Pulp Sadomasochism and Sensationally Narrativizing Sexual Violence in the Postwar United States

Abstract

While BDSM has recurrently served as a site of moral panic in the United States, little is known about its representations, pleasures, or politics before the 1970s. This article fills part of that gap, examining the mass of pulp fiction texts from the postwar United States that explicitly depicted BDSM. Underscoring that these pulps were popular vehicles for circulating meanings and definitions of BDSM to Americans, this article argues that the pulps collectively misrepresented and sensationalized BDSM as disturbed sadomasochism and/or nonconsensual sexual violence. In doing so, the pulps used BDSM to index central postwar concerns about the relationship between sexuality and norms of citizenship and national identity. At the same time, their pornographic excess undercut the ideological work of the texts. By analyzing the pornographic covers, paratextual framing elements, and narrative conventions of these pulps, this article aims to further understanding of both the history of BDSM and to interrogate what is at stake in repeated national and queer and feminist moral outrage with BDSM. This article highlights the long history of sensationalizing BDSM as a form of nonnormative sexuality within the United States. It argues that when queer and feminist thinking reproduces such sensationalizing, it ignores the longer history of using overblown concerns with nonnormative sexuality as a cover for solidifying raced, classed, and gendered structures of citizenship and identity. This article ultimately suggests that dwelling with the representations of BDSM found in the pulps offers an opportunity to examine how sexuality has historically reaffirmed and disrupted norms of US citizenship, and how it continues to do so.