'Doing, Feeling, Thinking Rope': A Comparative Analysis of Rope Bondage Scenes in London, Berlin and Paris

This doctoral thesis by Iris Carmina Ordean was submitted to the School of Modern Languages and Cultures in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at Durham University and deposited in Durham e-Theses in October 2024. Ordean’s earlier co-authored article on rope bondage lists her as a Leverhulme doctoral scholar at Durham.

The thesis starts from the observation that rope bondage is becoming more popular across Europe while remaining socially marginalized and little studied, both in kink studies and in cultural studies, and it sets out to bring the two fields together. Its questions concern how lived experience, situated knowledge and identity positions relate to one another in rope; how the practice can speak to cross-cultural narratives of East and West and to the politics of kink; how to build an inclusive, non-hierarchical theoretical framework for studying it, modeled on the rhizome; and where a researcher who is also a participant stands within that framework. A further aim is to move BDSM studies past debates about pathology and to treat rope bondage as a practice in its own right.

The method is qualitative and combines participant observation, autoethnography, semi-structured and unstructured interviews and artistic research. Fieldwork took place in rope venues in London, Berlin and Paris with 45 participants, described as 11 riggers, 10 models and 24 switches, across private sessions, rope jams, practice evenings, workshops, festivals and masterclasses.

According to the abstract, the work adds to efforts to bring BDSM studies into academic discourse and to scholarship on Deleuzian theory, cultural studies, the study of sexual cultures, affect theory and curatorial theory, and it closes by calling for more research on positionality and on how lived experience shapes the production of knowledge about rope.