Pleasure, Community, and Marginalization in Rope Bondage: A Qualitative Investigation into a BDSM Subculture

This doctoral thesis by Zoey Jones was accepted for the PhD in Sociology at Carleton University in 2020 (DOI 10.22215/etd/2020-14247). It is available through the university’s institutional repository.

Jones describes rope bondage as a subculture nested inside the wider pansexual BDSM scene, with its own norms, spaces, vocabulary, practices, art, events, careers and identities. Because that world is scattered across and between locations, Jones argues, people outside it rarely see it, and while some earlier research had touched on rope, none had made its social world the central topic.

Writing as a member of the scene, Jones bases the study on 23 interviews with rope practitioners living in Canada and the United States. The theoretical framing combines symbolic interactionism and feminist theory with disability studies and critical race theory, and the thesis also reflects on how to research one’s own community, proposing participant-centered methods shaped by the etiquette of kink spaces.

The findings Jones reports have two sides. Participants described pleasure, belonging and joy that they found hard to put into words, but also conflict and discrimination, both between individuals and built into the scene, which Jones sees as shaped by and mirroring the racism, ableism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia and classism of wider society. Jones treats the experiences of disabled and racialized practitioners as essential for understanding both oppression and resistance in this world. Building on Weiss (2006), Jones argues that kinky pleasure that is not plainly sexual tends to be unintelligible to most BDSM research.

A 2023 Cureus study on nerve injuries in rope bondage cites the thesis for background on practitioners and their community.