Please Scream Quietly is the collective autobiography of the BDSM subculture. It argues that most people are a little bit kinky, but the BDSM subculture teaches its members to emphasize and cherish their kinky differences. Drawing from interviews, survey data, and years of observations conducted by a self-identified kinkster and professional sociologist, it tells the story of how people live and love in this much misunderstood subculture. The book begins with a discussion of BDSM identities, explaining how kinksters learn to define kink/BDSM, and to construct socially meaningful identities for themselves as kinksters. It next discusses what kinksters get out of doing BDSM, with a particular focus on how they experience BDSM as sexual or not. It then moves from individual experiences to relationships, with a focus on BDSM relationships and consensual non-monogamy/polyamory in the subculture. Then it describes community-level experiences of group norms and rules, analyzing subcultural demographics, as well as behavioral and attitudinal norms in and out of public BDSM dungeons. The book concludes with an analysis of how the subculture constructs positive and negative social status for members, and reflects on how the subculture's world of BDSM might be different from BDSM outside of it.

About the Author

Julie Fennell holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Sociology from Brown University and a B.A. in Sociology and English Literature, summa cum laude, from the University of North Carolina at Asheville. Her academic specializations are gender and sexuality, and she is a tenured Associate Professor of Sociology at Gallaudet University. Her 2015 article with Robert Evans of cracked.com on BDSM has received over 2 million views, and a follow-up cracked.com article in which she was interviewed in 2017 received over a million views as well. An academic for-the-public talk that she gave locally on BDSM in 2015 was recorded has received over 10,000 views on YouTube; she will be giving a presentation on polyamory to the same organization in the fall of 2018. Dr. Fennell's co-authored earlier research on withdrawal (coitus interruptus) which was published in the academic journal Contraception in 2009, also received widespread public attention, with discussions in media outlets around the world, from jezebel.com to the New York Times. In addition, she has published a sole-authored article on men's and women's roles in contraceptive decision-making in the highest-ranked journal in gender studies, Gender & Society; two other articles in Contraception; a co-authored commentary in the highly ranked Journal of Sexual Medicine; has published academic articles on BDSM for the sociology magazine The Sociologist and the journal Sociological Forum, with a forthcoming article in Sexualities; and a methods piece on her BDSM research for Sage Research methods.

In preparation for writing this book, Dr. Fennell embarked upon an intensive period of in-depth participant observation in the mid-Atlantic BDSM scene beginning in January 2012. Throughout the summer of 2012, she traveled throughout the mid-Atlantic region, conducting interviews with 70 people who identified as kinky. She also observed dozens of small kink parties and several days-long kink events. Then in April 2017, she conducted a large-scale internet survey of kinksters with more than 1600 respondents. The BDSM scene is unusually appealing for an internet survey, as virtually all people involved in it are members of a single social networking website, FetLife.

In addition to her academic study of the Scene, Dr. Fennell has over seven years of personal experience in the D.C./Baltimore BDSM scene. She remains a well-established figure there as a kinky performer, blogger, and presenter. In 2015, she was the recipient of the BDSM organization Black Rose's highly regarded Jack McGeorge Award for Excellence in Education for her work in and about the community. She continues to teach BDSM in many parts of the U.S. and in Canada. Having lived in "the Lifestyle" (as kinksters sometimes refer to their lives in the subculture) for many years herself as a self-identified kinky polyamorous pansexual "slut," Dr. Fennell brings an insider's intimate understanding to her writings about the Scene. She discussed some of her experiences in Elisabeth Sheff's (2015) anthology Stories from the Polycule (Thorntree Press).

Book Information
ISBN 9781538168769
Author Julie L. Fennell
Format Paperback
Page Count 296
Imprint Rowman & Littlefield
Publisher Rowman & Littlefield
Weight(grams) 481g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 154mm * 18mm