Rope Bondage and Affective Embodiments: A Rhizomatic Analysis
A 2019 article by Iris-Carmina Ordean and Heath Pennington in the Colombian journal Corpo-Grafías arguing that rope bondage works through affect rather than through fixed identities such as BDSM.
Iris-Carmina Ordean, then a Leverhulme doctoral scholar at Durham University, and Heath Pennington, an independent scholar and performer, published this article in Corpo-Grafías: Estudios críticos de y desde los cuerpos (volume 6, number 6, pages 63–78), a journal of the Universidad Distrital Francisco José de Caldas in Bogotá. It came out on 2 January 2019 with Spanish and Portuguese titles alongside the English one.
The authors note that rope bondage, also called shibari or kinbaku, is usually filed under BDSM in both academic and popular writing. They argue that BDSM and sex-centered framings are not built into the practice but are two possible ways of describing it, depending on how practitioners see themselves. Drawing on feminist and queer theory, they treat fixed identity as a tool that often serves norms and regulation.
Based on the authors’ fieldwork with practitioners in Hong Kong, London, Paris and Berlin, the article argues that rope works through affective relations, directed both at the rope and at other bodies, which let people connect without passing through identity categories if they choose. They accept the observation that kink communities notice flow more readily in bottoms than in tops, but report from their fieldwork that in rope bondage flow comes readily to both, since the person tying works physically and the person tied works mentally too. They also describe a change in how practitioners feel time, which becomes rhythmic rather than linear and can approach an altered state of consciousness.
Finally, they propose a rhizomatic, non-hierarchical model of analysis, which they say can record developments in the practice without tying them to claimed origins in feudal Japan.