Search results

Over the past few decades, mainstream and independent films have increasingly represented kinky sexual behaviors of their characters, in ways that are frequently inaccurate, inappropriately titillating, and intentionally extreme. This chapter examines the representation of kinky sex lives in two groundbreaking (although extremely violent) offerings of exploitation cinema: director William Friedkin's 1980 film, Cruising, one of the first feature-length Hollywood movies to portray the sex lives of gay men in New York City's leather bars and sex clubs; and director Brett Leonard's 2005 film, Feed, one of the first feature-length independent offerings to explicitly explore the phenomena of fat fetishism and feederism. Both works are noteworthy for openly depicting nonnormative sexual activities and ways of being targeted primarily to mainstream audiences, at historical moments when doing so was quite rare. At the same time, this analysis demonstrates how both films, because of their exploitative approaches to their subject matter, ultimately communicate that the individuals and sexual activities they represent are “deviant” ones that must be contained or even eradicated in a civilized society.

The historical study of sexuality during the Victorian period has been influenced heavily by the development of sexology as a scientific field. The impetus of sexology to delineate and categorize “types” of sexuality and sexual behavior has situated the late nineteenth century as a starting point for studies of contemporary concepts of sexual “abnormality.” However, research into this subject, while drawing on both legal and medical discourses, has overwhelmingly ignored the value of porn in reconstructing the dynamics of Victorian sexuality. Accordingly, this chapter integrates legal, medical, and pornographic discourses of the late nineteenth century to develop a more thorough examination of Victorian sexual experiences that fell outside the limits of prescribed legal and medical “normalcy.”

This chapter addresses the prevalence of the shiny body in the kink aesthetic. Through an exploration of Freud's ideas on fetishism and Benjamin's thoughts on the aura, the author argues that the aesthetic of the kink community is shiny and that quality is often overlooked, and also that if we do look at the shiny kink aesthetic, we find a process that leads to a fetishized subject and to us dismissing that the objectification of people is unethical. By exploring the different qualities of the shiny body as well as the relationship between subject and object and the aura – achieved in part through the author's reflections on his own experiences with the attraction to shiny objects from his early childhood and adolescence – the resulting analysis articulates the effects of donning a fetishized shiny outfit and offers a theoretical re-empowerment of the fetishized body.

Since Barker, Gupta, and Iantaffi (2007), in both mainstream cultural products and academic literature dealing with BDSM, there has been an increase in emanations of the “healing narrative,” which suggests that BDSM practices offer therapeutic potential. However, no significant attempt has been made to explore in greater detail the problematic relationship between this healing narrative and the history of pathologization of sadomasochistic desires and practices. Barker et al. (2007) rightly point out that in suggesting BDSM has healing potential, one runs the risk of implying that individuals who practice BDSM are in need of healing to begin with. This could be damaging to the image of BDSM, which after centuries of pathologization finally appears to be moving into a realm of acceptability. However, the experiences of BDSM practitioners who describe their practices as healing should not be discounted and could actually help to cultivate a more positive reputation, which makes the issue a political one. In this chapter, through an exploration of the concept of “healing” in cultural objects such as the film Secretary (2002, directed by Steven Shainberg) and the Showtime cable television series Billions (2016–present), this issue will be investigated further, leading to a way out of the apparent double bind. The aim is to come to an understanding of the therapeutic potential of BDSM, which would not only reframe the discourse of pathologization surrounding BDSM but also further the political goal of creating space for BDSM practitioners to explore their desires without having to experience stigmatization.

In the last decade, much has been debated about the topic of BDSM in various scientific fields. With the slow and steady blending of BDSM with mainstream culture, which escalated rapidly with the appearance and extreme popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey, BDSM has become a current topic of discussion in a broad variety of contexts. Moreover, with the recent change in medical classification of BDSM practices in ICD-11 (World Health Organization, 2018), which strictly clinically separated the sexological diagnosis of nonconsensual sadism from consensual SM practices, BDSM has also become a hot issue in the community of diagnostic experts. This chapter explores three aspects of the evolution of BDSM subculture in the postcommunist Czech Republic in the context of the continuous worldwide development of BDSM subculture – (1) role-play, (2) unification, and (3) commodification in the BDSM subculture – situating them within the broader context of the development of society in the postcommunist environment and the development of the BDSM scene worldwide.

As emerging adults on college campuses, undergraduates are at a key stage of developing their identities and deciding the role that intimacy and sexuality will play in relationships for the rest of their lives. Experimentation through casual sex, which modern researchers have dubbed the hookup culture, plays a part in this development. While hooking up has been linked with sexual gratification and value clarification, there are negative aspects of the culture as well, including a lack of communication leading to regret, shame, and sexual assault. This chapter proposes looking to the bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, and sadism and masochism (BDSM) community as experts in the field of sexual communication and consent, and utilizing skills developed by this community to fill in the gaps where hookup culture has failed emerging adults. Through the use of a novel intervention called the Hookup Card, emerging adults could be empowered to increase their communication skills and see more positive outcomes as they navigate their sexual and identity development.

Much scholarly examination of BDSM and kink attempts to make meaningful various specific practices as cultural “texts,” and analyzes them for what they might signify within a particular culture or subculture. This approach has often focused on interpreting specific acts in relation to human sexuality or psychology – specifically deviance – or on critiquing them from a feminist perspective. I propose to approach an examination of (a particular) BDSM (event) itself as (a) performance, and I argue that it is not only performance but that it is performative, creating a liminal space within the already liminal space of the fetish club in which it occurs. This “kink-space” then becomes the place within which the embodiment, and the dissolution, of binaries occurs, creating possibilities for the audience and upending the structures upon which identity is based. Ultimately, BDSM as performance is an avenue for the understanding of the concepts of liminality and power and how they function to create and contain selves.