The Socio-Legal Regulation of BDSM in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This research examines Canadian case law and the lived experiences of BDSM practitioners articulated on the blog Reddit, using critical discourse analysis in order to understand: (i) How is BDSM framed in legal discourse? (ii) To what extent do dominant discourses produce a criminalised sexual subjectivity for BDSM practitioners? (iii) What interpretive repertoires do BDSM participants in different social locations (e.g., race, class, gender, disability) employ to describe their experiences negotiating consent? (iv) How might an analysis of people’s perspectives and policy arguments contribute to public and scholarly debates by recognizing the social value of BDSM practice? The findings illustrate several discourses, which are categorised by those found within case law data and Reddit data. The discourses found in case law include: Moral custodianship, deviance as a social contagion, biopolitical sexual regulation, state paternalism, and sexual citizenship. The discourses located within Reddit data include: Social-sexual dynamics and hierarchies, self-empowerment/confidence and self-worth, visibility of kink, consent/choice, pleasure/eroticism in kink, and counter-hegemonic pleasures/identities. The distinctions between discursive categories are often blurred as many adjudications and Reddit posts draw from multiple discursive narratives in the appeal for legal action against BDSM-related activities, and the narratives of personal experiences within BDSM communities. Consent, as a concept and practice, is present in Canadian case law and the narratives of BDSM community members within this study. Particularly, this research investigates the nuances of consent, its fluidity, and what consent means in the language of the law as compared to the practices of consent within BDSM-related encounters. Through the narratives of BDSM community members on Reddit, bloggers voice and resist dominant socio-legal discourses that frame their non-normative sexualities as immoral, deviant, and ultimately, criminal. Giving voice to BDSM practitioners contributes to a greater understanding of consent. The corollary of this research is the possibility of utilising the expert knowledge of BDSM community members in differentiating between consented BDSM play and willful sexual assault.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.033 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".