Date of Award
2015
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Honors Thesis
Department
Gender Studies
First Advisor
Brooke Beloso
Abstract
In Fifty Shades of Grey, James masterfully utilizes a first person narrative to ease readers into unfamiliar sexual territory. However, while introducing relatively accurate terminology to enlighten her readers on BDSM practices, James further perpetuates the pseudo-acceptance of such sexual deviance by relying on mainstream, vanilla, or non- BDSM practitioning audience members to insert their own normative framework into the narrative (Weiss, 2006, p. 114). This literary approach allows readers to unknowingly utilize these fictional texts as an educational tool to understand BDSM. Fifty Shades of Grey utilized as a pedagogical tool is counterproductive to an accurate understanding of BDSM. With James' weak character development and reliance on an easily absorbed romance/love narrative, mainstream readers are enabled and encouraged to use a heteronormative framework to interpret the brief BDSM scenes contained in Fifty Shades of Grey (Weiss, 2006, p. 114).
Recommended Citation
Linos, Viviane Panagiotis, "Fifty Shades of Fucked Up: On the Use and Abuse of a Sexual Subculture to Sell Books" (2015). Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection. 260.
https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/ugtheses/260