BDSM and total power exchange: Between inclusion and exclusion

Abstract

In recent decades, BDSM as a form of power exchange has gained partial recognition and social inclusion in the public sphere. The inclusive process comes with the price of excluding concrete behaviors and thought patterns that are considered dangerous and pathological. This exclusion/inclusion process is conducted in the framework of the production of consensual biopolitical knowledge and in the context of the normalization of sex. Under these conditions, the total power exchange master/slave relationship, which is realized through a full-time power exchange encounter, suffers from the exclusion mechanism, as it is incompatible with the inclusive reason. In the course of this paper, I will examine the exclusion process of the master/slave total power exchange under the constitutive mechanism of the BDSM discursive rules in order to expose a new form of thinking and behavior that challenges the biopower reason, while simultaneously operating within its limitations.