Article

Sexualities
2023, Vol. 0(0) 1–25
BDSM and total power © The Author(s) 2023

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inclusion and exclusion DOI: 10.1177/13634607231170320
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Ofer Parchev 
University of Haifa, Israel

Abstract
In recent decades, BDSM as a form of power exchange has gained partial recognition and
social inclusion in the public sphere. The inclusive process comes with the price of
excluding concrete behaviors and thought patterns that are considered dangerous and
pathological. This exclusion/inclusion process is conducted in the framework of the
production of consensual biopolitical knowledge and in the context of the normalization
of sex. Under these conditions, the total power exchange master/slave relationship,
which is realized through a full-time power exchange encounter, suffers from the ex-
clusion mechanism, as it is incompatible with the inclusive reason. In the course of this
paper, I will examine the exclusion process of the master/slave total power exchange
under the constitutive mechanism of the BDSM discursive rules in order to expose a new
form of thinking and behavior that challenges the biopower reason, while simultaneously
operating within its limitations.

Keywords
BDSM, total power exchange, biopower, consent, sexuality

Introduction
One of the social and cultural practices that has garnered much critical and theoretical
research in recent decades is BDSM. This umbrella term is used to describe a variety of
behaviors involving an explicit or implicit erotic power exchange through dominance and
submission, which includes the infliction of pain or intense stimulation, elements of role-
taking or role play, and various levels of bondage (Weiss, 2011). All these practices are

Corresponding author:
Ofer Parchev, Department of interdisciplinary, University of Haifa, haoren 28, Haifa 36601, Israel.
Email: oferparchev@gmail.com
2 Sexualities 0(0)

determined under a consensual agreement between the participants, which is a prereq-

uisite for the normative and descriptive existence of this phenomenon, thereby dis-
tinguishing it from nonconsensual abuse. It encompasses a variety of forms of pleasure
production through the exchange of power, some of them physical (flogging, for ex-
ample), some psychological (master/slave), and some combined (bondage).
In the last few decades, BDSM, especially as a sexual practice, has transitioned from a
lack of external recognition and public persecution to social inclusion in various arenas.
Indeed, BDSM remains a marginalized sexual practice, in the grip of social stigmatization
and suffering from a lack of public consensus regarding its legitimacy as a social practice
and discourse (Fanghanel, 2020: 273; Tomazos et al., 2017); however, notwithstanding
the controversy concerning its public legitimacy, partial acceptance has been gained in the
cultural, legal, and medical spheres. In the medical realm, it has shifted from a mental
disorder to a sexual, kinky practice that is legitimized under certain conditions (APA,
2013; Williams, 2017: 70–72); in the legislative sphere, from criminalizing BDSM
participants for engaging in abuse to recognizing their right to the production of sexual
pleasure under safe conditions (Weiss, 2011: 80–84; Weinberg, 2016); and in the cultural
realm as a pattern of behavior and sexual practice, emerging from the narrow realm of the
bizarre into the cultural mainstream, enriching marital erotic life, permeating alternative
sexual relationships, and occupying a prominent place in literature, film, and media
(Weiss, 2011: 1032–1049; Downing, 2004: 62–68; Williams, 2017: 74–77; Cruz, 2019:
152–161).
Consent and sexuality are the primary mechanisms for social inclusion in BDSM
relation (Langdridge and Barker, 2007: 41–60; Kleinplatz and Moser, 2011: 1–15;
Williams, 2017). Consent as an amiable decision between adults and sexual desire as a
pleasurable, sensual feeling distinguishes between BDSM practices and aggressive sa-
dism and humiliating masochism, with their criminal and mental disorders, and marks
BDSM as a realization of the participants’ interests and desires. But the possible range of
agreement between two adults and the scope of legitimate sexual acts is subject to in-
terpretation and may be used as a mechanism of exclusion. BDSM as a heterogenous
discourse and practice that is characterized by sexual tendency (heterosexual/
homosexual), gender and racial identity, and a wide range of power relations (mental
or physical domination, gradual degree of pain infliction and so on) further emphasizes the
controversial status of sexuality and consent and even how they may be used as a tool for
exclusion under the guise of social legitimization. For example, some statements or-
ganized under the consensual argument may include specific power-relation behaviors
and fantasies—thereby pushing others beyond the boundaries of legitimacy (Downing,
2004, 2007; Parchev and Langdridge, 2017; Cruz, 2019)—as well as practices for the
production of sexual pleasure that are established under accepted sexual orientations, such
as the marital relationship, thereby defining consensual, non-sexual power exchanges as
pathological and dangerous (Langdridge, 2006; Weait, 2007).
One of the divisions within BDSM is between part-time or time-limited versus full-
time and long-time relationships with determined under consensual context (Dancer et al.,
2006: 82–3). Time-limited BDSM encounters are circumscribed by rules and roles that are
established only for the duration of that encounter. Full-time encounters appear in
Parchev 3

relationships specifically established for the purpose of incorporating the power exchange
encounter as a basis for the entire relationship. Some of these relationships strive for a
“total power exchange” (TPE) in which the submissive partner consciously yields control
of significant domains of life to the dominant partner. Such relations include several
prominent subsets that are based on different roles. SM slavery is a subset of this re-
lationship, in which the submissive person chooses to be seen as a slave and identifies as
such (Dancer et al., 2006: 86), but there are other types created around other roles, such as
a parent-child relationship.
TPE as an experimental form of BDSM raises unique questions and problems con-
cerning marital relationships, power divisions and erotic and sexual experience, which
distinguish it from other BDSM intersubjective engagements, even as it remains a part of
the overall phenomena. In the last few decades, several sociological and ethnographic
researchers have raised a number of interesting issues regarding the formal structure of
TPE engagement, the power division between TPE agents, their subjective descriptive
experience, and the sexual versus erotic function (Bauer, 2014: 120–131; Kaldera, 2010;
Cook Daniels, 2010; Cascalheira and Wignall, 2022: 628–639; Dancer et al., 2006: 81–
93; Facio et al., 2020: 1146–1149; Green, 2007; Ortmann and Sprott, 2012; Williams,
2017). However, while most of the literature has examined TPE as another form of BDSM
activity, there has been very little contemplation of the distinct place it occupies vis à vis
other forms of BDSM social engagement (Cascalheira and Wignall, 2022: 628–639;
Dancer et al., 2006).
The goal of this paper is to expose the way in which the mainstream argument re-
garding consent and the function of sex in BDSM practice excludes TPE from the realm of
the normative. As required in social and political criticism, the purpose of the description
is not only to detail the exclusion process, but especially to present TPE as a form of social
relationship that expands the boundaries of the consensual and the erotic in order to
expose a new form of thinking and practice that goes beyond the dictates of normative
society (Foucault, 1997a: 311–313). For this project, I applied a discourse analysis
approach to academic and primary sources regarding BDSM. In order to achieve this goal,
I will review, first, the way in which most of the literature concerning BDSM validates
consent and excludes TPE from the boundaries of BDSM by using a social-constructive
and medical argument that is constituted by the biopower production and dissemination of
knowledge. In this context, I will suggest TPE as a constructive discursive mechanism
that expands BDSM practice beyond normative boundaries by enriching the argument
regarding consent. Second, I will expose the sovereignty of the sexual and erotic reason in
the BDSM discourse—especially as it appears in contemporary literature—as part of the
biopower disciplinary regime and as a mechanism of exclusion aimed mostly against TPE
practice. Finally, I will suggest TPE as a pure power relationship that indicates a new form
of social relations that functions within the biopower reason but at the same time expands
its boundaries.
Biopolitics functions, under this critical direction, as an analytical descriptive frame for
understanding TPE through Foucault’s analysis and his contemporary successors, es-
pecially in the liberal context. Through the development of the concept of biopower,
Foucault suggested a descriptive way of understanding the growth of temporal discursive
4 Sexualities 0(0)

rules and practices in their historical context and how the subjective function is constituted
through this process. As a discursive structure and social constructive practice based on
subjective corporal embodiment, BDSM calls for this analytical insight. Indeed, this
method has been applied in some of the central ethnographic and philosophical researches
concerning BDSM phenomena (Carlström, 2019: 1162–1181; Downing, 2007: 79–91;
Weiss, 2011: 60–99; Williams, 2017: 67–74). In the course of this paper, I will use
Foucault’s analytical and ethical point of view to identify BDSM’s constitutive discursive
rules and its process of constituting the subject in the biopower historical condition.

Methodological approach
The methodology that was employed in this paper is based upon Michel Foucault’s
genealogical approach regarding discursive analysis (Foucault, 1977: 79–96, 1997b:
140–148). The BDSM literature on consent and sexuality will be analyzed as a part of the
disciplinary knowledge that manifests the institutionalization of BDSM as a mechanism
of inclusion and exclusion, especially within the structure of governmental biopower. The
discursive rule functions in this analysis as a constructive consequence of institutional
power that constitutes every form of statement and practice by setting their limits and
determining their content, not as an oppressive exclusion, but as the immanent product of
the mechanism of discourse (Foucault, 1972: 79–96, 1977-8: 108–109).
In his genealogical research, Foucault looked for the way in which statement and
practice in modern society function and are produced under a concrete structural power
(Foucault, 1997, S.P, 340–54). This analytical direction was extended to his analysis of
the discourse concerning the constitutive process of objects, subjects, and concepts under
contemporary discursive rules (Foucault, 1982: 79–96). In the course of the paper, I will
identify the sociological and cultural academic literature that justified and legitimized
BDSM under the consensual and sexual argument as a part of the biopower reason, which
functions as one of the prominent structural powers of modern society (Foucault, 2008: 1–
42). Here, I will focus on the sociological and ethnographic literature that understands
BDSM practice as culturally produced and dependent on a social context, on the internal
feminist dispute regarding the legitimization of BDSM, on psychiatric discursive rules,
and on the ethnographic and phenomenological discussion concerning the place of
sexuality in BDSM practice and identity. As a result of this discursive analysis, I will
identify the inclusive/exclusive mechanism of the BDSM discourse, in which the in-
clusive argument excludes TPE practice, as it is not included in the boundaries of the
biopower discourse.
This methodological direction is determined under the fundamental, genealogical
assumption concerning the productive nature of power (Foucault, 1977–78: 95–105,
1997: S.P, 340–4). Thus, the act of inclusion/exclusion will be analyzed as a constitutive
mechanism of the discursive TPE rules, beyond the normative biopower reason. Here, I
will examine TPE through the empirical evidence of several research studies, referring
especially to the autobiography of Dan and Dawn Williams, a TPE master/slave couple.
Indeed, in recent years, it has become possible to find quite a bit of evidence in the social
web concerning TPE relationships (Reddit, 2022: 41). But the Williams couple, who share
Parchev 5

their life through a radio program and a blog (Williams and Williams, 2011: 9-83), provide
the most systematic, detailed evidence regarding the experimental existence of the TPE
way of life by describing the power exchange process in their daily life, the feelings and
emotions accompanying it, and the way in which they are expressed in the construction of
their life together. Thus, through this primary source, I will try to expose the process of the
exclusion of TPE within the discursive biopower rules and the way in which TPE
challenges the primary assumptions of these reasons. This critical and methodological
thrust is compatible with what has been termed by Langdridge “a voice from the margins,”
whereby the voice of BDSM participants is heard without the criminal or pathological
stigma (Langdridge, 2006, 375–379).

The consensual argument via the exclusion mechanism: The TPE case
Consent as a social mechanism of exclusion and inclusion that shapes the limits of
participants’ behavior and even the very content of their experience is determined by two
fundamental elements that reflect the social environment in which the structure of the
BDSM discourse has been growing in recent decades: First is the definition of a legitimate
decision as being one that is voluntary, knowledgeable, and explicit—a condition that is
commensurate with an autonomous free will (Bauer, 2014: 57–65; Newmhar, 2011: 149;
Fanghanel, 2020: 272), and second is the separation between statements and behaviors
that are decided upon rationally, and statements and behaviors that pertain to unacceptable
practices that are beyond the consensus.
The critical discussion regarding terms of consent that reflect an autonomous mode is
not determined through the formal act of saying “yes,” but through the individual’s
capacity to make decisions (Fanghanel, 2020: 269–270). Consent, especially in the
legislative discourse and its implementation in the BDSM social network and institutional
organization, is based on the conditions that define the right and ability of individuals to
make reasonable decisions that reflect their interests and wills, outside of direct and
indirect pressure. These conditions are established through behavior that confirms the
participants’ capacity to consciously understand their desires and needs on the basis of an
active participation in the process of constructing their activity and the ability to withdraw
from it. Hence, in order to establish such conditions, participants must mutually determine
their meeting location, the way in which they will establish their fantasy and desires, and
the inviolate limits of their statements and behaviors (Newmhar, 2011: 64–69; Bauer,
2014: 1–10; Weinberg, 2016).
This mutual, deliberate negotiation, which testifies to an autonomous capacity for
reasoning, is emphasized by BDSM scholars as distinguishing it from torture, intimate
partner violence, and assault (Weiss, 2011; Jozifkova, 2013; Pitagora, 2013). The pleasure
that emerges through negotiation is meditated and realized by the way in which each party
determines the proper script that fulfills its fantasy, which guarantees their awareness and
intelligent competence. Bauer points out the conditions that testify to this capacity
through the concept of meta-consent, in which certain standards of interaction are es-
tablished prior to the activity, the reduction of potential injury to third parties, and a clear
mechanism to cope with temporal change (Bauer, 2014: 80–88). Williams et al. add an
6 Sexualities 0(0)

additional layer of the same conditions through the translation of the rational process of
each party involved in the activity into an operational language (Williams et al., 2014: 7–
12). This complex process is determined and completed through three necessary actions:
surface consent concerning formal agreement; scene consent, which encompasses what
will happen at the scene and how both sides determine their limits; and deep consent,
which establishes what the partners are really able to do and the conditions under which
they are willing to overturn their prior consent.
The validity of BDSM consent, however, is based on one’s awareness of one’s will and
the way one realizes it through intersubjective engagement. But the prior condition of
consent is not exhausted by individuals’ recognition of their desire, but also involves the
legitimacy of the desire itself. Some patterns of behavior and thinking that reflect a
subject’s desires are deemed harmful and destructive and relegated beyond the boundaries
of the consensual, even if they are realized by a strong will. Fanghnel described these
patterns as an immanent desire that reflects individual wills but conflicts with accepted
social values, thus leading individuals to give them a minor expression, if at all (2020:
271–279). Thus, free will may encompass miscalculated decisions that lead to self-
destruction, which goes beyond the limits of the contingent BDSM agreement.
This argument is found in the radical feminist discourse, in which a woman’s
agreement to make a considered decision regarding her will is put in doubt if it serves the
patriarchy (Gilligen, 1993; Noddings, 1984). In the BDSM context, the radical feminists
argue that BDSM relations inherently serve the male hegemony and reproduce it, so that a
woman’s acceptance of them is not legitimate (Linden, 1982; Vadas, 1995). In the process
of incorporating BDSM in the public sphere, the best-known BDSM framework, Safe,
Sane and Consensual (SSC) reflects the dynamic mechanism of exclusion through the
slogan itself. Under the safety label, every practice that expands the limits of physical pain
to actual injury to the body and physical functioning is excluded from the intersubjective
engagement, even if it reflects a mutual desire (Weissman, 1997; Downing, 2004: 1–19,
2007: 79–91; Langdridge, 2006). Thus, only secure practices and behaviors that guar-
antee the safety of their subjects’ body are included in the consensus.
The question of sanity occupies a more complex place than physical security in the
context of exclusion. In BDSM practice, humiliation and pain infliction are responsible
for a gradual form of physical and mental sensation and emotions, which may be de-
termined to be a site of depression and suffering. As long as it is accompanied by the
participants’ satisfaction, as long as they show a willingness to be at the scene, and as long
as they feel that their bodies and lives are safe—then their behavior attests to their fitness
to make rational decisions that realize this manner of producing pleasure, that is, sexual
arousal or transcendent sensual feelings, and not create for themselves or for others a
negative atmosphere of depressed emotions, mutual hostility, and so on (Hopkins, 1994:
121–7; Stear, 2009: 142–159; Weiss, 2011: 142–149).
The absence of these behavioral marker’s casts doubt on the participants’ competence.
Herein lies the importance of safety codes or non-verbal signs in a relationship based on
in-depth familiarity, as a creation of actual and virtual boundaries that separate between
acceptable and non-acceptable statements, practices, and behaviors (Weinberg, 2016).
Thus, power exchanges that reflect the participants’ desires but are based on a sense of
Parchev 7

threat and transmit a feeling of distress and dissatisfaction with one of the parties, attests to
the parties’ inability to make a calculated and considered decision that reflects their wills,
even if they show a willingness to continue participating in the same activity and
sometimes actually build a relationship according to such rules. This point distinguishes
between a pathological desire to act against one’s will and serve another’s needs (e.g., as
in a brutal marital relationship), and a conscious desire to feel physical pain and ex-
perience inferiority in a consensual BDSM relationship, as part of neoliberal subjects’
investment of their physical and mental capital for the purpose of generating pleasure.1
The limitations of BDSM consent have constituted standards of behavior and ac-
ceptable thinking patterns, thereby transforming the heterogenous forms of the BDSM
existential experience from a mere practice that enriches one’s sexual practice to a way of
life that defines one’s identity. However, compliance with rules that reflect accepted social
norms, as manifested in the notion of valid consent, has excluded other structural desires
that are inconsistent with these norms. This exclusion derives from reducing the con-
sensual argument to a few sets of hegemonic values that reflect the mainstream social and
marital way of life. As Bauer has argued, reducing consent to pre-determined scenarios
and romantic axiomatic dogmas of necessary mutual satisfaction does not take into
consideration BDSM’s non-heteronormative way of establishing consent between
agents—a way that goes beyond a predictable script and that is based on the potential
dynamic of intersubjective engagements that can reach the point of potential interruption,
miscommunication challenges and so on (Bauer, 2014: 120–132; 2021: 767–783). Hence,
reducing the consensual act to prior negotiated rules based on a static script and constant
satisfaction raises concerns about subjugating every negotiated consent to conditions that
exclude every form of social engagement that does not agree with heteronormative
dogmas.
The hegemonic heteronormative domination of consensual argument expresses the
inherent tension between transgressive and social expectations regarding BDSM behavior
(see Langdridge, 2006; Langdridge and Parchev, 2017). It reflects the normalization
process, in which public legitimization reduces potential oppression and exploitative
relationships, but on the other hand leads to the exclusion and denial of contingent social
behaviors and experiences (Williams, 2017: 67–79). In her ethnographic research on the
incorporation process of BDSM in Swedish society, Carlström described this tension by
linking biopower governmentality in Foucault’s work with the social exclusion mech-
anism in the BDSM discursive practice (Carlström, 2019: 1168–1174). As mentioned by
Foucault, in modern society, individuals are under constant surveillance and regulation in
subtle ways, leading to normalization and acceptance (Carlström, 2019: 1168–1169).
Individuals are addressed as rational, autonomous, self-aware agents who are expected to
pursue lives that lead to the greatest degree of well-being, and hence they are likely to
conduct lives in accordance with authoritative ideas about how to live a safe and healthy
life. Liberal and neoliberal ideas function as a subtle social power, marking those who do
not conduct themselves in accordance with the normalized discourse as deviant, path-
ological, risky, and unethical subjects, who must be excluded.
In the context of the historical rise of the BDSM exclusion/inclusion mechanism, the
production of biopower knowledge of health values is determined in the framework of the
8 Sexualities 0(0)

neoliberal terms of responsibility and free choice, which has been described as a mutually
created effect by Rose (2001: 1–21, 2007). Thus, the mechanism is less an external
institutional dictate and more a rational decision of BDSM participants to reject state-
ments and actions that do not correspond with authoritative health values. This neoliberal
state is conditioned and, in some sense, shaped through the radical change in the medical
discursive rules concerning BDSM practice, from the description of every BDSM be-
havioral pattern as a pathological tendency (Kraft-Ebbing, 1965: 56–67) to “kinky,”
acceptable sexual behavior within certain limits (American Psychiatric Association, 2013:
94), and through the legal protection afforded to the institutionalized form of BDSM
(Weiss, 2011: 72–4).
Here, the neoliberal tendency functions through SCC as an institutional mechanism in
the public sphere that establishes BDSM discursive rules and practices through health
codes that are consistent with normative medical rules and legislature. This is accom-
plished first by limiting BDSM participants’ behavior to values of health that protect the
participants’ bodies from any physical damage and by establishing their will in any given
time through safety codes, common consideration, after-caring tactics and so on. Thus, the
participants shape their thoughts and actions in the context of what has been determined to
be safe and healthy, while excluding other contingent options as pathological, dangerous
and even criminal (Downing, 2004: 1–21, 79–91; Newmhar, 2011: 81–92; Weinberg,
2016). Consequently, the compatibility of BDSM with healthy codes is expressed in the
creation of an internal elitist group that produces the hegemonic voice of BDSM, which is
manifested in the public arena through the media and the institutional organization of
BDSM relationships (Weissman, 1997), in distinguishing between healthy and sick
practices and in establishing study workshops in which participants acquire tools that
allow them to adapt the power exchange to health values (Weiss, 2011: 72–88; Weinberg,
2016).
The connection between BDSM and health codes as expressed in the normalization of
BDSM SCC is not limited to permitted thinking and behavior but also to a division
between fiction/reality and the public/private realm (Weiss, 2011: 72–78). BDSM
functions as a healthy condition only when it is a fictitious practice between adults that
does not penetrate real life, whether a marital relationship, the workplace and so on. As
some scholars have argued, the separation between fiction and reality defines BDSM as an
activity in the private realm, separate from the public sphere, as a contra argument against
the radical feminist and post-colonial critical attitude, by establishing BDSM as an area in
which the individual expresses a necessary part of his identity, without violating public,
consensual values (Hopkins, 1994: 42–57; Stear, 2009: 142–159; Weiss, 2011: 72–78;
Cruz, 2019). Thus, BDSM practice abides by the condition of physical and mental health
only if it is not expressed in any part of human life, that is, by remaining a mere game that
is located in a separate time and place, like playing basketball on a Tuesday afternoon.
This separation corresponds to the medical determination of the DMS-5, according to
which BDSM is considered normal as long as the participants do not report any psy-
chosocial interferences (American Psychiatric Association, 2013: 94–95). The BDSM
mainstream attitude distances itself from any possibility of being considered pathological
Parchev 9

by creating normative subjects whose daily function is absent any expression of power
exchange.
In a contemporary research, Turley argues that the transgressive function of BDSM is a
real and important component for some of the participants, which sometimes serves as a
political statement against institutional discursive rules and practice (Turley, 2022) . But,
at the same time and not necessarily in contradiction, BDSM agents have divided into a
categorized dichotomy, where the good BDSM subjects obey the external normative
conditions, while the bad BDSM subjects, who are suspected of undermining them,
become even more marginalized, stigmatic, and fearful of external consequences. By its
very definition and as we have seen through examining the relationship between nor-
malization and biopower concerning BDSM acceptance, especially with regards to the
separation of reality and fiction—TPE cannot function under these conditions. In TPE
engagements, especially those that adhere to a severe protocol, the subordination of the
bottom to the top’s control encompasses considerable portions of their life (Dancer et al.,
2006). Thus, the separation between reality and fiction does not exist, as the dyadic power
division constructs reality and determines some of its parts. In this constructive
framework, the whole negotiated process that establishes the engagement does not
necessarily function under arbitrary SSC conditions, or at least has to be examined in
long-term relations. Thus, TPE may suffer from a pathological stigma that causes it to be
excluded from normative BDSM. Dunkley and Brotto emphasized this exclusion
mechanism as they define BDSM consent in this manner: “partners are able to dis-
criminate between BDSM activity and common everyday life” (Dunkley and Brotto,
2020: 668) and “everyday hierarchal disparity is mild” (ibid). Thus, TPE as an activity
that potentially penetrates every part of life is inconsistent with the prerequisites of the
“healthy” BDSM condition, and may be conceptualized as an abusive and pathological
relation (Dunkley and Brotto, 2020: 668–670).
However, TPE relationships are explored in this context as a transgressive social force,
as an intersubjective engagement that subverts the heteronormative marital reason. But
the transgressive force does not contradict the BDSM normalization process under the
production of biopower knowledge. During the ongoing process of consent in TPE, the
submissive partner gains autonomy over specific duties, which does not necessarily
violate the hierarchical division between the parties, and participants enter the relationship
of their own free will; this distinguishes between TPE and abusive, non-consensual
relations (Bauer, 2014: 233–239; Kaldera, 2010). Additionally, as Cascalheira et al.
revealed in their phenomenological evidence, TPE agents shape their desires and will in a
social construction context that emphasizes the process of identity constitution under the
aegis of community belonging and the gradual acquisition of mental and physical tools
(Cascalheira et al., 2022: 635–636). Thus, the discussion of health and sanity is a part of
the creation of TPE selfhood, as is the case in other BDSM experiences, while the question
of autonomy, the partner’s established will, and belonging to the BDSM community with
its normative conditions occupies a central part in the ongoing intersubjective engagement
and self-realization process.
10 Sexualities 0(0)

Intimacy and trust: TPE conditions of consent

If TPE is not included entirely in the normative BDSM form of consent, how can such
relations be legitimized? Is it a criminal and pathological behavior that cannot be justified
within a framework of consent? Does it require breaking the logic of consent? Or is it
possible to violate the hegemonic rules and expand these boundaries for the purpose of
inclusion?
In this regard, a key point for remaining within the discursive rule of consent while still
expanding its limits is the extended linguistic use of the concepts of intimacy and trust as
expressed in social interactions. As Bauer argued in linking between intimacy and BDSM,
intimacy means sharing intense effects, emotions, and physical responses, which in a
heteronormative context are expressed by exposing to someone else something that
nobody else gets to see (Bauer, 2014: 110–112). The capability to do so in a social
interaction involves allowing another to realize the goal of the exposed without damaging
the trust placed in the exposure and sharing process. Thus, the consent between the two
parties is based on the connection between intimacy and trust, on the responsibility of one
party to realize the hidden desires of the consenting partner or at least to respect them and
give them a proper place within the framework of their relationship.
The TPE master/slave relationship is based on the way in which both parties establish
their most immanent desires in all aspects of life, to control or to be controlled in a 24/7
relation. Thus, the process of intimate exposure is necessary for establishing the core of
the relationship, much more so than in a vanilla relationship and even in BDSM short-
term relations, where the essential interaction between the participants is not necessarily
constituted under terms of intimacy (Bauer, 2014: 44–47; Facio et al., 2020: 1644). Here,
intimacy functions as the main avenue of consensual validation, in which the inter-
subjective attachment realizes the most significant desires of each of the parties, consistent
with the mutual trust that has been established between them.
Understanding the TPE lifestyle enables exposing the consensual intersubjective
pattern, which draws its legitimacy from the promise of trust that exists in intimate
relationships. In this way, TPE subverts the mainstream academic and public consensual
discursive rule, which is based on a normative argument that is external to intimacy and
trust. In the rest of this section, I want to suggest a discursive analysis of the written text of
the William’s couple due to the central function of intimacy and trust in their life. This
analysis exposes the relative constitution of concepts and terms that are realized as
absolute, following Foucault’s genealogical analysis (Foucault, 1997a: 372–4), by
presenting a form of intersubjective attachment, which on the one hand cannot be
reconciled with the mainstream consensual rule, but on the other hand is consistent with
the consensual goal that separates between harmonious relationships and abusive and
exploitative ones. Through the TPE engagement, this analytical textual unit suggests an
inclusive mechanism of thinking and a behavioral pattern beyond the biopower structural
function, while recognizing the influence of the biopower function on shaping the
construction of every action and thought.
Parchev 11

Findings and results: From SSC to risk taking—Intimacy and trust through the
Williams’s story
In a confessional monologue in the autobiography by Dan and Dawn Williams, the latter,
a slave in a TPE relationship, presents the complex process through which they built their
marital relations:

“After examining ourselves individually, we shared our secrets, and our most secret desires,
with each other. Our relationship was built around our authentic selves. Dan needed to be in
charge and to be trusted completely, without reservation, by a strong person. I needed to
completely trust someone. Someone with whom I surround myself and my ego. Our re-
lationship is built on trust” (Williams and Williams, 2011: 9–10).

Dan and Dawn built their relationship not through a mutual consideration of their life,
but by exposing their inner desires, which is called by Dan “the authentic self”; in other
words, by trusting each other to accomplish their differing wills. Here, trust is not
conditioned on the production of a proper feeling such as love and warmth (Bauer, 2014:
111). The act of intimacy opens the door to a valid form of consent to a mutual en-
gagement that is not based on any signal of satisfaction from either party, a potential sense
of threat and even the option of physical damage to the body. Such possibilities come into
existence only if both parties, and especially the bottom, disclose their hidden desires to
each other and establish a relationship of trust in which the master does not, for the most
part, gratify himself but works to satisfy the needs and desires of the bottom. Thus,
intimacy has an inclusive social function that has not been recognized in the neoliberal
interpretation of SCC. Dan, the master, presented this contingent inclusion by detailing an
intimate engagement from his past, where he was acquainted with a slave partner that
aspired to be to locked up in a cage without any emotional closeness; just a mutual
relationship that realizes the slave’s desire:

“For her—and for others—M/S is not about a loving, committed relationship or a direct
exchange dynamic in the way most of us would see it. It was about knowing her place, and
her place as a property. Some will argue whether this is healthy, or whether any sane persons
would allow themselves to be used in such a one-sided manner. But it is one-sided? Or is it an
exchange just in a different sort? We have already broken the boundaries of normal rela-
tionships when we come to M/S. Some of us take a loving relationship and add a layer of
power exchange to it. Others simply seek the power exchange without an emotional aspect.
The aspect they seek comes from within, born to service” (Williams and Williams, 2011: 12).

The total pattern of control, without affection and love, as it appears in Dan’s pre-
sentation, is not a representative expression of a TPE master/slave relation, but a min-
imum threshold condition that justifies the contingent consent that facilitates engagement.
These TPE conditions challenge the biopower hegemony over the production and dis-
semination of social knowledge, as the intimate engagement is not conditioned on an
autonomous and self-aware subject linked to binding, necessary values that produce
12 Sexualities 0(0)

positive and healthy feelings such as warmth and affection; instead, the slave’s very act of
consent reveals his inner desires and attests to his fitness to make a voluntary decision,
perhaps even more so than a decision based on the existence of constant reflection during
the entire engagement but also on a lower level of awareness of both sides regarding the
desires of the other.
Dawn demonstrates this point when she presents menial tasks as a practice that she
dislikes but performs because the passion to serve the particular master to which she is so
attached is stronger than her lack of will to do such things (Williams and Williams, 2011:
72–78). Thus, if we still remain tied to the concept of health that conditions the capability
to act as a free will, based on the liberal-utilitarian paradigm of enjoyment via suffering,
we will condemn Dawn’s preference. But, if one chooses to serve a master out of one’s
deepest, inner expression of one’s sense of being a slave, then the process of intimate
exposure of the slave to his trustable master may be viewed as an effective instrument for
realizing the desires of both—perhaps even more so than in a healthy, vanilla relationship,
where the desires of both partners are sometimes hidden from the subjects themselves.
This point reveals options for expanding one’s existential experience beyond the safe
space of biopower, which is tied to the concept of sanity. It enables the crossing of
boundaries that is necessary for the production of thrills in a BDSM relationship
(McClintock, 1993; Kendrick, 1999; Weiss, 2011: 90–99). This subversive move against
the hegemonic power and knowledge joins the criticism in the BDSM community against
the mainstream SSC assumption outlined in the Risk Aware Consensual Kink (RACK)
worldview. This criticism rejects the imperative to be sane as a stigmatic psychological
pathology that inhibits BDSM practice; it rejects the imperative to be safe, preferring to
take risks in edge work (Weiss, 2011: 74–79; Weinberg, 2016: 74–77; Williams et al.,
2014: 3–5; Fanghanel, 2020: 273).
Nonetheless, RACK remains captured in the mainstream logic of consent, which
contradicts its goal, while it is tied through its semantic definition to a state of awareness.
Under these limitations, every fantasy and behavior have to be included in one’s will and
wishes, and every pleasure-creating practice and excitement derived from the loss of
individual control over one’s will is pushed outside the boundaries of consent. Here,
RACK limits the human experience to authoritative health values determined by the
autonomous condition of the subject. By exchanging awareness with intimacy, TPE
releases risk-taking from the neoliberal shackles of health and sanity, removing the
process of consent from any prior psychological and mental condition. Here TPE does not
contradict the RACK philosophy, which operates under the neoliberal reason concerning
the increasing danger of taking risks beyond calculated, safe contexts. However, the rise
in human behaviors that go beyond the condition of autonomy increases the level of
consent for modes of experience that reflect the participants’ desires in BDSM activity—
desires that are not established in RACK, as they are not expressed in mainstream SSC.
Thus, the intimacy function in the TPE master/slave engagement appears to be an in-
strument of social inclusion, as through the process of exposure it reveals one’s immanent
desires, which are excluded from the boundaries of normative health practices, and
realizes them under conditions of trust.
Parchev 13

Sexuality and BDSM: From sexuality to pure power exchange

The question whether or not BDSM should be considered a sexual experience has given
rise to various controversies in the literature. A good part of the academic discourse, with
its phenomenological and ethnographic evidence, regards sex as a fundamental and
necessary characteristic of BDSM. It is conceptualized in transgressive terms rather than
normalized sexual behavior as producing pleasure beyond the genital orgasm and a
plurality of outcomes beyond sexual arousal (Weinberg et al., 1984; Giddens, 1992;
Foucault, 1997: 165–9; McClintock, 1993; Kandreick, 1999; Langdridge, 2006: 380;
McWhorter, 2012: 99; Weinberg, 2016).2 In this transgressive orientation, sexuality
functions as a social inclusion mechanism by defining BDSM practice as a rational choice,
based on a calculated, considered decision that has a utilitarian motivation and that rejects
pathological brutal sadism and masochistic paraphilia.
Some researchers have taken this assumption a step further by finding the motivation
and goals of participation in BDSM as going beyond sexual arousal, and even viewing it
as a radical practice that subverts its epistemic reason. Some of them have recognized
BDSM as a bodily practice that enhances existence beyond the normative boundaries of
selfhood and identity, sometimes going beyond the limits of the production of biopower
knowledge (Foucault, 1997b: 165; Kendrick, 1999; Beckmann, 2005: 206–225, 43–53;
Weiss, 2011: 98–100; Carlström, 2019: 1164–1181; Cruz, 2019: 194–205). Others argue
for the precedence of power over sexuality in BDSM activity as a site of production of a
variety of thrills, fantasies, and thinking patterns that do not add up to sexual arousal
(Turley, 2018: 148–160; Newmhar, 2011: 74–80). Here, BDSM is seen as an existential
alternative to the dominant authority of sexual pleasure in the modern discursive rule of
the production of pleasure.
These critical attitudes, like those that limit BDSM motivation to sexual arousal,
require an external explanation of the power dynamic in order to distinguish between a
consensual relationship and an abusive one. The creation of positive sensual, mental, and
physical reactions is necessary for legitimizing the existence of the power differential as
the core of this intersubjective intimate relationship. Turley emphasized this point by
conditioning consensual BDSM on a contextual field that transforms unpleasant acts into
sexually pleasurable activities (Turley, 2017: 324–334, 2018: 148–160). Thus, although
sexual arousal does not function as the only valid motivation, every statement and practice
must embody pleasurable images and sensual pleasure, and every element of the power
relations must be confined within fictitious boundaries that necessarily attribute moti-
vations that are external to the pure power relation themselves. However, as some
ethnographic and phenomenological evidence demonstrates, numerous BDSM practi-
tioners are motivated by power rather than by sex (Weinberg et al., 1984; Ussher and
Taylor, 2001; Newmhar, 2010: 315–318, 2011: 67–70). This raises some questions, such
as whether the social constructive and psychological literature excludes them as path-
ological and criminal in this critical analytical perspective, and whether the behavior of
these participants is necessarily motivated by external pleasure, even if not sexual, thereby
distinguishing between their behavior and the behavior of non-consensual sadists?
14 Sexualities 0(0)

TPE occupies a prominent place due to this problematic issue. TPE is not based on a
separation between reality and fiction; rather, it permeates every part of human life, and
therefore the way these power relations are motivated externally requires, at the very least,
our scrutiny, especially since the attribution of an external motivation may serve as a
mechanism of exclusion of TPE subjects. In the next pages, I want to analyze the
discursive rules that determine the ethnographic, phenomenological, and sociological
argument, which is based on the hegemony of sexual knowledge under the production of
biopower knowledge. This I aim to do not only through understanding the boundaries that
emerge from the BDSM discourse, but also as a structure of physical existence that
subverts them. Then, I will explore the inclusive and exclusive discursive mechanism in
the Williams couple text as an experimental reaction.

Sexual hegemony and transgressive contingency under biopolitical production

The function of sexual pleasure as a social exclusion mechanism has been accompanied
by a discursive transformation of the biopolitical production of knowledge in recent
decades. In contrast to Foucault and his commentators’ description of the discursive
function of sexuality until the 1970s (Foucault, 1977-78: 84–9; Halperin, 2002; Rubin,
2011), sexual pleasure as a mechanism of exclusion based on the element of pathology is
seen less as a determination that several behaviors and structures of thought are path-
ological and dangerous and more as legitimizing various heterogeneous tendencies while
excluding others that do not belong to this sexual framework. Here, BDSM is not further
established as an expression of mental disorder and criminal personality because of the
connection of violence with lust and the lack of procreation activity, as discussed in the
majority of the sociological literature (Weait, 2007: 22–31; Rubin, 2011; Weinberg, 2016;
Parchev and Langdridge, 2017). In the contemporary epistemic context, in which sexual
pleasure functions as a natural tendency (Rose, 2001: 1–21, 2007; McWhorter, 2012) and
is traded in a world of social goods and services, sexual arousal resulting from a power
exchange testifies to the subjects’ health and legal competence—thereby excluding
behavioral patterns that are marked by this reason as criminal and pathological. Thus, as
Newmhar argues, scholars that limit BDSM practice to sexual arousal deny the true
motives of those who are not motivated by this goal, falling into the same essentialist trap
that derives from the normative sexual scale (Newmhar, 2011: 68), excluding subjects that
go beyond BDSM limitations and labeling them as criminal and unethical.
Faccio et al. (2020: 1641–1652) suggest distinguishing between sexuality and erot-
icism through a comprehensive definition that includes additional contingent experi-
mental statements and practices, for the purpose of increasing BDSM acceptance beyond
the normative sexual identity. They conceptualized eroticism as a world of imagery and
symbolism stimulating primordial feelings and sensations (Faccio et al., 2020: 1646–
1647). According to them, sexuality is a biological, psychological, and physical-technical
mechanism inhabiting an erogenous zone, while the erotic is a realm of abstraction
regarding what this mechanism is capable of doing to us. The significant difference
between vanilla sex and BDSM is that the former necessarily overlaps sexual and erotic
thrills, while the latter is a complex world of fantastical images based on the separation
Parchev 15

between the two, along with a contingent connection between them (Faccio et al., 2020:
1644).
Here, BDSM as a heterogenous erotic experience constructs individual BDSM ori-
entations according to the narrative related to the experience underlying erotic thrills and
sexual activity, and through a coherent narrative it establishes a sense of identity vis à vis
the specific sphere of experience (Faccio et al., 2020: 1648–1649). BDSM participants are
categorized according to their orientation within the complex scale of eros and sexuality,
into those who identify power exchange as another part of their sexuality and those who
define their entire being as part of a BDSM identity (Faccio et al., 2020; Ortmann and
Sprott, 2012). Thus, the separation between consensual BDSM and brutal sadism and
masochist pathology is not determined by sexual motivation, so that experiences of
desires and images that are excluded from sexual discourse are recognized as an ac-
ceptable basis for proper BDSM behavior.
Ortmann and Sprott located TPE at the extreme end of the erotic scale, where the
totality of the power exchange dominates every part of the subjects’ lives, making almost
every moment driven by the array of images and symbols that arise from the power
exchange (Ortmann and Sprott, 2012: 79–80). This analytical diagnosis is consistent with
Beckmann’s analysis of BDSM as a pattern of behavior that subverts the hegemonic role
of sexuality in the production of biopower politics through empathy between bodies that
engage inter-subjectively in order to establish pleasures that transcend the dictates of a
given identity (Beckmann, 2005: 212–217). Bauer presented this totality in his ethno-
graphic research as central to the power exchange of TPE participants (Bauer, 2014: 125–
128). They described their life as motivated by a rigid protocol that controls every detail of
their life, thereby defining who they are (Bauer, 2014: 127). Each action and statement
related to the erotic dimension of power distribution redeems the trivial details of human
existence from their emptiness. As some of the participants in a 24/7 power exchange
relation said: “My boy at the time actually wrote a poem about how sexy it was to take out
garbage. She just wrote this gorgeous poem about the sweet tickling between her breast, as
she carries the trash. I mean, it was totally eroticized and that was gorgeous” (Bauer, 2014:
127).
That said, the intense presence of the power relation may make the erotic component
too narrow and inadequate to serve as an overall definition of TPE. As Dancer et al. argue,
TPE indicates a daily relationship based on customary rituals and patterns of behavior that
anchor the division of power between the parties (Dancer et al., 2006: 83, 93–95). Here,
menial tasks that serve the master and that are performed by the slave replace the rope and
chain of the time-limited scene, emphasizing the necessary duties of the slave and how
they are delivered to the master. Thus, reducing every action and statement of individual
life to the generation of erotic thrills may seem excessive and even impossible and
unwanted. Indeed, eros cannot be physically touched, especially not in the erogenous
zone, but it is still based on emotional or physiological transcendence, expressed for
example, in an adrenalin rush. TPE, in contrast, is based on the construction of the power
exchange within a daily routine, that only partly and perhaps for the most part does not
provoke an erotic reaction. You may be able to write a poem about taking out the garbage,
but basing a whole life, including paying taxes, cleaning, being tired from work, etc., on
16 Sexualities 0(0)

the production of mental and physical thrills may be inconsistent with the menial tasks and
especially with the social engagement derived from it.
Dan identifies the failure to subordinate his TPE relation with Dawn to erotic or sexual
motivation in the discussion of the place of sex in their life: “Recently we were asked ‘Is
sex a big part of an S/M relationship, or just a little part?’ The answer is actually neither of
the above; sex is an optional part” (Williams and Williams, 2011: 48). The motivation of
Dan’s and Dawn’s relationship is not to be found in sex or its eros abstraction. These
desires or practices are not the core of the intersubjective engagement but are a non-
binding, contingent option. Dawn emphasized and strengthened this point:

“Dan and I are getting older. We have to keep in mind that there may come a day, at some
point in time, where neither of us is interested in sex … And if that day comes it’s okay. Our
foundation is built on an ethical total power exchange philosophy: because of that foundation,
we will survive together even if the desire for sex and/or BDSM play disappears” (Williams
and Williams, 2011: 50).

The division of power that determines the subjection of Dawn to Dan establishes the
central experiences and feelings in their life. Consequently, if the two bodies wither and
the external attractiveness diminishes, the relationships will last, as it does not depend on
an essentialist, external source such as sexual stimulation or its erotic abstraction. In this
context, TPE is viewed as a pure power exchange (PPE). It is an ethical philosophy
established through a way of life that constitutes the relationship between the individual
and himself and his external environment exclusively in the framework of power ex-
change.3 The way in which Newmhar used Stebbins’s concept of “serious leisure” as an
analytic ethnographic unit that allows characterizing the BDSM community creates, to
some extent, an ontological interpretation of the ethical meaning, through a structural
description that imbues the existential routine of pure power relations with meaning,
based on permanence and perseverance (Newmhar, 2010: 315–331). This perseverance is
realized through a mental and physical effort that includes the acquisition of proper skills
by training, attention to the needs of the bottom by the top, the tasks that the bottom is
required to accomplish, and self-construction through shaping qualities and capacities for
accomplishing mutual goals-all in order to create a sense of belonging vis à vis the
external world (Newmhar, 2010: 318–326). Cascalheira et al. revealed this serious
leisure character of the TPE engagement, especially regarding the acquisition of skills
through a self-constructed identity that is connected to a social construction process and
a sense of belonging to a community (Cascalheira, 2022: 630-632). While Dawn and Dan
discovered in their TPE relationship a similarity to serious leisure (Williams and Williams,
2011: 52–68), the sense of transcendence still leaves the erotic component as central in the
testimony of the BDSM community members sampled by Newmhar:

“SM participants speak of their play in terms of ecstatic experience, or what can be un-
derstood as a flow. They speak of weightlessness: of grooving and flying, of the cessation of
cognitive process and of the disappearance of the world around them… These ‘sharply
exciting events and occasions’ that are most memorable to serious leisure participants are
Parchev 17

‘thrills’ for Stebbins, who considers them ‘exceptional instances of the flow experience’”
(Newmhar, 2010: 328).

The ecstatic experience described by the community participants is compared by

Newmhar to erotic sensation (2010: 329). Here, the dominating function of sexual ab-
straction in the erotic experience occupies a minor place. Erotica is not reduced to an array
of abstract sexual images; instead it is assigned to any sensation that detaches one from his
routine rhythm and leads him to a feeling of transcendence, which is sometimes expressed
in physical symptoms such as an adrenalin rush. Here, the ethnographic evidence re-
garding the BDSM community challenges the normative health codes by presenting the
absence of sexual arousal from BDSM activity not as a dangerous pathological symptom,
but as a production of pleasurable thrill and flow (Newmhar, 2010: 329–331).
However, this description is still within the substantive boundaries of the normative
health discourse, as it subsumes appropriate and indecent behavior under an external
definition of how to live a good and healthy life. Sexual sensation is replaced by the
creation of sharply exciting events and occasions, but this only replaces one condition
with another. Not conforming the TPE master/slave relationship to these conditions does
not make this relationship pathological and dangerous; instead, it reveals a way of life that
does not require an essentialist external principle, that reduces the need to regulate the
power distribution and does not require any external regulation. TPE exposes emotions
and feelings that reside in the desires of some of those who are involved in BDSM
activities and that can only be realized within a relationship based on PPE. The penetration
of power divisions into every aspect of life and the way in which the needs of the master
and slave are realized only in this way open the door to a type of social engagement and
self-construction that are silenced under the essentialist shackles of the health code, thus
offering an existential option for individuals who do not belong to the essentialist limits.

Discussion: TPE and ethical practice–A queer reading of pure

power relations
TPE is a structural, anti-essentialist interpretation of valid consent that challenges the
health code reproduced by the biopower production of knowledge. The terms of consent
of an autonomous subject are realized through a secure space and the dependence of the
power exchange on a sexual or erotic motivation. These are transformed in the pure power
exchange, which is realized under terms of exposure and trust in order to create a form of
statement and practice that lays the foundation for an existential experience beyond the
normative, accepted value of health. Thus, BDSM at its extreme, as established in the
TPE-PPE intersubjective engagement, not only suggests a new contingency of social
interaction, but also a transgressive structure of subjectivity that challenges the biopower
subject, which is constructed in terms of healthy conduct, autonomy, and sexuality.
TPE is an intersubjective engagement that suggests a new form of subjectivity that
undermines the dominant egalitarian code constituted by the institutional structure of
liberal modern society (Bauer, 2014). The TPE interpretation of consent in the marital
relationship rescues social engagements that do not rely on an egalitarian relationship
18 Sexualities 0(0)

from repressive terms of exploitation and enslavement by turning them into a contingent
form of social relation and subjectivity, which exchanges the centrality of sexual mo-
tivation with a pure power relationship. Here, the justification of unequal power dis-
tribution within the family unit and the social environment is not subjected to
multicultural arguments based on the traditional structure of society, as indicated in the
communal and liberal multicultural criticism (Taylor, 1989; Kylmica, 1995). TPE is a
form of pure power relationship that is not based on external motivations-whether sexual,
traditional, or others—thereby suggesting a type of self-creation through self-
reproduction, as opposed to self-production under the egalitarian reason.
This suggestion is compatible with a queer BDSM reading. As a result of its het-
erogenous form, queer theory exposes the relative character of universal values and the
possibility of overstepping their boundaries (Butler, 1993). Several scholars have sug-
gested a queer reading of BDSM as a form of conduct that presents universal values such
as masculine superiority, the division of roles in marital relations and so on in a ridiculous
and relative way (McClintock, 1993; Berlant and Warner, 1998: 558; Weiss, 2011: 157–
169; Cruz, 2019; Langdridge and Parchev, 2017). TPE exposes the universal function of
the value of egalitarianism as a form of conduct that shapes intersubjective relations and
self-production by suggesting an opposite form of social relationship. The pure function
of power exchange, without any prior motivation, and the unequal division of power are
incompatible with the normative values concerning intersubjective engagements; they are
not derived from exploitation and brutality, and they suggest a new interpretation of
consent and a realization of an inherent individual desire beyond the sexual and erotic.
TPE creates an interesting ethical criticism by offering a new perspective on the social
code. However, this new form of criticism must be questioned. The social-constructive
mechanism that builds the normative health code also determines it transgressive con-
tingent practice, because any attempt to exceed the limits of power that shape the structure
of thought and action is invalid, if every behavior and utterance is viewed as a necessary
condition of social construction (Foucault, 1977–78, 1997a: 332–6). Hence, while we
limit any argument to the problem of consent and sexual construction, the radical change
in the nature of the statements that justify and deny them requires examining their
consequences, especially when it comes to subverting liberal fundamental values.
First of all, the problem of individual mental capability in terms of consent places a
question mark over the TPE contractual engagement itself. Indeed, the queer TPE reason
depends on the right to deliver individual desires to another without any a priori de-
terminations, such as medical arguments. However, full adherence to the absence of any
precondition apart from the slave’s consent to reveal his inner desires may provide
justification for any action by the master, including brutal and cruel acts that do not take
into account the slave’s desire. The absence of a sexual and erotic impulse that justifies the
slave’s desire for humiliation and potentially thrusts him into a daily existence that is
contrary to his will, without the barrier of mutual decisions, may place the relationship
within the boundaries of the pathological and the criminal. Therefore, the question of the
trust that complements intimacy must be raised. For example, a woman who undergoes
constant physical and mental humiliation by a man, accompanied by sustained vigorous
beating: in such a case of abuse, the delivery process may be legitimized under the TPE
Parchev 19

reason by proving that the man was given permission to perform the act of delivery. Here,
the queer reading of TPE suggests that any act of abuse or brutality can be legitimized
within the narrow, acceptable argument of a formal agreement. It seems that here we must
return to the starting point of autonomy as a rational process of deliberation of safe spaces
and motivation to produce sexual pleasure.
The shift of the ethical intersubjective dynamic from a mutual interaction to the realm
of the dominant master presents several options for coping with this problem. Domi-
nation, here, refers not only to the manner in which the master uses the slave for his own
purposes, but also, and perhaps even mostly, to the way he behaves in the context of
specific traits such as caring and attention, after taking responsibility for the needs and
feelings of the bottom slave. The power division, which is the master’s responsibility,
coincides with ethical approaches, the prominent of which is the approach to appren-
ticeship in ancient Greece, where the question of morality was the domain solely of those
who had suitable virtues and who were in the proper position in the hierarchy (Foucault,
1984: 1–20; Halperin, 2002).4 Dan presented this type of character in his relation with his
slave, Dawn (Williams and Williams, 2011: 53–61). According to him, the character of
the master has to include a responsibility for the slave and her relation to the master,
commitment to the slave, providing the slave with guidance for her education, and
assisting the slave’s growth (Williams and Williams, 2011: 53). This character must be
realized with constant attention to the mental and physical needs of the slave and the
changes in her mood and health (Williams and Williams, 2011: 54–59). Thus, on the one
hand, the way in which some slaves are motivated by the desire to be beaten and crushed,
physically and mentally, is not analyzed in pathological terms, but as an act of self-
realization in an intimate engagement. On the other hand, the relationship is not cate-
gorized as an oppressive one, such as a relationship between an abusive man and a
battered woman, since the master controls his desires and orients his behavior so as to care
for the slave’s needs. The TPE master/slave engagement suggested here is an interesting,
queer ethical point of view that challenges autonomy as a relative value under the Western
ethical principle of acceptable human virtue.
However, this argument exposes a new problem in the form of the absence and denial
of freedom. Freedom, as Foucault recognized, is the ontological form of ethics as a realm
of speech and action that is necessary for the relationship between the individual and his
social codes (Foucault, 1997a: 261–283; Rabinow, 2006: iii-vi). This relation is crucial for
the way in which the individual shapes his selfhood within the structure of concrete
power. In TPE, the relationship between the slave and the normative health code is put in
doubt when he hands over the very ability for reflexive interpretation to the external social
environment, his master. In other words, the questions of autonomy, security, and sexual
motivation may be criticized in the queer discourse, but the absence of freedom, as
manifested in TPE, undermines the very ability to challenge these values, thus nullifying
the power of the critical argument and perhaps even negating its validity.
However, this problem is even more complex than it initially appears, as in contrast to
orthodox servitude, the participants in the TPE slave/master relationship go to great
lengths to experience the desire for servitude, yet their basic human and civil rights remain
intact and cannot be relinquished. In the almost only empirical research dedicated to the
20 Sexualities 0(0)

TPE master/slave relationship, Dancer et al. (2006: 95–96) presented evidence that
describes the slave free space in this relationship. The comments and the survey indicate
that the limits within the relationship concerning the master’s power were respected.
Many responses reflected an assumption that slaves could refuse an order—even while
stating that they do not have the right to do so—when they feel it is too dangerous,
mentally or physically. This suggests that slaves can exercise their denied rights when
necessary. Sixty percent of the respondents reported having a bank account of their own,
suggesting that the slaves maintain some level of independence in spite of their slavery.
Additionally, the possibility of leaving was realized in this study when the slaves felt that
the relationship was unsatisfactory (Dancer et al., 2006: 86–87).
Dawn adds to the complexity of the tension between total control to freedom in the
confession she provided concerning her position as a TPE slave (Williams and Williams,
2011: 83–90). She recognized herself throughout the course of her relationship as a strong
person who can care for herself and is capable of developing her life and will. Fur-
thermore, she described the inherent dynamic in her relationship as depending on this
strength, which defines the conditions of trust and intimacy. Thus, according to her, the
tension between their personalities and the servile character of TPE raises crucial
questions: “Can you take care of yourself? Does your master have to hold your hand
through everything you do? Do you have the strength to keep working on yourself, even
though you are in a power exchange relationship? Your life is now about serving your
master, but do you also do things to grow as an individual? If something becomes very
wrong, or if your master begins taking advantage of your gift of submission in an abusive
way, could you walk away? (Williams and Williams, 2011: 89).”
These questions reflect the unsolvable tension between the individual’s will to build
and develop his selfhood and his desire to serve, which is the main motivation behind his
desires and needs. Yet, by being based on negation and cancellation, it contains the seed of
its own destruction. This was especially expressed in the extreme relationships that go far
beyond the practices of the majority of the TPE population surveyed by Dancer et al.—
relationships in which the slaves are motivated by a total desire to destroy their personality
and any remnant of contingent freedom (Dancer et al., 2006: 84–91).
This problem goes beyond the medical and legislative logic of exclusion; rather, it
emerges from the PPE argument regarding consent and thus opens up a space for a
discussion of alternatives to the vanilla couple acting according to the normative biopower
health code. Such alternatives question the engagement through existential problems that
derive from the centrality of sex and the egalitarian status: How to create an egalitarian
division of tasks and realize the desires of both partners? Are intimate relationships and
sexual pleasure limited to the marital relationship or is it possible to open them up? These
questions and others are either irrelevant in the TPE master/slave relation (question 1) or
else occupy a minor place that depends on other contexts (question 2). They are replaced
by issues based on power priorities, which are constructed through questions regarding
the existential experience and process of the construction of selfhood: Is the individual’s
control of his life and body consistent with the slave’s enslavement process? Is the slave’s
desire to give up a contingent space of speech and action consistent with self-realization?
Parchev 21

Does the total deletion of the self in the context of the TPE-PPE master-slave relation
facilitate and even determine the very realization and growth of the slave?

Limitations
It is important to acknowledge the limitations of this paper regarding its methodology and
findings. First, this project does not include any community-produced publications, news
media, and archival sources that may shed light on the findings and the analytical direction
of the paper. In other words, the findings here are representative only of the discourse that
was analyzed. However, the lack of literature on TPE and its significance to the BDSM
experience emphasizes the need to locate some of the fundamental principles of its
discourse. Accordingly, biopower as an inclusive/exclusive mechanism that shapes the
discursive rules of BDSM can be examined using contemporary relevant literature,
evidence concerning the phenomenon, and prominent research cases. Therefore, this
project should be viewed as the beginning of larger research studies that will examine TPE
with a variety of methods as a unique part of the BDSM phenomenon.

Conclusion
The inclusive process of the BDSM phenomenon in recent decades in the medical,
legislative, and cultural discourse has excluded several forms of existential BDSM
contingencies due to the criterion of consensual practice. In the institutional view, the TPE
power exchange oversteps the boundaries of legitimacy due to its lack of compliance with
the principle of consensuality and erotic sex, which is required for the sake of dis-
tinguishing between consensual BDSM and abusive, exploitative, sadistic relations. The
discursive analysis of the academic literature on BDSM in relation to a selected primary
text that describes a TPE experiment did not expose the oppressive mechanism of the
mainstream BDSM discursive rule and certainly does not imply that the TPE life style is
pathological or criminal in nature. It suggests, in particular, a queer reading due to the
relative function of BDSM practice in the social constructive condition: TPE as a pattern
of behavior and fantasy establishment subverts the production of biopower knowledge
that creates the mainstream BDSM argument, thus opening the door to a new form of
existential practice.
This queer reading is consistent with the critical literature in recent years, which has
recognized BDSM practice as a transgressive contingency against and within the in-
stitutionalization process (Beckmann, 2011; Weinberg, 2016; Langdrige and Parchev,
2017; Cruz, 2019). TPE as a PPE intersubjective engagement based on a pure power
relationship, along with an argument of consensuality between the parties, expands the
BDSM discursive rule. This represents a transgressive move that exposes a new form of
thinking and practice, which to a certain extent reflects the range of desires of BDSM
participants—desires that have been excluded in the process of normalizing BDSM. Thus,
in this analysis, TPE is seen as a transgress act that exposes the process of establishing
normative boundaries, while remaining within them (Foucault, 1997, P: 69–73). Within
the narrow methodological choice of this paper, TPE is included under this determination
22 Sexualities 0(0)

by suggesting a new form of experimental existence that remains limited under the
consensual boundaries that separate consensual BDSM from sadistic, abusive relation-
ships. This is a critical direction that must be developed and confirmed in future research
studies.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.

ORCID iD
Ofer Parchev  https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4644-6799

Notes
1. This argument appears especially in the feminist dispute concerning BDSM, whereby radical
feminists accuse BDSM practice of being an abusive act, even when it reflects a consensual
agreement and with a contra-reaction that presents BDSM activity in its awareness function; see
Sphere (Linden, 1982: 4; Hopkins, 1994: 121–127; Valdas, 1995: 160; Langdridge, 2006: 377;
Weiss, 2011: 148–9; Cruz, 2019: 22–26).
2. The absence of a label of genital orgasm in BDSM appears in the context of exclusion but also as
a way to enrich sexual function. It appeared especially in Foucault’ second description and in the
connection between the development of BDSM practice in popular culture and in the con-
struction of the community.
3. Here, Foucault and his commentators’ interpretation of ethics as a way of life that establishes
one’s interpretation of external rules and not just the mere content of these rules is of much
relevance to this social engagement (Foucault, 1984: 1–20; Halperin, 2002).
4. The relation to ancient Greece is not meant to connect the two but to define a mode of ethical
behavior that has found a place in modern Western society in the context of the researched
phenomena. We can see some critical experiments concerning BDSM in Weiss’s analysis (Weiss,
2011: 60–99).

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Ofer Parchev holds a PhD in political theory. He is a lecturer in the multidisciplinary

program at Haifa University. His research focuses on power, post-structuralism, gov-
ernmentality and sexual practice and discourse, especially in BDSM studies. He has
published diverse papers in international academic journals in criminology, sociology,
and political theory.