Perverse Pleasures: Ruminations on Sexology, Gender/Sex, and Madness

Ethan Coston, Virginia Commonwealth University

The sustaining moral panic around sex/gender variance in the U.S. has framed sexually minoritized people as morally corrupt and capable of corrupting (infecting) others, and gender minoritized people as secretly (or apparently not so secretly) sexually violent and/or pedophilic monsters. But, our notions about inherent or natural ways of human “being”—whether in regards to sex, gender, or sexuality—are fictions of modern medicine. Indeed, “homosexual," “sadist," “transsexual," and “pedophile" (among others) entered the medicoscientific lexicon at the same historical moment as other “diseases of the mind”: moral insanity, neurosis, schizophrenia, autism (intentional little “a”), and melancholia, among others. In many of the early and foundational texts of alienists, psychiatrists, and sexologists during the long 19th century, madness and gender/sex perversion were intimately and inextricably linked. In this presentation, drawing from diverse and transdisciplinary frameworks and approaches—such as close reading, narratology, autoethnography, and thick description, I will discuss this historical entanglement and place it within a broader conversation about normative terms, traditions, technologies and tools (of whiteness) and habits (of white supremacy); detail how these supposedly scientific conclusions about human ways of being/sensing/feeling/doing have been used more recently to justify the sociolegal control of bodyminds like mine; and begin to chart a path of refusal, resistance, and reclamation. In doing so, I hope to reveal the sticky, messy, fluid, and chaotic assemblages of mad gender/sex, and the radical possibilities of ruthlessly perverted performances and dynamically wicked self articulations.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 113. Sexuality, Race, and the Regulation of Difference