Responses to "Playing On The Edge: Concluding Notes"

As I was approaching the end (but before I reached my crisis point in chapter 8) I started to think that I might end up writing my posts about the ideas I found in Staci Newmahr's "Playing on the Edge: Sadomasochism, Risk, and Intimacy" in "reverse order" - that is, I suspected I would find it easier and more valuable for me to write about the later chapters first and then work backwards towards the first chapter.

As it happened, with the crisis that overtook me last night, and the two posts (so far) that this crisis has produced, this is almost exactly what I have started doing - I wrote about ch. 8 exclusively last night, and then this morning I wrote about some of the ideas from the previous chapters immediately previous to it, trying to put that crisis into some sort of context for myself.

Now that I am coming to write a more "academic" response to the book, I feel as though this "backwards" approach that I have already started, is after all the most appropriate way for me to deal with the responses I have.

Of course, while the previous two posts were intensely personal for me, and dealt with a very personal way in which I reacted to a passage in the book, it is impossible for me to approach anything written about BDSM in a completely non-personal level. Since I have always identified BDSM as "my sexuality" and a core part of my being, anything (however academic) that is written about it becomes in some way related to my personal space as well.

These thoughts lead me to the topics in Newmahr's "Concluding Notes", which means our journey backwards through the book starts here. I will tend to use the same headings as Newmahr used in the book to divide up the concepts and responses.

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Concluding Notes: Erotic Subjectivity and the Construction of the Field

Newmahr uses this section to discuss issues of how the ways in which she interacted with the community affected the course of her research - I have often felt frustrated by some of the things in the book and wanted to ask, "How the heck did you get to that!?" Here, Newmahr discusses some of "how I got to where I did." (I don't think it actually answers my objections, but as we work through this backwards, we shall see.)

Emotional Experiences in SM Play:

After including a passage from her field notes about her first ever SM play, Newmahr makes several statements about how the thoughts she had led to particular aspects of her development.

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.

...

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 Caeden and beyond.

In trying to interpret Newmahr's conclusions about "the conceptual dissonance between eroticism and violence", I felt as though I did not have a foundation for how that understanding developed.

Newmahr discussed feeling gratitude (and being surprised by that feeling) after the session, and after rejecting Stockholm Syndrome as a reasonable explanation, she looked for other explanations:

1/. Professional – enabled move from "observer" to "participant".
2/. "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."
3/. Glad to be unharmed.
4/. "New and profound bodily experience" – Russ "person at whose hands it occurred." – unfamiliar bodily responses, movements unlike other activities.

This last one appears to have had a big impact, because the following remarks about it echo very strongly the argument that appears in Newmahr's perception of what SM means in general:

I was aware that I was granting Russ and the onlookers access to normally hidden (and previously unfamiliar) aspects of my self. Somehow, I felt, they now 'knew' me better.

This matches very closely what she wrote about how intimacy works, both in general and in BDSM scenes. At the time that I was reading those passages in the rest of the book, part of me wanted to ask, "How much of this has come from your own experience, and how much from the community itself?" Of course, a part of my reasons for wanting to ask such questions was that I felt that emotional experiences like this one did not match my (limited) experience of witnessing public play or engaging in it.

These introspections about my own play contributed to a deeper understanding of how SM works. They provided conversation topics and specific questions to ask in discussions as well as interviews.

I feel as though I want to add "...for me" on the end of the first sentence. It seems like a personal, rather than general, theory of SM. Again, I find myself wondering how heavily the personal experience coloured interpretation of the answers to the questions in interviews and discussions. Newmahr says that these issues, "…generated questions and problems and new perspectives that I was able to explore with the people in Caeden." Maybe it worked that way for others in Caeden, and maybe it is a function of studying people who like to play in public that these results should come about; that public scening selects for people who feel like it involves intimacy with the audience?

Pain and Meaning-Making:

After writing about her attempts to understand different types of pain, Newmahr says that:

Because others had not thought about it, they were not likely to proactively list the ways in which they understood pain

Nor, she continues, did they volunteer explanations of differences in how different types felt.

To me, this is surprising because understanding different types of pain and how they feel, and having language for them, has been pretty integral to my experience of masochism.

In a passage from my post "That Name Is Life", about the relationship of pain and pleasure (likely I will link this post again in further posts), I wrote:

As a masochist, oh, how some of those notes shiver sweetly through my nerves; how some of them are just hideous screeches that I cannot enjoy or embrace. But it is all Pain, a part of life. Needles, to me, are no fun at all; to others they are a high art - and their shrill piercing is a part of life: injections by the doctor, for example, or when they take blood samples. So many different ways for Pain to express herself; so many ways for me to express myself, to work with Pain to create awesome symphonies of sensation and suffering.

It's not quite the tactile descriptions that Newmahr used in her field journal, because I was using sound as a metaphor, but the idea that most people haven't thought about questions of "different kinds of pain" surprises me.

Erotic Subjectivity:

Here, we get to one of the big problems that I have with just about any work on BDSM - the question of "Are you 'us' or 'them'?" For Newmahr in these concluding notes, the question seems to be about an "audience" that is specifically not composed of members of the SM community: an audience to whom she is presenting my "us" (BDSMers):

Treating myself as an erotic subject would have left me with two choices. The confirmation that SM was not erotic for me would reinforce an essentialist perspective of eroticism and pathologize SM, positioning me as the 'normal' researcher who engaged in SM but did not find it erotic. The alternative (the confirmation that it was erotic for me) would render me unwell; in that case, I would become either dangerous or deeply troubled (and likely, must have been all along), and my work might be received very differently. Ultimately, then, as sympathetic as I am to the call for ethnographers to deal theoretically and methodically with their own erotic experience in the field, I have permitted these concerns to constrain both my fieldwork and my representation.

But of course, from my perspective as someone involved in BDSM it looks a little bit different. Obviously, I don't cast finding BDSM erotic as "unwell", "dangerous", "deeply troubled" etc. But also there is a fear of the "normal" researcher and what she might find troubling about the various activities involved in BDSM, and how that might affect her findings. As noted above, one of my concerns was that she should include herself in her discussions of how pain is understood, and archetypes of play, to show up as 'us' rather than 'outsider'.

Newmahr's notes on the role (or lack of a role) of spanking in her research ties into this a little. She decided not to engage in this form of play, despite its ubiquity in the scene. She described it as a form of play where the rules of consent seemed to be suspended and it was as much a generalised social thing as a play-scene thing.

In part because of this, and for closely related political and ideological reasons, I was, quite personally, averse to spanking.

I think that in such a space, I , too, would feel averse to spanking (which Newmahr uses to include anything from a single slap to the rump up to full "punishment" spanking; I am not sure that I understand the single slap to fall in the same category as spanking). But I would find an uninvited slap (even if it's not "spanking") to be very unwelcome. At a number of points through the book, I have felt as though I would fit in very poorly in Caeden, and this is certainly the type of thing that would have me bothered and retreating from the scene.

Newmahr also says she felt unable to break her link between spanking and discipline/punishment or the adult-child relationships in which violence is an expression of love as well as discipline.

Mentioning that for academic reasons she felt she should try it, Newmahr writes, "I find it troubling to write this even now, much more willing to invite readers to imagine me being punched in the face than being spanked."

By comparison, however, I noticed that her descriptions of being punched in the face had been some of the more troubling passages for me to read. Introspection reveals that I have an oppositely-gendered view from Newmahr's of what slapping and punching mean. Punching (particularly to the face) is in my conceptual landscape symbolic of men beating down other, less masculine, men. That is, beating down me. Similarly, it is associated very strongly in my mind with images of spousal abuse. For Newmahr, a slap is a punishment for a child or a woman; a punch is being "hit like a man" (which she describes as, "a subversively feminist act."). For me, a slap is a "safe" expression of consensual relationships whereas a punch is a punishment for being (too) feminine or effeminate. A spanking, even for discipline within D/s, feels to me like an engagement between equals, and not at all similar to a spanking administered by an adult to a child, for example. Most of all, to me a spanking feels controlled and precise, whereas a punch feels uncontrolled, dangerous and "chaotic". "Safe" and "Not-safe". Her perspective is as valid as mine, of course, but I find the gendered understanding of these types of violence being so different is an intriguing point.

Newmahr says she created a personal narrative for her play, such that, "my play partner hits me because I want him to, not because I am naughty or incorrigible or evil, and not because I am childlike."

As a top, this was some of my favourite type of play - she says, "I want this!" and I say, "You asked for it!" But in terms of understanding Newmahr's work, I think this could have some interesting results and, in going through this, I will probably need to reflect on how things tie in to Newmahr's personal narrative, and how it connects with both her conclusions and her understandings.

Newmahr reports that rejection of spanking meant playing only with the more experienced tops, since spanking is deemed the safest form of play.

Amongst other effects, Newmahr writes that this meant "I played along boundaries that I would not have otherwise." – that is, closer to the edge - and she was "more comfortable with risk". Again, these are themes that appear quite strongly in the way she presents her understanding of SM, as her next comments recognise:

The elimination of spanking from my repertoire functioned as a shortcut to a wider variety of high-sensation play with more experienced players, which I view as having had a significant impact on my understanding of SM itself and this community.

Newmahr's explanation of how her gender affected her engagement is also noteworthy:

"Whatever way I played, I still, as both a biological and a social category, understood myself as a woman. Therefore, violence that was explicitly sexual (that is, directed at my breasts or hips or cunt), or even inextricably gendered (as I viewed spanking to be), evoked in me a different response than violence that was not, and I began to seek the latter fairly early in my fieldwork."

While Newmahr notes that there were plenty of people whose play preferences complemented her own (and therefore it is a fair depiction of what happens in SM play), this does seem to question her insight into the gendered role of play for those who seek out "explicitly sexual" play/violence. Newmahr notes in Chapter 1 that there is an "incidental androgyny" to the Caeden SM community, brought about by people's failure to perform gender "properly"; this later draws her to consider SM as potentially replacing gender with power as the axis of performing gender. This also raises a question about the meaning of "explicitly sexual" play in the context of gender and power.

I am not sure what to make of those questions, and I do not think that I pose them as criticisms as such of Newmahr's work.   I think I mention them more as areas for possible further research.