A discontinuous discourse on a discontinuous subject INTRODUCTION To attempt to present the following ideas in some logical and, consequently, linear way would amount to a deception. To offer a coherent and explanatory logic, as is perhaps too common to contemporary social science, is to fashion a rhetoric that sustains the illusion of a corresponding […]

Sadomasochism directly touches and sometimes embarrassingly illuminates the degree to which hierarchy, with the immediate implication of power and control, permeates virtually all aspects of social life (Burke 1966; Foucault 1978; Chancer 1992). Aspects of social life that claim for themselves an egalitarian character tend to do so with a self-consciousness that announces its intention […]

Pedophilia is generally defined as sexual desire for the prepubescent, a sexual desire for those who, aside from being seen as unable to give meaningful consent or to be fully sexually responsive, are seen as objects who lack many of the qualities of the semiotic of the body that suggest erotic significance. This lack, or […]

Masturbation and homosexuality over the past century have been repositioned with specific images that range from “normality” to tolerable or normal deviance. The continued oppressions associated with masturbation are largely confined to those that individuals are encouraged to impose upon themselves. Currently, masturbation is accepted in current schemata of individual development. Even for psychoanalysts, masturbation […]

It is possible that at any one moment a society may contain a wide variety of forms of sexual perversion as I’ve defined it. Many such perversions are so obscure that they remain unknown and unknowable, if only because of the innocuousness of their practices. Still others occur with sufficient regularity that they become part […]

Sex is dirty to the extent that erotic reality threatens to undermine the cosmic categories that organize the rest of social life. This is the source of the fears that surround sex, but also the source of its fascination. If sex did not disintegrate the cosmos to some extent, human beings would want to copulate […]

The invention of the concept of the homosexual, the major focus of concerns for perversion in the late nineteenth century, made the sexual significant by making it a powerfully signifying aspect of character. While homosexuality took center stage in a heightened scrutiny of the sexual as emblematic of basic character types, it was also an […]

Sexual “deviates” are.. .an enigma, and it is the future of culture that they are challenging us to decipher through their obsessions. (Sylvere Lotringer 1988) MASTURBATION: FROM PERVERSION TONORMALITY Within the Western tradition, masturbation was the first “disease” of sexual desire to become a matter of continuing public preoccupation. From the eighteenth century forward, though […]

By definition, what constitutes sexual deviance and what constitutes sexual perversion relate to larger categories of social practice than those that are specifically sexual. This leads us to a useful distinction between sexual deviance and sexual perversion. Sexual deviance might be defined as the inappropriate or flawed performance of conventionally understood sexual practices. Rape, for […]

The transparency of the self in traditional societies, where individuals are assumed to be what they appear to be, gives way in modern settings to the emergence of the more opaque strategies of the narrating subject. Objects of sexual desire, being representations of what is experienced as coming from within the self, as well as […]