This is a history of the decadeslong love affair between a powerful
alternative sexuality called BDSM (bondage/discipline,
dominance/submission, sadism/masochism) and an innovative narrative
genre called science fiction and fantasy (SF&F). The book shows how SF&F
provides easy access to the language, symbols, rituals and ethics of
BDSM. Science fiction and fantasy offer strikingly positive
representations of BDSM, while the marginal status of SF&F ensures that
these representations will not normalize BDSM out of existence. These
sympathetic yet subversive representations encourage audiences to view
BDSM as an ethical sexuality, while simultaneously permitting BDSM to
retain its transgressive identity. This book explores representations of
BDSM in the Wonder Woman comics of the 1940s, in the novels and short
stories that Samuel Delany and James Tiptree wrote between the 1960s and
1980s, and in the television shows of the 1990s and 2000s: Buffy, Angel,
Battlestar Galactica and Dollhouse.