Edgework: BDSM and Bug-

Chasing
Alexandra Fanghanel
a.n.d.Fanghanel@Greenwich.ac.uk
Overview
• Key terms
• Risk and edgework
• Risky sexual practice
• BDSM/Chemsex/Bug-Chasing
To think about…
• Some people do not want to be 'normal', or desire mainstream
lifestyles
• Why do people take pleasure in taking risks?
Looking forward to week 8...
• What is it? - observe or participate in a disobedient practice during week
8 (or thereabouts).
• Observe: other people/ in a film/ on some other form of media
• Participate: take part in a disobedient practice like some of the ones that
we have talked about BUT do a risk assessment first! and speak to me!
• We will talk about out disobedient practices in week 10
• You should use your reflections/field notes in your essays.
***Political possibilities of disobedience/ how far is it a disobedient
practice***
Key terms
• Patriarchy
• Transgression
• Risk/Safety
• Edgework
• Hetero/homonormativity
Risk and Pleasure
• 'to live a life that involves the avoidance of all risks is to be stultified,
moribund, trapped in old habits and ways, to fail to develop as a
person ' (Lupton, 1999: 155)
• Authenticity and personal growth
• Mastery, heightened living, super-human
Edgework
• “a clearly observable threat to one’s physical or mental well-being or
one’s sense of an ordered existence” (Lyng 1990, 857)
• “in the purest expression of edgework, one negotiates the edge by
striving to get as close to it as possible without actually crossing it . . .
[and] the edge can assume different forms” (Matthews and Lyng
2007, 78).
• Sex as edgework Egs. BDSM (Newmahr, 2011) Swinging/sex parties
(Walshjock, 1970, Jenks, 1985, Bergstrand, 2000, Rubin, 2001,)
Dogging (Bell, 2008) User generated pornography (Van Doom 2010,
Lehman, 2007)
Paraphilia: WHO- Disorder of sexual preference - inc.
fetishism, paedophilia, exhibitionism, voyeurism
• Donatien Alphonse Francois de Sade 1740-1814 Sadism 'love of
cruelty, 1888
• Leopold Ritter von Sacher Masoch 1836-1895, 'Venus in Furs', 1870,
Masochism - sexual pleasure in being hurt or abused (Krafft-Ebing)
• BDSM- bondage and discipline,” “dominance and submission,” and
“sadism and masochism.”
 BDSM:
• The collection of activities that involve the mutually consensual and
conscious use, among two or more people, of pain, power,
perceptions about power or any combination thereof or sensory
enjoyment (Newmahr, 2011: 688)
• Boundary pushing: order/chaos/sanity/insanity/life/death
• Gender dynamics of Edgework
• Safety - consent/limit, Expertise, Gender/Sex Relations, Community,
Pathology? Legal status?
Operation Spanner

Society is entitled and bound to protect

itself against a cult of violence. Pleasure
derived from the infliction of pain is an
evil thing. Cruelty is uncivilised.

http://www.spannertrust.org/
Fifty Shades... abuse
or kink?
Chemsex
• Consumption of drugs to facilitate sexual activity
• Poly-drug use it the norm
• Alcohol most common drug
• Men who use drugs use the gay scene more than men who do not use
drugs
• Chemsex happens mostly in private home
• Disinhibition leads to barebacking sex/UAI
• Risks of overdose, assault, mental health problems, risk of disease
Bug-chasing and gift giving and the Law
• ss18, 20, 23, 24 or 47 Offences against the Person Act 1861
• Recklessly inflicting GBH
• Regina v Dica (Mohammed) [2004]
• Regina v Konzani
A: Like many men my age, the AIDS crisis was a big deal in the early part of our
lives in the gay universe. There is a desire to connect to the generations of HIV
infected men, living and dead.
The AIDS crisis had a huge impact on the narrative of gay life. Some of that,
compassion for the individual has been good. But much of it, fear, stigma and
isolation has been bad. Those with the disease have a seat at the table where the
gay narrative can be redefined for a newer era.
Pushing my own "sexual envelope" has always been important to me.
Exploring many avenues of sexual expression has helped me fully understand my
own homosexuality and related desires. The entire gift giving/chasing subculture
presents a sexual frontier full of new adventures.
Forty years of careful, mostly safe sex has been supplanted by a couple handfuls of
exposures over the past week. The coming weekend will see my immune system
exposed to even more of the virus. Had this force been of lesser power, I would
have never reached this position. But now, it is not just a force, it is my destiny.
Denying that seems futile, embracing it is my choice.
Summary
• The role of violence as a sexualised practice can be resistant,
subversive and pose a challenge to the strictures of normative social
life.
• The imperative to be normal and to want normal things can be
oppressive - which is where disobedient practice takes place
• Consensual Sexualised violence skirts the edge of what we can do,
what we cannot do, what is taboo, what is abject etc.