Exploring Intimate Difference Through Gender

Abstract

One of the crucial practices in the dyke + queer BDSM communities was gender-based play. For some interview partners, like bisexual woman Vito, this was at the core of their practices: ‘We have also thought about it before if we could refrain from playing with that role and that gender, but to me it is completely essential. So for me it is a very, very strong lust motivation on top of it.’ Because of this major significance of gender-based play for generating desires and pleasures as well as for transformations of the self, this chapter investigates dyke + queer BDSM as a space for exploring and experimenting with gender as an example of intimate difference. I consider relations of social difference to be intimate, because they involve touch and boundary transgressions. Intimacy in the sense of access to bodies and its flip side, rights to bodily integrity, are distributed unevenly in society. Power circulates through bodies and produces erotic investments in social structures of domination and in subversive practices. Dyke + queer BDSM as an erotic practice highlights this intimate character of social difference and exploits it in play.