Playing on the Edge: Sadomasochism, Risk, and Intimacy (34 page)

SM conflates these paths to intimate experience, creating for its participants a sense of higher, deeper, more intense intimacy. The edgework of SM is not only collaborative; it is also intimate. Intimacy in SM is not only an outcome of collaborating the edge, but
central to its appeal.
“Intimate edgework” is not merely “collaborative edgework” that results in intimate feelings; it is distinct from collaborative edgework in that it takes interpersonal access to others as its objective.

The immersion in repeated cycles of risk and trust represents the ultimate boundary, continually creating and recreating spaces of potential violation. From the top and from the bottom, whether the scene is D/s or straight SM, SM play transgresses all sorts of boundaries. These transgressions themselves construct intimacy, but the cycle of risk and trust is the ultimate edge on which all SM plays—the edge between being violated and not being violated.

SM is a site in which creative energies are directed toward all of these things—coping, reproducing, subverting, and transforming gender as a power structure. SM play as it occurs in Caeden can only occur not in a patriarchal context, but in a
changing
patriarchal power context. It is only in this context, amid these changes, and from the inside out, that we can begin to understand the resistance to reductionism that underlies the words of the members of the SM community nationwide who call SM “what it is that we do.”

Concluding Notes
187

Concluding Notes:

Erotic Subjectivity and the Construction of the Field

The postmodern view of ethnography as a jointly constructed narrative, rather than an accurate objective depiction of social reality, has gained support in recent years. Despite increasing crossover between the two, questions concern- ing the role of the ethnographer remain unsettled. In the field and in her writ- ing, what the ethnographer “does” with her feelings, her presence, her narrative, her voice, her body, and her sexuality is a matter of interest for ethnographers across disciplines and intellectual inheritances. At times, the objectives of eth- nography themselves are at issue. The disagreements between “realist” (Van Maanen 1988) or “academic” ethnography (Rinehart 1998) and postmodernist ethnographies that have been termed “interpretive “ (Denzin 1997), “fictional” (Rinehart 1998), and “evocative” (Anderson 2006a) are not necessarily over the roles of subjectivity and introspection, but over their intentions. Advo- cates of subjectivity in ethnography have been accused of navel-gazing (Jarvie 1998), and indulging in “a celebration of the personality of the anthropologist” (Ryang 2000). Postmodernist ethnographers have responded with claims that realist ethnographers fail to recognize that “understanding is visceral” (Den- zin 1995) and have called analytic ethnography an attempt “to contain, limit, and silence the personal, or the self, in the research context” (Burnier 2006). Some scholars subscribe to the possibility of an integrated approach (Anderson 1999, Lerum 2001) and others have ventured examples of integration, blending personal introspection with conventional analytical approaches (Ronai 1995; Frank 2002). I have endeavored to situate this book in this blended space.

187

Long after most of this manuscript had been written, I had a fascinating conversation with a colleague from another institution. Anna
1
had read a paper I had written, based on this chapter, in which I touted the virtues of subjective analysis (Newmahr 2008). She wanted more information about my subjective experience of SM than I had shared in that article: Did I enjoy my play? What did I like? What didn’t I like? Did I find it erotic? Are these people my friends? Why didn’t I stay in the community once my research was finished?

I answered only her last question: because I was finished. I wrote the dis- sertation, landed a job, and moved to another city. I left the other questions unanswered. I did not see (and I am not certain that I see even now) how these questions would further, enrich, or usefully complicate an understanding of the people with whom I had spent so much of my time during these years. Still, her inquiries troubled me for reasons that I view as relevant to this book, and to ethnography more generally. They underscored an important question about where to draw the line in subjective analysis and representation of the self in ethnographic work.

While divulging the researcher’s emotional responses to field experiences may be valuable, it is not
necessarily
so. I agree with critics of this kind of eth- nography that all too often we assume that our emotional experiences in the field are relevant and instructive to our audience. There are, though, aspects of my subjective experience in the field that are germane to how my understand- ing came to be what it is, rather than something else. These are important pieces of the puzzle of SM. This illustrates some of the intersections between my own subjective analysis—that is, taking myself as the subject of analysis during fieldwork—and the central arguments of this book. The following sec- tion begins with my field notes about my first SM scene, and explores the ways in which my subjective analysis informed my project.

Emotional Experiences in SM Play

I told Russ I would be ready in a minute. When I returned to the room, he wasn’t there. Suddenly someone grabbed my hair from behind me and pushed me up to the cross at the wall, putting my arms above my head. My heart was pounding; I knew it was Russ, but I also knew people were watching us—watching me. He slid the blindfold over my eyes (which made me slightly less self-conscious) and gently pulled my hair out from underneath it. He lifted my shirt over my head and removed it. He cuffed

my left wrist and fastened it to the bolt above. I remember feeling relieved;

I hadn’t known what to do with my hands. He did the same with my right hand. I spread my feet apart a little bit, and he hit them back and forth to indicate that he wanted me to spread them further, which was, it turned out, a good idea, and I was soon glad he did it.

He trailed his fingers along my shoulders and back before beginning to flog me with a very light, barely stingy touch, which felt nice. It changed rather quickly; I don’t really remember the transition; he hit me and I thought “Whoa, that was hard . . .”—but it didn’t quite hurt. [ . . . ]

A few strokes later, I forgot entirely about the people watching me, and about how I was going to remember everything or when I was going to write it. I also forgot about Russ. In the beginning I had been picturing him back there; I could hear him breathing. But at some point I thought of nothing except the feeling . . . I don’t think I’ve ever felt that single-minded before. The only thing on my mind was when the next blow was going

to come.

It’s a difficult sensation to describe. It’s quite forceful; I was aware that it was somehow
hard.
I knew that he was swinging it hard and I knew it was landing hard; I felt the profundity of the blows . . . but I never thought “Ow.” It’s not an “ow,” really. It feels like the noise you make when you

get into a really hot bath and it’s too hot but you like it anyway . . . a sigh and a moan at the same time. No matter how hard it was, it felt like that sound—intense but ambiguous.

He stepped up behind me three or four times, grabbing my hair and checking in on me. He asked me how I was doing. I told him I was fine.

Another time he came close and grabbed my hair. I said “Hi!” and laughed. I think he laughed a little bit . . . he said “Hi” and asked how I was doing. I felt giddy and just . . . gleeful. I felt in love—not with anyone in particular, but somehow head over heels. [ . . . ]

Afterward, I was most definitely a little out of it. I had a very hard time remembering that Simon—new to the scene that night—was someone I didn’t already know, and I kept speaking to him with too much familiarity, asking him, “You were in here? Right there? The whole time??” I remember someone talking about the childhood rhyme Fuzzy Wuzzy, but I couldn’t quite follow the conversation. I babbled about something—I don’t remem- ber what—but I caught myself at some point and thought, or maybe said aloud, “I’m not making very much sense.” I was talking to Simon when Russ asked me from across the room whether I was okay. I made a thumbs- up sign and said, “I’m aces.” Aces?

Before this scene occurred, I was, like most people, someone who had never done anything like it. I had never (at least not since childhood) had my hair pulled, nor been shirtless in view of a dozen other people. I had certainly never stood blindfolded and cuffed to a cross while a person I barely knew hit me repeatedly on the back with a large leather flogger. It had never occurred to me that the experience of flogging might be akin to that of a rigorous deep tissue massage, and though I was aware of the claim that SM could cause the altered state commonly referred to as “subspace,” I did not quite believe it.

The boundary between freedom of movement and restraint was also new, and the fact that I was restrained in public was significant. I was aware of my ambiva- lence about engaging in this symbolic space. This performance of powerlessness was troublesome, and it fascinated me. The contradiction between being too tough to do this and being tough enough to do this was palpable. Finally, although I was overwhelmed by intellectual and emotional ambivalence at the beginning of the scene, the intensity of the sensory assault had facilitated in me an uncharacteristic and powerful single-mindedness by the time it ended.

My analysis of my own internal and external responses to this scene paved the way for a much broader perspective on SM. Because I did not think of myself as a person who likes pain, my understanding of the sensations I was experiencing was muddy and confusing. Preliminary research had encouraged me to think about the pain/pleasure dichotomy, but I had no lived experience on which to draw. I found myself completely unable to determine whether to categorize this flogging as painful. It felt, I later tried to explain to friends and colleagues, “like a 500-pound gorilla pounding me across the upper back with his forearm”—diffuse but very hard. Despite my best intellectual efforts, the fact that the sensation was pleasurable seemed to indicate to me that it could not (therefore) be painful. This inability to understand “pain” that did not quite “hurt” led me to explore the conceptual dissonance between eroticism and violence in the Caeden community (and beyond).

I was also very aware that I was feeling grateful to Russ, which surprised and troubled me. I expected to feel anger, catharsis, resentment, victimization, or turmoil of one sort or another, all of which I had been prepared to explore in a participant-observation study of SM. I did not expect gratitude to be a salient and profound part of my experience. My first impulse was to pathologize my response; was this something similar to “capture-bonding,” the psychological explanation for Stockholm syndrome? Knowing little about Stockholm syn- drome, but doubting that a forty-minute consensual flogging scene would have produced it, I moved beyond the discourse of pathology.

On the most comfortable level, my gratitude to Russ was professional. I had moved from observer to participant. For the first time I was fully convinced that I would not be able to understand SM without doing SM. Because Russ was the person who had, in a sense, facilitated what was a role shift for me, I felt grateful to him for having helped me to move my project along. But I was also compelled to confront a more personal gratitude. The intensity of the sensation had stopped the constant barrage of ever-racing thoughts, an effect that I had not anticipated and with which I was tremendously impressed. The power of this bodily experience trumped the power of my compulsion to think, and I felt grateful to Russ for what I was experiencing, paradoxically, as liberation.

I was also glad to be unharmed. By this time, I was familiar with the basics of SM safety, and I felt comfortable with Russ. However, I was aware that an accident in such a situation could have been injurious, and unlike the myriad risks in everyday life, this one was not easily justifiable for me. Ironically, I felt closer to Russ because we had entered into a situation in which the possibility of harm was higher than usual, and he had not caused me harm. My apprecia- tion that I was not injured, then, translated into gratitude toward Russ—that he was skilled enough to avoid harming me. Put in the terms of the community discourse, Russ had “kept me safe”—even as it was at his hands that I could have been otherwise. The fact that I had fully expected this outcome did not mitigate the gratitude I felt for its arrival.

These introspections about my own play contributed to a deeper under- standing of how SM works. They provided conversation topics and specific questions to ask during discussions as well as interviews. They helped me to discern which aspects of experience appeared to be mine alone, and which were shared—and by whom. The feeling of gratitude for the ability of play to “stop” a racing mind, for example, was volunteered time and again, in interviews and casual conversation. This sense of gratitude is bound up with notions of power, submission, and dominance in complex ways in SM. It is not part of the dis- course, though; had I not experienced it and chosen to examine this part of my experience, I would likely not have investigated its role in SM interactions.