Critical D/s Analysis: A Study in BDSM Identity Politics

Prpared by Richard Birch
Qualitative Methods SOCI 3126
Professor Vardalos
Tuesday, April 25 2006
This work Copyright (C) 2006 Richard Birch

Identity politics is one of the most unique and profoundly intriguing components of social research and theory. It can uncover sociological truths. It can also reveal sociological fictions. Both are very real and measurable. Both posit meaning forward to the world for analysis, conjecture, and discourse. Identity constructs are essentially the mechanism for institutional constructivism. Identity is where we find the drama in everyday social life. Identity keeps us moving, keeps us valid, keeps us serving, keeps us with the notion that we are individuals. The politics of the body provides us with the reality of roles as they are subject to the master narratives that define what roles are to solidify, how they are to be played out, and why we conceptualize their existence in the first place. Identity is what keeps us living as consumers. Identity is what maintains our positionality in economics. Identity is what we see as the unique demarcation point of social life, for when we think about living in the social, we are thus socialized to view society from outside-in, meaning it is society that affects us. The body politic is where our most unique human-centric existential subjectivity is relentlessly discursive and at times completely pointless. Yet, research in this abstract conceptual area as the self is essential for a specific reason other than for social change or communal interaction. Identity reveals darkness. Identity reveals the underbelly of human experiential matrices that elude and exist amidst all institutions. Identity conceptually brings out the most taboo activity we can construct. Identity is also thus subject to parameters of taboo and derogatory demarcation. This is what makes the body politic and identity politics so incredibly interesting in social research. Because in the very fabric of the darkness of specific underground elements of everyday social life, there can exist beauty and the idea of free thought and free thinking. Yet there is a way to see this beauty, but it is a way that is potentially counter-contextual to the existence of taboo culture. The lens from which we look through exists only in rationality. The lens sharpens the focus only under the premise and stipulation of critical thought and substantial social theory. One of the most profoundly interesting and exemplary identity constructs is the masochistic sexual subculture construct. It is a realm, unique and powerful enough to hold the title culture and institution on its own. The actors and members in this community, this subculture, have roles just as roles exist outside of the BDSM social framework otherwise known as vanillaspace. But the uniqueness to the BDSM subculture, or altspace, is measurable according to theories of rationalization and repressive desublimation, specifically those written in Frankfurt School theoretical writings on reification and social dimensionality. Hebert Marcuse states in his book One-Dimensional Man that “in the political sphere, [trends] manifest [themselves] in a marked unification or convergence of opposites…This unification of opposites bears upon the very possibilities of social change where it embraces those strata on whose back the system progresses – that is, the very classes whose existence once embodied the opposition to the system as a whole” (Marcuse, 19). Marcuse is not speaking about social phenomenon that is progressive however. He is discussing social phenomenon that is pathological and oppressive. It is based on the notion of the administered universality of one-dimensional life, the postmodern iron cage, the constructed realm of rational choice that supercedes all endeavours to be real, actualized, and creatively productive (as opposed to the Marxist definition found in the capitalistic modes of production). To be outside the mode, the realm of technocapitalist meaning is to be transformative “of the antagonistic structure itself that resolve contradictions (as perceived by virtue of rationalization) by making them tolerable” (21). As Marxism posits the conceptual transition from capitalism to socialism as a political revolution, it can be argued for purposes of conceptual development by virtue of grounded theoretical methodology that the BDSM sexual subculture is potentially teetering on the same sort of revolution, though it never seems to be quite recognizable even from within its very thick and vast borders. Under Marcusean thought, could it be possible that masochistic BDSM subculture is set up structurally to potentially subvert hegemonic ideologies of identity? If so, could it potentially through subversion affect social change? Does it aim to be socially revolutionary by essence of the roles, engendered encounters, and the basis of deconstructing the political body? Or, alternatively, does BDSM altspace simply reify and confirm the oppressive dynamics of postmodernity?

Grounded theory, specifically Marcusean social theory and analysis, though not initially intended for situating models of desublimation upon sexual orientative groups and activities, can be used to assess and generalize that which brings social meanings forth as knowledge and argument. The rhetoric of discourse is subject to the phenomenological essence of all individual accounts in play. The science of sexual taboo is quite revealing of Marcusean theory. It is dark like Marcusean theory. To actively examine the inner workings of the BDSM social institution, is to sustain high levels of critical thought, or else knowledge generated is inconsequential and insubstantial. To research the actors in altspace is effective done under a specific form of consciousness, a “space within” where subjects and respondents constitute objects of instrumentality, holistically as the raison d’etre in the successes and progressions of productivity. In other words, knowledge in altspace is best derived from those aware of their oppression, from those who are aware of why they engage in the roles that are constructed. It became clear that through a relentless search for actors to be willing respondents in this research, information was best provided by one who has a unique understanding of alienation and other modes of negation subsequent to technological rationality. In other words, the respondent had to be aware of their oppression and to be open to discussing their activities in altspace in order to provide cues as to whether such oppression gives meaning to their D/s role in subversive or stabile ways (65). Desublimated sexuality is key to understanding what the D/s identity construct is about because of its seemingly transformative nature, that which turns repression into the sublime, and vice-versa. To de-sublime something, like a sexual taboo according Marcuse, is a method of attaining a degree of normalization where the individuals are “getting used to the risk of their own dissolution and disintegration” (78). Because a one-dimensional society turns everything into a resource, a commodity measurable by development and growth, it can utilize what it touches in its nature of exploitation. Existence is “drudgery”, and thus drudgery is “satisfaction” (78). Most importantly in exploitation, when drudgery becomes satisfaction, it is not difficult to then conceptualize that freedom is oppressive for its meaning and the subsequent drive to be free, and the complacent tendency to rationalize a freedom-sense is also oppressive. Sexuality and sexual subcultures are just the same. They are built on rationalization. To engage in masochistic sexual socialization is a rational choice because the need for it is also constructed. That is desublimation. That is Marcusean sex at its most hardcore and pornographic.

Dal, is a 34-year old woman dominatrix. In her vanilla world she was born in a Southern Ontario, Canada, middle-class family structure, is highly educated, and is also very aware of her oppression in techno-capitalism. Her first encounter in altspace occurred in 1999 when a friend took her to a fetish event. It was here where she actualized her first altspace social knowledge. In her interview she was immediately able to posit descriptions of herself and of her socially constructed role as a dominatrix in altspace with ease and complete understanding. Dal is and has for many years been very aware of her attraction to darker lifestyles. For her the underground, the secret masochistic lifestyle she pursues outside of her vanillaspace existence is a demarcation point in her subjectivity and experiential framework. It is here where her underground sexuality (D/s sexuality) exists in response to repressive desublimation.

When speaking to Dal about her vanilla life, as a way to set up an experiential mise-en-scène that could suggest the possibility of causality and subsequent meaning in her altspace existence, it was becoming clear of how truly tied the respondent is to gender roles. She is very aware of her oppression as a female in patriarchy. She is aware of the challenges that exist in her professional world because of her gender. She is aware of the feminist sensibilities she possesses and has possessed for several years in response to what she has observed in the social as a woman. She knows what her desire is. She desires at times to be something different in the social. She endeavours to find acceptance in a lifestyle of differences in body types, where she can allow herself to be sexual and sensual. For Dal, traditionally in vanillaspace, active sexual and engendered sensuality as feminine in the mainstream hegemonic was submissive, not in the BDSM kink sense of the word. But purely because of her gender and the ascribed role she deals with as a woman, the parameters of sexuality and sensuality have always been constructed for her and without influence. In altspace she claims she can allow herself to be dominant and sexual which is interesting that she in her interview termed in this way. To “allow” herself a performative basis of sexual and sensual communication and discourse, of active role-playing, and of engaging in the social-psycho drama of the D/s world is key for it is in that allowance she deals with her desublimation in techno-capitalism.

In Marcusean social theory, repressive desublimation by which the people give over their sovereignty and their everyday perceived liberties to those who control power, social institutions and knowledge in exchange for crude materialistic and sensual satisfactions (82). In altspace, the aesthetic of fetishistic events and environments is important for Dal. The performative dressing up inspires the actor in her. Here in the scene she can be powerful and sexual at the same time, and not compromise her moral integrity. In altspace hang ups about her physical body is not as bad if they really exist at all.

In hegemonic desublimation acceptance is conditional on giving up personal subjective ideas about beauty, power, and agency. We must relinquish our agency in an industrial society in order to exist as functional extensions of machines and of the processes that maintain our existence. Desublimation is counter to the performative aspect of Dal’s altspace existence. The phenomenon for her is that she functions and negotiates existence through this altspace and the repressive desublimation as a form of art. It is creative when she performs flagellation on a play-partner, whether it is in private of in public. It is artistic for her when she dresses up in specialized fetish wear. It is artistic for her when she exerts power and dominance over her submissives for it is done sensually and with respect. This assimilation into a mechanized universe “establishes cultural equality while preserving domination” (64). In altspace Dal easily tackles the phenomenon of her personal Verfremdungseffekt, or “estrangement-effect” (67). In place of complete acceptance from other people in vanillaspace social environments like work, family, friends, and in her political realm pertaining to the body-politic, in altspace she can work the curves if she wants to, not just the curves of her body, but the curves and waves her actions as a dominant individual can have in a meaningful collective subjectivity. Dal recognizes the world for what it is, patriarchical, sexist, heteronormative, and imbalanced. She sees her association in the social as problematic because her femininity is problematic in oppression. Femininity is constructed as a means to maintain performance in labour and repressive desublimation. Through her altspace existence she can produce a disassociation in which the world can be recognized as what it is and dealt with accordingly (67).
In dealing with her dissociation of social hegemony, she takes on a rather sublime and specific role in altspace. The role of a dungeon monitor is crucial for her. Dungeon monitors are strictly crucial in all public masochistic play scenarios. The role of the monitor is to ensure safe, secure, and consensual play is performed in dungeon altspace environments. She is to know the limits of the submissives in the room and gage what is going on closely, that all performative flagellation is appropriate, that there no miss management of equipment, that no one is interrupting a scene, and that no bloodletting results which can result in complex charges.
Whether she is a dungeon monitor or engaged in play as a dominant, it is a way for her to express her distaste for feminine subordination. She has no problem playing with a female sub, but she does have a hard time watching Male Dom/ female sub interaction. However when there is respect and a balance in power exchange then it’s fine, otherwise “grates on her nerves”.

Dal is quite able to clarify what the D/s construct subjectively represents in her social existence and how it subsequently provides connectivity to her position in master narratives. In regards to relations of identity in capitalistic terms, according to Dal many Doms are typically unsatisfied in their professional and economic life. However, in altspace she now feels she has the freedom to express herself theatrically, in a corporeal way. She likes to “haul ass” as it were to challenge something in her altspace lifestyle that she definitely can’t in the vanilla world under desublimation. Dal as an underground alternative identity is just another layer to whoever she is. She doesn’t believe it is a political economic subversion or a subversion of gender roles, though she claims even switching the D/s role construct for her male partner is awkward. Her feminist sensibilities even start censoring her actions of being a sub for she becomes very aware of how her actions serve the master narratives in her existence because her traditional performative femininity becomes problematic. However she in Marcusean desublimatory fashion wants to negotiate around the need to “please her man”, but not compromise everything she believes in. As a woman she does not feel she is a submissive, but because she is a female in the social she has always been treated as such, she has always been very aware of her oppression as a female in techno-capitalist. Her mother was a role model as the primary bread winner, she was socialized in a feminist-dominant household, and in a patriarchical world feminist thinking is an extension of who she is and from where she comes from.

Altspace is a forum to express feminine mystique, though ultimately he can’t express publicly her involvement in the lifestyle, she could be subverting mainstream because she risks everything professionally by doing this, the risk of being found out is dangerous. If Dal were truly subverting mainstream hegemonic principles of oppression as it relates back to the initial research question, deconstructively and interpretively this would not be an issue. There is no subversion in underground context. If it is underground and discreet, it is foundational. Identity is dark and secretive because it serves power that way. We as social beings do not share our true identities because in a collective social we are not permitted to. As Marcuse posits, we give up our right to individuality for the pleasures of postmodernity and thus interpretively rationalize a constructed engendered existence to negotiate through a dark identity. Because Dal’s altspace remains dark and secretive it cannot be described as subverting. However, the next question would be, is D/s subversion really social change conceptually? Is not the creation of a social institution like the fetishistic institution, where one can performatively express an engendered mystique not needing any other level for existence? Because BDSM does not function on the same parameters of repressive desublimation as a social phenomenon (it is useful for clarity and to distinguish the concept from Freudian theory) the question of whether BDSM altspace and the D/s construct is subversive may not the be the right research question after all. It creates knowledge, but it doesn’t create history. Altspace creates knowledge for those who engage and exist as part of it but it doesn’t transcend to notions affecting public morality and social justice. As a body of identity politics, it serves hegemony first by reifying the roles we discuss through discourse. Quite possibly, it could be argued that the D/s relationship if ever appropriated and successful in a realm of social change and subversional power, could lead to its demise as a subculture. It functions on the existing as the taboo, and the cultural other. It functions as aside from gender and sexual normativity. It functions to serve both sides of the oppression equation. Maybe there already is balance in altspace, and where the rare phenomenon of balance occurs, subversion is immaterial in Marxist terms. BDSM is still however a product of desublimation in some ways.

Reference:
Marcuse, H. (1964). One-Dimensional Man. Boston, Mass: Beacon Press.

Response Paper: A Phenomenological Analysis of the film Black Robe as Social-Historical Text

Prepared by Richard Birch
First Nations in Historical Perspective HIST3216
Professor Wesley-Esquimaux
Monday, April 10 2006
This work Copyright (C) 2006 Richard Birch

The film Black Robe (1991) is not a film that provides a positive regenerative message about both Canadian Aboriginal historical cultures and Eurocentric social structure. As a text, it also does not shed a light on either culture as compassionate, forgiving, progressive, or remarkable. In terms of subjective meanings and deconstructive analysis, the film as both a social and historical text is valuable for its balancing of cultural customs relating to identity, power, and a spiritual social construct. The film highlights the social fact that power, identity, and spiritualism are all social constructions – as they were during the period the film takes place, and as they are now. Where the film is also important is how it discusses the nature and global process of cultural oppression that were present in the new world in the seventeenth century. Both the Aboriginal and European cultures are in equal standing in the film’s mise-en-scene. However the mise-en-scene as institutionalized historical text, sheds light on the nature of oppression and the ever-permeating hierarchy that was structured during this period. In this response paper, I choose to utilize a methodology of phenomenological film analysis to uncover subjective texts relating to cultural oppression social processes involved in the oppression of historical aboriginal cultures.

There are various scenes in the film that show the very nature of a dialectical process of cultural oppression. The systems, the rituals, the mechanisms that were in place at this time provide a measurement of objectification not always portrayed in both contemporary and historical films on aboriginal cultures dealing with the problematic nature of colonial genocide and the commodification of aboriginal peoples. One such scene near the beginning of the film involves the existence of rituals present in both cultures. The rituals of men, circling around fires and crosses, chanting, singing, dressing in flavourful costumes, drenched in power, importance, and decadence. The scene was structured around how both cultures prepared to meet each other to negotiate political connectivity. The rituals also construct cultural-centralism, in other words, self-importance. But this bilateral measurement does not provide the feeling of horizontal synergy. The scene depicts both cultures as equally racist, intolerant, and fearful. When watching the film, taking in the actions of the men, as they circle around their own symbolic centres, either fire or the cross, I felt the two very different dialectical meanings behind each set of rituals. For one was set up for the purpose of recognizing power in ancient intelligence and ancient ways of living. The other was set up on the purpose of cultural invasion and Eurocentric hierarchical foundations, the very beginnings of which contemporary techno-capitalism is based on.

In the beginning of the film, Director Peter Beresford presents the audience with bilateral decoration scenes, showing how both cultures have their customs relating identity, power, spiritualism, both equal in meaning. The decoration of the religious leaders of both societies symbolized the shared value system of cultural continuity. Each culture has institutions and meanings for these institutions subjective to the power structures within each group. The ideas of marriage, family, union, work, social cohesiveness, and structuralism are present in both cultures and regulated by these forms of institutional concepts. Beresford successfully gains a commonality between these two cultures in both this scene as well as throughout the film.

As in forms of social oppression take shape the specific phenomenon of historic erasure bilaterally becomes reality. Whether it be from the purpose of exploiting the essential construct known as human resource based commodities, or natural resource based commodities, the globalized process of human indignation through pyramidal forms of cultural eradication and the institutional reformulation of social roles are ever permeating and ever present. The phenomenon of Eurocentricism is certainly an historical marker of such social eradicating activity. For generations the histories, the subjective meanings of everyday life, and the subjective social constructions of cultural identities throughout the globe have been subjected to the global process of Eurocentricism. Eurocentricism is not merely an adjective that describes the focal cultural epistemological ideology of people. It also does not merely describe the transmission of hegemonic from one culture to another. It is also a process, specific to that of social designation of minorities, powerless to ever permeating structures of capitalism. I criticize Peter Beresford’s film Black Robe for as a commentary on early stages of North American techno-capitalistic hegemony, it lacks the wherewithal to provide in its narrative structure more definitive connections to the hierarchical echelons of European power centres. As both a student of social analysis and historical texts, Beresford’s intention was clearly recognizable but also daunting as I felt I wanted more information presented to me as the viewer on the specific intentions of the Church in France and how these intentions fuelled the impact on native societies. Whether I wanted real proof and reason to feel anger at the Church or that I needed to see what possible reasoning an entire group of nations could fashion that would involve the intended eradication of a complete way of life in a commodified society. Though educationally one may criticize the film for it’s lack of accountability in providing adequate historical proof of events pertinent to the narrative, yet the film is fictive and any response by the viewer may not only be of academic meaning but also of emotional capacity. What makes one’s response negative and uneasy is the ever-present notion of exploitation and the devaluation of personal identity in both Aboriginal and European characterizations as a result of European economic expansion into New France.

The certain exploitation of aboriginal peoples in Quebec and of course throughout North America and the certain disregard for the subjective histories of these cultures is a theme very intrinsic to the narrative of this film. The film does attempt to supply an at times positive characterization of the priests, the black robes. They are characterized as one fully charmed and charged by the notion that they have been chosen by god to cultivate Christianity and Catholicism to the “savages” of the new world. Driven by a “divine” ordinance and purpose constructed on faith and servitude these men threw themselves into the wild, into “god’s country” as it were to bring Christianity to those who lived without faith. Yet I questioned during the film whether the notion of faithlessness in aboriginal peoples in history is a true concept. Does the notion of faithlessness shed true social knowing of the historical cultures of the new world? The film posits the answer as such. Through the lens of Eurocentricism, the historic answer was predominantly yes, that the religious leaders and rulers of Europe in the 17th century perceived aboriginals as characterized by faithless, unknowing of god, and of thus, un-actualized in their role of global economic oppression. This very racially charged rationalization arguably leads to the eradication of native spirituality and individuality.

One other element important to the film in constructing the dialectic is in the idea of dreams and paradise. Dreams measure and give account of the real world in native experience in this film. This is an interesting notion as it is compared to the Eurocentric idea of paradise, or more importantly the Christian idea. Dreams are illusions. The dreaming of paradise during specific scenes by aboriginal characters and the Jesuit priest who leads the film highlight the sharing of dream ideology, that institutions are social fictions. Paradise is an illusion, and as a viewer watching the film I had to ask rhetorically if native societies felt the idea of a Christian Paradise was equal as illusion, or void of meaning. I imagined in response how difficult it must have been for native peoples during times of sickness to flounder on their spiritual foundations and choose Christianity as not a means to spiritual enlightenment, but as a way to offset violent invasion of French militarism during a time when many of their people fell weak to illness brought to North America via the process of colonization. The film towards the end highlights this struggle as the lead character who starting to become frail in both his corporeal state and in his faith, was persuaded to baptize many ill natives on the brink of death and starvation. Symbolically it was a powerful message drenched in the ever-present notion of pyramidal structures of social power. It became clear to me during that moment in the film the nature of Christian prosthletization during this time as not to save the “savages” from their spiritual plight, but to solidify their commodification as a colonial human resources for Eurocentric exploitative mechanism of new world exploration and the means to own the means of exploiting resources. Phenomenologically the film draws connectivity to capitalistic process to Christian prosthletization. Similar to acts of war as a means of ethnic genocide, the function of fear and the loss of faith brought this to reality in the film

By constructing Christianity and Eurocentric epistemology in aboriginal cultures the gain would be to create a human resource to be exploited for use in extracting natural resources. It was clear to those who control master narratives of European power and hierarchies of political economic hegemony that in order to base a social network of cooperation and submission of the aboriginal people in North America, the introduction of cultural and religious value systems was seen to be the methodology of practicality. Black Robe posits this idea clearly through the film.

Reference:
Beresford, B. (Producer) (Director). (1991). Black Robe[Motion Picture]. Montreal, PQ: Alliance Atlantis.