"Playing on the Edge" - my responses to Chapter 7

(Spoiler warning for "Alien Vs Predator", in case any readers haven't seen it but want to!)

Still working backwards through "Playing on the Edge", Staci Newmahr's book describing her ethnographic study of a US-based SM community. Posts so far about the other chapters are here: Concluding Notes and Chapter 8.

Chapter 7: Collaborating the Edge - Feminism and Edgework

In this chapter, Newmahr introduces the concept of "edgework", and develops this to produce a concept of emotional, collaborative edgework that she feels makes edgework theory both feminist and a useful framework for understanding the role of BDSM in its practitioners' lives. In my post about chapter 8, I wondered whether the argument Newmahr makes to discuss SM could not also apply to vanilla relationships as well, and the development here of "emotional, collaborative edgework" is where that question can be put to the test.

Newmahr opens by discussing the roles that the maxim of "Safe, Sane, Consensual" (SSC) in how BDSMers view their kink.

SSC appears both as "a basis for internal policing of play", and as a way of presenting BDSM in a positive way to outsiders - including the law. Newmahr notes the tendency for BDSMers to feel that, "what is not safe and sane and consensual is not SM, and therefore does not belong in the community."

From here, Newmahr discusses the concept of "edgeplay", although I think that the Caeden community that she studied may view edgeplay in a slightly different way from the usage with which I am familiar.

Newmahr writes:

'Edgeplay' is about playing on the boundaries of SSC – between safe and unsafe, sane and insane, consensual and non-consensual. Edgeplay threatens the efforts of SM activists toward social and legal tolerance and recognition of SM, and is therefore controversial in Caeden.

...

There are no criteria for edgeplay per se, and community members generally identify it intuitively; 'We know it when we see it.'

While playing on any of these boundaries could certainly constitute edgeplay, I think that in my experience, "edgeplay" is hard to define because what feels "edgy" to the participants is more important to people's perceptions than the nature of the acts in themselves. Something can appear perfectly safe, and sane, and consensual, and yet still feel "edgy" to the participants and be, for them, edgeplay. This intuition I have in a way pre-empts the evolution of "edgework" that Newmahr seeks to introduce later. Another difference in usage is that some people seem to describe anything they view as "extreme" as "edgeplay".

Newmahr identifies 5 different boundaries on which the Caeden community appear to feel edgeplay occurs:

1. Ethical/Unethical
2. Consciousness/Unconsciousness
3. Temporary/Permanent
4. Life/Death
5. Consent/Nonconsent

After discussing the definitions briefly, Newmahr uses edgeplay as a means to introduce her key concepts.

Negotiating Risk

Edgeplay, being risky, involves understanding risk; ignoring or being unaware of the risks is not edgeplay, it's just dangerous:

Edgeplayers negotiate these boundaries repeatedly, with play partners who are willing to play this way. Tops who simply ignore limits or push boundaries in the absence of a relationship in which this kind of behavior is permissible are not considered edgeplayers; this crosses the boundary on which edgeplayers play.

Newmahr discusses how the community polices edgeplay in public spaces via dungeon monitors; and the tendency for hands-off policing, unless intervention is clearly absolutely necessary (i.e. if there is a danger of which the top seems unaware). Then moves on to introduce the key terminology.

Edgework

Coined by Hunter S. Thompson, Newmahr adopts the term via the work of Stephen Lyng concerning voluntary risk-taking.

Edgework is summarised as activities that:

• "involve a clearly observable threat to one's physical or mental well-being or one's sense of ordered existence."
• Is in one's own control rather than that of others. (e.g. thrillseeking such as rollercoasters doesn't count because that's under the control of the rollercoaster operators and engineers, not the thrillseeker.)

Newmahr identifies Lyng's conception of edgework as being "masculinist". If I have understood correctly here, the charge is not that women cannot do physical edgework of the type that Lyng describes, but rather that, if she does, she is fulfilling masculine roles and is "an honorary man". I re-watched "Alien Vs Predator" recently, and it can be argued that the Predators are edgeworkers in their voluntary creation and breeding of an extremely dangerous foe to hunt. When the female lead character, Alexa Woods, is awarded the mark of the successful hunter (burned into her cheek by a Predator, using the acidic blood of the defeated Alien - the same ritual the Predators use to mark themselves), she is an "honorary Predator" and the mark prevents the other Predators from exterminating her at the end of the film. My understanding of Newmahr's point here is that in a similar way, a woman who engages in masculinist edgework can earn "honorary manhood", but does not claim edgework as a woman's activity.

Newmahr identifies 3 levels of "masculinism" in Lyng's version of edgework:

1. Conquest of the natural world
2. Focus on bodily risk alone
3. It is a "Solitary endeavor"

These are not intrinsically male, but they are male archetypal associations. Where "masculinism" is identified with fulfilling archetypes of maleness, then each of these three strands is masculinist.

Edgeplay as (Masculinist) Edgework

Having introduced the key term, Newmahr starts to bind together the strands of BDSM on the one hand, and edgework on the other. The first few points of contact will develop into a more coherent structure.

Newmahr first deals with a question that bugged me when edgework was introduced: Since in edgeplay, the bottom is dependent on the top to control risks, and the top dependent on the bottom to communicate risks, does that mean that edgework is not applicable?

Both participants in an edgeplay scene are playing at the same edge. Neither could be negotiating this boundary (between life and death, consciousness and unconsciousness, control and loss of control) without the other.

This presages Newmahr's innovation of collaborative edgework, with which she stitches edgework together with not only edgeplay but the rest of SM.

(Feminist) Edgework

- COLLABORATING THE EDGE -

Newmahr writes:

A feminist edgework model needs to move beyond the particular masculinist conceptalizations of 'the edge' and of 'skill,' while preserving its fundamental core: skill-based, voluntary risk-taking that seeks to (and does) negotiate extreme boundaries between chaos and order.

The case of SM poses these challenges, inspiring a feminist model for the use of edgework as an analytic category.

To develop this feminist model, Newmahr considers three key points:

• Understanding voluntary risk-taking "in relation to what is (and what is not) risky for the particular risk-takes involved" - specifically, what risks exist in women's lives?
• A shift to the realm of the emotional, so that "the boundary between order and chaos is negotiated in any situation in which most people would regard these feelings as so intense as to be uncontrollable"
• Collaborative edgework, defined as "Activities in which edgeworkers depend on each other for successful boundary negotiation reveal[ing] ... edgework as an interactive social process."

- EMOTIONAL EDGEWORK -

Under this heading, I had several questions or challenges. In her book, Newmahr says that, "From a feminist perspective, though, all SM is edgework." In email conversation, she said that it doesn't have to be, but that it can be usefully understood that way.    [Edit To Add: Newmahr has contacted me to clarify her emails in context of the statement in the book: she intended that the edgework we were discussing in email need not always play a part in SM, but she does still think all SM is some form of edgework, even when it's not that specific sort of edgework.]

Bearing that in mind, I think my questions still need to be posed.

Newmahr concludes the chapter by stating that:

There are two aspects to feminist edgework in the extension I propose: collaborating the edge, and voluntarily undertaking emotional risks as emotional edgework. While these aspects can be explored separately, they intersect in SM in ways that help illustrate how we might expand edgework beyond its current constraints.

My questions on this basis are:

To what extent is BDSM "voluntary"? Given that (as Newmahr notes early on in the book) many BDSMers identify an "essentialist" narrative for their origins (i.e. that it is not a choice, but we were "born this way"), to what extent does that essentialist narrative negate the voluntary aspect of edgework, and if it does not do so, why not?

Newmahr writes, "As a stigmatized social activity and a reputation as a deviant sexuality, SM transgresses normative boundaries of interaction and sexual behavior."

To what extent does this also represent the experience and social position of LGBT folks? Inasmuch as essentialist narratives also exist for these people, as they do for BDSMers, how do the arguments in the previous questions relate to LGBT sexuality and gender presentation?

In a generalised way, if edgework is both "collaborating the edge" and "voluntarily undertaking emotional risks", at what point to we identify an emotional risk as being "edgework"? My understanding of vanilla dating is that it can be perceived as fulfilling all the same personal, emotional, criteria that Newmahr introduces to describe SM:

• It is "about the risk in emotional experiences."
• Emotional edgework explores the line between emotional chaos and emotional order, between emotional form and emotional formlessness, between the self and the obliteration of the self.

When we look at the discussion of intimacy in chapter 8, we can see that there is inherent voluntary emotional risk involved in becoming intimate with someone, in "revealing something that is normally inaccessible", or indeed, in being allowed to access that. There is a saying that, "The one who has least (emotional) investment in a relationship is the one in control of it." It is a risk to extend love, or intimacy, to someone because it gives that person the power to hurt you emotionally - that person becomes your edge, in much the same way as Newmahr describes BDSM practitioners becoming one another's edges:

Unlike even partnered edgework, in which people may require each other's assistance in the safe exploration of the boundary, SM requires another person in order to first create the bounded situation and then to transgress it.

Here we need to recall that the boundaries are emotional boundaries and the transgression is feeling things that it is emotionally risky or dangerous to feel - putting those terms into the statement, along with "love", and we get, "Love requires another person in order to first create the emotional situation, and then feel something that is emotionally dangerous or risky to feel." The risks and dangers of love can include feelings of "Will you find someone else?", "Will you still want me if I say/do this?" (especially related, due to society's prohibitions, to sexual escalation of a relationship), "I don't want to see you get hurt", "I would do anything for you", and so on.

In creating her conception of feminist edgework as "collaborating the edge" and "emotional edgework", Newmahr uses her experiences and study of SM as inspiration. However, in some ways there are questions about whether it really does fit BDSM as it is experienced by its practitioners; in others we can argue that it extends to any intimate relationship, including vanilla dating.

All that said, I find the concepts Newmahr wraps into her feminist edgework to be incredibly powerful tools for understanding my kink. My suspicion is that the voluntary aspect is less important when it comes to sexuality, because it can be at once both voluntary and experienced "essentially". This is not on the basis of "you can choose not to be gay/lesbian/kinky" or "you can choose never to have gay/lesbian/kinky sex" but rather on the basis of choosing with whom you do do these things. I do not believe that all BDSM is edgework in Newmahr's terminology, for example when Newmahr writes that, "…because one of the overarching objectives is to stretch limits and to push one another further, either emotionally, physically, or psychologically, it transgresses personal – and interpersonal – boundaries," I question whether those are objectives that are intrinsic to BDSM, either in a scene or in an ongoing relationship. They often are or can be, but that does not make it essential or a sound foundation for conclusions.

However, this passage I think stands as an excellent summary on which to close:

For Lyng, edgework involves 'an effort to define the performance limits of some form or object, and in the process, explore the line between form and formlessness'. By extending 'form' beyond the body to include notions of identity and the self, all SM explores this line, seeking as it does to negotiate boundaries of violence and non-violence carnally and symbolically.

I think even the safest and most mild play can fit with this, because although they are not in any way risky, and don't push anything that feels like an edge, they do function "carnally and symbolically" in ways that are aware of and in touch with those boundaries.   [ETA: This quotation/idea ties in with the "edit-to-add" further up the page, about always being edgework even when it isn't particular kinds of edgework]