Title rated 3.6 out of 5 stars, based on 4 ratings(4 ratings)
Book, 2011
Current format, Book, 2011, , Available .
Book, 2011
Current format, Book, 2011, , Available . Offered in 0 more formats
"Techniques of Pleasure is a vivid portrayal of the San Francisco Bay Area's pansexual BDSM (SM) community. Margot Weiss conducted ethnographic resarch at dungeon play parties and at workshops on bondage, role play, and flogging, and she interviewed more than sixty SM practitioners. She describes a scene devoted to a form of erotic play organized around technique, rules and regulations, consumerism, and self-mastery. Challenging the notion that SM is inherently transgressive, Weiss links the development of commodity-oriented sexual communities and the expanding market for sex toys to the eroticization of gendered, racialized, and national inequalities. She analyzes the politics of BDSM's spectacular performances, including those that dramatize heterosexual male dominance, slave auctions, and US imperialism, contending that the SM scene is not a "safe space" spearate from real-world inequality. It depends, like all sexual desire, on social hierarchies. Based on her analysis, Weiss theorizes late-capitalist sexuality as a circuit -- one that connects the promise of new emancipatory pleasures to the reproduction of raced and gendered social norms" -- P. [4] of cover.
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