Book Review: Playing on the Edge: Sadomasochism, Risk, and Intimacy

• Author: Richard Tewksbury
• DOI: 10.1177/0734016811416002
• Published date: 01 December 2011
• Date: 01 December 2011
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

S. Newmahr

Playing on the Edge: Sadomasochism, Risk, and Intimacy Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2011. xi, 228 pp.

$24.95. ISBN: 978-0253222855

Reviewed by: Richard Tewksbury, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY, USA

DOI: 10.1177/0734016811416002

Playing on the Edge is an informative, theoretically rich, well-written, and surprising book. As an

ethnography of an Sadomasochism (SM) community, many readers will approach this book

expecting to find a tawdry, perhaps sensationalized, even somewhat erotic expose of a sexual under-

ground. This is far from what Staci Newmahr provides. Instead, this is a high quality, truly academic

ethnographic analysis of one SM community that highlights identities, motivations, activities,

experiences, identity constructions, and theoretically rich examinations of how a typically construed

as deviant, alternative lifestyle community provides for the social, emotional, and psychological

needs of individual members.

The book consists of three major parts, highlighting Newmahr’s examination of People, Play, and

Edges. Each section focuses on one of the major constructive elements of the SM community in

Caeden, a SM community in a major East Coast city. Additi onally, there is a lengt hy Introduc-

tion in which Newmahr provides an overview of her 4 years of active involvement—including 1

year of truly full immersion—in the activities and structure of Caeden as a community. Here, she

also carefully lays out definitions, the scope and breadth of her study and careful explanations of

what the study is and is not. A Concluding Notes section provides an opportunity for Newmahr to

reflexively position herself in her ethnography and to reflect upon and process for the reader how

her own experience in the SM community can and did intersect with and shape her research, and

her views of herself.

Part 1, People, is an examination of the members of the Caeden SM community and how they

both come to the community and what they derive from participation and membership. Here,

Newmahr emphasizes the deviance of SM community members, not based on their activities, but

rather based on their status as socially marginal individuals. Throughout their lives these individuals

have found themselves outside the mainstream, intellectually, socially, physically and in regard to

their perspectives on and understandings of mainstream American culture. As outsiders in ‘‘regular’’

society, the core members of the SM community find a ‘‘home’’—acceptance, comfort, predictable

and welcome structure, and a sense of security—in the activities, organizations, and peers that

constitute the SM community. A primary message of this section of the book is that this collection

of ‘‘geeks and freaks’’ finds a world in which they are not deviant (although they readily recognize

being stigmatized as deviant by the outside ‘‘vanilla’’ world). The Caeden SM community, despite

being populated primarily by social misfits, those who defy mainstream culture’s expectations for

physical attractiveness, career pursuits, and gendered presentations, is seen as a strong, supportive

and in many ways very nondeviant community.

Part 2, Play includes three chapters that center on discussions of how SM is conducted and how

participants structure their interactions, what the rewards of such activities are for participants, and

how gender is constructed and performed in SM activities. Despite common misconceptions of SM

as a sexual activity or as elaborate role-playing. Newmahr (p. 72) devotes significant effort to

explain that ‘‘the link between SM participants is a quest for a sense of authenticity in experiences

in power imbalance. In order to achieve this, participants must suspect belief in their own egalitarian

relations for the duration of the scene. When this is successful, the sense of power imbalance feels

real. This is sough, and is what often occurs, in and through ‘power exchange.’’’SM is not about sex,

it is about pursuing an exchange of power and an experience of either powerlessness or

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