Play, Pain and Religion - Creating Gestalt through Kink Encounter - Alison Robertson
Kinky Bodies
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 7 considers the nature of the body and its involvement in the creation of experience. Bodies are presented as multi-sensory, with senses braided together into a synaesthetic dynamic whole rather than separate from one another. Movement/animation as the foundation of bodily experience is explored in the context of BDSM and the complexities of kink experience are drawn out. The idea of the medium as the message (McLuhan, 1964; Seligman et al., 2008) – that the meaning, purpose or point of BDSM play is to play – is introduced here, to indicate the importance of bodies in their full multi-sensory kinetic reality as part of the gestalt of BDSM.