A Transnational Comparative Analysis of Queer Rights Activism

Abstract:

This thesis explores how kink communities’ constructed histories shape their relations to the globally venerated “Dutch tolerance,” first in discussing highly visible leather establishments in the Netherlands, and then moving into smaller BDSM subcommunities formed by queer women of color. The constructed histories in the gay male leather scene reflect a nostalgia for the 1970s, composed of transnational images of machoness, muscles, leather, and dirtiness. However, the leather nostalgia for a lost “grittiness” is also a nostalgia for a racialized gay masculinity reiterating ideas of liberalism that colonial Dutch discourses actively cultivate.  But while the white gay male leather scene mostly understands the power in kink as individual and agential, BDSM necessarily implicates more “social” forms of power, like racial hierarchy and cis-heteropatriarchy. The BDSM subcommunities I discuss centralize marginalized experiences of kink, in which the boundary between kink and daily life is inherent to kink desires and practices. In doing so, these communities refute glorifications of apolitical and fun kink spaces and the claim that extensive kink negotiation processes are “too American,” which is a position with strong connections to Dutch disavowals of race as solely coming from the US and other European countries, ongoing racism toward Afro-Surinamese diasporas, and nascent fears of the conflated Muslim/terrorism/refugee/immigrant category.