Abstract

Concluding the book, this chapter weaves together themes highlighted previously in the text. The chapter shows how multiple available meanings and understandings of BDSM map onto the private/public distinction fundamental to the contemporary understanding politics, and then how BDSM practitioners themselves navigate those distinctions. Instead of trying to set the meaning of kinky practices once and for all, this chapter argues for the multiplicity—wildness—as the key quality of BDSM practice, and argues that to understand the politics and possibilities of kink, we need to give up on trying to determine its essential qualities, and instead focus on its deep relationality.