Abstract
Abstract: In commercial BDSM sessions, the problems of feminized labor, the myth of modern subjectivity, and the contested status of the sex worker as variably subject or object become the frameworks for erotic play. These problems, which circle around fantasies of objectification and subjectification, are never resolved. Rather, they conflict with one another, and it is the tension engendered through this conflict that invests the session with its erotic charge. Through an ethnographic discussion of three professional dominatrixes and their clients, this article asks how transgressive investments in sociohistorical fantasies of objectification as well as the ambivalence of psychosexual processes of objectification get enacted in BDSM sessions. When dominatrixes play with these fantasies, they leverage the ambivalences in both their own and their clients’ drives for becoming subjects and becoming objects in order to play with—and even derive pleasure from—objectification.
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