Margot Weiss, Techniques of Pleasure. BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality

Abstract

Reviews the book, Techniques of Pleasure. BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality by Margot Weiss (2011). The book purports to be an ethnography of the San Francisco Bay Area BDSM scene, but it isn't. Instead, it's a queer theory critique of the supposed transgressiveness of the BDSM world, based on the author's observations and interviews, as interpreted through a familiar roster of gender and queer theorists. In numerous ways, the author fails to do justice to, or shed light on, the interesting and important issues, practices, and communities she has chosen to explore. The book engages with interesting questions regarding BDSM, private and public worlds, consent, neo-liberalism, relations with racism and sexism, but the reader would have liked to see less free floating and quite repetitive theorizing and more concrete information on the BDSM population, and should also have liked to see more of the interviews that were done. The author only offers bits and pieces of all her info, never tabulates them, shows more interest in racism than in other relevant forms of discrimination, shows more of the normative than of the non-normative couples and has an exclusive interest in how BDSM informs race and gender relations rather than the reverse circuit how those inform kinky interests. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved).