Ritual, structure, communitas and BDSM

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Nov 172006
 

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.

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Marcus Wood’s “Blind memory”

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Oct 252006
 

About 2/3rds of the way through through Marcus Wood’s Blind Memory, I’m convinced that the imagery of Atlantic slavery is a very important aspect in the evolution of BDSM. There are many, many written and visual examples of slaves being beaten and otherwise tormented in abolitionist texts. Frequently, these images become an opportunity to depict the black female body nude or semi-nude in extremis.

Willam Blake engraving

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Origins of slavery as a lifestyle

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Oct 072006
 

When I first started reading about the Munby-Cullwick relationship, I had assumed it was based on classical slavery, which I thought a well-educated English gentleman would have read about. Then, when I saw how Munby drew working class women to strongly resemble caricatures of black men, I decided it had more to do with a once-removed image of American slavery, transmitted across the Atlantic in books like Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe and blackface minstrelry.

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Christianity and voluntary pain

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Jun 152006
 

After thinking about the Jesus courted by the Christian soul narrative, I’m leaning towards the idea that there is something specific about Christianity that fostered sadomasochism.

I didn’t get to read all of it, but Lisa Silverman’s Tortured Subjects : Pain, Truth, and the Body in Early Modern France supported this idea. Christianity has two contradictory ways of thinking about physical punishment.

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Top me, Jesus, through the dungeon of life

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Jun 092006
 

I’ve considered the idea that there is something specific to Christianity that fostered BDSM, which no other culture did in quite the same way. It sounds good, but it’s a little too glib and simplistic to be persuasive.

But then I found something in David Kunzle’s History of the Comic Strip, Vol. 1 (University of California Press, 1973) that made me think there is something fundamentally kinky about Christianity after all.

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Stallybrass and White’s “The Politics and Poetics of Trangression”

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Apr 132006
 

I’m currently reading Peter Stallybrass’ and Allon White’s The politics and poetics of Transgression (Cornell University Press, 1986), which is largely based on Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque. BDSM certainly fits the definition of a world turned inside out and upside down, where people chose their roles from a variety of options. The old become young (ageplay and infantilism), men become women and women become men (genderplay), the weak become strong (femdom), rape becomes love (rape play), confinement becomes freedom and pain becomes pleasure.

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The masochistic penance of T.E. Lawrence

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Jan 062006
 

In 1917, the same year a generation of Englishmen were being slaughtered on the killing fields of Europe, Thomas Edward Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia, was captured by Turks at Der’a, beaten and threatened with rape. By his own account, he liked it.

“I remembered smiling idly at him, for a delicious warmth, probably sexual, was swelling through me; and then that he flung up his arm and hacked with the full length of his whip into my groin. This doubled me half-over, screaming, or, rather, trying impotently to scream, only shuddering through my open mouth. One giggled with amusement. A voice cried, ‘Shame, you’ve killed him,” Another slash followed. A roaring, and my eyes went black; while within me the core of life seemed to heave slowly up through the rending nerves, expelled from its body by this last indescribable pang.”

Lawrence survived and escaped, but not without his experience leaving a lasting effect on him.

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