Gary Needham

Bringing out the Gimp: Fashioning the SM Imaginary

Abstract The intention of this article is to investigate the cultural power associated with the gimp and the gimp mask. The gimp is a clothed or costumed Sadomasochistic (SM) body, frequently a submissive that often wears a leather or rubber costume that covers and effectuates the entire body including the face. The gimp is also a representation of SM that circulates throughout fashion and film and other forms of popular culture. Since the gimps first outing and naming in the film Pulp Fiction it has become the byword for the head-to-toe leather SM look that has been appropriated by a number of designers as way of exploring and exploiting the relationship between fashion, fetishism, and transgression. As a counterpoint to the popular image of SM in fashion and film, this article also explores how the artists Catherine Opie and Robert Mapplethorpe have represented the gimp, not as an index of horror or transgressive style rather as an affirmative image of their own SM communities that, while still intended to shock, is a defiant attempt to rescue or reclaim the gimp from its negative associations.

All That Diaspora Allows: Film Between Queer and Diaspora

Through an extended analysis of the recent ‘queer diasporic film’ Touch of Pink (Canada/UK 2004) this chapter outlines the contribution that the categories of both ‘queer’ and ‘diaspora’ have to offer each other in ways that dislodge both terms from their limitations in accounting for, on the one hand questions of race and ethnicity, and on the other hand questions of non-normative sexuality. The subject of ‘queer diaspora’ as a lived experience, a critical discourse, and an object of theoretical analysis and reflection is a rich area of inquiry that, in its fusion of the terms queer and diaspora, productively names a double unfixing from both the already unfixed and anti-essentialist notions that queer and diaspora also names. The film Touch of Pink is one of a number of films recently directed by a diasporic queer filmmaker of colour that seem to offer useful insights into thinking about the fusion of these terms queer and diaspora through an articulation of the complexities and experiences of identity as they bristle against the diasporic queer’s transnational sexuality, sense of belonging and relationship to ‘home’.