Health discourse and within-group stigma in professional BDSM

This article directly deals with health and stigma within practices of erotic labor. Scant previous literature has focused on erotic laborers' perceptions of stigma and the ways in which regimes of stigmatization operate within their particular social worlds. I use the commercial BDSM (Bondage, Discipline, Sadism, Masochism) “dungeon” as a strategic research site to investigate these workers' conceptions and management of their own stigma, and I find that discourses about stigma are inextricably entwined with concerns about health and wellbeing. Data are derived from ethnographic fieldwork with professional dominatrices (“pro-dommes”) who work in New York City and San Francisco as well as in-depth interviews conducted between September 2007 and April 2008. Counter to stereotypes of erotic laborers as violent or as vectors of disease, BDSM workers are in fact not only concerned about safety but professionally invested in it, reinforcing it through an identity politics of hierarchies of erotic labor. There are multiple implications of this work for public perception and policy-implications that could only be brought to light through the ethnographic method.