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So, the kinky paper:
Her argument was based on Victor Turner's idea of liminal spaces and the dichotomy of structure and communitas. Basically, hierarchical, or at least dichotomous, power relations form the structure for the community, and the communitas arises in the space opened by that framework. She talked about a scene as a liminal space; the top is the facilitator and the bottom is a liminal entity. Her argument for the scene as a ritual activity followed from there; toys are like magical objects which can become contaminated (both in a purportedly biomedical sense and through things as simple as being touched by another person). Subspace (and to a lesser extent topspace, and why is subspace accepted by firefox's dictionary?) is a trance state, which she related to Turner's "powers of the weak." She also discussed neophytes, switches, and queers as liminal figures within a liminal society. Their status is in question; while their status may become crystallized, as with neophytes and people recognized as "true switches", it may remain liminal indefinitely.
There were a couple issues with it. I thought her description of queers in the community was a little... confusing, and it didn't really jive with what I've experienced. She referred to it as "an intense form of switching", and I can see what she was going for and am sure the term is used that way in the community she studied; it just isn't my experience of that term. On the whole, also, I felt she could have gone deeper. Liminality is a great framework for describing scenes, but it's also kind of obvious. But, that's a function of giving a fifteen minute talk at eight in the morning for a bunch of people who are not walking around holding leashes.
But, overall, it was a good talk. She was very sensitive to community issues and avoided essentializing language (except, of course, the essentalizing language used by the community itself). If anybody's interested, I'm happy to email the author and ask her if she wouldn't mind sending me a copy of her paper.
(And I'm afraid to ask this, but... what do you use a blood pressure cuff for in the context of a scene? Is it for what I think it's for. Because, damn.
It does not help that I am really scared of them.)
Her argument was based on Victor Turner's idea of liminal spaces and the dichotomy of structure and communitas. Basically, hierarchical, or at least dichotomous, power relations form the structure for the community, and the communitas arises in the space opened by that framework. She talked about a scene as a liminal space; the top is the facilitator and the bottom is a liminal entity. Her argument for the scene as a ritual activity followed from there; toys are like magical objects which can become contaminated (both in a purportedly biomedical sense and through things as simple as being touched by another person). Subspace (and to a lesser extent topspace, and why is subspace accepted by firefox's dictionary?) is a trance state, which she related to Turner's "powers of the weak." She also discussed neophytes, switches, and queers as liminal figures within a liminal society. Their status is in question; while their status may become crystallized, as with neophytes and people recognized as "true switches", it may remain liminal indefinitely.
There were a couple issues with it. I thought her description of queers in the community was a little... confusing, and it didn't really jive with what I've experienced. She referred to it as "an intense form of switching", and I can see what she was going for and am sure the term is used that way in the community she studied; it just isn't my experience of that term. On the whole, also, I felt she could have gone deeper. Liminality is a great framework for describing scenes, but it's also kind of obvious. But, that's a function of giving a fifteen minute talk at eight in the morning for a bunch of people who are not walking around holding leashes.
But, overall, it was a good talk. She was very sensitive to community issues and avoided essentializing language (except, of course, the essentalizing language used by the community itself). If anybody's interested, I'm happy to email the author and ask her if she wouldn't mind sending me a copy of her paper.
(And I'm afraid to ask this, but... what do you use a blood pressure cuff for in the context of a scene? Is it for what I think it's for. Because, damn.
It does not help that I am really scared of them.)
