What is it about?
This study compares discourses and practices surrounding BDSM with the way BDSM is represented in the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy. It shows that while, on the surface, the novels draw on the same symbolic forms as BDSM practitioners, the affective ethos is different.
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Why is it important?
This study offers an original intervention into longstanding debates about the meaning of BDSM practices. It helps develop an understanding of an often stigmatized erotic minority. Methodologically, the study combines ethnography with close reading. Theoretically, the study offers insights toward an affective phenomenology of discourse.
Perspectives
This study helps show why it's important to think about symbolic forms in ways that extend beyond the mimetic or "degree zero" of representation, and to consider how people take them up in creative and variegated ways.
Richard Martin
Harvard University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Toward an affective phenomenology of discourse, Journal of Language and Sexuality, February 2018, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/jls.17008.mar.
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