BDSMSF(QF): Sadomasochistic Readings of Québécois Women's Science Fiction

Summary

For the first time in my life, I was living in the world where my fantasies – what I once considered perversions – were fully accepted, even encouraged.

— Chelsea Shepard, Worthy of a Master 110

Sexual themes are quite common in science fiction, demonstrated for instance in the many entries in sf dictionaries and encyclopaedias and in the many anthologies that revolve around speculative sexuality. Interestingly, sexual representations in sf stories often suggest a certain level of sadism, or at least of cruelty. From the impossibility of sexual encounters between the mutually alien bodies of human beings and Others (for example, in Octavia Butler's ‘Bloodchild’ [1984]) to the mind's entrapment in a machine that prevents any sexually induced exultation (for example, in Anne McCaffrey's The Ship Who Sang [1961]); from psychologically painful mutations (as in Samuel R. Delany's ‘Aye, and Gomorrah…’ [1967]) to the loss of the corporeal envelope in cyberspace (as in Pat Cadigan's Mindplayers [1988]), science fiction has not always been kind to the physical body in the stories that it tells. Beyond even these conjunctures of sf and sadomasochistic fantasies, however, there is an active subgenre that combines sf and sadomasochism – or BDSM. Its fictions depict scenes of domination and submission, of consensual (and sometimes not so consensual) torture and bondage, of BDSM established as a system. Books such as Cecilia Tan's The Velderet (2001), Chelsea Shepard's Two Moons series (2003–2004), and K. M. Frontain's Bound in Stone series (2005) fall into this category. John Norman's sadomasochistic-fantasy series Gor (1966–2001) made such a strong impression on the BDSM community that it led to a new set of material practices: real people, calling themselves Goreans, actually live their fantasies within the rules created by Norman for his novels (see Macintyre). Moreover, the fetish or SM scene and the sf milieu seem to some extent to attract the same audience:

I am no longer surprised when I go to a play party at someone's house

and find their book collection looks very similar to mine. A small shelf

of Pat Califia, Anne Rice, The Story of O, of course, but also shelves and

shelves of science fiction and fantasy.