Play, Pain and Religion - Creating Gestalt through Kink Encounter - Alison Robertson
Subcultural Identity: Kink in Context and in Clothes
Play, Pain and Religion - Creating Gestalt through Kink Encounter - Alison Robertson
Alison Robertson [+]
The Open University
Alison Robertson is a research associate with at the Open University. She is interested in the places where the lines commonly drawn between categories (such as ‘religious’ and ‘non-religious’) become blurred or ambiguous and in how such blurring affects the ways people look at the world. Her research interests, other than kink, include lived and personal religion, edgework, and self-inflicted or positive experiences of pain.
Description
Chapter 6 considers what constitutes a subculture and the utility of this concept in relation to the BDSM community. Kink, and all of the different strands which feed into a sense of it as gestalt, takes place within the wider context of society. That contemporary society is hypermodern, continuing the trends of modernity to what might once have been considered extremes. This chapter explores kink in this context, in relation to issues of subculture, identity, style and authenticity.