Playing with power: Kink, race, and desire

Abstract

Although the separation between “real life” and “play” appears to reinscribe liberal notions of autonomy, BDSM practitioners actually mobilize this boundary to trouble liberal understandings of the liberal autonomous rational agent. Through understandings desires as inextricable from power, and fetishes as displacements of anxieties, BDSM practices recognize “irrational” desires and multiple, fractured selves. In examining kink practices of queer women of color in the Netherlands, this paper explores the transformative potentials of BDSM for queer people of color, especially in resisting colonial discourses that privilege liberal discourses of agency and conceptualize bodies of color as nonmodern, inferior, exotic, and irrational. In the face of discourses that pit Dutch freedom and sexual expression against ethnic minorities and sexual constraint, marginalized kinksters are forming communities that radically centralize marginalized kink experiences and reject pathologizing discourses, as they critically alter the implications of and possibilities for slippages between daily life and kink.