Playing on the Edge: Sadomasochism, Risk, and Intimacy (33 page)

for those granted access, but also for those whose presentations have been, in a sense, compromised by the altered behavior.

The boundaries that are transgressed in SM range in severity and in conse- quence, but the opportunities for boundary transgression, and therefore for inti- macy, are always mutually created rather than seized. Through these constructed transgressive experiences, which grant players emotional and physical access not normally granted, SM play actively creates the sense of knowing another and of being known. SM results in feelings of intimacy because it creates intimate experience. Rather than exploring edges together, SM players are
defining
their edges together, creating the space in which the edges can be explored, and then responding to one another in the very ways that
constitute
the edges themselves. These experiences of self-revelation and self-disclosure, and of access to the same in others, are transgressive in means, in kind, and in form. In the presence of others and, indeed through interacting with others, these experi- ences of intimacy stem from the transgression of interpersonal boundaries. The public nature of SM scenes does not, then, detract from the intimacy created through boundary transgression; rather, it widens the circle of intimate rela- tions to people who watch the interaction. The revelation and disclosure acces- sible to onlookers is passive, but they are still accessible, and still not normally disclosed or revealed. A sense of group intimacy is created through this public

transgressive experience and the revelations and disclosures that emerge.

Beyond that, however, SM scenes themselves are sites of boundary transgres- sion. Because violence and eroticism do not comfortably converge elsewhere, the site of its confluence
itself
becomes transgressive; most people do not dis- close to most other people what is disclosed in and through SM play. Normative boundaries between accepted and unaccepted social interaction, assault and consent, violence and sex, masculine and feminine, sane and insane, safe and unsafe, power and powerlessness, and dominance and submission are explored through SM play, as well as (sometimes) physical boundaries between con- sciousness and unconsciousness and life and death.

At least part of the goal in all edgework is the risk experience itself. Col- laborative edgework seeks the added thrill of depending on one another for the success of the risk-taking. All collaborative edgework requires and constructs trust (and therefore risk) in order to transgress social and interpersonal bound- aries. These transgressions also construct intimacy as they grant particular and unique access. This particular kind of collaborative edgework—that which constructs intimate experience through the joint transgression of interpersonal and social boundaries—is also therefore “intimate edgework.”

The Feminist Question

SM revels in the space of potential (and multi-layered) violations. Through these repeated trusts and risks, SM play is a path to victory in the competition for intimate access to another. This is, on one level, easily read as consistent with heteronormative eroticism. Women in Caeden are more likely to bottom to men than to top them; men clamor to access them, and they are accessed only when they risk being hurt. Men who top can become successful clamorers, gaining access to intimate moments through repeated assurances that they can simultaneously violate women and keep them safe.

Even aside from the potential to invert hegemonic gender roles by allowing women to clamor for access to men, the parallel of SM to the dominant structure of heteronormative eroticism is not as simple as this. The long-debated and high- ly contentious questions surrounding women’s engagement in SM can be framed differently if we understand SM as edgework. For example, tops risk much more than would-be seducers do. The otherwise-inaccessible aspects of selves to which tops grant bottoms access are confessions of sadism—manifestations of cruelty and aspirations to superiority. These are socially dangerous confessions, and their practice can be physically and emotionally dangerous as well. Additionally, the empowerment of bottoming is complicated and seems paradoxical; SM blurs distinctions between active and passive and subject and object.

This trust-risk-intimacy cycle draws on age-old binaries, including good/ evil, safety/danger, clean/dirty, and sacred/profane. It also challenges these binaries—from moment to moment and scene to scene, player to player, deploying meanings and performances of masculinity and femininity. Men, women, and queer-identified people inhabit, perform, and construct good and evil in different relationships to each other. These questions are too complex to be reduced to the eroticization of male dominance that feminist theorists have illustrated lies at the crux of patriarchal power.
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They are intertwined also with notions of risk-taking. Social contexts not only determine which risks are socially acceptable and for whom, but also define what is (and is not) risky. Risk-taking is shaped, as Sandra Walklate notes, by fear, and fear is gendered; risk-taking behaviors acquire meaning in the context of gendered relationships to fear (Walklate 1997).

As Elizabeth Stanko has argued, the space for potential violation is the space in which women live their everyday lives. The continued immersion in cycles of potential violations of body and mind, viewed from the radical feminist perspec-

tive, is a ritualistic engagement in women’s oppression, the repeated enjoyment of the playing out dynamics of male violence on the body. These cycles, though, are not merely cycles of violence and potential violation, but cycles of
trust.
From this same perspective, trust, in regard to the safety and strength of the body, is
not
part of the space in which women live their everyday lives. In Stanko’s analysis, women’s fear of violence translates to women’s fear of men; women move through the world afraid for their physical and sexual safety and men do not—even when men are at higher risk of assault (Stanko 1987). Chan and Rigakos elaborate, “Women negotiate the risk of personal harm in the context of knowing that their assailant will most probably be a man” (2002, 743). What Stanko calls the “bra- vado” of men is the sense of being able to handle risk, of being able to withstand whatever attack may occur (1987). Men move through their worlds with trust, if not that they will not be assaulted, then at least that they will emerge intact.

The immersion in spaces of potential violation, then, may constitute and con- struct women’s own bravado. Through bottoming, women confront and with- stand and symbolically survive male violence. Women work the edge in SM of their everyday fears of violation, flirting, challenging, daring their would-be vio- lators. These women are not
celebrating
violation, but actively defying the cul- tural proscription to live in fear of it. Chan and Rigakos’s contention that the “thrill-seeking aspect of edgework is less present in women’s involvement in risky behaviours” underestimates the thrill of the space for violation. In much the same way that skydivers (Lyng 1990; Laurendeau 2006) prove their ability to control or defeat the natural world in the face of the threat to (masculine) order, women prove their ability to defeat men in the face of the threat to their order—safety and caution. Chan and Rigakos recognize this as edgework in their analysis of gendered risk, but they neglect to explore the
thrill
of the metaphoric victory. An edgeworker who revels in the sense of control over the natural world relishes the rush of power that comes with having ascended the mountain (albeit with a rope tied around his waist). The rush of power that accompanies having survived a knife to the throat or a bag over one’s head (albeit with a man who is not “supposed” to kill her) facilitates a similar sense of control. Viewed this way, SM play for women negotiates the edge of everyday fears and affirms their ability to confront the ultimate threat: the hands of a man, literally and metaphorically. A woman in an SM scene can stare into the eyes of a man who
looks
as if he could rape or kill her, and feel as if she is daring him to try. Whether women are topping men or bottoming to them, the potential for men to “snap,” to overpower them, to lay claim to women’s bodies, and to violate their trust is part of the chaotic edge. This edge for women may be no less thrilling than the edge of the cliff that threatens

the rock-climber’s sense of order through its reminder of his mortality. From the top or from the bottom, by playing with intersections of violence and eroticism with men, women are also asserting control over the uncontrollable—trusting men whom they “should” not trust not to take advantage of them. Elizabeth Stanko illustrates that for women, risk is “about misogyny and the continued perpetration of women’s oppression through fear of crime and blame for their situation” (1997, 492). SM play is a space in which
women
can insist, “I will not be hurt . . . even if I put myself in harm’s way.” It is a path to feelings of invincibil- ity to which only men have historically been privy, in a particular and deeply gendered context.

On still another level, this reveling in fear constitutes emotional edgework. The moment in which a bottom feels compelled to safeword but does not is the journey to the emotional edge. These are also the moments in which the top’s desire to hear cries and see blood feels visceral, and she almost says, “Never mind—I don’t want to feel this way. This is not good.” This emotional edge- work is not the attempt to maintain control over emotions that threaten to overwhelm (and thereby jeopardize the success of physical edgework), but the negotiation of the boundary between emotional chaos and emotional order. Emotional edgework travels between metaphoric life and death, between emo- tional awareness (“I know what I’m feeling and it makes sense to me”) and emotional unintelligibility. Emotional edgework, framed this way, is not about the management of emotions during intense moments, but about actively seek- ing the lines between emotional control and the loss of emotional control.

This is not an argument that women engage in SM as a conscious (or even subconscious) strategy for coping with oppression or the pervasiveness of male violence. Framing women’s voluntary risk-taking in SM (or elsewhere) as responses to patriarchal oppression while simultaneously dismissing the thrill of the risk reproduces the limitations of conceptualizations that Peter Don- nelly (2004) calls “risk response” theories. We can simultaneously recognize the social contexts in which risk-taking acquires meaning and reject the notion that risk-taking is always a coping mechanism with some (ostensibly unfortunate) social condition.

Marginality and Intimacy

In Caeden, experiences of marginality inform and shape quests for what is experienced as superlative intimacy. Among people who view themselves as having spent much of their lives in peripheral positions, this intimate edge-

work seeks to know and be known to another; it grants and achieves access to presentations of the self not otherwise presented. The community thus becomes both a means and the consequence of intimate edgework, and as such its mean- ing in the lives of its members is constituted as “home,” a metaphor for a sense of belonging, safety—and a network of intimate relationships. If intimacy is both highly valued and inherently competitive, then it is likely that we seek it, but differ in how well equipped we are for this quest. Among people who are navigating the multiple stigmas common in this community, access to inti- macy may be particularly challenging. Cultural capital in the intimacy market includes social skills, good hygiene, a healthy weight, and conformity to gender norms—signifiers to the world that we are worthy of being known. Without this capital, paths to intimacy are traveled differently.

I wish here to be especially clear: I am
not
contending that social marginality leaves SM participants with little choice but to turn to SM as the sole path to intimacy. The social marginality among people in Caeden is multi-leveled and complex, and it emerges at least in part from extraordinary creativity, intel- ligence, and nontraditional choices in all realms. If intimacy can be under- stood as access through boundary transgression, it must be noted that SM play transgresses more interpersonal boundaries in number, by more extreme and riskier measures, than conventional paths to intimacy. It is one among many nonconformist choices for the people in Caeden.

The incidental androgyny in the Caeden community provides a backdrop for gender performances in members’ SM play. These performances, however, occur also in a social context in which gender expectations are less clear and arguably less rigid than any time in recent history. I do not share Anthony Giddens’s optimism that the pure relationship is empirical evidence of a chang- ing gender order, nor do I believe that SM, by itself, is a mechanism for wider structural change. Lynn Jamieson maintains that “the creative energies of many social actors are still engaged in coping with or actively sustaining old inequali- ties rather than transforming them” (1999, 491). On one level, this is certainly the case, but I do not view this as an either/or proposition. The irreconcilable tensions that have so long plagued feminist theory emerge precisely from view- ing the power problematic as an either/or proposition.

Intimate Edgework

Much more than it is about sex, SM is about intimacy. That sex is also often about intimacy does not mean that SM should be understood as an alternative

kind of sex. SM is about constructing intimacy through social interaction. It is about obtaining access, securing it, granting it, promising it, daring one to take it, and testing it. The eroticism of SM is thus intertwined (as is the eroticism of sex) with ideas about power and access. An interactionist analysis of SM play illustrates two distinct axes along which intimacy is constructed in everyday life. The first is through the transgression of moral, social, ethical, and per- sonal boundaries. The second is the immersion in trust-risk cycles that create spaces for potential violations of trust. Outside SM, both of these are separate paths to intimate experience, for each provides access to pieces of selves that we understand to be protected from most other people. In SM, these axes intersect to construct intensely intimate experiences.