Bound Up: On Kink, Power, and Belonging

A provocative look at historical trauma as bound, incarnated, and processed through intimate and sexual expression.

In an autotheoretical journey through bondage, domination, and intimacy, Leora Fridman uncovers how Jewish historical trauma can be challenged and explored in embodied relations. Drawing on her experiences as an American Jew in Germany, Fridman delves into BDSM practices and experimental communities from Oakland to Berlin. This work weaves personal encounters with critical analysis founded in feminist theory, queer literature, Holocaust history, and memory studies. Bound Up begins with kink and leads us through a sensual and intelligent approach to intergenerational trauma and lived politics. What kind of healing can take place in the relational and physical realm? How can intimacy contradict and complement the process of political reparations? Fridman layers a nuanced understanding of shame, responsibility, and power with explorations of cinema, contemporary art, and popular culture to shed light on topics from personal and political relationships to victimhood and blame. Both timely and timeless, this work is an address to history and the contemporary moment, relevant to Jews, diasporic scholars, and all exploring ethical relationships with history and with other humans.

Leora Fridman is a writer, educator, and curator whose work is concerned with identity, care, collectivity, and embodiment. She is faculty associate in the narrative medicine program at Columbia University, faculty at the Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at the New School, and director of public programs at the Center for New Jewish Culture. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.