Preview

The Internet, Identity, And The Sadomasochistic Sphere

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
603 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
The Internet, Identity, And The Sadomasochistic Sphere
In the article “Taking the Leather out of Leathersex: The Internet, Identity, and the Sadomasochistic Sphere,” the author discusses sadomasochism and BDSM (a shortened acronym for Bondage and Discipline; Domination and Submission; Sadism and Masochism) as a counter public subculture, and identifies it as a public sphere, made more accessible through digital technologies. Rambukkana set the groundwork for his paper by defining key concepts like the public sphere, as well as its critics like Nancy Fraser, in which her idea of multiple publics and counter publics in a public sphere is more suited to his argument focussed on the particular public of BDSM. Even though the paper is discussing the evolution of public participation in BDSM culture
Continue Reading
View Writing Issues

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    Maggie Nelson's Spectatorship Theory
    • 1562 Words
    • 7 Pages

    Maggie Nelson's Spectatorship Theory

    The term spectatorship traditionally refers to the act of watching something without taking part. “Image flow” represents this idea of spectatorship where individuals mindlessly scroll through images and videos to fill the gaps in their day (Nelson 304). Maggie Nelson, author of “Great to Watch” presents the term “image flow” as the act of scrolling through social media and being in a constant state of “extremity”, either angry shock or boredom (300-311). However, she progresses her argument from disgust at the “desensitization” caused by the frequency of being in that state of “extremity” to exemplifying individuals and ideas that fall outside of those extremes (Nelson 300). Nelson’s notion of spectatorship, which identifies the self, is in direct relation to Malcolm Gladwell's theories of context. Gladwell, author of “The Power of Context,” suggests that direct physical environment, the “context of the situation”, molds an individual’s morals and the way he or she perceives the world altogether (149-162). Author Jean Twenge’s idea of entitlement in, “An Army of One: Me” serves as a foundation that holds together Gladwell and Nelson’s effect of a created context (486-505). The individuals feel that they are entitled to the information provided and by viewing the videos or images and taking action or voicing their opinion they are empowered, raising their self-esteem.…

    • 1562 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Better Essays

    Misconceptions: Why BDSM Is Fetishism
    • 1512 Words
    • 7 Pages

    Misconceptions: Why BDSM Is Fetishism

    Public perception about BDSM is steeped in misconceptions. Many are too fast to judge something they cannot wrap their mind around, especially when pain is an associated element. Unlike a traditional power neutral relationship, in a BDSM relationship, one partner asserts dominance over another, and this is hard to fathom if one does not slant toward being dominate or submissive. Dominance and submission are about personalities, and what works in one pairing may not work in another.…

    • 1512 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Better Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    2013 Amina Tyler Case article
    • 797 Words
    • 4 Pages

    2013 Amina Tyler Case article

    This whole ordeal has led to global controversy. The unbelievable acts of Amina’s family and nation have sparked the Ukrainian group Femen to take a stand. On April fourth Femen, led by Shevchenko, staged a topless protest called “topless jihad”. The protest spanned across Europe, and drew the attention of both civilians and police. While many of the feminists in this group fought bravely for their beliefs, many having to resists arrests and the jeering patrons, some members of the group took it too far. Some Femen activists not only strolled topless along public streets, but dressed and held signs offensive to the Muslim community.…

    • 797 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    Circumstance Film
    • 892 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Circumstance Film

    In the film Circumstance, it is apparent that Iran’s culture is greatly different than our own. This can be seen through a modernism lens point on Iran’s subculture of sex, partying, and drugs. Iranian citizens are forced into underground communities, quite literally, in order to express their true sexualities and gender. This is enforced by Iran’s morality police, often shutting down underground events and using violent acts to prosecute those who are caught. An analysis of modernism is key to understanding how sexuality is displayed and portrayed in other cultures, which reveals how young natives risk arrests and their futures by experimenting with sex, drugs, and defiance, a rebellion against authority, thought to be a product of their own parents rebellion.…

    • 892 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    Ethnographic Research Paper
    • 1045 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Ethnographic Research Paper

    In this research paper, Paul Booth and Peter Kelly carried out an ethnographic research on fans. Specifically they discussed the change that the advent of new digital technology brought to the world of fandom and to the shifting identity of fans. Their aim is to establish that despite the advent of new technologies fandom has not entirely changed its meaning but has expanded itself. This article has been published by an online Journal called “Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies” which main aim is to strengthen the fields of audience and reception studies and as many other articles on it, Booth’s and Kelly’s work encourages an open debate not only with media scholars but also with the subjects of the research itself. In fact, the researchers took in consideration the voices of 115 people at the Chicago Tardis convention for fans of Doctor Who and gave them the opportunity of questioning their own ideas about their identities as fans. Even though some of its elements do not perfectly match the conception of fan in 2016 and some of its point could have been analyzed more in depth, this research still gives a good explanation…

    • 1045 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    Fifty Shades Of Grey Film Analysis
    • 851 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Fifty Shades Of Grey Film Analysis

    Society is lead to believe that people who participate in BDSM have experienced some past trauma that causes them to want to use BDSM as an outlet. A prime example of the media displaying BDSM as a result of trauma is clear within the music video S&M by RIhanna. In the video, Rihanna participate in various forms of BDSM scenes. However, periodically throughout the music video, newspapers flash across the screen with the headline “daddy issues?”. Automatically, people try to justify the reason Rihanna is participating in BDSM as some form of childhood trauma. Another example of this is in the movie Secretary, where the main character Lee is released from a mental institution at the beginning of the movie and struggles with self harm throughout the movie (Steinberg 2002). After her boss introduces her to the lifestyle, she is told she can no longer cut herself. Repeatedly, society tries to justify the reasons for people to enjoy BDSM. Ethan’s presentation goes totally against this idea of BDSM participants having a previous trauma. In fact, he argues that many couples participate in BDSM because it is fun. It is a way to spice things up in the bedroom. BDSM also builds a lot of trust, which is something most couples who participate in traditional sex lose out on because they do not verbalize everything they want. Most couples just “go with the flow” or the “mood”. Ethan explanations for why most people…

    • 851 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    Youth Culture And Deviance Behavior In Goths Gamers
    • 926 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Youth Culture And Deviance Behavior In Goths Gamers

    There are significant differences between different societies. In studying issues of youth culture and deviance behavior, it is important to take these differences into account. “Goths, Gamers, & Grrrls” by Ross Haenfler, discusses a wide range of youth subcultures, from British mods to recent online communities. The youth subcultures that are covered throughout the book are skinhead, punk, hip hop, hard core, heavy metal, Goths, hackers, online communities, and groups in which members pledge to preserve their sexual virginity. Subcultural approaches assume there is a common value system to deviate from, don’t explain why people decide whether or not they participate in a deviant subculture, understanding the concepts of class, race, and gender, over focus on working class males and fail to highlight deviant sub-cultures in other sections of society.…

    • 926 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Better Essays

    The Shedding of Puritanism
    • 1504 Words
    • 7 Pages

    The Shedding of Puritanism

    In the article, “Perverse in the Popular” by Martha Bayles, the ideas of perverse modernism are lucid, straightforward, and audible. The article sums up the pure reality of the new culture we are living in; one filled with violence and sex. Bayles words are constant reminders that although what would have been seen as crude and obscene to our grandparents, is exactly what the young generations are being exposed to and brought up with today. Through the media, we as Americans are shown the form of art of today’s popular culture. Although this does not demonstrate what used to be considered ‘art’ many years ago, it has become what sells in culture today. The obvious downfall in today’s popular culture through the lives of Americans has changed what each individual distinguishes as ‘art.’ This all relates to the idea of “perverse modernism” (Bayles), which refers to the public’s attraction to negatives and evils of society, as it has grown over many years, becoming more offensive by the day.…

    • 1504 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Better Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    How Feminism And Sexual Identities Intersect In Sadomasochism?
    • 365 Words
    • 2 Pages

    How Feminism And Sexual Identities Intersect In Sadomasochism?

    The purpose of this thesis is to explore how feminism and sexual identities intersect in sadomasochism in relation to religious and historical understanding of the sexual identities and spiritual positions of women. Specifically: can women reclaim their sexual identity from their spiritual up bringing and assert it through sadomasochism? My research analyzes the history and roles of members in the BDSM community, expectations and positions of women in religious contexts, and the empowerment of women post-suffragette movement. I will be using sadomasochism and BDSM interchangeably fitting to the fluidity of the term.…

    • 365 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    Digital Divide By Claire Bishop
    • 460 Words
    • 2 Pages

    Digital Divide By Claire Bishop

    Claire Bishop sets out to examine the idea the largely the genre of “digital art” has been ignored and somewhat consciously forgotten by the world of contemporary art. Bishop also suggests that much of the ideology and history behind the “digital revolution” is also reduced, removed, and ignored; that digital art poses the necessary questions to our society today on the “troubling oscillation between intimacy and distance” (1) and that digital art “proposes an incommensurability between our doggedly physiological lives and the screens to which we are glued” (1). Bishop argues her point that not only is the art of the “digital art movement” itself significant, but that so many art movements (performance, social practice, assemblage based sculpture) also owe much of their inspiration and roots in the time of the digital art revolution (2). In reading this I found much sympathy for the role of the digital art in our present-day society and that a possible avenue of ignorance towards it is it’s significance in our everyday worlds, separate from the realm of contemporary art. The mediums of digital art, the tools we have come to advance in a technological revolution of the modern twenty-first century are difficult to keep up with and fully understand not only their make-up/construction and full-use, but also their implications on our society and culture as a whole. I too have been in doctored to see digital art as a acquired taste in the world of art, where the bridge between the physical and the unknown (or that of the cyberspace and digital realm) are blurred, and frightening. I believe it these very fears of digital art and its role in society which causes critics and audiences to question its role in the art world, and to construct rigid assumptions and rules for the medium, something Bishop argues we must destroy and to begin to “question art’s most treasured assumptions” (12). Bishop offers a lens…

    • 460 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Powerful Essays

    Deployment of Sexuality: A Disciplinary Apparatus Concerning Power
    • 4805 Words
    • 20 Pages

    Deployment of Sexuality: A Disciplinary Apparatus Concerning Power

    What does Michele Foucault mean by deployment of sexuality? Part four of the book on History of Sexuality speaks of the deployment of sexuality (HS 75ff). It is said here that deployment of sexuality is a disciplinary apparatus which concerns power. Many regard this work as a straightforward extension of the genealogical approach of Discipline and Punish to the topic of sexuality. This opus is a multi-volume work on various themes in a study of modern sexuality. His idea is that the various modern bodies of knowledge about sexuality, that is, various “sciences of sexuality”, including psychoanalysis, have an intimate association with the power structures of modern society and so are prime candidates for genealogical analysis. On his account, modern control of sexuality parallels modern control of criminality by making sex, just like crimes, an object of allegedly scientific disciplines, which simultaneously offer knowledge and domination of their objects. However, it becomes apparent that there is a further dimension in the power associated with the sciences of sexuality. Not only is there control exercised by way of others' knowledge of individuals but there is also control by way of individuals' knowledge of themselves. Individuals internalize the norms laid down by the sciences of sexuality and monitor themselves to conform to these norms. Therefore they are controlled both as objects of disciplines and as self-scrutinizing and self-forming subjects.…

    • 4805 Words
    • 20 Pages
    Powerful Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    "Liking Is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts”
    • 1430 Words
    • 6 Pages

    "Liking Is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts”

    We live in a world where the internet and social media plays a big role. There are constantly becoming less and less physical contact, and fewer face-to -face relations. This is demonstrated by the fact that we keep in touch with each other over Facebook, shopping takes place over the internet, we keep up with our economy whit online banking and meet friends and lovers over online dating sites. In late modern society, we are always available. But are we really missing out on a lot of important stuff, and is this necessarily a bad thing? This is also the theme in Jonathan Franzen’s essay, “Liking is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts” from 2011. The focus in this essay will be on how Jonathan Franzen uses a lot of different rhetorical methods to engage and convince the young readers with his massage. This essay will also discuss if Jonathan Franzen managed to convince the young readers and if the increased use of social media really has such bad consequences?…

    • 1430 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More
  • Best Essays

    Bethany's Vlogs
    • 4465 Words
    • 18 Pages

    Bethany's Vlogs

    In this research report, I shall consider the cultural significance of BethanysLife vlogs by using post modernist approaches of Jean Baudrillard on hyper realism. Vlogs are short video clips that are shared via the internet. YouTube one of the major online video sharing websites that hosts a lot of these videos called vlogs. By combining the grassroots of blogging with richness of expression, these video blogs are known as vlogs. Development in recent years has led to this widespread popularity of ‘clip culture’. Vlogs create dominant messages since it consists of distinct visual elements attached to it and is more of an interpersonal communication. BethanysLife is a YouTube channel started on 2010 which now has about 693,278 subscribers and 23,670,162 video views (see appendix B) owned by a seventeen year old teen Bethany Mota. Over the years her vlogs has grown a strong cult following among the other vloggers. There are several Facebook fan pages and dedicated Twitter accounts titled as ‘Motavator’, ‘Bethanators_07’, ‘Macbarbie07fans’ (twitter handles- see appendix C) which describes the level of intimacy that holds the audience back. This is a contemporary media text as these vlogs have a global viewership and there is an…

    • 4465 Words
    • 18 Pages
    Best Essays
    Read More
  • Powerful Essays

    Syblogs
    • 2557 Words
    • 11 Pages

    Syblogs

    In the last three decades or so, referring to the internet as a space that is somehow limitless, full of radical possibilities, an almost class-less space has become a trend of sorts. Especially after Donna Haraway's seminal essay 'The Cyborg Manifesto' - where the 'Cyborg' is an organism whose boundaries of 'human-ness' are blurred with his or her identities achieved via technology - imagining the internet to be a site that can allow for multiple identities, reworking and using fluid and unfixed gender identities and subverting one's notion of gender identity is a very powerful idea. In that vein, information networks are seen as sites for escape from the gender systems of everyday life, a Promised Land of sorts, one especially suited for women and 'feminine modes of communication'. At the same time, the general practice is to think of the Cyborg as an almost benign creature, akin to the fetishist notion of the female robot used in pop culture, which is paradoxically oversexualised and yet has no equipment for sexual intercourse. This notion of a ‘genderless Cyborg’ can be crystallized in Takashi Murakami’s sculpture Hiropon which depicts such a Cyborg: naked, lacking genitals and spurting copious amounts of breast milk; she is a fantasy, able to nurture without the threat of reproductive capacity.…

    • 2557 Words
    • 11 Pages
    Powerful Essays
    Read More
  • Good Essays

    Burlesque West Showgirls, Sex And Sin In Postwar Prostitution By Becki Ross Analysis
    • 846 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Burlesque West Showgirls, Sex And Sin In Postwar Prostitution By Becki Ross Analysis

    She expresses that she is “not entirely convinced that the current revival of neo-burlesque and female-friendly striptease classes will lead to a larger cultural shift, one that de-stigmatizes erotic dancing; and sex work in general.” That being said, the neo-burlesque movement and female-friendly striptease classes coupled with thorough studies such as Ross’ can be perceived as small victories on the road to a better understanding and clarity of “invisible” histories.…

    • 846 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
    Read More

Related Topics