Staci Newmahr

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at Buffalo State University

Nearly every ethnographer has observed the growing reach and increasingly uncomfortable power of the IRB. As IRB restrictions have grown tighter, the consequences have become more dire. The failure of most IRBs to understand ethnography at all, along with increasing concerns about litigation that trump the welfare of both researchers and “subjects,...

This paper conceptualizes eroticism as emotional experience. I use the Renaissance Faire to illustrate the construction of asexual eroticism along three dimensions: the carnal experience of Faire, its focus on physicality, and intimations of increased interpersonal access. This approach forefronts the complexity of eroticism and situates the erotic...

Stephen Lyng’s concept of edgework represents a crucial shift in understanding particular kinds of risk taking, as intrinsically and phenomenologically rewarding. Although it has been widely and usefully used since then, scholars have observed limitations in its applicability across class, race, and gender lines. A good deal of recent work has ende...

Representations of consensual sadomasochism range from the dark, seedy undergrounds of crime thrillers to the fetishized pornographic images of sitcoms and erotica. In this pathbreaking book, ethnographer Staci Newmahr delves into the social space of a public, pansexual SM community to understand sadomasochism from the inside out. Based on four yea...

Based on extensive ethnographic research in a public SM (sadomasochism) community, this paper frames SM as recreation. Drawing on Robert Stebbins’ work on “serious leisure” (1982), I posit that in order to more adequately understand SM as it occurs in this community, we need to shift from mainstream assumptions of SM as (simply) “kinky sex” to a mo...

Despite a good deal of work on pain as a social/emotional construction, the assumption persists that pain is understood and experienced as inherently and originally negative. Postmodern and constructionist treatments of pain alike focus on negotiations and mediations of pain from that point forward. This article explores the ways in which members o...

Based on a four-year ethnographic study of an SM community, this article blends analytic and interpretative approaches to ethnographic writing, in order to illustrate the value of incorporating subjectivity into traditional ethnographic analysis. I juxtapose field notes about my own participation in SM with stories of outsiderness among members of...