BDSM Women’s Dress Consumption: Experiences, Meanings, and Intersectional Identities

BDSM is a subcultural group wherein individuals participate in consensual sexual practices and utilize various garments and accessories to enact these sexual performances and desires. In our work, we asked: how do BDSM women practitioners experience the consumption of BDSM gear, and what influences their experiences during these processes? and how do their salient historically marginalized identities influence their consumption experiences? Additionally, we consider the concept of feminist consumption in these interpretations and implications and how the market may be contributing to the philosophy of self-empowerment through commodities. We conducted 19 in-depth semi-structured wardrobe interviews. We identified that BDSM gear consumption is entangled with accessibility, practicality, communities, and emotions. These women navigate formal and informal economies to enact their BDSM desires, lifestyle, and interests. They sometimes engage in politically transformative critical making processes to write their own narratives through dress about the ways their bodies can and should engage with their desired sexual fantasies and fetishes in BDSM spaces with BDSM gear. In many ways, these consumption practices reflect feminist consumerism as these women recognize agency over their body via consuming these dress objects; but the women also reformulate dress objects through DIY informal economies, which in some ways complicates the notion of self-love via commodity consumption. These findings reinforce the importance of the self, others, consumption, and production in identity formation.