In this lively ethnography, Weiss studies the pansexual BDSM community in the San Francisco Bay Area. Weiss finds that BDSM practice is not as transgressive as the participants imagine, nor is it simply reinforcing of older forms of social domination. Instead she shows how fantasy play depends on pre-existing social hierarchies, even as it also participates in a commodification of desires.

A Note on Terminology vii
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction. Toward a Performative Materialism 1
1. Setting the Scene: SM Communities in the San Francisco Bay Area 34
2. Becoming a Practitioner: Self-Mastery, Social Control, and the Biopolitics of SM 61
3. The Toy Bag: Exchange Economies and the Body at Play 101
4. Beyond Vanilla: Public Politics and Private Selves 143
5. Sex Play and Social Power: Reading the Effective Circuit 187
Appendix. Interviewee Vignettes 233
Notes 241
References 269
Index 291

Margot Weiss is Assistant Professor of American Studies and Anthropology at Wesleyan University.