Playing on the Edge: Sadomasochism, Risk, and Intimacy (4 page)

As is typical in ethnographic interviews, these were not limited to SM- related content; respondents were asked to share their life histories. Interest and participation in SM was an additional, but not sole, or even primary, the- matic focus. Interviews were loosely structured; I used a content guideline to ensure thematic uniformity, but interviews were flexible and dynamic in terms of structure, off-topic conversation, and sequence. Most interviews occurred in respondents’ homes or offices, and where this was not possible, interviews were conducted at a restaurant or in my office. On average, interviews lasted six and- a-half hours, with a range of between four and eleven hours. (It should be noted that this is “tape time”; interviews often included breaks for lunch or dinner. When this occurred, meal times were not counted as interview time, unless we decided to continue the interview through the meal.) In total, I conducted twenty ethnographic-thematic interviews. Most, including the longest, were conducted in one session; three were continued into a second session because of fatigue or lateness of the hour.

Interviews were tape-recorded, and I transcribed them verbatim, with the occasional exception of a bracketed description of an extremely lengthy and off- topic digression. In all excerpts throughout this book, ellipses indicate pauses in the respondents’ speech, and bracketed ellipses indicate editorial omission. I have omitted idiosyncratic utterances such as “uh” and “um.” I coded field notes, interview transcripts, and my field journals, multiple times, and recoded as themes emerged and my analysis developed.

I continued my participation in the scene (although not at the level of immersion that I had during the first year) until 2006, when I completed my interviews. Shortly thereafter, I left the field to begin writing.

Scope and Limitations

I was not able to be as inclusive as I would have liked, across sexual orienta- tion or race. Though there is considerable social overlap, the SM community in Caeden comprises a gay male SM scene, a lesbian SM scene, and a pansexual scene, and it was in the latter that I spent nearly all of my time. Additionally, the community is disproportionately white. I was, however, able to be inclusive across gender and SM identification labels.

Because there is so little contemporary work on SM and its participants, it is crucial to note that my discussion of “the scene” is not intended to be syn- onymous with “people who like SM.” The scene in Caeden is a public, social network of people who observe and engage in SM in designated public spaces. The lifestyle in some SM communities in the United States is built around pri- vate parties. Throughout my time in the field, I also attended private parties. Although certainly people who play in public also play in private, in Caeden, the private party “circuit” is different in important ways from the larger scene. Private play attracts different people, for arguably different reasons, and it is differently constrained, shaped, and engaged.

In Caeden, at least a portion of the private party circuit overlaps with the swinger community. The broader public scene was, at the time,
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distinct from the swinger community in notable regards. Public swing parties, for example, may involve “light SM,” but are not likely to involve heavier play, and public SM parties do not involve anal, vaginal, or oral intercourse. (Practices at private parties in both groups are dictated by the hosts.)

This book is not, on the whole, about SM as it happens in bedrooms or dur- ing private parties. It is about SM as it is engaged in the public SM scene in this particular city. It is about lifestyle in Caeden, the people who live it, and what it is that they do. These differences are relevant to the relationships between eroticism, violence, and intimacy that I explore here. It may be, for example, that gay leather scenes are less likely to frame their SM around the erotic/vio- lent problematic, or that scenes that are more racially diverse are more likely to do so. This analysis should not, therefore, be understood as applicable to other SM communities in a quotidian sense.

Issues of Representation

REFLEXIVITY AND SUBJECTIVITY

The ethnographic endeavor to understand a culture requires what Clifford Geertz described as the experience of anthropology: “[Y]ou put yourself in its way and it enmeshes you” (1973, 44). In some cases (such as when the cul- ture in question is that of an SM community) the truth of this enmeshing can approach the literal. As has been true for other studies of communities and cul- tures built around carnal experience (Frank 2002; Wacquant 2004), this work necessitated intellectual and theoretical attention to the body as epistemology. In particular, it demanded attention to my body as a source of data and a tool for meaning-making. As both the site of what I needed to understand and how I was to understand it, my body functioned as subject, object, and method, for there is no way to understand SM, or its participants, without a sense of what it feels like to engage in it.

As I explore further in the conclusion to this book, my own participation in SM illuminated dynamics of SM and undercurrents in this community that I could not have otherwise identified. These aspects of SM experience, though common among participants, are not readily apparent in the discourse of the community. Some of these experiences are taken for granted to such an extent that they are uninteresting to community members, and some are simply unex- plored. My willingness to examine the very personal sense that I made of SM during my fieldwork—how I responded to it and how it “made me feel”—gen- erated formative insights.

Therefore, in my endeavor to represent (and construct) carnal understand- ing through words on pages, I have included a prologue at the beginning of each chapter of this book. These sections are depictions of actual events, as I experienced them. These narratives were constructed from my field notes, but they are not necessarily verbatim. In a few instances, they have been edited or blended, resulting in representations not entirely true to time and space simul- taneously. They are creative representations of authentic experiences, products far more of my recollection than of my imagination, but products of both none- theless. In this way I follow Katherine Frank’s decision to incorporate creative representation to convey the ethnographer’s felt sense (2002).

My use of these narratives does not, in my view, situate this book as auto- ethnography, in any of its quickly changing senses. As it has conventionally

been used by anthropologists, the term “auto-ethnography” refers to eth- nographic work in one’s own culture (Hayano 1979; Strathern 1987; Dorst 1989). This is the way that I understand this term. This is in part because it is the way I became accustomed to understanding it. It is also because it makes sense to me to distinguish between insider and outsider perspectives when studying communities, and to delineate the movement between one and the other.

In sociology, “autoethnography” has been more recently adapted, with nota- ble success, to mean a kind of writing of the self (Denzin 1989; Ellis 1998, 2004). In this practice, the writer draws heavily on autobiographical narra- tive; indeed, the deliberate deployment of literary devices is often one of the characteristics of autoethnography (Ellis 2004). Yet there appears to me to be a widespread misperception that all instances of creative representation in socio- logical writing are also ethnographic.

I do not view this work as autoethnographic because I do not take the “self” as my project or as my analytical focus, and I do not treat myself as a biographi- cal subject outside the context of the field. If autoethnography has become, as Gans understands it, “basically autobiography written by sociologists” (1999), this book is not autoethnographic. I use descriptions of my field experiences
toward
a richer and more sociological understanding of the members of this community and of the social world they inhabit, as I believe ethnographers have long done, whether consciously or not.

Norman Denzin claims that “the work of the good realist ethnographer has always been to study and understand a social setting, a social group, or a social problem . . . these researchers were self-reflexive but not self-obsessed” (2006, 421). It was this kind of ethnographer I aspired to be when I began. Yet all ethnographic work is, on some level, “about” the ethnographer, for reflexivity “makes a problem out of . . . the figure of the fieldworker” (Strath- ern 2004, 8). During my fieldwork and my writing, I was consistently and rigorously reflexive. Nonetheless, I believe that there is an important distinc- tion, and a challenging balance, to be maintained between subjectivity in the analytical process and subjective focus in the representation of a community or subculture. I am therefore more absent from this representation than I was from my process and from my writing. Barbara Tedlock notes the conven- tion of publishing ethnographic diaries following the publication of a realist ethnography (Tedlock 1991), rather than integrating reflexive insights into the text. In a contemporary twist, ethnographic texts include reflexive insights, but often in the introductory chapter or in an appendix.
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Subjectivity and

reflexivity inform and shape my analysis throughout this work, but they are, for the most part, contained (and constrained) within a chapter situated at the end of the book.

CONFIDENTIALITY

Caeden is a tightly knit community of SM and sex activists, and generally edu- cated and intellectually curious people. They are likely to read what is written about them, and because the prologues are “true,” they will likely recognize one another. Though pseudonymous “scene names” (such as Dakota)
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are not unusual in the community, these obviously do not protect the confidentiality of my informants within the community. Because my interviews were com- prehensive life histories, I was privileged with information that is normally not available to other people in the community. I have therefore taken addi- tional precautions to protect the privacy of my respondents. I did not disclose to anyone in the community whom I did and did not interview. This required some juggling on my part, but because the community is so small and because I anticipated that at least some of the members might read this book, I went to considerable lengths to maintain anonymity about who was, and who was not, an interview respondent. Some people were unconcerned with this. Others were highly concerned.

In the text, in addition to the standard protection of changing proper nouns, the pseudonyms I use in the narrative sections (prologues) are not consistent between those and the rest of the text. Pseudonyms are consistent across pro- logues but not between prologues and text; for example, “Russ” in the prologue is “Russ” in all other prologues (and in field notes in which his actions would be recognizable to community members). If, however, Russ appeared in the text as a respondent, he would have a different pseudonym. For the same reason, dates that appear in interview excerpts may have been changed. Additionally, I make no mention at all of respondents’ race or ethnicity anywhere in this book, because people of color are so underrepresented in the community that to do otherwise would itself constitute a breach of confidentiality. However, SM identifications (i.e., submissive, dominant, top, bottom) remain true to the identities provided by my respondents at the time.

Because of these constraints, the people in this book cannot be as richly understood as I would have liked. Ideally, the same people who appear in pro- logues and in field notes—whom the reader “sees” engaged in play—would be recognizable as people whose life stories provide the backdrop for that play and for this book. The relationships between the life stories of the members of this

community and SM play in Caeden are central to my analysis. I regret that I needed to sacrifice this clarity in order to protect the confidentiality of my interview respondents, whose generosity is the heart of this book.

LANGUAGE

I have attempted to convey meanings of perhaps unfamiliar SM jargon within the text, and a glossary is included for reference. However, a few other notes about the linguistic and semantic choices I have made are important at this point.

I use the term “SM,” rather than the newer and trendier “BDSM” which seeks to blur the distinctions and subsume all SM activity under one overlapping acro- nym (Bondage/Discipline/Dominance/Submission/Sadism/Masochism). “SM” is a frequently used catch-all term, particularly among more veteran members of the scene, but BDSM is also widely used in Caeden.

“SM” is used in at least two different ways in the community. It is one of the terms used by members of the community to refer to itself and, inclusively, to its activities, along with “BDSM” and, less commonly, “kink.”
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However, there is a segment of the scene that reserves “SM” for a more specific set of activities, and therefore uses the more obviously inclusive term “BDSM” when referring to the community or to its activities in a general sense.

Perhaps because it is more popular with newer members of the scene, and pervasive on the Web, I have found the use of the term “BDSM” to engender some suspicion on the part of more veteran scene members. Additionally, in my experience, most people who use the term “SM” broadly are not excluding bondage, discipline, dominance, or submission from their frame of reference, as evidenced by the context in which they use it, as well as by the activities in which they themselves engage on a regular basis. I am, therefore, comfortable using the traditional “SM” to refer to
the collection of activities that involve the mutually consensual and conscious use, among two or more people, of pain, power, perceptions about power, or any combination thereof, for psychological, emotional, or sensory pleasure.
This definition of SM refers to SM interaction, rather than to either sadism or masochism in the clinical tradition. It also excludes auto- erotic practices that may involve pain or self-induced powerlessness. Further, it differentiates between SM and body modification practices; though piercing, cutting, and branding may be part of SM play, the objective in SM is taken to be, primarily, the experience rather than alteration of the body.