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Articles by Dee Payton
Scenes as Games: Agency, Autonomy, and Value in BDSM
Hostname: page-component-cb9f654ff-rkzlw Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-08-29T01:41:26.834Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2025 Information Type Article Information Hypatia , Volume 40 , Issue 3 , Summer 2025 , pp.
Scenes as Games: Agency, Autonomy, and Value in BDSM
1. Introduction Many second-wave feminists argued that there is a fundamental tension between BDSM and the goals of feminism. “BDSM” is a compressed acronym, one which stands for bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism. Feminist criticisms of BDSM are many and varied, but we can begin to get a sense for the common themes here by taking a look at the volume Against Sadomasochism: A radical feminist analysis (Linden et al. Reference Linden, Pagano, Russell and Star1982).
The Burdened Virtue of Racial Passing
…we need your help. Confronting the many challenges of COVID-19—from the medical to the economic, the social to the political—demands all the moral and deliberative clarity we can muster. In Thinking in a Pandemic, we’ve organized the latest arguments from doctors and epidemiologists, philosophers and economists, legal scholars and historians, activists and citizens, as they think not just through this moment but beyond it.
Keep Pride Nude
Image: Mike Jack Arguments that kink has no place in a post-#MeToo Pride may appear reasonable, but celebrating public sexuality is an important step toward a future free of racism and homophobia.
When Queers Fought the State and Won
May 11, 2021 15 Min read time Storm the NIH ACT UP Action, May 1990 / Image: NIH History Office Sarah Schulman’s new history of AIDS activism group ACT UP NY is a definitive and instructive history of how outsiders forced the government to accept that they mattered. Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987–1993 Sarah Schulman Let the Record Show, Sarah Schulman’s monumental new history of ACT UP New York, is a war chronicle in which the teller is both scribe and veteran.
Police Reform Doesn’t Work
Minneapolis police watch a crowd of protesters, May 27, 2020 / Image: Chad Davis A century of failed liberal attempts at policing reform in Minneapolis supports the view that none of the city council’s current proposals will prevent there from being another George Floyd. The trial of Derek Chauvin has concluded with a guilty verdict. But the police killing of Daunte Wright in a Minneapolis suburb only weeks ago drives home that one guilty verdict doesn’t go nearly far enough.
Forum XVIII (Spring 2021)
Redesigning AI Artificial intelligence will not create superintelligence anytime soon. But it is already making huge advances—revolutionizing medicine and transport, transforming jobs and markets, and reshaping the fabric of social life. At the same time, the promises of AI have been increasingly overshadowed by its perils, from automation and disinformation to powerful new forms of bias and surveillance.
With Gay Adoption Decision, Will the Supreme Court Erode the Regulatory State?
Image: tedeytan / Wikimedia On the surface, Fulton v. Philadelphia poses a question about religious conscience—but its proponents hope it will enable conservatives to pick and choose which laws they have to follow. LGBTQ+ Americans appear to owe a lot to the Supreme Court lately. Despite fifty years of right-wing legal training, conservative foundation building, and huge influxes of donor cash, the federal judiciary has for the past two decades rather consistently delivered on queer rights.
A People’s Anthology: Episode One
(AP Photo/Anthony Camerano) Claudia Jones — “An End of the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!” Our members-only podcast is now available to all! A People’s Anthology is a reading series of radical essays and speeches. Season one highlights six short texts related to Black liberation struggles in the U.S., from Claudia Jones to the Combahee River Collective. Find the other episodes and links to Apple, Spotify, and more here. Read and introduced by Carole Boyce Davies.
A People’s Anthology
Our members-only podcast is now available to all! A reading series of radical essays and speeches, season one highlights six short texts related to Black liberation struggles in the U.S., from Claudia Jones to the Combahee River Collective. We are thrilled to make our podcast A People’s Anthology available to all listeners in this final week of Black History Month! Launched in December 2019, until now it has only been available as a Boston Review member benefit.
Can We Deduce Our Way to Salvation?
Wikimedia A new book suggests that modern readers can still follow the path of reason that Spinoza traced to true well-being, but they might not want to. Think Least of Death: Spinoza on How to Live and How to Die Steven Nadler Socrates says in Plato’s Gorgias that there’s nothing more serious than “the question [of] how we ought to live.” We may aspire to live a good and happy life—but what does such a life consist in? Good in what way? And happy how?
Why We Shouldn't Compare Transracial to Transgender Identity
From left: Jessica Krug, Nkechi Amare Diallo (née Rachel Dolezal), Caitlyn Jenner, Laverne Cox Unlike gender inequality, racial inequality primarily accumulates across generations. Transracial identification undermines collective reckoning with that injustice. Vanity Fair’s June 2015 cover, Caitlyn Jenner revealed her transgender identity to the world. But these words were not only a revelation; they also were a demand. Most obviously, they demanded that others call Jenner by a new name.
Why We Shouldn’t Compare Transracial to Transgender Identity
…we need your help. Confronting the many challenges of COVID-19—from the medical to the economic, the social to the political—demands all the moral and deliberative clarity we can muster. In Thinking in a Pandemic, we’ve organized the latest arguments from doctors and epidemiologists, philosophers and economists, legal scholars and historians, activists and citizens, as they think not just through this moment but beyond it.
When Quotas Come Up Short
Recently elected Nepalese women attend a policy training. (Photo: Tricia Taormina) Some gender equality initiatives help to reinforce exclusion rather than dismantle it. This essay is featured in Boston Review’s spring 2020 book, The Right to Be Elected. Much has been written about the benefits of electing women to office.
Violence Cannot Remedy Violence
Protestors gather to support the extension of the Violence Against Women Act. (Photo By Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via AP Images) Instead of deterring sexual violence, criminalization has empowered policing and punishment. To prevent both sexual and state-inflicted abuse, we must embrace restorative justice.
Tearing Down Black America
Lincoln Center under construction, after the demoltion of the historically black neighborhood of San Juan Hill. Image: NYPL Policing is not the only kind of state violence. In the mid-twentieth century, city governments, backed by federal money, demolished hundreds of Black neighborhoods in the name of urban renewal.
Police Sexual Violence Is Hidden in Plain Sight
Image: WCN 24/7 Forms of gender-specific violence are baked into the structure of law enforcement. Reform efforts will fail until we eliminate police discretion over women’s bodies. When photographs of Brett Hankison, one of the officers who murdered Breonna Taylor on March 13, began to make the rounds on social media, at least five women recognized his face. He was the same officer, they said, who had offered them a safe ride home and then sexually harassed or assaulted them.
Moral Reasoning in a Pandemic
Image: Ventilators in storage (AdobeStock). Three things we need to get right. Policy discussions during the pandemic have raised concerns for me, as a moral philosopher, about how policy analysts and policy makers are thinking about deaths from COVID-19 and the right way to combat them.
The Revolution at the Gate
Image: Laurie Skrivan/St. Louis Post-Dispatch via AP File Photos of Mark and Patricia McCloskey waving guns at St. Louis Black Lives Matter protesters became instantly iconic. But the McCloskeys are also only a symptom of how racism is served by private property. Among the most iconic images of our time are the photos taken last Monday of Mark and Patricia McCloskey, armed on the front lawn of their St. Louis mansion as Black Lives Matter protesters pass by.
Translation
Image: Bex Wade Set against the backdrop of Seattle Pride, a personal meditation on trauma, loneliness, and the paradox that gay community is often both life-giving and terribly disappointing. Editor’s Note: Adapted from Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s forthcoming The Freezer Door. It first appeared in Boston Review’s fall 2019 book, Allies. I’m pretty sure there’s nothing as sexual for me as walking shirtless in the hot sun toward the pounding bass of a sound system telling me I’m about to dance.
How a Conservative Legal Perspective Just Saved LGBT Rights
Image: Ted Eytan Gorsuch’s majority opinion tossed out the old common sense about sex, even as its logic buttressed other kinds of state control. It is already a truism that the Supreme Court’s June 15 six–three decision, holding that discrimination against LGBT people constitutes sex discrimination, came as a shock to queer and trans legal advocates.
In the Fight for Policing Reform, LGBT Is a Threadbare Alliance
New Orleans Police Department rainbow badge for Pride month. Image: NOPD Twitter Pride festivities attempt every year to reinforce the idea of an LGBT community, but when it comes to views on policing, white gay men and trans women of color often have little in common. Like the Stonewall Riots that Pride month commemorates, today’s protests oppose police harassment, profiling, and violence.
The Struggle to Abolish the Police Is Not New
Intake mugshot of Bayard Rustin at Lewisburg Penitentiary, 1945 Prison and police abolition were key to the thinking of many midcentury civil rights activists. Understanding why can help us ask for change in our own time. As protesters demand justice for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and Ahmaud Arbery, calls for police and prison abolition have gained unprecedented traction.
The Privilege of the Ally
Image: ShyCityNXR Allies can be powerful aides to social justice movements—but it is their responsibility to make sure they don’t become a distraction from the cause. This essay is featured in Boston Review’s book, Allies. I finally said it aloud on a panel at AWP (the annual creative writing conference organized by the Association of Writers & Writing Programs).
Without Women There Is No Democracy
Image: Jacinda Ardern before being sworn-in as New Zealand's Prime Minister. On the hundreth anniversary of suffrage, it’s time for gender equity in political office. This essay is featured in Boston Review’s new book, The Right to be Elected. When COVID-19 paralyzed the globe in April 2020, Donald Trump swaggered about the White House telling falsehoods while New Zealand’s prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, held a special press conference to reassure the nation’s children.
Mothering in a Pandemic
Image: Flickr / Nenad Stojkovic Society relies on the unpaid, invisible work of parents—mostly mothers—to care for children and to buffer kids from trauma and stress. Supporting that work during COVID-19 requires direct cash support to families. As the crisis in the business sector occupies Congress, the quieter crisis in many American homes goes largely unnoticed. In theory, all parents of young children must now navigate a world without schools and daycare.
Ethics at a Distance
Image: Flickr / FUMIGRAPHIK_Photographist We may feel individually powerless to contribute to social transformation. But each of us bears responsibility for helping to create a more just world. As we sat down for dinner the other night, the windows of our Oxford apartment started rattling. Outside, the street was erupting in applause as neighbors put their hands together—and their tin pots—for the UK’s National Health Service.
New Pathogen, Old Politics
Image: Cholera as depicted in Le Petit Journal, 1912. We should be wary of simplistic uses of history, but we can learn from the logic of social responses.
Dying in Jerusalem
Image: Chevra Kadisha Jerusalem & Rolzur Tunneling Unlike most places in the world where people get buried where they lived, for over two millennia people have traveled from far and wide to die in Jerusalem. But now the city is running out of graves, and against the backdrop of the Israel–Palestine conflict, burial is often a political matter. For close to five millennia, people have been dying in Jerusalem.
Love One Another or Die
During the AIDS crisis, different contingents of the LGBTQ movement set aside their differences to prioritize mutual care. What can we learn from this strategy today? And why is it still so difficult to talk about AIDS? On PBS, David Gergen—aide to every U.S. president from Richard Nixon to Bill Clinton, and current talking head—was asked about the “leadership qualities” exhibited by previous presidents during major crises.
Missing Zinn
On the tenth anniversary of radical historian Howard Zinn’s death, Cornel West opens up about their friendship and what Zinn would have made of the decade—including whether he would have voted for Bernie. Ten years ago, on January 27, 2010, activist historian Howard Zinn died. I never met him, but his death felt like losing a family member. If you had told me on that mournful day that a decade later I’d be interviewing Cornel West about Zinn, I would’ve told you to stop playing with me.
American Bottom
A pump meant to remove water from Centreville sits broken in a flooded roadside. Image: Walter Johnson Designed as a bucolic working-class suburb of St. Louis, the nearly all-black town of Centreville now floods with raw sewage every time it rains. “Bring us back some help,” residents say, living through an environmental horror that evokes centuries of official disinterest in black suffering, as well as a future in which the poor are left to suffer in areas made uninhabitable by climate change.
The Radical Equality of Lives
Image: Javier Ignacio Acuña Ditzel Judith Butler talks with Brandon M. Terry about MLK, the grievability of black lives, and how to defend nonviolence today. This interview is featured in Boston Review’s new print issue On Anger. Judith Butler is arguably the most influential critical theorist of our era. Her early books, such as Gender Trouble (1990) and Bodies That Matter (1993), anticipated a profound social and intellectual upheaval around sex, sexuality, gender norms, and power.
Who Is an Ally?
Image: rosefirerising Before allies were included in the LGBT movement, they had never been afforded equal footing within a social justice movement. But is this an effective strategy for building solidarity? This essay is featured in Boston Review’s new print issue Allies. At the start of 2019, gay journalist Jonathan Rauch proposed that the term “LGBTQ” be retired as a collective referent for sexual and gender minorities.
Can Christian Democracy Save Us?
Image: Hannibal Hanschke/Pool Photo via AP The political philosophy embraced by Germany’s leading party helped reunite Europe after World War II. Can it guide us safely away from today’s populism—or did it cause it? What Is Christian Democracy? Politics, Religion and Ideology Carlo Invernizzi Accetti In November 2016, as the world was still reeling from the shock over Donald Trump’s victory, Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel prepared a public statement addressed to the president-elect.
‘Flexible’ Family Leave Is Lousy Feminism
Balancing work-life pressures is often considered the holy grail, but men can still opt out of these policies. To move the needle on gender inequality, the state needs to take more coercive action. “You must know lots about Denmark,” she says. I’ve just told my new acquaintance that I’m a political philosopher, writing about family support policies. Danish-style policies support caregiving but won’t move the needle on gender inequality.
Toward a Democratic Hedonism
Debate over Title IX affirmative consent standards has assumed that consent is the best basis for a feminist sexual politics. But what if it isn’t? In the summer of 2017, Teen Vogue published an article titled “Anal Sex: What You Need to Know.” Penned by sex educator Gigi Engle, the essay is cute and candid (“Here is the lowdown on everything you need to know about the butt stuff”) and emphasizes the importance of sexual communication between partners.
When Jamaica Led the Postcolonial Fight Against Exploitation
Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley. Image: Jamaica Information Service In the 1970s, a bloc of Third World states forced the United Nations to take seriously the unequal distribution of global wealth. Could their example inspire a new generation? Editors’ Note: This essay appears in Evil Empire and is adapted from Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination. In 1972 the socialist left swept to power in Jamaica.
Confronting the Relics of the Old South
National Memorial for Peace and Justice. Image: Susan Ellison Two attractions in Alabama—the new national lynching memorial and the First Confederate White House—show a nation struggling to contend with its legacy of racial violence. Relics have the power to galvanize and unify people for diverse ideological ends. A broad category of objects, relics can be anything from the body parts of holy figures to objects intimately associated with their lives.
Those Left Behind When #LoveWon
Image: Cary Bass-Deschenes Did the success of gay marriage erode the radical potential of queer politics? The Unfinished Queer Agenda After Marriage Equality Edited by Angela Jones, Joseph Nicholas DeFilippis, and Michael W. Yarbrough Routledge, $39.95 (paper) Queer Activism After Marriage Equality Edited by Joseph Nicholas DeFilippis, Michael W. Yarbrough, and Angela Jones Routledge, $39.95 (paper) Queer Families and Relationships After Marriage Equality Edited by Michael W.
A History of Cyborg Sex, 2018-73
How sex with robots became safer—and better—than sex with actual men. This essay is featured in Boston Review’s print issue Once and Future Feminist. Order your copy! A lot of people don’t know this, but we once thought cyborg sex might be a bad idea. Back in the 2010s, serious concerns were raised by prominent scholars that sex robots were made by men, for men.
The Execution of Carlos DeLuna
Preventing Wrongful Convictions Los Tocayos Carlos: An Anatomy of a Wrongful Execution by James S. Liebman, Shawn Crowley, Andrew Markquart, Lauren Rosenberg, Lauren Gallo White, and Daniel Zharkovsky Columbia Human Rights Law Review, Issue 3, Volume 43. Prosecution Complex: America’s Race To Convict and Its Impact on the Innocent by Daniel S.
The Origins of Birthright Citizenship
Freed slaves Wilson, Charley, Rebecca, and Rosa demonstrating the importance of reading, New Orleans, 1864. Photocard by Charles Paxton. The Fourteenth Amendment was shaped by freed blacks’ insistence that everyone born in the United States deserved full citizenship. Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America Martha S.
When the Klan Came to Town
“The Great Army for Truth and Americanism Makes Rome Tremble” (1928); Image: Wikimedia History reminds us that firm and sometimes violent opposition to racists is a time-honored American tradition. In Perth Amboy, New Jersey, members of the Ku Klux Klan assembled to hear a xenophobic celebrity speak. An angry crowd gathered outside the building and as the lecture began inside, protestors interrupted the speaker and tried to shout him down. Eventually the crowd outside forced its way in.
Black AfterLives Matter
Image: Honor guard at Michael Brown's funeral. Brett Myers/Youth Radio Second chances are the currency of white supremacy. To be white is to colonize the afterlife. Editor's Note: This essay is excerpted from Making Kin not Population, edited by Adele Clarke and Donna Haraway (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2018).
When Gays Wanted to Liberate Children
Image: J. Ross Baughman Seventies activists wanted to emancipate kids and destroy the nuclear family—so how did we end up with gay marriage instead? This essay is featured in Boston Review’s summer 2018 print issue Once and Future Feminist. Order your copy today. In 1972 members of Boston’s Gay Men’s Liberation, one of the most significant Gay Liberation groups formed after the 1969 Stonewall riots, drove to Miami to hand out a ten-point list of demands at the Democratic National Convention.
The Forgotten Baldwin
James Baldwin’s book about the Atlanta child murders speaks best to the era of Black Lives Matter. Editor's Note: This essay is adapted from James Baldwin and the 1980s: Witnessing the Reagan Era. Used with permission of the University of Illinois Press. Copyright © 2018 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Few have inspired the Movement for Black Lives as much as James Baldwin.
Baldwin’s Lonely Country
Baldwin in 1969. Image: Allan Warren Fifty years ago, when Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, a devastated James Baldwin made a final attempt to reconcile the generational divide between the civil rights movement and Black Power. Audio courtesy of curio.io. This essay is featured in Boston Review’s print issue, Fifty Years Since MLK. Order your copy today. On the afternoon of April 4, 1968, James Baldwin was relaxing by the pool with actor Billy Dee Williams in a rented house in Palm Springs.
Brother Martin Was a Blues Man
Image: Gage Skidmore Cornel West on Martin Luther King, Jr., hope, and the future of activism. Editor’s Note: In February 2018, the Cambridge Public Library hosted a conversation between Harvard University professors Tommie Shelby, Brandon M. Terry, Elizabeth Hinton, and Cornel West.
Toward a Trans* Feminism
Image: At the 2014 Marcha de las Putas in Ecuador / Wikimedia Commons Feminism and trans* activism have been at odds for decades. They don't need to be. Editor’s Note: This essay is adapted from Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability. Over the course of my lifetime, I have called myself or been called a variety of names: queer, lesbian, dyke, butch, transgender, stone, and transgender butch, just for starters.
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