The World of Rope Bondage

Abstract

Rope bondage is a social world positioned underneath the broader umbrella of pansexual BDSM subculture. When rope bondage is depicted and explored in research and media, it is often represented as just one among many expressions of kink and sexuality. This chapter utilizes interviews with rope bondage practitioners to illustrate how people’s experiences of rope can often exceed this simplistic framing and be an intensely social and personal experience; it can also be an activity around which kinksters build focused, distinct communities and subcultures across the globe. Next, this chapter demonstrates how racialized and disabled rope bondage practitioners’ experiences ideologically and literally shape the nature of the subculture; their accounts of oppression, alienation, and resistance provide a narrative that is critical to understanding these spaces. Last, this chapter will highlight stories of pleasure to help explain the drive behind people’s engagement with and commitment to rope bondage community.