BDSM em perspectiva: um olhar foucaultiano sobre a comunidade BDSM de Belo Horizonte

Abstract

Debates about the topic of sexuality are far from exhausted, especially in the field of Organizational Studies. We still encounter resistance talking about it in an open and notstigmatized way, be it inside or outside academia so, for that reason, it is necessary that we do so now more than ever. While others may say there are more urgent or relevant topics to be talked about, Michel Foucault and Gayle Rubin have said before that there is no other topic more relevant than sexuality. Sexual behaviours considered a part of dissident sexualities (outside the norm, illegitimate, outliers, non-heteronormative) are broadly commented in the public sphere, wrapped up in silences and contradictions and politically charged. It makes the perfect target of political debates in times of great social stress, since, as a fundamental part of human experience, its peculiarities can easily become vehicles for social anxieties displacement. In this way, we can find the erotic BDSM and its community located at the threshold of constant tension between resistance and interdiction. Split between attempts of domination from the heteronormative order and the creation of ways of living for those subjects, between the silences and the production of truth. Thereby, the influence of Foucaults and its commentators writings about sexuality, the ways of subjectification through practices of self, the power-resistance relations and regimes of truth can be seen in this research, at the same time we attempt to work some analytical elements from Foucaults approach for discourse analysis which can be found in his writings. Having said that, this researchs main goal was to analyse the power relations and the practices of self, involved in the constitution of erotic BDSM practitioners subjects in Belo Horizonte. We found a community of practitioners that organise themselves in socialization spaces of their own, with their own social norms, rules of conduct, power dynamics, rituals and symbolic elements that could be taken as organizational aspects articulated to the experience of their sexuality, ergo an erogenous organization. Likewise, we found a group of subjects inserted in a complex strategic game of knowledge-power-sexuality, in a field of power-resistance relations that produces not only interdictions and exclusions but also subjects and truths, making possible some ruptures with the actual heteronormative matrix.