Letter From the Editor

Abstract

Beyond the Assumptions examines the ways kink is understood, experienced, and interpreted across clinical, cultural, relational, and embodied contexts. Bringing together scholarship, critical inquiry, lived experience, and clinical reflection, this issue explores themes of care, trauma, power, sensory regulation, neurodiversity, sexuality, stigma, and therapeutic practice. Contributors challenge inherited assumptions about kink and invite deeper consideration of the meanings, functions, and contexts of diverse experiences. Collectively, the issue creates space for complexity and encourages readers to reconsider familiar narratives surrounding kink, its practitioners, and the communities in which it exists.