Book Review: Offending Women: Power, Punishment, and the Regulation of Desire

• Published date: 01 December 2011
• DOI: 10.1177/0734016811415256
• Date: 01 December 2011
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

powerfulness. Similarly, SM presents interesting takes on gender. Newmahr argues that the SM

community does not have gender as an organizing concept, instead relying primarily on top/bottom

and dominant/submission distinctions. Furthermore, ‘‘SM explicitly rejects gender as an organizing

category of social life, often subverts gender roles as normative and sex-based, and contains the

potential for further and more extreme subversion’’ and ‘‘for many players this subversion is a con-

scious objective of SM’’ (p. 118). SM is an all-encompassing lifestyle for those in the community

Newmahr studied. Not only does SM consume their time but so too does it serve as the raw materials

from which participants construct their identities.

Part 3, Edges is the most theoretically rich and dense section of the book. In the three chapters

comprising this section of the book, Newmahr explores definitions, their applications and intersec-

tions of issues of sexual, erotic, violence, pain and intimacy, as well as examining whether and how

SM can be conceptualized as edgework. As in earlier sections of the text here, she problematizes and

explores how feminist perspectives can be integrated with both SM and edgework, concluding that

SM can be viewed as edgework from a feminist perspective—but only with extensions of the

edgework concept to include emotional and psychological boundaries, not restricting edgework to

physical boundaries. In the end, Newmahr concludes that ‘‘SM is about constructing intimacy

through social interaction. It is about obtaining access, securing it, granting it, promising it, daring

one to take it, and testing it ... The edgework of SM is not only collaborative; it is also intimate.

Intimacy in SM is not only an outcome of collaborating the edge, but central to its appeal’’ (p. 186,

emphasis in original).

Throughout, Playing on the Edge is a well written, well supported, clear, easily accessed, and

comprehendible yet theoretically rich delineation of a (supposedly deviant) community. In simple

terms, this is a very good book and a first-class example of what ethnographic research can

and should look like. From the first to the last pages, Newmahr skillfully interweaves presentations

of findings and theoretical explanations and developments. Through her chapter-opening prolo-

gues, colorful and intense examples and theoretical explanatio ns the reader is drawn into the

Caeden SM community and shows how the community is structured, functions, and serves the

needs of its members. And, beyond the direct ethnographic explanations of the SM community

reade rs are also treated to sophisticated discussions of how concepts such as ‘‘community,’’‘‘identity,’’

and ‘‘edgework’’ can be understood and effectively used to understand alternative, supposedly deviant,

social experiences.

L. A. Haney

Offending Women: Power, Punishment, and the Regulation of Desire Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,

2010. xii, 287 pp. $24.95. ISBN 978-0520261914

Reviewed by: Marylee Reynolds, Caldwell College, Caldwell, NJ, USA

DOI: 10.1177/0734016811415256

Sociologist and feminist scholar Lynn A. Haney remarks in Offending Women that while social

scientists continue to study prisons to learn what goes on ‘‘behind bars,’’ many critical changes in

the penal system have occurred beyond prison walls. In Offending Women, Haney documents these

changes and explains why they occurred.

Offending Women is a comparative analysis of two community-based penal institutions for

women and their children, Alliance and Visions, in the state of California during two different

moments in time. Alliance, now defunct, was a group home for incarcerated teenage mothers and

Visions is a residential facility for incarcerated adult mothers. Based on ethnographic research

524 Criminal Justice Review 36(4)