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This article considers how the 1972 film Bijou works as a gay art porn film. It argues that the film draws from conventions of both hardcore cinema and postwar underground cinema, bringing the denotative qualities of hardcore into play with the connotative qualities of what P. Adams Sitney called the ‘trance film’. Through an exploration of Linda Williams’ concept ‘hard-core eroticism’, this article examines how Bijou expands on the common trance film trope of the male-desiring wanderer, and how it modulates the connotative focus and sustains the aestheticism of the trance film in order to draw attention to more polymorphously perverse ways of thinking about socio-sexual activity.

Originally presented before the Eighth International Psycho-Analytical Congress held in Salzburg in April 1924, ‘The Psychology of Women in Relation to the Functions of Reproduction’ was published in English in 1925. In this paper Deutsch endorses and expands Freud’s views about sexual development in relation to erogenous zones. What she shows here is how one becomes a woman, i.e., how the switch in valuation of the female genital occurs and how this event relates to the function of reproduction; and it emerges that for Deutsch, ‘woman’ means the ‘phallic mother’. The starting point of the paper is that the development of the infantile libido to the normal heterosexual object choice is more difficult in women: the little girl has to give up a masculinity bound up with the clitoris and, in the difficult transition from the phallic phase (whose importance is emphasized) to the vaginal phase, she has to discover a new organ ‘in her own person’ through a passive and masochistic submission to the penis. The truly feminine attitude to the vagina finds its origins in the oral activity of the child at the breast. This, Deutsch posits, reflects the whole psychological difference displayed by the mature woman in her relations with the object-world, since the psychic significance of coitus lies in the repetition and mastery of the trauma of a symbolic form of castration; incorporating the penis repeats the trauma of weaning. According to Deutsch, phallic narcissism centred on the clitoris gives way to a vaginal phase whereby the vagina becomes the maternal receptacle: the vagina, which represents the child, becomes the woman’s ‘ego in miniature.’ Thus, as the object of maternal libido, the partner becomes the child; and in coitus the penis takes on the role of the breast, and the vagina the passive role of the sucking mouth. The libidinal investment of the vagina derives from the entire body, on one hand, and specifically from the clitoris on the other. The greater importance of the investment of the whole body in women also explains the tendency for women to retain a relatively greater degree of polymorphous perversity. Finally, one should note Deutsch’s claim that for woman the sexual act is divided into two phases: orgasm and labour. Female orgasm is seen as a ‘missed labour’ and labour as an ‘orgy of masochistic pleasure’ that duplicates male ejaculation.

This article argues that a queer temporality emerged during the era of Soviet Stagnation: the Stalinist past was unspeakable and the future postponed or foreclosed. In response to the limited horizon of “developed socialism” – the loss of narrative coherence and futurity, the never‑to‑arrive communist promise – an expanded present rich in possibility and feeling was brought into being in animated films, providing a time and space where one could desire again. Iurii Norshtein’s Ezhik v tumane (Hedgehog in the Fog, 1975), Fedor Khitruk’s Vinni‑pukh films (1969‑72) and Bremenskie muzykanty (Bremen Musicians, 1969) activated desire and altered fantasy not, as one might expect, through a reestablishment of linear time, but a reimagining of stagnation as a domain of thrilling, non‑teleological explorations. Where the fog in Ezhik v tumane precipitated a lack and set the libido in motion, Vinni‑pukh provided a partial solution to the Brezhnev‑era desire crisis by staging polymorphous perversity and an elastic “kitchen time”; and Bremenskie muzykanty further developed the new socialities, loves, and forms of enjoyment communicated by such queer temporality. Gaps, magically intimate spaces, queer embodiment, and disfigured time were performed within the diegetic frame as well as instantiated by the film‑as‑object, asking spectators to playfully examine the impasses of late socialism, and imagine a libidinally saturated life, abounding with potentiality.

This article focuses on Karen Barad’s quantum ontology and her attempts to reformulate the concept of relationality. The aim is to show how Barad’s work articulates a new kind of empiricism for the social sciences, by reclaiming the creative and speculative force of experimental practice and by recentering the philosophical problem as a source of inquiry. Relationality is redefined through discussions of diffractive apparatus, more-than-human performativity, and the “polymorphous perversity” of the matter-meaning mixture.

This article explores the clinical limitations of an exclusive adherence to the oedipal paradigm for the understanding of erotic material in the transference/countertransference in analytic treatments where the participants identify with differing sexual orientations. Its central argument posits that possibilities for recognizing developmentally significant, evolved connections with patients of all genders and sexual orientations is subtly circumscribed when understanding of these phenomena is partitioned chiefly by the “either/or” of a positive or negative form of oedipal desire. The argument goes on to query and challenge formulations of a universal bisexuality as a satisfactory resolution to this conundrum, again, particularly when the 2 analytic partners claim different sexual orientations. Part object relations as residue of an early and ubiquitous polymorphous perversity are proposed as useful theoretical and clinical alternatives. Case material is also provided.

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 Great Latke Hamantash Debate, edited by Ruth Fredman Cernea. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 216 pp. $18.00. Almost sixty years ago, the University of Chicago became the site of what has subsequently evolved into a profoundly significant intellectual tradition, rivaling such outstanding scholarly efforts as the Journal of Irreproducible Results, the Annals of Improbable Research, and the Journal of Polymorphous Perversity. This highly innovative reflection of scholarly endeavor started in November 1946 with the first University of Chicago academic debate on the relative merits of the latke versus the hamantash. This example of the highest order of intellectual dialogue has become a permanent fixture at the University of Chicago and eventually became a model for the expression of erudition at numerous other colleges and universities across the nation. Accompanied by appropriate pompous ritual and a latke or hamantash or two, the debate takes place under conditions and rules that have clearly been described by the editor of this collection of arguments. Ruth Fredman Cernea made clear that: all participants must hold a PhD or equivalent degree; arguments be framed according to the theoretical position and jargon at the participant's academic discipline; and each symposium must include someone who is not Jewish-in order to lend a note of "gentility." (p. xxvii) One other ingredient has been required, according to Dr. Ted Cohen, author of the forward to the book: female as well as male academics have been encouraged to participate. Cernea has offered her perceptions of the reasons for the establishment and importance of the debates. First, as Jewish scholars became part of a universal commitment to scholarship, their interaction with Jewish students ceased to focus on an ethnic relationship. The debates became a way of stressing the ethnic heritage in a context in which good humor, rather than conventional scholarship, became the mode of interaction between and among students and faculty members. Second, coming late in the fall semester when the burden of term papers, tests, and other methods of torturing students was especially heavy, the debates were a small "release of the tension that has been building all fall" (p. xxv). Third, given significant sociological changes in the United States, the ethnic "outsider" has become a part of the mainstream, and the debates, including both Jews and non-Jews, became a symbol of that developing integration. Finally, Cernea indicated that in the post-World War II era, there were sufficient Jewish scholars and students at the University of Chicago to "set the academic tone of the campus," and the debates were a reflection of that culture (p. xxvi). This perspective clarified the social context or climate in which the debates developed. The numerous essays contained in the book reveal yet another aspect of academic life at the University of Chicago and elsewhere throughout the United States. As academics have become socialized into their respective disciplines by the ordeal of graduate school and other means of inflicting maximum suffering, they have come to believe that their and only their particular discipline reflects truth, virtue, and divine revelation. Hence, alternative disciplines can hardly be regarded as reflecting merit. The Journal of Irreproducible Results, the Journal of Polymorphous Perversity, the "Ig Noble Prizes," and other such examples of scholarly endeavor also illustrate this perception. Similar to these examples, the latke hamantash debates have permitted some academicians to support their own discipline at the expense of other disciplines. Thus, some of the essays contained in the Cernea book are sprinkled with the inflated views of the importance of one discipline at the expense of other disciplines. Other essays offer a critique of the author's own discipline, poking fun at or calling into question the approaches or methodology of that discipline. …

This article assesses the contemporary relevance of Sade's work and thought by returning to Jacques Lacan's interpretation of it. It is argued that if the Sadean emphasis on sexual freedom has been co-opted by neoliberal capitalism, this is in part thanks to avant-garde intellectuals of the twentieth century who approached Sade through a simplistically libidinal reading of Freud. By contrast, the article argues that Lacan's more sophisticated reading of Freud enables him in turn to situate Sade amidst eighteenth-century philosophical and political debates regarding, not sexual pleasure or revolutionary desire, but happiness. Lacan shows that Sade was already challenging the modern, and today market-based, notion of a ‘right to happiness’ with the ‘maxim for jouissance’ he asserted in La Philosophie dans le boudoir. This more troubling Sade, it is claimed, opens up the possibility of a perverse ethic distinct from the ‘polymorphous perversity’ characteristic of contemporary consumer culture and its related conceptions of happiness.

This paper concerns a theoretical struggle to situate childless women within contemporary feminist debates about gender, the body and sexuality. Although psychoanalytic theory offers a compelling approach to the body, a Freudian account of childless women has largely escaped investigation. This paper will provide such an analysis, arguing that competing interpretations of psychoanalytic theory reveal a salient tension in the interpretation of gender identification. On the one hand, some theorists focus on a social development model of gender identification. This model emphasizes the sexual aim of reproduction as a salient feature of ‘normal’ gender identity development. In this paper, I argue this approach may pathologize childless women insofar as they ‘fail’ to socially develop in ways that conform to the imperative to sexually reproduce. On the other hand, a number of theorists argue against the foreclosure on gender identity that the social development model implies. An alternate interpretation of psychoanalytic theory calls attention to Freud's theory of ‘psychic bisexuality’ or ‘polymorphous perversity’. This notion invites a much more complex and ambivalent notion of gender identity as it emphasizes the temporal, fragile and incomplete process of gender identification. I aim to argue that this latter interpretation offers a space for childless women as it attempts to lay bare the hegemonic relationship between femininity and sexual reproduction. I draw upon the work of a number of feminist theorists who variously take up these central themes in Freudian psychoanalytic theory to further contest the reification of the association between femininity and maternity.

This article focuses on the bisexual fantasies of playwright and memoirist Lillian Hellman. It analyzes the 1934 Broadway success, The Children's Hour, and the short story “Julia,” in her second memoir (1973), turned into a film in 1976. Both works are organized around a bisexual triangle of two women and one man, with one woman positioned as a bisexual, the other as a lesbian. The first is the autobiographical character, who understands her position as opportunistic yet chooses survival. The latter has a superior moral courage but succumbs to compulsory heterosexuality. Based on my theory of labial mimesis and dual female protagonists, I argue that the combination of Hellman's internalized biphobia and her repressed bisexuality was the psychological basis for her realism as a writer. The article also examines Hellman's difficulty in relating to real women, somewhat eased in transcultural situations where her guard against same-gender intimacy was down. The article is partly based in archival res...

Introduction: Why Asexuality? Why Now? Megan Milks and Karli June Cerankowski Part I: Theorizing Asexuality: New Orientations 1. Mismeasures of Asexual Desires Jacinthe Flore 2. Inhibition, Lack of Excitation, or Suppression: fMRI Pilot of Asexuality Nicole Prause and Carla Harenski 3. "There's No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship": Asexuality's Sinthomatics Kristian Kahn Part II: The Politics of Asexuality 4. Radical Identity Politics: Asexuality and Contemporary Articulations of Identity Erica Chu 5. Stunted Growth: Asexual Politics and the Rhetoric of Sexual Liberation Megan Milks 6. On the Racialization of Asexuality Ianna Hawkins Owen Part III: Visualizing Asexuality in Media Culture 7. Spectacular Asexuals: Media Visibility and Cultural Fetish Karli June Cerankowski 8. Aliens and Asexuality: Media Representation, Queerness, and Asexual Visibility Sarah E.S. Sinwell 9. Compulsory Sexuality and Asexual/Crip Resistance in John Cameron Mitchell's Shortbus. Cynthia Barounis Part IV: Asexuality and Masculinity 10. "Why Didn't You Tell Me That I Love You?": Asexuality, Polymorphous Perversity, and the Liberation of the Cinematic Clown Andrew Grossman 11. Masculine Doubt and Sexual Wonder: Asexually-Identified Men Talk About Their (A)sexualites Ela Przybylo Part V: Health, Disability, and Medicalization 12. Asexualities and Disabilities in Constructing Sexual Normalcy Eunjung Kim 13. Asexuality and Disability: Mutual Negation in Adams v. Rice and New Directions for Coalition Building Kristina Gupta 14. Deferred Desire: The Asexuality of Chronic Genital Pain Christine Labuski Part VI: Reading Asexually: Asexual Literary Theory 15. "What to Call That Sport, the Neuter Human...": Asexual Subjectivity in Keri Hulme's The Bone People Jana Fedtke 16. Toward an Asexual Narrative Structure Elizabeth Hanna Hanson

Jean, Duc de Berry (1340–1416), often seen as the first great ‘collector’ in Western art, is also described by some historians as a ‘homosexual’. This article examines the relationship between these two terms and the problematic historical evidence for the latter claim, exploring the duke’s desire for things, images and bodies in less categorical terms. The main argument is that we can best understand Jean’s sexual tastes from the artworks he commissioned and in which we know from contemporary accounts he took great personal delight. Reinterpretations are provided of some well-known images, such as the January page of the unfinished Tres Riches Heures (1416), where the patron is pictured at the centre of a ‘homosocial’ feast for the eyes. This manuscript, along with the marginal decoration of his Grandes Heures, suggests his enjoyment of beautiful youthful bodies in general and of androgyny in particular. However, this has to be viewed within the very different gender system of the late fourteenth century in which women, youths and children were literally objects of male control. Only in this sense can we begin to understand how the duke’s love of things intersected with his political position and power more generally. Rather than see his collecting in all its polymorphous perversity as a symptom of personal trauma, I want to view it as a socially creative and recuperative act that was part of the performance of a ruthless man of power.

The work of performance artist and playwright Holly Hughes expands our conceptions and performances of gender and sexuality. The essay discusses ways in which women's performance art contests traditional systems of representation and gender classification, presenting to audiences the unique, subjective artist. In addition, the essay explores the dynamic interplay of self and other, identification and objectification occuring between performers and their audiences in this kind of autobiographical performance. After a discussion of Holly Hughes' work in general, the remainder of the paper focuses specifically on Hughes' recent solo performance piece, World Without End, as it explores the enormity of female desire and sexuality. In the tradition of innovative performance art, Hughes' plays and performance pieces allow her audiences to confront their own preconceptions, fears, and taboos about gender, identity, and sexuality.

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.

The recent centennial celebration of Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) has brought to my awareness a major fact likely to shed light on an experience familiar to parents and to psychoanalysts: “polymorphous perversity” of the child has overshadowed adolescence. Of course Freud’s successors have not failed to highlight the characteristic traits, particularly the difficulties and the suffering that occur at adolescence both in the development of a given subject as well as for his or her family. Added to this is the impact of adolescent malaise on the culture of a society and its era. It nevertheless seems to me that our approaches are sidestepped by the two extremes of the psychosexual chain: to begin with the narcissistic polymorphism of the newborn child incites epistemophilic curiosity; and at the end, the paradigm of neurosis with its optimal completion in genitality. We know only too well how fruitful this schema has been. The narcissism of the “polymorphous-perverse-and-theoretician” child has supported both the Kleinian revolution, which at the same time distanced itself from the Freudian model to develop

This essay uncovers a basic compatibility between queer theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis by elaborating their shared commitment to antipsychologism. Observing that queer theory has its political origins in the aids crisis and traces its intellectual genealogy to Michel Foucault and Georges Canguilhem, the essay contends that queer theory actually begins with Freud, specifically, with his theories of polymorphous perversity, unconscious desire, and partial drives. Foucault’s understanding of the disciplinary function of psychological and sexual identities is shown to be cognate with the psychoanalytic critique of imaginary identity; likewise, queer theory’s critique of normalization can be connected with Lacan’s critique of subjective adaptation to social norms. The axiomatic status in Lacanian doctrine of the impossibility of the sexual relation aligns psychoanalysis with queer theory’s critique of heteronormativity. The essay concludes by explaining how queer theory and psychoanalysis part company on the question of pleasure. Whereas Foucault emphasizes pleasure’s extensibility, Lacan shows how pleasure is complicated by jouissance and therefore by the death drive.

As a talented writer for The New York Times , Maureen Dowd in the mid-1980s was one of a select group from the New York press and other media with access to Woody Allen. Like other writers and critics in this group, she indicated a decidedly favorable leaning toward Allen, in part because of what she discerned as a new direction in his work concerning women. As mentioned earlier, in a lengthy piece for the Sunday New York Times about Allen's developing attitude toward women as suggested in his new film at the time, Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), Dowd asks, “Has Woody Allen turned some sort of emotional corner now, writing endings rosy with redemption and happily ever after?” Much has happened to Dowd and Allen since that article. While Allen's work, career, and life have taken a turn in a direction different from the one Dowd anticipated, her influence has grown as a widely read columnist whose mordant opinion pieces appear regularly on the “op-ed” page of the Times . In her columns, Dowd usually excoriates leading political figures at the helm of the Washington political establishment or punctures the inflated egos of other elites. Given her prominence, Dowd's change in attitude toward Allen seems notable and worth considering as part of an examination of Allen's work and career.

Falstaff’s language in 1 & 2 Henry IV is inseparable from the much discussed ‘polymorphous perversity’ which it expresses. Its historical resistance to the Crown’s centralizing ‘Lenten civil policy’, as Michael Bristol has called it,3 remains to this day essential to the kind of pleasure which it affords to the audience. In the wake of Mikhail Bakhtin’s reading of Rabelais, the concept of popular or festive laughter (which C.L. Barber had already established as a major and productive approach in Shakespearean criticism) has been extended to embrace the difficult but useful idea of a ‘language of the grotesque body’. Common sense tells us that the idea is paradoxical, since it appears that the body, if considered as an entity distinct from the mind, cannot be said to have a language. Deconstruction of this old Cartesian dualism, apart from being tedious and perhaps a bit too predictable, is not necessarily very persuasive. A more pragmatic approach would be to point out that, whether it can be said to have a language or not, it can certainly be made to signify. This can be put more strongly. The body cannot escape from signification, even from the standpoint of the person spontaneously performing a gesture or bodily function.

Reconstruction of the origins of present day psychic phenomena constitutes an essential component of psychoanalytically oriented treatment. The clinician seeks to help restore to the patient a picture of the past and to correct or revise those early impressions that have been distorted as a result of cognitive immaturity or altered by the employment of defense, fantasy, or compensatory adaptations. It is this renovative aspects of reconstruction which will be elaborated upon, drawing from the treatment of a borderline woman who, since childhood, had overly employed the autoerotic resources of her body to compensate for missed object experiences. Ultimately this effort came to block her development, distort organization, and compromise self valuation. By tracing her polymorphous perversity in adulthood back to its origins, it was possible to enable her to regard her responses to chronic childhood trauma in a new light. This in turn aided in the revision of the predominantly negatively coloured self representations, leading to more positive development in the narcissistic sphere of her personality.

Dress Suits to Hire won Holly Hughes the distinction of having authored her own genre. When the play opened in May 1987 at P.S. I22 in New York City, C. Carr of The Village Voice heralded Hughes as queen of her own "Dyke Noir Theatre" and broadcast her reputation as bad girl of the bad girls. "She's hell on heels, a twisted sister-a character from the timeless, tasteless world of dyke noir as imagined by Holly Hughes." Where is Hughes' dyke noir since Dress Suits? If Carr is right, "Wherever she goes it's the wrong side of town" (I987:32). I found Hughes close to midnight in the East Village. She was popping out of a glaring pink, plaster-of-paris pig at performance space P.S. I22. It was I6 September I988, the beginning of World Without End, Hughes' latest work-in-progress. The pig bore the name "Trojan Pig" because, Hughes told me, she wanted to appear as "some kind of Sappho reincarnate." Hughes stood with her naked back to the audience as four lovely negligee-clad attendants helped her don a pinkish bra to complete her garish girdle outfit. The beauties guided her to a pink scallop-backed chair center stage where, for the rest of the night, like some kind of Venus on her shell, Hughes told it all-from her own version of Genesis in which Eve and Adam ride the IRT subway, to the particularly smutty Gospel According to Mona, Hughes' mother. In the course of her raunchy tales, spicy asides, and sometimes painful personal sagas, Hughes, with a winsome smile, proclaimed herself the "preeminent lesbian playwright of my generation." The campy butch-femme role playing of Hughes early Well of Hominess evolved through Lady Dick and Dress Suits to receive quite a bit of critical attention, especially from those interested in ways lesbian theatre disrupts traditional constellations of gender and power on stage (see Davy I986; Dolan 1988). Hughes' latest "dyke noir" appears in new garb as the sinuous and long-winded monolog World Without End, a piece which pays a surprising amount of attention to the specifics of Adam's anatomy