3rd Global Conference
Friday 16th November - Sunday 18th
November 2007
Salzburg, Austria
Session 7: Workshop
A Well-Caned Arse
Luisa Orza and Paul Reynolds**
* Independent Scholar, United Kingdom and ** Department of Social and Psychological Sciences, Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, Lancashire, United Kingdom
This paper represents two papers in workshop form. The session uses a variety of discursive formats to explore representations, voices and arguments around the nature of BDSM, starting from a single moment: a well-caned arse. The workshop will begin with the distribution of a questionnaire as delegates arrive, to gauge responses to images, statements, words and language expressing different aspects of BDSM as a prompt to explore theoretical and experiential positions. The workshop itself will use images, sound, creative dialogue, theoretical framework and performance to provoke thought and reaction around meanings of pain, punishment, harm, language, sensation, and gaze, as well as issues of consent, permission, prohibition and regulation. We want to move beyond abstracted arguments of whether or not people have a right to engage in their own private sexuality, to something more phenomenal and embodied. Rather than problematising actions, predilections, tastes, as things for which solutions need to be found, we intend to explore them as conditions of being.