Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality

The award-winning Techniques of Pleasure: BDSM and the Circuits of Sexuality (Duke University Press, 2011) is an ethnography of BDSM communities in the San Francisco Bay Area. Based on several years of ethnographic research at dungeon play parties, workshops, conferences, and other community events, as well as interviews with over sixty SM practitioners, the book charts the rise of the pansexual scene from the mid-1990s through the early 2000s in the context of the Silicon Valley dot.com boom and bust, the rise of the Internet, and the gentrification of San Francisco. Against readings of BDSM as transgressive of or existing outside existent social relations, Techniques of Pleasure instead links BDSM’s spectacular performances of race, gender, and sexuality to class, consumerism, and the social dynamics of neoliberal capitalism. Chapters take up the race and class dynamics of BDSM as a form of biopolitical self-mastery or techne; the role of consumer expertise and an expanding market for sex toys and commmodities; the public/private intersections of whiteness, masculinity, and heterosexuality in D/s (Dominant/submissive) play; and the impossibility of fully separating fantasied performances of Master/slave and other forms of race play from the “real world” eroticization of gendered, racialized, and imperial American power. Techniques of Pleasure theorizes late-capitalist sexuality as a circuit—one connecting the promise of new emancipatory pleasures to the reproduction of raced and gendered social norms. It shows how BDSM is not a “safe space” separate from real-world inequality, but rather depends—like all sexual desires—on existent and unequal social relations.

Techniques of Pleasure won the 2012 Ruth Benedict Book Prize for Outstanding Monograph from the Association for Queer Anthropology and finalist for best book in LGBT Studies from the Lambda Literary Foundation.

Find in a library: worldcat.org

Purchase: Duke University Press | Amazon | IndieBound

Check out the Techniques of Pleasure Tumblr for stories on kink and feminism, interviews with Margot Weiss, and materials for teaching BDSM!

–> Read an excerpt of Techniques of Pleasure

Selected full-length reviews of Techniques of Pleasure:

Selected Reviews and Endorsements
“I cannot emphasize enough how vital the analysis in Techniques of Pleasure is. Margot Weiss reveals the half-lie of ‘safe space’ in the BDSM world and, in doing so, artfully unveils the half-lies that propel ideas of ‘agency’ and ‘choice’ in neoliberal culture.”—Annalee Newitz, author of Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture

“Techniques of Pleasure is a wonderful, theoretically significant, and ethnographically rich book. Margot Weiss contextualizes the development of the Bay Area’s BDSM scene, analyzing contemporary BDSM as biopolitical practice. Examining the complex connections between discipline and freedom, subject formation and subjugation, power and play, Weiss extends feminist and queer theoretical debates about identity, community, sexuality, gender, race, and the nature of power. This book breaks new theoretical ground in relation not only to BDSM but also to questions of personhood, political economy, and embodiment in late capitalism.”—David Valentine, author of Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category

“Techniques of Pleasure is an important theoretical and empirical contribution that moves beyond the existing analyses in feminist and queer theory that depict SM as either inherently sexist or inherently transgressive. Building on both these theories without discarding their core assumptions, Weiss demonstrates how SM can be both sexist and transgressive, often at the same time. Beyond the empirical focus of this book, Weiss contributes to the broader literature on late capitalism’s impact on bodies, sexualities, and subjectivities.”—Amy L. Stone, American Journal of Sociology

“Techniques of Pleasure…is a landmark study of the BDSM ‘scene’ in San Francisco…Weiss succeeds admirably in producing a work that is conceptually rich and ethnographically engaging.” — Richard Joseph Martin, Current Anthropology

“Weiss offers a nuanced reading of sex, power, consumption, and subjectivity that makesTechniques of Pleasure a major contribution to new theoretical work on neoliberal economic processes and the anthropology of sexuality and gender.”
— Michael Connors Jackman, American Ethnologist

“Margot Weiss’ sociological approach to the formation of sexual desire is breathtakingly smart and powerful, and should be required reading for any serious scholar of sexuality henceforth.”—Adam Isaiah Green, Contemporary Sociology

“By theorizing BDSM as a practice which functions as a circuit re-instantiating capitalism via performance, Weiss is able to shine a light on the complex nature of BDSM and its relationship to the larger capitalist culture, even for those who practice it. Because Weiss ties her ethnographic research to theoretical grounding in sexuality, race, gender, performance, and neoliberalism, the book is relevant to scholars from a variety of disciplines, and serves as a relatively well-balanced ethnographic investigation of the implications of subcultural movements and the importance of including sexuality in any consideration of late capitalist culture.“—Dana Sayre, Liminalities

“In debunking some myths that continue to surround BDSM, Weiss contributes to an honest and nuanced conversation about how power dynamics really work within a scene that plays with power for pleasure.” — Lisa Downing, New Formations

“Researchers and teachers of popular culture may use this book to counterbalance the recent upsurge in media depictions of BDSM, particularly the strain of erotic fiction known as ‘mommy porn,’ which uses BDSM imagery to reinforce heteronormative ideals…It is a complex subject, worthy of the meticulous treatment Weiss offers.” —Misty Luminais, International Social Science Review

“In its analytic candor, both generous and unflinching, Weiss’s book is an appropriate entrée for anyone wishing to engage with contemporary BDSM communities — nestled within the larger queer academic trend of critiquing neoliberalist ideological formations of liberated selves and others.”—Andy Campbell, GLQ

“The analysis of these circuits is quite fascinating and could be expanded outside the BDSM scene to explore sexual fantasy and performance in any affluent, educated, tech-savvy culture. Recommended to readers interested in human sexuality.”—Scott Vieira, Library Journal

“Weiss’s book offers a fascinating extension of debates about the sexual politics of neoliberalism, and a consideration of how local economic changes in the San Francisco Bay Area have reconfigured sexual communities there…”—Gavin Brown, Society and Space

“Techniques of Pleasure is an impressive book that does much to humanize BDSM to those who wish to get involved in the community or simply wish to be better educated about the topic. . . . Weiss exposes a world that is typically viewed as dank and dark by the casual outsider; through her insightful analysis, she brings this subculture into the light and shows us the ‘softer side of kink.’”—C. J. Bishop, Electronic Journal of Human Sexuality

“[A] vital, if controversial, contribution to the body of writing and theory on BDSM.”—Nina Lary, Bitch

“[A] useful scholarly monograph on how once perversions of the select have become indulgences of the many. . . . Techniques of Pleasure is at its best when Weiss describes what goes on at gatherings of consenting adults engaged in semi-public and non-commercial fetishistic S-and-M role-play. To her credit, she includes extensive quotes from practitioners she meets along the way. Ethnographers have the eyes and ears of an explorer.”—David Rosen, The Brooklyn Rail