This article combines in-depth interviews and Karen Barad's work on materiality to think about the ways in which the materiality of blood might be understood in relation to sociality and blood-borne virus prevention among BDSM (bondage and domination, dominance and submission and sadomasochism) body modification practitioners in Sydney, Australia. In doing so, it confronts questions of how the materiality of blood can be theorized in ways that neither presume a fixed, a priori ontological status or essence, nor exclude it from (...) an active role in the production of realities. In taking account of both its co-constitutive role in practice, and its figurative power (as flow) in understanding the mind/body, discourse/materiality conjunctions at work in BDSM body modification practice, we aim to illuminate further the imbrication of materiality and meaning, and generate a more complex and fruitful account of blood for the purposes of blood-borne virus prevention and education. (shrink)

This article takes a genealogical approach to the problem of affective communication that we find coalescing around the phenomenon of ‘affective transfer’ identified in experiences such as voice-hearing, telepathy and hypnotic suggestion. These experiences breach the boundaries between the self and other, inside and outside, and material and immaterial, and make visible some of the central issues that are important in re-thinking affect, relationality and embodiment. The article will attempt to re-engage the problematic of subjectivity by asking what a turn (...) to affect entails within such technologies of listening and attention. This is particularly important when such turning or opening to affect engenders a conversation with traumatic memories, albeit a conversation that does not occur primarily in a verbal register. The key focus will be on the marginalized status of telepathic modalities of affective transfer throughout the histories of the development of the psychological sciences. The article uses this as a platform to consider the connections between what is occluded or excluded from the psychological sciences, and what is being silenced within work on affect taking form across the humanities. Taking us back to the practice of telepathy in the 19th century and the problem of hypnotic suggestion in the mid 20th century (the Macy Conferences), the article discloses how both function as carriers of what is being overlooked and silenced in the engagement by many affect scholars with the knowledge-practices of the psychological and neurosciences. (shrink)