Kink Community Research Articles

The light in the shadows: therapeutic explorations of fantasy and fear*

Recent decades have given rise to a preponderance of studies centered on fantasies involving forced sexual experiences. While the genesis, meaning, and plot of these fantasies vary greatly, it is clear that sexual trauma survivors often experience such force fantasies. Some individuals who have experienced sexual trauma may engage in certain practices, termed shadowplay within the BDSM and Kink communities, to work through their trauma. Shadowplay may involve re-enacting sexually traumatic events with the purpose of regaining control over oneself, one’s memories, or one’s experience of trauma. Therapists and clinicians must become aware of shadowplay and its many manifestations in order to better support their clients throughout the treatment process. This article describes the various manifestations of shadowplay and provides guidelines for appropriate clinical support of such behaviors.

Immoral geographies and Soho’s sex shops: exploring spaces of sexual diversity in London

London’s Soho, situated in the urban heart of the city has long been understood as both a cosmopolitan and diverse space where transgression and deviance, particularly in relation to the sex industry and sexual commerce, are constitutive of this area. Drawing on three years of ethnographic fieldwork, we add to some of the existing debates on sexual spaces in Soho by documenting the changes to the social/sexual landscape of sex shops in this area, and look to geographers interested in the spatial politics of gender and sexuality to understand the importance of this particular place. Looking at two particular sex shops in Soho, we argue that the spatial practices in this very specific part of the city encourage a disruption of traditional hierarchies that often govern gender and sexed practices, and invite women, LGBTQ and kink communities to inhabit more inclusive spaces of sexual citizenship.

Creating a Feeling of Belonging. Solidarity in Finnish Kink Communities


 
 
 Kinky sexuality is often stigmatized in Finnish culture. Therefore, kink communities are vital for creating safe spaces for people who identify as kinky. In this article, I discuss the ways in which the sense of belonging is created in the Finnish kink communities, in particular in their kink events. In kink communities solidarity acts as an important aspect in creating a feeling of belonging. It manifests in shared experiences and knowledge, etiquette rules and consensuality, dressing up in fetish attire and volunteer work at associations. Through interviews, written kinky life stories and participant observation I have examined the experiences of individuals, myself included, to obtain an understanding of the kink phenomenon and the elements that contribute to the sense of belonging. For some people it is important to be able to attend kink events and have face-to-face encounters, whereas others are part of a community online. Yet, the mere existence of the kink community might be enough for an individual to achieve a feeling of belonging to a community.
 
 

Sexy warriors: the politics and pleasures of submission to the state

This essay examines links between sexuality, sexiness, and militarized bodies. While scholars have persuasively established links between militarization, hyper-masculine identities, and sexual assault, I want to trouble the soldier as an object of desire, not merely as a subject imposing violence. This paper analyses the fetishism of militarization to argue that the relationship between soldiers’ bodies and the state might be usefully understood using theoretical categories derived from kink communities. While few would dispute that dominance and submission are involved in all hierarchical social relations, I follow Foucault in arguing that communities that eroticize these roles have broadly applicable insights into the productivity of power. Combining theoretical arguments with empirical illustrations of how fetishism and militarization concatenate, I demonstrate how to think critically about the relationships between gender, war, desire, and agency. I do so because, like it or not, war is sexy in contemporary US culture.

Sensual, erotic, and sexual behaviors of women from the "kink" community.

Unconventional sensual, erotic, and sexual behaviors (herein referred to as kink behaviors) investigated by academia are based largely on clinical and criminal cases, and most published, peer-reviewed, quantitative research on these behaviors is based almost exclusively on male participants. For this study, information was collected and analyzed from 1580 female participants recruited from the kink community, using a non-clinical and non-criminal sample. We explored and described the preferences and diversity of more than 126 sensual, erotic, and sexual behaviors found among these participants, along with recommendations for continued research. Gaining a better understanding of the breadth and depth of activities engaged in by female kink practitioners could benefit educators, counselors, therapists, medical doctors, and other professionals when interacting with members of the kink community.

Beyond Black and Blue: BDSM, Internet Pornography, and Black Female Sexuality

Feminist Studies 41, no. 2. © 2015 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 409 Ariane Cruz Beyond Black and Blue: BDSM, Internet Pornography, and Black Female Sexuality I have been the meaning of rape I have been the problem everyone seeks to eliminate by forced penetration with or without the evidence of slime and/ but let this be unmistakable in this poem is not consent I do not consent —June Jordan, Poem about My Rights Introduction: The Evidence of Slime Slavery, itself a kind of “slime,” remains an active marketplace for the production of Black female sexuality and its representations.1 The impact of chattel slavery and the pervasive rape of Black female slaves on modern 1. In using the term “Black women,” I am referring to African American women for whom the history of chattel slavery in the Americas has produced the socio-historical conditions that uniquely inform Black female subjectivity and sexual politics. My use of this term is not to essentialize Black American womanhood; rather, like Black feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins, I use the term to gesture to a Black women’s standpoint influenced by the condition and experience of gendered and racialized abjection, a “common experience of being Black women in a society that denigrates women of African descent.” Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (London: Routledge, 1990), 22. In this essay, I focus on Black women who practice BDSM, a small but nonetheless heterogeneous group of women in the already-marginalized larger kink community. 410 Ariane Cruz constructions and representations of Black women has been well theorized , in particular by a number of Black feminist scholars who have worked to rupture what Darlene Clark Hine terms the “culture of dissemblance ,” the politics of silence shrouding expressions of Black female sexuality.2 While the antebellum legacy of sexual violence on Black women is substantive, what has not been effectively considered is how Black women deliberately employ the shadows of slavery in the deliverance and/or receiving of sexual pleasure. That is, how the “slime”—a staining sludge of pain and violence—becomes a type of lubricant to stimulate sexual fantasies, access sexual pleasure, and heighten sexual desire. In this paper, I explore how Black women facilitate a complex and contradictory negotiation of pain, pleasure, and power in their performances in the fetish realm of BDSM.3 Situating my analysis in the context of hardcore BDSM Internet pornography and the controversial praxis of race play, I argue that BDSM is a critical site from which to reimagine the formative links between Black female sexuality and violence. Race play is a BDSM practice that explicitly uses race to script power exchange and the dynamics of domination and submission. Most commonly an interracial erotic play, race play employs racism, often involving the exchange of racist language, role-playing, and the construction of racist scenes. Eroticizing not just racism, but the miscegenation taboo, racial difference, and (hyper) 2. See Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West,” Signs 14, no. 4 (1989): 912–920. For more on Black female slave sexual assault and its aftermath, see Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Ann duCille, “‘Othered’ Matters: Reconceptualizing Dominance and Difference in the History of Sexuality in America,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 1, no. 1 (1990): 102–27; Elsa Barkley Brown, “Imaging Lynching: African American Women, Communities of Struggle, and Collective Memory,” in African American Women Speak Out on Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas, ed. Geneva Smitherman (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1995), 100–24; and Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness As Property ,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (June 1993): 1707–91. 3. BDSM is an umbrella term that stands in for bondage/discipline (B/D), domination /submission (D/S), and sadism/masochism or sadomasochism (S/M). For the purposes of this paper I exchange S/M, S&M, and/or SM with the more contemporary label BDSM. For more about the terminology of BDSM, see Margot Weiss, Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). Ariane Cruz 411 racialization itself...

Gender and BDSM revisited: Reflections on a decade of researching kink communities

This paper reflects upon the ways in which my understandings of BDSM and gender have shifted over the past 10 years of studying kink communities. I begin with my early work on women who identified with both BDSM and femin.ism, and how they presented their positions. Then I touch upon ethical issues of how we research precarious communities, and our role as researchers in making certain narratives available or not. Following this, I summarise an analysis of a BDSM blog which complicates common views of female domination, and raises important questions about gejider in kink communities. Finally I mention my most recent work on shifting understandings of consent within kink communities, and how these are in line with certain strands of feminist thought, pointing to important directions for future research. Throughout the paper I endeavour to draw out implications both for research practice and for how we understand the operation of gender and power in kink communities and beyond.

Sexual subjectification and Bitchy Jones's Diary

This article presents the reflections of two academics on the blog Bitchy Jones's Diary (2006–2010), particularly its considerations of dominant femininity within the UK kink communities. Weaving together excerpts from the blog with our own dialogues, we consider the potentials of such a voice from within the communities in relation to more academic explorations. Specifically, we focus on the relationship between Bitchy Jones's arguments and our own understandings of limited sexualised femininities available within wider culture, the place of agency within these and the potentials for mutual recognition within both kinky and non-kinky relationships.

Sexuality, Boundaries, Professional Ethics, and Clinical Practice

Psychotherapists who identify as part of the sexual kink community are often asked to treat clients who are part of the same small community. The therapists are faced with unique boundary challenges regarding the issue of personal sharing within the therapy hour and social contacts with clients outside of the therapy room. This article addresses those professional challenges and various approaches to these situations while maintaining necessary therapeutic boundaries.