Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

BDSM is the consensual exchange of power for pleasure. BDSM is an acronym made up of three term-sets: bondage and discipline (B&D), domination and submission (D/s), and sadomasochism (SM, S/M, or S&M). Although practices similar to those in contemporary BDSM communities have existed in most places and times, BDSM communities are a phenomenon of industrialized capitalist societies.

This essay explores the political dreams we invest in radical sexualities and why we might want to find liberation, specifically economic justice, in radical sexualities. In a time of ongoing neoliberalization of knowledge, where what might appear to be radical sexual difference is all too easily absorbed into multicultural tolerance, I argue that the desire for sex to be liberatory indexes a more social desire for transformation. Taking up the recent turn away from critique in both queer studies and anthropology, I argue that we need critique now more than ever—an immanent critique that implicates both objects and subjects in …