Margot Weiss
Techniques of Pleasure, is an ethnography of the San Francisco Bay Areaâ€™s pansexual BDSM scene, a community of practitioners of bondage, domination/submission, role-playing, fetishes, and other forms of eroticism. ,Margot Weissâ€™s research entailed attending dungeon play parties, workshops on SM techniques, and business meetings of the Society of Janus, one of Americaâ€™s oldest BDSM organizations. She interviewed more than sixty SM practitioners, including dungeon owners, well-known prodommes (professional dominants), and community experts. Weiss vividly evokes the feel of the BDSM scene in San Francisco area in the early 2000s.,At the same time, she challenges notions of SM as inherently transgressive, revealing a technique-oriented community, largely organized around classes, rules, and the acquisition of expensive sex toys. Most members of the Bay Areaâ€™s BDSM community were white, heterosexual, middle-aged, well-off, and involved in long-term relationships.,Weiss analyzed SM â€œscenesâ€â€”sexual encounters involving roles, costumes, and propsâ€”including dramatizations of slave markets and the creation of the Abu Ghraib photographs. She contends that such performances eroticize social inequality, reproducing hierarchies based on race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, rather than offering a safe space, separate from real-world inequities.
Sexuality,Erotica,BDSM,Nonfiction,Anthropology,Sociology,Gender and Sexuality,GLBT,Queer Studies,GLBT,Queer,Feminism
Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality