Power for Pleasure

In this timely work, Weiss interrogates the purported transgressiveness of BDSM subcultures and practices using ethnographic research methods and the insights of feminism and queer theory. BDSM culture is understood, not as a utopian realm of free expression that escapes the influence of everyday life, but rather as ‘a formally organized community with very particular social and educational practices’ (p5), which is shot through with ‘often-invisible race and class privilege’ (p5). The mention of ‘circuits’ in the subtitle of the book alludes to the key thesis Weiss propounds: namely that the BDSM lifestyle and the neo-liberal marketplace exist in a relationship of mutual interdependency, rather than the former offering any kind of inherent critique of, or challenge to, the latter. And, more broadly, Weiss’s circuitry imagery suggests that sexuality is always in a relationship with economic and social power structures and hierarchies, rather than lying beyond them. Indeed, for Weiss, ‘although sexuality is imagined as a break from material social relations, sexuality is, instead, the raw material of these circuits’ (p230).

The research that led to this book involved Weiss’s thorough submersion as a participant observer in the Bay Area BDSM scene. Weiss attended a number of events such as play parties, munches (social events where sexual acts are discouraged), clubs, fund-raising auctions such as the ‘Byzantine Bazaar’, and educational classes. She worked as a volunteer archivist for the Society of Janus. She also interviewed sixty-one participants whose interviews form the basis of the data on which she draws in analyzing the subculture, its practitioners, and its practices. Weiss establishes a dichotomy (that some scholars, such as Gayle Rubin, would likely question) between the ‘old guard’ and ‘new guard’ of BDSM participants in her field. The ‘old guard’ describes the gay leather men who lived in the Folsom Street district of San Francisco prior to the AIDS crisis and the area’s gentrification, and who are seen as now existing on the margins of mainstream consumer culture. The ‘new guard’ comprises younger players who self-identify largely as heterosexual, bisexual, or pansexual; are internet-savvy and often employed in the IT sector; and are heavily consumerist in lifestyle and sex-style. Weiss is particularly interested in how much money these ‘new guard’ BDSMers spend on toys, costumes and other paraphernalia, seeing in the financial commitment to the scene the players make one of the main ways in which ‘SM produces both subjects and communities’ via engagement in ‘consumer practices’ as well as the acquisition of ‘SM techniques’ (p111).

The argumentational thread drawing together the various analyses in Techniques of Pleasure is the idea that the alternative scene of BDSM is alternative only in very limited ways. It fails, for example, to exclude mainstream prejudices and stereotypes; indeed it shores up many normative assumptions about gender, heterosex and race, replicating, at the very least, the appearance of systems of oppression within the community space. Describing the various participants in the Byzantine Bazaar, she asks ‘how do we read the political effects of … selling black bodies at a pretend slave auction in front of an almost exclusively white audience?’ (pp5–6). Yet, Weiss also reported some disquiet and demurring among the audience at the spectacle of the black woman offered ‘for sale’ by her white ‘master’, suggesting that the question she poses is already - at least implicitly - working on those participating in the community. That the problem of race remains implicit, however, is returned to in Weiss’s Chapter 4, where she explores the similarity between BDSM dynamics and mainstream sexual and relationship norms. Many players interviewed by Weiss, keen to insist upon the transgressiveness of BDSM and to reinforce the boundary between it and its vanilla counterpart, articulated concern that, too often, heterosexual BDSM partnerships take the form of dominant men and submissive women in a constellation that seems to ape the heteronormative stereotype and the patriarchal power dynamic. Yet, Weiss notes that disparities in class and race between dominant and submissive partners remain largely...