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BDSM in American Science Fiction and Fantasy Lewis Call. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Despite their relatively taboo status, references and images of bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, and sadism and masochism (known as BDSM or in slang terms "kink") have recently grown increasingly prevalent within American popular culture. Examples range from the SM series of novels Fifty Shades of Grey to American television, where protagonists from AMC's Mad Men to CBS's The Big Bang Theory have recently explored domination and discipline respectfully. Though the inclusion of BDSM in popular culture has become mainstream, these particular erotic practices are still often misunderstood and even pathologized. Lewis Call's BDSM in American Science Fiction and Fantasy, however, sets out to define BDSM as an ethical set of erotic practices which can undermine patriarchy and phallogocentric behaviors through the exchange of power amongst other subversive transgressions (9,13).
This particular study differs from the other books about BDSM as Call provides an enthusiastic, theoretical charting of BDSM in the science fiction and fantasy genre (SF&F) in particular. Numerous texts consider feminism, sexuality, and gender within science fiction, such as Brian Attebery's Decoding Gender in Science Fiction (2002) and Carlen...