Bound Up: On Kink, Power, and Belonging

by Leora Fridman

In an autotheoretical journey through bondage, domination, and intimacy, Leora Fridman uncovers how Jewish historical trauma can be challenged and explored in embodied relations. Drawing on her experiences as an American Jew in Germany, Fridman delves into BDSM practices and experimental communities from Oakland to Berlin. This work weaves personal encounters with critical analysis founded in feminist theory, queer literature, Holocaust history, and memory studies. Bound Up begins with kink and leads us through a sensual and intelligent approach to intergenerational trauma and lived politics. What kind of healing can take place in the relational and physical realm? How can intimacy contradict and complement the process of political reparations? Fridman layers a nuanced understanding of shame, responsibility, and power with explorations of cinema, contemporary art, and popular culture to shed light on topics from personal and political relationships to victimhood and blame. Both timely and timeless, this work is an address to history and the contemporary moment, relevant to Jews, diasporic scholars, and all exploring ethical relationships with history and with other humans.

Genres: Nonfiction, Sexuality, Feminism, Memoir, Jewish, Germany

240 pages, Paperback

Published September 24, 2024

Reviews

[Alec L · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written in a meandering, autotheoretical format, this book examines (both the author's own, and also more generally) the Jewish body in the present day. And indeed, though "Jewishiness" is completely absent from the title of the book per se, it serves as the clear focus of the book. Of course, Kink does feature as a lens: spending a moderate amount of time on investigation of kink (e.g. doing some mildly close readings of anything from Nazi furry porn to the author's attendance of an Oakland kink party), the author is able to force the reader to consider the experience of embodiment as a Jewish woman. As Fridman reminds us, Oscar Wilde said that "Everything is about sex, except sex, which is about power", and kink makes such power in sex extraordinarily explicit. That being said however, kink is far from the *only* method of investigation in the book, and much of the book (though still very much focused on Jewish bodies, e.g. the through the story of Stella Goldschlag) is indeed about questions of "power" and "belonging".

Admittedly, I am slightly let down because I had hoped for more theory (especially around kink), and instead I got a bunch of dick jokes about the "fascinus". Indeed, while the author does sometimes slightly reach for theory (seemingly authentically and naturally by how she conceptualizes the world), there is not much *theorization* that happens per se. The most central theoretical move is the wordplay, which I first took to be banal and standard "consider the etymology" sort of trick, and later appreciated as at least a fairly meaningful attempt at playing around with the prefix "fasci-" (presumably where the "bound up" in the book's title comes from). Though these interventions have varying effectiveness, they do at least tie the book together, with discussions ranging from the aforementioned dick jokes to a later on less humorous observation on the tendency of some around her in Oakland to call many things "fascist". Even if Fridman does not have theory in the sense I had hoped for, this book is affectively effective, and leaves one not only with emotions for thought, but useful glimpses of the author's own existence in the world (glimpses which, she makes a point of noting, she has actively chosen to share).

[Sophie Abromowitz]

what if you were doing a scene and some lady from belmont was there Thinking About History