Panel Idea time for WisCon: Kink Bingo / Being Politically Sex Positive

[sasha_feather]

j00j and I are doing idea generation for a proposed WisCon panel on kink. Please comment! We need to come up with a description, and possibly suggest people for the panel and things to discuss.

Being politically sex positive: Kink Bingo, Fandom, and understanding Kink through fiction

Points to indclude:
kink is a lens through which you can see the world
it can be an oppressed identity
No kink-bashing, everyone's kink is OK, kink as an umbrella that includes infinite things
define terms: squick, BDSM, others
Intersectionality

ETA: Thank you for leaving comments; I may not respond to all comments. This panel is being planned partly in response to a disappointing panel at Think Galacticon entitled "Dangerous Sexuality".

Comments

[thingswithwings]

I've been trying to write a comment to this post for hours now. I don't know if I can get it right, but I feel like my need to speak a bit about the issues raised in comments now outweighs the difficulty of saying some things in public.

1) I think it's important to define what you mean by "kink," especially when you're talking about fandom and real-life practice in the same breath; if you look at any kink meme you'll see the broad fandom definition of kinks that includes "narrative kinks" - "Jensen and Jared hold hands and have a picnic." This broad definition is sometimes useful (it can de-familiarize things that are normative kinks, like heterosexual courting rituals) and sometimes extremely troubling (de-familiarize all you want, but having a kink for picnics is not the same as having a kink for humiliation; people treat you differently). So, this adds a lot of stickiness to the issue, I think. Especially when you factor in some fans' occasional use of the word "kink" to defend historically fannish narrative practices that can be critiqued for their problematic roots (my kink is for h/c where the disabled person gets better, my kink is for pretty white boys kissing each other, my kink is for killing off the women characters). So I think that at all stages of discussion people have to be clear about what they mean by kink; while anything can be a kink and kink can be an umbrella that includes infinite things, that is not how people use the word eg while writing exchange-fest letters and specifying that they don't want any kink fic.

2) I sometimes balk at the way we have to examine and come to terms with our obviously incredibly problematic kinks, but this is apparently the kind of discussion you ONLY have to have in relation to what you call a kink. In other words, why is the immediate question "omg how can I reconcile social justice goals and inclusive kinkiness!" but not "omg how can I reconcile social justice goals and watching [any given problematic tv show]!" or "omg how I can reconcile social justice goals and my desire to only write fic about the young able-bodied white men!" - - - this is not to say that no one struggles with those latter kinds of questions; I do, and I know lots of people who do! And it's not to say "oh, no one does it for X, why should we bother for Y?" It's more to say, I think it's important to recognize that this question comes up with kink practices (especially what is 'traditionally' meant by kink, especially in non-kink circles - bdsm, play with power dynamics, play with identity categories, edgeplay) much more quickly, much more frequently, and much more urgently than it ever does for other potentially problematic aspects of fandom. And that there is a historical and political reason for that frequency and urgency.

3) Free kink is like free speech; it can be used to do bad things; it can be used to reinforce kyriarchy and oppress individuals. It can also be used to lift us up, make us joyful, make us free, parody the kyriarchy and take some of its power. The key is not to restrict or question types of kink, any more than it is to restrict types of speech, but to react to specific incidences of kink, or incidences of speech, that do harm. A kink is a medium, a language, a mode of expression; to say that any given kink is always harmful, or never liberatory, or never a source of harmless pleasure, is like saying that you can't write poetry in English because it is a language of colonial and imperialist oppression.

How you determine what incident is doing harm is the difficult part; as with other forms of harmful actions, or harmful speech, or harmful fanfiction, it's difficult and there will always be dissent. When I see a piece of fanfiction that I find racist or misogynist or homophobic, I sometimes email the author or leave a comment or talk to my friends about it, trying to have a conversation about it. I don't know why the process ought to be different with kink fic, or with kink practice.

There is no type of kink, none, none whatsoever, that cannot be practiced in a positive or harmless way, that cannot be used to make people more free. I know people who write rape fic as catharsis because they live in a rape culture or have been raped themselves; I know people who create stories about erotic children as a way of working through their own childhood traumas, memories, abuses, or desires (my favourite is the Todd Haynes film Dottie Gets Spanked, a partly-autobiographical short film about a boy fascinated with spanking; it is my favourite text on kinkiness of all time); a friend told me yesterday about a woman she knows who uses necrophiliac-fantasies as a way of eroticizing her own terminal diagnosis. Mollena is brilliant on the subject of raceplay and slaveplay as ways of eroticizing and reclaiming the oppressions inherent in being a Black American woman. People always want to have conversations about what kinks are problematic, but a kink is only a tool, a lens, a language; to do social justice within kink communities has often meant, and I think should continue to mean in fandom, talking about what actions or approaches or specific stories are problematic, and why.

4) Therefore, if you really want to have a conversation about kink and social justice, if you want to be serious about the intersection of these two things, you have to start by recognizing that social justice as it works in kink communities may not always look like social justice as it works elsewhere. Social justice can happen through slut-shaming and humiliation, forced feminization and slave fantasies. To have that conversation you also have to recognize the conversations that go on within kink communities, polarizations between things like "safe/sane/consensual" and "risk-aware consensual kink," discussions around potential for psychological harm (resulting from things like identity-play) as well as physical harm, as well as the extremely nuanced discussions of informed, enthusiastic consent and what it looks like. What bothers me sometimes is people who come to kink spaces from social justice spaces, often being pro-kink and well-meaning, who don't realise the decades of discussion that have already gone on in regards to, for example, negotiating consensual non-consent and 24/7 D/s relationships. The idea that these discussions aren't already vibrant and in progress is one that I'd like to dispel. This is good news, really: we don't have to start from scratch! I'm not saying that kink communities have already had all the discussion and it's done, yay! - but rather that there are already lots of discussions going on that we can join in with. Check out my link to Mollena above, for example, if you want to get a flavour of how discussions about raceplay are happening, especially within various communities of Black kinksters. Obviously there are different issues of voice and appropriation in fandom vs in fleshspace or even online kink spaces (for me, while I would never want to ask someone to self-identify, the author's self-identity does make a difference in how I feel about their use of particular tropes or kinks in a story, which can lead to some awkward moments - "but what if so-and-so IS a person with an amputation, writing this amputation-fetish story that seems appropriative or exploitative?") but I think we already have starting points from which to develop those nuances of conversation.

5) I have a near-visceral reaction to the idea that everyone in fandom avoids this subject (kink+social justice) or that it's forbidden in mainstream fandom spaces to be kink-negative. I see people complain all the time that you just can't talk about how problematic kink is these days in fandom because the mainstream kink police will shut you down and shun you, but - to give just one example - the amount of work it takes to keep kink bingo relatively safe from the most blatant kink shaming practices demonstrates otherwise. The fact that so many people complain about how you can't complain about it demonstrates otherwise. It feels to me, and I know I am far from objective on this issue, but it feels to me like there are now some safer spaces for kinky people in fandom, and the existence of those safer spaces makes people who aren't relieved by their existence feel like something has been taken away, some basic freedom to critique kink that can now only happen in 90% of fandom spaces, not 99%. I get the feeling that there's an idea that "safer space for kinky people" reads to some as "you can't do social justice in this space, you can't bring up issues in this space, this is a discussion-of-marginalized-identity-free-space" - not recognizing that a safer space for kinky people is in itself a kind of social justice, just as any safer space for any marginalized identity is in itself a kind of social justice. And "safer space for kinky people" doesn't mean "don't bring up problems of intersectionality" or whatever, at least that's not what it means to me. But, as with many safer spaces, for us at kink bingo it means "educate yourself about this discussion before coming in; recognize if what seems to you like a genius original point is actually something commonly used to oppress and silence people; basically, be respectful, don't ask folks here to educate you, etc." I don't have a lot of patience for people who show up on our comm to say "BUT SECOND-WAVE FEMINISM: ISN'T ALL BDSM AND HUMILIATION INHERENTLY HARMFUL???", but that doesn't mean that "safer space" = "shut down discussion"; it just means that "safer space" = "you don't get to reiterate the shame that caused oppression and ptsd for many kinky people on our dime."

[sasha_feather]

Thank you very much for this very excellent comment and for taking the time to write it.

[j00j]

Yes, thank you so much for this.

Yeah, I have no idea how much work it takes to keep kink bingo relatively safe (and I thank you for doing it as a regular k_b reader), but I see enough anti-kink comments here and there in other parts of fandom (thinking of a certain fanfic flamingo post, or all the "I don't like [kink] but I like your fic" type comments, both of which are probably pretty mild compared to some of the stuff you see) that I can only imagine how difficult it is.

"People always want to have conversations about what kinks are problematic, but a kink is only a tool, a lens, a language; to do social justice within kink communities has often meant, and I think should continue to mean in fandom, talking about what actions or approaches or specific stories are problematic, and why." I think that's what I've been heading towards and totally failing to articulate. Again, thank you.


Maybe one of the questions we should be discussing on the panel (if we still feel we can do this. I am intimidated as hell) is what does it mean to be politically sex positive? And framing what safer space might look like? Ground rules for this panel would be really important-- I've seen the "ISN'T ALL BDSM INHERENTLY HARMFUL???" argument come up once in awhile at Wiscon before, and I'd rather start with some principles in place than stop to do 101 stuff.

[j00j]

Also, still mulling over defining kink. Discussing fandom and real-life practice (where real life practice= kink in peoples' actual lives in physical space or online space, rather than an online space vs physical space distinction, I assume) together do make things complex. Narrative kinks is an interesting discussion, but perhaps beyond the scope of where this panel may be headed? Would using the kink_bingo list of kinks be helpful in defining? Later I will look for helpful definitions.