front cover of The Book of Minor Perverts
The Book of Minor Perverts
Sexology, Etiology, and the Emergences of Sexuality
Benjamin Kahan
University of Chicago Press, 2019
Shortlisted for the Modernist Studies Assocation Book Prize

­Statue-fondlers, wanderlusters, sex magicians, and nymphomaniacs: the story of these forgotten sexualities—what Michel Foucault deemed “minor perverts”—has never before been told. In The Book of Minor Perverts, Benjamin Kahan sets out to chart the proliferation of sexual classification that arose with the advent of nineteenth-century sexology. The book narrates the shift from Foucault’s “thousand aberrant sexualities” to one: homosexuality. The focus here is less on the effects of queer identity and more on the lines of causation behind a surprising array of minor perverts who refuse to fit neatly into our familiar sexual frameworks. The result stands at the intersection of history, queer studies, and the medical humanities to offer us a new way of feeling our way into the past.
[more]

front cover of The Intercourse of Knowledge
The Intercourse of Knowledge
On Gendering Desire and 'Sexuality' in the Hebrew Bible
Athalya Brenner
SBL Press, 2016

Now in paperback!

This groundbreaking book, which builds on the author's earlier work in On Gendering Texts, studies how, by what means, and to what extent human love, desire and sex, and possibly even "sexuality"; are gendered in the Hebrew Bible. The investigation looks into the construction of male and female bodies in language and ideologies; the praxis and ideology of sex, procreation, and contraception; deviation from socio-sexual boundaries (e.g. incest, rape, adultery, homosexuality, prostitution); eroticism and "pornoprophetics."

Features:

  • Paperback format of an essential Brill monograph
  • A classification and gendering of the linguistic and semantic data
  • Discussion of wider sociological and theological implications
[more]

front cover of Perversion and the Social Relation
Perversion and the Social Relation
sic IV
Molly Anne Rothenberg, Dennis A. Foster and Slavoj Zizek, eds.
Duke University Press, 2003
The masochist, the voyeur, the sadist, the sodomite, the fetishist, the pedophile, and the necrophiliac all expose hidden but essential elements of the social relation. Arguing that the concept of perversion, usually stigmatized, ought rather to be understood as a necessary stage in the development of all non-psychotic subjects, the essays in Perversion and the Social Relation consider the usefulness of the category of the perverse for exploring how social relations are formed, maintained, and transformed.

By focusing on perversion as a psychic structure rather than as aberrant behavior, the contributors provide an alternative to models of social interpretation based on classical Oedipal models of maturation and desire. At the same time, they critique claims that the perverse is necessarily subversive or liberating. In their lucid introduction, the editors explain that while fixation at the stage of the perverse can result in considerable suffering for the individual and others, perversion motivates social relations by providing pleasure and fulfilling the psychological need to put something in the place of the Father. The contributors draw on a variety of psychoanalytic perspectives—Freudian and Lacanian—as well as anthropology, history, literature, and film. From Slavoj Žižek's meditation on “the politics of masochism” in David Fincher's movie Fight Club through readings of works including William Styron's The Confessions of Nat Turner, Don DeLillo’s White Noise, and William Burroughs's Cities of the Red Night, the essays collected here illuminate perversion's necessary role in social relations.

Contributors. Michael P. Bibler, Dennis A. Foster, Bruce Fink, Octave Mannoni, E. L. McCallum, James Penney, Molly Anne Rothenberg, Nina Schwartz, Slavoj Žižek

[more]

front cover of Smut
Smut
Erotic Reality/Obscene Ideology
Murray S. Davis
University of Chicago Press, 1983

Smut investigates sex in a way that differes from nearly all previous books on the subject. Drawing on a wide variety of literary forms, including the work of novelists, poets, and even comedians–resources ranging from the most sublime theologians to the most profane pornographers–Murray S. Davis goes beyond those who regard sex merely as a biological instinct or animal behavior. He recaptures sex for the social sciences by reemphasizing the aspects of it that are unique to human beings in all their rich perplexity.

In part one, Davis employs a phenomenlogical approach to examine the differrence between sexual arousal and ordinary experience: sexual arousal, he argues, alters a person's experience of the world, resulting in an "erotic reality" that contratsts strikingly to our everyday reality; different perceptions of time, space, human bodies, and other social types occur in  each realm. Davis describes in detail the movement from everyday into erotic reality from the first subtle castings-off to the shocking post-orgasmic return.

In part two the author employs a structuralist approach to determine why some people find this alternation between realities "dirty." He begins with a meditation on the similarity between sex and dirt and then asks, "How must somone view the world for him to find sex dirty?" Normal sex can be disliked, Davis concludes, only if it violates a certain conception of the individual; perverted sex can be despised only if it further violates certain conceptions of social relations and social organization. Davis ends part two with a "periodic table of perversions" that systematically summarizes the fundamental social elements out of which those who find sex dirty construct their world.

Finally, in part three Davis considers other conceptual grids affected by the alternation between everyday and erotic realities: the "pornographic," which concieves of the individual, social relations, and social organizations as deserving to disrupted by sex; and the "naturalistic," which concieves of them in a way that cannot be disrupted by sex. Throughout history these ideologies have contested for control over Western society, and, in his conlusion, Davis ofers a prognosis for the future of sex based on these historical ideological cycles.

[more]

logo for University of Chicago Press
Stepchildren of Nature
Krafft-Ebing, Psychiatry, and the Making of Sexual Identity
Harry Oosterhuis
University of Chicago Press, 2000
Psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902) played a key role in the construction of the modern concept of sexuality. As the author of the famous Psychopathia sexualis, he named and classified virtually all nonprocreative sexualities, synthesizing knowledge on sadism, masochism, fetishism, homosexuality, and exhibitionism. His influence on the study of sexuality cannot be overstated, but it is often misunderstood. In the wake of Michel Foucault's influential sexual histories, Krafft-Ebing is often maligned as a contributor to the repressed Victorian construction of sexual deviancy.

But in this powerful new cultural history Harry Oosterhuis invites us to reconsider the quality and extent of Krafft-Ebing's influence. Revisiting the case studies on which Krafft-Ebing based his findings, and thus drawing on the voices of his patients and informants, Oosterhuis finds that Krafft-Ebing was not the harsh judge of perversions that we think he was. He argues that Krafft-Ebing had a deep appreciation of the psyche, and that his work reveals an attempt to separate sexual deviancies from ideas of immorality. In the tradition of Freud, then, Krafft-Ebing should stand not as a villain, but as a contributor to more modern notions of sexual identity.
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter