97

Gender
and
Sexuality
TOUCHING RACE THROUGH PLAY:
SADOMASOCHISM, PHENOMENOLOGY,
AND THE INTERTWINING OF RACE
AND SEXUALITY
Ada Demaj
Feminist researcher and writer residing in Toronto, Canada
Annual Review
of
Critical Psychology 11, 2014
Abstract
When scholars research and theorize about sadomasochism (SM) as a
sexual practice, they usually focus exclusively on how gender and sex-
uality are played out in SM encounters, often neglecting other crucial
identity categories such as race. In this paper, I undertake a phenom-
enology-inspired, interdisciplinary discussion of the controversial SM
practice of race play, which involves re-enacting and staging oppres-
sive racist relations in a sexual context. I argue that exploring race
play is important because it can reveal the ways in which race is closely
intertwined with the erotic, even when race is not overtly acknowl-
edged. Importantly, I argue that SM race play brings forth the ways
in which institutionalized relations of domination and submission are
always already imbued with eroticism, and that the erotic elements of
contemporary sadomasochistic relations are inextricably linked to his-
torical oppressive relations. I claim that further critical engagement
with SM can bring to appearance the transformative and subversive
potential of these practices.
Keywords: Sadomasochism, phenomenology, sexuality, femi-
nism, race play
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TOUCHING RACE THROUGH PLAY:
SADOMASOCHISM, PHENOMENOLOGY,
AND THE INTERTWINING OF RACE AND
SEXUALITY
Introduction
This article seeks to examine whether and how race as a category that structures relations
between people (and institutions) is manifested in sadomasochistic (SM) engagements. It
is interesting to look at race in the context of SM because, as much recent empirical re-
search reveals, self-identifed SM participants generally perceive their SM relations as sub-
versive, or as rejecting social norms (Turley, King, and Butt, 2010).

However, insofar as
SM participants ignore or deny the existence and importance of race as a category that
can be played with deliberately and as a structuring feature of sadomasochistic engage-
ments--even when not intentionally brought into a scene by the participants--SM relations
risk perpetuating hegemonic, implicitly racist, neoliberal ideologies about sexuality and inti-
macy, even though SM relations can seemingly be subversive in certain aspects.
I focus specifcally on a type of SM play known as race play because it is one of the
few genres of SM interactions that explicitly calls up race as a source of and resource for
arousal. I take up race play as an entry point into a broader discussion of the (often con-
cealed) presence of racialized relations of inequality in SM practices. Similar to many other
SM practitioners, race players can also be inclined to individualizing and privatizing their
interactions--prominent neoliberal strategies of handling non-normative sexual practic-
es--claiming them to be just their personal kink/fetish and therefore unrelated to historical
and contemporary structural manifestations of racism. Contrary to these widespread strat-
egies, my central argument is that SM can have phenomenological relevance in the sense
that it can help to reveal and deconstruct the ways in which our subjectivities are raced or
racialized today, how these racializations are connected to historical power relations of in-
equality, and how these unequal power relations are tightly interwoven with sexuality--thus
pointing to a lasting link between race and the erotic which persists today. I suggest that
critical engagement with SM, whether conceptual or embodied or both, has the potential to
alter how we relate to our own and other peoples bodies, offering opportunities for (co-)
creating new meanings in regards to race and sex difference, as well as sexuality in general.
The sort of critical engagement that I argue for in this paper entails keeping an open mind
to the multiple and interconnected experiential dimensions that affect peoples lives, even
if certain dimensions are not immediately salient in our own lives.
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A. Demaj
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Setting the Scene: Background, Theory, and
Methodology
First, I would like to further clarify the central concepts in my paper, sadomasochism
and phenomenology, and touch on how the two may be connected and the importance of
seeking out these connections in our research and theories. Invented by the Austrian sexol-
ogist and psychiatrist Karl Krafft-Ebing, appearing for the frst time in his Psychopathia Sex-
ualis (1886), sadism was frst used to describe the tendency to experience sexual arousal
by seeing and making ones partner suffer, while masochism meant that one experiences
arousal by suffering and/or being humiliated by a partner. Sigmund Freud took up mas-
ochism and sadism throughout his works (specifcally in Three Essays on Sexuality, 1905,
The Economic Problem of Masochism 1924, and A Child is Being Beaten 1919), and
he is the one who frst combined the two terms into sadomasochism, claiming that they
are very closely connected, if not inseparable. The philosopher Gilles Deleuze tried to sep-
arate these terms, arguing for the distinctness and unique structure of each in itself (Cold-
ness and Cruelty 1967), however sadomasochism remains to this day the preferred term,
encompassing a wide range of activities, behaviours, desires, and fantasies. Another term
used is BDSM and it is inclusive of sadomasochism (SMthe term I will use most often
in this article), while also referring to bondage and discipline (BD) and dominance and sub-
mission (DS). Some other terms that BDSM practitioners use to describe themselves and
their activities are kinky, perverted, and freaky, in addition to other terms that people
may use. The range of activities that comprise SM is infnite, but what makes an activity
distinctly SM is the manifestation of an eroticized power differential or exchange. A strong
defnition of SM that I work with here is of SM as consensual sexualized encounters
involving an orchestrated power exchange characterized by domination and subordination
typically involving the infiction of pain and humiliation (Deckha 2011, p. 130 ).
SM is deeply rooted in a psychological tradition which has often conceived it as a men-
tal disorder or pathology located and manifested in the individual psyche. The popular
Western imagination today as well as some contemporary scholars and mental health pro-
fessionals continue to conceptualize and treat SM and its practitioners according to the
frame of pathology. Andrea Beckmann (2001), Emma Turley, Nigel King, and Trevor Butt
(2010), as well as Margot Weiss (2008) reveal some evidence for the persistence of the
pathologizing treatments of SM and its practitioners in the academy and mainstream cul-
ture. The authors themselves provide helpful theoretical and methodological alternatives
to these pathologizing tendencies. Because of these tendencies, it is important to approach
SM from disciplines other than psychology, or even better, to work with it from an inter-
disciplinary perspective.
Here, I propose that we engage with SM alongside phenomenology, as has been done
by Darren Langdridge and Trevor Butt (2004), Turley, King and Butt (2010), Darieck Scott
2010), and Corie Hammers (2013) among others, though my thinking is also heavily in-
fuenced by literary, historical, and sociological research. By phenomenology I am re-
ferring to a set of philosophical approaches emerging from the Continental (European)
philosophical tradition, founded by Edmund Husserl, and further elaborated and refned
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by Friedrich Hegel, Martin Heidegger, Simone De Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and
others. My work here is guided by Heideggers explication of phenomenology as the meth-
od of ontology (Heidegger 1954, p. 20) rather than as something characterized by specifc
content, or the method for getting at and understanding being, notably, by delving into
particular experiences. Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty all have different positions
on whether it is possible to get at pure experience (Stoller 2009, p. 709). Husserl elab-
orated epoche as a crucial initial step to getting at the essence of experience, which entails
bracketing or putting out of action the general positing which belongs to the essence
of the natural attitude; we parenthesize everything which that positing encompasses with
respect to being (Husserl 1983, p. 61). By natural attitude Husserl meant a relationship
toward life which simply assumes that the world is just there for us, without questioning
or challenging what is there--thus taking things for granted and allowing them to fall to the
background (Stoller 2009, p. 709).
SM and phenomenology are already similar in this crucial strategy of bracketting, for as
much empirical and theoretical research on SM shows, participants experience and think
of their interactions as play or fantasy which allows them to bracket the scene from
the everyday (Weiss 2011, p. 151). I am critical of the tendency in some scholarship to
conceptualize this bracketing in SM as escape from reality or the self, leading to a kind
of abstraction, depoliticization, and individualization of fantasy. Roy Baumeister (1988)
popularized the masochism as escape from self thesis, which still has some following in
scholarly and clinical approaches. I suggest that, like the phenomenological epoche, the es-
sential component of bracketing in SM can in fact allow us to suspend the familiar in a way
that can allow us to sink deeper into it, thus gaining insights which are nearly impossible to
attain when we go about our lives as usual.
My goal in this paper is not simply to apply the tools of phenomenology to explore SM,
but to explore some ways in which SM can work phenomenally in terms of revealing about
being. I theoretically delve into race play specifcally not only because of the interesting re-
actions of silence, disgust, and condemnation that it brings forth in some scholars and SM
practitioners (Scott 2010; Hernandez 2004) but because I perceive race play as a valuable
nexus of sexuality, gender, race, and class that discloses the simultaneity of historical and
contemporary systemic inequality, gathering both the oppressive and liberatory potential
of our intersubjective encounters. First and foremost, I wish to contribute to intersec-
tional and interdisciplinary feminist work on sexuality and race, by further elaborating an
approach to SM that goes beyond traditional pro-sex/anti-sexism feminist approaches to
sexuality (Chancer 2000; Collins 1992). My methodology in this paper is comprised of a
dialogue between multiple psychological, philosophical, and sociological works on sexuality
in general and SM in particular. My thinking is guided by a philosophical spirit that seeks
to question and disclose the reversibility between race and (SM) play or the ever-present
energy that oscillates between and connects the two. Admittedly, I do not apply a systematic
phenomenological method in this paper,
1
nonetheless, my approach, my questioning, and
my language are deeply affected by phenomenology.
1 There can be variations of the phenomenological method or reduction, depending on which
philosopher one is engaging with; see Mallin (1994) for a valuable and well-structured explanation of how
to practice phenomenology.
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A. Demaj
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The Invisibility of Race in SM Practice and
Research
Even though SM practitioners generally pride themselves in transgressing social taboos
around sexuality, there is one set of practices that is considered too controversial to be
taken up by many practitioners: race play. Hernandez describes race play or racial play
as getting aroused by intentionally using racial epithets or enacting racist scenarios like
a slave auction or a Nazi interrogation scene (Hernandez 2004, p. 14). Some research in-
dicates that simply talking about race play in SM communities is considered too touchy
because many practitioners feel that race does not matter (Bauer 2008, p. 245). Yet if race
does not matter, then how come its so touchy?
Perhaps one answer lies in the fact that, as much recent sociological research on SM re-
veals, the majority of practitioners who are active in SM communities, in Western Europe
and North America, are white (Sheff and Hammers 2011). In Elisabeth Sheff and Corie Ham-
mers article (2011) on the importance of researching the role of race in SM relations, the authors argue that
in addition to most SM research being done by and with white people, another contributing factor to the ab-
sence of the experiences of people of colour may be that, due to the added surveillance, stigma, and racism
experienced by people of colour, people might be more reluctant to assume a potentially disadvantageous
identity than white or ethnic majority people (p. 13). Moreover, it is possible that some people of colour
refuse to engage with (white) researchers about their sexual activities for fear that the research fndings might
perpetuate stigma and racism about a particular group. This reluctance and the real possibility of the per-
petuation of stigma are in themselves indicative of the interconnection between race and sexuality. Collins
(1992) reveals in her article that African-Americans inhabit a society that requires them to censor themselves
in regards to their sexual lives, which affects their intersubjective relations as well as relations with the self.
This self-censorship, Collin explains, is an inherent characteristic of a hierarchical society, where sexuality
and power as domination become intertwined (1992, p. 87). Moreover, the benefts that white people
accrue from their whiteness--which can be as simple as never becoming aware of their
own race--can be conceptualized in relation to the universal status that is attributed to
whiteness, or the idea of whiteness as nonracial (Weiss 2011, p. 193). Simply turning our
attention to terms such as people of colour, which is often used to mark racial identities
other than white, reveals that whiteness is not considered a colour or a racial category (In-
gram 2008; Fanon 1968).
The rhetoric of the insignifcance of race and racial difference is relentlessly streamed
into our everyday lives through a liberal humanist position, which, despite being mostly
shell-mouthed on the question of sex and eroticism anyway--habitually and insistently
disavows the salience of racial difference and argues that any recognition of it taints the
purity of real love or real desire (Scott 2010, p. 342). In other words, the dominant
ideological stance on the role of race in mediating our relationships is to deny its signif-
icance, by positing that love and desire are (ideally) immune to the infuence of race or
racism.
However, as I discuss further on, race and racial difference are always already present in
all manifestations of sadomasochistic sexual practices, private and public. So long as white
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SM participants insist on keeping considerations of race at a distance, they will remain
oblivious to their racial privilege--which not only dulls the transgressive and transformative
potential of SM, but also contributes to contemporary relations of inequality. White partic-
ipants certainly can and do engage with SM in ways that allow them to reclaim certain op-
pressed dimensions of their experience, such as gender and sexual orientation, however by
not deliberately accounting for the intertwining between sexuality and race, these practices
risk becoming co-opted by neoliberal ideologies and practices, which tolerate the existence
of non-normative sexuality as long as it remains private and able to be capitalized on by
being marketed to particular groups of people--i.e. white, middle-upper class (Beckmann
2001; Weiss 2008; 2011).
In an American study conducted by Sheff (2005), one research participant explains that
many African Americans are much less likely to go into a BDSM setting and feel like they
belong, and identify with the label of BDSM (study cited in Sheff and Hammers 2011,
p. 15). The participant interestingly states that BDSM is similar to feminism, in that many
African American women have feminist principles and take feminist action and even par-
ticipate in what some would consider feminist activism, but refuse to identify as feminists
(Sheff and Hammers 2011, p. 15). This research participant explains that because of the
majority of SM practitioners are white and readily identify with each other on this basis,
race does not stand out to them, so kink can become their organizing identity (Ibid). The
research participants comparison between SM and feminism is quite compelling for me as
a feminist researcher because it points to the ever-present invisibility of race in feminist
scholarship, which is not so much a symptom of the inherent, incorrigible whiteness of
feminism, but more of an indicator and an outcome of the researchers own subject posi-
tions and how these affect research interests and agendas.
The Touchiness of Race (in) Play
In Hernandezs (2004) article, an American black woman, Chupoo, comments that she
engages in SM with her partner, but rejects racial play because [i]ts too close to home for
American black people (p. 16). Chupoo explains that she can accept other people are able
to rise above their sexism, but [t]he race thing is really a lot deeper. Chupoos statement
that racial play is too close to home for American black people is perhaps referencing
the not so distant past of black slavery in the United States, as well as the continuation of
anti-black racism in the country. Like Chupoo, some people may strongly feel that sadomas-
ochistic race play is unacceptable because racism is a very real, if not a tangible phenome-
non that signifcantly impacts and harms the well-being of people racialized as non-white.
However, sexism is very much a real phenomenon as well, and I think we are allowing our
critical lenses to get fogged up if we really believe that sexism--or unequal gendered re-
lations of power--however different from racism, is any less harmful and that people are
able to rise above it. Moreover, if a woman engages in an SM scene where overtly sexist
practices are being enacted, these practices are always already tinged with racial ideologies,
but they will have different meanings depending on the participants and the context.
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Sadomasochistic encounters, even when not explicitly taking up race, evoke a racialized
history of what are now sexualized dynamics of domination/submission in SM commu-
nities, such as the master/slave relation. One way in which SM practitioners enact this
dynamic is by wearing collars to establish the role of the slave. Interestingly, and not co-
incidentally, young Black boys who played as exotic ornaments for wealthy white women
in the 1500s to the early 1800s were made to wear fancy collars with padlocks (Tuan
discussed in Collins 1992, p. 103). These collars undoubtedly served to symbolically and
materially mark the collar-wearers submission and belonging to an owner. Race play is
signifcant because, by deploying racist slurs and practices in a sexual context, it brings
forth the intertwining between race, sex, and sexuality, and it intensifes [the] reference to
the historical context from which the words [and practices] emerge (Scott 2010, p. 236).
Moreover, the political nature of these practices can also start to appear by taking into
account that it is through these sexualized, violent, dehumanizing practices that citizen-
ship was and still is established. Scott (2010) elaborates that a certain knowledge that is
obtained through the acts of the body and the catalysis provided by words, whether it is
experienced as a pleasurable high or as orgasm, is the material and psychic trace of a
shift in discursive activity that comes from working in the present with the legacies of slavery
(p. 238, italics added). This shift in discursive activity which can emerge from expressing
our bodily existence through sadomasochistic sexual practices can serve as a powerful path
through which we can resignify the body and open up opportunities for more egalitarian
sexual relations. However, the transformative potential of SM can only be garnered if we
always keep in mind the intertwining of race difference, sex difference, and sexuality.
I turn to McClintocks (1995) insightful historical study of SM to underscore the point
that SM is inherently founded on racializing practices and ideologies--a foundation that is
called up by a multitude of props, toys, roles, and terms with which SM players engage.
Ever since the inception of the terms masochism and sadism and the emergence of
SM as a historical subculture in Europe, the sexual and the erotic acquired their meaning
from and informed peoples understandings of gender and race (McClintock 1995, p. 142).
McClintock writes that it is not by accident that SM as a subculture emerged in Europe
toward the end of the eighteenth century with the emergence of imperialism in its mod-
ern industrial form (Ibid). She explains that just when the industrial economy was being
transformed from a slave market to a wage market, objects which were previously mark-
ers of slavery, such as slave-bands and chain-collars, started being taken up and utilized
as paraphernalia for kinky sexual and erotic relations (McClintock 1995, p. 155). This is
a fascinating analysis because, at frst sight, we can interpret this paraphernalia and other
markers of BDSM (such as enacting roles of slave and master) as simply a displacement of
imperialist slavery to the erotic realm--as trying to hold on to colonialist slave practices and
ideologies just when they are disappearing from public view. On second thought, we can
also interpret the emergence of SM as a subculture and the ways in which it becomes man-
ifested as a refusal to allow the history of slave labour fade into the past--a refusal to forget!
McClintock puts it more eloquently, The slave-band thus stages the history of industrial
capital as haunted by the traumatic and ineradicable memory of imperial slavery (Ibid).
McClintocks analysis of the emergence and development of SM in this period high-
lights the potential of sadomasochism to work phenomenologically or its ability to reveal
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and expose historical and contemporary systems of inequality and discrimination, such as
the exploitation and enslavement of poor, white women and women and men racialized as
non-white. McClintock writes that by borrowing the paraphernalia of state power, such
as boots, whips, chains, and uniforms, S/M plays social power backward, visibly and
outrageously staging hierarchy, difference and power, the irrational, ecstasy, or alienation
of the body, placing these ideas at the center of Western reason (McClintock 1995, p.
143). We can consider SM as playing social power backward by virtue of being an engage-
ment that is actively sought out, in which all of the partners involved know exactly what
their roles are, rather than embracing a liberal ethos that (falsely) declares equality amongst
individuals to be the existing state of affairs. McClintock adds that with its exaggerated
emphasis on costumery, script and scene, S/M reveals that social order is unnatural, script-
ed and invented (Ibid). The usage of props and costumes, as well as the types of titles and
labels that SM partners use to refer to, humiliate, and pleasure one another can be phenom-
enologically relevant because they can be methods for highlighting the processes through
which current unequal social relations become legitimated-- fundamentally, these relations
are not natural but require props and labels to acquire their force. But how is it that these
racializing props become (tied to the) erotic and what are the political implications of this
intertwining?
The Intertwining and Potential of the Erotic with/
in Unequal Relations of Power
In his fascinating exploration of racialized and sexualized power dynamics in literary
works by African American authors, Darieck Scott (2010) points out how racial difference
is materialized in interracial pornographic representations, noting that more commercial
and mainstream black-white porn usually engage racial hyperbole in more muted
ways (p. 214). In other words, although mainstream porn still takes up markers of racial dif-
ference, by displaying particular bodies engaging in particular activities, it usually minimizes
reference to past and present systemic relations of inequality. Scott highlights that BDSM-
themed porn stories represent racial hyperbole in more overt ways since (especially) a
black-white pairing in domination/submission fantasies cannot avoid the historical under-
pinning of such scenes (Ibid). The historical underpinning that Scott is referring to is not
only the fact that a history of enslavement makes the pairing possible and legible, but
that it is the very history that is the source of erotic fantasy. This is a compelling claim
indeed: the history of racism and enslavement is precisely what makes sadomasochistic
race play erotic and sexually titillating. Could there be a mistake here? I think Scotts claim
is absolutely correct. But rather than rushing to the conclusion that people of colour who
fantasize about race play are self-hating, uneducated, or uncritical, let us re-examine our
own critical lenses and rethink SM beyond the frame of individual pathology. Rather than
understanding SM practitioners as individuals who fetishize and eroticize damaging
relations of social inequality, lets remind ourselves of the phenomenological potential
of sadomasochism. The arousal derived from fantasizing about and enacting relations of
domination/submission is not something that perverts superimpose--rather, hierarchical
relations of power are always already imbued with the erotic!
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As Scott (2010) highlights, the very fact these scenarios are titillating to participants and
observers can serve to call to, as a part of the excitement, the historical processes of the
production of racial difference through humiliation and domination (p. 221). In other words,
race play brings to appearance the ways in which racial difference is historically produced
through humiliation and domination, which is already latently erotic, but it can also become
overtly erotic for all of the parties involved. This does not mean that oppressed people,
past or present, enjoy or get off on being humiliated and dominated; rather, when people
belonging to oppressed groups take up race play as an enactment of their erotic fantasies,
like all erotic fantasies, Scott states, their play involve[s] an identifcation with both
the perpetrator and victim (p. 222). Bauer (2008, p. 247) writes that [t]he fact that most
members of [the dyke/trans BDSM] community have racial privileges seems to prevent
them from experimenting with and transforming race and race relations in their play.
It appears then that, in their aversion to race play, many white SM practitioners can only
identify with the perpetrator. This reveals that many SM practitioners take up and seek to
transform only those roles that oppress them or that they feel restricted by; in a way then,
these practitioners are not taking into account how they hurt others or how they are ben-
efting at the expense of others due to their racial privilege. However, race play can open
up opportunities for revealing and challenging current oppressive power relations since,
sadomasochism as a sexual practice, like sexuality in general, can be a mode of dramatiz-
ing and investigating a concrete historical situation (Butler 1989, p. 85).
2

To try to understand what Butler (1989) means when she writes that sexuality can drama-
tize a concrete historical situation, let us turn to Patricia Hill Collins (1992) explication of
sexuality as an energy or a stream of life which is kept bounded within a particular sex/
gender system (1992, p. 87). This sex/gender system is multilevel, Collins explains, be-
cause it affects our interactions with social structures, other people, and with our self. Al-
though this sex/gender system comes out of so-called biological sex differences between
females and males as well as socially constructed gender differences between the feminine
and the masculine, this system refects the needs of a given historical moment such that
social constructions of sexuality change in tandem with changing social conditions (Ibid).
The ways in which we express our sexuality is therefore not simply a personal choice or
preference, but has implications that are tied with present and historical social relations.
Drawing from Merleau-Pontys theorizations on sexuality in his Phenomenology of Percep-
tion (1962), Butler (1989) explains that [s]exuality is not a choice inasmuch as it is a nec-
essary expression of bodily existence and the necessary medium of choice (p. 89, italics
added). Here Butler is elaborating on the idea that sexuality is not necessarily manifested in
2 There is of course a diversity of participants who take up race play, and some of them
self-identify as racist. Scott (2010) also takes up this occurrence, pointing to the possibility that for some
SM participants racialized as non-white, race play can be especially titillating if they know their play mate
to be genuinely racist. Questions emerge whether this particular occurrence can still be subversive or
even safe for the racialized participant. Like all SM engagements, trust and communication between the
participants is a crucial part of race play and the way to establish mutual pleasure and safety. I suggest that
such an encounter can still be phenomenologically relevant since it reveals, even more starkly, the deep and
complicated interconnection between race and sexuality--i.e. a mutually satisfying sexual encounter can take
place even when the participants are cognisant of a racial hierarchy existing or imposed on the relation.
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any particular form, nor is it attached to any specifc part of the body, even though sexuality
is an expression of the fact that we exist as bodies. Sexuality is the medium through which
choosing becomes possible, not a choice itself or something which represents existential
choices which are themselves pre- or non-sexual (Butler 1989, p. 89). Even though Mer-
leau-Ponty writes that the sexual life is a sector of our life bearing a special relation to the
existence of sex (Merleau-Ponty 1962, p. 159), the ways in which we carry out our sexual
lives are not necessarily directly or explicitly linked to sex.
Merleau-Ponty (1962) does not explicate further what he means by sex, but we can
gather from his explanation and Butlers interpretation that sex is a current of life--that
[l]ife is particularized into separate currents (p. 159); however, there are no specifcally
sexual or non-sexual phenomena, for sexuality has no necessary forms, but presents itself
as having-to-be-formed (Butler 1989, p. 89). Making choices or expressing our bodily exis-
tence through sexuality implies intentionality or will, which engage both consciousness and
the body, but, as Merleau-Ponty explains, [w]ill presupposes a feld of possibilities among
which I choose (1962, p. 161). Even though the body is a specifcally corporeal agency
the types of choices we make and the ways in which we exercise choice is based the feld
of possibilities in which we fnd ourselves. This feld of possibilities or horizon is partially
shared with other people in our culture, in the sense that we typically engage in the sexual
practices and behaviours that we are exposed to or that are available to us. Depending on
the types of bodies we are or how our bodies are received in the shared horizon, we will be
expected to express our sexual bodily existence differently and we will only have access to
certain sexualities. Race and sex difference are both categories of being which circumscribe
what sexual practices are authorized and sanctioned as belonging to particular individuals
and groups of people.
One crucial connection between race difference and sex difference is that they are both
salient in how we carry out our sexual lives in the sense that race is sexualized and sex is
racialized; however this connection is carefully disguised in Western societies. Sadomasoch-
istic sexuality, particularly race play, can be one way in which the connection between race
and sex are brought to light and reworked. The repertoire of practices which makes up our
sexual life, be it SM, vanilla, or a combination of the two, is constantly being formed. The
fact that we perceive and conceptualize some sexual practices as being natural or normal
or healthy is less a result of their being rooted in human nature--although nature is never
completely detached from our bodily existence--rather, the persistence of particular ways
of expressing our sexual being is a result of the systematic and ever-renewing relations of
inequality.
Being Accountable for Our Kink
There is something erotic about unequal relations--so what? Does this mean that we
should advocate for them? My answer is no--unequal power relations which are institution-
alized and based on imperialistic, patriarchal ideologies of inferiority and superiority are un-
doubtedly harmful, and it is our task as antiracist feminists to work to uproot them. How-
ever, sadomasochistic engagements, whether fantasized or enacted, depict an exaggerated
Touching
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and excessive version of these widespread patriarchal ideologies and practices, and thus
can be useful in our political work since contemporary systemic relations of power work in
evermore invisible and stealthy ways. I cannot stress enough that in order for the phenom-
enology of SM to be politically useful we have to get rid of the easy neoliberal strategies
of individualizing and privatizing our desires, and be more alert to the reversibility or the
ever-present oscillation between race and sexuality that emerges in SM. This alertness can
come from the simple act of speaking deliberately about our own and other peoples (e.g.
our research participants, if we happen to be researchers) practices and identities, rather
than unthinkingly taking up the terms that are there. When we identify ourselves or others
as kinky, are we explicitly calling up race or inviting a discussion about it? No? Then we
ought to do precisely that.
It is fascinating that the third set of defnitions for kink (n.1) offered by the Oxford
English Dictionary Online are of three American slang usages for the word: the frst is
derogatory reference to A black person, currently obsolete but reported to have been
used in the middle of the 19th century; the second meaning is A criminal; and the third
usage refers to A sexually abnormal person; one who practices sexual perversions--this
being the most common meaning of kink today. We would be naive to think that its just
a coincidence that the term kink today has almost completely converted from being a
derogatory term for criminals and Black people which calls up curly hair as a sensible (vi-
sual) manifestation of racial difference and therefore deviance to its modern usage which
refers to sexual perversion or deviance from normal sexuality. The fact that the racial
implications of kink are seemingly obsolete is a linguistic manifestation of the apparent
de-racialization of contemporary sexual practices.
3
The de-racialization of sexuality is not
only propagated by the liberal humanist position discussed by Scott (2010), but it is also
evident in the manifestation of sadomasochistic sexuality, particularly among white practi-
tioners, as Bauers (2008) research reveals. Nevertheless, sexuality, sex difference, and race
are inextricably connected.
Sadomasochistic race play can serve to bring to appearance the connection between race
and sex because in these encounters it becomes clear that the racist usage of certain terms
and practices is precisely what makes them arousing and pleasurable. For example, Scott
(2010) explains that the word nigger is erotic, and this eroticism has political meaning
(p. 229). To say that this word is erotic implies that there is some sort of desire or passion
that underlies its usage, and to say that this eroticism is political means that the term is part
of a repertoire of symbolic and concrete practices which work to delineate a persons or
groups position relative to the state and to other people, as well as to distribute citizenship
rights. Racial slurs which are taken up in certain SM encounters are arousing because they
are slurs, Scott explains, and they provide an expression of a particular domination/
submission dynamic (2010, p. 225).
Scott (2010) touches upon something quite crucial about the usage of racial slurs: the
power and affect of the term does not only lay in its ability to reify racial difference; the
3 Interestingly, the most common term for non-normative sexuality used by people of colour,
particularly Black people, is freak or freaky instead of kink or kinky (Stewart 2013, p.1).
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term establishes a hierarchy which enforces a position of inferiority and submission on the
target(s) of the term. In other word, racial slurs, particularly the controversial and prob-
lematic n word, are laden with and reverberate a relationship of ownership or submission
between the speaker and the addressee--a relationship which presupposes and demands
that the addressee is to be used by the speaker as she or he sees ft. This relationship of
ownership simultaneously denies and affrms the subjectivity of the addressee: on one hand
the subject is inferiorized and objectifed, but on the other hand, the addressees subjection
is so valuable and titillating because he or she is a human subject just like the speaker--
the main difference being the addressees presupposed (and/or enforced) submissiveness.
Needless to say, the erotic is always present in such a relationship by virtue of the endless
possibilities in regards to what we can do to/and with another body.
Another angle for explaining how racialized dynamics of domination and submission
become sexualized is that sexuality is one crucial site through which racial difference has
historically been and continues to be enforced. In a fctional account that reveals the racist
underpinnings of modern pornography, Alice Walker (1981) discusses the almost always
pornographic treatment of black women who, from the moment they entered slavery...
were subjected to rape as the logical convergence of sex and violence (in Collins 1992,
p. 90). The systemic rape of Black women during American slavery is not simply indica-
tive of white mens insatiable sexual urges; the sexuality of Black women (and men) was
specifcally targeted because sexuality and the erotic are key domains of exploration,
pleasure, and human agency (Collins 1992, p. 88). Therefore, to channel or stife the sexual
current of another persons or groups life is an incredibly effective means through which
racial domination is achieved. Although during American slavery intense levels of physi-
cal violence as well as blatantly racist legal measures were administered on Black people
as methods of control, the ideological justifcations for such violence are still in play today.
Collins (1992) explains that the legacy of the discourse that frames Black women as pro-
miscuous prostitutes who need to and deserve to be raped is still manifested today in the
victim-blaming legal and social responses to instances of sexual violence experienced by
Black women (p. 101).
The racial signifcations of popular contemporary terms such as kink are practically
absent from peoples engagements with the term as a marker of (non-normative) sexuality;
while certain other words, such as the n word, remain highly charged precisely because of
the racialization that they invoke, leaving its erotic affect quite concealed. A race play scene
which deploys racial slurs, however, can signifcantly bring to appearance these disguised
affects--if we are attune to them. This being attuned begins with distancing ourselves from
neoliberal strategies of individualization and privatization, and acknowledging our inex-
tricability from a network of relations that has power and meaning beyond our personal
intentions. Becoming accountable for the language we use and the practices we partake in
does not automatically mean suppressing our non-normative desires and practices--quite
the opposite, accountability can allow us to enact our desires more deliberately, since it can
bring to presence the multiple disguised affects of our activities, without taking for granted
our imbrication in unequal relations of power in which we are both oppressors and op-
pressed.
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A. Demaj
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Concluding Thoughts: Garnering the
Phenomenological Potential of SM
I have argued that SM can have phenomenological importance because it can make ap-
parent historical and current systems of oppression. That is, when SM is thought about
and enacted critically it cannot occlude the historys framing presence but instead evokes
it--and demands, or reveals, that this history become for the participants sexually and erot-
ically pleasurable (Scott 2010, p. 217). For those bystanders, onlookers, or third parties
who dont understand how unequal power relations, however excessive and hyperbolic, can
be erotically stimulating, they ought to investigate the value in their responses of shock,
offense, and anger or squamishness (p. 220). Stopping at these reactions without taking
them further shields against uncomfortable experience and the knowledge--the recogni-
tions--that might accrue from the examination of this discomfort (Ibid). What can these
reactions tell us about ourselves and the context in which they arise?
Sadomasochism today is practiced by people who exist in a larger society and who are
undoubtedly affected by its racist, sexist, and classist ideologies. We always have to ask
who is consuming these images and representations and who is performing them. How
are these images taken up by liberal and capitalist enterprises? Performing SM does not
automatically put one in a better position to be critical of systemic relations of power, nor
do these performances magically ignite in its practitioners a desire to think about their fan-
tasies and act on them politically. SM practices have a signifcant advantage in comparison
to hegemonic organizations of sexuality (i.e. the monogamous heterosexual couple) in
that they are often manifested in public settings such as play parties, which can be valu-
able venues for thoughtful discussion and refection. Undoubtedly, community discussions
unfold regularly in SM-centered encounters which means that it is very much possible for
powerful, non-oppressive, liberatory energies to be cultivated through play if we become
more accountable for and attuned to the ambivalent energy of our sexualities.
Acknowledgements
She would like to thank Erica Lawson and Helen Fielding for their help with this paper and
their continued support and friendship. Thank you as well to the anonymous reviewers and
the journal editors for their feedback and contributions.
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Correspondence
Ada Demaj
Email: [email protected]
Authors information
Ada Demaj
Feminist researcher and writer currently residing in Toronto, Canada.