An anthropologist among spanks

Researcher positions and limits of participation in BDSM events in the city of Córdoba

Abstract

This paper asks about the researcher's ways of being -as a situated subject- in an ethnography focused on BDSM events, spaces where bondage, domination/submission and sadomasochism practices were performed. Faced with the express request of one of the organizers to do some of the activities, I intend to investigate the limits of participation in a research concerned with the production of subjectivities and subjections from forms of social-erotic sociability. That is why I wonder how to interact in expressly regulated instances, where a series of codes that marked the (im)possibilities of interaction between/with submissives and dominants came into play? How to respond to requests for participation in practices considered as erotic in those places? How to construct a "character" capable of flowing through different scenarios?