Over the last half century, the privatized nuclear family gave way to a dense web of differentiated social, sexual, and habitational norms (Bernstein 2001; Giddens 1992; Klinenberg 2012; Swidler 1980). As the individual was freed from some the social and sexual constraints of family life, an increasing number of specialized erotic subcultures emerged, organized around specific social (and since the Covid-19 crisis, telepresent) spaces of interaction (Green 2008b, Borsa et al. 2023; Orne 2017). These “specialized erotic domains” (Green 2008b) function in two distinct ways: they provide what Tewksbury (2008) called “erotic oases,” sites that cater to some delineated segment of bodies and desires, providing spaces for social and sexual learning. They also signal an increasingly commodified relation to sexual lifestyle choices, where individuals negotiate their way into communities through the acquisition of ever more technical sexual skill sets (Weiss 2011).

New sociosexual worlds consolidate specific sets of erotic frames, learned interactional norms, modes of dress or self-presentation, and even spatial configurations. These “shared definitions of the situation” are often unspoken (Humphreys 1970) and must be learned by newcomers (Orne 2017), who stumble through experiences of social transgression along the way. Beyond structuring interactional norms, new sexual subjects quickly learn that “sexual fields” are erotic marketplaces that run on economies of racial, gender, and material difference (Green 2008b; Orne 2017). As individuals grasp their relative positions in “hierarchies of desirability” (Green 2008b), they learn to consciously manipulate the outward performance of their identities (Hoang 2015; Jones 2020). The bodily techniques that define social position (Bourdieu 2000; Mauss 1935), and the skill sets inherent to a field require material, temporal, and social investments in sexual learning. This new knowledge creates conditions in which erotic desires emerge, desires that are inextricable from social location (Hennen 2008; Weiss 2011). Erotic desires emerge as part of an individual’s subjective self-understanding; they also position the individual within surrounding racial, gendered, and sexual hierarchies (Hoang 2015; Ward 2010).

But how do we develop our erotic self-concepts, and how do those self-constructions merge affective, bodily, and interpersonal experience? If we accept sexual field theory whole cloth, the answer would look something like: we internalize and then reproduce stratified forms of desire, often based on race, class, or gender (Green 2014). Putting aside the limitations of defining “the sexual” as a field (see Wacquant and Akçaoğlu 2017 for a dose of skepticism on that construct of sexual fields), sexual field theory presumes, as does much social theory, an individual habitus that is at best resistant and at worst impervious to continued and consequential revision. But there is room for a more “penetrating” analysis of the “structural antecedents of sexual ideation” (Green 2008a, 597).

Often considered the signal approach to the sociological study of sexuality because of its generalizability across subcultural spaces (Green 2014; Stambolis 2012; Taylor 2014; Wade 2022), the sexual fields approach draws on the work of Pierre Bourdieu, and contributes an interactionist, psychoanalytically informed explanation of “the differential valuation of potential sexual partners” (Martin and George 2006, 108). First conceptualized by George (1996), but most often associated with Adam Isaiah Green (2014), sexual fields are terrains of interaction in which individuals struggle over contested erotic goods (Wade 2022). Each sexual field operates according to a stratified “structure of desire,” (Martin and George 2006) in which individuals accrue different amounts of “erotic capital,” the relational and bodily resources valued within that particular milieu (Green 2014). The mechanism underwriting the structure of a given field is the habitus, “a system of lasting and transposable dispositions which, integrating past experiences, functions at every moment as a matrix of perceptions, appreciations and actions” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 19). Individuals obtain a primary habitus from their family of origin, and later in life, a secondary habitus, which forms in interaction with social institutions. Habitus is the internalization of the structure of a field and the driving force of what Bourdieu called illusio, the specific libido inherent to that field (Bourdieu 1992). Our socialization, encoded through somatic experience, structures not merely what we want, but the very ways we want.

Sociologists have used this model to fruitfully explore erotic spaces like gay “bear” subcultures (Hennen 2014; Tan 2019), nightclubs (Orne 2017), BDSM clubs (Weinberg 2016), dating apps (Regan 2023), college hookup culture (Wade 2021), and more, often focusing on the racialized nature of the marketplace for partners (e.g., Brooks 2010; Evans 2015). Whiteness is prized across myriad domains, both domestic and international (Carillo 2018; Green 2008a, 2011; Manalansan 2003), but capital can also accrue to individuals who fit highly racialized erotic ideals (Green 2008b; Han 2021; Jones 2020). In this stratified system, people of color, women, older people, people with disabilities, and those who don’t fit hegemonic gender ideals engage in some erotic negotiations from a disempowered position, leading some to agree to disadvantageous or dangerous erotic acts and relationship structures (Brickell 2009).

This economic model of erotic exchange, while claiming not to focus on sex, per se, or even long-term relationships (Martin and George 2006) nonetheless treats erotic life as goal-oriented and, to some extent, transactional. It also treats habitus as something one “has,” in the sense that it is based on durable categories like race and structured by one’s surroundings. This explains the if of sex: Will person A be able to attract partner B in a particular erotic milieu, given one’s accumulated erotic capital? However, the potential of sexual field theory as a mechanistic explanation extends beyond partner choice into the very content of erotic exchange itself. Bourdieu’s illusio is a useful heuristic for exploring the ways the forces of attraction and repulsion that operate within given fields don’t merely determine which individuals are valuable; they determine which social scripts become erotically electrified, and which forms of relational exchange individuals create. If we take Bourdieu’s theory on its face, the sexual is completely interwoven and interpenetrated with a search for recognition, which for Bourdieu is at the source of all forms of libidinal investment. This is recognition in a Meadian sense (Mead [1934] 1967), a processual conversion of interior experience into a self-concept that can be reflected back to oneself by significant others. Entering a field involves coming to recognize certain significant others as the only ones able to provide one with the recognition one seeks, and acquiring the tastes and desires for the very things that person possesses or represents. This is the how and the why of sex. Sexual actors think, not merely about who they want, but about who they are; as such, desire is not merely the desire for a particular sexual object, it is also a desire to be a particular sexual object in relation to another (Whittier and Melendez 2004) and to the larger social milieu (Hoang 2015).4

Bourdieu’s formulation of habitus has come under scrutiny in recent years for being “overly stable” or deterministic (King 2000). Habitus as a “durably installed generative principle of regulated improvisations,” yields “practices that reproduce the regularities imminent to the objective conditions of [their] reproduction” (Bourdieu 1990, 78). In other words, we are “fish swimming in water,” unable to identify the “symbolic violence” conditioning our responses and the responses of others to us; the water, like air, both outside and inside of us (Burawoy 2019, 23). The surrounding cultural schemata that are constitutive of an individual’s habitus are inculcated without our awareness; those of us in subordinated positions, (women, for example), engage in gendered relations that are at once “spontaneous and extorted” (Bourdieu 2000).

A range of scholars critique this position as myopic, overly pessimistic, and dumb to the experiences of minoritized groups, many who are well aware, not merely of the violent nature of social norms and social classifications, but also of the ways they can manipulate those norms to their own advantage (Burawoy, 2019). While some self-proclaimed Bourdieu originalists insist that dislodging our symbolic universe is nearly impossible, Bourdieu himself indicates such transformations might happen through a “thoroughgoing countertraining, involving repeated exercises” (Bourdieu 2000, 172).

Bourdieu’s closest student and collaborator, Loïc Wacquant demonstrates precisely this sort of bodily self-fashioning in his ethnography Body and Soul: Notes of an Apprentice Boxer (2006). Wacquant depicts a multitude of tiny interactional moments, in which he himself comes to internalize the bodily comportments, perceptions and inclinations of the boxer through repeated “fish out of water” experiences (Reay 2004) that stretch, destabilize, and ultimately transform his disposition. These experiences prompt internal reflection and deliberation (Archer 2007) and in Wacquant’s case, an intensely reflexive project of self-transformation (Crossly 2013). Indeed, Wacquant himself expresses frustration with this formulation, insisting that habitus is a “multiscalar and multilayered set of schemata subject to ‘permanent revision’ in practice” (2016, 64). It can be incoherent and particularized, duplicative of or incongruent to the cosmos in which it develops, and well-suited to explaining not merely stagnation, but social crisis and change.

If participation in a sexual field can transform individuals’ desires (Hammers 2008), sociologists should be able to trace the process through which that individual converts bodily and affective experience into desire, and desire into a durable self-identity. Becker’s explanation of how people “become” marijuana users gets us part of the way there: in a bid to supplant extant “predispositional theories” of deviant behavior, he traced a tripartite process in which individuals (1) learned to use marijuana in a way that produced a bodily effect; (2) learned to recognize that effect and connect it with smoking, “learning, in other words, to get high” (Becker 1953, 242); and (3) learned to enjoy the sensation of getting high, a set of sensations one might just as easily interpret as unpleasant. This is the sole way one can develop “a disposition or motivation to use marijuana, which was not and could not have been present when he began use, for it develops and depends on conceptions of the drug, which could only grow out of actual experience.” This is, I would argue, the point of genesis of a new desire.

The ritualized interactions BDSM practitioners construct incorporate the intersectional social positions of the practitioners, sometimes fairly blandly, and sometimes in ways that explicitly mobilize highly gendered or racialized dynamics of domination and submission (Cruz 2015, 2016). Some contemporary Black feminist theory excavates the ways in which pleasure and pain are not dichotomous and opposing experiences but instead underscore the very dynamics that are inescapable in erotic exchange (Musser 2014). While the explicit manipulation of such dynamics is a form of “illicit eroticism” (Nash 2014), such versions of erotic play can be vehicles for self-knowledge or even self-transformation (Cascalheira et al. 2021; Thomas 2019). And yet, some caution against losing the racialized subject “in the play of desire, flesh, consciousness, and transformation” (Holland 2012, 51).

Becker’s formulation better captures the adoption of BDSM sexual practices as a form of what Newmahr (2010) and Weiss (2011) called “serious leisure,” a recreational preoccupation with a set of activities, a cultural fluency with the meanings of language, actions, or totemic objects; a consumerist investment in acquiring the technologies that optimize performance; and a relational landscape in which one engages in elations of play and experimentation with intent and precision. But—and this is a place Becker never went—it also provides an aperture for viewing how and why Tru would translate desires that could easily be kept in the domain of interpersonal experience into a durable conception of herself as “a submissive” or why she might construct a “Daddy/boy” dynamic, indexing both gender and power in her relationship with Johnnie. The parallel literature on “role exit” (Ebaugh 1988; see also Vaughn 1986) traces the processes of disillusionment that lead individual or dyads to leave particular identity categories or social roles (“nun” for example, or “married”). Some also describe the consolidation of “new selves;” they focus on the parts of identity (“hangover identity”) that consolidate one’s separateness from a past self (Ebaugh 1988). But submissives weren’t abandoning an old identity, they were undergoing a re-constitution of something that they experienced as always-already-there, as stable or true. Sexuality as a form of sociality is ripe for self-translation. As one acquires and revises a sexual habitus, one is not merely absorbing broader cultural tastes, one is at the same time acquiring a sense of subjective position in one’s erotic milieu and in the larger social order. The result is not merely erotic identity, but the reflexive nature of the desiring subject who both wants a particular something and wants to be wanted as a particular something.

As sexual worlds become ever more specialized (Green 2008b), so too do erotic self-concepts, affective and bodily practices, and intersubjective relational scripts. They gather themselves into the meta-narratives of their practitioners, incorporate explicit consent practices, and intently engage, rather than elide or erase complex forms of inequality. While one might imagine such a process-based model of sexual play to erode erotic energy, in BDSM communities, the energy is heightened by the specificity. Erotic contexts always mobilize an individual’s social position, their gendered, racialized, and even cultural position. The techniques BDSM practitioners learn make possible iterative experiences that consciously draw on those formulations, allowing for the transformation of assigned categories into actively negotiated site of engagement.

Some BDSM practitioners intentionally use play to refashion their embodied experiences of self, often with the aim of clarifying and distilling their relationships to intimate others. These reflexive, narrativized, intentional, and structured relationships are “articulate intimacies.” They are the product of a novel process whereby the nature of subjectivity moves from “spontaneous and extorted” to intentionally crafted and voluntarily given. Submissives are a rich, single case analysis of self and self/other articulations—linguistic, behavioral, and interactional constructions aimed at conveying meaning and providing stable structural and symbolic pathways for negotiating relationships and holding oneself and others accountable.

Perhaps most significantly, as individuals come to more precisely articulate their identities, they become more aware of social dynamics (patriarchy, heteronormativity, racialization, ideas of the normal) previously invisible to them. They create historically novel forms of relationship, recruiting some of that social material into the erotic, while also rewriting those scripts and sometimes inverting assumed social hierarchies. Some of those modes of relation may unsettle outsiders, to whom they appear rearguard or self-effacing. Female submission and racialized play often challenge our most basic ideas of agency. Yet, BDSM offers practitioners a playground on which to try out versions of normativity and non-normativity, power and powerlessness, control and surrender. As they come to understand what they like, or what they dislike but appreciate, players craft ever more particularistic ideas of who and what they are, who and what they like, and who and what they wish to be.

Rachel, a thirty-two-year-old white, queer woman, said she was “a very kinky child.” Though she grew up in a large Orthodox Jewish community in the Northeast, she told me she sought out queer people by the time she was in high school, joining a drag troupe and performing with a group of young, gay men. It was there that she received her first lessons in leather subculture. “I’ve always had the same kinds of fantasies, I think. I mean, they’ve developed in … to adulthood, and especially when they became realities. But I think my brain’s always done about the same things.” The drag performances Rachel did with her troupe often had sexual themes. As she spent more time with the group. Some of the boys sensed her interest in leather and began introducing her to imagery and ideas. “It was pretty obvious from the way I was interacting with just about everyone [that I] was submissive.” They began having Rachel play the “leatherboy” in performances, a common trope in BDSM culture, a submissive position for a young person with a masculine aesthetic.

Soon after, a peer in the troupe gave Rachel her first set of “leathers,” a term used in older iterations of BDSM communities for particular “totemic” (Durkheim [1912] 2008) articles of clothing, always made out of leather, that are either purchased, earned by, or gifted to a novice member of a community by a more established member. Leathers can come with varied sets of rules, depending on the context. Rachel said,

Wearing the leathers produced for Rachel an embodied experience of submission. People around her reacted to her differently. She desired and more deliberately sought instruction from others on modes of behavior and interaction. She described the scene as “sexy and exciting and fun.” Someone eventually explained to Rachel the protocol for removal of the leathers; that person, over time, became her first “owner,” a significant relationship that brought her more fully into the world of BDSM. It was during that relationship that Rachel developed a leather identity. She moved from the world of drag, which felt like performance, into her daily life, where she identified herself as a “girl,” a feminine person in service to a Dominant (typically masculine) partner. She described a process of integrating her desires for kinky practices with her sense of herself as a feminine person, finding the identity space that absorbed both.

slave lizzie,6 a forty-eight-year-old heterosexual Black woman understood from her vanilla sexual experiences with men that she enjoyed painful stimuli. She reported that friends were surprised to hear that she genuinely enjoyed plucking her eyebrows, waxing, getting tattoos, things other people might find unpleasant. Recognizing that her enjoyment of and even desire for pain were atypical, she turned to the internet. She typed “I like pain” into Google and came across the acronym BDSM, opening up a world of information to her on sexual practices and concepts. She joined a dating service and found her first Dominant partner. Sensing her lack of expertise, he instructed her to join various Facebook groups. He told her, “You’re going to learn a lot, you know. You’re going to find out a lot about yourself.”

Though that first relationship lasted only a short time, slave lizzie credits that partner with her basic education in BDSM practices and protocols, and with helping her articulate a sense of herself as a submissive. When we met, slave lizzie had been in a Master/slave relationship with a different Dominant for nearly ten years. She told me she identified as a “slave,” adding, “which … I’m going to be honest with you … which didn’t sit too well with me in the beginning.” She described thinking about her ancestors, “you know … shakled in the bottom of the boat, and stuff like that, being whipped, and uh, bloodied, and I don’t know, just being treated badly.” She described trying different words for the experience she sought, one in which “I belong to somebody.” She reported that nothing else fully conveyed the totalistic arrangement she sought. “And,” she was quick to note, “it’s a totally different meaning of slave in this lifestyle in BDSM … slaves are loved. They’re cherished, yeah.” slave lizzie told me that she’s “never not a Black slave.” She said, “I feel both the word and the history of the word.” But she was quick to qualify the identification, explaining that the security she felt with her current Master allowed her to use the term in a way that both connected her to the very real past while standing in important contrast to it.

Mama Vi said she knew she wished to submit to Master Jill long before they had words for what they were doing or a community of practice with which to identify. Mama Vi and Jill, both sixty-seven-year-old Black women, found their initial inspiration for their forty-year Master/slave relationship in the Blaxploitation films of the early ’70s, films like Shaft, The Mack, and Sweet Sweet Bad. Both heterosexually identified in their early twenties, Mama Vi and Jill became (initially nonsexual) friends and began playing out elaborate Pimp/ho fantasies, in which Jill controlled Mama Vi, garnered her earnings (monetary gifts from the man she was then dating), and began to mete out physical discipline in scenes that became progressively intense over time. In one scene, Jill beat Mama Vi with a “pimp stick,” which she traced to the film The Mack, describing it as a wire coat hanger with tape around the edge. Jill said the tape prevented the stick from leaving marks. “Cause you don’t want to damage the property.” Mama Vi added, gesturing toward herself. She continued, “At that point all of this was still trying to figure it out whatever ‘it’ was. There was still a disconnect up in here.” Mama Vi pointed to her head. “It made no sense to me. Sure, these are interesting sensations, it’s an interesting concept. I think, I can’t remember honestly if I actually went and saw the damn movie to try and figure any of it out.”

Their mutual interest in playing out these erotic fantasies evolved into a love relationship, and a decades-long partnership organized around a Master/slave dynamic. In their early years together, they ran a small “fantasy” business, offering sexual services to men. It was through the business that they met a client who was a member of an exclusive private BDSM club for (mostly heterosexual) men in New York City. Meeting him and learning that there were others who shared their proclivities led them to venture from suburban New Jersey into New York City. They went to a sex shop and browsed magazines until they found a tiny ad for a meeting for people with masochistic interests. When they arrived at the location, Mama Vi was wearing a collar, attached to Jill’s hand by a long chain leash. They “stood in the doorway, shaking like leaves.” It was maybe the third year of The Eulenspiegel Society, the oldest BDSM organization in the United States. They were the only women in the space, and there were few other people of color. Mama Vi recounted that a man looked over at them, a man who appeared to be “about, what? 8’4” tall? At least he was to me.” He was in all black leathers, an imposing figure. He said, “Come in little sisters, you’re home.”

Not everyone learned the cultural norms through direct mentorship; some used a combination of various media and experimentation with lovers to get the basics down, seeking the public BDSM world only once they had a sense of their place within it. Submissive respondents and kink practitioners alike reported three basic pathways to entry into BDSM subculture: internet information sources like message boards or dating sites, local BDSM community events and workshops, and personal connections to active practitioners. All submissive participants described the integration of some extra-erotic feature of their social position—most commonly gender and/or race—into their leather self-understanding. White participants were more likely to focus on gender, whereas participants of color, particularly those in ongoing power dynamics, often understood their practices through the racial dynamics in their relationships.

Both kink-inclined subjects who enjoyed receiving painful stimuli (“bottoms”) and submissive-identified subjects reported erotic experiences in which they, like Tru, encountered painful stimuli they would have rejected in nonsexual contexts, recoding it as pleasurable. Some even learned to attribute value to experiences they distinctly did not enjoy. These erotic practices were sometimes corporeal, sometimes psychological, often both; some also included the articulation of complex scenarios in which individuals’ social positions in the racial, gender, or national order were used as erotic material (what some practitioners call “role play” or “race play.”) In both cases, the acquisition of a framework for receiving pain or difficult emotion translated assault into play, resistance into flirtation, violence into eroticism.

beau, a fifty-six year-old, newly out, white, divorced gay man, met his Dominant Jax through work some years before the two began dating. Jax had extensive prior experience with BDSM; beau had recently ended a “vanilla” marriage. beau admitted that he struggled with receiving pain during their early sexual play.

When I asked beau to explain what he meant by “down-down,” he said, “All of a sudden, all I am is skin, the burning sensation where he slapped me, a body hurtling in space. I’m just … his … It’s like sex, but it’s also like being a more … a brighter version of myself.” beau understood his experience of submitting to painful erotic play as refractive of a moment in his life where he was submitting more generally to experience, letting go of a heterosexual marriage and family life, coming out as gay and submissive, falling in love. As his “life fell apart and got reorganized,” he found himself seeking novel experience, most particularly in his relationship to Jax.

Respondents with bottom and submissive preferences used a variety of descriptive metaphors to articulate what they call “bottom space,” a “role-specific altered consciousness” associated with positive affect and sexual arousal (Ambler et al. 2017, 75). MissLyn’sBoy, a fifty-four year-old, white male described it like this:

Others used metaphors like “flying,” floating through space,” “stripping down to my skin,” “being hyper-alive.” One respondent described it as “like floating on top of water. If you could—if you could jump off this balcony and just float and not fall.” Most tied the experiences to a relation to the top or Dominant, the person exacting the pain, and to the specific experience of losing control of what was about to happen, of not quite knowing what would or could happen. It was an experience of the body in relation, in a context in which pain or fear or discomfort might be rearticulated as pleasure. These were forms of “consensual violence” (Weinberg 2016) through which participants reformulated the meanings of various sensations. It was not enough to merely experience the sensations, however; the subject must “be able to point them out to himself and consciously connect them” to the actions (Becker 1953, 238). Respondents attained bottom space only from “play” with Dominants they recognized as both skilled and authoritative. No respondents reported enjoying such activities absent that context.

Some respondents also reported engaging willingly in somatic experiences they distinctly did not enjoy. Rachel, for example, thought that chronic orthopedic issues left her with an unnaturally high tolerance for pain, which she translated into masochism. She reported enjoying impact with any number of different implements, so much so that she imagined it was something of a chore for her Dominant to exhaust her. The one exception to this general rule was any sort of play involving the breaking of skin, particularly needles. When describing her relationship with her current Dominant, however, she broke into a huge grin and said, “Um, she really likes needles. I really hate needles. She is absolutely allowed to put needles into me. Thank you for putting needles … I hate it but thank you. That’s all good.” I asked Rachel to explain to me why she allowed her Dominant to pierce her, why she was smiling at me as she recounted hating it, “Because I am so opposed to it.” When I push her for further explanation, Rachel explains that it’s uncommon for a Dominant to get a strong physical reaction from her. She described herself as stoic. “It takes a long time for me to feel things.” Needles produced an immediate response,

Rachel described appreciating being pushed into fear, enjoying the pleasure that brought her Dominant partner, actively desiring to engage that negative affect in an escalating way, to “see how much she could take,” how much delight she could bring to her partner by “taking it.” She wanted to be a “good girl,” and in her formulation, being a good girl meant welcoming an unpleasant physical experience. Several other respondents echoed this desire to push their boundaries, to receive increasing amounts of painful stimuli in a playful attempt to “see how far they could go.” They expressed pleasure in the accomplishment of forbearance. And it was not generally simply desired by their partners; it was an experience they distinctly sought, that the very process of withstanding pain transformed it into an experience of value and thus, of pleasure.

Participants of color, particularly Black participants, described the complex ways their racial identities functioned in BDSM spaces. All described forms of “erotic racism,” a toxic blend of exclusion and fetishization that circumscribed the kinds of relationships they formed with white peers. And yet, some portion of the play experiences reported by participants also drew, sometimes tacitly but often deliberately and thoughtfully, on racialized power imbalances, patriarchal gender dynamics, or even religious or nationalist fantasies.

Sir Isis, a thirty-four-year-old, Black trans man, played primarily as a top, and talked at some length about the difficulties of being one of the few people of color in his small BDSM social network. He said, “When you walk into a BDSM event and you’re one of the only people of color, it can go one of two ways. It can go all eyes on you. Everyone’s watching your every single move … or it can go, now you’re the token Black person, ’cause you’re like fetishized. You’ve got a Black person.” Cobra, a Black Dominant man in his forties elaborated, “There are the certain roles that … they want you to play. You should be the buck that’s owning their wife, which is … a power position but not really. You still not calling the shots. It’s still just a picture of what you are.” Sir Isis and Cobra both described ping-ponging between experiences of fetishization, scrutiny, and exclusion in BDSM social spaces and heightened expectations, mostly but not exclusively from white partners that they fit highly racialized sexual ideals. None of these frameworks accounted for them as individuals with complex psychologies or sets of desires.

Sir Isis tried describing these observations to Jake, his white husband, but said he lacked a language through which to communicate what it felt like in his body. He felt his husband struggled to mentalize the experience of being at once uniquely visible and constrained by a set of stereotypes outside of his control. He reported, “those conversations were like him not being able to connect to where I was coming from as a person of color.” Around that same time, Sir Isis began experimenting with racialized play. He played first as a top with people of color who desired to enact slave scenarios, “who want to do those scenarios without feeling like they’re actually being oppressed.” Asked to elaborate, he said,

These experiences gave Sir Isis a vehicle for feeling his way through the legacies of racism. They helped him to reflect more deeply on the ways racial difference structured his marriage. He suggested that he and Jake experiment with some of the same themes.

At this point in our conversation, Sir Isis leaned in, assumed a conspiratorial tone, and said softly, “Nobody knows about it. Um, I don’t tell anybody about it ’cause it’s still, you know, it’s kind of embarrassing.” When I asked why, he replied, “Because there’s this thing around it where it’s, like, dude, your ancestors went through this shit, and they … you’re not supposed to like it.” Though he rarely bottomed, Sir Isis felt a novel ability to move into a submissive space in the context of slave play, that in enacting a scenario so deeply encoded into his experience of the world as a Black person, he is able to move out of a space of dailiness to “let go of everything [he thinks he] should be doing, to just let go and submit to something.” He explained,

Sir Isis felt that Jake was able to understand something through the medium of play that is embedded within his own experience of whiteness, which is inaccessible through conversation. “It’s a way to revisit or stay with something … that is difficult. To figure it out, and to find ways to associate a positive feeling to it, a closeness or understanding.”

Erotic fantasy trades not merely in desire for particular other bodies or other objects, but in fantasies of the self in relation to others. Sir Isis was one of several respondents of varying racial and ethnic identities who described engaging in scenes organized around hyper-racialized interactions. Some others engaged rigid gender scripts. Two respondents with Jewish partners reported engaging in Nazi play; one respondent even described an INS interrogation scene with an immigrant partner. Scenes that would be emotionally terrifying in the social world were recast as building blocks for intimacy in intricate somatic and psychological play, sometimes shrouded in secrecy, sometimes in public. Some queer respondents reported enjoying “normcore” play, elaborate reproductions of patriarchal heterosexual domestic or erotic scenarios that allowed them to embody the very normative positions they rejected in daily life.

BDSM is, as Ariane Cruz writes, an aperture through which to view some of the architecture of the sexual order more generally. In my interviews, women and people of color had extremely articulate relationships to their manipulation of racialized and gendered subordination. Men mostly defended against the conflation of submission with femininity. Dominant men and white people of all genders struggled more with articulating their investments in domination. I found myself counting and documenting pauses, silences and elisions in my interviews on these topics, thinking of them as a particular kind of white inarticulacy. There appear to be few linguistic conventions for people to draw on for formulating racialized desires outside of tropes of colorblindness, objectification or exclusion. Respondents of color and women in subordinate positions to male partners understood their “difference play” as either reformatting objectification into recognition, reversing the terms of subjectification by either consenting to it (thus not fully being a subject of it), repeating it to gain mastery, or spinning the iconography to subjectivize whiteness or maleness. They tied it to emotional states like fear, aggression, grief, shame, humiliation, but always in contact with the specificity of their identities.

White subjects, on the other hand, often understood or offloaded their racialized investments onto their partners. Jonas, a white man whose submissive partner was Black, said, “I am here to help her in her process of reckoning with what was done by my forefathers.” Joe explained that he had trouble finding words for why he enjoyed the race play scenes he did with his East Asian girlfriend, “It’s like … she is into being seen in this stereotypical way, and … I’m … what … I’m being this gross, like … overbearing guy who is perving on her … and disrespecting her … which … I mean … obviously it’s like not who I am in the rest of my life. I don’t know how to describe it … [long pause] … We both feel things that would be awful in any other context.”

BDSM play, like play in any context, involves improvisation within a scene of constraint (Mead [1934] 1967). Rachel, beau, Mama Vi, Sir Isis, and Cobra all absorbed the basic conventions and techniques of BDSM play, including the particularities of the roles they might assume and the specific others with whom they might interact. Though this mirrors many forms of childhood play, this play is profoundly adult; it incorporates social structures and hierarchies, including BDSM’s position in culture as an exceptional form of social interaction.

The third and final step in the process of becoming a submissive is to translate these kinds of bodily and psychic experiences into a durable self-concept. Practitioners who achieved this step became submissives, they imported their desires for particular structural locations in their erotic lives into a articulate identity. This required them to conceptualize service or submission as an innate need or desire, constitutive of their self. This need might not be something they experienced outside of an erotic or intimate context; indeed, many submissives were quite authoritative in their professional lives. Submissive subjects described a kind of stripped-down experience of daily life; freed from the need to make mundane decisions. Some reported feeling more alive, more present to individual experience, and more tuned in to gratitude for what they received from the people to whom they entrusted their authority; others found service and adherence to rules difficult. But everyone felt that submission was an expression of core identity with inherent value. Nearly all of them said, at one point or another, either “This is who I am,” or “This is what I am.”

slave charles, a sixty-two-year-old white, straight man imagined that most people believe that only sissies are slaves, a fact he thought bothered “a lot of other submissive men.” He was careful to distinguish himself, saying,

slave charles held positions of authority in his professional life, and owned several homes. He raised two successful children with his ex-wife, before meeting and partnering with Lady O, his Master of nine years. He said he considered himself submissive, because he found joy in giving up his “self-proclaimed ideas.” He described finding “truth, beauty, and goodness” in his submission, a clearer or simpler experience of his core self, a peace he had never known in other relationship configurations. When I asked him to explain what he meant by peace, he replied,

The word “presence” came up frequently for slave charles. It appeared to index moments in his life where he felt he was acting authentically, rather than being responsive to a set of socially imposed expectations. He said he was only able to understand the difference when he adopted a submissive identity five decades into his life, that it took time and experience to find a way to merge his desire to be seen as masculine with his desire to submit to the authority of a female partner.

paul, a forty-three-year-old, white, gay man identified as a slave and had been in a nonsexual relationship with his Master for nearly nine years when we met. Together they ran an academy that held workshops for people wanting to learn about being Masters or slaves, one of several such programs that exists in the United States. They also ran the largest annual Master/slave conference in the United States, which catered to a mostly heterosexual, but somewhat mixed, crowd of relationship practitioners that had grown over the years to include thousands.

During my conversation with paul, there were moments he chafed at some of the rules imposed by his Master. He admitted to breaking them, pushing limits, and testing boundaries. He told me about another relationship he had with a man he called his Daddy. It was also not explicitly sexual, though they engaged in a form of body-centric Daddy/baby play in which paul was diapered and fed and held and cuddled. It seemed that many of his basic needs for touch and affection were satisfied by this other man, and I asked him why he stayed with his Master. He replied,

For paul, not liking some of the rules and restrictions was part of the experience he sought, part of what he understood himself to need. He opined that for submissives in general, the key to self-acceptance was to understand and embrace “the thing I am.” Paul understood himself to need a life anchored in submission, even when he didn’t enjoy it, and even if it didn’t come with the kind and quality of physical touch he craved. His need for physical touch and for a life anchored in an uneven distribution of power reflected an innate submissive tendency, and whether he was engaging in the age-graded play he enjoyed, or following instructions he didn’t, constituted the alignment of his life with his identity as a submissive.

While there were no pure “negative cases” (Emigh 1997; Lincoln and Guba 1985), in the sense that nobody I interviewed acquired a submissive identity without some knowledge of BDSM subcultures and direct interpersonal experience, not everyone who tried BDSM from a receptive position determined they were submissive. Individuals could turn away from the process at any time. Some people never try kinky sex at all.7 Some do it sparingly with select partners, but never give it much thought. Of those who learn enough about the BDSM subculture to attract a partner with whom to experiment (step one), some portion will not recode the painful stimuli associated with BDSM sexuality into a pleasurable psychological experience (step two). They will instead determine that they tried but didn’t like BDSM sexuality, and confine their future sexual behaviors to vanilla sex. (None of those people appear in this analysis.) Both switch/kinky and submissive-identified respondents completed those first two steps; they experimented in the scene and recoded body and emotional sensations they would experience as unpleasant or painful in other contexts into pleasurable erotic experience. Some stopped there, contenting themselves with occasional or even regular erotic experiences, but never underwent a shift in identity. Others reported changes in their identities over time, acquiring a submissive identity at one point, and then encountering a moment when new understandings, derived from experience within the BDSM world, made them reconsider and ultimately discard their submissive identity.

Neda recalled an initial confusion about the difference between bottoming and submission. In her early years in the BDSM community, she identified as “a submissive and a bottom.” She had a series of short-lived Dominant/submissive relationships, one with a man she called her “Sir.” Eventually, she met her current partner and moved into a vibrant, public play community. She described rich experiences bottoming for physical scenes that involved flogging and caning and psychological scenes involving emotional manipulation. She said,

Neda began attending workshops on flogging, believing that a greater understanding of the technical aspects of the practice would allow her to better communicate her desires to her Dominant partners. But she found she enjoyed acquiring skills and began topping other people, that it connected her to a capacity for sadism she didn’t know she possessed. She began thinking more about her relationship to the idea of submission, realizing that while she preferred to bottom sexually overall, she did not consider herself to have the main qualities she associated with submission. She said, “I’m not a masochist, in the sense that pain doesn’t turn me on. But pain causes like adrenaline and other things which, um, feel good and, um, can intensify other things [like sex] as well.”

When I asked her to explain the difference between being a bottom and being a submissive, she said,

Neda realized in her initial forays into kink that she was disinclined, generally, to give up control of anything outside the context of a very limited sexual or play scenario she herself circumscribes. She told me she didn’t want her partner to have authority, and that when she tried to submit, she found it impossible to execute the tasks she was assigned, that she was too “stubborn and defiant.” She determined she was inclined to be a receptive play partner, but that this was not the exclusive type of play she enjoyed, and she did not want to be dominated in other parts of her life. Thus, she concluded, she was not a submissive.

While the sexual fields framework sensitizes the social analyst to “the process whereby the biological libido is invested in, oriented toward, and brought into alignment with the universe of historically specific objects that constitute a social order” (Green 2008b, 598), our subconscious sexual desires and preferences emerge not merely from culture, but from our hierarchical position within culture. Green mobilizes Bourdieu’s (1990) concept of habitus, suggesting that social structures like racial and gender hierarchies are “‘deposited’ into our subconscious via ‘symbolic force,’ materializing in a set of embodied inclinations, dispositions, schemas of action and appreciations” (Green 2008b, 580). We “soak up our symbolic environments” in a pedagogical process that occurs beneath our notice. Through repetition of interaction rituals (Goffman [1967] 2017) and emotional experiences, we come to recognize the ways our bodies and the bodies of others carry the inscriptions of the social order (Mauss 1935; Douglas 1966). Social learning happens within the body, “in the ‘here’ of my body and the ‘now’ of my present” (Berger and Luckman, 1967, 22). Social actors focus on their immediate experience, and those experiences accrue, leading us to construct notions of our innate dispositions to the world and to other people.

Moving to the how question (How does sexual subjectivity happen?) rather than the if question (Will person A consent to sex with person B?) or even the why question (Why are some people submissives?)8 provides an opportunity to watch practical action in situ: the accumulation of cultural knowledge, engagement in physical and emotional experience, and the construction and naming of subjectivities and relations. Submissive subjects learn to answer “Yes” to the question “Is BDSM fun?” or maybe, more importantly, “Is BDSM meaningful?” While bodies are experienced intrapsychically, understandings of bodily experience are intersubjective. An encounter with BDSM play that includes battery, for instance, could be received in different ways. For a translation of physical violence or emotional subjection into value to occur, a subject must revise their understanding of the significance of that experience. Becker explains that “this happens in a series of communicative acts, in which others point out new aspects of his experience to him, present him with new interpretations of events, and help him achieve a new conceptual organization of his world” (1953, 242). BDSM play is a “conversation of gestures” (Mead [1934] 1967), one in which submissive subjects cultivate the beginnings of a self-concept in bodily interaction with a larger universe of social meaning.

In much the way a novice to pot smoking might encounter her first joint, Tru, Rachel, Sir Isis, and the others first “[arrived] at a willingness to try [BDSM], knowing that other people do and derive pleasure from it, [noting a] curiosity about the experience and a lack of knowledge of what it might be like, perhaps a fear that it may be ‘more than [they] bargained for’” (Becker 1953, 236). All participants engaged in the leather world from this position and learned the social norms sufficiently to attract complementary partners. Next, while novices might not enjoy their experiences initially, or even in an ongoing way, BDSM practitioners “acquired the necessary concepts with which to express the fact that [they were] experiencing new sensations […] to use [the practice] so as to produce effects, but also to learn to perceive those effects when they occur” (239). The taste for “bottom space” was a socially acquired one. Given that experiences of physical battery and emotional control would be easily rejected in other contexts, a BDSM novice would “not continue unless he learns to redefine these experiences as pleasurable” (240). For Tru and others, this happened through prior engagement with ideas of BDSM sexuality, through post hoc redefinition of the situation, or through conversation with more “veteran users,” who supplied new interpretations of experience. Rachel learned through play to master her experience of chronic pain, even finding a way to derive appreciation for being able to “take” pain she didn’t enjoy, even to “want” it. Sir Isis explored the complex emotional and physical terrain of chattel slavery through a series of scripted interactions with two different partners who occupied different racial positions. beau tied submissive play to a larger moment of surrender to great changes in his life, one which allowed him to experience even physical sensations differently than he had before. Each learned to reinterpret bodily experiences in a community of practice, while also informed by their individual stories and prior experiences with the sorts of social scenarios they elected to use in play.

The process of becoming a submissive involves not merely encounters with pleasure and pain for the sake of transient experience. Rather, those somatic experiences are themselves negotiations of social position, sometimes of gendered or racialized histories of subordination, and of what one’s unique social location means vis-à-vis a specific other. These strands, taken together, suggest that identity transformation is best understood as a multilayered process: anchored in embodied dispositions, shaped by cultural histories, and articulated through practices of intimate communication. Submissives engage in projects of self-articulation that both draw from and remake habitus, revealing the “inventive capacity of agents” (Wacquant 2016, 64) not only to live, but to reflexively rescript the meanings of their identities and relations to others. Their practices stand in stark opposition to theories of habitus that insist on its intransigence. While habitus exhibits some inertia, Wacquant describes it as “a mediating construct that helps us revoke the common-sense duality between the individual and the social by capturing ‘the internalization of externality and the externalization of internality,’ that is, the ways in which the sociosymbolic structures of society become deposited inside persons in the form of lasting dispositions, or trained capacities and patterned propensities to think, feel, and act in determinate ways.” (65)

BDSM spaces and activities also become, for some, a site where habitus is malleable. While there are unconscious processes at work in this retranslation of social experience into sexual action, the stories submissives tell of identity acquisition also trace a visible process of desires and dispositions developing in conscious relation to others. These desires are irreducible to the received categories they mobilize. The conscious cultivation of normative racial experience, for example, differs in important ways from the experience of passively being racialized.

These stories suggest that the dynamics of becoming within BDSM resonate with but in some ways differ from transformations across other domains of social life. Just as Ebaugh’s “exes,” Wacquant’s “pugilists,” or Becker’s “musicians” must learn new ways of being, submissives acquire skills, vocabularies, and orientations that reorganize their relationships. But whereas the exes, musicians, and pugilists of the sociological canon are abandoning or taking on new social roles, submissives are retranslating the very same social selves they already understood themselves to have, reconfiguring not who they are in culture and relationships, but how they are in culture and relationships. Identity, in this account, emerges less as a fixed position and more as an ongoing project of articulation, offering opportunities for reflexivity and change.

Contemporary sexual identities have expanded beyond merely naming a gender configuration (man/man is gay, man/woman is straight). They name investments in politics: queerness as a form of political opposition to the normative, for instance (Ward 2008). They index a self-conscious relationship to the social order. Erotic identities might still reflect a gender configuration—one is not merely a boyfriend, one is Daddy’s boy—while some also reflect a specific configuration of gendered power—a boy/boi is a masculine-identified person in a submissive relationship to a Dominant gendered figure, often a “Sir” or “Ma’am.” Sex or modes of relation can even be “normcore,” which is to say, they can be self-consciously and intentionally heteronormative. They can play with tropes of gender inequality, vanilla erotics, and overall “heteropessimism” (Serasin 2019). While as a general rule, heteropessimism is a performative disaffiliation with straightness—often from within—for kinky subjects who used it, the aim was to embody, as fully as possible, the actual discomfort and displeasure heterosexual engagement often generates. This is a level of reflexive engagement with the social world that is historically novel. We are now so outside ourselves, normativity has become, not a description, but an elective experience.

For minoritized sexual subjects, BDSM presents an opportunity to work outside of the common racial conventions: exclusion, objectification, and denial (i.e., colorblindness). Mama Vi and Master Jill began their explorations of Dominant/submissive relations through complex identifications with Blaxploitation dramas, importing them into their erotic lives and then finding a community that might help them articulate a framework for their desires. Their practices elaborate in an explicit way what Ariane Cruz (2016) has called “racial sexual alterity,” the entanglement of racial and sexual otherness that characterizes the particularized experiences of Black women. This is something they both knew and cultivated. slave charles and paul both absorbed their desires to submit to their female partners into a particularized concept of themselves as “slaves,” the kind of people who are oriented to erotic and emotional service and submission. Each in his own way then grappled with the complex social nexus of masculinity and submission.

These reflexive projects are only as articulate as the culture they reflect. As white people in the contemporary U.S. find new ways to reckon with whiteness and new assessments of their individual investments in racial domination, one might expect their erotic language and erotic schemas to become more dynamic as well. Whiteness, for my subjects, tended to accompany a more inarticulate relation to the social order than did and other racial positions. While heterosexual men were sensitive to others’ perceptions of them as unmasculine, they had less language for understanding the gendered dynamics of their relationships than did the women in their lives, though all of them understood refashioning gender dynamics to be part of their relational projects.

The question of why Rachel, beau, slave charles, Mama Vi, MissLyn’sBoy and others would come to understand themselves as constitutionally submissive, rather than just interested in bottoming for sexual play, is complex and tied to larger transformations in intimate life. Anthony Giddens (1992) argued that in the modern era, sexuality has become “plastic,” freed from its ties to reproduction, emotionally emancipatory, untethered to specific symbolic objects, neutral toward social convention, and more available to be recruited into individuals’ increasingly reflexive life projects. This freeing of sexuality from social mores contributed to the rise of the ideal typical “pure relationship,” modes of intimacy that exist not to satisfy external criteria, but solely to deliver emotional rewards based on self-disclosure, trust, and the exaction of individual life projects. But Giddens and his contemporary Ulrich Beck suture these notions of sexual freedom to a greater egalitarianism between men and women. Pure relationships are equitable meeting places.

Yet we know that even the most intimate ties to others are shot through with social inequality. Men and women negotiate uneven workforce experience and differential domestic expectations; interracial couples navigate cultural difference and disparate treatment in the outside world. The sexual fields framework itself documents the differential sexual capital distributed according to both racial and gendered logics. One might conclude that there is, thus, an irreconcilable analytic tension between ideas of sexual fields and ideals of the pure relationship. But if we extricate the idea of the pure relationship from the ideal of egalitarianism, we can better understand the pragmatics of how contemporary intimacies actually function.

What is particularly interesting (and vexing for some, certainly) about submissive identity is that it appears inextricable from one’s social position. slave charles does not think of himself merely a submissive, but as a “submissive man.” Mama Vi is well aware that her identity as an “old guard slave” is always already read alongside and inextricable from her blackness; more than that, her blackness animates it. MissLyn’sBoy was careful to note that he was erotically submissive but quite professionally Dominant. For him, this further underscored his intimate identity as something apart from and more authentic than the brand of maleness he occupied in the rest of his life. Tru knew she enjoyed submission to a particular gendered dominance that was “masculine but not male.”

Each individual articulation of self led its subject toward reflexively constituted forms of intimacy, articulate intimacies. Rather than remaining the passive recipients of a primary habitus, structured entirely by inescapable symbolic violence, submissives grappled with the relationship of their specific gender, race, class, bodily configuration, and nation to that of their partners. They constructed encounters and relationships with internal hierarchies that gave them a place from which to experiment with and perfect their interpersonal dynamics. Erotic worlds are becoming more specialized (Green 2008a), as are our eroticized frameworks for identity and group membership. While we act “under description” (Hacking 1985) in even the most intimate domains of our lives, attributing our erotic preferences and affective dispositions to the kinds of people we believe ourselves to be, some of us intentionally recraft our ways of “being those things” through studied and repetitive action.

In a move quite ahead of his time, Max Weber ([1915] 1946) observed that stigmatized and undervalued features of social identity often accrue a kind of erotic capital. Erotic spaces intensify social difference, producing both instances of exclusion and unique opportunities for new types of intimacies to emerge. Erotic contexts electrify an individual’s social position, their gendered and racialized and even cultural subjectivities. If indeed the domain of sex in Western societies, our erotic “practices, feelings, knowledges” compose “the medium through which people seek to define their personalities, their tastes” (Kulick 1995, 12), then individual “sexual projects” (Khan and Hirsch 2020) are not merely about sexuality for the sake of sexuality; they are one of the fundamental channels through which we are oriented to the social order more broadly. And one of the ready pathways through which we might practice intimate forms of resistance.

Most of the people I met in the field were “kinky,” meaning that they identified as people who enjoyed BDSM-related erotic experiences. Some, however, also had core identities as submissives. “Kinksters,” “switches,” and “subs” had things in common. All (1) learned to relegate control over their body to the hands of another and (2) recognized their psychic experiences of bodily sensation as “bottom space,” either by enjoying painful stimuli or deriving articulate appreciation for experiences they did not enjoy. Submissives also (3) developed a self-concept that translated these receptive bodily and affective experiences into a durable self-identity, one which integrated their social position (race, gender, etc.) and from which they had the chance to structure intentional forms of relating.

While some BDSM practitioners never made it through this tripartite process, either abandoning BDSM activities altogether or deciding they merely derive pleasure from occasional “kinky sex,” self-identified submissives transformed, through repeated, intentional self-cultivation, their very sense of their own psychic and sexual makeup, their embodiments, their dispositions, their desires. Submissive identities, for their part, never stood apart from, but rather absorbed gender, racial and sexual identities, as sexual categories are always imbricated with other forms of social difference. The more reflexive identity became, the more potential there was for remaking bodily habitus. Those with subordinate positions in the social order understood the forms of social violence that surrounded them. Rather than spontaneously enacting them in intimate life, submissives carefully and with cultivated practice, came to understand as malleable the way power structures social ties. Perhaps the surprising world of BDSM offers sociologists a ripe example of the power of reflexivity to refashion forms of inequality that seem both subconscious and intractable. Perhaps they offer new models, not for specific and inalterable social situations, but for pathways to new forms of being and new ways of being with others.