ABSTRACT
This chapter, informed by ethnographic fieldwork in BDSM communities in Sweden focuses on the bodily aspects of BDSM. Drawing on the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty's concepts of the living body and intercorporeality, it analyses the embodied interactions, sensations and emotions that encompasses BDSM practice. BDSM can create spaces in which practitioners not only explore bodily boundaries, strong emotions and states of subspace and domspace, but it can also enable a wordless bodily empathy in which practitioners can experience feelings of belonging, intimacy and trust.
