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This chapter explores how two seventeenth-century converts to Protestantism, Thomas Gage and James Wadsworth, employ father figures as a powerful and multivalent anti-Catholic trope in their conversion narratives. Gage’s The English-American and Wadsworth’s The English Spanish Pilgrime recount how they came to reject the faith of their biological fathers but both men also spent considerable time within Catholic institutions modelled on paternal hierarchies: the Jesuit and Dominican orders. As such, they compose elaborate chains of paternal association which encompass God, the Pope, monarch, magistrate and confessor in order to identify the language of Catholic fatherhood with a perversion of familial roles. I argue that these diverse father figures operate as a way of organising and justifying their conversions to Protestantism.

In this chapter, I suggest a way of reading Henry James’s ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ which treats as central to its ethical and political import the absence which resides at its centre. This void or hole is, I will argue, not only the cause of the narrative and that which confers meaning and structure upon the lives of its characters, but also a dialectical empty space which opens up new ways of thinking about the concept of negativity. In the second part of the chapter, I take a different, but not an entirely unrelated, turn. First, I examine the dynamic between the two protagonists in James’s tale – John Marcher and May Bartram – in relation to the economy of perversion sketched out by Lacan in a number of his Seminars; second, I look at the structural congruence between perversion and the discourse of the analyst which Lacan constructs in his Seminar XVII. By taking this approach, I aim to bring the reader to an entirely new understanding of James’s short masterpiece: the story is not ‘about’ a missed romantic encounter between two isolated individuals; rather, it dramatizes the relationship between an analyst and an analysand, a relationship that brings to the fore a complex range of ethical and political questions which lead the reader well beyond the confines of the psychoanalytic clinic.

Perversion is everywhere apparent in Charles Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge (1841). The novel evidences an impressive array of perverse desires, relationships, and subject positions. Barnaby Rudge abounds with a sexualized excess that lends itself almost irresistibly to a range of psychoanalytic and queer modes of interpretation. With its melodramatically inflected depictions of violent interfamilial conflict, father–son rivalry, mob violence, mass psychosis, and social collapse, Barnaby Rudge can be aligned with several key elements of Sigmund Freud’s account of psychosexual development, including Oedipal rivalry, polymorphous perversity, and civilization’s unintentional intensification of perverse desires. In particular, the novel exemplifies Freud’s observation, in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), that perversity is not external and anathema to normality, but is actually fashioned and strengthened by it. For Dickens, as for Freud, the family is the crucible of our perversions, primarily through its functional failures and its counterproductive repression of sexual desire. Dickens depicts desire as potentially disruptive, violent, and anti-social, particularly if left unchecked or, conversely, overly repressed; like Freud, he prescribes the sublimation—not the repression—of libidinal energy, and he regards the bourgeois, heteronormative family and ‘civilization’ as safe containers of erotic excess.Dickens conflates the familial and the political, depicting an interwoven private and public paternalism that violently prohibits sexuality and, thus, ironically generates the libidinal excesses it labours to contain.

The active presence of women in any form of armed combat has been considered an anomaly, indeed a state of perversion. There are several reasons for this. Throughout history, hegemonic masculinity has been constructed and performed through exclusive access to armed aggression and warfare: recourse to violence has been considered the supreme male prerogative, even the most gendered of all privileges. When women challenge this by staking their claim on these seemingly unalienable rights — be it within rigid, state-authorized parameters or a social insurgency — the very structure of patriarchal society is undermined.

Ancient Greeks and Romans were accustomed to the problems arising from the abuse of public office for private gain, but the term ‘corruption’ also denoted moral perversion and decay. These latter meanings were informed by prevalent assumptions about correspondences between the order of nature and the orderliness of societies and polities.1 According to Cicero, for example, nature compelled social and political association because humans naturally desired company2 Natural sources of moral, social and political order were often framed by organic or biological metaphors and analogies in which the order of human society confirmed a natural order or structure.3

Many aid-receiving countries have fallen into the dire trap of aiddependent, despite the increasing scale of international aid transfers. The billions of dollars in aid from wealthy countries to developing African nations have effortlessly become ‘dead aid’ as they failed to reduce the escalation of poverty levels and increase growth rates (Moyo 2009). Post-conflict countries, such as Cambodia, unable to refuse aid, are now rife with the pernicious effects of aid dependence and its perversion of Cambodian democracy (Ear 2013). William Easterly (2003), in this regard, argued that the white man’s burden would be reduced only if the West’s donors changed the fundamental identity of development aid from planners to searchers. Indeed, it is a longstanding impasse in the aid industry: the more aid dependent a country, the more distorted its incentive to develop sustainably.

Body modification, the permanent and semi-permanent intervention on the body’s surface such as tattooing, piercing, branding and cicatrization (scarification), would come quite low down on a list of recurrent cinematic themes. However, like BDSM imagery, body modification often slips through unnoticed, providing convenient but typically pejorative connotations of danger, perversion and threatening ‘other’ through characters such as ‘villains’, ‘sexual deviants’, and ‘foreign’ natives. More recently, it has appeared as subcultural background atmosphere in the guise of pierced punks and tattooed skinheads. A few films, however, utilize body modification as a structuring feature of the narrative, and explore the beliefs associated with these practices.

As one of his translators, I would like to say a few words about Claude Lefort’s style; Raymond Aron, who was on Lefort’s doctoral committee, commented on it. I have the following information in the form of a note Lefort wrote to me as I was about to take on the translation of his thesis (Le travail de l’oeuvre Machiavel: The Work of the Oeuvre Machiavelli). It reads as follows: “I am sure my book is difficult to translate. My thesis director, Raymond Aron, vigorously criticized my style, which he considered to be Proustian; that was by no means a compliment! Since those days I have tried to be more concise.” He goes on to authorize my shortening and/or simplifying of his sentences, which I was indeed sometimes able to do. But was Aron’s allusion to Proust entirely negative? Or did his ears hear all that his lips were saying? And does Lefort’s propensity for jovial self-deprecation forbid our application of a broader interpretation of the Proustian allusion? For, although in this early (1972) thesis the sentences do indeed tend to meander-ings and tucked-in afterthoughts (or what the French call “repentirs”), both authors thereby remain faithful to their mental movements’ ranging through the depths of a meditation followed through to its reluctant release. A case in point: at the very beginning of his book, Lefort imagines a critic accusing him of the “perversion” of desiring to pursue the discourse of his interpretation of Machiavelli even beyond the silence that would hypothetically be imposed, were one to stumble upon an interpretation that would end that discourse.

Developments in media and communication technologies imply new types of access to the world, to the lives and experiences of people, bringing about new forms of intimacy – and often disrupting them – but they also entail what Paul Virilio (2008, p. 46) has called ‘the obscenity of technology’. Virilio pairs technology and mass media with perversion in his constant probing of the generalised ‘industrialization of vision’ and those interventions into perception that mark so many potential ethical fault lines in the relation between media and capitalist society (1997, p. 89). The spectre of obscenity runs through many of the instances of intensive media explored in this book; however, the intention is clearly not to dismiss it as the purely negative or aberrant outcome of media technologies or practices but rather to position obscenity as an aspect of the aversive affects that images of pain are able to command. That is, the aim is not to attach a moral interpretation of pain as the pure expression of negativity, but to understand how that link might be productively decoupled.

Up to now, I have largely been concerned with articulating the complex, theoretical relationship between Lacan’s concept of the Real and the wider concerns of his metapsychology. In approaching these questions, I have tended to downplay or bracket what is perhaps the most familiar aspect of psychoanalysis as a praxis, namely its approach to psychopathology and the exploration of mental illness. Even when, in Chapter 2, the question of psychosis was central to my wider exploration of the valences of the material signifier, the specifically psychopathological implications of psychosis as a categorization of mental suffering were left to one side. In this chapter, by contrast, I will move the question of psychopathology to centre stage. Through an investigation of the ways in which Lacan conceives the relationship between hysteria, obsessional neurosis and perversion, I will highlight the centrality in each of a particular relation to the Real and to the signifier, conceived as split between its state of being in-relation and of being in-isolation.

This chapter examines some of the ways in which the discourses of female sexuality that are enshrined in foundational modern European sexology and psychoanalysis are cited, perverted and resisted by two very different French female writers: the Decadent novelist Rachilde (Marguerite Vallette-Eymery, 1860-1953) and the separatist lesbian feminist Monique Wittig (1935–2003).

As has become clear in the previous chapters, Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) was not, as is often claimed, the great first sexualizer ‘who changed everything by making everything about sex’,1 nor was he the first to emphasize the significance of childhood events as determiners of later sexual predilections or to argue that sublimated libidinal energy is the main driving force of cultural achievements.2 Whilst Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) is undoubtedly the most groundbreaking and influential work on sexual deviations, Freud too was under the spell of a specifically modernist fascination with perversion, and participated in an already well-advanced sexological discourse. As discussed in the previous chapters, the turn to the perversions, both as symptoms of a general cultural decline and as potential pathways out of the modernist impasse, is a specific reaction to the social, spiritual and epistemological crisis experienced by the modern subject.

When comparing French, German and English sexological traditions, it is striking that far fewer studies were written on the subject in Victorian Britain during the early decades of the discipline than were on the Continent. Before Havelock Ellis (1859–1939) published Sexual Inversion in 1897, not a single medico-psychiatric monograph had appeared on the subject of perversion. Ivan Crozier notes that, by and large, ‘British psychiatry was not explicitly concerned with sexual perversion’.1 However, he also challenges the commonly held view that no attention at all had been paid to homosexuality in British medical discourse before Ellis’ publication, whilst conceding that the existing discussion was conservative, apolitical, ‘less theoretically sophisticated and less sexually explicit than Continental sexology’.2 The ‘pre-Ellisian’ British sexological literature Crozier discusses consists exclusively of short essays and reviews, and tends to focus predominantly on homosexuality.3

In 1905, Sigmund Freud published in Vienna and Leipzig his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, and their English translation appeared in New York five years later. In these early essays, Freud draws liberally on a number of contemporary exponents of what was already called Sexualwissenschaft or scientia sexualis; among others, he refers to Iwan Bloch, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis, each of whom sought to taxonomize sexuality in a scientific manner and to contest sexual normativity on historical and social grounds.3 Unlike the sexologists to whom he refers, however, Freud declares in the first of the Three Essays, on ‘The Sexual Aberrations’, that he is ‘forced to a suspicion that the choice between “innate” and “acquired” is not an exclusive one or that it does not cover all the issues involved in inversion’,4 thus anticipating a problem formulated, at the end of the century, by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.5 ‘Aberration’ and ‘perversion’ sound to the modern ear insufferably moralistic, but Freud starts from the assumption that if we define perversion as anything that diverges from heterosexuality aimed at sexual reproduction, then we have to admit that all sexual practices, including those defined as ‘normal’, belong to the category of the perverse. A case in point is his illuminating definition of the kiss as contact

In Oliver Twist (1838), Bill Sykes asks Fagin why he wants to use a delicate and sensitive boy like Oliver as a pickpocket when he can easily recruit one of the “fifty boys snoozing about Common Garden every night” (326). Fagin replies, “Because they’re of no use to me. [...] their looks convict ‘em when they get into trouble” (326). Fagin knows that Oliver has a sentimental value not possessed by the other boys. He understands that if he could somehow combine a pitiable figure like Oliver with a cunning figure like the Artful Dodger he might have the perfect pickpocket, one who can continue to steal without ever being convicted. While the sentimentalized child of the workhouse is a figure like Oliver and his friend parochial Dick who is happy to die young before he is ever forced to earn a living as a criminal, the un-sentimentalized street child is a figure like the Artful Dodger who is a perversion of childhood innocence, a boy dressed in adult clothing and wise beyond his years.1 Fagin knows that finding a child who is a combination of these two kinds of children is a virtual impossibility. In the figure of the innocent pickpocket, however, there lies a mythology about a middle-class hero who can be involved in a mercenary enterprise and yet still remain uncorrupted. One of the reasons that the child became such an important figure and that childhood became such an important structure of feeling in the nineteenth century is that middle-class society became increasingly concerned with the erosion of its innocence inside commercial society. By continually portraying itself through children like Oliver Twist, it could see itself as an innocent child put to work in a commercial society by forces ultimately lying beyond its control. It could see itself, in other words, as Fagin’s perfect pickpocket, a child involved in the mercenary pursuit of profit whose looks will never convict him.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, medical sexual knowledge was characteristically international, so that it was common for physicians to keep up-to-date with the latest developments in medical science from the United States and European countries. Despite such internationalism, each country formulated its own autonomous medical discourses. While it was not until the late 1890s that Ellis started to systematically study sexual inversion in Britain, the Italian case was completely different: Arrigo Tamassia had introduced the subject in the late 1870s, which triggered the publication of a considerable number of medical articles on the subject of sexual inversion between 1878 and 1890, plus numerous reviews of foreign and Italian works. From the mid-1880s onwards, the complex nosologies articulated by psychiatric treatises consistently referred to sexual inversion as a distinct mental disorder, so that same-sex desires were no longer interpreted as a symptom of other diseases, which had been the predominant interpretation in earlier decades. In the 1890s, this phenomenon was followed by an explosion of studies on sexual perversion, with numerous book-length scientific studies dedicated to the topic.1 Pioneering historical research such as that of Giovanni Dall’Orto and Nerina Milletti has identified a number of medical works from this period that engage with same-sex desires. Roughly half of these medical studies addressed the question of female same-sex desires.

Among the major European modernists, there are few who engage as extensively with the erotic as does Franz Kafka. This engagement was shaped in no small part by his reading of erotic literature and his interest in psychoanalysis. Unsurprisingly, in the extensive secondary literature on Kafka’s oeuvre, commentators have devoted considerable attention to questions of gender and sexuality.1 However, with some notable exceptions, the general tendency in studies of the erotic in Kafka has been to locate both him and his oeuvre within a particular category as regards the sexual, or even to identify which of the so-called perversions — as conceptualized in the sexological discourse of the second half of the nineteenth century, and as canonized in Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) — is the master perversion in Kafka’s work. In contrast, my aim in this chapter is not only to highlight the specifically modernist characteristics of Kafka’s representations of the erotic, and to chart some of his key influences in that field, but above all to suggest that Kafka’s oeuvre is characterized not by one particular form of eroticism but rather by what, following Freud, may be termed ‘polymorphous perversity’. Rather than being governed by one master perversion, Kafka’s works explore various forms of perversion, and challenge the very conception of ‘perverse’ in contradistinction to ‘normal’ sexuality.

With a few exceptions, most early perversion theorists conceived of the perversions as pathologies that were either the direct result of the ramifications of modernity or else a cause for its further decline into decadence. Two similarly incompatible perceptions of sexual deviance exist in the current discourse on the perversions, as Lisa Downing argues: on the one hand, particularly in the context of deconstructive queer theory, perversions are cast as transgressive, destabilizing forces, associated with a revolutionary impulse and thus a radical rather than a liberal politics. On the other hand, perversion is seen as a rigid, conservative fixation, endlessly repeating a predetermined script.1 Downing criticizes reductive and monolithic claims about the ‘nature’ of the ‘pervert’, no matter from which side of the analytic spectrum, for they ultimately reify experience into a category of being and deny specificity and difference. At stake in such claims ‘are both an ethical danger and an epistemological fallacy, which centre on reduction.

From the late eighteenth century onwards, the general understanding of such key terms as ‘impotence’ and ‘frigidity’ began to change. By the first decade of the twentieth century, frigidity was regarded as an exclusively female — not to say feminine — disorder. The rest of this chapter will seek to map that general shift while pointing to the continuing resonance of some early modern notions. It should be noted firstly that much of the talk that went on in the nineteenth century was explicitly about the definition of terms. What lay at the heart of most discussions — and sometimes turned them into heated debates — was disagreement about the place of women. The predominant trend over the nineteenth century, interspersed with moments of reaction, was to allow women a more central position in the discursive field of impotence and frigidity. To think of that trend as progress or liberation would be foolhardy. It was undoubtedly a type of closer attention, and indeed of greater recognition, but the very closeness of attention served to refine the workings of a form of knowledge that came to make pathology and perversion out of the absence of female sexual desire or pleasure.

In culture, defined as it is by the incest taboo, desire inevitably becomes a mediated phenomenon, as Rene Girard so ably and amply demonstrated.1 That is, it becomes a figural formation. It requires an act of displacement (away from the forbidden primal object) and, simultaneously, a certain acquiescence in an act of substitution whereby the alternative object of desire acquires a fragile equivalence, despite its difference, in relation to the inaccessible ‘ideal’, producing an illusion of their identity — a quasi-identity, if you will. Which is to say that desire, as it exists in culture, is necessarily fetishistic in character, but also that a fetish is a figure that combines the effects of digression with those of metaphor. It is also to say that fetish is not a perversion but a norm.

List of Illustrations Notes on Contributors Preface J.Peakman Introduction part I:What is Sexual Perversion? J.Peakman Introduction part II: Sexual Perversion Pre-Sexology J.Peakman Staging Perversion: The Restoration's Sexual Allegory of (un) Civil War B.McLaughlin Objects, Desire, Identity and Eros in the Writings of Lord Hervey and Charlotte Charke M.Morris The Woman in Man's Clothes and the Pleasures of Delarivier Manley's "New Cabal" J.Frangos The Hostile Gaze: Perverting the Female Form, 1688-1800 J.Skipp Rape and the Construction of Female Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century J.Mills Morbid Parts: Gender, Violence and the Necro-Gaze R.E.May Nuns, Monks and Sexual Perversion in the Church D.Peschier Tropics of Sexuality: Sexual Excesses and Oriental Vices' in the British Raj P.Murthy Chinese Sexuality and the Bound Foot S.Adams

In making sense of our lives, each of us is engaged in the continuous process of telling and retelling their own life story or stories. In doing so we draw on the stories that are currently circulating but these are themselves both culturally and historically specific (Bauman 2001, Jackson 1998, Lawler 2002, Plummer 1995, 2001). In his 1995 book Telling Sexual Stories Plummer suggested that ‘different moments have highlighted different stories: puberty stories, marriage-bed stories, perversion stories coming out stories, abuse survivor stories women’s fantasy stories, men’s tribal fairy stories, stories of living — and dying — with AIDS’ (Plummer 1995:4). The late twentieth and early twenty-first century can be identified as a moment when it became possible to tell of ones life as a story of childhood sexual abuse (CSA) based on recovered or alternative memories. It is a world in which the stories we tell about ourselves are increasingly informed by a therapeutic culture (Furedi 2004), which has seen an explosion of self-help and self-development literature and where greater and greater emphasis is placed on looking inward for possible causes of and solutions to our troubles (Simonds 1996, Showalter 1997, Woodiwiss 2007a). These stories are constructed in a ‘cultural moment’ in which we place great ‘causal and explanatory, that is, psychological, significance on victimization in people’s lives’ (Davis 2005:4).

This piece of work has demonstrated, through the deconstruction of some of the major organizing, ‘naturalized’ (thus depolitized) and ‘normalizing’ concepts of ‘truth’ about ‘body’, ‘sexuality’, ‘perversion’ and ‘pain’ that serve to stabilize the social construction of ‘Sadomasochism’, that these are reductionist concepts and do not capture the dimensions of ‘lived bodies’. As these limiting and deterministic concepts continue to be internalized by many and remain predominant within the public sphere as well as part of many expert discourses and practices (e.g. psychologists, psychiatrists, sexologists, teachers and last but not least legal professionals), they are a crucial part of contemporary ‘conditions of domination’. This is particularly obvious when the individual and social harms (facilitated and ‘legitimated’ by such normalizing ‘truth’ conceptions) that were generated by the entire Operation Spanner, its subsequent proceedings, judgments and the disappointing decision of the European Court of Human Rights, are considered. These harms stand in no comparable relationship to the ascribed harms of the consensual ‘SM’ that had to stand trial.

While many have argued, and I would agree, that George Etherege’s play The Man of Mode or Sir Fopling Flutter (1676) can be read as a comment on boredom and social ennui, an attack on the mannerisms of the bourgeoisie, I would also argue that a powerful political undercurrent becomes quite evident if we take into account two phenomena that were considered the curse of Restoration and post-Restoration English society: social mobility and sexual impotence.

John Drummond, at his trial for a rape mused that ‘The Nature of a Rape is so very perplex’d, and the perpetration of it on Adult Persons so very difficult, that it requires something of an implicit Belief to be credited.’1 The difficulty of establishing convincing evidentiary proof given the private nature of rape, coupled with a deep-seated belief that rape was physically impossible, made the presumption of male innocence compelling. It was commonly understood that if a woman put up a sufficiently determined defence it was unlikely that she could be raped.2 Voltaire provides a neat analogy to depict the physical difficulties faced by the would-be rapist: ’For girls or women who complain of having been raped, all that is needed, it seems to me, is to tell them how, long ago, a queen frustrated an accusation of rape. She took a scabbard and, constantly shaking it, she made the complainant see that it was then impossible to put a sword in the scab-bard.’3 Voltaire’s evocation of female authority indicates a truth born of female experience, and although women may not be aware of their tacit consent, accusations of rape can never be accounts of rape. An incomprehension of the possibility of rape existed which deemed that any modest and decent woman worth her reputation resisted and could not be raped. Thus, the physical implausibility of rape was a strong defence.4

During the second half of the nineteenth century, perversion and its assorted manifestations was used in propaganda directed against the Roman Catholic Church. This was not a new phenomena2 but it reached almost hysterical proportions due to the re-establishment of the Catholic hierarchy in England and resulted in English Protestants describing Roman Catholics as ‘perverts’. Convents were depicted as prisons, brothels and madhouses and were regarded as the locus for all kinds of perversions, sexual perversions in particular. The term ‘pervert’ was used in the context of the ‘pervert’ being led astray from ’true’ religion, and applied to Protestants who converted to the Catholic faith but it carried with it overtones of sexual misconduct. It is therefore not surprising to find accusations that Roman Catholics were indulging in perverted and immoral sexual practices. The main perpetrators of these acts were priests and nuns, a section of society who led secretive lives, which lay them open to suspicion. Sometimes these perversions involved the laity, usually young, innocent girls, and sometimes perversions were hidden behind the convent or seminary wall. Some of these accounts were pure fiction; others purported to be ‘true’ facts. They came in different guises — in novels, in Protestant revelations, nuns’ ‘memoirs’, ex-monks’ exposes and confessional tales, which all fitted into a sub-genre of anti-Catholic literature.

Despite the chorus of scorn that followed “Camillagate,” Charles and Camilla’s notorious 1989 telephone conversation was one of their finest moments, in which they revealed themselves as the unabashed imitators and creative perverters of themes in Catullus and Donne. Camilla imagines Charles as the knickers that she can perpetually wear. Charles imagines himself as the man forever inside the woman, endlessly erect. But no, in this wonderful perversion of a perennial heterosexual fantasy, he is soft and, alas, disposable after all. Camilla rescues the fantasy (“what a wonderful idea!”) only to be met by Charles’s self-mocking “my luck to be chucked down the lavatory and go on and on, forever swirling round on the top, never going down.” An eternity of activity, but never even going down (the lavatory) — let alone into Camilla. But again, Camilla rescues the fantasy, picking up on Charles’s ambiguous “until the next one comes through.” The next tampon? And through what? The lavatory? Camilla? Camilla turns it into the latter. Charles may not be endlessly in her, but, like a box of tampons, he can multiply himself so as to be in her again and again and again: “you could just keep going,” “repeating yourself.” Like the best of fetishes, this is repetition without a difference: more of the same, a same that is wanted obsessively, repetitively, but now. “Oh, darling I just want you now.” An impossible now for two people separated by the distance of a telephone call or a letter or a poem. Or rather a now that can only be achieved prosthetically. Othello away, Desdemona still kisses him in the form of the handkerchief that was his first gift to her. Catullus imagines himself as his beloved Lesbia’s pet sparrow.

Sexual perversion as an activity or behaviour has been given definite, albeit, changing definitions throughout history, while simultaneously being seen as something fluid and uncontainable. It also has been seen as a social construction dependent on temporality and geography. Yet, seemingly contrarily, it also has been defined as inherent in nature, as essentially bound up with the individual. Sexual perversion, then, is made up of a complex interweaving of ideas and beliefs in history.

In Space, Time & Perversion, Elizabeth Grosz suggests that as subjects, we come to attach certain social and cultural codings to the aesthetic appearance of all bodies (including the ‘obese’ subject). In other words, it is in and through processes of socialisation that we internalise the expectations of normative bodily aesthetics: that is, the ways in which we maintain our bodies, and co-extensively, the ways in which our bodies (and the bodies of others) appear in-the-world come to discursively ‘mean’ particular things to us. Given this, we acquire the means to ‘read’ and understand certain bodies as ‘confessing’ supposed ‘truths’ about one’s being. Grosz goes on to focus her critical attention on the understanding of all bodies as ‘virtual confessors’, and asserts that “The body becomes a text, a system of signs to be deciphered, read, and read into. While social law is incarnate, ‘corporealized’, correlatively, bodies are textualized, ‘read’ by others as expressive of a subject’s psychic interior” (1995, pp. 34–35).

If, as Colleen Lamos avers, the ‘surplus of significance produced by the citations [that pepper The Waste Land] generates an economy of excess, virtually an unreserved expenditure of semantic capital … rendering the poem a Venice of textual prodigality’ (1998: 111), what might be done to accommodate that surplus, and that expenditure? In what ways might one think that excess, without resorting to the conventional, not to say by now some-what hackneyed arguments concerning the poem’s fragmentation, its disunity, and its profligacy? Would it not, for example, be an act of critical perversion to argue for adding yet more text to the poem, for putting back at least some of that which Ezra Pound had the poetic sense to remove? And to ask, for me, the most urgent question: what is the relation between citation, city, the velocity of transmission, and the apprehension of crisis as representation?

The Alternative Tradition was a cluster of beliefs which had sustained the defeated and the repressed. At its heart lay the conviction that the Soviet experiment had been right at the beginning, had gone tragically wrong under Stalin, but could yet create a socialist society — provided the leadership democratized, made real economic reforms and returned to a proper conception of socialism. The origins of the Tradition went back to the 1920s and early 1930s, to the struggle against Stalin’s hijacking of the revolution and perversion of its purposes, though not until Khrushchev’s thaw had ‘alternative’ views begun to be heard. They were then voiced strongly through the 1960s, most of all by economists, who came up with ideas for change that had implications which went well beyond the economic. Alternative viewpoints also emerged in literature, literary criticism, history and most branches of the social sciences. The Tradition’s home was Novy Mir (New World), journal of the Union of Soviet Writers, which under the inspired editorship of Alexander Tvardovsky stood for a democratic socialism wholly purged of the Stalinist perversion. ‘We believed’, one of Tvardovsky’s colleagues wrote, ‘in socialism as a noble ideal of justice, we believed in a socialism that was human through and through and not just with a human face. We regarded the democratic rights of the individual as incontestable.’1

War is one way of resolving conflicts of interest; politics is another. Violent politics, lying in the zone between peace and war, is a third. Conventional politics uses the modes of persuasion, shame and reward; violent politics adds prevention, fear and force. The belief that societies are naturally peaceful and that violence is a perversion, is utopian. When people consider their vital interests threatened – and it is impossible in practice to avoid this entirely – they do not voluntarily eschew the powerful modes of violent political change and limit themselves to constitutional modes, since the modes of violent politics trump those of conventional politics. Conventional politics is a subset of violent politics, not the reverse. Violent politics is universal; it is of no value to argue that it is unnatural. Violent politics is more demanding than constitutional politics, since it encompasses both forms: conventional politics of a high order within a community, to mobilise the base for success, and violent politics of equal skill between factions, in order to outmatch the opposition.

In his famous denouncement of cross-dressing Philip Stubbes raised the spectre of hermaphroditism in order to deride the monstrous perversion of so-called masculine women.2 Here, with a characteristic rhetorical flourish, Stubbes invoked the slur ‘hermaphrodite’ in order to rebuke cross-dressers. However, the term also signals a point of tension as the righteous diatribe stumbles into an awkward double negative. These cross-dressed women ‘maie not improperly be called Hermaphroditi’ not for their dubious sex but because of their dubious appearance. Masculine women were monstrous to Stubbes and to other early modern moralists not because they were physically hermaphroditic but because their behaviour (epitomized by their clothing) transgressed fixed gender codes. In other words, they enacted rather than embodied hermaphroditism. It was gender (culture) rather than sex (biology) that was at stake here.

The history referred to covers the half-century since Sukarno and Hatta proclaimed Indonesian independence, and especially the period around 1965–66 when Sukarno’s Old Order was replaced by Suharto’s New Order. The ‘tortured and defeated’ once belonged to the Partai Komunis ]Indonesia (Indonesian Communist Party) (PKI) or to one of the other organizations of the ‘communist family’,1 such as its women’s organization, Gerakan Wanita Indonesia (Indonesian Women’s Movement) (Gerwani).2 Suharto rose to power by orchestrating a campaign of unprecedented violence, legitimized by accusations of sexual debauchery allegedly committed by members of Gerwani. Suharto’s New Order regime was built not only on the deaths of an estimated million3 innocent people who were massacred during the final months of 1965 and the early months of 1966, but also on the suppression of the power women had acquired during the preceding decades, a power which, as I shall go on to show, their adversaries interpreted through sexual metaphors linking women’s political activity with sexual perversion and moral depravity.

Brian Epstein was ‘not gay’. He was a ‘queer’, a ‘puff’, a ‘pansy’… but he was not ‘gay’. The expression simply did not exist in the Liverpool of the 1950s and early 1960s. To be ‘gay’ was to be happy, exhilarated, confident … qualities that had no connection with what were then considered to be acts of perversion and gross indecency. To be ‘queer’ was to be one of the dregs of conventional society, on the hinterlands of a netherworld.

A couple of years ago I was researching a paper on how memories of Italian Fascism were affected by the political and generational conflicts of the 1960s. I became interested in the way a number of feature films made after 1968 ‘remembered’ the period of Fascism and German Nazism with images of sexual violence, and the way these images coalesced with representations of homosexuality, bisexuality and a panoply of perversions, from sado-masochism to incestuous rape and child sexual abuse. These films were part of my memory, too. I had been to see them either soon after they were released, like Luchino Visconti’s The Damned (Gotterdammerung/La caduta degli dei, Italy/FRG, 1969) and Liliana Cavani’s The Night Porter (Il portiere di notte ,Italy/USA, 1973), or a few years later: I watched Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Saleo o i 120 giorni di Sodoma (Italy/ France, 1975) in a cold fleapit in Pisa in January 1978 shortly after the ban on it, imposed by the Milan Tribunal in January 1976, was lifted. Though I found all these films problematic and disturbing on first viewing, it was not until I watched them again nearly 20 years later that their way of depicting Fascism appeared tome to constitute a historical problem.

As Jennifer Wicke observes: ‘It is not possible to write about Dracula without raising the sexual issue.’1 Sexuality virtually dominates critical debate on Bram Stoker’s 1897 Gothic novel. However, while most critics would agree with Wicke, few have addressed the question of why this is the case — not why vampirism is erotic, but why critics insist that it is. Why do critics need to uncover a sexual ‘secret’ at the heart of Dracula? The present essay considers this question. It proposes an historicist reading of the relationship between vampirism and the erotic, and how this relationship is reflected in Stoker’s text. By examining the historical context (specifically contemporary discourses on sexuality and perversion), a reading is suggested which differs markedly from the way modern criticism generally represents the erotic in Dracula.

In recent years, studies of Dracula have frequently focused on questions of gender and politics, reading vampirism in relation to Stoker’s attitudes towards female sexuality, homosexuality, other races, classes and cultures. As these discussions have suggested, the novel reveals fin de siecle anxieties concerning the dissolving boundaries produced by cultural and social changes. These include the scientific discoveries that eroded the stable differences between species, the agitation for women’s rights (the spectre of the ‘New Woman’ that haunts Dracula) which threatened to abolish sexual distinctions, and the debates over imperialism which challenged belief in essential racial differences. For Stoker, however, such concerns are connected to the act of writing itself. As Van Helsing reminds Seward, the rise of modern science contributed to a loss of religious faith, which for many was replaced by faith in art as the only true manifestation of higher powers.2 Decadent art and naturalist writers’ representations of less elevated drives and impulses were therefore seen as a perversion of art which contributed to moral and social degeneration.

Sex, The Secret Places of the Heart reminds us, can be looked at in two ways—as bringing about ‘a renewal of life in the species’ or ‘a renewal of energy in the individual’. It is the second of these aspects that fascinates Wells. His interest in the first is relatively cursory and largely stimulated by individual circumstances. Only two of his books, Anticipations and Mankind in the Making, could be said to deal at any length with human reproduction. He wrote each of them when his wife was expecting a baby. Anticipations, insisting that ‘the main mass of the business of human life centres about reproduction’ and dismissing a childless life as ‘essentially failure and perversion’, appeared in 1901: so did Wells’s first son. ‘Mrs Wells and I have been collaborating (and publication is expected early in July) in the invention of a human being’, he explained to Arnold Bennett. Mankind in the Making, proclaiming that ‘Exceptionally good people owe the world the duty of parentage’, coincided with Wells’s undertaking of this duty for a second time—with the arrival of his son Frank in 1903.

If we are to pursue the task of exploring further our images of God and if we are to move from literary descriptions to theological and philosophical development, we have to consider first the extent to which human reason can help us fulfill this task. Since the time of Hume and Kant the use of human reason in religious matters has been subjected to a number of criticisms.1 Many theologians and philosophers claim, for instance, that even if one were to grant the possibility that from the evidences which are on hand in this world there could be some way to acquire some knowledge of God, we would still be unable to get through to this knowledge. According to them, due to the perversion of our reasoning power whatever idea of God we may arrive at would be so false and distorted that it could not be said to be knowledge of God at all.

Of all the wonders of Nature and Man, export controls must rank among the least entertaining. An inclination close to perversion would be required to squeeze much merriment from licensing regulations or lists of goods for which export approval is necessary. No one in industry actually enjoys the problems presented by compliance procedures, and only the most twisted of bureaucrats could revel in administering regulations that often verge on the unintelligible. To be sure, there may be a stray academic — a political scientist or similar — whose meat and drink is deducing causes and consequences and for whom export controls must seem heaven sent for the opportunity they offer to speculate and pontificate. Export controls are inherently dull; no one in his right mind would choose a book on the subject for bedtime reading, or the company of an export control expert on a desert island. Moreover, the underlying purpose of export controls — or at least the ostensible one — is deadly serious: preventing the Soviet bloc acquiring the means of exterminating its potential adversaries with greater ease is surely no laughing matter for the potential adversaries. Nor are national security, national pride and patriotism generally — except for the breed of intellectual scoundrel which mocks as the herd rallies round the flag. In short, export controls would seem singularly unpromising as a focus for popular interest.