ABSTRACT
This chapter reflects on the libidinous dimension of compliance and explores how the pleasure of complying in BDSM practice can be reworked as a tool for disobedience. Unlike many critics who interpret BDSM practice as a mere reproduction or, even worse, as a reinforcement of hegemony, it highlights instead its potential to undo our compliance with hegemony. The chapter argues that BDSM dissociates and isolates one singular affect from the social setting of hegemony the passionate attachment to domination and in doing so alienates and reworks. Within the BDSM scene, the slogans 'safe, sane and consensual' (SSC) and 'risk-aware consensual kink' (RACK), condenses codes of conduct, stand for the centrality of the principle of consent to BDSM practice. A study of BDSM may help to discern two interrelated dimensions of domination. Between Gramscian and BDSM discourses, there is one major difference in how compromise is conceived: in BDSM, compromises function because all participants experience it as somehow pleasurable.
