ABSTRACT
Scenes of BDSM-adjacent sexual practices recur through contemporary trans literature. From the choking sequence opening Imogen Binnie’s Nevada all the way to the erotic games played between Reese and Stanley in Torrey Peters’ Detransition, Baby or the titular humiliation play in Allison Rumfitt’s Tell Me I’m Worthless, it seems like kink has found itself a prominent place in narratives of transness. However, the question remains: what is this place exactly? While BDSM has long been celebrated in queer theory and other radical approaches towards sexuality as potentially emancipatory—and as an area of especial freedom of gender expression—what is striking about the representations of kink in contemporary trans literature is the focus not on liberation and revolution, but on ordinariness and ambivalence. If the hope once was that BDSM could provide an escape from the crushing demands of social normativity, then trans literature is interested in the way that it disappoints those hopes, and yet continues to be desired and practiced by trans people. In this chapter, I survey a number of scenes of BDSM-adjacent sexual practices that can be found in contemporary trans literature with an eye for the ways that trans authors—particularly transfeminine ones—use kink as a way to address the daily drudgery of making and experiencing gender. In this framework, BDSM and trans literature are linked not through categories such as “transgression” or “perversion”, but rather meet in a deeply ambivalent site of everyday trans negativity.
