POL378H1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Bicycle Helmet, Adventure Travel, Gated Community
Document Summary
For these and other practitioners, bdsm is a project, a practice of developing oneself as a skilled practitioner, of learning how to be a practitioner (see weiss. Becoming a practitioner takes work on the self: finding the community, attending events, learning techniques and skills, and educating oneself. These practices are forged in relation to the community norms and rules, but as foucault emphasizes it is not a question of complying with the rules, but of transforming oneself through one"s own interpretation of the rules. (weiss). In this way, rather than a general ethos or collective consciousness, risk functions to produce differentiated subjects . Representations of risk and ability do not passively reflect but rather justify social inequality. In sm, the ability or desire to take on a socially constructed risk is one way in which the community is produced as white and middle class, and, cyclically, continues to appeal to and produce these same practitioners (weiss).
