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Weiss, Margot. Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. xv + 315 pages. Paper, 24.95.
In Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality, anthropologist Margot Weiss argues that sexuality cannot be divorced from social location. Her book is the product of ethnographic fieldwork she conducted in San Francisco among the heterosexual BDSM (bondage/discipline/dominance/submission/sadomasochism) community in and around the Bay Area in the early 2000s. Combining semi-structured interviews with participant observation, Weiss examines how "becoming an SM [variant of BDSM] practitioner, even if imagined to spring from a core or essential desire, requires self-mastery and self-knowledge that is bound to community rules, techniques, and perspectives" (p. 10). The neoliberalism of late capitalism structures, she asserts, the ways in which people create and experience sexuality in this particular community.
In the past, BDSM has been treated as either hegemonic or subversive, reproducing and reinforcing relationships of unequal power based on historical circumstance, such as race or gender, or alternatively questioning the nature of those same relationships by standing them on their heads. Weiss charts a middle course for understanding BDSM, discussing the ways in which sexuality completes the circuit between material circumstances and ideology. The results of BDSM rely on...