Epistemologies of Consent in U.S. BDSM Communities

This dissertation is a study of consent epistemologies in BDSM communities in the United States. What is consent? What constitutes a consent violation? How are violations handled, given the extralegal status of BDSM practice? To answer these questions, I draw on a year of fieldwork in BDSM communities in California, in addition to interviews with 55 BDSM practitioners from more than 20 distinct kink communities across the United States (and one in Canada). Four major findings emerged: (1) consent in BDSM operates on a spectrum, rather than being a simple yes-or-no; (2) some level of consent violation is not only expected, but acceptable, to most practitioners; (3) consent is learned by doing, and; (4) in regards to these first three findings, community is centered in critical ways where it is not in other sexual communities. From these larger findings come my analysis: I first analyze 10 prevalent consent discourses, five each from broader American sexual culture and from BDSM communities more specifically, articulating how these consent discourses fail to align with consent practices adequately because of the discourses’ singular focus on the individual. I demonstrate how these discourses become weaponized in a multitude of BDSM communities to maintain social hierarchies along lines of gender and sexuality, but also as importantly, along lines of dis/ability, social class, and race, leading me to theorize hegemonic consent. But this hegemonic ideology of consent is not reflected in BDSM play; instead, I outline four tenets of consent practices in BDSM communities that operate counter to this hegemonic consent ideology. I conclude by providing an application of my findings in the form of a new framework of consent, called the ABCCCs (awareness, bodily autonomy, caring, communication, and context), which is derived from experiences of consent, violation, and response that BDSM practitioners shared with me. Though I developed this way of thinking about consent in practice both from and for sexual communities, my goal with the framework is in fact a larger one: how does consent operate in many realms of social life? And how might a framework like this be usable both within sexual communities and also beyond them?

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