Power Struggles: Pain and Authenticity in SM Play

Abstract

Despite a good deal of work on pain as a social/emotional construction, the assumption persists that pain is understood and experienced as inherently and originally negative. Postmodern and constructionist treatments of pain alike focus on negotiations and mediations of pain from that point forward. This article explores the ways in which members of an SM (sadomasochism) community frame, cast, and understand the role of pain in their SM activities, toward the ultimate achievement of authenticity in experiences of power-imbalanced social interaction. This analysis, based on an in-depth ethnographic study of an SM community, identifies four main discourses of pain, three of which conform to hegemonic understandings of pain as intrinsically negative experience. It reveals the complex strategies SM participants employ to make sense of pain and contrasts this with a minority discourse in the community in which the provision and experience of pain is framed as a desirable social, carnal, and emotional experience.