Aftercare

[print edition page number: 263]

Is This a Room

I was privileged to serve as the respondent to the first “Kinky Renaissance” conversation, a seminar at the 2021 Shakespeare Association of America (SAA) meeting. That was the second all-virtual SAA conference, the one everyone knew would be virtual from the start. For many of us it marked one year of intellectual isolation, save the fleeting disembodied contact with others’ tinny, walkie-talkie voices and talking heads in Zoom boxes on our computer screens. Virtual panels and seminars provided a tantalizing taste of intellectual stimulation — the content of brilliant, groundbreaking new work, without the community engendered around it. Virtual talks felt like a one-way channel, with no way for listeners to give anything back to the speaker by laughing or murmuring assent, and no way to process our thoughts about the ideas we had heard collectively, by reacting to a shared experience together in time and space. If you had something to say to someone, you could say it in an email after the fact.

Eviscerated from the experience were all of the structures and energies that scholarly exchange shares with performance — a special ordering of time and space, bodies brought into proximity for a ritualized purpose, [264]  a repertory cast of recurring and new characters moving through the space, and a visual vocabulary of costumes and props that telegraph the genre of scene we’re in, as well as aiding characterization. And, hardest of all to put into words and hence, I think, most missed, was what, to me, is the performance itself: the academic conference’s convention-bound yet idiosyncratic, improvisatory dance of verbal and affective contacts — the open weave of addressing others and being addressed; the searching dynamics of receptivity that govern taking, holding, and ceding the floor in a multi-person conversation, in which there is time and space to think aloud, to change positions; the free-floating agency and occult, multi-layered constraints around joining, inviting others into, and leaving, fleeting conversational trios and quartets and quintets whose content could swing wildly afield of anything anyone had said on a panel; and, everywhere, the potential for surprise, for encountering someone or something new that might become, perhaps through many iterations over time, incorporated as a vital element of one’s being. It’s repetition with revision, iterated over years and decades of scholarly life; it’s a form, as formative of texts (like this one) and authors (like me) as any other. And, like all forms, the kinds of community it materializes and the ways of thinking it produces are particular to it and can’t be engendered apart from the physical practice of the form.

This description of the affordances the academic conference shares with performance is also, of course, a description of the structural features it shares with scenes of group erotic interaction — of the resemblance that informal conference socializing bears to attending a kinky party, where everyone is there for the same larger purpose, though each is doing different things in a different order, with different configurations of people, together in space and time. A conference is, in this sense, a group erotic dynamic, in which pleasure — and pain, both pleasurable and just plain painful! — are generated collectively across a group of people together, interacting with one another in different groupings [265] and power dynamics, at a variety of scales and levels of formality. And the conference scene is just as constituted by a specific subculture and its performance traditions as any kink party scene is. Its players are bound together by a set of structuring conventions, idiosyncratically understood and enacted by each one. This collective invention within the bounds of generic constraint makes the scene, the iteration of which makes the form.

There’s a reason some snarkily compared the difference between leading a discussion about literature on Zoom versus in person to the difference between watching porn and having sex (or, an analogy I like even better: the difference between producing an episode of a cooking show, and cooking and sharing a meal). Was it better than nothing? Was it better than getting and spreading COVID-19, before anyone was vaccinated? Yes and yes. But the elements of embodied, improvisatory performance, and of collective pleasure generated through a thousand shifting contacts framed by a larger scene, couldn’t be replicated in the digital simulacrum of the form. Caroline Levine says this about how the affordances of forms are produced in Forms: “One cannot make a poem out of soup or a panopticon out of wool. In this sense, form and materiality are inextricable, and material is determinant.”^[1]

Something that happens during a virtual intellectual event is that, at the end of the session’s allotted time, everyone logs off and the Zoom meeting ends. The brief portal into contact, conversation, and community abruptly closes, and you are left, very suddenly, alone, staring at your computer screen, your cluttered desk, the wall. It feels absolutely horrible. It’s a specific, highly predictable sinking feeling, caused by the absolute lack of social denouement after the climax of the panel’s conclusion (last question, last word, thanks to all the participants, applause). For someone who has just put themselves and their ideas before others, [266] expended energy in the aspirational self-gratification-through-gratifying-others of a performance they hope was well-received, this emotional drop can be particularly severe. It’s called the drop, and it’s a well-documented and much-discussed occurrence after power exchange or BDSM sex play. It’s caused by the neurochemical ebbing of endorphins and other material transmitters of pleasure, stress, and excitation from the brain and body, and it’s exacerbated by inadequate aftercare — the practice of intentionally communicating with one’s partners to process the intensity of a BDSM scene after it concludes.^[2]

What happens in a room just after a ritualized performance — whether a sex act, a lecture, or a seminar discussion — is an integral part of the ritual. It is not the cessation of form; it is convention-bound precisely in its transition to a more dispersed, informal mode of being together, in which no one is addressing the whole group and anyone can say anything they want to anyone else. A pent-up charge of affective, erotic, and social energy is discharged in this moment. Both the tension in which audience members were silently holding themselves, and the tension with which the performers were remaining “on,” are released. It’s a moment of decompression, in which the complex power imbalances that structure the ritual, dividing people into their specialized roles, are (partially) equalized. But this restorative diffusion of power requires the players/participants in the event to be together, to collectively participate in what I would call the academic form of aftercare.

All of this is to say that the world we live in, the world of desire and power and being in configurations with others, the world of politics and pedagogy and thought, presents situations all the time that we need a kinky analysis, or kink theory, to fully understand. Why do I feel so awful after giving a talk on Zoom? Ask a kinky person. Read some BDSM theory. Watch and learn. [267]

Sex, But Make It Fashion

My reading just above, of the formal structures that link an academic conference, a performance, and a sex party, is an example, I think, of the kind of analysis this volume sparks. These essays invite us to think kink not only as a set of topics or subcultural activities but as a methodology, a reading practice, an analytic. This move of extrapolating, from the history and practices of a marginalized sexual subculture, the methodological tools and interpretive techniques that culture has cultivated, and using them to analyze material beyond that subcultural archive, echoes queer theory’s early leap of deploying methods of reading honed in gay and lesbian studies to analyze the rest of the supposedly not-gay universe (finding, of course, much queerness there).^[3] In making this move, kink as method offers itself as the odd, outré cousin of queer method, taking its place on an L Word–style hookup chart of critical influences and intersections that now includes asexual, trans, and disability reading practices as well.

In what follows, I want to sum up the particular quality to this set of essays that, I think, amounts to a kink methodology. Much like queerness or asexuality, as scholars advancing those methodologies have taught us,^[4] kink is there if you know how to read for it. And once you see it, you can’t un-see it. The question becomes, then, what does a kinky reading practice do? What are its qualities? What does it recognize, what does it bring out, what kinds of interventions does it enable, what does it get us in literary studies? [268]

One way to describe this set of essays is as an assemblage of shamelessly invested, virtuosic close readings. They give beautiful, fetishistic attention to textual detail — fetishistic in the sense of Sigmund Freud’s subject, in Fetishism, who “had exalted a certain sort of ‘shine on the nose’” as the object of his erotic investment. He was actually, Freud breezily deduces, into noses themselves, which “he endowed at will with the luminous shine which was not perceptible to others.”^[5] The object of the fetishistic gaze, in this image, is a glancing sheen on the surface of a ubiquitous everyday object — a certain play of light with the body oils on the surface of the skin and the tilt of another’s head. It enhances and marks ordinary noses, rendering them specially alluring to the fetishist. But it exists, in the first instance, just for him; he sees it where he needs to see it, where not just anyone can.

One way I would describe the aim of a kinky methodology, then, the task of the fetishistic reader or literary critic, is making visible the “shine on the nose” of a text: describing the precise formal, affective, erotic, ideological, etc. effect one sees, so clearly that others can suddenly see it too where they could not before. These essays do that, I find, in their attention to the valences of tossed-off and interstitial language: the Dom/sub affects that Gina Filo finds anew in Robert Herrick’s lyrics, and Gillian Knoll brings out in John Lyly’s drama; and the dynamics of bondage, restraint, and complex, shifting power roles that James Mulder sees in Christopher Marlowe’s epic poetry. Fetishism in Freud’s account is erotic investment displaced from its “proper” destination (for Freud’s subject is the aspirationally cisheterosexual male): a woman’s vagina, which, in Freud’s narrative, is so primally horrifying in its difference from the penis as to divert desire into the fetish object, a fantasy substitute phallus. (This is told, and, somehow, often read, as an utterly straight story.) One of the anxieties transmitted in the concept of fetishism, particularly [269] as it attaches to kink practices, is that the naked human body may not magnetize the totality of sexual desire — that artificial, made things, prostheses, technologies, accessories (ornamental and functional), gear, and paraphernalia might hold more erotic attraction. Fetishism enacts a challenge to heteropatriarchy (for anyone can wield these things), anthropocentrism, and the “natural,” which is why I locate a kink methodology in these essays’ sybaritic attention to the material things and substances in texts: Beatrice Bradley’s body fluid spatter analysis, and Heather Frazier on the politics and erotics of urine.

Kink method, like queer method, makes a case for the radical pleasures, and generative social potentials, of practices — and performances of practices — deemed sinful, criminal, or pathological. Some (not all) of these essays offer such reparative readings of stigmatized phenomena, like cuckoldry in Erika Lyn Carbonara’s and Nathaniel Leonard’s essays, the interracial erotic pairings Kirk Quinsland analyzes in Shakespeare, or the specter of public sex Erin Kelly raises in The Taming of the Shrew.

The essays in this volume are wise to the limitations of a model of human “subjectivity” or “social identity” that presumes a coherent, internally motivated locus of agency, in the early modern period or indeed any other. Kink methodology contains the knowledge that erotic pleasures, preferences, and power dynamics — indeed, selves — are, perhaps more often than we allow (and not just in the Renaissance), constituted by and in doing, in physical practices. One of the interventions that kink method brings to the study of sexuality is this (new) materialist understanding of eroticism as constituted through the continual, dynamic enactment of material phenomena in space-time. Kink method is aware that what happens — the iterated movements, gestures, expressions, and exchanges among bodies, forces, and materials in the world — is what makes us, and the world.

Yet at the same time, a kink methodology interrogates what is left out by a strict historicist, archival-evidence-or-it-didn’t-happen model [270] of sexuality, as the kinky readers in this volume ebulliently demonstrate. Kink analysis in fact torpedoes homogenized or prescriptive historical notions of sexual normativity. All of these essays demonstrate, in different ways, that attempts to define kink as a departure from retroactively imagined statistical “norms” of sexuality do not hold up in early modern archives — and maybe do not hold in any time, for seemingly minoritarian kinky dynamics prove again and again to be all too constitutive of the larger erotic and aesthetic forms that make up a genre, or a culture. They all must contend with the complicated, by no means “straight”-forward, role of the phallus, recalling Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s argument that decidedly other-than-hetero-erotic energy, transacted through form, fancy, and materials, natural and artificial, is a constitutive force shaping English literature itself.^[6] After all, so much of what constitutes early modern sexuality as represented in literary archives can and should be — and will be, thanks to this volume — called kinky, including hyper-realized portrayals of “normative” patriarchal social hierarchies, kicked into the gear of kink (or camp). In holding together this performative, materially enacted model of subjecthood and an expansive attitude toward reading for desire across historical difference, kink method intervenes in a refreshing way in our field’s critical debates about the alterity of the past, and how to study sexuality before coherent sexual identities, under very different normative and disciplinary regimes, etc. Through a kink lens, these historiographic observations look very different from, say, David Halperin’s model of early modern sexuality,^[7] because kink method attends to the eros inhering in aesthetic dynamics of power, desire, and style, which do not necessarily correspond to social categories.

Finally, perhaps most interestingly, something I would call a kink formalism (in conversation with Michelle Dowd and Lara Dodds’s notion of [271] feminist formalism) emerges from these essays’ attunement to the rhythms of the scene: the pace of plotting, the rhythms of a scene’s blocking and stage directions.^[8] A kink interpretive practice is honed on exquisite attunement to who does what, when, with what, and to whom, and to how it feels in time. Much of this collection is about drama, a genre whose literal scenes lend their structure to the BDSM scene of erotic play. But a kink reading practice also finds scene-level dynamics in the fantasy space-timescapes of poetry and frothing prose treatises. The essays here cover a  wide range of scales, sizes, or scopes in terms of their formal objects of analysis, or what aspect of the text the author is examining as kink, or with a kink methodology. The fine details of bodily acts and substances come in for analysis (Bradley; Frazier), as well as specific power dynamics (Carbonara; Kelly; Leonard; Mulder). But these writers also locate kinkiness in mechanisms of literary and/or theatrical representation (Bradley; Mulder), turns in the figuration of affect (Filo; Knoll), and the overarching dramatic power dynamics of a text (Quinsland; Leonard).

Think Kink

So, can it then be said that attunement to kink makes for superior literary criticism? This is not a facetious claim: kink is an aesthetic phenomenon. It can be defined as “sex, aestheticized”: a primal human drive elevated to the level of an aesthetic form. Kink shares with literary reading itself a fanatical attention to the made thing. And kink method is especially able to see how the idiosyncratic form of a text dramatizes an aesthetics of relationality — human and other-than-human, erotic and athwart of the erotic. This kinky form of attention alights on scenes of literary production — as in Beatrice Bradley’s analysis of the poetics [272] of fluid on skin, or Nathaniel Leonard’s provocative claim that revenge tragedy is a cuckolding-kink genre — to illuminate how texts themselves are created according to communally used and understood codes. Poetry coteries and playing companies, like kink subcultures, have their in-group vocabularies and customs, the frameworks that shape the new iterations of the form. Texts, like kinky sex “scenes,” are made: made of formal poetic and generic conventions, conceits, and meta-theatrical devices. If kink is about the style, the form, the aesthetic structure of both literary texts and social rituals, and of social rituals as figured in literary genres, kink method might offer a new theoretical angle on the old, complicated question of just how a literary text is related to the culture that produced it. And if, as I argued at the beginning of this piece, both kinky sex and scholarly conferencing share the structure of performance, there is an oblique case to be made that writing and publishing poetry, or writing, acting in, producing, and/or printing a play are, in different ways, structurally kinky enterprises, animated by collective, convention-bound aesthetic forms and distinctly sadomasochistic pleasures/pains. I would even go so far as to suggest that literary criticism, and in some ways all of literary academia, exists in a kinky power relation, bound by envy, anxiety, identification, dependence, disavowal, exploitation, pleasure, and pain, to these arts of cultural production.

These essays’ attention to the languages of power exchange, affective solicitation, and other kink dynamics in texts has made me hear new valences in some of our stalwart critical metaphors. In fact, this collection makes visible — to me, and, I assume, to many of its readers, for the first time — a submerged kink heritage inflecting the long-standing critical vocabulary used in politically engaged literary criticism after Michel Foucault, particularly around gender and sexuality. For instance, think about how often scholarship describes the constraints imposed by material conditions, patriarchy, heteronormativity, racial classification, state power, class norms, etc., and subjects’ resistance to those constraints, [273] their struggling against what binds them, or their agency in twisting (partially) free. This bondage metaphor (for that’s what it is) conditions, via the ropes, cords, or chains of its vehicle, the framing questions we learn to ask about the social and ideological dynamics in a work of literature: What forms did resistance to hegemonic constraints take? How tight were the constraints, or was there play? How effective was the resistance? How were the constraints loosened and/or re-tightened in the end?

I think, not incidentally, that something has been lost from this metaphor (which is everywhere in Foucault’s early work, in Discipline and Punish and in The History of Sexuality) in the course of its widespread adoption by Anglophone literary studies. As Foucault uses it, constraint (contrainte) is almost always a force acting in a dialectic with something else, usually with an incitement of some kind: constrained to tell, constrained to speak, constrained by obligations to act and by relational systems. It’s a dynamic in a larger system of active and passive dynamics; it is not unilateral, or definitive. Constraint in Foucault is generative, not preventive: of energies, processes, discourses, and desires. Through his lifelong participation in the gay BDSM/leather scenes of Paris and San Francisco, Foucault knew the pleasure and generativity of constraint: both the literal experience of bondage and the psychic, social, and conventional constraints that constitute a sexual subculture and one’s participation in it. I wonder how our field’s habits around the use of constraint in Marxist/materialist, feminist, etc. literary criticism might have been impoverished by a “vanilla” reading of Foucault, in which the salient feature of constraint is that it is imposed without the desire or participation of the constrained, and the emphasis is on the agency it forecloses rather than on the discursive and aesthetic forms it bodies forth.

In this light, Foucault’s repressive hypothesis, as well as the model of sexuality he offers in its place, can be re-claimed as a constitutively kink theory, in that it acknowledges and calls out the perverse pleasures on [274] display in the story we love to tell ourselves, not only in what gets called the repression or disciplining of sex, but in the (arguably kinky) popular investment in a narrative of sexual repression versus freedom: “Why do we say, with so much passion and so much resentment against our most recent past, against our present, and against ourselves, that we are repressed? By what spiral did we come to affirm that sex is negated? What led us to show, ostentatiously, that sex is something we hide, to say it is something we silence?”^[9] It bears thinking about how the “straight” or “vanilla” reception of Foucault may have conditioned not only critics’ understanding of this repressive hypothesis, but our received understanding of the much more complex story he tells instead, with its emphasis on the pleasures and identities incited by proliferating sexual constraints and their discourses. Kink theory, I would follow Foucault so far as to say, posits a uniquely multivalent model of power itself, alive to the pleasures of pain and of power, in both exerting and being subject to it.

Even besides this nuanced theorization of power, the kink literary methods on display in these essays turn received critical metaphors of freedom versus constraint over and inside out. Along with psychoanalytic thinkers like Adam Philips and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, kink methodology points out the countless dynamics besides the push-pull of constraint versus resistance in which humans’ relations to sex, gender, or social norms can be figured.^[10] But kink method also opens up a universe of variety and complication within the critical vocabulary of bondage and constraint. There is more than one kind of constraint, and more than one kind of resistance. More than one kind of control, and more than one kind of submission to control. These terms do not self-evidently or monolithically explain anything. The very definition of aesthetics I [275] applied to kink above — innovation within constraint — understands the constraints of genre and form as productive of the aesthetic object.

We Have Always Been Kinky

The Introduction to this collection, as well as several of the essays, interrogate what the study of kink brings to early modern literature: what kink readings can illuminate about gender, sexual behaviors, social structures, and genres in the period. But, in this textual act of Aftercare, I want to devote equal care and attention to processing what these essays have shown me about kink — how inquiring into kink dynamics in early modern literature enriches our concept of what kink is and does.

1) Kink is not only a quintessentially aesthetic practice; it is in large part a specifically literary, textual phenomenon. Kink is disseminated as a set of forms through genre-bending written texts, used in scenes of auto- and alloerotic gratification and community building, in addition to their intended purposes. This collection draws on a venerable, often submerged kink genealogy of writing in queer theory: from Foucault to Gayle Rubin, Leo Bersani, and Patrick Califia (to name only the most “out,” visible vanguard), and on through Amber Jamilla Musser, Christina Sharpe, and Ariane Cruz. Kink’s theoretical heritage of course extends back to Freud, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Kink’s literary genealogy, which includes the Marquis de Sade, Angela Carter, Dorothy Allison, and Samuel Delany, has also been extended here to consider John Lyly (in Gillian Knoll’s essay) and Robert Herrick (in Gina Filo’s) on the same map, along with the canonical poets and playwrights — Shakespeare, Marlowe, Thomas Middleton, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher — whose figuration of bodies, affects, and power dynamics these essayists ask us to see anew.

2) Both Erika Carbonara’s reading of cuckoldry in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside and Erin Kelly’s treatment of publicity and shame in The Taming of the Shrew show that kink is a collective phenomenon, constituted [276] in a community, a culture. However, a kink analytic gets especially interesting where the scene of literary production being analyzed is a solitary one (paging Gina Filo on Robert Herrick!). To paraphrase Bishop George Berkeley’s question about trees in the forest with nobody by to perceive them, if a kinky impulse forms within a person’s fancy and no one is there to recognize it and participate in it, does it make a kink? Can a writer belong to the kink archive if they’re alone, and not physically doing anything kinky, or even sexual? Sedgwick would say, in no uncertain terms, absolutely: that “many people have their richest mental/emotional involvement with sexual acts that they don’t do, or even don’t want to do”^[11] — and she should know; Sedgwick herself identified as a “sexual pervert” only via her elaborate sadomasochistic fantasy life.^[12] Fantasies are as much a part of culture as acts; a culture fashioned from fantasies and realized in textual forms is still a culture, through which readers can recognize themselves and others. The kinky readings explored in this collection are, to me, wayward queer descendants of Sedgwick’s, alive to the same “almost astrologically lush plurality”^[13] of overlapping orders and levels of meaning that Sedgwick honors in psychoanalytic thought, and aware of the complex ways in which fantasy, even unconscious fantasy, can be brought into signification.

3) Kirk Quinsland’s, Nathaniel Leonard’s, and Erin Kelly’s essays show that kink can be, in a very substantive way, about pain: intensities of bodily, psychic, social, and historical pain — shame, hurt, wounds, suffering — that cannot be folded into any sanitized notion of pleasure. Echoing Heather Love’s intervention in Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, this volume gives the lie to the idea that liberation necessarily follows from “sex positivity,” or that trauma can be effectively re-written by a politics of pleasure. One of the things kink method must [277] contend with is that, all the best practices of consent notwithstanding, kink may not be essentially “safe,” because no form of living, making, or relating in this world is safe.

4) Beatrice Bradley’s and Heather Frazier’s essays show that kink is about materialization, in a very literal, ontological sense: how matter is materialized, and how matter functions as a sign system. Bradley’s close reading of the “money shot” gives a radical new gloss to “fluid” as a critical term, commonly used to modify identity or sexuality. Here bodies themselves are fluid(s), erotic investments are fluid(s), and energy economies are fluid(s). Distinctions between individual bodies or identities are de-emphasized by kink’s focus on the circulation of energy in and through matter. Kink is instead about the materialization, in and with bodies, of pleasures, power, and affective entanglements — indeed, the materialization of energy, known in physics to be consubstantial with matter itself. In fact, I would go so far as to say that kink literary analysis undoes a dualistic bright line between energy and matter, which is to say, between the intangible and the tangible.

5) Erika Carbonara’s, James Mulder’s, and Kirk Quinsland’s engagements with role-playing — both as an activity depicted in early modern texts and as a fantasmatic practice of reading and spectatorship, through which texts are used, within a culture and across time — show that kink is constituted by imitation and replay, by a perverse return to the scene where gratification has been found in the past. Thus kink time is not one-way or linear, but recursive. Though, like all performance, kink is defined by a special ordering of time, kink temporality is specifically attentive to ends — not only to climax but to denouement (aftercare!), return, and repetition.

If aftercare is a way of integrating the intensity of a BDSM event into one’s being and re-entering ordinary time as a changed self, and thereby, perhaps, in a changed world, I want to conclude by framing some of the big questions — two about our scholarly field and two about the politics [278] of kink — that remain yet unanswered by this collection, in hopes that readers might improvise their own roles to play in this critical scene.

1) What is sexuality as an object of study, and how does it diverge from kink or from queerness as objects of study or analytic methods? If what I’ve discussed here are things that kink readings of early modern literature make newly visible about kink, are these also things that kink readings of early modern literature make visible about sexuality tout court? If not, why not?

2) What is distinct about literary archives? What relationships do literary works of different genres bear to the thick, heterogeneous life of a culture (much — but not all — of which leaves other kinds of archival traces)? What is different about the literary critic’s gaze, methods, and act of reading when one is looking at a literary text in order to try to find out about the culture that produced it versus reading it for other reasons (e.g., to find out what’s happening in a poem)? (Is there any such thing as analyzing a literary text “for its own sake”?)

3) What is the role of intentionality in scenes of social and sexual relation, and what is the relationship of intent to consent? Conscious, deliberate, articulated, and shared intention is central to kink ethical frameworks, as a precondition for participation and a basis of trust. But good intentions have been thoroughly exposed as inadequate, indeed as a cover and excuse for perpetrating harm, in the analysis of racism.^[14] Literary criticism, as well, tells a story of its progress away from the intentional fallacy, toward analyzing what’s made and done over what was intended.^[15] Does intention have a special value in scenes of sexual relation as opposed to other genres of scene? Is it more important and/or more legible? Pleas of the rapist/harasser’s lack of intent to harm are a commonplace of rape culture, despite how clearly it can be perceived by [279] the person being harmed. (As Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “Even a dog distinguishes between being stumbled over and being kicked”^[16]). How do these questions complicate the task of reading for consent — and for violation — in early modern texts, without flattening out consent’s extreme historical contingency? And relatedly: How complete can consent be in a world structured by such relentless inequities?

4) And finally: Why does kink matter? The trans-historical fact is that all of these kinky ways of seeing, inclinations, predilections, and practices are marginalized because they are a threat to the delusional, violent dictates of cisheteropatriarchy. Kink queries and mocks and sends up and détournes and re-writes the violence cisheteropatriarchy levies against those it deems to be not patriarchal men (women, queers, and gender nonconforming people) — but also the violence that cisheteropatriarchy demands of straight, cis men. Kink opens a portal into forms of love, vulnerability, and collectivity that patriarchy forbids for those men. At this terrifying moment of upsurging state persecution of sexual and gender minorities by Republican lawmakers, when anti-trans, anti-gay, and anti-kink rhetorics are actively, deliberately being muddled together and folded in with paranoid rhetorics of child sexual abuse in order to license even further state and mob violence, the long historical view of kink explored by the essays in this volume is uniquely important. Critical lenses derived from marginalized desires and sexual practices — like queer theory, asexuality studies, and now kink method — help us to see both the through lines and the sea changes as the discourse of sexuality keeps morphing into new forms. Cuck, meaning cuckold, as a case in point, circulates today as a slur in the misogynistic and homophobic lexicon of men’s rights activist culture, which holds up a version of patriarchal masculinity defined by domination of women and of other men — and [280] which increasingly serves as a gateway to recruit young men into far-right and white supremacist politics.

This collection writes toward a utopian scene, one which may live only in our imaginations, in which the power and reach of violent cisheteropatriarchy — the entire complex of misogyny, cissexism, queer phobia, whore phobia, ableism, white supremacy, classism, and colonialism — is shriveling and shrinking, with fewer and fewer people buying its false promises of entitlement and impunity in exchange for abiding by its narrow dictates. The Kinky Renaissance participates in the collective task, which I pray will continue after all of us contributors are dead, of peeling and chipping away at cisheteropatriarchy, piercing its facade and knocking out so many of its structural joints that, someday, where it sits, irrelevant and exposed in all its ugliness and hypocrisy, no one can imagine why anyone ever wanted anything to do with it. If I may be so bold as to invoke Octavia Butler’s futurist incantation, by way of setting my — and this volume’s — intention in this fight: “So be it! See to it!”^[17]