Please Scream Quietly

Julie Fennell holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Sociology from Brown University and a B.A. in Sociology and English Literature, summa cum laude, from the University of North Carolina at Asheville. Her academic specializations are gender and sexuality, and she is a tenured Associate Professor of Sociology at Gallaudet University. Her 2015 article with Robert Evans of cracked.com on BDSM has received over 2 million views, and a follow-up cracked.com article in which she was interviewed in 2017 received over a million views as well. An academic for-the-public talk that she gave locally on BDSM in 2015 was recorded has received over 10,000 views on YouTube; she will be giving a presentation on polyamory to the same organization in the fall of 2018. Dr. Fennell’s co-authored earlier research on withdrawal (coitus interruptus) which was published in the academic journal Contraception in 2009, also received widespread public attention, with discussions in media outlets around the world, from jezebel.com to the New York Times. In addition, she has published a sole-authored article on men’s and women’s roles in contraceptive decision-making in the highest-ranked journal in gender studies, Gender & Society; two other articles in Contraception; a co-authored commentary in the highly ranked Journal of Sexual Medicine; has published academic articles on BDSM for the sociology magazine The Sociologist and the journal Sociological Forum, with a forthcoming article in Sexualities; and a methods piece on her BDSM research for Sage Research methods. In preparation for writing this book, Dr. Fennell embarked upon an intensive period of in-depth participant observation in the mid-Atlantic BDSM scene beginning in January 2012. Throughout the summer of 2012, she traveled throughout the mid-Atlantic region, conducting interviews with 70 people who identified as kinky. She also observed dozens of small kink parties and several days-long kink events. Then in April 2017, she conducted a large-scale internet survey of kinksters with more than 1600 respondents. The BDSM scene is unusually appealing for an internet survey, as virtually all people involved in it are members of a single social networking website, FetLife. In addition to her academic study of the Scene, Dr. Fennell has over seven years of personal experience in the D.C./Baltimore BDSM scene. She remains a well-established figure there as a kinky performer, blogger, and presenter. In 2015, she was the recipient of the BDSM organization Black Rose’s highly regarded Jack McGeorge Award for Excellence in Education for her work in and about the community. She continues to teach BDSM in many parts of the U.S. and in Canada. Having lived in “the Lifestyle” (as kinksters sometimes refer to their lives in the subculture) for many years herself as a self-identified kinky polyamorous pansexual “slut,” Dr. Fennell brings an insider’s intimate understanding to her writings about the Scene. She discussed some of her experiences in Elisabeth Sheff’s (2015) anthology Stories from the Polycule (Thorntree Press).