Dominatrix: Gender, Eroticism, and Control in the Dungeon

Danielle Lindemann is a postdoctoral research scholar at Vanderbilt University. She received her PhD in sociology from Columbia University in 2010.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2012 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2012.

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-48256-9 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-48258-3 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-48259-0 (e-book)

ISBN-10: 0-226-48256-1 (cloth)

ISBN-10: 0-226-48258-8 (paper)

ISBN-10: 0-226-48259-6 (e-book)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lindemann, Danielle J.

Dominatrix : gender, eroticism, and control in the dungeon / Danielle J. Lindemann.

pages. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-226-48256-9 (cloth : alkaline paper)

ISBN 0-226-48256-1 (cloth : alkaline paper)

ISBN 978-0-226-48258-3 (paperback: alkaline paper)

ISBN 0-226-48258-8 (paperback: alkaline paper)

ISBN 978-0-226-48259-0 (e-book) (print)

ISBN 0-226-48259-6 (e-book) (print)

1. Sexual dominance and submission. 2. Sex customs. I. Title.

HQ79.l554 2012

306.77′5—dc23

2011050363

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Dominatrix

Gender, Eroticism, and Control in the Dungeon

DANIELLE J. LINDEMANN

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

This book is dedicated to Jessica Porter Hickok.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Scripting Pain: Power Exchange and the Theatrical Frame

2. All I Really Need to Know I Learned in BDSM Kindergarten: Dominatrix Careers

3. Will the Real Pro-Domme Please Stand Up: Art, Authenticity, and Pierre Bourdieu

4. Playing Make-Believe: Fantasy and the Boundaries of Commercial Intimacy

5. Whip Therapy

6. Is That Any Way to Treat a Lady?: (Re)production of Gender on the Dungeon Floor

CONCLUSION. The Emperor’s New Leather Thong

APPENDIX A. Methods

APPENDIX B. Getting Collared: Pro-Dommes and the Law

APPENDIX C. Historical Context

APPENDIX D. Terminology

APPENDIX E. Initial Contact E-mail

APPENDIX F. Original Interview Schedule

APPENDIX G. Final Interview Schedule

Notes

References

Index

Acknowledgments

Many people have supported me, both personally and professionally, throughout the course of this project. First and foremost, this book would not have been possible without the generosity of the women and men who agreed to sit for interviews and who allowed me to tag along with them to their dungeons, parties, meetings, video shoots, and discussion panels. I would also like to thank Priscilla Ferguson, Peter Bearman, Shamus Khan, Lynn Chancer, and Elizabeth Bernstein, whose diverse viewpoints and areas of expertise served to make this a much stronger project. It is crucial that I acknowledge Paul DiMaggio, for giving me the idea that Bourdieu may have had something to say about pro-dommes’ claims to artistic purity, as well as for inspiring my interest in sociology by giving me a research job when I was a lowly undergraduate at Princeton.

It goes without saying that this project would not have come to fruition without the enthusiasm and dedication of the people at the University of Chicago Press. In particular, I would like to thank Doug Mitchell (for his guidance on this manuscript and his perspective on jazz versus rock drumming), Tim McGovern, and Carlisle Rex-Waller.

The following people were also influential in the successful completion of this project and cannot go unmentioned: the proprietors of the Dallas BBQ restaurant chain (for concocting giant, cheap margaritas); Virginia Kao and Danielle Nunez (my D-BBQ buddies); Natacha Stevanovic and Jen Kondo (my partners in crime); Shaina Steinberg (for her occupational empathy); and Ilana Keane (for her unyielding support and unparalleled Ms. Pac-Man abilities). I owe a great deal to my mother, Louise Lindemann, who now chats about dominatrices with her neighbors and her ophthalmologist, and who couldn’t possibly be a better Sunday crossword buddy. I’d also like to thank my late father, Bruce Lindemann. I’m grateful that he was able to read an early version of this book.

Portions of this book have been previously published in other venues and have been reprinted with the publishers’ permission. An alternate version of chapter 3 appears in Sociological Forum (Will the Real Dominatrix Please Stand Up: Artistic Purity and Professionalism in the S&M Dungeon, 25, 2 [2010]: 588–606), and an alternate version of chapter 5 appears in the journal Sexualities (BDSM as Therapy?, 14, 2 [2011]: 151–72). Additionally, material from chapter 6 has been included in Christina Bobel and Samantha S. Kwan’s edited collection Embodied Resistance: Challenging the Norms, Breaking the Rules, published by Vanderbilt Press in 2011.

Last, but not at all least, I need to thank Hunter Murdock, whose love, support, feedback, hugs, informal legal advice, and general sanity have seen me through this project. YMB.

Introduction

In an office building in Midtown Manhattan, a woman in her early twenties is describing the last time she flogged someone in this room. She’s clutching the flogger she used, which consists of a wooden handle, wrapped in straps of leather, from which hang a series of other flat straps. It’s like a stubby mop, but it’s designed to administer pain. Clutching the handle, she begins to move her hand from side to side in circular motions, making figure eights with her fist. I did the heaviest corporal I have ever done on him, she explains, Lot of flogging. Her hand begins to speed up, and she flicks the device at one of the posts of a large metal suspension frame for emphasis. I used the tack whip on him while he was bound to the cross, and then I took him off the cross and tied him to one of the posts of the suspension frame, and I did a lot of, like, kicking him and punching him in the chest and some ball and cock slapping and a lot of nipple torture. I begin to understand how she inspires fear in her clients, though she is young and small.

It’s an unseasonably warm afternoon in early March of 2008, toward the end of my fieldwork for this project. I had arrived here early, pressed the buzzer and waited to be let inside, then waited again in the elevator for the receptionist upstairs to view me on the elevator’s closed-circuit television and send me up to their floor. When I got out of the elevator, I was in a dimly lit entryway with one wooden door, flanked by two vases holding decorative twigs. On the wall to my left was a mirror in an ornate frame. I knocked. The receptionist let me in, led me to the waiting room, and asked if I’d like something to drink. I opted for water, and she returned with a chilled bottle, along with a glass and a paper napkin, which she placed on the table in front of me. Then she left, drawing the purple curtain that separated the waiting room from the rest of the space. I was alone in the room.

I took out my notebook and recorder. To my right was a small end table on which were arrayed a jar of peppermints, a box of tissues, a cup filled with pens, and a pad of paper. The coffee table in front of me was stocked with a variety of reading material ranging from issues of New York magazine to erotic photography books to The Encyclopedia of Wine. Next to the table was a green padded bench with five thick black straps stretching over the seat, in parallel. The floor was hardwood, and the room was windowless but somehow airy. The ceiling was high.

I’d been waiting for about five minutes when my informant arrived. A well-spoken woman, apologizing for being late in a soft voice, at first glance she seemed too shy to command much fear, but then I wasn’t one of her clients. Looking at her in her tank top and lounge pants, at the glasses stuck on her nose, at the blond hair pulled back into a bun, my immediate impression was that she could easily be one of my undergraduate students. She offered to give me a tour of the space and took me out of the waiting room, to the right, past the receptionist’s area, to a door marked 1.

This is where she demonstrates the flogger. The main feature of room 1 is the suspension frame, a metal apparatus with an industrial feel that towers over our heads. Cables run down from each of the four supporting posts and attach to the corners of a floating table. To the right of the frame is the cross that the woman describes having used in her last session and a closet filled with a variety of items in plastic bins with computer-printed labels: platform heels, cleaning supplies, shackles, mummification wrap, straitjackets, medical implements, twine, mitts, canes, floggers. Several body bags hang on the closet door. On the way out of the room, she gestures at the iPod player on the table by the door and indicates that she and the other girls make play-lists to keep track of time in their sessions.

We leave the room and walk past the receptionist again, down a long hallway, past the girls’ dressing room on the left, and then back through the waiting area. I remark about the bench with the straps, and she explains that sometimes she does sessions in the waiting room, but it’s generally used for consulting with clients beforehand. The straps are primarily decorative. We move further down the hallway, past a kitchenette and then an art deco bathroom with a shower, past a door marked 3, to the end of the hallway and a door marked 2.

Room 2 is about half the size of room 1, and its main feature is a large four-poster bed. It, too, has a St. Andrew’s cross, in addition to a spanking horse (which resembles a padded sawhorse), a wooden throne (for foot worship), and a chest of drawers stocked with items for clients who enjoy cross-dressing—jewelry, hats, and lingerie. There is also a closet with a mirrored door. It contains a variety of items, including more shoes, gags, a latex maid’s outfit, and about a dozen wigs arranged on a line of foam heads.

Room 3, which is used primarily for cross-dressing and foot worship, is the smallest of the session rooms. It also includes a throne, as well as a padded table edged with eyebolts: a bondage bed. There is a chest of drawers containing cleaning supplies, puppy toys, condoms, and vibrators. There is a mirror over the bondage bed and mirrors on all the walls. I remark about the multiple mirrors in all of the session rooms. For the clients, it’s all about the visuals, I am told. We make our way back to the waiting room, where she tucks her legs under her as she settles on the couch. I perch on the edge of the couch again, and we begin the interview.

This book is about women like the one I interviewed on that warm March day: professional dominatrices—hereafter, pro-dommes.¹ Male clients (also referred to as submissives, subs, or slaves) pay them money for the experience of being physically and verbally humiliated, flogged, spanked, whipped, caned, slapped, kicked in the groin, urinated on, forcibly cross-dressed, tied up, treated like pets, and to play out a variety of other sadomasochistic and fetishistic scenes. Pro-dommes refer to their work spaces as dungeons, houses of pain (or simply Houses), or play spaces. Few have intercourse with their clients, but their work is erotic in nature and more often than not involves sexual release on the parts of the clients—either through vibrator stimulation, spontaneous orgasm without touch, or most commonly, the clients masturbating to climax.

The puzzle that this book presents is the following: What can pro-dommes’ narratives about their encounters in the dungeon, seemingly on the periphery of society, teach us about the set of tensions that undergird our daily lives in the real world? To work through this puzzle, I develop a main argument with two prongs that operate in tandem. First, although this industry is structured around interactions that are organized as inversions of the male/female power hierarchy, the industry is also normatively patterned, in the sense that social expectations from everyday life work themselves into the dungeon. Pro-dommes’ stories about their interactions with their submissives thus contribute to our understanding of gender and control by allowing us to understand what an inversion of our gender power arrangement can look like, while at the same time speaking to the persistence of this arrangement. In short, although their activities are subversive in many ways, pro-dommes also reproduce relationships of hierarchy and illuminate them.

Second, the people who inhabit this social world highlight a set of social relations that we suppress in daily life. These include hidden facets of gender, control, hierarchy, and eroticism—for instance, relationships of control within professional exchanges and elements of male gender display that are subordinated to compulsory expressions of hegemonic, or complicit, masculinity.² In this sense, observing this set of relations within daily life is akin to looking through a foggy window. We know that things are happening. We can make out the vague movement of shapes, the play of light, the green blur of the grass, and the mushroom tops of the trees. Being given access to a world that is structured around these supressed social elements is like sliding a hand across that window and looking again. Now, in the clear patch of glass, we can see the blades of grass. Now we can see the leaves on the trees.

Professional dominatrices’ narratives about their labor thus defog a series of classic binaries that structure everyday experience—male/female, normal/abnormal, dominator/dominated, provider/consumer, researcher/subject, and purist/commercialist—bringing them into crisp focus. In doing so, they also call these binaries into question. One of the salient arguments of this text, for instance, is that pro-dommes’ characterizations of their work elucidate the fact that neither these women nor their clients maintain total control over the BDSM (bondage, discipline, sadism, masochism) encounter.³ Generally, the participants jockey for control, both within the dungeon and during their scripting sessions beforehand. This struggle may be viewed as deeply transcendent of the dominant/submissive binary, at the same time that the very essence of pro-dommes’ work relies upon this duality.

It is important not only to seek out corners of social life that have not been fully limned by social scientists but also to assess the basic social processes at work in daily life. By setting out to do both, I embrace a framework that is inherently queer in nature. Steven Epstein points out that queer theory analyzes putatively marginal experience, but in order to expose the deeper contours of the whole society and the mechanisms of its functioning, describing the assertion of the centrality of marginality as the pivotal queer move (1994, 197). By considering the world of commercial BDSM not only interesting in its own right but also revealing of larger social processes and conventions, we can make this move. Though not explicitly about LGBTQIA (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, intersex, asexual) issues, this text represents a queering of everyday life. It applies a queer theoretical framework to a particular set of liminal activities, shedding light on the binaries (for instance, normal/abnormal and kinky/conventional) that perpetuate the marginalization of such practices.

By focusing on pro-dommes, this book thus identifies the principles of erotic exchange at work in a largely unexplored subculture, but it also limns the depths of everyday practices, contributing to our understanding of such major elements of social life as gender relations, power, dominance and submission, and the exchange of money for erotic labor. Ultimately, I argue that professional erotic dominance is interesting not for its exoticism but for its mundaneness—for the normal social dramas that play out on its stage.

Goodbye, Omaha: Some Background on the Project

The germ of the idea for this book emerged in 2005, when I was a second-year graduate student taking a sociological methods course at Columbia University. I was writing a paper about catcalling on the streets of New York, and another student in my class mentioned that some of the women where she worked often discussed their experiences with catcalling and might be eager informants for my project. It turned out she worked at a dungeon.

After speaking with several of the dominatrices at this particular House, I had many rich catcalling narratives on my tape recorder and many more questions. Who were these women, and what did they do behind those closed doors? Did they really have control over their male clients? How did gender and power work in these interactions? Certain that this topic would be supersaturated, I pored through the usual academic resources and was surprised to find no studies that focused on professional dominatrices and few answers to my questions. The professor who taught my methods class was concerned for my professional future as an academic were I to pursue such an unconventional and potentially prurient topic. You’ll never get a job as a professor in Omaha if you do this, he cautioned. Shortly thereafter, however, my intellectual masochism got the better of me. I bid Omaha farewell and began conceptualizing this project.

A couple of years later, during an early stage of my research on this topic, I attended a fetish party at a club on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. When I was introduced as a researcher who was working on a project about pro-dommes, one of the partygoers, a thirty-something man in lederhosen, smiled and said, "So you’re the one this month." The attitude that research in this subject area has become redundant was prevalent not only among people at these parties and my interviewees but also among academics with whom I discussed the study. On one level, this attitude is surprising, considering how often I encountered the seemingly contradictory position that it was a frivolous or useless topic of study. On another level, however, it was expected. After all, I had also been one of those people who had not anticipated the dearth of published research about professional erotic dominance.

To date, there has not been a systematic study of professional dominatrices. Research on erotic labor has focused primarily on prostitutes, and studies of sadomasochism absorb dominatrix/client relationships into the category of all sadomasochistic (SM) relationships, without exploring what makes these paid encounters unique. The most extensive of these latter studies is the work of Martin Weinberg, Colin Williams, and Charles Moser (1984) on gay and straight sadomasochistic communities in New York City and San Francisco from 1976 to 1983, which included but was not limited to dominatrices (see also Kamel and T. Weinberg 1983, Lee 1983, and Patrias 1978; T. Weinberg 1983 provides an excellent summary of the relevant literature). The one study (Scott 1983) that deals with pro-dommes in their own right does so from the participant-observation standpoint of a researcher who had become a novice domme—an analysis that has been criticized as not scientifically sound (Moser 1984, 418).

To be clear, I am not asserting that this topic calls out to be studied because it fills a void in the literature. Depending upon which social scientist you ask, either all elements of our social worlds or no elements of our social worlds are worthy of study simply by virtue of existing. This topic is noteworthy not because it has never been examined sociologically before, but because, as I will argue throughout this text, by presenting in a clear way pervasive social elements such as microlevel control and gender display, dominatrices allow us to understand these elements in new and unexpected ways.

Looking at this corner of social life also sheds light on the erotic hierarchy that organizes our social world. Sadomasochism is a sexual practice that is at once complexly stigmatized, shrugged off as frivolous, and embraced within postmodern culture. In discussing the public response to this practice, it is useful to draw upon the work of feminist theorist Gayle Rubin, who argues that sexual stratification is one of the major systems of organization that underlie our experiences as human beings. She makes the claim that SM is just one form of eroticism that exists in a hierarchy of socially evaluated sexual activities. Modern Western societies appraise sex acts according to a hierarchical system of sexual value, Rubin explains. Marital, reproductive heterosexuals are alone at the top of the erotic pyramid, while sadomasochists are one of the most despised categories, towards the bottom (1992, 279).

To describe sadomasochism as a non-normative, socially stigmatized erotic practice, however, is to tell only part of the story. Certainly, individuals who engage in BDSM have historically been subject to reproach, particularly stemming from the psychiatric community. Nineteenth-century sex researcher Richard Krafft-Ebing, who is credited with coining the term sadomasochism, for instance, described the practice as both a perversion and an affliction (1965, 53). This pathologizing attitude has continued to be evident in media accounts of BDSM practices, particularly when injuries resulting from these practices have come under public scrutiny. One 1976 Time magazine cover story, The Porno Plague, warns its readers about the burgeoning representations of SM in popular culture. More recently, in a 2008 ABC News article, Love Hurts: Sadomasochism’s Dangers, published online on Valentine’s Day, a Columbia University psychology professor characterizes interest in sadomasochistic practices as incompatible with a healthy psyche (Goldman 2008, quoting Judy Kuriansky).

At the same time that the psychiatric community has historically characterized dominatrices and their clients as maladjusted, however, such practices have not been subject to the same public scrutiny as other sexual activities at the bottom of Rubin’s erotic pyramid. Somehow, Chris Gosselin and Glenn Wilson explain, most of the general public seem to have treated these excesses with some irreverence: although they have reacted strongly against those who would legalize sex with children, and even now have a considerable ambivalence towards homosexuality, they have made sadomasochism the subject of jokes, accepted it with a casual shrug, treated those who enjoy its practices with the sort of tolerant bemusedness reserved for the slightly mad or simply ignored it (1980, 11).

We see this bemused acceptance manifest itself in the fashion industry, whose catwalks have featured models brandishing whips and wrapped in leather; Gianni Versace’s bondage collection of the early 1990s is one example. Dolce and Gabbana put out a similarly themed collection in 2007, causing one newspaper headline to exclaim, Dominatrix & Gabbana! (Menkes 2007). The 1950s pinup girl Bettie Page made a career out of modeling in fetish clothing. And sadomasochistic themes in popular culture are not limited to the area of clothing design. A recent advertisement for Sunsilk hair products depicts a stiletto boot encircled by a whip and the tagline, My frizz is so wild even a dominatrix couldn’t tame it. In another advertisement—a commercial for Wonderful pistachios—a male voice intones, Dominatrixes do it, and a domme in gleaming boots is seen cracking open a pistachio with her whip.

The cartoon characters on the television show Family Guy regularly dress in SM regalia for comedic effect. The movie Secretary introduced one overtly sadomasochistic relationship to mainstream audiences. The popular television show CSI has included a dominatrix as a recurring character. On a 2005 episode of the television show House, a patient was brought to the hospital for injuries inflicted by a pro-domme. On a 2008 episode of the prime-time drama Private Practice, one of the characters dressed up as a dominatrix, brandishing a flogger at her lover. On a 2009 episode of the reality series Real Housewives of Atlanta, one of the housewives greeted a friend dressed for an elegant party with, Oooh, you look like a dominatrix—I love it!

In 1982, American singer-songwriter John Mellencamp went to number 2 on the Billboard charts singing, Sometimes love don’t feel like it should / You make it hurt so good. In her 2004 song La La, pop princess Ashlee Simpson crooned, You can throw me like a lineman / I like it better when it hurts—although censors required her to change the lyric to I like it better when we flirt for her halftime performance at the 2005 Orange Bowl. In 2011, a trip to the gym leaves the strains of Rihanna’s S&M pounding in my ears: Sticks and stones may break my bones / but whips and chains excite me. And who could forget Madonna’s role in perpetuating the mainstreaming of kink? In the 1990s, the pop superstar inextricably linked her name to BDSM imagery—specifically, in the 1992 video for the song Erotica, in which she donned a black bodice and mask and seductively handled a riding crop, and 1995’s Human Nature, in which dancers wrapped in shiny, form-fitting black fabric contorted amid whips, chains, riding crops, and suspension ropes, to the refrain Express yourself, don’t repress yourself.

The Facebook application SuperPoke includes a dominate option, illustrated by a whip-wielding cartoon avatar in a corset and fishnets. One issue of Time Out New York featured a dominatrix’s dungeon in its Apartments section, among the other real estate items; the piece described the space as appearing "as if it sprang from the pages of Martha Stewart Living rather than the stories of the Marquis de Sade (Yun 2007). And a search of the Amazon book list yields 3,835 hits for the keyword dominatrix," ranging from tell-alls (The Domestic Domina: My Life as a Suburban Mother and Celebrity Dominatrix) to works of erotica (She’s on Top: Erotic Stories of Female Dominance and Male Submission) to the sexual how-to (The Mistress Manual: The Good Girl’s Guide to Female Dominance; Sex Tips from a Dominatrix) to books that, like this one, draw parallels between principles of erotic dominance and daily experiences (The Corporate Dominatrix: Six Roles to Play to Get Your Way at Work; Whip Your Life into Shape! The Dominatrix Principle).

SM practices, then, and the figure of the powerful dominatrix in particular, while they continue to be characterized as subversive, are also to some extent normalized and maintain a relatively high level of cultural visibility. One night in March of 2008, I watch a rerun of Frasier. Frasier’s producer, Roz, is attending a costume party dressed in a bondage costume. Waiting for her doctor to call with the results of a pregnancy test, she worries aloud that she will make a bad mother. Well, I don’t think discipline will be a problem, Frasier quips. A few days later, the British tabloid News of the World comes out with the story that Max Mosley, head of Formula One’s governing body, has been caught in a Nazi-themed sadomasochistic orgy.⁴ That same week, I walk past (the now-defunct) Kim’s Video in the Morningside Heights area of Manhattan, and a large, glossy book propped in the window catches my eye. Its cover features a photograph of a dominatrix in leather regalia, posing seductively on a flight of stairs. The cultural symbol of the Dominatrix, like that book, is both taboo and regularly on display. She is perceived with an unsteady mixture of repulsion, disinterest, concern, amusement, and fascination.

Unfogging the Window

Not only is sadomasochism a prevalent theme in popular culture, but prior studies have indicated that the predilection for sadomasochistic sexuality is prevalent enough to call into question the classification of SM as an alternative sexual practice. Pro-dommes and their clients are less than exotic, in the sense that sadomasochistic arousal is not unique to niche groups. In putting forth the argument that sadomasochistic practices illuminate a basic series of oppositions in the real world, I stand on the shoulders of those theorists who have argued the inverse, conceptualizing sadistic and masochistic impulses as essential components of human life.⁵

Sadomasochism’s practitioners include not only those hardcore individuals who go to BDSM clubs or pay to be flogged by women in leather. The sadistic and masochistic impulses have implications beyond the sexual sphere and have been theorized as phenomena that pervade daily life. Sociologist Lynn Chancer, for instance, argues that a variety of relationships are sadomasochistically oriented, regardless of whether the pattern appears in the well-publicized realm of sexuality, or in other instances of everyday life, whether between a particular teacher and student, or a worker and boss, or in other highly charged encounters between partners caught in symbiotic enmeshments of power and powerlessness (2000b, 1). Anthropologist and sexologist Paul Gebhard concurs, noting that sadomasochism is embedded in our culture since our culture operates on the basis of dominance-submission relationships, and aggression is socially valued (1969, 77). For the same reason, historian and sexologist Vern Bullough makes the claim that to ignore sadomasochism . . . is to ignore life itself (1983, 11).

Give and take, aggression and submission, love of pain and love of giving pain, are not features of social life unique to a visit to the dungeon. Rather, we can use the dominatrix’s workplace as a laboratory for looking at a particular way that these basic principles manifest themselves. While pro-dommes are both organizationally and conceptually embedded in a multitiered system of social relations—for instance, the SM Scene in New York City—the dungeon provides a relatively circumscribed arena in which to explore broader social mechanisms.

In considering the prospect that sadomasochism has implications beyond the sexual sphere, it is useful to draw a parallel with Judith Butler’s work on the practice of drag. Drag is a kind of theater in which gender display becomes both exaggerated and denaturalized. Butler contends that drag "reveals the distinctness of those aspects of gendered experience which are falsely naturalized as a unity through the regulatory fiction of heterosexual coherence. In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself—as well as its contingency (1999, 175; emphasis in original). She goes on to argue, Although the gender meanings taken up in these parodic styles are clearly part of hegemonic, misogynist culture, they are nevertheless denaturalized and mobilized through their parodic recontextualization (176). In essence, drag contributes to our understanding of gender by exposing femininity as a performed role. Similarly, practices of sadomasochism that are naturalized in everyday life—for instance, a boss reprimanding his underling—are recontextualized in the dominatrix’s dungeon. The sadomasochistic theater, by caricaturing them, increases their visibility and contributes to our understanding of them. Sadomasochistic interactions are stylized representations of dominance and submission, but they are able to both lay bare and destabilize the taken-for-granted assumptions underlying such practices. Further—and here is where the queer theoretical frame comes in—in their putative reversal of gendered erotic roles, they actually provide an amplification of those roles as they exist in the real world."

Why Pro-Dommes?

If sadomasochistic practices are a window into a set