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Book Review: Offending Women: Power, Punishment, and the Regulation of Desire

community does not have gender as an organizing concept, instead relying primarily on top/bottom and dominant/submission distinctions. Furthermore, ‘‘SM explicitly rejects gender as an organizing category of social life, often subverts gender roles as normative and sex-based, and contains the potential for further and more extreme subversion’’ and ‘‘for many players this subversion is a conscious objective of SM’’ (p. 118). SM is an all-encompassing lifestyle for those in the community Newmahr studied. Not only does SM consume their time but so too does it serve as the raw materials from which participants construct their identities. Part 3, Edges is the most theoretically rich and dense section of the book. In the three chapters comprising this section of the book, Newmahr explores definitions, their applications and intersections of issues of sexual, erotic, violence, pain and intimacy, as well as examining whether and how SM can be conceptualized as edgework. As in earlier sections of the text here, she problematizes and explores how feminist perspectives can be integrated with both SM and edgework, concluding that SM can be viewed as edgework from a feminist perspective—but only with extensions of the edgework concept to include emotional and psychological boundaries, not restricting edgework to physical boundaries. In the end, Newmahr concludes that ‘‘SM is about constructing intimacy through social interaction. It is about obtaining access, securing it, granting it, promising it, daring one to take it, and testing it . . . The edgework of SM is not only collaborative; it is also intimate. Intimacy in SM is not only an outcome of collaborating the edge, but central to its appeal’’ (p. 186, emphasis in original). Throughout, Playing on the Edge is a well written, well supported, clear, easily accessed, and comprehendible yet theoretically rich delineation of a (supposedly deviant) community. In simple terms, this is a very good book and a first-class example of what ethnographic research can and should look like. From the first to the last pages, Newmahr skillfully interweaves presentations of findings and theoretical explanations and developments. Through her chapter-opening prologues, colorful and intense examples and theoretical explanations the reader is drawn into the Caeden SM community and shows how the community is structured, functions, and serves the needs of its members. And, beyond the direct ethnographic explanations of the SM community readers are also treated to sophisticated discussions of how concepts such as ‘‘community,’’ ‘‘identity,’’ and ‘‘edgework’’ can be understood and effectively used to understand alternative, supposedly deviant, social experiences.