This book is an anthropological study of the BDSM community in early 2000s San Francisco and it’s fascinatingly chewy.
“Understandings of the scene as completely outside social reality, as not a part of gendered relations of inequality, help construct [a barrier between these “roles” and “real life”], 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 (fantasized) 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.” [Weiss, 2011, 179.]
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Margot Weiss, Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press. 2011.
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This is a book recommendation I received after reading Gabriele Koch’s Healing Labor, about sex work in the Japanese gendered economy. Techniques of Pleasure is based on ethnographic/anthropological research conducted by Margot Weiss in the San Francisco area in the first few years of the 21st century, on people involved in BDSM and BSDM-focused communities. I read it about a month ago, and some of details now escape me, but one of its arguments is that the “liberatory” and “transgressive” forms of sexuality found in BDSM cannot in fact be separated from social hierarchies that exist outside BDSM practices and in fact reproduce more often than not raced and gendered social norms rather than transgressing them.
I’m interested in the relationship between “normative” social hierarchies and “transgressive” sexual or sex-related practices — whether that transgression comprises sexual encounters and relationships in a BDSM context, or in queer ones, or both at once. I’m interested in what happens when we de-naturalise normative society’s gendered hierarchies, specifically. So this was a fascinating book to read.
Weiss has five chapters, a substantial introduction, and an appendix which consists of a short paragraph contextualising each of the people Weiss did interviews with.
In Weiss’s introduction, “Toward a Performative Materialism,” she articulates the position she takes in her research and its theoretical context. I think the key statement is probably: “[P]erformances,” in a BDSM context, “are both dependent on and productive of particular social, cultural, political, and economic formations… I began to understand SM performance 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 sexual hierarchies, such spectacular performances work within the social norms that compel subjectivity, community, and political imagination.” She discusses the idea of sexuality as a symbol of freedom, as intrinsically private and at least in part disconnected from — or an escape from — structural social inequalities and counter-argues that sexuality is social, that it is a relation, and involves relations and social dynamics (complex and contradictory as they might be) that both produce and are “reproduced within particular sexual cultures, practices and desires.”
Her first chapter, “Setting the Scene: SM Communities in the San Francisco Bay Area,” describes the communities she found in San Francisco, a little about their history and development in relation to the economic and social development of San Francisco city and environs: distinctions of wealth, class, race, gender, and access. In chapter two, “Becoming a Practitioner: Self-Mastery, Social Control, and the Biopolitics of SM,” Weiss discusses the rise of classes and workshops on BDSM techniques, and how “SM practitioners master themselves, becoming subjects of themselves.” But Weiss also discusses the idea that community understandings of risk and safety, of techniques and seminars, as expressions of social privilege which “produce and justify the assumptive race and class locations (whiteness and professionalism) that the rules encode.” Weiss highlights the tension between the idea of BDSM as a transgressive or “outlaw” sexual practice and the community impetus towards a “regulated” approach to engaging in that practice.
Chapter three, “The Toy Bag: Exchange Economies and the Body at Play” discusses the implements of BDSM practice (toys and other paraphernalia) in light of anxiety around commodities, access, and social connection. (This chapter seems to me to be engaging in the same kind of anthropological analysis, sort of, vaguely, maybe, as The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America, but instead of folklore the social contradictions and power relations inherent in commodity capitalism are embodied in objects — this is my reading of Weiss’s analysis. It’s the chapter where I’m least confident that I’ve followed the argument properly.)
Chapter four is titled, “Beyond Vanilla: Public Politics and Private Selves.” In this chapter, Weiss uses the common male dominant/female submissive gender play to analyse “how the desire to transgress social norms enables practitioners to imagine a split between the public (oppressive social norms, white privilege, heteronormativity, and sexism) and the private (personal desire).” Weiss identifies and analyses the ambivalence inherent in a theoretically liberatory form of play that also mirrors gendered, racial, and sexualised social norms in that play, looking at “the way practitioners know and do not know, name and fail to name, the social relations of power — grounded in material relations — that produce SM play.”
The fifth and final chapter is “Sex Play and Social Power: Reading the Effective Circuit.” In this chapter, Weiss focuses on what she refers to as “cultural trauma play” — that is, BDSM roleplay that plays around race and ethnicity — to pursue close readings of the political effects of such play. Weiss reads this roleplay in a continuum of cultural performance with the torture photographs from Abu Ghraib and their reception in news media: Weiss notes that the connection between the world of social relations and the world of individual desires creates “opportunities for practitioners to both reaffirm and disrupt the fantasized break between the erotic and the political.”
Weiss’s anthropology (ethnography?) here is not aiming at a conclusion, but at a set of arguments situating sexuality and desire not solely in the private realm, but in social world, and in the world of capitalist materialism, and in the context of inherently political (politicised?) social relations of power.
I found this book fascinating from the point of view of articulating the view that sexualities and sexual practices are not private and divorced from the world of social relations, and thinking through what that means for desire, the construction of sexuality and sexual identities, relations of power in intimate relationships, the nature of the “transgressive” with regard to sexual practices. It’s an interesting ethnographic snapshot (and made me wonder, occasionally, how many of Weiss’s interviewees were also active in SFF fandom, because at least one of the noms-de-guerre seemed to reference a Marion Zimmer Bradley book) and also, at this point, an interesting piece of cultural history. Read it if you want your brain to break a bit and then start putting things together a bit differently.
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