I got up at 7 AM to take notes about kink for livejournal

[sabinetzin]

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.)

Comments

[beccastareyes]

Well, subspace is also a word used a lot in mathematics to represent a subsection of space, and in SF as a handwavy word for 'why we can go faster than light'.

And some of the limits of giving a fifteen minute talk to people who don't necessarily know the first thing about BDSM (outside of pop culture dominatrices*) probably mean being superficial as hell, as you know. (Heck, one of the conferences I go to has 7-8 minute talks, and I'm told the AAS (the big astronomy conference) has 5 minutes, unless you're a grad student presenting dissertation work, when you get 10 or 15. My boss likened it to a commercial -- 'Hi, this is what I do, if it interests you, see me over coffee'. Or else it's to get people to use the poster sessions.)

"And I'm afraid to ask this, but... what do you use a blood pressure cuff for in the context of a scene?"
Well, I'd assume some folks would be turned on by medical role-play, and others might like the ability to incrimentally restrict blood flow, though I'd think they wouldn't be sized well for things other than limbs.

Though right now, thanks to visiting the campus health center, I had to remind myself that there were manual cuffs, rather than the automatic ones the health center uses.

* Which Firefox also knows. 'Dominatrices' pings as correct; 'dominatrixes' doesn't.

[sabinetzin]

I had my suspicions that it was mathematic/scientific in nature. I always giggle a lot when Stargate talks about "subspace communications."

Yeah, it's always a bitch trying to talk about a community that most listeners won't be familiar with. I was really lucky this year, because I was speaking to a crowd of experts about a town they all know and an informant that most of them know personally. But last year I gave a talk on fanfic communities, and oof. I had thirty minutes and still barely had enough time to explain myself.

[anatsuno]

What do you imagine them used for? (haha, I was only thinking of manual ones, before I read the comment above. I don't think I've ever seen non-manual ones).

Thank you for taking these notes for us! I would be interested in the paper, yeah. <3

[sabinetzin]

I mean, the use that, uh, sticks out, so to speak, is that you could put it on somebody's wang. Which seems like the WORST IDEA, but, I mean, some people juggle geese.

[theleaveswant]

Heh. I used Turner in the first paper I wrote on this stuff as an undergrad four years ago and made some similar arguments. I'd definitely appreciate a copy of her paper if you can get it. I'm also curious, did she self-identify as kinky or talk about her research methods at all?

[sabinetzin]

She talked about her research methods a little, which were mostly ethnographic in nature; she studied the central Texas community, went to events, sat in on scenes, etc. She didn't self-identify as kinky, and the way she was talking, I don't think she is (I say that because she mentioned being uncomfortable and shocked watching scenes at first, which could mean that she isn't kinky or that she isn't a voyeur).

[theleaveswant]

Interesting. I hope she talks about that discomfort in the written version of the paper, that could be really useful for me (I'm doing all this auto-ethnographic stuff on affect & leatherdyke experiences, so it would be neat to see if there's anything indicating how she interprets her response as discomfort or whether she's saying it to distance herself from her research participants and why).

Thank you so much for letting us all attend the talk vicariously!

[aliaras]

Interesting! I, too, would be interested in the paper (or a citation to where it is/will be published so I can go beat up the library for it).

I'm not sure how queers are liminal figures in the BDSM community, because as I've seen it they started some parts of it, at least in the Bay Area where I'm from. It was originally queer, but the het folks moved in and started messing around, and now both groups overlap often. Hence the leather contingent in the pride parades.

[sabinetzin]

I dunno. I think it could have a lot to do with the fact that she studied central Texas, and she described the scene as overwhelmingly het, which doesn't really surprise me.

[ancient_reader]

I'd be really interested in reading the paper. I wonder whether she'd be willing to post it someplace public (so you don't have 400 people begging you for copies, say ...).

[ancient_reader]

Oh, and duh I forgot to thank you for taking notes!

[clavally]

I could only read every other word of this, but it was still interesting :p Thanks for getting up so early and taking notes!

And yeah, I'm thinking the whole blood pressure cuff is used for cuffing things that probably shouldn't be, including breasts. At least, I think I've seen that done somewhere before...