<<TRANSMATHOME

2.0

No healthy person, it appears, can fail to make some addition that might be called perverse to the normal sexual aim. - Freud [1]

The elements of a comprehensive definition of sexual perversion should include sexual activity or fantasy directed towards orgasm other than genital intercourse with a willing partner of the opposite sex and of similar maturity, persistently recurrent, not merely a substitute for preferred behavior made difficult by the immediate environment and contrary to the generally accepted norm of sexual behavior in the community. - P.D. Scott, Clinical Psychiatrist. [2]

In this chapter perversion will be posited as a tactic towards transformation - a line of flight which encompasses a particular space in becoming minoritarian and a term that emphasizes the openness and flux of the body. Within and beyond the parameters of traditionally aberrant sexualities and bodily manifestations, perversion is embedded in a history of the repudiation of the dominant. Any tactical use of perversion must remain contextually sensitive to the histories and bodies of the minoritarians it encompasses. Horror films, their viewers and their makers represent a certain element of filmic perversion within the motion picture canon, but in this chapter perversion goes beyond evincing non-normalized objects of desire as perverse. The flesh itself and its innumerable ways of experiencing - film, pleasure, desire and the world - can be theorized as perverse in many incarnations. I will argue that the act of watching film itself may be construed as perverse, were it to exist outside of its sanctioned context. But because perversion insinuates a history of oppression and denigration of many kinds of bodies, I will first explore the traditional, psychiatric and biological manifestations of the threat of perversion. If pleasure affects the subject towards transformation, perversion may be a middle ground of politicized minoritarianism, another line of flight or at least a launcher for such.

Affect perverts the subject; however, the negative terminology of ‘pervert’ should be seen rather as transformative and hence positive. Perversion, a noun itself, is frequently taken as a means to making the noun ‘pervert’ rather than as a verb or, as I wish to utilize it, to describe affect. Because bodies are seen as finished once they exhibit adult sexual drives, the rigidity of the term pervert is affirmed upon intervention from other discourses: medicine, psychoanalysis, genetics. The open-ness and constant change of the body is a model I prefer, which sees the self and the subject as being in permanent flux and re-figuration. For this reason all subjects are perverting, themselves and each other, but none are pervert, in an ontologically static sense. Linda Williams, in Hard Core states

It is this idea of the very dismantling of the very idea of the norm that I find most helpful for a feminist reading of, and defense against, contemporary film pornography... We must come back, therefore, to the question of the most effective feminist use of the notion of perversion. For since there can be no authentic, true, or normal position from which to resist the repression of the feminine as currently enacted in visual pornography, but only the hope of breaking out of the economy of the one, it seems to me that the most effective strategy is to embrace the liberating potential contained in the very idea of an ‘implantation of perversions’. [3]

Even for Freud, female sexuality was enigmatic enough to almost constitute perversion in itself, and in phallologocentric culture feminine sexuality is, by its existence in an isomorphic cultural structure, perverse to the single masculine aim. Considering this a strategy of positive perversion elucidates itself as an entrance point for feminists and all minoritarians interested in visually affect-ive discourses.

Whether watching film, in a sexual frenzy or in any other moment of pleasure, pain or affect, by the subject’s very desire to feel something, or to feel different, it is clear that the subject will emerge altered. Similar to the idea that for something to be feminist, it must be ‘different’ to culture’s dominant homogenized and homogenizing structure, perversion is something different; reading a different way, comprehending a different way, and also, rendering the subject as different with each affect. Because this has a very definite history in medicine and psychiatry, I will discuss the different incarnations of perversion in such doctrines. Although this chapter is not about sexuality, it would be unethical to launch the subject into perversion without acknowledging perversion’s history of power, control and oppression, similar to post-modernism’s fetishization of pure difference without acknowledging women’s histories. The histories of various ‘perverse’ subjects locate them as objects of scientific research, their status of abnormal sexuality given to them by scientific and social ontology. By making perversion a line of flight I wish to allow those bodies, and all bodies, the ethical power to enforce their own perversion. Becoming minoritarian is an ethical tactic towards transformation as much as it is a subversive one, because it refutes the desirability of being accepted within dominant discourse, without refuting its own history or forgetting the accountability of the dominant. Becoming minoritarian does not know its own end; it does not become fixated with the rigid romanticism of marginals within a social system. Deleuze emphasizes the difference between becoming minoritarian and romanticizing marginality. He states,

I share Michel’s [Foucault’s] distaste for those who consider themselves marginals; the romanticism of madness, delinquency, perversion, and drugs is less bearable for me. But for me lines of flight… are not created by marginals. On the contrary, they are objective lines that cut across a society, and on which marginals install themselves here and there in order to create a buckle, a whirl, a recoding. [4]

Deleuze’s anxieties express the importance he places on the flight of his lines of flight. The pervert, the mad(man) and the addict are all posited upon an axis at a single point if pervert, addict and mad is indeed what they are. Deleuze is concerned that perversion is utilized as an aim or a final product of subversion, whereby perverts would install themselves along a line of flight. In this chapter perversion refers to a tactic, not a subjective mode of existence. To pervert one’s static self is the aim, not to become pervert. Becoming has a lot in common with my use of the term pervert because both are a setting off of the subject without a final aim (but with an idea toward what one becomes, which in turn insinuates what one is perverted from). But I utilize the term pervert because it does not simply repudiate or forget the histories of minoritarians. Perversion continues, implicitly, to suggest history and accountability while forcing transformation and making desirable alterity. Considering women have been aligned with the perverted form of the hu-man, be it because they are castrated, reproductive, non-dominant or any other number of historical reasons, the ethical importance of a historically contextualized becoming seems urgent. This is why, although this chapter concludes with a discussion of becoming, the multiple histories and eventually multiple accesses to perversion are the primary foci.

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