Emotions, Power, and BDSM

Abstract

Abstract The chapter examines ethnographic fieldwork within the realm of BDSM, with a focus on the ethnographer´s emotions, participation, and etic reflections. Based on years of researching Swedish BDSM communities, with diary and field notes, the author reflects upon different situations and events which, in various ways, have had personal effects and given rise to ethical reflections and dilemmas as well as strong emotions. The complex relationships between the field, its actors, and the ethnographer are important and salient for all of those who engage in such fieldwork. Ethnographic work requires a high level of personal commitment but also enables a voice to be given to stigmatized populations, prejudices to be revealed, and informants’ feelings, lives, situations, dilemmas, and ambitions to be nuanced, though it can sometimes be very exhausting emotionally for the ethnographer.