There aren’t a lot of spaces that entirely fit with the kind of work I want to do. I remain committed to a bunch of frameworks and approaches I’ve learned in my course of study. But those frameworks are often not taken seriously or read legibly by people without the same background. Spending time in activist and rope spaces has made want to apply approaches to parts of ordinary life in ways that are practical but often outside of disciplinary bounds of academic spaces, and are often looked down upon by scholars. And that’s all complicated by an ethical and political imperative I feel to address the ways that kink and BDSM haven’t always been accessible or inclusive. It means that I often find myself producing work that doesn’t always fit well within the stifling libertarian orthodoxy of most sex-positive spaces.

Everyone involved in Chicago Rope has their own reasons for putting time and energy into it. But a big motivation for me has been to get the different realms of experience in my life to work with each other. For me, working on Chicago Rope has rope has largely been about translation and transformation, an ongoing interrogation of knowledge I’ve received. It’s been less about squaring of disparate parts of my life in an attempt to try and build something unified than to bring things together into constellations that allow new forms connection and potential. On some basic level, all I want is some more tools to live and think with, stuff that opens up new ways of affecting and being affected.

I’ve recently had a few people approach me and tell me that there’s a significant difference in the way I talk about things differently when I write about them for blog posts and when I teach. Part of that is a question of audience. But another is just one of function. A lot of what I’m doing when I’m trying to write about rope, especially what I’m trying to publish publicly in this form, is to piece my way through things I haven’t fully figured out yet. There’s a lot of marks of jargon and specific dialects, the sinew and connective tissue attached to where I got my thought from. This is as much a form of citation as anything else. I’m looking for people that can push me in productive ways, and knowing my sources helps with that. Beyond that, I think there’s value in some of the language I use, and we shouldn’t strip discourse of minor language or demand everything be totally transparent or immediately legible.

However, I also realize there’s an educational imperative to sometimes be clear and concise. Both have value, and their own time and place. When I’m teaching in person, I generally want to impart something a lot more direct. And I want to have a polished finished product, something that’s a lot easier when designing a lesson than trying to fashion a relatively discrete chunk for a new conceptual approach for rope bondage. So when I’m teaching, a lot of this language falls to side, and my form of speaking is more direct and conversational, more directly about my experience and the experience of others. That doesn’t mean that all the thinking I do outside of it isn’t there. It’s just in the background, informing the material.

When I sit down to think about why I’ve spent so much time thinking about rope, I come to the fact that that right now the pedagogy for rope bondage really hasn’t crystalized. This is a new community. There’s still a lot of space for new approaches. In the last few years, I’ve seen a lot of professionalization. Some aspects of that are really laudable. I think it’s going to lead to a communal reckoning about the responsibilities that presenters and organizers have that’s much needed. But there’s also been a downside. Rope bondage as an art has slowly started to harden as it coalesces to become a culture and discipline all of its own. And there’s something that’s lost in that process. Part of why I’m so motivated is that I want to see a closing window to make some major changes in how we talk about kink and sex and rope in ways that have a lot of ethical and political importance. There are some ways in which it becomes harder to do make those changes day by day, as rope culture settles and thickens.

I don’t want people to walk away from my writing thinking I believe that they should have the same theoretical approaches and coordinates. A monoculture dedicated to the same commitments I have would be dreadful. I want a proliferation of kinds, a generative bounty full of things that I could never think of and perhaps won’t be able to fathom. I actually don’t think that the mode of approach is particularly important. What I care about is a specific process. I want to encourage people to do is to bring the knowledge and experience they have to rope and to enrich it, to use rope as a tool to think with and their experience and use their experience as a way to challenge and push at what they’ve received with rope. I think that project doesn’t just lead to better tying. I think it can lead to more politically informed and intentional action. Kink doesn’t have a lot of great tools for talking about and dealing with the influence of outside social structures. But the good news is that rope culture need not limit itself to existing BDSM discourse.

What I’m advocating for here is not a hard edged moral relativism, but an ecumenism, a methodological promiscuity. One way to make sure that everything doesn’t just look like a nail is that you have tools other than a hammer. One of the great things about rope being only a small domain in life is that it gives us room to bring the rest of our lives, our varied experience to the table. Tying is the kind of activity that heartily rewards collecting cultural knowledge. We think better when we think together. Having a conversation doesn’t mean always agreeing, or playing nice, or refraining from criticism. But it means talking in good faith, and actively thinking and listening. It also means that one tries to make an effort to articulate how one’s ideas and tools work. That’s one of the most important parts of making sure others can benefit as a community from what you know.

And here, I’m reminded of something W.B. Yeats once said: “All that is personal soon rots; it must be packed in ice or salt.” Yeats appreciated rot a lot less than I do. The same can be said of the personal. But I think there’s something to that description of writing. A lot of my writing project is my trying to package my thought for myself in others in ways that it stays durable, in ways that might be transportable. And, like something salted or frozen, the thought is changed by the act of writing. Perhaps it’s better to think of my writing as pickling, an attempt at fermentation, of productive creation by introducing the foreign. Sometimes the results are messy. Sometimes they’re confusing and intoxicating. But there’s value in it. What I want to see, and call for, is for more people to be honest and open about the messy work. To stake being wrong, to hazard mixture and making something new or different or against orthodoxy. A big part of what I want to do when I teach, and my project with Chicago Rope, is to help facilitate others doing that. I don’t want to reproduce myself or how I think. I want make a space for us to create together. That’s the goal of my writing and my classes, even if both look pretty different. Sometimes that might mean pushing against existing structures and institutions. But that’s only towards the end of communal flourishing. I want us all to write and talk. But in ways where we’re open to possibility of both of those processes changing us. It’s a tall order. And one that’s actively disincentivized in so many kink spaces. But I think it’s worth it. There’s value in sharing, in being open to being transformed while we transform our communities. Even self-tying is fundamentally communal and social on some level.

There are times when I question whether my choice to try and make spaces within the rope scene for the kind of project I’m engaging in was the right one. There are times that I think about going back to school, or starting some other kind of project where I can get better institutional support, or where I feel more legible to people. But even as I think about changing course, I know that if I decide to, I’ll have been pretty fundamentally shaped by rope, and how it has utterly changed how I think about and approach the world. And for now, I want to share that. And I want to see what rope has done to others, what rope can do, and be in a position where I can start to personally and politically evaluate how I could best incorporate rope into my life and my community.