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.
