Kassandra Sparks

KASSANDRA SPARKS, then a graduate student at University of California, Berkeley, California, was approved funding in October 2022 to aid research on “The Fantasy Exchange: Intimacy, Multiplicity, and Ritual in Commercial BDSM,” supervised by Dr. Mariane Ferme. Retitled “Theaters of Perversity: The BDSM Sex Economy in New York City,” this project examines paid BDSM sessions as fantasy stagings of perversity, alterity, and traumatic experience. In these sessions — what dominatrix and author Terrence Sellers has described as “theaters of your perversity” — dominatrixes and their clients enact the ambivalent circumstances that frame the sex work transaction: fantasies of prostitution and sex trafficking, anxieties around commodified intimacy, classed fantasies of racial-sexual alterity, and in the case of this research, fantasies of ethnographic fieldwork. Through highly symbolic and libidinal enactments, dominatrixes and clients stage these dramas, not in order to resolve them but rather to enact them in all their unresolvability. As such, BDSM sessions offer a unique insight into the libidinal drives that surge through contemporary scholarship of and regulations of sex work. This research draws on 12 months of observations of paid BDSM sessions, shifts at commercial dungeons in New York City, interviews with dominatrixes and clients, oral histories with elder dominatrixes, and archival research at the Leather Archives in Chicago.