August20ll the Thesis of Emily Elizabeth Prior Is Approved
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CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, NORTHRIDGE WOMEN'S PERSPECTIVES OF BDSM POWER EXCHANGE A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Master of Arts in L"'lterdisciplinary Studies By Emily Elizabeth Prior I August20ll The thesis of Emily Elizabeth Prior is approved: Dr. Sabina Magliocco Date Date Dr. Suzanne Scheid, Chair Date California State University, Northridge ii Acknowledgements This research was funded in part by a grant from the Thesis Support Program at California State University, Northridge. This research was approved by the Research Advisory Committee of the Community-Academic Consortium for Research on Alternative Sexualities (CARAS). I would like to thank my thesis committee, Dr. Suzanne Scheid. Dr. James Elias, and Dr. Sabina Magliocco, for their continued support and assistance. 1 would also like to thank Matthew Lynch and Cielle Williams, and the women who graciously allowed me to interview them, for their encouragement and strength. m Table of Contents Signature Page 11 Acknowledgements iii Abstract v Chapter 1: Introduction 1 Chapter 2: Methodology 15 Ethnography 15 Feminist Ethnography 18 Self as Subject: Autoethnography 25 Chapter 3: Identit'j 36 Chapter 4: Power Exchange 58 Chapter 5: Conclusion 80 Bibliography 92 Appendices 97 iv ABSTRACT WOMEN'S PERSPECTIVES OF BDSM POWER EXCHANGE By Emily Elizabeth Prior Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies Using ethnographic methods and feminist theory, this research analyzes women's sexual identities and power within the context ofBDSM (bondage/discipline, dominant/submissive, sadist/masochist) power exchange relationships. This research expands upon the work of Taylor and Ussher (200 1), Langridge and Butt (2004 ), Cross and I\1atheson (2006) a••1d others, focusing on BDSM as a social, not psychological, phenomenon. I argue women who engage in these relationships and identities are furthering the ideals of third wave feminism, exploring sexuality on their own terms. v Chapter 1 Introduction I found my local BDSM community largely by accident. I wasn't really looking for it. In fact, it never occurred to me that something like it really existed. It was unfathomable to me that a space where people act out sexual fantasies and taboos actually exists, much less that such a space could be accessible to someone like me and be safe. And yet ... while going through a difficult and drawn out divorce simultaneously but not surprisingly coupled with my own search for my sexual identity, I found myself coming in contact with a bevy of interconnected individuals who showed me this very special path over a period of several months. This path has elongated to several years now, and I often equate it to the yellow brick road out of The Wizard ofOz, with friends and enemies met along the way, adventure, self-discovery, and in the end finding that home is right where I left it. Oh, and more importantly, that it took this strange adventure to bring color into my world again. A rainbow of amazing colors that I could never have imagined in my wildest dreams was placed in front of my eyes and has dazzled me ever since. It took me many years to honestly declare to myself that my sexual identity included words like "queer" and "sadomasochist". Even after being a self-identified member of the larger BDSM community, it still took me many years to develop the language and confidence to be able to declare my selfhood in terms of my sexual identity. 1 There are many words used by this group and the connnunity in which it finds itself that could be considered slang or may not be familiar to the reader. In order to establish not only the flavor of the group but to maintain use of the terms this community sees as proper, I have kept all such words. These words will be in italics when they first appear and definitions can be tound in Appendix B. 1 This can be limiting because the English language often does not allow for a lot of subtleties of variance, but it can also be freeing to discover that somewhere there exists some words that at least come close to describing who I am or who I want to be. As it is in life, many roads are traveled concurrently. While discovering my sexual identity I was also discovering other identities, rene\ving identities that had been cast aside previously, and strengthening identities that needed shoring up. I found myself returning to college to finish a Bachelor's degree that I had started years before-- before I was married, before I was divorced, before I was a divorced single mother, before I really started to find myself My daughter was especially supportive, as was my current partner. In returning to school I found myself drawn to sex and gender studies from a variety of perspectives- anthropological, sociological, psychological, historical- and all of them overlapped and converged on topics of sexuality, women, sexual identity, power, feminist theory, and so much more. Now I had an academic theoretical basis with which to understand my experiences. I could begin to see the common threads that link these larger constructs together, weaving an extremely complex tapestry of human interaction and context. I found myself especially drawn to the intersections of power and identity, and how women especially have often been denied the self expression of both of these. I / started to see a link between BDSM sexual expressions, power, sexual identities, and the lack of women's perspectives on such topics and their intersections. I also found a link between third-wave feminism that allowed for women who engaged in sex work and/or enjoyed pornography to be proud feminists who were choosing sex as a way of expressing and experiencing autonomy and control. I recognized that women who engaged in BDSM sexual practices, especially those who defined themselves in the 2 bottom or submissive roles, were doing the same thing. Although seemingly lacking or giving up control or power, these women were using their sexuality to express and experience autonomy and control, albeit in a somewhat subversive, non-traditional manner. In the language ofBDSM, there exists the power exchange. This has been discussed in many community-created texts and has come to be more academically accepted as the central focal point ofBDSM relationships, rather than pain or other concepts. Power exchange within this context is often linked with various aspects of eroticism and sexuality and generally can be defined as the giving and/or receiving of " ... sexual, sensual.. force or authority to, from, or with someone else" (Henkin and Holiday 1996:29). Within the community, this exchange is more or less taken for granted. It is understood that this is the centering mechanism through which a host of erotic, sensual, sexual, and spiritual paths may cross. People within the community talk about it, pontificate about it, and write about it, but they don't really examine it much. On the other side, the real world, the "vanilla" world, there is the scientific and academic communities. Granted, there are a lot of kinksters who are scientists and academics, and vice versa. In fact it seems that BDSM draws a particular population of middle to upper-middle class, mostly white, well-educated individuals (Connolly 2006). Still, the scientific and academic communities by and large have done an amazing job over the past century or more to do their best to ridicule, minimize, politicize, sanction, criminalize, penalize, and all together quash individuals and groups who associate themselves with anything outside ofheteronormative sexual behavior. And in the realm of non-normative sexual behavior, things like bondage, domination, submission, 3 whipping, Master/slave relationships, and so much more definitely fit the bill as a type of behavior to attack, and eliminate if possible. In recent years, since about the 1960s and especially -vv'ithin the last twenty years, more work has come from the academic and scientific communities that has attempted to take a more objective look at activities, behaviors, and personalities that could be grouped under the larger BDSM umbrella. Some of these works have even been positively focused and have come from people who cross over into both worlds of vanilla-academia and SM Still, much of this work has focused on attempting to legitimize the normalcy of such acts and behaviors without really trying to explain what people are doing and why. Further, most of these works make it painfully clear that the researchers have taken a «hands off" approach, studying BDSlv'I from a safe distance, unwilling to get their hands, and bodies, involved in what happens and yet somehow coming to conclusions about what people do. This approach really doesn't work when studying BDSM because it is the doing that matters. Only when you can embody what is happening can you get any true sense of what is happening, and more importantly, what the significance is (see Behar and Gordon 1996 and Stoller 1997 for exampies). The previous century of work focused on activities and behaviors related to BDSM purported to assume that BDSM \vas an inherently negative experience brought about by persons who suffered from some type of mental illness or defect (Freud 1938, 1953, 1959, 1961; Kraffi-Ebing 1965; Stekel1965). This stigma ofBDSM activities, behaviors, and identities as being related to mental illness and even coercive, illegal sexual activities (American Psychiatric Association 2000) has le-d not only to published works that remain problematic for people who engage in these activities but also the 4 public perception that people who engage in these activities are inherently mentally ill and a menace to society at large. Over the past ten years more social science studies have been published about BDSM, BDSM communities, and BDSM activities and behaviors that allow for the possibility that these activities, behaviors, and people not may not only be mentally healthy, but well-adjusted and happy.