Back on topic.



I found a great article in the SandMUtopian Guardian (#36) about "Body Size and BDSM". Unfortunately the article is not available on line, but you can purchase the back issue for only $6. The URL is: http://www.aswgt.com/html/sandmutopian_guardian.html

I have excerpted a few lines from the piece that really struck home for me. I would recommend getting a copy and reading all of it. Also I have included the author's sources for his article below.

"Body Size and BDSM", Michael P. Marks, Ph.D.

"Michael Foucault, the late French Philosopher, wrote extensively on the role the human body has played in social and political development in the West over several thousand years”. Foucault’s thesis is that the body is a site where society plays out struggles over power… In his work on human sexuality Foucault argued “that sexuality is not something that people are born with, but constitutes a construct by which society names certain identities and practices as ‘normal’, and then proscribes behaviors that have been deemed illegitimate. Specifically, sexuality is constructed as embodying heterosexual intercourse, with auto-eroticism and homosexuality as uniquely prohibited practices”.
This was later picked up by Judith Butler, who wrote “the homosexual identities, as well as behaviors, are explicitly outlawed by the language that society uses to describe what is considered as the appropriate human condition”. “For Foucault, the body is where society invests itself; the way the body is named, medically treated, punished, and sexualized is a political act. For Butler, society ‘inscribes’ itself on the body through language.” Foucault suggested that the traditional regime of sexuality, which normalizes heterosexual acts and makes all other behaviors deviant, be replaced with a shifting repertoire of what he called ‘bodily pleasures’. While he did not specify this range of activities, Foucault’s followers have suggested that they include things such as gay sex, fisting, and sadomasochism.
The author Marks “believes that BDSM, seen in this light, is by its very nature, an act of political resistance. In doing so people who engage in BDSM activities shift the focus away from bodily objectification, which includes the denigration of people who do not adhere to accepted standards of body size, and re-ploy the language of sexuality against out oppressors”. Seen in this light, “BDSMers have an obligation inherent to resist the normalizing effects of objectification inherent in the dominant regime of sexuality that governs our bodies. Bigotries of any type have no place in our (the BDSM) community. While discussions of body size should be entertained, arbitrary prejudices against obesity are self-defeating because they sustain the oppressive discourse which not only marginalizes people of non-standard body size, but everyone who does not adhere to accepted and sanctioned sexual practices”.
“Instead, a commitment to the bodily pleasures inherent in BDSM permits us to escape the dominant culture’s emphasis on institutionalized normality, and embrace an alternate discourse which has the potential for sexual liberation”.

Butler, J (1993). Gender trouble: Feminism and subversion of identity. (New Your, Routledge).
__(1993). Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of sex. (New York: Pantheon books).
Foucault, M. (1978). The history of sexuality: Volume I: An introduction. (New York: Pantheon Books).
__ (1980). Power/Knowledge: Selected interviews and other writings, 1972-1977. ed. C. Gordon. (New York: Pantheon Books.
__ (1995). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. Translated by A. Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books).