Bois and grrrls meet their daddies and mommies on gender playgrounds: Gendered age play in the les-bi-trans-queer BDSM communities

Abstract

Based on a qualitative empirical study of les-bi-trans-queer BDSM in the USA and Europe, this article discusses sexual practices that explore the significance of age, gender and sexuality and their simultaneous workings to produce desires, embodiments, identities, intimacies and kinships that transgress and partially transform heteronormative social concepts. Queer ‘age play’ and ‘intergenerational play’ practices involved processes of becoming-child in the Deleuzian sense, renegotiating masculinity and femininity in relation to age, power and sexist stereotypes, as well as compensation for queer- and gender-related limitations experienced in one’s own childhood.