Alison Robertson

It was a huge pleasure to meet Alison Robertson for this week’s Nostalgia Interview. Alison’s research is in the area of subcultures – specifically BDSM and kink as religious practice. Alison refers to how this is a notoriously sensitive area – and about how hard it can be to get people to talk to her. 

Alison discuss the insider vs. outsider question and we learn that Alison is fascinated by areas where boundaries blur. Her participants might reject the label ‘religion’ but not the things that Alison believes make it a religion. Some people have a very fixed understanding of religion.

Alison talks about the therapeutic or confessional benefit for her participants when they talk about BDSM, and how some of them both wanted to be identified and didn’t want to be identified at the same time.

We discuss stereotypes and the judgements that people think may be attached to what they do, and we look at this in the context of nostalgia and the past.

Alison’s first degree was in Law and she is still in touch with a friend from playschool. In her experience as a PhD candidate she found that the edgier you are the better. But in an employment sense people tend to be more wary – and Alison recounts the experience from when a referee once refused to write a reference for Alison because they didn’t want to be associated with kink.

We talk about assumed binaries and how it applies to pleasure vs. pain. Alison tells us why she has a problem with the category of non-religion and about the different uses we give to the same word.

Alison reflects on how at school religion was put in a container and cut off from everything else, and that this does Religious Studies a disservice. She did a PGCE RE and we learn how she became interested in studying kink and why she would like it if more people studied it.

Then, towards the end of the interview Alison discusses positive memories and the definition of nostalgia, and how some words are negative and not all positive, e.g. intimacy, and the way kink can be a way of reshaping trauma. We end the interview by talking about the way Bat out of Hell has helped her understand fandom – and how there is nothing random about fandom!

Please note: Opinions expressed are solely those of Chris Deacy and Alison Robertson and do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of the University of Kent.