President's Showcase
Lark Stafford She/her
Supervising Professor: Dr. John Kilgore
Lark Stafford is a senior Creative Writing major hoping to pursue a career as a Marriage and Family Therapist specializing in Sex Therapy. In 2023-2024, she worked as a research assistant to Dr. Darrian McKiernan in their study on child sexual abuse disclosure patterns. After graduating in the Fall 2024 semester, Lark plans on attending a Couple and Family Therapy graduate program.
Abstract
With the popularization of social media, users in their particularly formative years are exposed to a wide variety of rhetoric dealing with matters of the self in relation to larger societal movements. Simultaneously, our understanding of sex has arguably never been more central to certain contemporary social discourses, especially feminism.
Movements such as “Choice feminism” and its perhaps reductive view of women’s personal capacity for freedom in the patriarchy have inspired numerous reexaminations of social structures women must contend with, sex being a predictably polarizing topic. Kink (more specifically, sadomasochism), though not quite mainstream, has been the subject of much discussion both in and outside of the academic sphere. Those who might consider themselves both feminists and activists may regard BDSM critically, seeing female/feminine submissive with male/masculine dominant participants as acting counter to the ideals of feminist thinking. In conceptualizing sex or kink as an accurate extension of common political dynamics, these activists unwittingly establish there to be a “correct” way to perform sexuality, a burden that again is disproportionally suffered by women.
This nonfiction piece aims to highlight the flaws of such ideology by offering a personal examination of the writer’s feminist identity in relation to sexuality. “Anti-kink feminism,” as it is called here, is challenged as being something born from the expectation that women must explain their sexual selves, especially when such a persona heavily deviates from conventional social norms.
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