Exploring the Ways Women Navigate Feminist and Submissive Identities: A Phenomenography

Identity shapes how people make sense of the world and their experiences, including their interactions with other people. Although bondage/discipline, dominance/submission, and sadism/masochism (BDSM) have been examined through a range of lenses, little research has explored the lived experiences and identity navigation of women who are both feminist and submissive. As women in this community navigate the intersecting meanings of feminism and submission, they might have trouble reconciling their politics and Dominance and submission (D/s) practice. When a person's identity characteristics intersect, there can be inner tension, whereby an individual might view herself as “wrong, other” or be viewed as “wrong, other” by society. Women who identify as both feminist and submissive may experience the phenomenon in qualitatively different ways, depending on life histories, level of identity resonance, and a variety of other issues impacting their lives. In this paper, we use phenomenography to investigate the differing ways in which 23 women in the BDSM community who identify as feminist and submissive navigate the conflicting identity standards of their feminist and submissive identities. Women in BDSM who identify as feminist and submissive navigate the identity standards in three ways: (1) having never experienced internal conflict between the identities (n = 9), (2) having experienced internal conflict between the identities in the past but no longer (n = 9), and (3) coping with current unreconciled internal tension between the identities (n = 5). These findings contribute to discourse on identity development, healthy relationships, and adult education by identifying challenges that women experience in accepting, reconciling, and navigating their identities.