Are You Comfortable with Blood Play? BDSM Mobilization and Social Movement Identity as Cultural Capital

• In Event: 594 - Regular Session. Sociology of Sexuality: Sexualities, Social Movements, and the Law

Abstract

This paper employs an ethnographic case study of a small-scale BDSM social group in order to investigate the multiple and competing ways identity can orient social movement activity, either facilitating or foreclosing possibilities for movement-generated social change. Empirical research and queer theory alike highlight the transformative potential of BDSM mobilization, centering the challenges BDSM poses to normative constructions of sex and sexualities, particularly sex- and gender-based eroticism, reproduction, private sexuality and monogamy (Rubin 2011, 1984; Newmahr 2010; Weinberg 2008; Langdridge 2006; Taylor 1997). At the same time, because many BDSM practitioners assert that stigma and deviance form a “key part of the thrill of their identities and practices” (Landridge 2006: 383), in many ways their very self-definition is dependent on the stability and permanence of a restrictive, oppressive and moralizing sexual status quo. Thus, BDSM movement identity can function either as “identity for empowerment” (Bernstein 1997), providing a foundation for collective challenge to restrictive sexual morality, or a form of cultural capital (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977) signifying an individual's supposedly superior and enlightened sexual practices and politics. I assert that it is only where social movement actors deploy identity for empowerment that challenge to the broader social order is possible. Conversely, where identity functions as an element of cultural capital, movement participants become actively opposed to social change. I conclude with implications about the role of collective identity in determining the differences between social movements and subcultures.

Author

• Brenna Harvey, University of Connecticut