Queer Resistance Through Sexual Role-play: Arousal and Community

This paper examines a BDSM role-play event (larp) within a long-standing leather dyke+ community in the Nordics and Europe as a site of shared pleasure, communal care, and queer resistance. Drawing on seven scene-focused small-group interviews, participatory observation, and analysis of design documents, the authors analyze one event in depth as a heterotopic "common world" in which queer desires can be explored collectively. Their analysis uses reflexive thematic analysis from an insider perspective, framing the event as both a ludic counterpublic and a space of radical intimacy.

The study argues that pleasure is structurally embedded in erotic larp design rather than added on afterward. Sensory registers such as touch, taste, sound, and smell become part of the game system, shaping both individual arousal and a communal erotic atmosphere. Participants described arousal as emerging through the interplay of fiction, bodily sensation, and community culture, moving between self and character rather than attaching to a fixed identity. Four themes emerged from the analysis: ridicule of patriarchal and heteronormative clichés, the balancing of role-play with eroticism, the un-shaming of queer erotic action, and the ungendering and redefinition of arousal, particularly through transmasculine erotic traditions.

The authors conclude that these play spaces function as caring counterpublics that enact political resistance through affective practice. By enabling non-normative desires and relational dynamics that may be unsafe or unavailable in everyday life, the event supports what the authors describe as livability strategies, sustaining viable and pleasurable queer lives despite cultural suppression. The work contributes to erotic larp scholarship and to game studies more broadly by showing how resistance becomes integral to the ludic experience through queer community and shared sexual pleasure. As a short submission to the DiGRA community, the paper presents preliminary findings intended to inform a full article.