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BDSM Dictionary : Samois: history
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This entry is part of the BDSM Dictionary hosted by Informed Consent.
Samois was a lesbian-feminist BDSM organization based in San Francisco and existing from 1978 to 1983. It took its name from the fictional estate of Anne-Marie, a lesbian dominatrix character in "Story of O", who pierces and brands O. Well-known members of the group included the writer Pat Califia and feminist academic Gayle Rubin.
The roots of Samois were in a group called Cardea, a women's discussion group within the mixed-gender S/M group, the Society of Janus. Cardea existed only briefly, from 1977 to 1978 before discontinuing, but a core of lesbian members, including Califia and Rubin, were inspired to start Samois, an exclusively lesbian BDSM group.http://www.soj.org/Janhis.pdf http://web.archive.org/web/20050208113202/http:/...
Samois was strongly rebuked (and sometimes picketed) by Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media (WAVPM), an early anti-pornography feminist group. WAVPM, like later anti-pornography feminists, took a very strongly anti-SM line, seeing it as ritualized violence against women. Samois members felt strongly that their way of practicing SM was entirely compatible with feminism, and held that the kind of feminist sexuality advocated by WAVPM was conservative and puritanical. Samois openly confronted WAVPM with their position, and the exchanges between Samois and WAVPM were among the earliest battles of what later became known as the Feminist Sex Wars, with Samois being among the very earliest advocates of what came to be known as sex-positive feminism. http://www.leatherarchives.org/resources/issue21...
In 1981 Samois published a book "Coming to Power: Writing and graphics on Lesbian S/M", which reached a world-wide audience the following year when it was reprinted by Alyson Publications. The book alternates short stories with advice on technique, a model that has been used by various other BDSM books since then.
Samois split up in 1983 amid personal infighting, however, in 1984 Gayle
Rubin went on to form another organization called The Outcasts.
The Outcasts lasted until 1997, until they too split due to infighting.
A breakaway group, The Exiles, is still extant as of 2006 and
carries on in the tradition of Samois and The
Outcasts.http://web.archive.org/web/20050208113202/http:/...
In 1996, Pat Califia and Robin Sweeny published an anthology titled "The
Second Coming: A Leatherdyke Reader", which served as a sequel to
"Coming to Power", and also contained historical information on The
Outcasts, as well as other lesbian BDSM groups like the
Lesbian Sex Mafia and
Briar Rose.
http://www.bdsmdebunkingthemyths.com/Bibliograph...References
(This entry incorporates text from the SAMOIS article in Wikipedia.)
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