Jay Szpilka, "BDSM Practices in Contemporary Poland: Barbed Wire Floggings, Rope Orgasms, and the Problem with Desire" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025)

Summary

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Podcast Summary: New Books Network

Episode: Jay Szpilka, "BDSM Practices in Contemporary Poland: Barbed Wire Floggings, Rope Orgasms, and the Problem with Desire"

July 7, 2026

Host: Atali Ayisraeli Neva, New Books Network
Guest: Jay Szpilka, Assistant Professor, SWPS University

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Episode Overview

This episode explores Jay Szpilka’s new book BDSM Practices in Contemporary Poland: Barbed Wire Floggings, Rope Orgasms, and the Problem with Desire (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025). Through an in-depth conversation, Szpilka and host Atali Ayisraeli Neva discuss the book’s ethnographic research, theoretical interventions, and the complexities of kink, culture, desire, and politics in Polish and broader contexts. Central themes include how BDSM is practiced and understood, negotiations between normalcy and perversity, debates around violence and consent, the material culture of BDSM, and the politics (or strategic anti-politics) of desire.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Author Background and Academic Trajectory

• Szpilka’s entry into BDSM research stemmed from personal investment as well as academic ambition.
  "A very conventional story, like trying to do research on something that you are personally invested in... my sexuality, my sexual desires, my sexual interests have always been very heavily informed by bdsm." (03:56)
• Initial motivation: Ethnographic study of Polish BDSM, inspired by established works in the field (e.g., Stassi Neumer, Margaret Wace), with a gradual shift toward more theoretical approaches.
• Szpilka’s identity as a trans woman and immersion in queer anthropology shaped both methodology and perspective:
  "Midway through my Ph.D I came out as trans. And so so much of it was also just me grappling with that particular intersection.” (09:55)

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2. Research Process and Theoretical Development

• Book’s origins: master's thesis → PhD project → monograph
• Methods: Began with participant observation, interviews (“classic ethnography”), then evolved toward a “patchwork” blend of theory and fieldwork due to the gaps in Szpilka’s formal education in queer and trans studies within Poland.
  "You can basically see this entire project as a descent from cultural anthropology towards very loosely understood cultural studies." (09:39)
• Rich cross-pollination due to “scattershot” education and necessity to self-educate in underrepresented theoretical fields in Poland.
  "I do personally think that the sort of stumbling can be immensely productive, but...often you just end up with very, very little depth." (12:13)

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3. Framing of the Research Question

Central question: How is it possible to practice BDSM?

• Motivated by anxieties and critiques—especially those from radical feminism—about the ethics of sadomasochism, and personal/professional encounters with skepticism or hostility.
  "A lot of my experience, personal experience, both in researching it and practicing it, is running into people who ask...How can it possibly be erotic to be flogged or be slapped...?" (14:00)
• Emphasis on practitioners’ strategies for navigating external and internal anxieties about desire and legitimacy.
  "Those anxieties are not external to the practice of kink, but are something that hounds practitioners themselves." (16:18)

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4. “Strategic Universality” and Knowledge Production

• Critique of the expectation for scholars outside the Anglophone west to only contribute “local color,” while “universal” theory is produced in the Western metropole.
• Szpilka’s response: Refusal to self-limit to the “ethnographic only” mode, writing from Poland as a site relevant for theorizing beyond its borders.
  "What if I wrote as if I was writing from this position of being allowed to treat your locality as...an excuse to talk about something grander in scale?" (21:09)

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5. Beyond the Bedroom: Public and Private Boundaries (Ch. 2)

• The permeability of the “bedroom” as both a physical and conceptual space.
  "Practices are not so neatly confined in this bedroom...it is where we culturally locate sex as properly belonging." (24:37)
• Kink is ever “leaking” into public life: fashion, language, roles. Practitioners actively negotiate boundaries and legitimacy in different arenas.
• Practitioners (especially women with submissive preferences) employ “double lives”—e.g. “badass girl boss in public and the submersive in the bedroom.” (26:08)

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6. Normativity, Subversion, and Tactical Identity (Ch. 3)

• Negotiation between “perversity” and “normalcy”: Practitioners strategically claim either depending on context—both as erotic strategy and in response to social stigma.
  "People often hold both of them [subversive and normative]. And which they are currently expressing depends on what they will think will help them best navigate various difficulties..." (31:40)

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7. The Problem of Consent, Relationality, and the Torture Analogy (Ch. 4)

• Addresses mainstream tendency to rely on “consent” as the great divider between BDSM and violence or torture.
• Szpilka foregrounds “relationality” instead of consent: "If we look at what people in BDSM actually do, you will quickly find out that a lot of them like playing with consent..." (38:57)
• Existing legal and social frameworks treat consent inconsistently (e.g., MMA fights vs. BDSM).
• Relationality as key: what matters in BDSM is how people relate to each other, world-expanding vs. world-annihilating (in torture).
  "What my interviewees describe...even when they describe practices...where consent is not full...they instead describe those experiences as world making, as expanding their capacity to experience the world..." (43:33)
• The limits of outsider access to affective states and relationships:
  "At some level, we will never have access to those relationships...as direct as we would like." (44:26)

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8. Material Culture: Toys, Tools, and Technology (Ch. 5)

• Explores ambivalence about the commodification and technologization of sex and kink.
  "Are we having sex or are we having collectibles?" (46:13)
• Toys as objects of both anxiety and pleasure; debates about authenticity, nature, “true kink.”
• Draws on queer theory, trans studies, and feminist science & technology studies to challenge the nature/technology binary: "There is no sex that precedes technology. Sex is always a technology." (49:59)
• Advocates treating toys/objects as partners in “techno-cultural assemblages.” (52:15)

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9. Politics, Desire, and Disidentification (Ch. 6/Conclusion)

• Explores the fraught relationship between sexual desire/practice and political commitments.
• Practitioners often disidentify, neither embracing nor rejecting politics in their sex lives—setting shifting boundaries:
  "They very carefully set boundaries between what they allowed themselves to perceive as political in their sexual practices and what was supposed to be just a hobby, just a kink." (60:12)
• Recognizes both radical feminist critiques that “the personal is political,” and the counterargument that the bedroom is private; finds both inadequate.
  "Both of those answers are obviously unsatisfying and insufficient and fundamentally unresponsive, fundamentally failing to respond to the richness of the experience and the complexity of the experience." (59:11)
• Her project: to describe and theorize these navigations as they are lived, rather than prescribe or categorize.
  "This project being about ways of navigating questions of what BDSM is and isn't and the politics of BDSM not as the directly or even objective for means of navigating our own political attachments vis a vision, the desires that we have." (61:06)

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10. Memorable Quotes and Moments

• On “patchwork theory”:
  "Patchwork theory in that sense...can people can gain a lot by using it in many senses." (12:32)
• On the persistent need for practitioners to justify themselves: "Practitioners who need to be able to explain and justify to build themselves their partners in the world. Why they get off of the things they get off." (16:34)
• On world-making versus world-annihilating violence: "They instead describe those experiences as world making, as expanding their capacity to experience the world instead of diminishing it." (43:33)

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Notable Timestamps

• [03:53] Szpilka discusses personal motivation for researching BDSM.
• [09:39–10:16] Shift in the book’s methodology/theoretical approach and coming out as trans.
• [14:00–16:18] Why “how is it possible to practice BDSM?” is the central question; negotiation with feminist critiques.
• [21:09–22:18] “Strategic universality” and theorizing from Poland.
• [24:37–27:06] The bedroom metaphor, the porousness of public/private sexual boundaries.
• [28:19–31:47] Negotiating normativity and subversion among practitioners.
• [33:20–44:50] Consent, violence, relationality, and the analogy to torture.
• [45:36–52:51] Toys, technology, and the material cultures of kink using queer and trans theory.
• [53:44–61:36] Politics/desire, issues of disidentification, and the complexity of aligning sexual practice with politics.

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Closing & Author’s Next Projects

• Szpilka is currently working on a project about BDSM and transfemininity, combining history, culture, and auto-theory, as well as engaging more with literary analysis of contemporary English-language transfeminine literature. (62:07–63:38)

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Summary Takeaways

Jay Szpilka’s BDSM Practices in Contemporary Poland offers a rich, theoretically intertwined ethnography of kink, emphasizing how practitioners continuously navigate the anxieties, pleasures, and boundaries between eroticism and normativity, private and public, violence and care, and desire and politics. The book foregrounds the “mess” of real-life BDSM, refusing both simple condemnation and simple celebration. Szpilka’s work is a major intervention into how we theorize sexuality, desire, and the limits of both academic and popular understandings of erotic practice.

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Transcript

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[Jay Spielka]

Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Atali Ayisraeli Neva]

So hello everyone, and welcome back to New Books Network. I'm Atali Ayisraeli Neva, one of the hosts of the channel today. I'm very excited to be talking to Jay Spielka about her new book, BDSM Practices in Contemporary Barbed Wire Floggings, Rope Orgasms and the Problem with Desire. Jay Spielka is an assistant professor in the Department of Humanities at SWPS University. Jay, welcome to the show.

[Jay Spielka]

Thank you for having me.

[Atali Ayisraeli Neva]

So, Jay, I was wondering if you could begin by telling us a bit about yourself, your journey as an academic, your journey to researching the topics that you're interested in.

[Jay Spielka]

That's such a big question. Well, I've basically have been trying to

do research on BDSM in wide variety of ways, not as wide as it could have been throughout my entire academic, throughout my academic, entire academic career.

And I ended up landing on the

project which ended up being this book when I was trying to figure out what to do for my master's. And I was, I had this. I had this idea that I want to write about, about, like, specific erotic practices among Polish BDSM practitioners and that I would like to do like the sort of quote unquote, classic ethnography of the community. I was greatly inspired by works of Stassi Neumer and Margaret Wace, who at the time, when I was doing the. When I was starting to do searching to consider this research were somewhat recent, were somewhat. Were somewhat new and as such they kind of like gave me this idea that you can do this, that you can do this. The sort of very, I don't want to say very traditional, but in some ways very, very by the book. Study, ethnographic study, participant observation, all those things you hear about cultural anthropology seminars or ethnography as we still in many ways prefer to call it in Poland when it comes to how departments are named.

[Atali Ayisraeli Neva]

Yeah, yeah, for sure. I think maybe we should state for listeners who don't know that BDSM is the acronym for bondage, domination, submission, sadism and masochism and practices that and a lot of practices under this umbrella. And I guess before we, before we move to talk about the actual book, I'm interested in what made you interested in, you know, pursuing research about BDSM specifically.

[Jay Spielka]

Well, it's a very, as I write

an introduction to my book, it's a very conventional story, like trying to do research on something that you are personally investors. And I've been like, my sexuality, my sexual desires, my sexual interests have always been very heavily informed by bdsm. And since I was also pretty much always an insufferable academic academic, like I always wanted to go to academia, like terrible fate really. I figured out that the best thing I could do was like research it, read about it, write about it, do some, do some field work.

So it was, this was in many ways an attempt to like think through

a number of my personal concerns, ideas, desires. Much, much, much later into my research I managed like come across works of Esther Newton, who was very, very absent from my extremely spotty education. And I.

And find out that what I'm doing is in fact following a very well

established trend in queer, in queer anthropology, that I'm basically doing a thing that most well known of which I'm not queer anthropologists have been doing since this discipline basically emerged as a subfield. I suppose. So it's a, it's a very, it's a very classic story in many ways.

[Atali Ayisraeli Neva]

Yeah. I love that you say classic when you know, it's. I guess it's our kind of classic. Right? You know, talking about queer anthropologists. Yes. So. So moving to the actual book, how did you, how did you come about to do the research for the book? Was it part, what was that, your dissertation?

[Jay Spielka]

Yes, the. So the book is result of again, it started as a master's thesis, which

I then developed into a project for my PhD which then like took several more years and like a year longer than expected

field. So I think the big processual, I

guess, or methodological shift that occurred part.

Part way through writing it is that when I started, when I started writing

it, when I started like again, I

was doing my master's and I was

very much unaware of most theoretical developments around queer theory as a discipline and

trust studies as a discipline, which ended

up being significant inspirations for what the book is.

And this is once again a consequence

of the fact that both of those fields are very, very poorly represented within Polish academia.

And as such they just, they have

just completely missed me in my education. I had to come by them by myself and mostly stumbling very blind. So it, it's so.

So the result is that what I set out at the start was the.

This again, very by the book. Go to parties, make interview, take interviews, talk to people, have whole

small life

crisises about interview coding al. The usual of qualitative, qualitative research.

But as I was getting more and more into that, I was getting increasing. I was getting increasingly interested in writing

perhaps a little more of a theoretical work.

And obviously it is not that you

cannot connect theory and fieldwork. And in fact, like when people.

One of the things, one of the

books that charmed me thoroughly when I was writing this was and it sings Famous Mushroom at the End of the World with truly magisterial blending theoretical and fieldwork inside.

But that was also.

This is also a work of someone so much more familiar and comfortable the intricacies of the craft that I was at the time.

So it was, it was as, as

so many dissertation works, this was a lot of stumbling. And then obviously I finished my. I finished my dissertation, I defended it. And then after submitting the book proposal, I ended up having to rewrite it basically from ground up. So a lot of the, A lot of the perspectives have also changed. There were certain things that they could not have done while writing a dissertation that were more permissible when publishing it. Publishing as a monograph partially, for example, the, let's say out of theoretical aspects of the book. I was basically told that this is going to go very poorly with my committee. And so I again was only allowed to really explore this when reworking the book for publication.

So you can basically see, you can basically. Oh, you can basically see this entire

project as a descent from cultural. From cultural anthropology towards very loosely understood cultural studies.

And also a work that was informed to a significant degree by the fact

that midway for writing, Midway through my Ph.D. i came out as trans. And so so much of it was also just me grappling with that particular intersection, I suppose, of my life experiences and trying to make sense of it.

And fundamentally I also just found out

that trans studies as a discipline has a lot of really good insight for writing about sexuality and that. And this is where my current work lies right now.

[Atali Ayisraeli Neva]

So. Yeah, and I think, and I think this process shows in the way that you're. Yeah. Both the fact that the book has. Does have a strong, at least for me as a reader, ethnographic component, but also a very, you know, of course, strong theoretical component, and the fact that you take really, from different, you know, theoretical routes, you take inspiration and you use them is. I think it adds a lot to the richness. To the richness of your book. So, yeah, so I think the readers at least got, you know, we. Yeah, we. We. It probably got better for us.

[Jay Spielka]

So, yeah, it's. It's very. Just. Just want to very quickly say that it is very funny for me to hear because I think that this. Would you say this diversity of approaches is really a byproduct of just how extremely scattershot my education was, how profoundly

and systematic, because, again, I was in a cultural anthropology program, more or less

it was technically cultural studies, but I was.

My supervisor was a trained sociologist. And a lot of people who are like, my teachers were sociologists, often quite conservative sociologists when it comes to. When it comes to methodology, which is again, mostly by a product of how the Polish academic scene works or academic landscape looks.

So everything else I had to stumble for. And I felt. And I just. I do personally think that the sort of stumbling can be immensely productive, but

it is also, like, immensely, immensely frustrating. Often you just end up with very, very little depth. You just take a lot of loose

inspirations without properly locating them within any

sort of an intellectual tradition or archive, I suppose.

[Atali Ayisraeli Neva]

Yeah. I mean, I think that's the give and take of these things. But I think in a sense also, you know, in cultural era of topology, they call it, you know, patchwork ethnography. But I think also patchwork theory in that sense can make. Can people can gain a lot by using it in many senses. Yeah. And I think, you know, if we move to the actual book and the actual very first sentence. So in the very first sentence of your introduction chapter, which is the first one, you write that the core question which underlines your book is, is how is it possible to practice bdsm? And I wanted to ask, why do you ask this particular question?

[Jay Spielka]

So I think that another thing that kind of needs to be said is that when I say that this work

is a byproduct of my personal investment in bdsm, it is also a byproduct

of the fact that I have always been kind of both interested and maybe a little bit worried by the long

history of particularly radical feminists. But not only critiques of sadomasochism, the

critiques which often hinge around the idea

that it is that BDSM is somehow ethically suspect, particularly from feminist standpoint, if not utterly impermissible.

And on the other hand, a lot of my experience, personal experience, both in researching it and practicing it, is running into people who ask some sort of one variety or another of the questions, how can you possibly get off on that? How can it possibly be erotic to be flogged or be slapped or be

whatever, any of the very, very, very wide variety.

And those questions I think are actually really interesting because they betray both a number of fundamental assumptions that we have about what sex is, what sex isn't, by extension, but also the significant unease that so many of us have around practicing sex that looks and feels very

different from the one that we have been mostly a call accultur.

And obviously there has been a sea

change in the in that BDSM as significantly more legible as an actual sexual practice now, but it's been even like 20 or 30 years ago, let alone when the radical feminist critiques of Damascus were frisbeeing post.

But it still exists. And like I I have had so

many conversations in academic circles in Poland,

again, where older process, but not just

older to be clear, this is not

just an age difference thing where kind of put off by the subject. And similar experiences have been recorded by

other anthropologists working on that.

And this is once again something that is I think, familiar story to anyone

doing intimate or erotic. Intimate or erotic anthropology.

So I just really wanted to start

off and like lay the basic question is how do people navigate that? How do people navigate all those anxieties?

Because those anxieties are not external to the practice of kink, but are something that hounds practitioners themselves. Practitioners who need to be able to explain and justify to build themselves their

partners in the world.

Why they get off of the things they get off.

[Atali Ayisraeli Neva]

Yeah, I think, you know, yeah, I think it's a great way to frame your book and I think you raised some very interesting themes and, and the way people navigate and a lot of the times, you know, not don't necessarily decide on one stance on it, even if they're practically if they practice it, which I think is. Is a really interesting takeaway in general from your book and many of of of its themes before we ed into them though I did. So the book is called BDSM Practices in Contemporary Poland. And in the your introduction you make a very interesting argument about, you know, about previous reach research on BDSM and, and how a lot of it is made in the US and there's sort of a bias. And you say that in those terms. Your approach is that of strategic universality. So I wanted to ask what do you mean by that and what kind of an intervention you're doing in the field of bdsm, sex and sexuality, specifically in terms of your work in Poland.

[Jay Spielka]

So it is a pretty common experience

among scholars in the broad field of women, gender and sexuality studies that come from outside what I would say anglophone academic, academic world, especially the sort of like very, like very Anglophone world of academic feminism, queer fear and so on.

And I have no idea how those

things look in francophone and German speaking and German speaking academic context because I do not interact with them. I didn't interact with them enough. So I'm speaking about the experience of someone who comes out of Poland and starts interacting with, probably primarily in English speaking academic world, academic publishing market and civil.

And the experience is that people who

come from outside of this western academic

context are very frequently kind of subtly or not so subtly expected to provide specific, locally specific information.

So there's.

Instead of doing what so many scholars in the west do, which is write based on material gathered in their locality and uses material to generate a theory

that does not disclose its profound block out profound provinciality.

And there is a rich, rich body

of critique around that sub. Around that which comes from so many different fields, from decolonials, from decolonial research through women of color feminism, to basically any anthropologist born after a certain point

kind of needs to grapple with that, right?

This is, it is a discipline that has to ask itself constantly, okay, where am I standing?

But I think that while one potential

response to this issue is to provincialize everything and just like provision and insist

on all knowledge being provisional, which has its charms. But then you kind of like still settle for academic division of production, where theory is the high tech, so to

speak, component that is being made in

the intellectual factories the United States of,

of England, like the big centers of education.

Whereas the more, let's say, like more

ethnographic material comes from outsiders.

And I really did not want, I

really did not want to do that.

I really did not want to settle for a situation where I'm allowing myself a purely practical, practical perspective while nonetheless

having to utilize theoretical frameworks produced elsewhere.

So what I instead did is ask, is try to ask the following question. What if I wrote as if I

was writing from this position of being

allowed to treat your locality as, as

an excuse to talk about something grander in scale? I'm not going to say Universal. Because obviously, again, another of those terms that anyone with anthropology education is or ought to be immediately skeptical of.

But what if I do not allow myself to bracket. To be this. To be this bracket? And this really hit me mostly because there was actually quite a decent body

of ethnographic research on various national BDSM scenes.

But most of it is just like doing just that. So just like providing sort of like an overview of. Okay, so this is a scene, this

is history, this is how it works. And here are some names of colors. Usually English, in English of like written about would be dsmb.

So I was like, okay, what if we. What if we do not.

[New Books Network Host]

If.

[Jay Spielka]

What if we do not go badly?

What if.

What if we like, pretend for a moment that despite writing from a vastly different position, I do not have to treat myself as someone who needs to limit her herself to a very narrow local perspective. Not that narrow local perspectives are bad versus always give and take and thus.

[Atali Ayisraeli Neva]

Yeah, no, that makes sense. And I think it creates really interesting theory. You know, when you say, okay, let, let's just pretend for a sec that I am in that position of writing like that. In your second chapter, you invoke the space of the bedroom and how BDSM practices in Poland seep outside of it. Can you elaborate on what you mean by that?

[Jay Spielka]

So once again appeals to common queer

experiences like the ages old question of why don't you keep it in your bedroom?

Right, but the thing about BDSM is that practices BDSM are expensive and include so many things which are not limited

to simply coitus, but which can include from.

Which can include things from fashion choices to specific modes of address to your partner.

So, you know, I don't know, wearing a discreet collar in public or a whole ass latex outfit to your grocery store by or like calling your partner daddy or sir or, or whatever.

And those practices are not so neatly confined in this bedroom, which I understand not just as an actual physical space, but also a conceptual space space. It is where we culturally locate sex as properly belonging. And obviously this also means, and I don't think I've actually explored that sufficiently, is that what the bedroom is will

vary by sexual practice, will vary, will vary by context, but this space is

permanently shifting that there is no settled place for sex in society just as much as there is no settled understanding

of what sex is.

So when I speak, when I use the metaphor of the bedroom, I use it as to, as a method to interrogate where and how we grapple with the proper place of Having sex and what happens when certain practices keep exceeding the space. This is especially important. This is especially important from the point. From the point of view of bdsm, because for a lot of people who

practice bdsm, there is a very sharp disjunction between. Or maybe this junction is a poor word purchase word.

There's a very sharp difference between what they do, what they perceive themselves as

being like in bed, in bedroom, and in public life.

Like one of the. As it happened, so many of my

interview participants, my interviewees were women who preferred submissive roles.

I do not believe anyone is like,

I speak of preferring submissive or dominant roles. I do not treat those as stable identities. So I'm going to, like, speak of someone like, prefers a specific role and

they prefer submissive roles. But a lot of them felt compelled to stress that their preference for submission in the bedroom has no bearing on

how they conduct themselves outside of it. Like, employ. Often employing the sort of a trope of a badass, badass girl boss in public and the submersive in the bedroom.

And again, I took that as a strategy of navigating and also establishing the

boundaries of the bedroom. Exactly. There's, like, space where your sexual expression

becomes both clearly legible and is allowed

to be perceived as such.

But then obviously the question becomes, okay, but do those practices ever really stay properly contained in.

Which is what I would. My research want me to believe that there is the bedroom. The doors. The doors to the bedroom are always at least a little bit open. This is the containment of sex. Sexual practices in private space is never completed.

Once again, I feel like I was

when I was writing that I was kicking down an open door to. No pun intended. Considering this is basically the point of view of so many queer scholars, we can look back to the conversations about sex in public in the 1990s. Lauren Barrow and Michael Werner, obviously, and many more.

[Atali Ayisraeli Neva]

Yeah, that's true. But I will defend you in saying that in opening that door, because I think the connection you make, and we'll talk about it in some of your other chapters, between this earlier career work and connecting it to work on bdsm, where, as you mentioned in your book several times, not all of your interviewees and respondents were necessarily queer or. Or gay in their sexual practices or how they think about themselves. But I think drawing these connections is part of the intervention you're making in your book.

[Jay Spielka]

That sense, yes. No, for sure. Especially since, uh, one of the things that I was at one point very invested in criticizing was this concept of

bdsm practices as intrinsically subversive, intrinsically revolutionary, intrinsically non normative.

I have a very dim view of

the concept of subversive sexual practice or intrinsically subversive. Subversive sexual practices. Or

instead I was like, more interested in pointing out towards how those registers of normativity, non normativity and so on, operate not as objective states of sex, but are specific positions that are assumed, that are assumed by practitioners themselves who

will tactically shift from seeing themselves as subversive to presenting ourselves as fully normative depending on the necessities of the moment.

[Atali Ayisraeli Neva]

So, yeah, this is basically my next question, because this is, this is what you talk about expensively in your third chapter of the book. And yeah, and as you. And as you say in the book, your respondents constantly negotiate between perversity and normalcy. So you mentioned just now that they tactically choose, you know, when to invoke each of these categories, if something is normative or either if something is preferred. So can you, can you elaborate on when they choose what and why?

[Jay Spielka]

Obviously there's an element of the erotics

of the forbidden, right? So like trying to present yourself as a sword, as a sort of a cool trans bdsm, it's like sore cool thing that is not for everyone, that requires specialist knowledge, specialist equipment and so

on, has potent erotic charge. There is also.

I will need to grab water in moments. I'm sorry.

There's also an obvious element of this

desire to be out this again, this, I think erotics of being a renegade, okay.

And I think this is something that

BDSM has historically engaged with very heavily with this or just with building its reputation. So many people who talk about kink in public, like building reputation as this like outlaw thing. And this can also be deployed politically when it is to present kinksters as a pol, as a sexual minority under attack and basically lump it together with other forms of fight for sexual freedom.

And at the same time, however, this same fight for sexual freedom can very

easily happen along the lines of assimilationism, right? So saying, oh, this is just a hobby we have. This is like, this is what we do. And that mother, like wife, wife and husband. This is perfectly normal. And we just want our right to privacy be respected.

What is important, I think, is that despite they having like pretty opposite charge, those positions are not exclusionary.

People often hold both of them.

And which they are currently expressing depends on what they will think will help

them best navigate various difficulties in both internal and external that they find themselves in.

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[Atali Ayisraeli Neva]

So moving to chapter four, that's titled Is It Torture or Is It Being Torture? You address the comparison between BDSM practices and torture and you problematize the usual explanations both for and against torture. Doing this comparison, I think this is a really important topic and it comes up a lot, I think, when, when people talk about BDSM and discuss it both I guess in mainstream discussions, but also in academia. And the way you do it is you put not consent, but rather relationality in a way at the heart of BDSM practices. Can you explain a bit about these debates and, and why you choose, you know, relationality rather than consent?

[Jay Spielka]

So obviously, historically, one of the biggest problems explaining BDSM was that BDSM appears

at least appears a very, very close, disturbingly close to various forms of violence that we would like absent from our society. It uses tools that have been historically used for corporeal punishment. It invokes the imagery and sometimes lexicon of slavery, of domination of all those bad, quote unquote things. Well, not quote unquote, like bad, literally bad, but like also bad as a sort of signature bad things that we just have inhabited our history, right?

So obviously, if we want reject those

things, if we for example, want a society that is free from torture, how do we allow someone to whip another person bloody?

And a lot of the people, like so many people practice bdsm, practice it

in a very say, not a particularly intense form. It is basically a small addition to their sex life.

But some, but for some people who are particularly invested in bdsm, it becomes very much an art that goes beyond

just like being being a form of foreplay. And like I've talked, I've interviewed people who have done genuinely extreme things, or at least things I thought extreme. So the title barbed wire, barbed wire flogging was a display at the play party in Poland where 1. One of my interviewees was beat was flogged with a piece of barbed wire,

which, as she explained, was a painful

in the grand scheme of things, but

was rather really bloody.

There was a lot of blood splattering.

So when I heard that for the

first time, I was like, oh, my God, how do I handle this information? Like, I thought. I thought that. I know I knew what BDSM was like, but God damn, this is. This is so much beyond anything I understand.

This is.

This is like, is this even possible to enjoy. See the opening question, Right?

So obviously, one of the questions that I had to address is what is the status of those practices vis a

vis our commitment to expunge violence and domination from society?

And historically, this question was even used

as an argument against bdsm. So saying sadomasochism is violence, domesticism cannot be allowed because it is just allowing violence into our bedrooms. And this has been the radical feminist position, although the radical feminists would like to say that this is not allowing it because violence is already there. It is just an extreme form of patriarchal. Of patriarchal violence, like exemplification.

But it was also. It's also like the justification that has

been at times used to persecute people who practice bdsm.

Although most of the time persecutions for

BDSM were ones in which BDSM was kind of like a compounding factor. So the most famous cases where persecution of sexual minorities, such as gay men, for example, where the fact that we were engaging in BDSM was a very convenient excuse to put them through the wringer of police violence, basically, police and juridical violence. So this famous spanner case in the United Kingdom is a. Is a great example where a number of gay men who were doing some pretty intense BDSM in the early 90s were put on trial for battery, assault and so on. Because.

And the thing is, the counter argument has historically been that there is a

fundamental difference between BDSM and, say, torture, because people in BDSM consent, they are okay with what is happening to them. So obviously, BDSM cannot be violence because it is consensual. This argument has always been, I believe, primarily a legalistic one.

Especially since consent, as we understand it

today is illegal, is a term which has profound legal implications.

There's, again, rich body of feminist and

queer scholarship that takes consent to task for being a framework borrowed from liberal. From, like, liberal imagery of sovereign subjects that are entering, like, with the right to enter contracts and moving it as establishing as a bedrock of sexual. Of sexual ethics.

So cons. So consensus mind defense but then if you look at what people in BDSM actually do, you will quickly find out that a lot of them like playing with consent. That they will talk openly about how consent is an absolute necessity. But then like in practice, they will be like, is it really? And this at a glance sounds horrifying because once again we are, we are used to believing that consent is both the foundation, but also the, let's say,

horizon of affects of good sex. That consent is what both allows them and secures them and what if sufficient for it. But to, to use an example I, I analyze in my book, I have,

I've met and I interviewed many people

who say that they do not use safe words.

Not because they are sadistic monsters who

just do not want their partners to suffer until they expire, but because they

are themselves like prefer submissive practices and kind of dislike the idea of giving themselves an out. Like, if I get a safe word, I'm going to like chicken out of something. I would prefer to endure. I would prefer to like have this pleasure of enduring. Or another example is like people who have, who like do consensual non constant

practice to where they consent to being put in a situation where the capacity to withdraw constant is blocked.

And what those practices I think demonstrate is both that the concept of consent

is far less clear cut than we

prefer, but also the usage of consent

as a radical difference between BDSM and various forms of violence also needs to be reformed because not all of BDSM does it.

And then again, if we do a

strictly like formalistic or legalistic understanding of

consensual violence, this kind of like leads

us to a number of other questions like this.

There's a lot of legal research specifically comparing the fact that you cannot. There are many places in the world

where you cannot consent to being flogged

by your girlfriend, but you can consent

to receiving traumatic brain injuries because of the extreme sports you engage in. So like average MMA fight I imagine is orders of magnitude more intense than most of what kinksters do and it's perfectly illegal. Well, many of those same localities because constant, because the fighters agreed to what they're doing, even though we often have very little understanding of what the actual risks entail. And this is like a common theme in sports, right? That players find out that they have

been put for like they have consented

away their right to, right to redress the injuries they have suffered in the course of their career.

And at the same time, you cannot

do that for sex. That's, that's Forbidden, which obviously could lead one to wonder what happens if someone gets off on being in the octagon, for example. But I imagine this is a conversation for another time.

So this is.

So this is the other thing, right? So the constant as a distinction just does not hold as absolute as we'd like to.

And this is where I found myself

drawn to analysis of torture and to analysis of torture as an actual practice, like juridical torture and so on, which

both revealed to me that torture is incredibly difficult to define, similarly to how

BDSM is often very difficult to define. But we have that our work, that

most of our definitions of actual torture,

working definitions which are assembled for a specific legal purpose or research purpose, rather than ones which feel exhaustive enough to encompass the wholeness of this form, of

this form of violence, but also that torture. What some of the best scholarship on torture does is show that torture is built not just on specific things that

happen to bodies that are done to

bodies, but on specific types of relationships between.

Between people who practice them.

And this is famously an argument which

has been erased by Elaine Scarry and her landmark work, the Body in Pain,

where she talks about torture of this

way for the torturer to obliterate the world making capacity. The world of the torture, and notably

this sort of a narrative has been fully abstinent from my interviews. Because what my interviewees describe, even when they describe practices of practices where consent is not full in the way we come from, they instead describe those experiences

as world making, as expanding their capacity to experience the world instead of diminishing it.

And what facilitates that, again, is the relationship with the people they practice with. So I tried to zero in specifically on those relationships to showcase that if we look at the question of whether BDSM is or not is not torture, we find a perspective that is not so necessarily committed to, like, trying to defend or condemn bdsm, but it's more interested in, like, trying to understand what actually happens between people, which obviously puts a sharp limit on our capacity to access this, because what happens between people happens between people.

Like, we can. We can speculate, we can take their word for it.

We can talk about effective states, we

can apply the whole range of theoretical approaches.

But it also means that at some level, we will never have access to those relationships that underpin BDSM as direct as we would like. As direct as the at least putative

directness of our ability to witness a specific practice and declare, this is good or this is bad. This is torture, this is king, this is. This is Abuse. This is not abuse.

[Atali Ayisraeli Neva]

Yeah, no, thank you for that. And I think you, in a way, this sort of discussion takes a different kind of form in your next chapter in chapter five, where you discuss what you call the material culture of bdsm. And you do that through a discussion of the uses of and anxieties about BDSM toys and tools in your respondents practices. Can you tell us more about it? And also how do you use specifically in this context, queer and trans theories to examine those issues?

[Jay Spielka]

So, so one of the things, one

of the other avenues of criticism of

BDSM that has existed for quite a bit is that it is basically commodity fetishism because BDSM has a very large

market of various toys, toys and tools that exist to facilitate it.

So there's always this little bit of

unease about the fact that it's an expensive hobby. It can be an expensive hobby at

least, and that it often feels like

when you're talking with people, like comparing the size of your toy bag, it's

not difficult to like wonder what's going on here.

Are we having sex or are we having collectibles? And this also intersects in interesting ways with varieties of feminist approaches to sex,

with the question of whether the intrusion of technology into the space of sexual expression is allowable or if it alienates

us from some sort of primal, essential experience of sexual desire.

And once again, voice are in humans

go back to radical feminism. They go back to the sex, to the feminist sex wars, where for example, the use of dildos was a massive point of contention, both because of the association between dildos and biophaluses, but also

because of this, again, sort of conservation.

Okay, are we losing touch with our natural side by relying so much on

technology, or is there something else going on here? And the same anxiety is present in

the minds of many BDSM practitioners. Again, like, we are not free from the anxieties that surround our practices.

[Commercial Announcer]

So

[Jay Spielka]

in the, in the interviews have been a lot of the store this kind of. Because when I was asking about toy toy usage, a lot of this anxiety work. On the one hand, toys are really cool. We like our toys. A lot of them have some very

favorite ones that we would that make

that make us feel so much more

into things if toys are involved.

But at the same time admitting that feels like, are we more invested in

toys than in people?

Which is aware that it's so a lot of my interviewees would respond sometimes somewhere along the line that toys are cool, but they're not necessary. Like true kink is like something that

you can just do with your raw psyche, with your raw.

This is.

There's especially funny masculinist version of it when you just talk to certain kind of mostly CIS male, CIS male dominance who will love to tell you how the true dominant, true macho dom will dominate a woman simply with stern glare. That's something those people I think would really enjoy. Manosphere Some of those, some of this, some of us go before the time of the contemporary Internet of the contemporary Internet manosphere, but neither here nor.

And what I try to do with this anxiety is once again not try

to resolve it in one way or

another, but rather ask about the foundational questions. And here trans studies and queer theory both came in very handy because what those disciplines in variety of ways do

drawing on also like feminist science and

technology studies, is that they both ask about what makes nature nature right and force us to kind of abandon this dualistic understanding of technology and culture as

perfectly oppositional and cleanly delineated.

Delineated space. And this is very important also for trans people obviously who have been long associated with excesses of technology like being

like products of technology.

Even so this means that has been

a rich body of thinking of scholarship

developed into circles to counter that and oftentimes what this counter is an attempt to show that there is no sex that precedes technology. Sex is always a technology. Whether this technology takes form of a dildo, a set of handcuffs or a specific erotic technique. It's. It's technology. And we have so many other technologies like facilitate having sex from. From anti conception to just bedding just the fact that we have fucking healthcare which allows us to deal with a yes. Yeast infection or. Or uti. All those things are part of our.

Of the technological of say like the techno culture of.

Of sex sell them. And maybe the point is instead of

like trying to argue about primacy of either technology or culture or nature and bad. And I'm sorry for the slippage here, I promise that I'm a little bit more careful about that when I write

is to examine it once more from the perspective. Once more from the perspective of what

people actually do and what would we do with things without sort of prejudice.

So what I arrived at is also

an understanding which is derived from new

materialist thinking which tries to see relationships

between humans and non human object and

non human animals or objects even as meriting similar. The same kind of appreciation as relations say between humans. So what if we include those particular

pieces of technology like BDSM plugs into our Analysis of BDSM not as either

some sort of a malignant technological creep or a prosthetic or a prosthetic assets, but as equally relevant partners in a technocultural.

In a techno cultural assemblage, throwing all how.

[Commercial Announcer]

All.

[Jay Spielka]

All the buzzwords now that is, that we came to know as sex.

So this has been my.

This was my effort in that chapter.

Like, what if we take the relationships

between people and toys seriously without condemning them? What if we allow the idea of sex as a. As a technology to be seen not as a result of some alienation from an. From a primal state, but rather as

a fact about sex as it is

currently articulated in our understanding?

[Atali Ayisraeli Neva]

Yeah, totally. Thank you for that. I think it raises a lot of questions that. That are totally connected to bdsm, but also go way beyond that. And what, in general, we just think about what is sex? And this goes back to what you. What you started with when you started describing in the last concluding chapter of the book. You know that throughout your research, a lot of your respondents made an effort to separate between their sexual practices and their political engagement. And following that, as a concluding, you know, a finale to your book, you analyze this desire to separate BDSM practices from politics. And I wanted to ask what is your argument and takeaway on that point?

[Jay Spielka]

So I think that at the time when I was writing it, it's actually

very funny because in my very early

work, in my early days, and it still kind of shows, I was hugely, with my, like, days as a student, I was hugely, hugely inspired by a

pretty unlikely scholar to cite research on bdsm and namely Hannah Arendt, who I

wanted to put her everywhere and just do an orangian analysis of everything. So obviously the key term had to be politics, right?

Because what if,

as a result, I kind of fixated on the idea of writing about politics as bdsm, but this properly led to the question, okay, does BDSM do politics? This is big practices of bdsm political. And this is also a feminist question, right, Feminine. The famous question of the politics of sex. Right, but what does that mean? Does that mean that, like, certain sexual

practices have certain political status or nature assigned to them?

Does it mean. Does it mean that what we do

in the bedroom, to return to the metaphor, is necessarily an extension of our political commitments elsewhere?

Does it mean that we necessarily have

to subordinate or direct our desires towards optimally relevant.

And this is a massive, massive question that we have been grappling for such a long time.

And I think we'll be grappling with for much, much longer.

And it is a question that is easy to see in like an extreme form in bdsm. Right handed, what is the political status of wanting to be flowed, flogged by

barbed wire in public, right?

And you can obviously dismiss it by

saying that it happens in. In the bedroom, and the bedroom is not a place of politics. But at this point you run into the obvious feminist rejoinder, right? That private is political, Though how to understand this rejoinder is not always clear. And also you run into this entire long tradition of queer critique of. Of the separation of the public and private, like this.

Of this sectioning of sex into.

Into the private, into the private hurry. So this is one angle you can take when exploring.

But there is another problem, right? Another problem is also this sharp disjunction many of us experience between our sexual desires and our politics. And interestingly, this is something that I think I arrived at far more. I arrived at for, partially for bdsm, but far more for being a trans woman and coming from a specific kind of feminist background, a feminist background which is very, very skeptical, if you look at it closely, of the idea of femininity, right? Of this idea that because there's so much of this legacy of feminist critique which points out towards femininity as a

set of norms and relations which are imposed onto women in order to subordinate them.

So what does it then mean to

want to be feminine, want to not

be not just a woman, but also a femme? And those questions have been tremendously difficult to navigate on the grounds of the intersection between transness and feminism. And they have all often been elaborated on in pretty apocalyptic terms. But also this is a ground where so much interesting thinking about what to

do with our desires, if our desires

do not seem to live up to

our political commitments happen. So, for example, works by Andrea Long, Church Shoe and her famous like demand that we must stop treating our desires as our. As our politics because. Because desires do not conform to politics.

Or in a more, I think, subtle,

nuanced way, Gabriel K's work on gender as a mode of exploitation, where she, like try, where she argues that the problem is not that we have particle desires, but rather a their situation within a specific mode, specific circle. And what we do with them, do what we do with them next.

And for me, all those considerations seem

also very, very relevant to talk about

BDSM and talk about bdsm, which often felt to me ended up coming down

to one of two extreme positions, right? So we either follow the radical feminist critique to it to a hilt. And we end up with basically, if you spank your girlfriend in bedroom, you are basically no better than the Nazis, than the Nazis shooting people in the streets. And I wish I was exaggerating, but this is the sort of stuff that's been written about sadomasochism in the late 70s, early 80s.

And then on the other hand, you have the other extreme, which is like, okay, what we.

Our sexual practices are private matter, and goddamn, nobody has any right to talk, criticize, or approach them as anything other than our private matter.

And both of those answers are obviously unsatisfying and insufficient and fundamentally unresponsive, fundamentally

failing to respond to the richness of the experience and the complexity of the experience.

So that was the. Basically the problem. And my response to the problem, or the attempt to navigate it was again, not try to discern the question of

what is the political status bdsm, but

rather to ask how practitioners approach it.

[Commercial Announcer]

Right.

[Jay Spielka]

How do they approach the question of

what their political status of their practices is?

And what I found out is that most often they practice a form of disidentification, that they very carefully set boundaries between what they allowed themselves to. What they allowed themselves to perceive as political in their sexual practices and what

was supposed to be just a hobby, just a kink.

And of course, those boundaries were also contingent, were also constantly shifting. So the final chapter was, in the end, an attempt to just navigate with.

That is, practitioners or people who deal

with it specifically by refusing to deal with it. And what happens with this refusal?

What are. What are the consequences of using to. Because once again, you cannot really leave your social circumstances. You cannot bore the trade out of the society to a party town and return. There's always. There's the. There's always leakage to once again, bring back to the point about bedrooms.

So, yes.

So this is what this project ended up being about. This project being about ways of navigating questions of what BDSM is and isn't and the politics of BDSM not as the directly or even objective for means of navigating our own political attachments vis a vision, the desires that we have. Desires end.

[Atali Ayisraeli Neva]

Thank you for that. I think it's a really good summary of the intervention you're proposing in your book. And I think a lot of people from different avenues and interests can take a lot from your work. Unfortunately, we have come to the end of our time. But before we conclude, I'm going to ask you the traditional question of the New Books Network, which is, what are you working on these days working on

[Jay Spielka]

a research project on BDSM and trans femininity that is Historical material, cultural representation or author representations in degree of auto theory.

And the project is an extension basically

of the question I posed moments ago, right what we do with desires that we find problematic or which that we find politically difficult to process, to neither redeem them nor condemn them gives us and this project will be coming out as a book that I'm currently writing for Bloomsbury. Hopefully it will be coming out next year, although God alone knows how long writing will take. Although I'm under contract so there are certain applications here obviously is research currently.

And other than that I increasingly doing

this terrible thing of abandoning qualitative research for more literary literary interests. And so I'm increasingly working with contemporary English language trans feminine literature.

[Atali Ayisraeli Neva]

Well, we're not judgy here. At least not at least I am not. So yeah, that that sounds actually fascinating both of these, you know, directions and I can't to can can't wait to read your next book. And on that note, Jay, thank you so much for taking the time to be here and discuss your book. And I'm going to say the title again so people can know BDSM Practices in Contemporary Poland. Barbed Wire Floggings, Rope Orgasms, and the Problem with Desire. I really, really enjoy that conversation, truly. And I'm sure the listeners will enjoy as well. Thank you very much.

[Jay Spielka]

Thank you so much for having me. Really.

I so glad that this is reaching out to people.

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