Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes For example, despite the rather relentlessly engendering thrust of U.S. American cultural productions around sexuality, in the practices of sadomasochism in the U.S. sexual subjectivity is not produced through any necessary relation to gender. Sadomasochists constitute their sexual pleasure and their sexual subjectivities through extended and wide-ranging engagements with power. Both pleasure and power may, of course, in some cases be gendered within or through the constituting practices of S/M, but not necessarily so. Take, for example, Pat Califia's (1994 [1983] Califia , P. ( 1994 [1983] ). Gay men, lesbians, and sex: Doing it together . In P. Califia , Public sex: The culture of radical sex . San Francisco : Cleis Press , 183 – 189 . [Google Scholar]) account of herself—a self-identified lesbian and S/M practitioner at the time—finding specifically sexual pleasure in the practice of anally fisting gay men. Califia's sexual subjectivity in relation to anal fisting (an S/M practice for her) does not invoke, rely or draw on gender difference—her own or that of her partners—either for constituting the practice as sexual or for constituting herself as a sexual subject who finds sexual pleasure in the practice. If such an example of nongendered sexual subjectivity can be found in U.S. American society, what of the many other societies in which gender is not endowed with such profound powers to define subjects and structure desire? S/M, moreover, does not stand alone in U.S. American cultural productions of sexuality as having a nonexistent or tangential relation to gender: consider fetishism, bondage and discipline, a preference for group sex, a preference for sex partners of a certain age group or ethnic identification, etc. I suggest these point, minimally, to the need to hold out space for anthropologists to be able to apprehend ways of organizing and constituting sexuality (and sexual subjectivity) in which gender may not be foundational and in which it may, indeed, be irrelevant. Additional informationNotes on contributorsDeborah EllistonDEBORAH ELLISTON is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Binghamton University/SUNY. Her research specializations include sexuality, gender and power, feminist theory, cultural politics, and nationalism, with an area focus on French Polynesia and Oceania.