color; and Giroux (2004) for an
analysis of the links between the guards’ working-class ruralness and sexual
deviancy.
20 The torture techniques depicted in the photographs (‘‘water boarding,’’ ‘‘stress
positions,’’ sensory and sleep deprivation, and even sexual humiliation) have
been part of the repertoire of torture and terror for a very long time (see Scarry
1985), and in use by the United States for at least the last fifty years—in
Vietnam and in homeland prisons, taught by the School of the Americas, and in

N OT E S TO C H A P T E R F I V E 267
 cia training manuals like kubark (see Cohn, Thompson, and Matthews 1997;
Pincus 2004; the 1963 kubark manual is available on the National Security
Archive website: http://www.gwu.edu/≈nsarchiv/). As Scarry points out, tor-
ture has long had a sexual component; the goal is to turn the prisoner’s body
against itself, transforming basic bodily needs (food or sleep) and ‘‘special
wants like sexuality’’ into ‘‘ongoing sources of outrage and repulsion’’ (1985,
48). This general objective was combined with the no-touch shaming, humilia-
tion, shock, fear, and dehumanizing tactics advocated in the kubark manual.
The ‘‘script’’ at Abu Ghraib brought together widely used stressful conditions
(noise, food and sleep deprivation, and stress positions) with sexual humilia-
tion, rape, and violation (forced masturbation, nakedness, homosexual acts,
human pyramids). In this sense, the scenes from Abu Ghraib are part of a long
history of sexualizing imperialism (Enloe 2007; McClintock 1995; Stoler 1995,
2002).
21 For an analysis of what is, in some ways, the other side of this scandal,
see Jasbir Puar and Amit Rai’s reading of the construction of the ‘‘Monster-
Terrorist’’ figure as a damaged, deviant, and pathological personality (2002,
123; see also Puar 2005, 27).
22 Rosalind Morris argues that it was the satisfaction and enjoyment we could
read in the photographs (the thumbs up, the smiles), rather than the torture
itself, that made the photographs disturbing (2007, 103). For Morris, the tor-
turer’s enjoyment is based on a reconfiguration of the tortured as satisfied and
consenting (123–30). I take up this formulation of consent below.
23 Another way to read the distinction is through Deleuze’s differentiation of
masochism and sadism. Deleuze argues that Sacher-Masoch’s masochism and
Sade’s sadism are entirely different mechanisms: sadism is institutional, quan-
titatively repetitive, demonstrative, and hostile to aestheticism, whereas mas-
ochism is contractual, qualitatively suspended, imaginative, and aesthetic
([1967] 1991, 134). In this analysis, contemporary, consensual bdsm would be a
form of masochism, while the detainee torture would be sadism. Although I find
this line of argument interesting, I am not convinced that breaking these forms
apart in this way is a particularly useful path out of the discursive problems
generated by ‘‘sadomasochism,’’ for reasons I show.

268 N OT E S TO C H A P T E R F I V E
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Woltersdorff, Volker. 2011. ‘‘Paradoxes of Precarious Sexualities: Sexual Subcul-
tures under Neo-liberalism.’’ Cultural Studies 25 (2): 164–82.
Zaloom, Caitlin. 2004. ‘‘The Productive Life of Risk.’’ Cultural Anthropology 19 (3):
365–91.
Zussman, Mira. 1998. ‘‘Shifts of Consciousness in Consensual s/m , Bondage, and
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REFERENCES 289
INDEX N

Italicized page numbers indicate illustrations.

Abu Ghraib prison: photographs of, 21– gender and, 164–65, 168, 171, 179,
22, 219–28, 268 n. 20; torture and, 183–84, 263 n. 13; liberal, 133, 165–
221–23, 225–28, 267–68 nn. 18–23 66, 172, 228; libertarian, 166, 263
affect: affect care, 68, 116–17; affective n. 14; neoliberal, 37, 58, 94–95, 98,
disengagement, 222, 225–27; affec- 102–3, 121, 166, 172–73, 179, 183,
tive exchange, 23, 218, 222; cultural 189, 228; race and, 172–73, 183–84,
trauma play and, 21, 210–12, 217– 197–98, 228; self-mastery and, 94,
19; effective circuits and, 211–12, 97–98, 100, 146, 172, 179, 183–84.
213–21; national belonging and, See also autonomy; free choice; per-
213–15, 217, 219, 221; politics of sonal responsibility
bdsm and, 216–17, 227, 231. See aids and hiv , 40, 68–69, 253 n. 6. See
also aftercare also safer sex
African Americans: in Bay Area, 45, 47, Alexander, Bryant, 218
50, 250 n. 8, 250 n. 13, 251 n. 16, alibi, 15, 17–18, 90, 151–53, 203, 207,
266 n. 6; white/black racial imagi- 219, 226. See also bracketed space;
nary and, 199–200, 214, 265 n. 2, disavowal; play frame
266 n. 6; whites’ appropriation of ambivalence, 19–20, 25, 189–90, 229–
experience of, 196–99, 206, 266 n. 5. 30; contradiction and, 142, 146, 185;
See also cultural trauma play; people of the fetish, 266 n. 7; about individ-
of color; race play; slave auction(s) ual versus collective responsibility,
aftercare, 9, 68, 74, 76, 116–17 94–98, 204–9, 217–19, 228; of late-
agency, 18–19, 62–63, 146, 229–30; capitalist subject, 140–41; mas-
 ambivalence (cont.) 100, 132, 139; consumerism versus,
culinity and, 175–76, 178–79, 185; 120–22, 125–26, 128, 132, 139; of
mimesis and, 146, 183–84, 204, 206, self, 7, 90, 144–45, 152–53, 166–67,
210; rules and, 85–86, 98, 100; about 180–81
social norms, 146, 163, 170, 179–80, autonomy: liberal/neoliberal, 18–19,
181–82; about toys as fetish, 129, 37, 58, 94–95, 103, 121, 146; liber-
141–42; white racial dualism and, tarian, 263 n. 14; race and, 197; rules
175, 179–81. See also anxiety and, 62–63, 98, 100; subjects and,
America(n): ideologies, 30, 55–56, 63, 189, 228, 230, 263 n. 13. See also
76, 86, 111, 172, 195, 267 n. 15; agency; free choice; personal
imperialism, 21, 224–27, 268 n. 20; responsibility
racial imaginaries, 174, 181, 191, Axel, Brian Keith, 225
196–98, 199, 210–11, 214, 219, 266
n. 6; San Francisco Bay Area com- Backdrop Club, 71, 168, 253 n. 9
pared to, 44–46, 49–50, 53, 104, 251 Baker, Lee, 197
n. 18; social hierarchies, 6–8, 20, Baldwin, Guy, 74–76, 99
214, 245 n. 8. See also national Bar On, Bat-Ami, 148–49
imaginaries Bateson, Gregory, 17, 151
American Indians, 47, 250–51 nn. 12– Baudrillard, Jean, 113, 225
13, 259 n. 19, 267 n. 15 Bauer, Robin, 152, 156
Antioch College rules, 80–82, 254 n. 20 Baumeister, Roy, 256 n. 30
anxiety, 179–83; about gender and fem- Bay Area. See San Francisco Bay Area
inism, 154, 163, 165, 169–70, 172, b&d ( bondage and discipline), vi–viii.
176–80; racial, 175; about risk, 63, See also bdsm
86; about rules, 97; spectacle and, bdsm , vii–x, 4–6, 11–12, 28, 242 n. 1,
225; about toys, 121–30, 139, 258 248 n. 19; feminism versus, 163–64,
n. 13. See also ambivalence; consum- 170–72, 183, 185; identity, xi–xii,
erism; contradiction 10–11, 111–12, 125–26, 133–34,
Appadurai, Arjun, 113, 134–35, 258 156, 167, 170–71, 244 n. 6; kinky
n. 17 and, viii, 28; late capitalism and, 6–8,
appropriation, 184, 267 n. 16; racial, 14–15, 35, 55, 104, 229; law and,
188, 196–99, 203–4, 206, 211, 259 68–69, 83–84, 91–94, 97, 145, 253
n. 19, 265 n. 18, 266 n. 5. See also nn. 7–8, 255 n. 28, 256 n. 29; main-
race/racial; subversion/subversive streaming of, 66, 76, 85; pathologiza-
arousal, 23, 28, 67, 82–83, 127, 136– tion of, x–xi, 12, 27–28, 176–77,
37, 174, 243 n. 1, 248 n. 19. See also 219–26, 230, 242 n. 1, 245 n. 9; poli-
desire(s); eroticism; sexual(ity) tics of, 12, 19–20, 23, 145, 163, 184–
Asians and Asian Americans, 45, 47, 86, 220, 244 n. 8, 260 n. 1; s&m or
191, 249 n. 6, 250 n. 8, 251 n. 13, s/m versus, x–xi; vanilla versus, 6–7,
251 n. 16, 266 n. 6. See also people of 28–29, 82–83, 180, 255 n. 22, 259
color n. 22. See also community; feminist
aspiration (ambition), 5, 77–78, 175, theories of bdsm /sadomasochism;
179–81, 264 n. 18 new guard; practitioner(s); safe space;
authenticity: in bdsm play, 66, 76, 99– San Francisco Bay Area

292 INDEX
Beck, Ulrich, 86 bondage, vii–viii; equipment, 13–15,
Berger, Maurice, 176 105–6, 127; as a play style, 9, 74, 76,
Berlant, Lauren, 158–59, 167 81, 87–88, 98, 137, 139; techniques
Bhabha, Homi, 176, 182–83, 230 of, 141, 205, 221–22, 260 n. 23
biopolitics/biopower, 63–64, 102–3, bottom(s), xi–xii, 11, 17, 262 nn. 10–
115–16, 129–30, 140–42, 170, 246 11; heterosexism and, 149, 168, 170,
n. 11 177–78, 264 n. 15, 264 n. 17; hetero-
Black Rose Conference, 26, 78, 212, sexuality and, 160–61, 165, 172,
227, 259 n. 19 181, 190–91, 262 n. 10; race and,
black/white racial imaginary, 199–200, 195–96, 199, 265 n. 4; transgression
214, 265 n. 2, 266 n. 6 and, 145–46, 149, 156–58, 160–61,
bodily pleasure: bodies and pleasures, 165, 169; toys and, 114–15, 117–18,
99, 118, 120, 136, 139–40; com- 132–35, 259 n. 22. See also submis-
modity exchange and, 120, 129–38, sion/submissive(s); switch; top(s)
140–42; desexualization and, 99– Boyd, Nan, 35, 43–45, 249 n. 5
100, 118, 120, 130, 135–40; pain bracketed space, 5–6, 17–19, 90, 150–
play and, 98, 136–37, 139; tech- 51, 153–54, 166–67, 221–22, 267
niques of, 15, 114–20, 119, 140, 257 n. 18; consent and, 150, 152, 158,
nn. 5–6, 259 n. 22. See also body, the; 172, 174–75, 185, 196–97, 206; cul-
desire(s); rules: pleasure of; sensation tural trauma play and, 19, 150–51,
play; sex-desire; toys 196–97, 204–7; disavowal and, 17,
body, the: capitalism and, 13–15, 20, 218; the fetish and, 127; neoliberal-
102–4, 120, 129–30, 136, 140–42, ism and, 18–19, 146, 163, 172–73,
246 n. 11; circuits and, 103, 131, 183; play frame as, 17, 127, 151–52,
135–38; classes and, 116, 193, 257 172–73, 206; safe space as, 19, 59,
n. 8; clothes and, 133–34; com- 146, 154, 163, 183–84. See also alibi;
modification of, 129–31, 139, 142; disavowal; play frame; play space(s);
cyborg, 129–30, 259 n. 18; as flex- real(ity); safe space
ible, 14–15, 23, 103, 120, 129–31, Braun, Bruce, 90
137, 140–42; fragmentation of, 104, Brown, Wendy, 37, 91, 247 n. 13
117–20, 119, 129–31, 139, 142, 258 Bush, George W., 224
n. 15; knowledge of, 99, 102–3, 114– butch-femme, 18, 44, 149, 156–57,
20, 129–32, 137–41; at play, 104, 182, 260 n. 1, 261 n. 5, 264 n. 15
115, 118, 129–31, 135–39, 140; as Butler, Judith: on performance and
productive (useful), 102–3, 136–39, gender transgression, 156–58, 162,
140, 246 n. 11, 259 n. 22; prostheses 192, 261 n. 2, 261 n. 5; on perfor-
and, 103–4, 129–30, 132–35, 138– mativity, 8, 182, 190; on regulatory
39, 259 n. 21; sexed (genital), 17–18, ideals, 64–65, 145, 161–63, 243 n. 2,
99, 135–37, 140, 155–57, 161–62, 243 n. 4
182, 243 n. 4, 244 n. 6, 261 n. 5;
zones of, 118–20, 119. See also bodily Califia, Pat[rick], ix, 88, 101, 154–55,
pleasure; desexualization; embodi- 187, 252 n. 5, 253 n. 6, 255 n. 26,
ment; knowledge; technique(s) 259 nn. 19–20
Boellstorff, Tom, 160, 230 capitalism, 4, 6–8, 13–15, 24, 229, 245

INDEX 293
 capitalism (cont.) 84; types of, 9–10, 16, 74, 76, 220.
n. 10; in Bay Area, 35–37, 40–43, 45, See also knowledge; Society of Janus;
48–51, 55, 60, 104; communities techne; specific type(s) of play
and, 35–37, 55–58, 60, 100, 102, clothes, 2, 35, 51, 101, 112, 256 n. 1;
104, 120–21, 258 n. 13; consumer- body and, 133–34; for cultural
ism and, 55, 60, 104, 111–13, 120, trauma play, 21, 191, 208, 211–12;
140–42, 258 n. 17; informational, economics and, 106–7, 125–26;
14, 35, 41, 49, 55, 140; post-Fordist, fetish, 35, 57, 106–8, 256 n. 1
7–8, 14, 140–41, 246 n. 11; subjec- codes of conduct. See rules
tivity and, 20, 22–23, 102–4, 129– collective responsibility, 62–63, 69–70,
30, 140–42. See also circuit(s); com- 91–92, 95–98, 185–86, 204, 208,
modity(ies); late capitalism; material- 217–19, 230; personal responsibility
ism; neoliberal(ism); sexual versus, 223. See also personal
marketplace responsibility
Card, Claudia, 187 colorblindness, 19, 197–98, 210–11,
Cardea, 252–53 nn. 5–6 267 n. 15
care of the self, 64, 99. See also techne Comaroff, Jean and John, 111, 121
Carrette, Jeremy, 6, 136, 140 coming out, 59–60, 82, 106, 170–71,
Celsi, Richard, 87 251 n. 22. See also practitioner(s)
choice. See free choice commodification: of the body, 129–31,
circuit(s), 4, 6–8, 20, 23, 25, 31, 229, 139, 142; of desire and sexuality, 24–
230; bodily, 103, 131, 135–38; com- 25, 55, 104, 120–21, 122, 139, 145;
munity, 12–15, 35, 37, 57, 60, 100, of difference, 14, 45; social connec-
120, 140, 142; flexible, 22–23, 103, tion versus, 122, 125, 128–29, 134–
189, 246 n. 11; performative mate- 39. See also commodity(ies); com-
rialism and, 8, 22, 24–25, 188; play, modity exchange
16–20, 145, 153, 179, 184, 204, 206, commodity(ies): community and, 8, 12–
211, 219–20; practice, 9–12, 62, 79, 15, 55, 104, 111–12, 121–22, 129–
100, 129; private and public, 7, 19, 30, 137–39, 229; effective circuit(s)
201, 221–22, 229; socioeconomics and, 138, 151; expertise and, 14,
and subjectivity and, 15, 24–25, 27, 111–14, 120, 129–31, 138–39, 141;
30. See also effective circuit(s); specific fetishism and, 120, 127–29, 130–32,
circuit(s) 134, 138–39, 141–42, 258 nn. 16–
citizen, bdsm community, 15, 55, 70, 17; gifts versus, 134; identity and,
79–80, 97, 130, 141–42, 189. See 14, 111–12, 121, 125, 130, 134, 257
also aspiration; practitioner(s); uni- n. 4; late capitalism and, 8, 14–15,
versal subjectivity 55, 102, 104, 141–42, 229, 246
class. See social class n. 10, 258 n. 17; neoliberalism and,
classes, viii, 5, 26, 53–54, 56, 104, 106, 8, 62–63, 102–3, 121, 229; safety
110, 227; the body and, 116, 193, and, 62–63,102, 229. See also toys
257 n. 8; consumerism and, 55, 60, commodity exchange, 23, 130–31,
75, 106; old guard versus new guard 134–35, 142, 229; bodily pleasure
and, 54, 67–68, 74–76, 252 n. 2; and, 120, 129–38, 140–42; power
techne and, 9–10, 60–62, 70, 75–78, exchange and/versus, 114, 130–31,

294 INDEX
 134–39, 141–42, 229; toys and, 23, consensual nonconsent play, 21, 88–89,
102, 104, 113, 120, 130–31, 134–39, 171–72. See also consent; rape play;
141–42 ssc
community, vii–viii, 5–8, 12–15, 55– consent, viii, xi, 23, 80–85, 94;
60, 102, 229, 251 n. 19; capitalism bracketed space and, 150, 152, 158,
and, 35–37, 55–58, 60, 100, 104, 172, 174–75, 185, 196–97, 206;
120–21, 258 n. 13; debates, 62, 69, legal definitions of, 91–93, 254 n. 20,
83, 85, 89, 92, 97, 121, 131, 179, 255 n. 28; liberal subject/free choice
208–10; evaluative, 77–78, 86–87, and, 18, 98, 164–66, 167, 169, 171–
90, 94; events, 5, 25–26, 54–55, 59, 72, 208, 261 n. 2; nonconsensual
106; formal organization of, 5–6, 11, sadism versus, 201, 221–22, 226–28,
55, 59–60, 62, 69–73, 76, 90, 102, 241 n. 1, 245 n. 9, 253 n. 11, 267
252 n. 4; as home/homeland, 29, 35, n. 18, 268 nn. 22–23; politics of
38, 42, 44–45, 51, 56–58, 70, 252 bdsm and, 20, 148, 165–66, 182,
n. 5; ideal citizen of, 15, 52–53, 55, 188. See also rape play; sadism; ssc ;
70, 79–80, 90, 97, 130, 141–42, 173, torture
189; munches and, 35, 52–53, 57– consumerism, 8, 14–15, 20, 55, 104–6,
58; old guard versus new guard, 5, 111–14, 120–25; anxiety about,
37–38, 53, 55, 62, 65–72, 74, 252 121–23, 125, 128–30, 139, 258
n. 4, 263 n. 6; online networks of, 26, n. 13; appropriation and, 206;
37, 53–55, 57–58, 104–5, 109–10, authenticity versus, 120–22, 125–
177; professional class basis of, 15, 26, 128, 132, 139; autonomy and,
55, 64, 90; risk, 62–63, 65, 71–72, 121; capitalism and, 60, 104, 120,
83–84, 86–91, 94–95, 97–98, 229; 140–42, 246 n. 10, 258 n. 17; classes
romance of, 14, 58, 100, 120, 129, and, 55, 60, 75, 106; community and,
251 n. 19; rules, 6–7, 10–11, 62, 64– 12–15, 58, 120–22, 125, 129–30;
70, 78–80, 89, 94–95, 100, 102, 209, desire and, 13–14, 24–25, 28, 128,
215; semipublic, 5, 26, 51, 60, 68– 134, 141, 258 n. 13; disavowal and,
69, 81, 91–94, 207–9; toys and con- 83, 125; freedom and, 58, 60, 121,
sumerism and, viii, 5–6, 13–15, 54– 141; identity and, 103–4, 120–21,
56, 102, 105–6, 111–12, 120–22, 125, 130, 134, 141, 257 n. 4; knowl-
125–26, 130, 141–42; whiteness of, edge and, 14, 112–14, 120, 129–31;
19, 60, 64, 90, 192–94, 200–201, production and/versus, 14, 102–3,
219. See also new guard; practition- 111–12, 128, 141–42, 257 n. 4; risk
er(s); scene, the; social belonging; and, 63; subjectivity and, 103–4,
social control 120–21, 125, 130, 141, 257 n. 4. See
community circuit, 12–15, 35, 37, 57, also flexibility; neoliberal(ism); sexual
60, 100, 120, 140, 142; bodily and, marketplace; toys
103, 131, 135–38. See also capital- consumption. See consumerism
ism; commodity(ies); toys contradiction, 7, 23–24, 142, 175, 179,
community norms (social control), 62, 183, 190, 201, 230; ambivalence and,
64–65, 68–72, 77–80, 82–84, 89, 146, 185; the fetish and, 128–30,
91–98, 100. See also dungeon moni- 132, 139, 141–42, 219–20, 266 n. 7;
tors; rules; social normativity gender and, 182–83, 263 n. 13; play

INDEX 295
 contradiction (cont.) D’Emilio, John, 43–44, 250 n. 9
frame and, 17, 151–53, 164, 185–86, Derrida, Jacques, 243 n. 3
206, 219–20; race and, 206, 210 desexualization, 99–100, 118, 120,
copy/original, 147–48, 181–84, 206–7, 130, 135–40
226, 247 n. 15, 265 n. 20. See also desire(s), 6–7, 10, 12–14, 18–19, 24–
mimesis 25, 229–31; arousal and, 23, 28, 67,
counterpublic, 158–62, 230, 248 n. 2, 82–83, 127, 136–37, 174, 243 n. 1,
261 n. 7 248 n. 19; authenticity and, 144–45,
cultural performance, 17–23, 188–89, 166–67; commodification of, 55, 104,
192, 214–18, 229–30, 246 n. 12, 248 120–22, 139, 145; consumerism and,
n. 17, 263 n. 12, 265 n. 1. See also 28, 112, 125, 128, 134; flexible, 14–
cultural trauma play; mimesis; per- 15, 120, 130, 137, 140–41; mar-
formance; performative efficacy ketplace of, 4, 55, 102, 104, 120, 141,
cultural trauma play, 22, 29, 87–88, 228; neoliberalism and, 146, 166–67,
145, 188–90, 212–15, 267 n. 16; 172, 211, 218–19, 229, 263 n. 14; as
affective responses and, 21, 210–12, personal/private, 144–46, 149–50,
217–19; bracketed space and, 19, 166–67, 172, 186, 188, 226; privat-
150–51, 196–97, 204–7; clothes for, ized, versus social norms, 19, 144–46,
21, 191, 208, 211–12; disavowal and, 174, 180, 203–4, 207–11, 217–19;
19, 203–4, 206, 211–12, 214–15; queer, 158–59; sadistic/masochistic,
effective circuits and, 22, 145, 189– x–xi, 226, 241 n. 1, 245 n. 9; social
90, 203–7, 212–15, 217–19, 267 inequality and, 120, 164–65, 168,
n. 16; eroticism of inequality in, 21– 186, 214, 217, 219, 231; for trans-
24, 147–49, 188–89, 203–7, 210– gression, 19, 144–46, 179, 183–85,
14, 216–19, 222, 267 n. 16; fantasy 188, 264 n. 18. See also aspiration;
and, 197–201, 204–7, 211–12, 215, bodily pleasure; eroticism; privatized
266 n. 5; national imaginaries and, desire; sex-desire; sexual(ity); toys
22, 188–89, 201, 213–15, 218–19, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
221, 227, 267 n. 16; politics of, 188, Mental Disorders (dsm-iv-tr ), x,
204, 207–9, 215–16, 219–20, 221; 241 n. 1
reenactment and, 146–49, 151, 204– dialectic, 8, 13–15, 20, 103, 120, 129,
6, 216. See also appropriation; gender 229–30. See also contradiction; per-
play; mimesis; race play; specific cul- formative materialism
tural trauma play difference(s), 8, 25, 28–30, 90, 103,
Curtis, Debra, 111–12 190, 200–201, 219, 230–31; appro-
cyborg, 129–30, 259 n. 18 priation of racial, 188, 196–99, 203–
4, 206, 211, 259 n. 19, 265 n. 18, 266
Danner, Mark, 224 n. 5; commodification of, 14, 45; flex-
Davis, Katherine, 154–55 ibility and, 15, 23, 141; tolerance of,
Day, Liz, 89 15, 23, 46–48, 55–56, 60, 155, 198,
Delany, Samuel, 40 250 n. 6; tourism and, 36–37, 45–
DeLeon, Richard, 46 48. See also colorblindness; social
Deleuze, Gilles, 242 n. 3, 246 n. 11, 268 inequalities; universal subjectivity
n. 23 disavowal, 17–20, 146, 189–90, 214–

296 INDEX
 15, 218, 229–30; Abu Ghraib prison Duggan, Lisa, 247 n. 13, 264 n. 16
photographs and, 222–24, 226–27; Duncan, Patricia, 151–52
bracketed space and, 17, 218; con- dungeon monitors (dm s), 53, 61–62,
sumerism and, 83, 125; gender and, 69, 70, 91, 94–97
176–77, 179, 182, 264 n. 17; of his- dungeons: home, 54, 122–24, 229; in
torical inequality, 19, 203–4, 206–7, the San Francisco Bay Area, 1–2, 51,
211–12, 214–15, 218, 267 n. 15; 58, 91–93, 101, 161, 207–8, 251
neoliberalism and, 18–19, 175, 179, n. 21; semipublic, 1–2, 5, 29, 51, 58–
197, 211–12, 218–19, 229; race and, 60, 74, 91–93, 122, 131. See also
19, 175, 198–99, 206–7, 211. See dungeon monitors; play parties; slave
also alibi; bracketed space; uncanny, auction(s)
the; visibility/invisibility
disciplinary power, 15, 22–23, 89, 99, Easton, Dossie, 108–9, 115, 138
140–41, 243 n. 4, 246 n. 11, 247 n. 17 Echols, Alice, 260 n. 1
discipline, vii–viii. See also bdsm economics: of Bay Area, 35–37, 40–43,
diversity. See difference(s) 45, 48–51, 55, 60, 104; clothes and,
dm s (dungeon monitors), 53, 61–62, 106–7, 125–26; homo oeconomicus,
69–70, 91, 94–97 18, 102; toy costs, 14, 105–8, 123–
dominance/dominant(s), ix, xi, 11, 243 24, 257 nn. 5–6. See also capitalism;
n. 1, 262 nn. 10–11, 264 n. 17; dom- circuit(s); neoliberal(ism)
ism, 176, 264 n. 15; expertise and, edge play, 9, 62, 76, 87–90, 94, 97–98,
74–76, 112–18, 257 n. 8; femininity 208. See also risk; safety
and, 17–18, 149, 160–61, 178; mas- education. See classes
culinity and, 144–45, 153–54, 160– effective circuit(s), 22–24, 151, 153,
61, 168, 170–79, 183, 185, 253 n. 9, 188–90, 201, 214, 217–19, 221–22,
264 n. 17; professional dominant(s), 226, 228–30; Abu Ghraib prison pho-
ix, 71, 156, 253 n. 6; race and, 145– tographs and, 222–24, 226–27;
46, 173–75, 181, 183, 185–86, 190– affect and, 211–21; commodities
91, 194–96, 199, 214–15, 265 n. 4; and, 138; cultural trauma play and,
toys and, 108, 112–15, 131–35, 145, 203–7, 212–15, 267 n. 16; erot-
138–39, 157, 261 n. 6. See also icism and, 23, 147, 203–7, 210–14,
hmd s; Master or Mistress/slave; 216–19, 221, 228, 230; gender and,
social inequality; submission/sub- 179, 181–82; national imaginaries
missive(s); top(s) and, 22–23, 218–21, 227, 229–30.
dominatrix (professional dominant), ix, See also performative efficacy
71, 156, 219, 221–23, 227, 248 n. 1, efficiency, 102–3, 136–40, 228, 246
253 n. 6, 262 n. 11 n. 11, 247 n. 17. See also performa-
Dore Alley (Up Your Alley) Street Fair, tive efficacy
26, 42, 249 n. 4 Ekberg, Merryn, 86
D/s (domination/submission), vii, ix, 9. electrical play, 9, 21, 77, 87–88, 101–2,
See also bdsm 108, 115, 125
dsm-iv-tr (Diagnostic and Statistical Elliston, Deborah, 192
Manual of Mental Disorders), x, 241 embodiment, 162–63; bdsm as, 14, 23,
n. 1 99, 103–4, 184–85, 229; embodied

INDEX 297
 embodiment (cont.) exurbs/suburbs, 34–37, 48, 50–51, 54,
exchange, 135–38; late-capitalist, 58–60, 63, 251 n. 15. See also San
13–15, 20, 102–4, 120, 129–30, Francisco Bay Area; Silicon Valley
136, 140–42, 246 n. 11; racialized,
193–95, 199–200, 207, 225, 261 fairs, street, 26, 42–43, 46–47, 108,
n. 5, 265 n. 18; of social norms, 5–6, 128, 249 n. 4, 251 n. 19
146, 169–70, 181–83, 191–92, 261 fantasy, 7, 17, 19, 22, 90, 144–46, 151–
n. 5. See also body, the 53, 164, 188, 230–31, 265 n. 1; Abu
England, Lynndie, 219, 221–23, 227, Ghraib torture versus, 222, 225–26,
267 n. 19 228; of cultural trauma play, 197–
English-Lueck, J. A., 49, 53–55 201, 204–7, 211–12, 215, 266 n. 5;
eroticism: arousal and, 23, 28, 67, 82– gender and, 172, 181–86; sexual, x,
83, 127, 136–37, 174, 243 n. 1, 248 28, 80–81, 154, 170–71, 209, 222,
n. 19; of cultural trauma, 21–24, 241 n. 1, 244 n. 6, 260 n. 1; toys and,
147–49, 188–89, 203–7, 210–14, 128. See also bracketed space; fetish,
216–19, 222, 267 n. 16; effective cir- the; play frame
cuit and, 23, 147, 188–89, 203–7, femininity: butch-femme and, 18, 44,
210–14, 216–19, 221, 228, 230; of 149, 156–57, 182, 260 n. 1, 261
heteronormative gender, 148–49, n. 5, 264 n. 15; dominant, 17–
168, 174–76; rules versus, 67, 73, 18, 149, 160–61, 178, 262 nn. 10–
75–76, 82–83, 255 n. 26; of toys, 11; heterosexual, 156–58, 160–61,
114, 127–28, 131, 157, 159. See also 165, 167–70, 176–78, 182, 262
body, the; desire(s); knowledge; rules; n. 10–11, 264 n. 15; submissive, 145,
sexual(ity); toys 149, 158, 160–61, 164–65, 168–70,
ethnography. See methodology 175–76, 253 n. 9, 262 nn. 10–11,
etiology, 27–28, 245 n. 9. See also 264 n. 17; top/bottom(s) and, 160–
pathology, bdsm as 61, 165, 168, 170, 172, 262 n. 10,
Eulenspiegel Society, the (tes ), 8, 70 264 n. 15, 264 n. 17. See also anxiety;
events: bdsm community, 5, 25–26, feminism; gender(ed); gender
54–55, 59, 106; national, 26, 54, 80, inequality
194 feminism: anxiety about, 154, 163, 165,
exchange(s), 23, 79, 103–4, 131, 134–35, 169–70, 172, 176–80; bdsm versus,
140–41, 153, 190, 222, 229; affective, 163–64, 170–72, 183, 185; lesbian,
218; energy, 65–66, 75, 135, 137–38, 149, 154–55, 167; liberal, 164–67,
212; sensation, 135–38, 152, 267 171–73, 180, 264 n. 16; liberal versus
n. 18; spiritual, 131, 138, 259 n. 19. See radical, 149–50, 163, 166, 171–72,
also commodity exchange; power 182, 263 n. 14; queer, 145–46, 154–
exchange; spirituality 55, 162, 191–92, 247 n. 15, 260 n. 1;
Exiles, the, 26, 78, 117, 131, 253 n. 6 race and, 148, 150–51, 172–74, 180,
expertise, 6, 9–12, 62, 74–80, 90, 98, 185–86, 198, 247 n. 15, 266 n. 5; radi-
111–13, 138; community, 77–78, cal, 145–46, 148–50, 154–55, 169,
86–87, 94; toys and, 111–18, 131– 180, 184, 186, 260 n. 1; top/bot-
32, 137–39, 261 n. 6. See also classes; tom(s) and, 149, 172. See also feminist
edge play; knowledge; technique(s) theories of bdsm /sadomasochism;

298 INDEX
 mimesis; neoliberal(ism); perfor- Fraser, Nancy, 243 n. 2, 246 n. 11, 261
mativity; queer studies n. 7
feminist theories of bdsm /sadomas- free choice, 18–19, 163–68, 229; con-
ochism, 12, 245 n. 8; critical, 20, sent and, 98, 169, 171–72, 208, 261
145–46, 148–50, 163, 169, 178, 182, n. 2; freedom and, 165–67, 172,
184, 260 n. 1, 263 n. 13; supportive, 197–98, 263 n. 14, 267 n. 15; gender
154–55, 169, 182, 184 and, 171–72, 179; liberalism and,
Ferguson, Ann, 155 146, 172; libertarianism and, 146,
Ferguson, James, 184 263 n. 14; neoliberalism and, 37, 58,
fetish, the, 127–29, 258 nn. 15–17; 91, 94–95, 98, 121, 172–73, 179–
ambivalence and, 266 n. 7; bracketed 80, 198; race and, 172–73, 198–99,
space and, 127; commodity, 120, 206, 216–17. See also agency; free-
127–29, 130–32, 134, 138–39, 141– dom; liberalism; rules
42, 258 nn. 16–17; contradiction freedom: consumer, 58, 60, 121, 141;
and, 128–30, 132, 139, 141–42, 201, liberalism/free choice and, 165–67,
219–20, 266 n. 7; toys as, 127–30, 172, 197–98, 263 n. 14, 267 n. 15;
131–32, 134, 138–39, 141–42. See neoliberalism and, 58, 60, 91, 98,
also fetish scene 121, 141, 164, 167, 183, 247 n. 13;
fetish scene, vii–viii, 1, 5, 11, 26, 54, rules and/versus, 64–65, 76, 91, 97–
70–71, 155, 248 n. 1; clothes and, 98, 100, 208–9; San Francisco’s sex-
35, 57, 106–8, 256 n. 1; fetish as play ual, 45–46; sexuality as, 7, 65, 139–
style, 9, 243 n. 1. See also fetish, the 40, 144–45; from social norms, 6,
15 Association, 253 n. 6 65, 144, 163–64, 170, 180–81, 183–
flexibility, 14–15, 22–23, 102–3, 140– 86, 204
41, 246 n. 11; body and, 103, 120, Freud, Sigmund, 128, 139, 206, 242
129–31, 137, 140–42; of circuits, n. 3, 244 n. 6, 245 n. 9, 258 n. 15,
103, 189; of desires, 120, 130, 137; 265 n. 20
late capitalism and, 54–55, 121, 130,
140–42, 245–46 nn. 10–11; of new Garreau, Joel, 50
guard, 65; tolerance and, 15, 23, 141 gay men: leathermen, viii, 12, 38–40,
Folsom Street Fair, 26, 42–43, 46–47, 69, 203, 251 n. 19, 252 n. 5, 253 n. 6;
108, 128, 249 n. 4, 251 n. 19 San Francisco’s history of, 14, 43–47,
Folsom Street leather scene. See old 248 n. 2, 249 nn. 4–5; sexual iden-
guard (leather scene) tity, 244 n. 6, 257 n. 4. See also gen-
Foucault, Michel: on bdsm , 6, 99, 118, der(ed); lesbian(s); old guard (leather
156, 158, 254 n. 17; on biopower, 63; scene); queer(ness)
on desexualization, 99, 118, 120, Geertz, Clifford, 153, 261 n. 4
130, 136; on disciplinary power, 22, gender(ed), 17–18, 145–46, 155–58,
140, 246 n. 11; on entomologizing 160–62, 244 n. 6, 261 n. 5; Abu
sexuality, 27; on neoliberal govern- Ghraib prison and, 225, 228, 267
mentality, 69–70, 94–95, 102–3, n. 19; agency, consent, free choice,
247 n. 13; on sexuality as regulatory and, 163–69, 171–72, 179, 183–84,
ideal, 161–62, 243 n. 4; on techne, 229, 263 n. 13; anxiety about, 154,
10–11, 64, 76, 79, 162–63 163, 165, 169–70, 172, 176–80; dif-

INDEX 299
 gender(ed) (cont.) Hart, Lynda, 152, 261 n. 3
ference, 15, 45, 168, 200, 219; dis- Hartigan, John, 265 n. 19
avowal and, 176–77, 179, 182, 264 Harvey, David, 245 n. 10, 247 n. 13
n. 17; dominance and, 17–18, 144– Hein, Hilde, 266 n. 5
45, 149, 160–61, 168, 170–79, 183, Henkin, William, 164
185, 264 n. 17; eroticism of hetero- Hennessy, Rosemary, 15, 141
normative, 148–49, 168, 174–76; heteronormativity, 17–18, 145–46,
masochism and, 168–69; Master or 149, 154–62, 165, 167–68, 175–76,
Mistress/slave and, 175–76, 177– 178–83, 230; eroticism of gender
78; as performance/performativity, and, 148–49, 168, 174–76. See also
4–8, 17–20, 24–25, 162–63, 178, social normativity
181–84, 189–91, 200, 214, 229–31; heterosexism, 149, 161, 168, 170, 176–
self-mastery and, 146, 168–69, 172; 78, 264 n. 15, 264 n. 17. See also
submission and, 149, 164–65, 168– bracketed space; feminism; gender
70, 176–78, 262 nn. 10–11, 264 inequality
n. 17; toys and, 124–25, 157–61, heterosexual(ity): bdsm , 5, 15, 26, 35,
180, 258 n. 13; transgender, 44, 136; 37, 52, 75, 168, 262 nn. 10–11; femi-
transgression and, 5–6, 19–20, 153– ninity and, 156–58, 160–61, 165,
58, 170, 178–79, 181, 183–85. See 167–70, 176–78, 182, 262 n. 10–11,
also femininity; feminism; gender 264 n. 15; fetish scene, viii, 248 n. 1;
inequality; gender play; heterosex- masculinity and, 160, 170, 172, 174–
ual(ity); hmd s; masculinity 83, 185, 190–91, 262 nn. 10–11,
gender inequality (sexism), 15, 17–20, 264 n. 17; queerness versus, 145–46,
60, 145–46, 149, 154, 161, 173–75, 154–56, 158–60, 162, 179–80, 230,
177–81, 200, 228–30, 264 nn. 15– 264 n. 18; as sexual identity, 244
16; freedom from, 6, 168, 170, 181, n. 6; as social privilege, 15, 58, 60,
184; justification of, 24, 37, 58, 121, 146, 154, 170, 173, 178–80, 181–85,
179, 183–84, 189. See also bracketed 264 n. 18; Society of Janus and, 26,
space; feminism 69, 72, 168, 253 n. 6, 253 n. 9, 262
gender play, 3–4, 17–18, 22, 89, 145– n. 11; top/bottom(s), 160–61, 165,
46, 156–58, 167–68, 190–91, 214; 172, 181, 190–91, 262 n. 10; whit-
politics of, 5, 19–20, 145–46, 184, eness and, 15, 154, 170, 172–76,
190–91, 200. See also cultural trauma 178–79, 181–83, 185, 190–91. See
play; gender(ed); mimesis; perfor- also femininity; feminism; gen-
mance; rape play der(ed); heteronormativity; hmd s;
gentrification, 35–43, 46–48, 50–51, masculinity; new guard; pansexual
60. See also neoliberal(ism) historical inequality, 8, 19, 21–22, 128,
Giddens, Anthony, 86 145, 150–51, 187–88, 267 n. 16; dis-
Goldstein, Richard, 219 avowal of, 19, 203–4, 206–7, 211–
Grosz, Elizabeth, 132–34 12, 214–15, 218, 267 n. 15; eroti-
cism of, 21–24, 147–49, 188–89,
Halberstam, Judith, 261 n. 5 203–7, 210–14, 216–19, 222; of
Haraway, Donna, 129–30, 259 n. 18 imperialism, 22, 174, 203–4, 220,
Hardy, Janet, 138 267 n. 15, 267 n. 17; politics of sm

300 INDEX
 and, 22–23, 145–46, 187–89, 197– techniques of the self; working at
98, 205, 210, 219–20; of racism, bdsm
150, 195–98, 204–7, 210–12, 219; inequalities. See social inequalities
of sexism, 150, 174–75. See also cul- informed consent, 80–81, 84, 94–95.
tural trauma play; slavery; social See also consent
inequalities intelligible subjectivity, 6, 8, 17–18, 23,
hiv/aids , 40, 68–69, 253 n. 6. See also 64–65, 145, 161–62, 178, 181–83,
safer sex 243 n. 4. See also social normativity
hmd s (heterosexual, male dominants), interracial play. See race play
144–46, 153–54, 160, 169, 170–86, interrogation play, 9, 20–24, 145, 189,
190, 262 n. 10. See also gender(ed); 191, 198, 220–28, 267 n. 16. See also
masculinity; politics of bdsm cultural trauma play
Holiday, Sybil, 164 invisibility. See visibility/invisibility
homo oeconomicus, 18, 102. See also it (information technology), 6, 14–15,
neoliberal(ism) 35, 37, 41, 48–55, 57–58, 104, 246
homosexuality, 43–46, 177, 244 n. 6, n. 10, 247 n. 17, 251 n. 18; new
264 n. 17, 250 n. 9. See also gay men; guard and, 12–13, 15, 52–57, 140,
heterosexual(ity); lesbian(s); 177, 260 n. 23; professionals, 15, 26–
queer(ness) 27, 35, 50, 52, 54–55, 263 n. 14. See
hooks, bell, 206 also San Francisco Bay Area; Silicon
Hopkins, Patrick, 149–50 Valley
Howe, Alyssa Cymene, 45
Jameson, Fredric, 246 n. 10
identity: bdsm , xi–xii, 10–11, 111–12, Janus. See Society of Janus
125–26, 133–34, 156, 167, 170–71, Jonel, Marissa, 149
244 n. 6; consumer, 14–15, 55, 103– Joseph, Miranda, 8, 14, 35, 37, 100,
4, 111–14, 120–21, 125, 130, 134, 113, 120, 243 n. 3, 251 n. 19
141, 257 n. 4; in practice, 10–11; sex- Journeyman II Academy, 65, 252 n. 2
ual, 10–11, 14, 156, 243 n. 4, 244
n. 6, 257 n. 4. See also subjectivity Kamel, G. W. Levi, ix, 156
imperialism: and/as play, 17, 20–24, Kantrowitz, Arnie, 203–4, 206
220–22, 267 n. 17; US sexualized Kingfisher, Catherine, 247 n. 13
military and, 21, 224–27, 268 n. 20. kink aware professionals, 83–84, 255
See also Abu Ghraib prison; cultural n. 23
trauma play; historical inequality kinky, viii, 28. See also bdsm
incest play, 16–17, 19–20, 146–47, Kipnis, Laura, 258 n. 14
187, 212–15, 221, 228–29, 248 kkk play. See Ku Klux Klan (kkk ) play
n. 19. See also cultural trauma play knowledge, 67–68, 70, 140; bodily, 99,
individual agency. See agency 102–3, 114–20, 129–32, 137–41;
individual responsibility. See personal consumer, 14, 112–14, 120, 129–31;
responsibility power/knowledge, 22, 103, 247
individuation (self-cultivation), 62, 64– n. 17; risk and, 87–90; self-
65, 79–80, 85, 89–90, 98–99, 162– knowledge, 10, 111, 140, 162–63,
63, 169. See also rules; self-mastery; 215, 243 n. 4; techne and, 10–11, 64,

INDEX 301
 knowledge (cont.) legal issues, 68–69, 83–84, 91–94, 97,
74–77, 80, 103–4, 260 n. 23. See also 145, 253 nn. 7–8, 255 n. 28, 256
classes; consumer-subject; expertise; n. 29
self-mastery; technique(s) leisure, 12, 15, 25, 28, 68, 102–3, 130,
Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, x 141; labor and/versus, 28, 54–55,
kubark cia manual, 21, 268 n. 20 57, 78–80, 109–10, 121. See also
Ku Klux Klan (kkk ) play, 207–8, 211– work on the self
14, 216–18, 267 n. 16. See also cul- Lemke, Thomas, 69–70, 94–95, 102–3
tural trauma play; race play lesbian(s): butch-femme, 18, 44, 149,
Kulick, Don, 184 156–57, 182, 260 n. 1, 261 n. 5, 264
n. 15; feminism, 149, 155, 167; free
labor: Bay Area economy and, 39, 41, 49– choice and, 164–65, 167–68, 261
50, 54–55, 104, 249 n. 5, 250 n. 8, 250 n. 2; leatherdyke, viii, 148–49, 151–
n. 10; leisure and/versus, 28, 54–55, 52, 154–55, 252 n. 5, 253 n. 6, 260
57, 78–80, 109–10, 121; privatized n. 1; San Francisco history of, 14,
desire versus, 7, 19, 102–3, 136, 140, 43–47, 248 n. 2, 249 n. 4; 250 n. 10;
145; working at bdsm as, 55, 60, 64, sexual identity and, 10, 244 n. 6. See
76–80, 110–11, 125–26, 132, 215, also feminism; gay men; gender(ed);
258 n. 14. See also capitalism; it ; pro- homosexuality; queer(ness)
duction; work on the self Lewin, Ellen, 30
Lacan, Jacques, 243 n. 4, 261 n. 3 liberalism, 18, 133, 146, 164–67, 173,
Lady Green, 117–18 182, 208, 227, 266 n. 15; feminism
Lancaster, Roger, 191 and, 171–73, 180, 261 n. 2, 264
late capitalism, 13–15, 22–23, 140–42, n. 16. See also autonomy; free choice;
245–46 nn. 10–11; the body and, 20, neoliberal(ism)
102–4, 120, 129–30, 136, 246 n. 11; libertarianism, 146, 150, 155, 166, 208,
commodities and, 8, 55, 102, 104, 263 n. 14, 264 n. 16
229, 258 n. 17; flexibility of, 54–55, Linden, Robin Ruth, 148
102–3, 121, 130; sexuality and, 6–7, Lingis, Alphonso, 225
19, 55, 104, 136, 144–45, 166–67; Lipsitz, George, 172
subjectivity and, 6, 14–15, 20, 102– Liszt, Catherine, 108–9, 115
4, 129–30. See also capitalism; con- Lorde, Audre, 187
sumerism; desire(s); neoliberal(ism); Lott, Eric, 198–99, 230
sexual marketplace Lowe, Donald, 55
Latinos/as, 39, 50, 213, 249 n. 6, 250
n. 8, 251 n. 13, 251 n. 16. See also MacKendrick, Karmen, 6, 98–99, 137,
cultural trauma play; people of color 139–40, 156, 256 n. 30
Leap, William L., 30 Magister, Thom, 68
leather, vii–viii; leatherdyke(s), viii, Mahmood, Saba, 162–63, 192
148–49, 151–52, 154–55, 252 n. 5, Manalansan, Martin, 40, 58
253 n. 6, 260 n. 1; leathermen, viii, Martin, Biddy, 159–60, 260 n. 1
12, 38–40, 69, 203, 251 n. 19, 252 Martin, Emily, 14–15, 103, 140–41
n. 5, 253 n. 6. See also new guard; old Marx, Karl, 128, 258 n. 16
guard (leather scene) masculinity, 172, 174–79, 264 n. 17;

302 INDEX
 ambivalence and, 175–76, 178–79, middle class, 47, 50, 52, 77, 90, 106,
185; authenticity and, 180–81; domi- 123, 181. See also professional class;
nant, 144–45, 153–54, 160–61, 168, social class
170–79, 183, 185, 253 n. 9, 262 Miller, Daniel, 111, 120
nn. 10–11, 264 n. 17; heterosexual, mimesis, 19–20, 146–48, 156, 181–84,
160, 170, 172, 174–83, 185, 190–91, 247 n. 15, 265 n. 20; ambivalence
262 nn. 10–11, 264 n. 17; submis- and, 146, 183–84, 204, 206, 210; cul-
sive, 156, 160–61, 176–78, 262 tural trauma play and, 22, 147–48,
nn. 10–11, 264 n. 17; top/bottom(s) 150–51, 188–89, 194–95, 198–99,
and, 160–61, 165, 168, 170, 177–78, 202–7, 213–15, 219–21; resignifica-
181, 190, 262 n. 10, 264 n. 15, 264 tion and/versus, 19, 157–58, 162,
n. 17; transgression and, 170, 178– 187–88, 190–92, 220–21, 247 n. 15;
83. See also anxiety; butch-femme; transgression versus, 145–46, 154,
feminism; gender(ed); gender in- 185, 262 n. 12. See also copy/origi-
equality; heterosexual(ity); hmd s nal; cultural performance; cultural
Maskovsky, Jeff, 247 n. 13, 257 n. 4 trauma play; politics of bdsm ; resig-
masochism, x–xi, 241 n. 1, 245 n. 9, nification; transgression
268 n. 23. See also bdsm Mitnick, Hope, 47
Mason, Rose, 173 Moore, Alison, 85
Master or Mistress/slave (M/s), ix, xi, Morris, Rosalind, 227–28, 268 n. 22
3–4, 11, 17, 76, 156–58; classes on, Moser, Charles, 242 n. 1
76; gender and, 175–78; politics of, Mr. S store, 42, 105, 108, 112, 131–32,
156–58, 194–201, 207, 227; race 151, 257 n. 6
and, 194–201, 207, 265 n. 4, 266 M/s (Master or Mistress/slave). See
n. 5. See also cultural trauma play; Master or Mistress/slave; slave
dominance/dominant(s); slave auc- auction(s)
tion(s); submission/submissive(s) munches, 5, 25–26, 34–35, 36, 51–55,
materialism, 7–8, 35–37, 47, 56, 191– 57, 59–60, 76, 106, 193
92, 226, 228–30; performative mate- Muñoz, José Esteban, 159, 170
rialism, 6–8, 19–20, 22–25, 146,
157–58, 163, 184, 188–89. See also National Coalition for Sexual Freedom
performative efficacy; social class; (ncsf ), xi, 69, 253 nn. 7–8
social inequalities national imaginaries, 20, 22–23, 189–
McClintock, Anne, 127–28, 152, 156, 90, 201, 214–15, 218–19, 227, 230–
173, 266 n. 7, 267 n. 17 31, 266 n. 6, 266–67 nn. 15–16;
McDougall, Marina, 47 affect and, 213–15, 217, 219, 221;
McKenzie, Jon, 22, 103, 188–89, 246 cultural trauma play and, 188–89,
n. 11, 247 n. 17 213–15, 221; effective circuits and,
McRuer, Robert, 141 22–23, 189–90, 201, 214, 218–21,
men. See gay men; gender(ed); hetero- 227, 229–30; white/black racial
sexual(ity); hmd s; masculinity imaginary and, 199–200, 214, 265
methodology, 7–8, 22–24, 25–30, n. 2, 266 n. 6. See also America(n)
188–89, 248 n. 18. See also perfor- Native Americans, 47, 250 n. 12, 251
mative materialism n. 13, 259 n. 19, 267 n. 15

INDEX 303
 Nazi play, 148–49, 187–90, 198, 201– 60, 94–95, 98, 102–3, 121, 189, 228.
4, 206–10, 212–15, 219; clothing See also late capitalism; liberalism;
for, 21, 191, 204, 207, 208, 267 privatized desire; sexual marketplace;
n. 16. See also cultural trauma play urban development projects
ncsf (National Coalition for Sexual new guard, 5, 25–27, 34–37, 51–56,
Freedom), xi, 69, 253 nn. 7–8 60; exurbs/suburbs and, 34, 37, 51–
negotiation, 3, 9, 22, 74, 80–83, 116– 52, 54, 56, 58–59, 70; it and, 6, 12–
17, 150, 166, 254 n. 19, 255 n. 22; 13, 15, 35, 52–55, 56–57, 140, 177,
ssc and, 62, 68, 70, 85, 95, 97–98, 260 n. 23; old guard versus, 5, 37–
152 38, 53, 55, 62, 65–72, 74, 252 n. 4,
Nelson, Diane, 132–33, 259 n. 21 263 n. 6; old guard nostalgia and,
neoliberal(ism), 8, 18–19, 58, 69–70, 66–68, 73, 75–76, 85, 88–89, 99–
91, 229, 247 n. 13; agency and, 37, 100, 121, 126, 129. See also commu-
94–95, 98, 102–3, 121, 146, 166, nity; practitioner(s); San Francisco
172–73, 179, 183, 189; autonomy Bay Area; Silicon Valley
and, 19, 37, 94–95, 103, 121; Nichols, Jeanette, 149
bracketed space and, 146, 163, 172– nonwhite. See people of color; race/
73, 183; commodities and, 62–63, racial
102–3, 121; desire and, 146, 166– norms. See social normativity
67, 172, 211, 218–19, 263 n. 14; dis- nostalgia for old guard, 66–68, 73, 75–
avowal and, 175, 179, 197, 211, 218– 76, 85, 88–89, 99–100, 121, 126,
19; efficiency and, 102–3; flexibility 129
of, 102–3, 246 n. 11; free choice and,
37, 94–95, 98, 121, 164, 167, 172– old guard (leather scene), 5, 38, 40, 42–
73, 179–80, 198; freedom, 60, 98, 43, 67–68; Folsom Street Fair and,
121, 141, 164, 167, 183; as govern- 42–43, 249 n. 4; hiv/aids and, 40,
mentality, 18, 60, 94; homo oeconomi- 68–69, 253 n. 6; new guard versus, 5,
cus and, 18, 102; justification of 37–38, 53, 55, 62, 65–72, 74, 252
social inequality and, 24, 121, 146, n. 4, 263 n. 6; nostalgia for, 66–68,
167, 172–73, 179, 183, 189, 263 73, 75–76, 85, 88–89, 99–100, 121,
n. 14; liberal feminism and, 163–65, 126, 129; urban development proj-
167–68, 172–73, 179–80, 263 n. 14; ects and, 38–42. See also San
personal responsibility and, 37, 62– Francisco
63, 94–95, 98, 102–3, 121, 167, 183, Omi, Michael, 247 n. 14
189, 217–19; privatization and, 40– online networks, viii, 26, 37, 53–55,
41, 60, 63, 164, 166–67, 218–19, 57–58, 104–5, 109–10, 177. See also
228, 263 n. 14; privatized desire and, it ; munch
18, 167, 218; racial projects, 19, organizations (bdsm ), 8, 26, 54, 68,
172–73, 175, 197–98, 200, 210–11; 70–72, 78, 154–55, 168, 253 n. 6,
as rationality, 24, 30, 37, 56, 60, 94– 253 n. 9, 262 n. 11. See also specific
95, 102–3, 121, 167, 172, 189, 218, organizations
263 n. 14; safety/risk and, 63, 94– original/copy, 147–48, 181–84, 206–7,
95, 97–98; self-mastery and, 65, 94– 226, 247 n. 15, 265 n. 20. See also
95, 98, 172, 189; subjectivity and, mimesis

304 INDEX
Ortner, Sherry, 153 performative efficacy, 22–23, 103,
outlaw sexuality, bdsm as, 62, 65–67, 188–89, 228, 246 n. 11, 247 n. 17.
73, 85, 88–89, 97, 145, 154–55, 204 See also cultural performance;
effective circuit(s); performative
Pagano, Darlene, 149 materialism
pain play, ix–xi, 11, 81, 115, 117, 156, performative materialism, 6–8, 19–20,
227, 243 n. 1, 267 n. 18; bodily plea- 22–25, 146, 157–58, 163, 184, 188–
sure and, 98, 136–37, 139; sensation 89, 191–92, 228–30. See also
exchange and, 135–37. See also sen- effective circuit(s); performative
sation play efficacy
Palo Alto. See new guard; Silicon Valley performativity, 8, 23, 146, 162, 181–
pansexual, vii, 26–27, 160–61, 253 82, 190–92, 229, 247 n. 15, 247
n. 6, 262 n. 11. See also community; n. 17. See also mimesis; performance;
new guard; practitioner(s) resignification
parties, play, viii, 1–5, 26, 58–60, 91– personal agency. See agency
95, 101, 106, 122; rules for, 61–62, personal responsibility, 18–19, 62–63,
69, 91–94, 96, 98 91, 93–95, 226, 229–30; ambiva-
pathology, bdsm as, x–xi, 12, 27–28, lence about, 94–98, 204–9, 217–19,
176–77, 219–26, 230, 242 n. 1, 245 228; collective versus, 69–70, 92, 98,
n. 9. See also etiology 204, 208, 217–19, 223; liberalism
people of color, 26–27, 52, 191, 192– and, 166; libertarianism and, 166,
95, 265 n. 2, 266 n. 6; invisibility/ 263 n. 14; neoliberalism and, 37, 58,
visibility of, 192–95, 199–201, 208– 69–70, 98, 102–3, 121, 167, 183,
12, 266 n. 6; munches and, 34, 193; 189, 217–19; risk/safety and, 69–
whites’ appropriation of experiences 70, 84, 97. See also agency; self-
of, 188, 196–99, 203–4, 206, 211, mastery
259 n. 19, 265 n. 18, 266 n. 5. See phantasmatic. See fantasy
also race play; race/racial play, vii–viii, x, 9, 17, 19–20, 28, 57,
performance, 4–8, 17–20, 22–25, 145– 145–47, 151–54, 243 n. 1, 248 n. 19;
46, 229–31, 247 n. 17; conditions of, the body at, 104, 115, 118, 129–31,
158, 188, 192, 201; gender as, 155– 135–39, 140; negotiation to, 3, 9, 22,
58, 162–63, 178, 181–84, 189–91, 74, 80–83, 116–17, 150, 166, 254
200, 214; performative efficacy, 103, n. 19, 255 n. 22; parties, viii, 1–5, 26,
188–89, 228, 246 n. 11; power/ 58–60, 91–95, 101, 106, 122; work-
knowledge and, 103, 188–89; as pro- ing at, 55, 60, 64, 76–80, 110–11,
ductive, 149, 162–63, 182–84, 188– 215. See also knowledge; perfor-
90, 192, 228–30, 263 n. 12; race as, mance; play space; politics of bdsm ;
181–84, 189–91, 200, 214–15, 218, rules; toys; specific play types
229–30; sexuality as, 152, 155–58, play circuit, 16–20, 145, 153, 179, 184,
162–63, 181–84, 189–91, 200, 214, 204, 206, 211, 219–20. See also cul-
217; subjectivity as, 6, 8, 23, 152, tural performance; neoliberal(ism);
162–63, 182–83. See also cultural performance; play; safe space; social
performance; mimesis; perfor- normativity
mativity; play; resignification play frame, 17, 127, 151–53, 206; con-

INDEX 305
 play frame (cont.) power exchange, ix, xi, 23, 89, 131, 134,
tradiction and, 164, 185–86, 201, 143, 149, 151, 168, 180, 195–96,
219–20. See also bracketed space, 229; commodity exchange and/ver-
safe space sus, 114, 130–31, 134–39, 141–42.
play parties, viii, 1–5, 26, 58–60, 91– See also exchange(s)
95, 101, 106, 122; rules for, 61–62, power/knowledge, 22, 103, 247 n. 17
69, 91–94, 96, 98 practice circuit, 9–12, 62, 79, 100, 129.
play space, 6, 18, 54, 58–60, 150–54, See also knowledge; self-mastery;
158, 163; vanilla space versus, 18, 57, techniques of the self
169–70. See also bracketed space; practitioner(s), vii–viii, 5–6, 11–15,
events; play frame; semipublic 25–27, 34–37, 51–56, 60, 106;
pleasure. See bodily pleasure; de- becoming a, 62–65, 76, 78–80, 98,
sire(s); eroticism; rules: pleasure 110–11, 125–26, 132, 209, 215;
of; sexual(ity) coming out as a, 59–60, 82, 106,
police busts/raids. See legal issues 170–71, 251 n. 22; idealized, 15, 70,
politics of bdsm , 5–6, 19–20, 23, 145– 79–80, 90, 97, 130, 141–42, 173,
46, 154–55, 163, 184–86, 188, 190– 189, 229; old guard versus new
91; affective responses and, 216–17, guard, 5, 37–38, 53, 55, 62, 65–72,
227, 231; consent and, 20, 148, 165– 74, 252 n. 4, 263 n. 6. See also bdsm ;
66, 182; cultural trauma play and, community; identity; new guard; self-
207–9, 215–16, 219–20, 221; gen- mastery; subjectivity; technique(s)
der play and, 5, 19–20, 145–46, 184, Preston, John, 72, 75, 97
190–91, 200; liberal versus radical prison play, 21, 191, 201–4, 207, 220–
feminism on, 149–50, 163, 166, 21. See also Abu Ghraib prison; cul-
171–72, 182, 263 n. 14; Master or tural trauma play
Mistress/slave and, 156–58, 194– private/privatization, 7, 18–19, 58–60,
201, 207, 227; queer/feminist 62–63, 91, 126, 166–67, 207–9,
bdsm -positive analysis, 145–46, 218, 228–30; neoliberalism and, 37,
154–56, 158–60, 162, 169, 184, 185; 40–42, 164, 218–19, 228–29, 247
race play and, 5, 150–51, 184, 190– n. 13, 263 n. 14; public versus, 144–
93, 198–200, 205–6, 209–10, 260 46, 163–64, 183, 186, 187–90, 201–
n. 1; radical feminist bdsm -critical 4, 207–12, 216–19, 221–22. See also
analysis, 20, 145–46, 148–50, 163, privatized desire; public(s);
169, 178, 182, 184, 260 n. 1, 263 semipublic
n. 13; subversive, bdsm as, 6, 20, 23, privatized desire, 7, 18, 24, 149–50,
145–46, 164, 184–85, 228–29; uni- 166–67, 172, 186, 188, 226; labor
versal subjectivity and, 165, 196–98, versus, 7, 19, 102–3, 136, 140, 145;
203, 206–7, 218–19. See also appro- neoliberalism and, 18, 167, 218;
priation; bracketed space; feminism; social norms versus, 19, 144–46,
feminist theories of bdsm /sadomas- 174, 180, 203–4, 207–11, 217–19,
ochism; outlaw sexuality, bdsm as; 229–31. See also circuit(s); desire(s);
subversion/subversive; transgression private/privatization
Portillo, Tina, 199 privilege. See social privilege
Povinelli, Elizabeth, 266 n. 15 production, 7–8, 23, 102–3, 142; body

306 INDEX
 as productive, 136–39, 140, 246 queer(ness), 60, 184–85, 230; aspira-
n. 11, 259 n. 22; consumerism tional, 179–80, 264 n. 18; new guard
and/versus, 14, 20, 55, 111–12, 128, versus, 5, 37; San Francisco as, 35,
141–42, 257 n. 4; of difference, 14, 43–48, 55, 250 n. 7, 250 nn. 9–10;
45, 200–201; performance as pro- tourism, 36–37, 45–48. See also gay
ductive, 6, 18–20, 145–46, 149, men; homosexuality; lesbian(s)
162–63, 182–84, 188–90, 192, 228– queer studies, 29–30, 155, 160, 191–
30, 263 n. 12; relations of, 14, 56– 92, 257 n. 4, 260 n. 1; bdsm -positive
57, 103, 111, 128, 141, 257 n. 4; of analysis, 145–46, 154–56, 158–60,
subjects, 10–11, 18–19, 86, 98, 111– 162, 169, 184–85. See also feminism
12, 140–42, 145, 162–63. See also
community; consumer-subject; Rabinow, Paul, 63, 77
knowledge; practitioner(s) race/racial, 4–8, 18–20, 24–25, 172–
professional(s), 3, 28–29, 37, 58, 64, 79– 74, 181, 189–90, 192–201, 247
80, 97, 106, 197, 211, 252 n. 22; class, n. 14; Abu Ghraib prison and, 225,
15, 26, 28, 52, 54–55, 83; it , 15, 26– 227–28, 267 n. 19; agency, consent,
27, 35, 50, 52, 54–55, 263 n. 14; for- free choice, and, 18–19, 172–75,
malization of community and, 55, 60, 183–84, 197–99, 206, 216–17, 228–
76, 90, 102, 252 n. 4; kink aware, 83– 29; American imaginaries of, 174,
84, 255 n. 23. See also professional 181, 191, 196–98, 199, 210–11, 214,
dominant; Silicon Valley 219, 266 n. 6; appropriation, 188,
professional class, 15, 26, 28, 52, 54– 196–99, 203–4, 206, 211, 259 n. 19,
55, 79–80, 83, 106, 211. See also 265 n. 18, 266 n. 5; bodily knowledge
middle class; social class and, 116, 193; colorblindness, 19,
professional dominant (dominatrix), ix, 197–98, 210–11, 267 n. 15; differ-
71, 156, 219, 221–23, 227, 248 n. 1, ence, 15, 36, 45, 47, 190, 197, 200,
253 n. 6, 262 n. 11 219, 265 n. 2; disavowal and, 19,
prosthetic: relational, 132, 134–35, 175, 198–99, 206–7, 211; domi-
138, 259 n. 21; technological, 103–4, nance and, 145–46, 173–75, 181,
129–30; toys as, 132–35, 138–39 183, 185–86, 190–91, 214–15; femi-
psychology of bdsm . See pathology, nism and, 148, 150–51, 172–74,
bdsm as 180, 185–86, 198, 247 n. 15, 266
Puar, Jasbir, 225, 268 n. 21 n. 5; Master or Mistress/slave and,
public(s), 58–60, 65–66, 80, 87, 94, 97, 194–201, 207, 265 n. 4, 266 n. 5;
195–96, 199, 207–12, 216, 229–30; performativity, 4–8, 17–20, 24–25,
counterpublics, 158–62, 230, 248 181–84, 189–91, 200, 214–15, 218,
n. 2, 261 n. 7; neoliberalism and, 40– 229–30; projects, 19, 172, 175, 197–
41, 63, 91, 164, 166–67, 228–29, 99, 211, 216–17, 247 n. 14; racial-
247 n. 13, 263 n. 14; private versus, ized embodiment, 193–95, 199–200,
7, 18–19, 144–46, 163–64, 186, 207, 225, 261 n. 5, 265 n. 18; self-
188–90, 201–4, 216–19, 221–22. mastery and, 208–9, 216–17; sub-
See also circuit(s); private/privatiza- mission and, 145–46, 161, 178, 190–
tion; privatized desire; semipublic 91, 194–96, 199, 214–15, 265 n. 4;
Putnam, Robert, 56, 251 n. 20 toys and, 5–6, 151, 194–96, 210;

INDEX 307
 race/racial (cont.) 261 n. 3; authenticity and, 90, 152–
transgression and, 19, 154, 170, 179, 53; bdsm play as, 16–17, 138, 147,
181; universal subjectivity and, 181, 152–53, 215; political, 222, 226–27;
189, 193, 196–201, 211, 218–19; practitioners, 11–12, 130–31, 161,
visibility/invisibility of, 190, 192– 261 n. 6; realism, 22–23, 205, 207,
95, 199–201, 208–11, 229, 266 n. 6, 210, 212, 216–17, 220, 265 n. 20;
267 n. 19; white/black racial imagi- social (real world), 127, 148, 150,
nary and, 199–200, 214, 265 n. 2, 162–64, 179, 196–98, 200–201,
266 n. 6; white racial dualism, 175, 204, 206–7, 214–15, 227. See also
179–81, 197–98, 204. See also peo- bracketed space; mimesis; play frame
ple of color; race play; white(ness) redevelopment, 35–43, 46–48, 50–51,
race play, 3–4, 22, 145, 148, 150–51, 60. See also neoliberal(ism)
173, 189–90, 193–200, 212, 214, reenactment. See mimesis
216–19, 265 n. 2; interracial, 195, regulatory ideal. See intelligible
213, 217–18, 266 n. 5; kkk play, subjectivity
207–8, 211–14, 216–18, 267 n. 16; Reid-Pharr, Robert, 200, 230–31
Master/slave play, 194–98, 207. See resignification, 19, 162, 191, 220, 247
also cultural trauma play; mimesis; n. 15, 267 n. 16; mimesis and/versus,
performance; race/racial; slave 19, 157–58, 162, 187–88, 190–92,
auction(s) 220–21, 247 n. 15. See also mimesis;
racial inequality (racism), 6, 15, 17–20, performativity; subversion/subver-
145–46, 149, 188–89, 192–94, 196– sive; transgression
98, 209, 214–17, 260 n. 1; African responsibility. See collective respon-
Americans and, 47, 199; Asians and sibility; personal responsibility
Asian Americans and, 47, 161, 191, Reti, Irene, 260 n. 1
249 n. 6; Native Americans and, 47, risk, 62–64, 70, 84–88, 90; anxiety
250 n. 12; neoliberalism and the about, 63, 86; breath play and, 77,
denial of, 19, 60, 173, 197–200, 211. 87–89, 92, 94, 255 n. 26; commu-
See also appropriation; bracketed nity, 62–63, 65, 71–72, 83–84, 86–
space; white(ness) 91, 94–95, 97–98, 229; consent and,
racial projects, 19, 172, 175, 197–99, 80–81, 83–84, 94–95; edge play and,
211, 216–17, 247 n. 14 9, 62, 76, 87–90, 94, 97–98, 208;
racism. See racial inequality knowledge and, 87–90; neoliberalism
rack (risk-aware consensual kink), 84 and, 63, 69–70, 91, 94–95, 97–98,
radical feminism. See feminism 229; personal responsibility and, 62–
Rai, Amit S., 268 n. 21 63, 69–70, 84, 91–95, 97, 229; rules
raids and police busts. See legal issues and, 64–66, 69–70, 73, 80–83, 89,
rape play, 9, 21, 145, 146–48, 171, 212, 94, 97–98, 127, 152, 254 n. 20, 255
214, 221; nonconsensual rape versus, n. 26; safewords and, 62, 80–84, 220,
x, 83, 93, 148–49, 150, 187, 255 228, 254 n. 19, 255 n. 21; self-
n. 28, 268 n. 20. See also cultural mastery and, 86–87, 97–98; social
trauma play; gender play privilege and, 63–64, 90, 97–98,
real(ity), 6, 17–20, 145–46, 151–53, 229. See also legal issues; safer sex;
168, 181–83, 185–86, 188–89, 222, safety

308 INDEX
risk-aware consensual kink (rack ), 84 163, 172–73, 183, 193, 227. See also
risk society thesis, 86 bracketed space; play frame; play
Rose, Nikolas, 62–63, 77 space(s)
Rossoff, Margaret, 149 safety, 23, 62–65, 69–70, 80–86; com-
Rubin, Gayle: on heterosexual bdsm , modities and, 62–63, 102, 229; com-
262 n. 11; on leathermen, 5, 12, 37– munity and, 71–72, 83–84, 86–91,
38, 42, 68; on lesbian bdsm , 154– 94–95, 97–98, 229; dungeon moni-
55, 252–53 nn. 5–6; on old guard tors and, 61–62, 69, 70, 91, 94–97;
versus new guard, 65–66, 75–76; on edge play and, 9, 62, 76, 87–90, 94,
social norms and sexuality, 155 97–98, 208; personal responsibility
rules, 6–7, 10–12, 62, 64–65; ambiva- and, 62–63, 84, 91–95, 97, 229;
lence about, 85–86, 98, 100; Antioch rules for, 64–66, 73, 89, 94, 97–98,
College, 80–82, 254 n. 20; authen- 127, 152, 254 n. 20, 255 n. 26; safer
ticity versus, 66–67, 76, 99–100, sex, 62, 68–69, 81, 91–92, 95–97,
125; community, 64–70, 78–80, 89, 101–2, 108–9; safewords and, 62,
94–95, 100, 102, 209, 215; debates 80–84, 220, 228, 254 n. 19, 255
over, 69, 83–85, 89–90, 97; dungeon n. 21; self-mastery and, 86–87, 97–
monitors and, 61–62, 69–70, 91, 98. See also risk; rules; ssc
94–97; eroticism versus, 67, 73, 75– safewords, 62, 80–84, 220, 228, 254
76, 82–83, 255 n. 26; freedom n. 19, 255 n. 21
and/versus, 76, 91, 97–98, 100, Samois, 154–55, 252–53 nn. 5–6
208–9; house/party, 61–62, 69, 91– San Francisco: class and, 35–37, 40, 42,
94, 96, 98; for new versus old guard, 47, 50, 55–56, 247 n. 13; gay and les-
65–70, 71–72, 74–76, 97, 99–100, bian community history in, 14, 43–
252 n. 4; pleasure of, 82–83, 89–90, 47, 248 n. 2, 249 nn. 4–5, 250 n. 10,
98–100; safety and, 69–70, 73, 80– 252 n. 5; population of, 43–45, 47–
85, 89, 94, 97–98, 127, 152, 254 48, 50–51, 249 n. 6, 251 n. 14; as
n. 20, 255 n. 26; self-mastery and, progressive, 43, 45–47, 55–56, 250
65, 76–79, 80, 83, 89–90, 97–98, n. 6; as queer city, 35, 43–48, 55, 250
100. See also freedom; safewords; ssc n. 7, 250 nn. 9–10; queer tourism in,
Rumsfeld, Donald, 220–21, 223–25, 36–37, 45–48; as sexually free and
228 permissive, 45–46, 48, 51, 55; Silicon
Valley’s relationship to, 5, 35–36, 43,
sadism, x–xi, 85, 221–25, 241 n. 1, 242 48–50, 55; as symbolic center of
n. 3, 245 n. 9, 268 n. 23. See also bdsm , 35, 42, 51, 58; urban develop-
bdsm ; ssc ment projects in, 35–43, 46–48, 50–
sadomasochism, vii, ix–xi, 12, 219, 221, 51, 60. See also San Francisco Bay
223–26, 242 n. 1, 245 nn. 8–9, 268 Area; soma
n. 23. See also bdsm San Francisco Bay Area: economy of,
safe, sane, and consensual. See ssc 35–37, 40–43, 45, 48–51, 55, 60,
safer sex, 62, 68–69, 81, 91–92, 95–97, 104; exurbs/suburbs in, 36, 48, 50–
101–2, 108–9. See also hiv/aids ; 51, 251 n. 15; it in, 6, 35, 41, 49–50,
rules 53–55, 104, 251 n. 18; map of, 36;
safe space, 17, 19, 59, 127, 150–54, populations in, 50–51, 250 n. 8, 251

INDEX 309
 San Francisco Bay Area (cont.) See also knowledge; techniques of the
nn. 14–16; US and/versus, 44–46, self; work on the self
49–50, 53, 104, 251 n. 18. See also semipublic, 5, 26, 51, 60, 68–69, 81,
new guard; old guard (leather scene); 91–94, 207–9. See also community;
San Francisco; Silicon Valley legal issues; private/privatization;
San Francisco Planning and Urban public(s)
Research Association (spur ), 39 sensation play, vii, ix–x, 9, 15, 112–15,
Savran, David, 188, 263 n. 13 118–20, 125, 134–37, 257 n. 6, 257
Scarry, Elaine, 267 n. 18, 267 n. 20 n. 11. See also bodily pleasure; ex-
scene, the, viii, 17–18, 22, 54, 56–57, change(s): sensation; pain play; toys
59, 66–70. See also bdsm ; bracketed settler colonialism, 214, 266 n. 15
space; community; new guard; old sex-desire, 99, 118, 120, 131, 136–37,
guard (leather scene); play frame; 139–40, 217. See also bodily pleasure
real(ity); San Francisco Bay Area sexism. See gender inequality
Schechner, Richard, 262 n. 12 sex toys, 104–5, 155, 159, 160. See also
Schilder, Paul, 133–34 toys
Schlesinger report, 223, 226. See also sexual(ity), 6–7, 144–45, 219, 228–31;
Abu Ghraib prison capitalism and, 14–15, 19, 55, 104,
Schlichter, Annette, 264 n. 18 136, 140–42, 166–67, 250 n. 9; com-
Schwartzenberg, Susan, 43, 49 modification of, 24–25, 55, 104,
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 23, 244 n. 6 120–21, 122, 139, 145; fantasy, x,
self, the: practices of, 10–11, 24, 63– 28, 80–81, 154, 170–71, 209, 222,
65, 76, 79–80, 98–99, 103–4; self- 241 n. 1, 244 n. 6, 260 n. 1; as free-
cultivation, 62, 64–65, 79–80, 85, dom, 7, 65, 139–40, 144–45; iden-
89–90, 98–99, 162–63, 169; self- tity, 10–11, 14, 156, 243 n. 4, 244
knowledge, 10, 111, 140, 162–63, n. 6, 257 n. 4; marketplace, 4, 14,
215, 243 n. 4; self-subjectification, 24–25, 55, 102, 104, 120, 141, 228;
63–64, 99, 102, 140, 162–63, 209; performativity and, 17–20, 24–25,
techniques of, 10–12, 64, 89, 162, 152, 155–58, 162–63, 181–84, 189–
169, 181; work on, 11, 63–64, 76– 91, 200, 214, 217; as private, 7, 18–
80, 110–11, 162–63, 170, 215–16. 19, 24, 144–46, 166–67, 186, 187–
See also self-mastery 88, 203–4, 208–9, 226; sexed body
self-cultivation (individuation), 62, 64– and, 17–18, 99, 135–37, 140, 155–
65, 79–80, 85, 89–90, 98–99, 162– 57, 161–62, 182, 243 n. 4, 244 n. 6,
63, 169. See also rules; self-mastery; 261 n. 5; US military and, 21, 224–
techniques of the self; working at 27, 268 n. 20. See also arousal; bodily
bdsm pleasure; desire(s); eroticism; gen-
self-mastery, 10–12, 62, 64–65, 79, der(ed); heterosexual(ity); hmd s;
111, 140, 189, 215; gender and, 146, homosexuality; vanilla
168–69, 172; neoliberalism and, 69– sexual marketplace, 4, 14, 24–25, 55,
70, 94–95, 98, 172; race and, 208–9, 102, 104, 120, 141, 228. See also cap-
216–17; risk and, 86–87, 97–98; italism; commodity(ies); consumer-
rules and, 65, 76–79, 80, 83, 89–90, ism; flexibility; late capitalism;
97–98, 100; toys and, 112–14, 126. neoliberal(ism)

310 INDEX
sexual politics. See politics of bdsm 267 n. 19; middle class, 47, 50, 52,
sex wars, 148, 245 n. 8, 260 n. 1. See 77, 123, 181; professional class, 26,
also feminism 28, 52, 54–55, 83, 211; San Francisco
Sharp, Leslie, 129 and, 35–37, 40, 42, 47, 50, 55–56,
Silicon Valley, 35–37, 48–51; exurbs/ 247 n. 13; social norms and, 5, 58,
suburbs and, 36, 48, 50–51, 251 121, 145–46, 181, 189, 219, 230–31;
n. 15; munches in, 34–35, 51–53, 57; working class, 35, 106, 199. See also
population of, 48–50, 251 nn. 14– social inequalities; social privilege
15; San Francisco’s relationship to, 5, social control (community norms), 62,
35–36, 43, 48–50, 55. See also it ; 64–65, 68–72, 77–80, 82–84, 89,
new guard; professional(s); San Fran- 91–98, 100. See also dungeon moni-
cisco Bay Area tors; rules; social normativity
simulation. See mimesis social inequalities, 6–8, 15, 60, 90, 103,
Singer, Linda, 55, 141, 144–45, 166–67 145, 151–52, 163, 183–84, 188,
Singer, Milton, 246 n. 12 228–29; in America, 8, 19–20, 24–
slave. See Master or Mistress/slave; 25, 56, 181, 189, 196, 214–15, 217,
slave auction(s); slavery 245 n. 8; desire and, 120, 164–65,
slave auction(s), 1–5, 19–20, 24–26, 168, 186, 214, 217, 219, 231;
151, 190–97, 200–201, 204–7, 210– effective circuit and, 189, 214–15,
11. See also Master or Mistress/slave; 222; neoliberalism as justifying, 18–
slavery 19, 58, 98, 121, 146, 164, 167, 172–
slavery: bdsm versus historical, 19, 73, 179, 183, 189, 247 n. 13, 263
151, 194–95, 197–99, 210–11, 227; n. 14; toys and, 5–6, 13–15, 104,
eroticization of historical, 145, 148– 120–22, 129–30, 141–42, 196, 210.
49, 187–88, 195–96, 205–7, 214– See also difference(s); gender inequal-
15. See also appropriation; disavowal; ity; heterosexism; historical inequal-
historical inequality; mimesis; race ity; racial inequality; social class;
play; slave auction(s) social privilege
s&m : sadism and masochism, vii, x–xi; social normativity, 15, 170, 173, 180–
stand and model, 121–22, 126. See 83, 185, 190–91; ambivalence about,
also bdsm 146, 163, 170, 179–80, 181–82; cir-
sm (sadomasochism), vii, ix–xi, 12, cuit of socioeconomics and, 6–8, 15,
219, 221, 223–26, 242 n. 1, 245 24–25, 27, 30; embodiment of, 5–6,
nn. 8–9, 268 n. 23. See also bdsm 146, 162–63, 169–70, 181–83, 191–
s/m (sadism/masochism), vii, x–xi, 92, 261 n. 5; freedom from, 6, 65,
242 n. 2. See also bdsm 144, 163–64, 170, 180–81, 183–86,
smo dyssey, 72, 95 204; outlaw sexuality as transgress-
social belonging, 5, 8, 15, 26, 37, 56– ing, 89, 145, 154–55, 204; privatized
60, 112–13, 121–22, 141, 189–90, desire versus, 19, 144–46, 174, 180,
214, 229, 251 nn. 19–20. See also 203–4, 207–11, 217–19, 229–31;
community queer versus, 5, 37, 145–46, 154–55,
social class, 15, 37, 79–80, 90, 102, 158–60, 162, 230, 250 n. 7; subver-
106, 122–23, 126, 130, 141, 243 sive of, bdsm as, 144, 155–60, 158,
n. 2, 257 n. 4; Abu Ghraib prison and, 162–63, 169, 178, 182–83, 191–92;

INDEX 311
 social normativity (cont.) 201, 210, 218, 221–22, 225, 246
as vanilla, 18, 20, 27, 144–46, 154– n. 10; tourism and, 36, 45
55, 158, 183, 204. See also desire(s); spirituality, 74, 122, 125–26, 131, 138,
gender(ed); heteronormativity; intel- 259 n. 19. See also exchange(s)
ligible subjectivity; masculinity; pro- spur (San Francisco Planning and
fessional(s); race/racial; social class; Urban Research Association), 39
transgression; white(ness) ssc (safe, sane, and consensual), viii,
social privilege, 5, 15, 20, 24, 58, 170, 20, 66, 80, 83–85, 88–89, 97–98,
173, 181, 184–86, 188–89, 230; 162, 165, 188, 208–9, 254 n. 20;
class and, 5, 28, 58, 98, 100, 104, bracketed space and, 17, 183–85,
130, 142; gendered, 6, 146, 167, 196–97, 206. See also consent; safety
178–81, 183; heterosexuality as, 15, stein, david, 80, 85, 121
58, 60, 146, 154, 170, 173, 178–80, Steinberg, David, 227
181–85, 264 n. 18; racial, 154, 170, Stryker, Susan, 135–38
173, 175, 189, 198, 200–201, 206, subjectivity, 6, 11, 20, 65, 140, 195, 243
211, 218, 265 n. 19; risk and, 63–64, n. 4, 244 n. 6; capitalism and, 14–15,
90, 97–98, 229; toys and, 5–6, 13– 22–23, 54–55, 102–4, 129–30, 140–
15, 104, 120–22, 129–30, 141–42, 42; circuit of socioeconomics and, 6–
196, 210. See also social class; social 8, 15, 24–25, 27, 30; consumer-
inequalities; social normativity subjects, 14–15, 102–4, 111–14,
social responsibility. See collective 120–21, 125, 129–30, 141–42, 257
responsibility n. 4; desubjectification, 6, 98–100,
Society of Janus (Janus; soj ), 8, 9, 70– 137, 139–40, 244 n. 8, 256 n. 30;
74, 168, 253 n. 6, 253 n. 9; events, intelligible, 8, 17–18, 23, 64–65,
9–10, 25, 34, 116, 128, 194, 210; 145, 161–62, 178, 181–83, 243 n. 4;
membership, 54, 68–69, 211, 253 neoliberalism and, 18–19, 60, 94–
n. 6, 253 n. 11, 262 n. 11 95, 98, 102–3, 121, 189, 228, 247
soj . See Society of Janus n. 13; as performative, 8, 23, 145–
Solnit, Rebecca, 43, 49 46, 152, 158, 162–63, 182–83, 265
soma (South of Market), 38–43, 105, n. 1; production of subjects, 10–11,
249 n. 4, 251 n. 21. See also old guard 18–19, 23, 86, 98, 111–12, 140–42,
(leather scene); San Francisco 145, 162–63; self-subjectification,
Sontag, Susan, 222 63–64, 99, 102, 140, 162–63, 209;
South Bay. See new guard; Silicon Valley universal, 15, 18, 181, 189, 193, 195,
South of Market (soma ), 38–43, 105, 218–19, 228–29. See also individua-
249 n. 4, 251 n. 21. See also old guard tion; national imaginaries; practi-
(leather scene); San Francisco tioner(s); self, the; self-mastery
space. See bracketed space; community; submission/submissive(s), ix, xi, 11,
play space; safe space; San Francisco 262 nn. 10–11, 264 n. 15; femininity
Bay Area; urban development and, 145, 149, 158, 160–61, 164–65,
projects 168–70, 175–76, 253 n. 9, 264 n. 17;
spanking, viii, ix, 9, 76, 112, 115, 117– masculinity and, 156, 160–61, 176–
18 78, 264 n. 17; race and, 145–46, 161,
spectacle, 6, 22–23, 154, 189–90, 200– 178, 190–91, 194–96, 199, 214–15,

312 INDEX
 265 n. 4; toys and, 112, 114–15, expertise and, 74–76, 112–18, 257
117–18, 132–35, 138–39, 157, 196. n. 8; heterosexism and, 149, 168,
See also bottom(s); dominance/domi- 170, 177–78, 264 n. 15, 264 n. 17;
nant(s); Master or Mistress/slave heterosexuality and, 160–61, 165,
suburbanization. See exurbs/suburbs 172, 181, 190–91; race and, 195–96,
subversion/subversive, bdsm as, 6, 20, 199, 265 n. 4; techniques and, 76,
23, 145–46, 164, 184–85, 228–29; 112, 117, 255 n. 21, 257 n. 8, 259
of capitalism, 137–38; of social n. 22, 260 n. 23; toys and, 108, 112–
norms, 144, 155–60, 158, 162–63, 15, 117–18, 131–35, 138–39, 157,
169, 178, 182–83, 191–92. See also 259 n. 22, 261 n. 6; transgression
bodily pleasure; desexualization; poli- and, 145–46, 149, 156–58, 160–61,
tics of bdsm : resignification; 165, 169. See also bottom(s); hmd s
transgression torture: Abu Ghraib prison and, 221–
supplement(ary), 8, 65, 120, 145, 243 23, 225–28, 267–68 nn. 18–23; con-
n. 3 sensual bdsm versus, 201, 221–22,
switch, xi, 264 n. 15. See also bottom(s); 226–28, 241 n. 1, 245 n. 9, 253
dominance/dominant(s); submis- n. 11, 267 n. 18, 268 nn. 22–23; as
sion/submissive(s); top(s) play type, 9, 21, 220. See also Abu
Ghraib prison
taboo play. See cultural trauma play toys, 2, 101–2, 107–9, 114–15, 123–
Taussig, Michael, 181–82, 265 n. 20 24; anxiety about, 121–30, 139, 258
techne, 10–11, 24, 63–65, 76, 79–80, n. 13; authentic connection versus,
98–99, 103–4; classes and, 9–10, 120–22, 125–26, 128, 132, 139;
60–62, 70, 75–78, 84 commodity exchange and, 23, 102,
technique(s), 5–6, 9–12, 14–15, 60, 62, 104, 113, 120, 130–31, 134–39,
74–77, 102, 111; of the body, 114–20, 141–42; community belonging and,
129–30, 137, 140–41, 168, 193, 257 5, 14–15, 56, 112–13, 120–22, 125–
n. 8, 259 n. 22, 260 n. 23; edge play 26, 130, 141–42; community pro-
and, 62, 87–90; late capitalism and, duction and, viii, 6, 12–15, 54–56,
54–55, 74, 102–3, 120, 130, 140–41, 102, 105–6, 111–12, 120–21, 130;
246 n. 11; techne, 10–11, 24, 63–65, cost of, 14, 105–8, 123–24, 257
76, 79–80, 98–99, 103–4; techniques nn. 5–6; craftsmanship of, 29, 105,
of the self, 10–12, 64, 89, 162, 169, 107, 112–14, 124, 128, 257 n. 3;
181; toys and, 29, 112–16, 119–20, dominants and, 108, 112–15, 117–
129–32, 138–39. See also expertise; 18, 131–35, 138–39, 157, 261 n. 6;
knowledge; self-mastery eroticism and, 114, 127–28, 131,
techniques of the self, 10–12, 64, 89, 157, 159; expertise and knowledge
162, 169, 181 and, 102–4, 111–18, 120, 129–30,
tes (the Eulenspiegel Society), 8, 70 131–32, 137–39, 141, 261 n. 6; as
therapeutic, bdsm as, 28, 92–93, 147– fetish, 127–32, 134, 138–39, 141–
48, 248 n. 19, 256 n. 30, 267 n. 18 42; gender and, 124–25, 157–61,
tolerance, of difference, 15, 23, 46–48, 180, 258 n. 13; pervertable, 123,
55–56, 60, 141, 155, 198, 250 n. 6 127, 133, 257 n. 11; power and
top(s), xi–xii, 11, 17, 262 nn. 10–11; energy exchange and, 23, 114, 130–

INDEX 313
 toys (cont.) Up Your Alley (Dore Alley) Street Fair,
32, 134–35, 137–41; proliferating 26, 42, 249 n. 4
desire and, 13–15, 102, 104, 120, urban development projects, 35–43,
125, 141, 258 n. 13; as prosthetic, 46–48, 50–51, 60. See also
132–35, 138–39; race and, 5–6, 151, neoliberal(ism)
194–96, 210; self-mastery and, 109–
14, 126, 140; sex toys, 104–5, 155, Vadas, Melinda, 150
159–60; social privilege and, 5–6, Valentine, David, 244 n. 6
13–15, 104, 120–22, 129–30, 141– Valley of the Kings. See old guard
42, 196, 210; submissives and, 112, (leather scene)
114–15, 117–18, 132–35, 138–39, vanilla, viii; bdsm versus, 6–7, 28–29,
157, 196; as tools, 112, 121, 132, 82–83, 180, 255 n. 22, 259 n. 22;
134, 139; top/bottom(s) and, 114– pervertable toys, 123, 127, 133, 257
15, 117–18, 132–35, 259 n. 22; n. 11; social norms as, 18, 20, 27,
working at bdsm and, 112–13, 121, 144–46, 154–55, 158, 183, 204;
125–26, 130, 132, 258 n. 14. See also space, 18, 57, 169–70
body, the; classes; commodification; visibility/invisibility: of gender, 162,
fetish, the; subjectivity 178, 243 n. 2; of race, 190, 192–95,
transgression: bdsm as, 4–6, 19–20, 199–201, 208–11, 229, 266 n. 6, 267
24, 139–40, 154–60, 184, 188, 230, n. 19. See also intelligible subjectivity;
244 n. 8; cultural trauma play and, white/black racial imaginary
188, 204; desire for, 19, 144–46,
179, 183–85, 188, 264 n. 18; gender Wagner, Sally Roesch, 149
and, 144–46, 153–54, 160, 178–79, Walker, Alice, 266 n. 5
181, 183–85; mimesis versus, 145– Wallis, Brian, 176
46, 154, 185, 262 n. 12; outlaw sex- Warner, Michael, 158–60, 167, 257 n. 4
uality as, 65, 89, 145, 154–55, 204. Watson, Simon, 176
See also outlaw sexuality, bdsm as; Weinberg, Thomas, ix, 12, 156
politics of bdsm ; queer(ness); Weston, Kath, 28, 44
subversion/subversive white(ness), 5, 15, 19, 26–27, 50, 52,
trauma, 20, 28, 146–48, 151, 188, 198, 90, 172–76, 192–201; ambivalence
203–4, 206. See also cultural trauma of, 175, 179–81; of bdsm commu-
play; historical inequality nity, 19, 60, 64, 90, 192–94, 200–
Turner, Victor, 17, 246 n. 12, 263 n. 12 201, 219; colorblindness, 19, 197–
98, 210–11, 267 n. 15; heterosex-
uncanny, the, 206, 221–22 uality and, 15, 154, 170, 172–76,
United States. See America(n) 178–79, 181–83, 185, 190–91; intel-
universal subjectivity, 15, 18, 181, 189, ligibility and, 178, 181–82, 191; neo-
219, 228, 229; gender and, 165, 176; liberal, 19, 172–73, 175, 197–98,
politics and, 165, 196–98, 203, 206– 200, 210–11; privilege, 5–6, 60, 154,
7, 218–19; race and, 193, 196–201, 170, 173, 175, 179–80, 189, 200–
211, 218–19. See also citizen, bdsm 201, 211, 265 n. 19; racial appropria-
community; difference(s); tion, 196–99, 206, 211, 259 n. 19,
neoliberal(ism) 265 n. 18, 266 n. 5; tourism and, 45,

314 INDEX
 47; transgression and, 19, 154, 170, Wiseman, Jay, 77, 81, 90
179, 181; as unmarked and universal, women. See femininity; gender(ed); het-
58, 64, 70, 97, 181, 192–95, 197, erosexual(ity); lesbian(s)
199–200, 265 n. 4; white/black racial working at bdsm , 55, 60, 64, 76–80,
imaginary, 199–200, 214, 265 n. 2, 110–11, 215; toys and, 112–13, 121,
266 n. 6; white racial dualism, 175, 125–26, 130, 132, 258 n. 14. See also
179–81, 197–98, 204. See also practitioner(s): becoming a
professional(s) work on the self, 11, 63–64, 76–80,
white/black racial imaginary, 199–200, 110–11, 162–63, 170, 215–16. See
214, 265 n. 2, 266 n. 6 also labor; self-mastery; techne;
white racial dualism, 175, 179–81, technique(s)
197–98, 204. See also white(ness): workshops. See classes
neoliberal(ism)
Wiegman, Robyn, 181, 265 n. 18 Zaloom, Caitlin, 86–87, 90
Williams, Linda, 128 zones of the body, 118, 119, 120
Winant, Howard, 19, 172, 175, 179, Zussman, Mira, 259 n. 19
181, 197–98, 247 n. 14

INDEX 315
margot weiss is assistant professor of American studies and
anthropology at Wesleyan University.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Weiss, Margot Danielle
Techniques of pleasure : bdsm and the circuits of sexuality / Margot Weiss.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-8223-5145-0 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-8223-5159-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Sadomasochism—California—San Francisco Bay Area.
2. Bondage (Sexual behavior)—California—San Francisco Bay Area.
3. Sex—Social aspects.
4. Sex—Political aspects.
I. Title.
hq 79.w 45 2012
306.77%5097946—dc23
2011027662