It’s 1:30 am on a Tuesday. My boyfriend is in bed next to me snipping GIFS from Un chant d’amour for a presentation he’s preparing. I’m trying to snuggle him, stuck somewhere between watching what he’s doing on his laptop and dwelling on how it feels teaching rope. As I watch Lucien Sénémaud dance, all I can think about is how far that seems from how we tie and how far I feel when I’m comfortably at home from the way I am in a classroom or a dungeon.

I think back on the class we just taught, how we were read, how we were gendered, and I try not to spiral. Rope, when it’s done well, feels authentic. Other times it’s captured into something else, something out of my control. I’m interpellated into a whole lot of things I’m not okay with. And I am left wondering why I spend so much time teaching it. Why I make myself visible in a way that isn’t necessary.

I’ve come close to quitting teaching and tying publicly a few times. I feel on the brink of it more often than I’d like to admit. But something has kept me going. It’s more than the satisfaction I get out of watching someone I’ve taught use something they’ve learned. It’s more than that rope is a good thing to think with. I think I’ve stuck around because the process of learning to tie has been a chance for me to work out a bunch of things about who I am and how I want to relate to the world. It’s been a chance not only to look at where I’m at, but to begin changing my habits, my orientation, my relation to the world.

I think back on Susan Stryker’s “The Poetics of Transsexual Sadomasochism.” How strongly I identified with it reading it:

S/M had become for me … a technology for the production of (trans)gendered embodiment, a mechanism for dismembering and disarticulating received patterns of identification, affect, sensation and appearance, and for reconfiguring, coordinating and remapping them in bodily space.

Kink spaces are some of the most gendered spaces I’ve ever been in. A lot of the time that’s toxic. But that very visibility helped me start thinking through a bunch of tangled stuff that I spent years trying to avoid. The conscious embodiment of rope forces someone to contend with their body, how they are being read. How they want to be read. How they map things. And through tying I’ve found new relations, new cartographies of the self, opened myself up to trying to change things that bothered me but always felt fixed and out of my control.

I spend a lot of time pushing back on people who think that BDSM or kink or rope or sexuality is inherently transgressive and liberatory. I don’t think that any of those things are. But I do think they’re special. They’re special because they are places people actively try to think about and change their habits of relating to others. They’re places where the edges of what we assume about gender and culture start to unravel. They are places, perhaps, where there’s a little bit more room for action.

All of that, though, seems so fragile to me. It’s all so ready to be taken up into selling something. Or, even worse, some naturalizing fable. I watch people misread the brilliance of @barkas interview metaphor as something it isn’t, a vision of interrogation, a journey towards unknown truth betrayed by involuntary spasms of pleasure or pain. Nothing about rope is properly forensic. Nothing about pain or pleasure, as much as we fantasize it’s the case, vouchesafes the truth. That’s the logic of pornography and torture, not a good rope scene.

But that logic is there, lying in wait, for the people that want to feel confident in themselves. There’s so much to be written about how rope culture is haunted by Darwin and Ekman and Charcot. That’s partially why we’re awash in anatomical explanations, in cheap primers on neuroscience. Knowing how endorphins work doesn’t let you know what someone else is feeling. There’s aspect of that that’s unknowable. Dealing ethically means acknowledging that. It means reading someone’s else’s body not as a series of symptoms or clues or evidence, but as something that’s communicating, as someone who is communicating, and that you have to learn a language to understand. It’s a comforting fiction that you can know someone’s body better than they know it themself, that you can be sure you’re doing the right thing without communicating or checking in. But it’s just that. A fiction. A dangerous one at that.

Alongside barkas’ Archaeology of Personalities, we should we read Preciado’s Contrasexual Manifesto. That might help us begin to articulate where the bottom falls out of the self, about what such an archaeology can actually uncover:

Sexualities are like languages: they are complex systems of communication and reproduction of life. As languages, sexualities are historical constructs with common genealogies and biocultural inscriptions. Like languages, sexualities can be learned. Multiple languages can be spoken. As is often the case within monolingualism, one sexuality is imposed on us in childhood, and it takes on the character of a naturalized desire. We are trained into sexual monolingualism. It is the language that we are unable to perceive as a social artifact, the one that we understand without being able to fully hear its accent and melody. We entered that sexuality through the medical and legal acts of gender assignment; through education and punishment; through reading and writing; through image consumption, mimicry, and repetition; through pain and pleasure. And yet we could have entered into any other…

It is possible to learn and invent other sexualities, other regimes of desire and pleasure production. While thinking of sexuality as a language and aesthetic, this manifesto calls for surpassing formalism, functionalism, and the empire of vision. Countersexuality is an attempt to become foreign to your own sexuality and to lose yourself in sexual translation.

When rope goes well, it’s a way not just to learn new patterns of desire, but a way to build to space for inventing them. A big part of learning how to tie is acculturation. It’s learning new pleasures. That’s why I like to tie with people familiar with who I’ve learned from and the culture I’ve learned to be part of.

But it’s more than that when done right. It’s a toolset for building other regimes of knowledge, for modulating attention. It’s subversive in its perversity. In the way it spreads sensation across the body in new configurations. In its duration. In the way it pulls us away from some of our norms and fictions around gender and sex.

In a good rope scene, everything is so contingent. Tying well means opening yourself to other, to the unknown and unknowable. Sometimes, though not always, it can make a space outside of set logics and given relations. The binaries we’re held to so often and so violently can be inverted or displaced or give way to something else, which may also be displaced as part of the process of tying. Exposer / exposed. Exposing exposed. Mover / moved. Moving moved. Toucher / touched. Touching touched. These are genders and ways of being much as anything else when tying.

That’s perhaps why it’s so painful to feel all that potential collapse when someone makes a joke, well-intentioned, recruiting me into some universe of uber masc domly doms where I don’t really belong. I can feel naturalization pulling the air out the room, the walls collapsing. I feel the need to push for more space. To plea for a way of doing rope that’s positioned against nature. A rope that has room for liberation and resistance. A kind of rope that is properly countersexual.

There’s a lot of work to be done talking about rope and gender. How what we do plays into existing systems or resists them. What queer rope looks like. How to contend with histories of violence and colonialism tied up in what we do. It’s a lot to think about. Sometimes too much. Which is why it’s nice, after class, to try and ignore it all, head placed against someone I trust who recognizes me, as I distract myself with something related, but far enough away it will let me drift to sleep.