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In the last decade, much has been debated about the topic of BDSM in various scientific fields. With the slow and steady blending of BDSM with mainstream culture, which escalated rapidly with the appearance and extreme popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey, BDSM has become a current topic of discussion in a broad variety of contexts. Moreover, with the recent change in medical classification of BDSM practices in ICD-11 (World Health Organization, 2018), which strictly clinically separated the sexological diagnosis of nonconsensual sadism from consensual SM practices, BDSM has also become a hot issue in the community of diagnostic experts. This chapter explores three aspects of the evolution of BDSM subculture in the postcommunist Czech Republic in the context of the continuous worldwide development of BDSM subculture – (1) role-play, (2) unification, and (3) commodification in the BDSM subculture – situating them within the broader context of the development of society in the postcommunist environment and the development of the BDSM scene worldwide.

Much scholarly examination of BDSM and kink attempts to make meaningful various specific practices as cultural “texts,” and analyzes them for what they might signify within a particular culture or subculture. This approach has often focused on interpreting specific acts in relation to human sexuality or psychology – specifically deviance – or on critiquing them from a feminist perspective. I propose to approach an examination of (a particular) BDSM (event) itself as (a) performance, and I argue that it is not only performance but that it is performative, creating a liminal space within the already liminal space of the fetish club in which it occurs. This “kink-space” then becomes the place within which the embodiment, and the dissolution, of binaries occurs, creating possibilities for the audience and upending the structures upon which identity is based. Ultimately, BDSM as performance is an avenue for the understanding of the concepts of liminality and power and how they function to create and contain selves.