‘How can we create safe spaces to enable exploration in kink?’
Well, I think this one week, I got a bit done in terms of secondary reading and figuring out things for non-verbal communication research and the workshop for communication.
Mapping out the stages of the workshops in co-relation to activities as well as the design process helped me find the gaps to fill in as well as necessary themes to translate into activities or evidence different activities.
I had asked a friend who is a psychology major, to give me some input on where to start, and she had asked me what I was supposed to do to and I told her I needed to do some activities to improve communication skills, verbal and non-verbal and she had suggested activities from her experience, which were good starting off-points, but I wasn’t entirely confident that it aligned with my goal of the activities being self-led and creative!
My search ranged from “communication in kink”, “communication in sexuality”,”understanding body language” “non verbal communication in kink”, “non-verbal communication in sexuality”, “body language in sexuality”, but most of them related to observational articles in the kink community or from ranged to body language in kids and babies which drew parallels, but I was pretty intrigued when I came across ‘LeBlanc, C., 2020. Being Kinky: Intimacy, ethics, and the self (Doctoral dissertation, Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa).’ This article had a deep comprehensive qualitative analysis based off interviews with a few subjects, and covered so many aspects of communication and sub-topics which go unnoticed, especially in maintaining long-term relationships, which made me look at relationships as a world to be developed rather than an entity in itself, since there are so many nuances that go into a relationship which go unnoticed, and so here I came up with the exercise of ‘Mind-mapping different aspects of a relationship’, which may or may not be suitable for this particular workshop, but in the next stages of the design process of prototyping it might be useful.
In this I also came across the Becker’s Career Model Becker, H.S., 1953. Becoming a marihuana user. American journal of Sociology, 59(3), pp.235-242. , which talks about the stages of adaptation, even though the article was about marijuana consumption, from the underlying philosophy we can draw a parallel on ‘adjusting/settling/getting in’ to a kink community.
Communication also happens in many modes and this multimodality is effective in helping one familiarise themselves with various people, such as some people are highly comfortable with face-to-face interactions, whereas some are comfortable with technology-mediated communication, but using one mode is ineffective, the ability to transfer to different modes is important as highlighted in Rubinsky, V., 2018. “Sometimes it’s easier to type things than to say them”: Technology in BDSM sexual partner communication. Sexuality & culture, 22(4), pp.1412-1431. the ability to transfer from different mediums is required in order to move to different stages in a relationship!
I also noticed some difficulties in engaging the participants over the course of 1-2 months, and was wondering how the process would work if I were to do it in a single workshop, either physical or virtual, since the comparison would show a difference in levels of trust built, openness and community building and engagement and especially diversity, and participation rate.
This might be a little bit harder to process, but it’d be an interesting compare and contrast to see.
Key points which the participants had expressed interest in engaging in are:
- Safe words
- Boundaries
- Aftercare
- Body language
- Cues and suggestions.
- Facial expressions
While 1-3 are verbal as shown in the map above, 4-6, are non-verbal and are harder to navigate or design self-led exercises, but I do love a challenge so I tried to put in my best, and I looked into various articles and found that most body language differences comes to quite literally biological and cultural differences, as well as individual experiences so it is subjective and personal, where the Becker’s Career Model comes into the picture, the process of familiarisation helps partners understand and familiarise each other with verbal and non-verbal languages and boundaries.
I also read into how to effectively organise workshops, since some of the feedback was also to improve the efficiency of the workshops, and I came across various commonly used activities and how it facilitates and engages different parts of the brain etc., and one was a crossword puzzle and this could be a self-led activity where the participants have to fill in different puzzles and in this process gain knowledge and communicate with each other, and building knowledge is crucial in exploring and understanding one self better.
Co-scripting/negotiation is a key aspect of engaging in kink/bdsm, and this led me to an activity of quite literally scripting and enacting a scene with the said map in mind, keeping in mind all the things which were learnt as a final activity to demonstrate implementation in real-life.
Having gone through various possible discourses, I particularly feel confident enough in carrying out the workshop this weekend, and learning new things!
Reading list:
Hughes, S.D. and Hammack, P.L., 2022. Narratives of the origins of kinky sexual desire held by users of a kink-oriented social networking website. The Journal of Sex Research, 59(3), pp.360-371.
Rubinsky, V., 2018. “Sometimes it’s easier to type things than to say them”: Technology in BDSM sexual partner communication. Sexuality & culture, 22(4), pp.1412-1431.
Sanchez, A.L., 2021. Consent, Identity, and Communicative Competence among BDSM Practitioners (Master’s thesis, San Diego State University).
Summers, N., 2021. There has to be a better way: Kink-ifying campus culture to overcome communication challenges. In Kink and everyday life (pp. 45-63). Emerald Publishing Limited.
Rubinsky, V. and Roldán, M., 2021. Disrupting sexual communication. Communicating intimate Health, 119.
Rubinsky, V., 2020. A communicative interdependence perspective of sexual communication and technology in bondage, domination, and sadomasochist relationships. Communication Quarterly, 68(4), pp.375-396.
Cutler, B., Lee, E.M., Cutler, N. and Sagarin, B.J., 2020. Partner selection, power dynamics, and mutual care giving in long-term self-defined BDSM couples. Journal of Positive Sexuality, 6(2), pp.86-114.
LeBlanc, C., 2020. Being Kinky: Intimacy, ethics, and the self (Doctoral dissertation, Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa).
Erickson, J.M., Slayton, A.M., Petersen, J.G., Hyams, H.M., Howard, L.J., Sharp, S. and Sagarin, B.J., 2022. Challenge at the intersection of race and kink: Racial discrimination, fetishization, and inclusivity within the BDSM (bondage-discipline, dominance-submission, and sadism-masochism) community. Archives of sexual behavior, pp.1-12.
Becker, H.S., 1953. Becoming a marihuana user. American journal of Sociology, 59(3), pp.235-242.
Babin, E. A. (2013). An examination of predictors of nonverbal and verbal communication of pleasure during sex and sexual satisfaction. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 30(3), 270-292. https://doi.org/10.1177/0265407512454523
Ebesu Hubbard, A.S., 2022. Misunderstood non-verbal cues in close relationships: Contributions of research over opinions. In Nonverbal Communication in Close Relationships: What words don’t tell us (pp. 165-186). Cham: Springer International Publishing.
Grammer, K., Kruck, K., Juette, A. and Fink, B., 2000. Non-verbal behavior as courtship signals: The role of control and choice in selecting partners. Evolution and Human Behavior, 21(6), pp.371-390.s