Queering BDSM subcultures

I'm currently working on a big academic project on queer and SM spaces (and eventually some of it will be a conference paper -- eek!). I'm aware that plenty of communities around the world will tend to place BDSM under the big queer umbrella, if you like. But the community in the UK is not so keen to do this.

Pat Califia wrote in Public Sex:

By "radical sex", I do not simply mean sex which differs from the "norm" or heterosexual, vanilla, male-dominant intercourse. People whose erotic practices are deviant do tend to acquire an outsider's critical perspective on marriage, the family, heterosexuality, gender roles, and vanilla sex. Being a sex radical means being defiant as well as deviant.

In the UK, the majority of the community does not tend to operate from a critical perspective on most of those things. Plenty believe there are inherent, naturalised differences between the sexes that are merely acted out through gender role (and hence, often through BDSM), for instance, and many are in favour of performing to the world a normative presentation of marriage, family and gender role. With the recent advent of Max Moseley's "outing" and trial, the community has been called upon to make various statements to the press about our relationship choices, practices, etc. Of course, journalists will lift, re-word and use whichever segments of interviews they fancy (and a friend of mine found herself wildly misrepresented in a national newspaper as a consequence), but there has been this attempt to "out" BDSM in the UK as a tad fluffy, white, middle-class and Middle England -- and it's not just an impression that's circulated by the media: it's how the community want to be represented, in the main.

Obviously, I'm in favour of partially dismantling all of those things -- or at least the not-othering of choices that don't fit into those boxes. So, while BDSM in the UK is certainly deviant, we're missing that defiance -- or at least, we're missing defiance of social norms of the kind Califia's describing.

Given that this blog has a pretty international readership, I'm curious to ask: is queer viewed in a similar way within BDSM communities in other countries?
Do fetish clubs/events in other countries operate on a more pansexual basis? Is there a wide variety of sexualities and genders on display?
Is there a certain degree of social defiance and resistance to normative gender roles, relationship formations, marriage and family in other communities?*

*this isn't lazy research, by the way! I'm just beginning to unpick all these tensions, so here seems like a good place to air some of my concerns!

Spirituality and BDSM

So this is coming up in some comments in other threads, and it's one of the things that I'm interested in, so what the hey, I'll open up the thought for some more general discussion.

For how many folks around here is their BDSM entwined with spirituality? I know I've been writing a fair bit on and off over at my place on things that touch on ecstatic practices around the world, which include things like orgasm/sex denial, flagellation and other forms of pain endurance, ordeal training, descent into the underworld and other things that are readily metaphorisable in terms of d/s, sensory deprivation, and so on; all things that translate rather well into kink and have been written about in kink/spiritual terms by various authors. I know that my current explorations of sadomasochism in specific are explicitly religiously driven at this point.

The biggest thing for me in kink and spirituality is actually in terms of my work with Feri witchcraft. For those who aren't familiar with the Anderson Feri tradition, it's an American tradition of religious witchcraft with ties in a whole bunch of places, and one of the parents of the far better known Reclaiming tradition, associated with Starhawk, which is a mover and shaker in the goddess spirituality / feminist spirituality circles in the States.

One of the major tools of the Feri tradition, which it shares with Reclaiming, is something called the Iron Pentacle. The relevant part of this is that each point of the Iron Pent is, for lack of a better word, a virtue, something which the tradition founders considered unreasonably denigrated in surrounding culture, which needed to be claimed by the individual in order to become a whole human being. Those points are Sex, Pride, Self, Power, and Passion. These are all things I write about and explore in terms of kink, and my d/s relationship both in its development and practice has been intensely intertwined with my work with the IP; I've been working with them both for about the same time, in fact, as my relationship with my liege began in the part of my training where I was formally taught the IP. I've gotten into arguments with other Feris about whether it's possible for a submissive to present the virtues of Iron, and this is one of the reasons I get vehement about things like expanding an understanding of what it means to have, hold, and manifest power.

One of the fascinating conversations I had a while back about the intersection of BDSM, specifically d/s, and spirituality was with someone who had a hard time understanding how a submissive could be a worthy follower of a god -- because all of their experience with subs was with the surrendered doormat style, "I can't do anything, do it all for me, what master says is what goes" thing, rather than someone who was capable in their own right and choosing a path of service. I about broke their head a little when I pointed out that I am a sub, and further that I frame some of my relationships within my faiths in d/s terms.

So, there's a little of how the kink and spiritual interact for me; anyone else want to share?

BDSM women's spaces and transphobia

When bending gender around can be described as a fetish, and you combine that with a sizeable population of transmen and transwomen in a smallish subculture, the results can be explosive, confusing and often pretty offensive.

Of all the arguments I've seen pan out in the BDSM community, the debates over where transwomen are 'allowed' to be and what they represent are often the longest and most heated.

We've had the argument over the personal ads, whether transwomen should have to put themselves in a separate category from other women so men don't have to look at their profiles. We've argued at great length about the London Ladies' Munch, who took a democratic decision to only allow physically transitioned transwomen in. I get what they were trying to do (which I'll explain later..) and think the move was well-intentioned, but it resulted in a lot of people using the contention over exactly what constituted 'fully transitioned' to have a grand transphobic rant. We've also had an argument about women's toilets at clubs and who should be allowed in them, which resulted in the same.

There's always people like me, with a few trans friends on and off the scene, who are completely bewildered that what's between someone's legs apparently makes them 'less' of a woman when most would say they have experienced the vast majority, or even their entire lives as women; who can't imagine having a 'girly' setting that would exclude them for not being girly enough and who don't feel they need to be segregated and start their own munch! And then there are the 'if it was born with a dick, it's a man' types, who will argue their prejudice into the ground if they have to. While some of these arguments come from men, the transwoman who caught the most flack were most offended, I think, when the arguments came from women. Women who wanted to exclude them.

The mainstream UK BDSM scene is pretty heterocentric and, as a bi, queer identified woman in a hetero relationship, there are parts of that heterocentricity that marginalise me let alone gender queer, lesbian and transgendered people. I know some lesbian SM communities turn their noses up at transwomen (and there was one SM dyke who was probably the most offensive of the lot) and people who engage in relationships with transwomen, but fortunately SM Dykes don't share that view at all.

I think the issue the Ladies' Munch were trying to address, originally, was the problem of predatory straight men who crossdress, or who are transvestites only in their scene persona. I get that this is a problem. The whole point, as I understand it, of the Ladies' Munch, just like the under-35 munches, is just to have an evening with other kinky people where you're less likely to get approached and preyed upon. I know that SM women get this all the time. When I went to my first munches, aged 19 or so, I was the youngest female - and female sub at that - by a mile, and did feel I got a lot of unwanted attention from much older men, waiting to approach me one by one. I barely got a chance to talk to other women until I learnt to feel more confident in those spaces. I get that women only munches are useful for noobs, particularly, but I still feel the emphasis of them is oddly heterocentric. After all, what is the point of a 'safe space' for women not to get preyed upon if they allow lesbians to attend but not straight pre-op transwomen? What is it about transwomen who do not yet have or have chosen not to have a body sex that matches their gender that makes them less acceptable or somehow understood as more predatory than lesbian women? I find this confusing.

What a number of people seem to miss is that there is a major difference between someone who fetishises female clothing and appearance and someone who has been born into a body that does not feel like their own. I think it's really important that women in the BDSM community begins to accept and embrace transwomen's presence and offer them support. There are sexist male dominants, and there are a lot of men who are made incredibly uncomfortable by transwomens' presence, probably more uncomfortable than most women. There are dominant men whose approach to transwomen on the scene is almost aggressively exclusionary and I'm still unsure of exactly what it is that makes them so uncomfortable when so much of the scene is based on assumption and appearance. But transwomen on the scene need women's support and to feel included if we don't want them to feel marginalised and so men begin to offer them the courtesy they deserve.

Most people can accurately guess whether someone is dominant or submissive by the way they present themselves (well, I get told I must be a dommay quite often, but I've stopped letting it bother me) and I don't really understand why it's so impossible to refer to someone as the gender they are presenting.

It seems to me the problem is all about how well someone 'passes'. If a transwoman is dressed up in high femme clothing, or has had cosmetic surgery on her face to 'feminise' it, or is generally 'convincing', she might be allowed in and accepted. If not, she's just 'a bloke in a dress'. Or even just 'a bloke'. For them, there is nothing more complex than that going on; there is no differentiation to make between a woman who has lived part of her life with the wrong genitalia, and a man who has a fetish for women's clothing. And that's no good at all.

I want to make it absolutely clear that this feminist space is trans-friendly. It's cross-dressing friendly. Hell, it's feminist-man-friendly.

But we still don't want no predators here. Simple as that.