Power and Agency in
the Dungeon: Exploring Feminist Understandings of BDSM
Introduction
Though BDSM is often regarded as a controversial, taboo
practice, it nonetheless has increasingly made its way into mainstream media over
the past several decades. Indeed, marketing campaigns have used
sadomasochistic-themed advertisements to sell everything from cigarettes to
clothing, and E.L. James’s Fifty Shades
trilogy has achieved international fame. Because it touches on questions of
consent, agency, and power, BDSM has continued to be a site of contention
within feminism, and it is for this reason that a more comprehensive
exploration of its nuanced nature is appropriate.
I use BDSM as the shortened
acronym for bondage/domination, domination/submission, and sadism/masochism.
The latter, S/M (sexual pleasure through giving or receiving physical pain),
tends to be the more controversial practice of the above definition, so I often
employ this term to emphasize the pain aspect of BDSM. Finally, kink refers
more generally to sexual preferences of a non-normative nature. Some
practitioners are casual players, while others consider themselves much more
serious enthusiasts, investing in large collections of toys, attending
conventions, and networking with other players. In all, the BDSM community is
incredibly diverse, a feature which must be kept in mind when making
generalizations about the sexual subculture.
While not wanting to oversimplify this complex debate, I
begin by outlining and evaluating the two principal, conflicting perspectives
regarding BDSM, which can be structured very basically as “radical” versus “pro-sex.”
A postcolonial theoretical framework elucidates how neither of these views
sufficiently acknowledges the multifaceted, often contradictory, nature of BDSM. After assessing the
dominant voices within this debate, I shift to a more focused case study of commercial BDSM to examine feminist
questions of agency and power, ultimately drawing from Butler’s notion of parody
to show that BDSM has the potential to resist the oppressive, gendered ways
that power operates by revealing the very constructedness of those normative
gender relations.
Framing the
Theoretical Debate: “Radical” and “Pro-Sex” Feminists
Often referred to as “radical” feminists, this group has
been especially vocal in their questioning of and opposition to commercial sex.
Andrea Dworkin, for instance, claims that pornography is systematic harm to all women, asserting that it “crushes a
whole class of people through violence and subjugation” by creating “a sexual
dynamic in which the putting-down of women, the suppression of women, and
ultimately the brutalization of women, is what sex is taken to be.”1
Taking advantage of their highly taboo nature, she utilizes vivid images of
SM/fetish porn in an attempt to prove her point about the dehumanizing violence
that is pornography. Indeed, if vanilla pornography is systematically hurtful
to women, then BDSM porn, by extension, is even more blatantly damaging. Because
it exaggerates power relations and sexualizes the infliction of pain, S/M, in
this conceptualization, is dangerous because it creates the impression that all
sex is brutal and oppressive toward women.
Similarly, Kathleen Barry denounces the structural violence
that she believes is inherent in prostitution. She argues that “[w]hen the
human being is reduced to a body, objectified to sexually service another,
whether or not there is consent, violation of the human being has taken place.”2
Depicting the ways in which women are reduced to their bodies, while men are
not, Barry is clearly concerned with the negative effect that prostitution
supposedly has on the frequency with which rapes are committed.
Expanding on this line of thinking, sex work that specializes in SM/kink is
especially exploitative because it reproduces and commercializes oppressive
gender relations. Even professional dominatrices, who take the dominant role in
BDSM interactions with submissive men3, are nevertheless involved in
a troubling practice because it ultimately reinforces violence and gender
hierarchies. Though seemingly paradoxical, the argument follows that women who
sell sadomasochistic services, even when they play the role of the ‘pro-domme,’4
are reinforcing patriarchal domination because the ostensibly submissive men
are still in control of the transaction. In this view, then, pornography and
prostitution, especially when sadomasochism is involved, are inherently abusive
because of the structural, systematic harm they levy against all women.
Toward the other end of this debate are the “pro-sex”
feminists, many of whom take issue with the radical feminist notion that women
who participate in BDSM are victims of their own internalization of patriarchal
oppression.
Gayle Rubin, a feminist theorist and member of the lesbian S/M
community herself, condemns the penalization, demonization, and stigmatization
of the practice both within and beyond the mainstream feminist movement. In an
attempt to dispel the damaging myths, she shows how the S/M community “is
obsessed with safety and has an elaborate folk technology of methods to
maximize sensation and minimize danger” and that, furthermore, “scaring people
away from the community puts people in real danger of trying things they do not
know how to do.”6 Indeed, Rubin is one of many BDSM practitioners
and researchers who emphasize the stringency of pre-scene negotiations and
thoroughness of safety practices. She disagrees with the radical feminist
conceptualization of consent as influenced largely by oppressive, structural
factors and asserts that the only issue BDSM has concerning coercion has to do
with “the way in which people are prevented from doing it,” in the forms of
penalization and stigmatization.7 This view, then, advocates for
dismantling the police function of sexuality—those formal and informal
regulatory practices that aim to keep individuals in their heteronormative
places.
In a similar vein, Stacey May Fowles highlights the crucial
divide between commercial (mis)representations of BDSM and serious
practitioners as part of a regulated sexual subculture based on enthusiastic
consent. Writing from the perspective of a female sexual submissive, she claims that although a dominant/submissive
relationship does not ostensibly promote equality, “for most serious
practitioners, the trust and respect that exist in power exchange actually
transcend a mainstream ‘woman as object’ or rape mentality.”8 In
effect, she demonstrates how mainstream representations of sexuality have
dismantled the notion of enthusiastic consent and that BDSM—when practiced
safely—has the potential to bring consent back to the forefront of our sexual
conversations. Taking to task the often inaccurate representations of BDSM in
porn, television, novels, and other media, Fowles posits that when “those
desires specific to BDSM are appropriated, watered down, and corrupted, the
complex rules that the counterculture is founded on are completely disposed of.”9
Hence the distinction must be made between serious practitioners who play in
the privacy of their own homes and commercial representations of S/M.
Representing another voice within the pro-sex literature, Fowles views BDSM not
as a simple reproduction of patriarchal gender norms, but as a practice that
has the potential to disrupt and transcend those norms.
Although I am examining a predominantly western practice,
applying a postcolonial theoretical framework here can nonetheless illuminate
how neither of these views fully acknowledges the deeply complex nature of
BDSM. Postcolonial conversations touch on questions of women’s agency as they
relate to non-western practices such as female circumcision and tend to “err on
the side of affirming the complicated choices of women to engage in painful
practices.”10 This is primarily because the theory rejects the imperialistic
tendency to impose hegemonic norms on other cultures by deeming their
traditions as backwards or barbaric. Both
S/M and these third world practices have
in common the infliction of bodily pain, the involvement of a stigmatized
subculture, and are often perceived as indicators of patriarchal domination; a
postcolonial theoretical framework is thus a logical tool to use when analyzing
perceptions of BDSM. Deckha encourages feminists to examine their own culture
and search for parallels to S/M that illustrate the pervasiveness of pain
tolerance in everyday life. Examples might include paying to see movies that
make us cry, painful hair removal practices, and intense exercise in pursuit of
an aesthetic ideal.11 Searching for parallels has the effect of
contextualizing S/M, thus beginning to peel off the layers of stigma that
surround it. A postcolonial framework that neither venerates nor condemns S/M,
then, is useful to this analysis because it recognizes the tangled web of
structural and individual factors
that may be at work when a woman chooses this practice. Rather than simplifying
the discussion to a question of ‘good’ versus ‘bad,’ this particular
theoretical framework asks us to heed the testimonials of women who choose S/M,
while also not ignoring the structural factors that may be functioning in the
background of these decisions.
Subversion,
Normativity, and Performativity within Commercial BDSM
I now shift from an evaluation of this debate to a more
focused case study of specifically commercial
BDSM to examine and elucidate feminist questions of agency and power as
they relate to the practice.
Commercial BDSM, broadly speaking, may include representations of SM/kink in
porn, television, film, literature, as well as sex work that specializes in
kink. For my purposes, I will focus on the latter, specifically, women who
perform “erotic labor,” to borrow Wendy Chapkis’s term.12 Erotic
labor points to the fact that some sex workers who specialize in BDSM, such as
professional dominatrices, do not actually have sex with their clients, even though the scenes are erotic and typically
bring about sexual release on the part of the buyer. Examining the intersection
of S/M and erotic labor points to the nature of “interactions within commercial
exchanges and the transformative power of money over intimate relationships.”13
I ultimately argue that BDSM, though often bound up in capitalism and its
attendant privileging of white, middle- to upper-class men, nevertheless has
the potential to disrupt the gendered
ways that power operates by transgressing norms and parodying
heteronormativity.
In her analysis of the stigmatization of sex work, Gail
Pheterson touches on the experiences of sex workers who focus on sadomasochism.
She writes that S/M sex “is often most expensive and may involve no body
contact at all.”14 Here, the socioeconomic factor is introduced: it
is often the case that only more financially well-off individuals are able to
participate in this economic interaction because of its cost. In this sense,
commercial BDSM reflects broad relations (and tensions) between “consumerism
and desire; race, class, and neoliberalism; and politics and privilege.”15
Though not always the case, BDSM enthusiasts are frequently white, middle- to
upper-class professionals who have access to capital (both cultural and
monetary) and are thus able to invest in these services. It follows that this
is one way in which commercial BDSM reinforces structures of capitalist
domination by favoring those who are more financially able to participate. At
the same time, however, and indicative of its potential for transgression,
erotic laborers who provide S/M sex often develop it into their specialty.
Contrary to what many radical feminists might argue, Pheterson uses this point
to make the claim that the sex worker’s ability
to refuse a particular sexual practice proves the existence of their
agency. S/M thus occupies a special location within the sex work industry, and
begins to hint at how commercial S/M both transgresses
gender roles by giving sex workers the power to choose and reinforces hierarchies of patriarchy and capitalism by favoring
white, professional males.
Further elucidating the nuanced nature of BDSM, the
professional dominatrix occupies a particularly fascinating position within the
commercial sex industry. In this line of work, clients—predominantly male—pay
money for the experience of being humiliated, spanked, whipped, kicked,
urinated on, and other sadomasochistic and fetishistic scenes.16 The
pro-domme can either work independently in her ‘dungeon’ or with a larger group
of dommes. This role is a particularly salient example of the fundamentally
complex nature of `commercial BDSM because, while the interactions are
organized as inversions of traditional male/female roles, the industry is also “normatively
patterned, in the sense that social expectations from everyday life work
themselves into the dungeon.”17 The client base is made up primarily
of professional white men who are financially able to pay for these services
and have a good deal of control over the transaction in that they want to get
what they pay for, so to speak. Indeed, the dominatrix caters to her clients’
requests “like any other service-sector employee.”18 This is not to
say that the dominatrix has no power in the relationship—to the contrary, she
has the ability to begin and terminate the professional relationship. Yet she
is expected to please the client and usually presents herself in a very
feminine way: corsets, heels, makeup, and so on. This hyper-femininity could
potentially reinforce societal expectations of women, while its juxtaposition
next to the pro-domme’s sexually dominant role could also offset that effect.
Clearly, the practice is highly nuanced in its ability to transgress and
reinforce gendered power structures, often at the same time.
In another instance of subversion and
conformity, many dominatrices, when describing their work, often compare
themselves to therapists. Indeed, many dominatrices prominently employ a
therapeutic discourse when explaining that their work frequently is healing for
the clients: “Through ‘therapy,’ clients can become emotionally open, revealing
the repressed facets of their ‘complicit’ masculinities.”19 In this
way, the therapeutic discourse points to an example of subversion because of
the man’s tendency to be more in touch with his emotions during an S/M session—a
characteristic that is generally associated with femininity. Additionally,
there is something potentially empowering about relating one’s work to therapy;
feeling that one is helping people heal
can be an enriching, freeing experience. At the same time, however, the
dominatrix, in employing this therapeutic discourse, could also be reinforcing
normative femininity through her engagement in “nurturing practices that have
traditionally characterized femininity and female labor forms.”20 By
participating in healing roles that are usually associated with femininity and
have not always been regarded as ‘real,’ wage-worthy labor, it may be that this
discourse partly conforms to oppressive gender norms. Particularly illustrative
of this ambivalence, the comparison between commercial BDSM and therapy has the
potential to be simultaneously empowering and disempowering for the
professional dominatrix.
Drawing from Weiss’s notion of performative materialism, it
is clear that the professional dominatrix maintains a complex relationship with
power, producing a series of effects
on and through the social and material world. Rather than existing in a power
vacuum, professional dominatrices (and BDSM practitioners more generally) are “generated
through and within social norms, and linked to multiple productions and
disavowals of social power.”21 Inextricably linked to power, they
produce and reproduce relations of material and cultural inequality, while also maintaining the ability to create new knowledges through resignification
and the ostensible inversion of oppressive hierarchies. Evidently, then, BDSM
is not merely a performance; rather, it is fundamentally productive in that “practitioners
draw on social hierarchies to produce S/M scenes, just as such norms
performatively produce subjects.”22 This profound ambivalence must
be recognized and kept in mind when analyzing commercial BDSM. Indeed, looking
at how gender “works” in these encounters “sheds light not only on how
traditional gender roles can become destabilized within non-mainstream modes of
erotic expression, but also, in contrast, on the robustness of normative gender
paradigms,” even within these purportedly taboo sexual practices.23
The discussion clearly needs to be deconstructed and restructured to account
for these complexities and to reveal both the subversive and supportive roles
of the professional dominatrix and, more broadly, commercial BDSM.
Parody as a Technique
of Transgression
The mimetic nature of commercial BDSM begs the question: to
what extent can parody subvert the gendered ways that power operates? Judith
Butler points to drag and butch/femme categories as analytic examples of how
the imitation of heterosexual gender norms could potentially illuminate the
very constructedness of those norms and serve to denaturalize them. She argues
that categories like “butch and femme [are] not copies of a more originary
heterosexuality, but they [show] how the so-called originals, men and women
within the heterosexual frame, are similarly constructed.”24
Relating this idea back to commercial S/M, it is clear that these encounters
are theatrical parodies of gendered dominant/submissive relationships in
everyday life. This is true regardless of whether the female participant is
playing the dominant or submissive role. A female sexual submissive could
perhaps be regarded as a more ‘accurate’ representation of larger structures of
patriarchy; dominatrices, though theatrically inverting gender roles, are
nonetheless parodying the normative practice of dominance and submission. The
act of mimesis in this instance, then, is not simply a copy of a natural or
true ‘original,’ but a practice that can display and disrupt the constructed
nature of normative gender hierarchies. Commercial BDSM thus has the potential
to be transgressive in its ability to do
gender in a theatrical, parodic manner, revealing the ways in which certain
configurations are privileged as ‘natural,’ while others are regarded as merely
derived.
It should be noted, however, that parody by itself is not
subversive; instead, there must be something else that makes it so. As Butler
notes, “there must be a way to understand what makes certain kinds of parodic
repetitions effectively disruptive, truly troubling, and which repetitions
become domesticated and recirculated as instruments of cultural hegemony.”25
This suggests that the act of parody needs to have some degree of intentionality; that is, the
caricaturing of a power relation should exist alongside the aim of equalizing
the normative and the non-normative. For some professional dominatrices whose
primary motivation is to pay the bills, it may very well be that there is no
larger philosophical, normative aspiration for them. There is, of course,
nothing wrong with desiring financial independence—that could certainly be
considered a normative aspiration in itself—but it could limit the extent to
which parody, in this context, is an effective tool of resistance. If
commercial BDSM implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gendered
hierarchy itself, then there must be an attempt to make that implicit
equalization fundamentally explicit.
Only then does the practice have the chance to be truly transformative. In this
sense, then, commercial S/M has the
potential to be subversive by way of its capacity to provide a mimetic version
of normative power relations.
Over the course of this analysis I have tried to show that
the current debate surrounding S/M, usually conceptualized as ‘radical’ versus ‘pro-sex,’
needs to be wholly reformulated to account for the complexities inherent in the
practice. A postcolonial theoretical framework can significantly aid in
accomplishing this task, as it pushes feminists to contextualize S/M and
recognize the complicated mix of individual and structural factors that
influence a woman’s desire to inflict and/or receive pain in an erotic
exchange. Restructuring the debate to appreciate this ambivalence has crucial
implications for feminist theory and BDSM, both as a private and commercial
practice. For feminist theory, it highlights the necessity to challenge
practices like S/M, without writing them off as either invariably benign or
harmful. This could potentially alleviate the polarization between the two
perspectives that I have outlined. For BDSM, the discussion elucidates how the
practice is constituted within power structures, simultaneously (re)producing
and destabilizing them. The commercial aspect adds an additional layer of
complexity, as commercialized S/M has shown to reinforce the capitalistic
privileging of professional men, while also giving erotic laborers a
substantial degree of control over the transactions. As this analysis has
demonstrated, safely playing with power in an erotic context can be an
enriching way to escape and challenge the inequalities of everyday life. While
not losing sight of critical engagement and skepticism, the ‘othering’
discourse frequently applied to S/M practitioners has proven itself to be
another manifestation of cultural hegemony, a discourse that needs to be
fundamentally rethought.
Butler, Judith. Gender
Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge,
1990.
Butler, Judith. Undoing
Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Deckha, Maneesha. “Pain as Culture: A Postcolonial Feminist
Approach to S/M and Women’s
Agency.” Sexualities
14, no. 2 (2011): 129-150.
Dworkin, Andrea. “Against the Male Flood: Censorship,
Pornography, and Equality.”
Fowles, Stacey May. “The Fantasy of Acceptable ‘Non-Consent’:
Why the Female Sexual Submissive Scares Us (and Why She Shouldn’t).” From Yes Means Yes! Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape
(2008): 117-126.
Lindemann, Danielle J. Dominatrix:
Gender, Eroticism, and Control in the Dungeon. University of Chicago Press,
2012. Kindle Edition.
Pheterson, Gail. “The Whore Stigma: Female Dishonor and Male
Unworthiness.” Social Text no.
37 (Winter 1993): 39-64.
Rubin, Gayle S. “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of
the Politics of Sexuality.” From
Pleasure and Danger:
Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carole Vance (1984): 3-35.
Weiss, Margot. Techniques
of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality. Duke University Press,
2011.
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