![]()
Reflections on Practice: From Suspension Hooks to College Hookups
![]()
Chapter 1
Kink-Space and the Body: Transforming the Liminal
Teresa Cutler-Broyles
Abstract
Much scholarly examination of BDSM and kink attempts to make meaningful various specific practices as cultural âtexts,â and analyzes them for what they might signify within a particular culture or subculture. This approach has often focused on interpreting specific acts in relation to human sexuality or psychology â specifically deviance â or on critiquing them from a feminist perspective. I propose to approach an examination of (a particular) BDSM (event) itself as (a) performance, and I argue that it is not only performance but that it is performative, creating a liminal space within the already liminal space of the fetish club in which it occurs. This âkink-spaceâ then becomes the place within which the embodiment, and the dissolution, of binaries occurs, creating possibilities for the audience and upending the structures upon which identity is based. Ultimately, BDSM as performance is an avenue for the understanding of the concepts of liminality and power and how they function to create and contain selves.
Keywords: Fetish club; kink-space; liminality; performance; performativity; suspension
Not an insignificant amount of feminist critique of BDSM since the 1970s has centered around the argument that scenarios in which male (or male-identified) people dominate female (or female-identified) people has the negative effect of reinforcing socially constructed, heteronormative patriarchal gender and societal roles. 1 , 2 , 3 This is most easily argued in scenes in which women are bound, flogged, or otherwise in submissive positions to a male dom, but the critique extends as well to such events as suspension, blood work, and various other kinds of edge play in which women are sometimes the sole participants. What has been elided in these ongoing discussions is a recognition that within the BDSM Scene, and more importantly in specific scenarios acted out as ritualized performance, a very particular kind of space that I term âkink-spaceâ is created that makes inapplicable terms and concepts used to discuss social and cultural interaction. 4 Even terms as integral to the Scene as âdominantâ and âsubmissiveâ can become subsumed, and ultimately meaningless in this space, in relation to the larger social order.
Setting the Stage
I argue that the existence of kink-space â a liminal space created through the public performance of BDSM, which has its own rules and boundaries â allows for and perhaps requires an inversion of power dynamics, societal norms, and expectations and gives people, especially women, an embodied stance from which to claim power. 5 Through ritualistic performance and by claiming both submissive and dominant roles within given scenarios, practitioners/performers (re)create and subvert socially understood power dynamics, and through their bodies allow for a dynamic that makes obsolete the binaries of domâsub and powerfulâpowerless. 6
Kink and BDSM are not interchangeable, of course, and as the focus of this chapter is BDSM specifically, the use of the term âkinkâ in âkink-spaceâ requires some deconstruction. The broad sense of kink as âan umbrella term used to describe a wide range of sexual activities that are considered to be unconventional or unorthodoxâ (Definition, n.d.) is worth considering. While this definition depends heavily on what are considered conventional and orthodox sexual activities, it serves as a starting point. In this sense, the larger social order within which the current, American BDSM Scene exists serves as the measure, and its views on sexuality the boundaries outside which kink begins. While those edges are difficult to discern given the relatively ubiquitous imagery and representation of what would be termed kink in popular culture â and given the cultural shift around nonheterosexual sexual orientation (such as gay marriage), nonessentializing gender identities (such as transgender and nonbinary identities), and the preference for sexual activities (BDSM and kink) â it is safe to say that most fetish and BDSM practices transgress them. Such practices become, thereby, specific incidents of kink. Kink is not necessarily BDSM, but BDSM is part of kink. As an overarching concept, therefore, it is useful.
Engaging in BDSM necessitates setting aside conventional, generally understood-as-normative rules of sexual engagement and entering an alternative place in which kink is the norm. While this can be a physical place, it is also, and importantly, a liminal state of being in which the societally proscribed rules and boundaries are suspended. This liminal state becomes a space of possibility (i.e., kink-space), and it functions to enclose, reify, and make possible a wide range of nonnormative behaviors, and in the process reshape their meanings. And it goes farther than that. In specifically pain-related performance, the performers themselves enter a second level of kink-space that imbues upon them a kind of transcendent status, conferred by the presence of pain, an audience that observes, and bodies that respond. These components make up, in part, what Nick MulĂ©, elsewhere in this volume, calls âbackspaces.â MulĂ© deploys this concept in pursuit of his examination of male sexual spaces that allow men to experience a liberated sexuality that does not exist for them outside of these liminal spaces, and his attention to the concept of spatial practices is an intriguing counterpart to, and augments, my own discussion here.
While a discussion of the relationship between BDSM and ritual falls outside the scope of this chapter, I utilize a number of ritual-related terms and their related meanings. First, rituals are important to the practice of BDSM in a number of ways within the Scene overall; within scenarios as played out by practitioners they can be found in stylized interactions, expected responses to stimuli, modes of speaking, the choosing of floggers, the donning of leather or latex, the methodical unwrapping or wrapping of ropes, and so on. Examining a particular performance as itself a ritual is a logical step, and the parallels to other rituals are easy to draw. In the specific instance I describe, understanding these ritualistic aspects is vital to the way kink-space is functioning. 7
2019 â The Performance
For hours the cavernous, dark club in Mesa, Arizona, has seethed with a steady, and steadily shifting, mass of people dressed in variations on a leather-leash-cuff-fishnet theme. Hard industrial dance music has played almost nonstop, broken only by announcements, by the very male-appearing drag queen, of upcoming performances that have included a woman dropping to her knees and rolling around in a carpet of broken glass, lip-synched leather daddies with their pajama-clad daughters and sons, and some burlesque and strip teases. Scattered throughout the room, providing ongoing entertainment when the stage is empty, both men and women have wielded floggers of all kinds on eager volunteers, experienced and newbies alike. Orgasms have happened in the corners, new partners have felt the press of bodies along the rails of the dance floor, and the tension in the room has built throughout the night.
Toward the end of the evening, a scaffolding is erected on the stage in practiced motions by two scantily clad men. They disappear off-stage, replaced by a man and a woman dressed entirely in fishnets and lace who bring out a small table laid with a vial of rubbing alcohol, bandages, and stainless steel hooks. Big ones. The crowd stops dancing, gradually at first and then more quickly, as people notice what is happening on the stage and turn to watch. The music cranks louder. The tension heightens until it feels as if the room might burst into flames.
And then, Maegan Machine appears. 8 She wears leather shorts and a tiny leather top and is covered from head to toe in tattoos, a tapestry of color and black-work that draws the eye almost as much as do her intense beauty and brilliant red hair. The crowd screams as she hangs her head, shaking it so her hair flies. She shakes her arms and shoulders as if preparing for a fight and takes deep breaths. Then, hyped so high she seems drugged, she sits restlessly on a metal chair on the edge of the stage and continues to shift her weight and shake her arms and head.
The crowd goes quiet. The woman in fishnet approaches her with one of the huge hooks, and a quick and easily missed communication between them occurs. A whisper, a nod. Machine holds up her arm, forearm toward the audience members who are now utterly silent, rapt, letting the scene and the music wash over them. A quick swipe with alcohol and then, without warning, the woman with the hook drives it through Machine's forearm, straining to puncture the skin and exit on the other side. The crowd surges, screams. Machine's arm and entire body shake with pain. Another quick communique, another nod and a swipe, and another hook a few inches from the first is thrust through the skin. And a third. The crowd is breaking up now. A few people leave the area hastily, their faces white.
The process is repeated on Machine's other arm, her quaking visible each time. Her hair hangs over her face, and each time a hook finds its mark she violently shakes her head as if shaking off the pain â or drawing it into her body. The crowd members who have stayed let out a roar with each hook placement, with each piercing of the skin.
Two larger hooks drop from the ceiling, and the man in fishnet goes through the same question-nod-swipe process before he punches the hooks through the skin on Machine's back, one at a time. The crowd seethes anew. Leather ropes are attached to each hook in her arms and, although it does not seem possible, the music becomes more intense. Suddenly, after more vigorous headshaking, she stands and kicks the chair aside, nods off-stage, and â as the crowd loses its collective mind â is jerked hard into the air by the straps attached to the hooks in her back.
She writhes and launches herself toward the crowd; they scream louder, and the entire crowd sways as she swings toward them. Her two co-scene members grab the leather straps attached to her arms and pull on them to swing her back and forth and outward. She fights them â or appears to â and their tug-of-war grows more harsh as they twist her from one side to the other. Her body arcs, pulls in on itself, gyrates in time to the pounding music in an embodiment of both pain and ecstasy as her frenzied movements pull her ever higher and outward over the audience. She swings in ever-larger arcs, and those audience members who have endured the intensity to this point reach for her, seeming to believe that if they can touch her, they can partake even a little in the dark claim she has made to power.
Machine seems oblivious to them; she has entered the second level of kink-space and embodies both pain and power, both submission and dominance. She has become herself liminal, embodying all the potential that state of being holds as she claims the right to her own place within it that outstrips the boundaries of pleasure and pain and sadism and masochism, and lies both outside and internal to us all.
Performance and the Embodiment of Meaning
The above scenario, this scene within the Scene, has a number of important characteristics endemic to the BDSM performance space that not only contribute to the formation of kink-space and all it allows, including an embodiment of power, but also seem to necessitate it.
The first is the concept of performance itself. Many people in the BDSM Scene do not themselves believe they are performing. After all, a lifestyle does not feel like a performance; it is daily routine, habits and rituals of one kind or another. However, according to Richard Schechner (2002),
âŠour lives are structured according to repeated and socially sanctioned modes of behavior [âŠ] [therefore] all human activity could potentially be considered a âperformanceâ, or at least all activity carried out with a consciousness of itself. (p. 31, emphasis added)
Repetition here is key. Typically, enacting a scenario does not happen by accident or without ritual. And there are indeed rules within the Scene, though they differ from those in non-kink interactions. Within the overarching framework of BDSM, each scenario might involve different positions, actions, words, toys, tools, or modes of enactment but they play out in ritualized, repeated ways. The behaviors, movements, even the language of BDSM are learned, handed down, the basic moves codified and imbued with relatively stable, understood meanings. They are âa known, organized, and formally transmittable semiotic system of meaning separate from everyday behaviorâ in which âthe actors have consciously mastered a system separate from ordinary behaviorâ (Schechner, 2002, p. 186). This last notion, and the earlier emphasis on the word repeated, forms the basis for conceptualizing BDSM as performance. The repetition of understood actions, the use of recognizable props that convey agreed-upon meanings, and preferred reactions and behaviors all constitute participation in BDSM scenarios. In other words, whether occurring on a stage for the purposes of creating a spectacle or simply entertaining an audience, or in a mixed space in a dungeon (which hosts private, invitation-only, or semi-public scenar...
