Bundna Positioner: Känsla och teknologi i kinbaku som förkroppsligande praktik

Bundna Positioner: Känsla och teknologi i kinbaku som förkroppsligande praktik (roughly “Bound Positions: Feeling and Technology in Kinbaku as an Embodying Practice”) is a thesis by Amanda Engström, registered in 2015 in DiVA, the Swedish academic repository. Its title page identifies it as a bachelor’s thesis (kandidatuppsats, 15 credits) in gender studies, written in the spring term of 2015 at Södertörn University’s Department of Culture and Education, and its English abstract calls it an essay.

The study examines how embodiment is gendered within kinbaku, which the abstract also calls shibari or Japanese rope bondage. The research was carried out in the Swedish kinbaku community with ethnographic methods: interviews with practitioners and complete participant observation.

Engström uses the phenomenology of touch as both method and theory, together with theories of somatechnics. Through this lens, practitioners’ close experiences of and relationships to rope are read as processes of embodiment that work through affect, sensation and technology.

Building on that reading, the thesis asks how the embodied positions people take in rope are gendered, and what possibilities and limits the practice holds for renegotiating them.