Abstract
This article explores the experiences and practices of self-identifying female sexual age-players. Based on interviews and observation of the age players’ blogged content, the article suggests that, rather than being fixed in one single position, our study participants move between a range of roles varying across their different scenes. In examining accounts of sexual play, we argue that the notion of play characterizes not only their specific routines of sexual “scening” but also sexual routines, experimentations, and experiences more expansively. Further, we argue that a focus on play as exploration of corporeal possibilities allows for conceptualizing sexual preferences and practices, such as age-play, as irreducible to distinct categories of sexual identity. The notion of play makes it possible to consider sexuality in terms of transformations in affective intensities and attachments, without pigeonholing various preferences, or acts, within a taxonomy of sexual identities. In doing so, it offers an alternative to the still prevalent categorical conceptualizations of sexuality that stigmatize people’s lived experiences and diminish the explanatory power of scholarly and therapeutic narratives about human sexuality.
Highlights
As role-play pertaining to age, age-play is broadly considered a subset of BDSM
We aim to intervene in the pathologized framing of age-play as paraphilic infantilism (e.g. Doshi et al 2018), which occurs despite the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-V stating that “most people with atypical sexual interests do not have a mental disorder,” and paraphilic infantilism not being classified as a paraphilic disorder within the manual
When the widespread tendency to pathologize age-play intersects with the still prevalent normative notion of coherent and categorical sexual identity,3 people’s preferences and experiences become stigmatized. It follows that the explanatory power of popular, scholarly, and therapeutic narratives about human sexuality diminishes while definitions of, and attitudes towards age-play get locked into conceptions of a flawed self (Nichols 2014)
Summary
Relevant interview snippets from a number of interviews between 2011 and 2017, blog outtakes and fieldnotes. Some of the interviewed Littles expressed finding the aesthetic and dynamic of what they perceive as “conventional BDSM” unappealing, while still enjoying intense pain and humiliation Others play as both Littles and as BDSM submissives depending on partner, mood and situation. Rather, their positions shift depending on the mood, the partner, as well as a myriad of personal aspects connected to headspace—an affective and cognitive shift in ways of being in and connecting with the world in BDSM play (Wignall and McCormack 2017; Busbee 2008; Cutler 2003). This suggests that the practitioners’ sexual preferences, routines, and practices—and not merely their relations with partners—come into being in a process of play
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