Am I on Earth?: Immanence, Transcendence, and Religion in Kink Experience

Kink is not a religion, however it is in relationship with religion. Kink has something to say about and to religion. In this dissertation, I combine interviews from community partners and fieldnotes from participate observation from the kink communities in Saint Louis, Missouri and the Dallas/Fort-Worth Metroplex to analyze the relationships between kink practices, kinksters, and the Kink Community with religion. While kinksters and the Kink Community mostly consider kink and religion adversaries, or in the least, incompatible practices and belief systems, religion offers kinksters a framework to understand, articulate, and organize their kink identities and roles as individuals and as a Community in meaningful ways. In the field of religious studies, kink provides a schema to consider ‘religion’ outside of religion and it also offers new approaches to evaluate ‘religion’ inside of religion. I use John Sarrouf’s model of “essential tensions” to demonstrate the requisite role of immanence and transcendence in kinksters’ understandings and experiences, as well as in the functioning of the Kink Community. In kink, immanence and transcendence are separate principles and epitomize different experiences that are never quite separate. They must exist together and they must be antagonistic toward one another. Through this tension, immanence and transcendence stabilize each other as well as everything around them. This dissertation will reveal how and why immanence and transcendence are functioning in this way, why it’s related to religion, and what it says about religion.