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Text
Broad Creation Date
2025
Language
English
Location
Portland
Abstract
This dissertation explores the aesthetics of Kink Kulture (KK), a vernacular term used by its practitioners, lovingly identified as kinksters, a subculture characterized by consensual practices involving power, control, and pain, such as BDSM. The study argues that KK represents a significant aesthetic influence on an artist's lifeworld, providing freedom and creative inspiration. The research examines KK as a communal subjectivity emerging in modernity, contributing as a creative force in art.
The investigation takes a hermeneutic-phenomenological approach, considering an artist's participation within the kink community as a source of inspiration, imagination, and creative intuition. It explores how KK provides enchantment to the world through the praxis of kink, offering a feeling of great pleasure and attraction due to its beauty.
The dissertation is structured into five chapters, covering topics such as the genealogy of algophilia, KK as a 'way of thinking', philosophical perspectives on KK, and its influence on visual and performing arts. KK’s influence intertextualizes the works of philosophers Nietzsche, Deleuze and Jean-Luc Nancy, and highlights the artists Garth Knight, Kembra Pfahler, and Hermann Nitsch.
The study challenges traditional definitions of violence, resistance, pain, and pleasure within the context of algophilia. It argues that KK offers an optimistic lifeworld aesthetic and establishes a promise for the future in which the kink culture aesthetic contributes to the arts.
By exploring KK and its aesthetic relationship to the artist's lifeworld, this research aims to bridge the gap between academia and activism, examining personal meanings related to the constructs of pleasure and pain in consensual kink play. The dissertation contributes to the limited scholarly literature on kink as a significant cultural phenomenon and its impact on contemporary aesthetic philosophy.
Disciplines
Aesthetics | Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies | Philosophy
Publisher
Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts
City
Portland ME
Recommended Citation
Kochansky, Samuel W., "THE AESTHETICS OF KINK KULTURE AND SUBJECTIVE INTERESTEDNESS" (2025). Academic Research and Dissertations. 66.
https://digitalmaine.com/academic/66
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