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Article published In:
Language/Sexuality/Affect
Edited by William L. Leap
[Journal of Language and Sexuality 7:1] 2018
► pp. 30–54

Toward an affective phenomenology of discourse

BDSM and the Fifty Shades phenomenon

| Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

The Fifty Shades trilogy is often associated with BDSM, yet practitioners of BDSM typically disavow the trilogy. Previous research highlights how mechanics of BDSM such as agency and consent are misrepresented in the trilogy; this study highlights differences in affect. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among BDSM practitioners in Berlin, Germany, this paper considers reception beyond reading as evidence of BDSM’s affective phenomenology. The paper combines an Ortner-inspired “cultural ethnography through discourse” with close reading: it compares discourse and affect observed in the field with that in the novels, and suggests that the portrayal of BDSM in the novels and portrayals of the novels as representations of BDSM misinterpret the affective phenomenology of BDSM. Through attention to language, this study shows how affect and situated discourse become mutually constitutive in shaping the legibility of phenomenological experience, suggesting that playful reterritorializations of semiotic forms can counter mimetic perpetuations of symbolic violence.

Keywords: affect, BDSM, Berlin, discourse, Fifty Shades of Grey , mimesis, phenomenology, semiotics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction: BDSM, mimesis, and the problem of legibility
  • 2.Ethnography: Discourse and affect in the scene
  • 3.Close reading: Discourse and affect in the novels
  • 4.Conclusion: The language of play, affective phenomenology and BDSM
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 22 February 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jls.17008.mar
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