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Perversion: Perversion and the Problem of Fluidity and Fixity

Chapter of: Clinical Encounters in Sexuality: Psychoanalytic Practice and Queer Theory(pp. 123–144)

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Metadata
TitlePerversion
SubtitlePerversion and the Problem of Fluidity and Fixity
ContributorLisa Downing(author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.21983/P3.0167.1.06
Landing pagehttps://punctumbooks.com/titles/clinical-encounters-in-sexuality-psychoanalytic-practice-and-queer-theory/
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/
CopyrightDowning, Lisa
Publisherpunctum books
Published on2017-03-07
Long abstractIt is a commonplace to state that the problem of sexuality is cen-tral to the endeavors of both psychoanalysis and queer theory. Whereas for psychoanalysis, traditionally at least, sexuality has an etiological status as the nexus of f/phantasies underlying an analysand’s symptoms and behaviors, for queer theorists, espe-cially following Michel Foucault, sexuality is a constructed epis-temological category that functions to normalize the behaviors and bodies of social subjects. In the former, it is a source of truth to be tapped; in the latter it is a pervasive and power-laden lie to be exposed. Whereas psychoanalysis relies on a developmental model of sexuality (Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein and so on) or a structural one (for example, Jacques Lacan), “queer” takes the theory of performativity as its explicatory model to account for the ways in which subjects learn to “do” their genders and sexualities. Moreover, the category of “perversion” has central import for theorizations of sexuality within both psychoanal-ysis and queer theory. For clinical psychoanalysts, perversion is sexuality gone awry; the failure of the subject to attain adult genitality. For queer theorists, on the other hand, perversion may be construed as a defiant performance of excess that shows up the constructedness and arbitrariness of the category of the “normal,” and it is centrally implicated in queer’s rejection of the meaning of identity in favor of the politics of practice. In what follows, however, I will focus on a pair of concepts that are central to both psychoanalytic and queer thinking on sexuality and its perverse forms — namely fixity and fluidity — in order to trouble certain orthodoxies within both bodies of thought. In this way, I will neither pathologize queer in the name of psy-choanalysis, nor accuse psychoanalysis of reactionary politics in the name of queer. Rather I shall highlight — and challenge — a logic that is surprisingly shared by both systems.
Page rangepp. 123–144
Print length22 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)