Lisa Downing

Safewording! Kinkphobia and gender normativity in Fifty Shades of Grey

This article considers the recent publishing phenomenon, E.L. Jamess Fifty Shades trilogy, from what may be termed a ‘sex-critical’ perspective. That is, it evaluates, without endorsing, the differing responses to the trilogy issuing from both sex-positive and radical feminist perspectives. Further, it subjects to equal scrutiny the ways in which the trilogy and discourses about it represent both BDSM practices and the rituals of ‘vanilla’ heterosexual romance/marriage. It concludes that both the trilogy and kinkphobic mainstream responses to it collude in rendering invisible the ethically and politically problematic aspects of heteronormative courtship narratives ending in marriage and reproduction by othering and scapegoating non-normative practices such as those included under the BDSM umbrella.

French Cinema’s New ‘Sexual Revolution’: Postmodern Porn and Troubled Genre

This article proposes and examines a selection of interpretative strategies for viewing the type of sexually explicit art film made by French directors Catherine Breillat, Patrice Chéreau, Gaspar Noé and the team Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi, over the past five years. To contextualise the relevant debates, political work on pornography, produced mainly by feminists in the 1970s and 1980s, is placed in dialogue with recent deconstructive gender theory and postmodern philosophy. While this hybridisation of theory problematises what pornography is, my readings of the films demonstrate that the cinematic medium may call into question our habitual ways of seeing sexuality. This is done by means of denaturalisation of the sexual spectacle (Romance, 1999) or generic collage and the dislocation of ideology from genre (Baise-moi, 2001; Irréversible2002). I conclude that, rather than being pornographic films, these problematic works constitute specifically cinematic interventions into wider contemporary cultural debates about the status of gender, sexuality and subjecthood at the turn of the twenty-first century.

The Subject of Murder: Gender, Exceptionality, and the Modern Killer

The epigraph is a lyric taken from Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. A well-known musical turned film, Sweeney Todd tells the story of one Benjamin Barker who seeks revenge rather indiscriminately by slitting the throats of his barbershop clients. A thoroughly engaging if graphic story, Todd embodies a typically modern view of what murderers look and act like. His skin is pale, his eyes a deep hue, he is well-spoken and mild mannered, except when using his razorblade to slash a victim. At the same time, he is the person ‘no one would expect to be a cold-blooded killer’ and his accomplice, Mrs Lovett – who disposes of the bodies by mincing them into pies – is the more-or-less idealised version of the doting maiden. She is eager to settle down, to spend a life with Mr Todd, who completely ignores her on his quest for revenge. While fictional, Sweeney Todd is emblematic of general perceptions about the murdering subject. On the one hand, the murderer is seen as the ‘boy next door’ – kind, gentle, and unassuming. That is until it comes to light that actually the man living next door is a murderer. Then the conversation changes: ‘There was always something a bit odd about him’; ‘I never felt comfortable around his property’; ‘He gave me the creeps’. As Lisa Downing points out in her brilliant new book The Subject of Murder, this discourse is important as it essentially ‘others’ the murderer. For if the murdering subject is seen as ‘different’ than ‘us’ despite the initial reactions about him being ‘seemingly average’, we can construct murderers as exceptional, aberrations not like the rest of us. Part and parcel of her methodology, Downing reflects on Foucault’s argument that a murder defendant’s behaviour is made to retrospectively correspond with his identity as a criminal (8). The aim of the narratives about the subject – whether in the form of legal testimony or in the form of a story as with Todd – is to show how the defendant resembles the crime and

Viewing critical psychology through the lens of queer

This article constitutes an intervention by two arts and humanities scholars with an expertise in queer studies and an outsiders interest in the discipline of critical psychology. First, it proposes a critical comparative history of the homosexual rights movements that predates ‘queer’ and the development of the discipline of psychology. Second, it examines some of the most recent currents in queer theory and tests their applicability to psychology. In particular, it looks at the modes of ethical philosophy that have been engaged by the so-called antisocial turn in queer and asks to what extent post-structuralist models of ethics might trouble the foundational belief in a normative idea(l) of health, in which even progressive critical psychology has an investment.

Feminine Sexual Pathologies

Th e a i m o f t h i s s p e c i a l i s s u e is to produce a set of detailed studies of so-called feminine sexual pathologies over the course of the long nineteenth century and its immediate prehistory and to explore a range of genres and media, including literary, medical, and philosophical texts. Just what conditions or practices came to be counted as pathology is, of course, the object of critical attention throughout. The collection highlights the complex and often intermittent history of “pathologies” such as hysteria, frigidity, nymphomania, lesbianism, and erotomania as well as treating the heavily gendered discourses surrounding “perversions” such as sadism and masochism and delinquent behaviors such as murderousness. The shift in perception of “abnormalities” from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century is an underlying concern of this volume. First, the eighteenth century entertained wide discrepancies in discourse according to generic locality: medical writing often presented graphic descriptions of such distempers as nymphomania accompanied by dire warnings, while libertine fiction typically sought to present unusual sexual behaviors as diverting or amusingly eccentric matters of “taste,” able to be momentarily transformed in the course of erotic contests. The nineteenth century, by contrast, tended to produce a more narrowly convergent understanding: such behaviors were fixed into the categories of sexual perversions, as Michel Foucault famously argued in 1976. 1 Second, eighteenth-century accounts of pathology were often bound up with material understandings of human physiology as constitutionally natural (that is, based on humoral differences between bodies), whereas the nineteenth century witnessed the adoption of medical and philosophical theories of instinct and then of desire to account for these sexual behaviors. (Caroline Warman’s article lays the groundwork for a discussion

Heteronormativity and Repronormativity in Sexological ''Perversion Theory''and the DSM-5's''Paraphilic Disorder'' Diagnoses

The move from “paraphilias” to “paraphilic disorders,” where only the latter constitute mental disorders, has been hailed as a major change to the conception of non-normative sexualities in DSM-5. However, this is a claim that has been criticized by numerous activists and doctors working for removal of all diagnoses of so-called sexual disorders from the APA’s manual. This article, written from a critical humanities, queer theory-inflected perspective, examines the historical and ideological grounds underlying the inclusion of the newly branded “paraphilic disorders” in DSM-5. It argues that the diagnosis does nothing to overturn the conservative and utilitarian view of sexuality as genitally oriented and for reproduction that has colored sexological and psychiatric history. It suggests that despite homosexuality no longer being classed as a disorder, an implicit heteronormativity continues to define psychiatric perceptions of sexuality. In sum, this article proposes that (1) the production of the field of psychiatric knowledge concerning “perversion”/“sexual deviation”/“paraphilia”/“paraphilic disorder” is more ideological than properly scientific; (2) the “normophilic” bias of the DSM is a bias in favor of heteronormativity and reproduction; and (3) some sexual practices are valued above others, regardless of claims that the presence of a paraphilic practice itself is no longer a criterion for a diagnosis of mental disorder.

John Money's ‘Normophilia’: diagnosing sexual normality in late-twentieth-century Anglo-American sexology

This article considers the treatment of the concept of paraphilia in the work of sexologist John Money (1921–2006). It argues that Moneys writing on paraphilia in the 1980s and 1990s, while both prolific and influential for clinical practice, has been ignored by historians and critics who have instead paid attention to his controversial pioneering work on gender identity and sex reassignment. First, the article reveals and analyses Moneys indebtedness in conceptualising paraphilia to a nineteenth-century sexological model of perversion, based on a notion of the ‘natural’ gone awry, which stands in contradiction to his explicit political distancing from ideas of ‘nature’ in favour of the social constructionist concept of the ‘lovemap’. Second, it considers Moneys invention of the term ‘normophilia’ which works to construct an impossible standard for sexual behaviour. An analysis of the rhetorical uses of ‘normophilia’, by Money and others (including a self-identified fetishist writing on the internet), shows up the limits of Moneys claimed ideal of a liberal sexual democracy and reveals the normativity inherent in his system. In pursuing both of these lines of enquiry, the article casts historical light on current debates about the legitimacy of paraphilias continuing status as a mental disorder in the DSM.

The Birth of the Beast: Death-Driven Masculinity in Monneret, Zola and Freud

The beast in question in the title of this article is a very specific beast. It is the fantasy of embodied destruction to which the nineteenth-century imaginary gave birth. It is a beast gendered masculine—but ambivalently so—and constructed along strict ideological lines as the underside of progressive modernity and the product of sexual excess. Three types of discourse on destructive masculinity will be explored here, as the sub-heading suggests. ‘Monneret’ is the name of the author of a comprehensive medical work of 1861, the Traite de pathologie generale, in which the destructive monomanias are grouped together for the first time. My paper is not a contribution to Monneret studies; rather his name has a primarily symbolic function. ‘Monneret’ stands in for the discursive field comprised of nineteenth-century medicine, alienism and sexual science, which my investigation will tap. ‘Zola’ represents here a dual author function. Firstly his name is a synecdoche for Naturalism, the literary school which, in the words of Daniel Pick, dreamed both of ‘mastering disorder’ and of providing a ‘master narrative of disorder’ (Pick, 74), by trying to make literary craft approximate scientific method. Secondly, and more specifically, Zola’s novel La Bete humaine (1890) will be considered in detail as a work which functions as a historical and imaginative bridge between two models of destructive beastliness. On the one hand it draws for inspiration on the aberrant pathological masculine typology

Reading Bitchy Jones's Diary: sex blogging, community-building and feminism(s)

The four articles in this section are united by their analyses of the links between three phenomena: female-authored web blogging; questions of sexual identity and community construction; and debates in feminism and postfeminism. The genesis of this collection was a call for expressions of interest I issued back in 2009 for academic and activist responses to the UK-based blog Bitchy Jones’s Diary (http://bitchyjones.wordpress.com/, 2006–2010).1 This blog, authored by a dominant, female BDSM2 practitioner and feminist struck me as a particularly significant document in terms of female online authorship. It was unusual in that it not only participated in the confessional mode of recounting personal sexual experiences that, according to Michel Foucault (1976/1990), constitutes the means by which the modern field of ‘sexuality’ and the modern ‘sexual subject’ are constructed,3 but it also – sometimes in the very same posts – reflected critically upon the feminist implications of sexual discourses and practices; the communities which produce them; and mainstream representations of those practices, practitioners and communities. (Sexual practices scrutinised for their gender–political meanings by Bitchy included penis-in-vagina sex; strap-on sex (woman-on-man); ‘queening’ (a woman squatting over her partner’s face); urine play; and the kink of ‘forced feminisation’.) Moreover, during its life, the blog provided a vibrant interactive forum for an underserved subcultural community – that of BDSM feminists,4 especially ‘femdoms’.5 Posts elicited comments that typically expressed identification with Bitchy’s arguments and shared her frustrations about both mainstream representations of BDSM and gender normativity within the relationships and practices carried out within (mainly heterosexual, cis-) BDSM communities. In addition, comments on posts engendered a concomitant self-disclosure of the readers’ sexual practices, often coupled with a degree of cultural critique and self-reflexivity. If I express surprise at having located the co-existence of confession of individual erotic pleasure and critique of systemic iniquity in the same location, this lies in the fact that these two types of discourses often belong exclusively to different political traditions of feminism. Generally speaking, the former (explicit personal confession) would be associated with a ‘liberal’ or ‘sex-positive’ branch of feminism (e.g. Friedman & Valenti, 2008; Johnson, 2002; Feministing) and with the (somewhat overlapping) phenomenon of so-called postfeminism that has been described as characterised by ‘self-surveillance,

Death and the Maidens: A Century of Necrophilia in Female-Authored Textual Production

This quotation, taken from Gabrielle Wittkop’s novella Le Nécrophile, addresses some of the central paradoxes of necrophilia as a socio-sexual phenomenon. Firstly, it evokes its quality of remaining unspoken or better, unspeakable. In fact, necrophilia is one of the few sexual taboos that remain in the secular, post-modern Western world. The response of simultaneous disgust and fascination elicited by the idea of sexual pleasure on contact with a corpse is seemingly untempered by fluctuations in religious and moral systems of authority. Secondly, the terms that are used here by Wittkop’s character and narrator, Lucien, to describe and qualify his passion contrast sharply with the universal disapprobation that, he has just told us, necrophilia provokes in society. For Lucien, it is the uniquely pure form of love, a personal source of the sacred. This reference to pure love, as opposed to base love, echoes the language of Platonic discourse. This binary conceptual framework, aligning the bodily with ‘low’ and the cerebral with ‘high’ runs through the history of thinking about human sexuality. Considering the above-quoted extract again, we soon begin to suspect that the most apparently ‘unspeakable’ phenomena of sexual life are in reality understood, by both self-identified practitioners and commentators, according to a highly codified set of discursive assumptions. Few things, in fact, are more heavily codified than taboos. French Cultural Studies, 14/2, 157–168 Copyright