BDSM Practices in Contemporary Poland

This book is a study of BDSM practices based on anthropological fieldwork (a mix of the following methods: participatory research, semi-structured interviews, autotheory) conducted among Polish BDSM practitioners between 2015 and 2020. Instead of focusing on organized kink communities (which are relatively weak in Poland), it instead foregrounds the practice of BDSM itself, and asks what are the conditions (social, cultural, and rhetorical) which make this practice at all possible. In doing so, it builds towards an argument that BDSM practitioners rely on how our ways of understanding and categorizing sex and sexual activities consistently fail to properly describe the errancies of sexual desire in order to carve out a space of kink's possibility for themselves-and that BDSM practices themselves are both enabled by this, and are the means of such carving out. The author investigates a number of practices of contemporary Polish BDSM practitioners, ranging from the very act of attempting to define what BDSM even is all the way to consensually non-consensual simulated drownings. By analyzing them, they ask what relationships are produced through practice-both to other practitioners, as well as to more abstract concepts such as the public sphere, the sexual norm, or the oft-mythologized Western kink culture. In the process, the study also constantly returns to the question of what it means to both practice, as well as think about kink from the half-peripheral, Eastern European perspective. While the book refuses the demand that non-Anglophone authors should prioritize area studies over the production of "theory", it nonetheless locates and analyzes the practices and problems it describes within the specific geographic and cultural context of Poland. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in fields including queer theory, sexuality studies, and feminist theory. It could also appeal to cultural anthropologists more broadly, and people working with Central-Eastern European cultures.