I’m reading Victor Turner‘s The Ritual Process: Structure and Antistructure. BDSM is, obviously, a ritual affair, but what function does ritual serve?
According to Turner, drawing on Arnold van Gennep, rites of passage have three phases:
* separation. The initiate is separated from his or her usual social setting and role.
* margin or limen (Latin for “threshold”). The initiate’s social status is unclear, and he or she enters a new social setting where the rules are ambiguous and/or contrary to previous rules.
* aggregation. The initiate is reintegrated into society in his or her new social status.
The middle, liminal phase is what is relevant here. This is where I see the parallels between BDSM sexuality.
Liminal entities, such as neophytes in initiation or puberty rites, may be represented as possessing nothing. They may be disguised as monsters, wear only a strip of clothing, or even go naked, to demonstrate that as liminal beings they have no status, property, insignia, secular clothing indicating rank or role, position in a kinship system — in short, nothing that may distinguish them from their fellow neophytes or initiands. Their behavior is normally passive or humble; they must obey their instructors implicitly, and accept arbitrary punishment without complaint. It is as theyou they are being reduced or ground down to a uniform condition to be fashioned anew and endowed with additional powers to enable them to cope with their new station in life.
Turner refers to a contrast between structure and what he calls communitas. Structure is the rules and roles of society, the “hard” or “conscious” aspects. Communitas is the opposite, the sense of being emotionally, intuitively integrated into humanity, soul to soul contact. The purpose of a rite of passage is to take a person out of structure, make them experience communitas so they understand that society is more than just rules and roles, and put them back into society.
Two key masochist texts, Pauline Reage’s The Story of O and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs, operate much like rituals, but with very protracted liminal states. Severin emerges from his affair with Wanda as a new man, cured of his obsession with domineering women. Similar regenerations occur in Sacher-Masoch’s other works. In his real life, however, Sacher-Masoch had a repetitive obsession with being mistreated by women, and he never achieved the transformation of Severin.
O, however, goes deeper and deeper into liminality, never completely returning to society. (There was an essay on the web about the ritual and magical aspects of the novel, but it appears to be offline.)
Anne Rice’s The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty
The problem with applying this model to BDSM is that you have, in the liminal phase of a BDSM scene, an intensification of roles and rules. I think you can salvage this by saying that roles are chosen in the liminal phase instead of assigned. In structure, we are assigned roles, while in communitas, we are free to indulge our fantasies and meet each other soul-to-soul.
Now, we don’t get a lot of liminality these days in modern industrial societies. Instead we get the liminoid experiences, which have traits of liminality but don’t bring about real changes in social status.
All of this goes towards developing a historical/anthropological/sociological theory of what BDSM is.
