Session 4: Texts of Pain and Love
1st Global Conference
Wednesday 17th February – Friday 19th February 2010
The Women’s College, Sydney, Australia
in association with the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of New South Wales, Sydney
The Erotics of Pain: BDSM Femslash Fan Fiction
Malin Isaksson
Umeå University, Sweden
My paper focuses on the erotics of pain in fan-produced, so-called femslash texts describing romantic/sexual relationships between the two super powered Slayers Buffy and Faith from the cult TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Fan fiction writers use an existing fictional universe (film, TV series, etc) to develop scenarios and characters in creative ways within the logic of the original universe, the ‘canon.’ Femslash are fan fictions featuring a lesbian couple who is not a couple in the canon, e.g. Buffy/Faith.
In ‘adult’ Buffy/Faith femslash, fan writers describe sexual pleasure and intimacy as inextricably linked to pain, especially in BDSM sex scenes. Drawing on the preternatural resilience of Slayer bodies which can take extreme amounts of pain, fanfic writers create graphic, hard-core descriptions of BDSM as key elements in Buffy and Faith’s relationship. Such representations subvert stereotypical ideas about female desire and sexual behavior as ‘passive’ or ‘vanilla’ and necessarily connected to romantic love. The pairing of two extremely ‘tough’ and strong female characters in fan fiction, where a general rule is to stay true to the canon’s descriptions of characters, is a particularly interesting point of departure for such non-stereotypical representations.
Since they allow for intersections between gender and sexuality expressed in non-normative ways, the Buffy/Faith femslash texts I address queer the stereotypical assumptions that readers’ or viewers’ sexual identifications and fantasies are stable, hetero or homosexual, and gender-coded when it comes to preferences for soft (allegedly ‘women friendly’) vs. hard-core (supposedly ‘for men’) pornographic representations.
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
Dancing in Others’ Shoes: Between Pain and Pleasure
Daria Radchenko
Independent Researcher, Moscow, Russia
Practicing dances of foreign cultures has become a popular hobby in Russia in last decade. To achieve successful performance in this field even at an amateur level one has to transform significantly his/her body so that it corresponds to the physical demands of a foreign bodily practice. This process of transformation of the body may be painful; yet pain is often seen as a value in its own and as a virtue of the dancer regardless of his/her actual achievements. Other groups see their dancing as a way to relieve pain. The paper investigates the process of disciplining one’s body for dancing in the Other’s way, finding compromises between one’s own culture and the Other’s body techniques, forms and functions of pain in amateur “ethnographic” dancing, perception and representation of painful/painless dancing within groups, practicing Irish dance, belly dance, swing dance, etc.
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
The Discourse of Cutting – A Study of Visual Representation of Self-injury on the Internet
Hans Sternudd
Department of Global Political Studies, Malmö University, Sweden
My study addresses images of self-inflicted violence. I have focused on self representations of self-injury (SI), specifically in the form of cutting, on a community for support and information about SI. The study aims to understand the role and function of visuality in a discourse constituted by skin cutting practices. Through the examination of over 6000 photographs, from formal and communicative perspectives, an understanding of the role of the skin as discourse has derived. Skin perceived as an interface in which the inside and outside is understood and expressed by the individual. The function of cutting as a way of communicating, inner pain, giving it an expression that is understood both by the inner “self” and outsiders, is clear in the study. As a result of the study it is also apparent how these images of cut open feminized bodies (irrespective of “biological” sex) plays an important role in the building of a global network based on a shared understanding and experiences of bodies in pain. This is a network of solidarity and resistance.
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