![Umschlag Queer BDSM Intimacies, Palgrave](http://robinbauer.eu/web_robin/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/queer-bdsm-intimacies-robin-bauer-palgrave-bookcover-193x300.jpg)
“Queer BDSM Intimacies” was published in 2014 by Palgrave and presents the results of the first extensive qualitative empirical study on les-bi-trans-queer BDSM practices, identities, intimacies, communities and politics. You can look at a sample chapter and order your copy here.
Reviewers say about „Queer BDSM Intimacies“:
Ivan Crozier on the H-Histsex-listserv (May 2015): Download
“The thorough analysis of the German dyke + queer BDSM community offered by Bauer (and the works of other sociologists of sexual subcultures) will surely encourage future historical research into the genealogy of BDSM, in an attempt to historicize communities engaged in such practices, in their efforts to historically understand the ways in which the body and sexuality come together in certain communities to produce new possibilities of pleasure. This process has been significantly advanced in Bauer’s groundbreaking study, which everyone interested in BDSM, sexual subcultures, gender (and especially trans*), or the use of queer theory should read.”
“Now is the time to be researching these marginalized areas of sexual history and sociology, as we have better theoretical tools available to us, as Bauer’s book demonstrates.”
“Bauer’s interview partners are sophisticated and thoughtful; they are engaged citizens in their community, not blindly following what lawyers and psychiatrists say about them. Their voices are put to good use in this book when Bauer deftly uses their words as a way of negotiating the heady terrain of queer theory.”
“Bauer uses his particular variety of queer theory to inform his understanding of what happens in BDSM scenes. He draws much from Deleuzean conceptions of desire and pleasure, which were formed in partial distinction from Foucault’s emphasis on pleasure. In a typically elegant passage, Bauer maintains: ‘While desires incite bodies to move, pleasures are experienced exactly when bodies are opened to touch through lingering. A body experiencing pleasure is lost in a moment of enduring intensities, defying categories, accepting what is rather than how things might be. Pleasure is not directed at something and, rather than being associated with motion, it is about stillness: it is being in the moment without an intentional directedness…. Pleasure in this sense actively opens up undefined spaces for new ways of being and experiencing, and constructing new kinds of subjectivities…. Pleasure can produce precisely a state of losing oneself, of letting go and therefore opening up the embodied subject to transformations and reinventions, becoming a deterritorializing force’ (p. 50). These intimate spaces where one can enter a state of unrefined pleasure, where one can let go and construct new subjectivities, where one can lose oneself—these are the spaces that BDSM practices create, according to Bauer’s study. They involve a negotiation of power, they involve a negotiation of boundaries, and they actively involve the body in the formation of social relations. For these reasons it is clear why sociologists would be interested in them, as well as why some discursive regimes have been keen to control these activities by framing them as either perverse, abnormal, or illegal. BDSM, in other words, is potentially transgressive, as it has been since its roots in the erotic-political tracts of the Marquis de Sade.”
You find my reply and further discussions here.
Brandy Simula in Sex Roles 73 (9-10), November 2015:
“Beyond its important contribution to an area in BDSM Studies where our knowledge is troublingly sparse, this book is also useful for scholars working in gender studies more broadly. Its fine parsing of gender, sex, and sexuality, as well as its detailed examination of how gender boundaries are constructed, policed, and/ or transformed in a particular subculture organized in part around gender provides a fascinating look at the ways in which individuals both draw on and resist gender as an organizing principle of social life. The book also contains a rich portrait of contemporary, on-the-ground struggles over the contested meaning of gender identity categories, including trans* identities, and the process of unlearning and relearning gender intelligibility in the context of particular subcultural arrangements that differ significantly from those of the dominant heteropatriarchal culture. Queer BDSM Intimacies is an important addition to BDSM, gender, and sexuality studies. Readers unfamiliar with BDSM practices, identities, and terminology may find the text less accessible, and the text would benefit from a glossary. Bauer’s sometimes dense theoretical language and extensive use of academic jargon make it appropriate to advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in gender and sexuality studies, with relevance to a number of issues in such courses, including disability, trans* identities and experiences, intersectionality, and social movements.”
“Queer and lesbian women’s voices are largely absent from much of this work (but see Ritchie and Barker’s 2005 study, which focuses on women in the UK). Thus, Queer BDSM Intimacies, which focuses specifically on participants who belong to what Bauer terms the ‘international dyke + queer’ subculture—communities that started out as lesbian communities, but have expanded to include trans* people (individuals whose gender identity/ies and/or expression(s) transgress gen- der boundaries), as well as bisexual, pansexual, and hetero- sexual women— is an important addition to the expanding field of BDSM Studies. Bauer’s ethnography joins several other recent ethnographies of BDSM subcultures and communities, including Newmahr’s (2011) ethnography of a community in the Northeast U.S., Weiss’ (2011) ethnography of the Bay area community in the U.S., and Lindenmann’s (2012) ethnographic study of pro-Dominatrixes in New York City and San Francisco, but is the first full-length ethnography to focus exclusively on women’s and trans* communities.”
“Of critical importance in Bauer’s findings is the resistance to static meaning among participants, who define their practices, identities, and relationships in varying, oftentimes contradictory ways, with the same practices having different meanings over time, across partners, or across contexts. Importantly, Bauer uses this complexity to argue against the tendency in some lines of BDSM research to find a generalized definition of BDSM. Key to Bauer’s analysis is that many of the ways in which participants identify are only intelligible within dyke + queer subcultures, underscoring the relational and communal aspects of these identities.”
“One of the most compelling contributions of this book is its interrogation of the notion of consent in BDSM contexts, which has most often been framed by both practitioners and researchers as an uncontested axiom. Bauer provides a nuanced deconstruction of both liberal and lesbian feminist conceptualizations of consent, arguing that both fail to consider the complex ways in which social inequalities impact the ability to provide meaningful consent.”
“Bauer does an excellent job of explicating how one’s position in social hierarchies outside of BDSM constrain roles one can enact within dyke + queer BDSM spaces, emphasizing that embodied performances require enacting those performances in ways accepted by others. Its explanation of the ways in which the hypothetical ability to enact certain roles is in fact constrained by larger social structures and the knowledges and resources individuals are able to draw from (or not) as a result of their positioning in those structures is perhaps one of the most important theoretical contributions of Bauer’s work to feminist and queer theory.”