Palgrave Handbook of the Psychology of Sexuality and Gender Clinical Psychology, Sexuality and Gender (original) (raw)
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SEXUALITY BETWEEN THE NATURAL FOUNDATIONS OF THE HUMAN BEING_AND ITS_FUNDAMENTAL LACK OF NATURE
It seems to me that Philippe and his colleagues tend to establish too quickly a connection between the presence of an external object with reproductive or other normative parameters. However, one can invert this argument: if lips do not kiss themselves but the rim, the border between them where the extimic parasite dwells, then oral pleasure is not the effect of pure physiological processes but what opens biology to new unforeseeable horizons. The otherness that haunts autoerotism is not what constrains it to external normative parameters but, on the contrary, is what opens human disposition to the possibility of producing new norms. Human sexuality is the possibility of betraying human nature. Thus, rather than normalizing the pathological, I think we should pathologize normality. It is not perversion normal but heterosexuality that is perverse by pretending that there is something normal. Sexuality is more like a contagious disease (a parasite) than the expression of normal human dispositions. In this sense, Joyce McDougall created the ultimate diagnostic category: normopathy. It is normality (heterosexuality) that distorts and exaggerates the relationship of sexuality with reproductive norms and human dispositions. Rather than studying perversions to understand human normal features, I think we should explore heterosexuality to understand, by contrast, human sexuality. That is, instead of pathoanalysis I would claim for a normoanalytical project.
"Sexuality", in Routledge Handbook of Psychoanalytical Political Theory, ed. Yannis Stavrakakis
Routledge, 2020
One of the oldest examples of sexuality's political potential appears in Aristophanes's comedy Lysistrata, in which the women of Greece are tired of the ongoing war between their cities. Under the unifying leadership of Lysistrata, they declare that they will refuse to have sex with their husbands until the war is over, and miraculously enough, a peace treaty is signed much sooner than expected. The different peoples reconcile with each other, and so do the different sexes. Indeed, sexuality expresses much more than an intimate interaction between two bodies. It also involves various elements such as power, dominance, control, pleasure, and pain-elements that are inherent parts of any human interaction, from relationships between two people to complex social structures. These elements, however, are not static and take diverse shapes and forms according to the time and the place of their emergence. Sexuality changes accordingly in both its praxis and its discourse, interacting with different norms and codes that define what 'legitimate' sexuality is. The interesting question for our purposes, however, is not so much how sexuality is shaped by history-a question that has been studied extensively-but rather how sexuality may in turn shape history. What is the political potential of sexuality, and how can we realize it? In this respect, psychoanalysis may serve as a powerful tool of investigation. Indeed, sexual-ity has occupied a central place in psychoanalysis from the outset, and this place, moreover, has been the focal point of many criticisms and attacks against psychoanalysis. It is as if the way that psychoanalysis conceived of sexuality profoundly disturbed and threatened to reveal something hidden in society. The introduction of infantile sexuality, for instance, provoked outrage and disgust among conservative circles, which accused psychoanalysis of decadence and nihilism and of seeking to destabilize family and sexual norms. Later on, however, a contrary type of criticism was raised, one that considers psychoanalysis to be too conservative and oppressive. Psychoanalysis is actually both revolutionary and conservative, not because of Freud's own personality or other external factors but because of the very nature of what psychoanalysis investigates. On the one hand, it introduces blind forces, which are the drives: Libido (or Eros, the life drive) and Thanatos (the death drive). On the other hand, it focuses on the ways these forces are restricted by social norms and the various symptoms that are caused by these restrictions. Neither wishing to undo these norms nor aspiring to conserve them, psychoanalysis is content with describing the norms. Its aim is to find a cure for the symptoms within existing restrictions rather than to create a society with no symptoms at all.
The natural and the normal in the history of sexuality
Psychology and Sexuality, 2010
The idea of the normal has a quite particular history, and this paper shows how that history informs the papers to follow. The long-term history begins before the advent of psychology, with a brief discussion of the 'natural', a notion grounded in early modern theology. When the term 'normal' did emerge in the nineteenth century, that involved a change in its primary meaning, which had belonged to the domain of geometry. In the nineteenth century there was a problematic, contested overlap between the emerging discipline of statistics and medical science. Paradoxically, the notion of the abnormal seemed to be less problematic, and appeared frequently in the discourse of nineteenth-century psychiatry. But the relation between the abnormal and the normal was not straightforward and abnormal sexualities were not always considered pathological. In parallel with typologies of sexuality, nineteenth-century thinkers also developed the idea of distinct human races and colours, but it became possible to ask in the twentieth century whether those differences were 'natural', or whether they were the work of discourse. This questioning of the status of 'normal'
Psychology's pathologization of female sexuality
Female sexuality has long been the focus of medical attention. Various parts of the female sexual body have been regarded as a site of pathology throughout history. While 21st century physicians and psychiatrists generally do not attribute women's afflictions to a wandering or dehydrated uterus, the female sexual body is still treated as something that needs to be handled and treated by the medical field. This preoccupation with female sexuality can be traced back to ancient Egyptian practices, to Freud's notions of sexual fantasy, to the current Diagnostic and Statistical Manual IV-TR (2004), which pathologizes female sexuality in the form of personality disorders, specifically Histrionic Personality Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder. By looking back at the various ways female sexuality was handled, it is evident that the way in which women dealt with their sexuality was largely governed by others. Women's sexuality was deemed something that needed to be controlled because it could be dangerous both to men and to the dominant ideology of patriarchy.
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Psychology, 2020
Sexual science or sexology arose in the last three decades of the 19th century when psychiatrists and neurologists began to study and treat deviant sexualities as sickly “perversions.” The new science of experimental psychology did not engage with this morally contested subject. Research into sexuality was rooted in a biomedical and clinical approach. All the same, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, some medical experts increasingly explained perversion as well as regular sexuality in a psychological way. This trend was intertwined with the changing definition of sexuality as either a pushing or a pulling force, which pertained not only to biological versus psychological interpretations, but also to the contrast between nature and culture, male and female sexuality, and pessimistic and optimistic evaluations. All of this has contributed to the shaping of the modern concept and experience of sexuality and also to its sociopolitical regulation in the 20th-century Western world.
This two-day conference proposes to examine the history of conceptions of sexuality and of gender relations that have, explicitly or implicitly, been used in sexological “constructions” since the mid-19th century. The knowledge, theories and practices to which “sexology” refers imply specific conceptions of sexuality. Sexology is a social (and, above all, medical, psychological, psychiatric or even legal) response to the questions people ask about “their sexuality”. Its history has shifted from a “proto-sexology”, centered around perversions and deviancies, to a second phase with a focus on the “function of orgasm” and on sexual behaviors (Béjin 1982). Sexology is evolving with the emergence of “sexual medicine”, “sexual health” and “sexual rights”, trends that weigh on the reformulation of theories of sexuality. Papers will present material from medical, scientific or educational sources or from institutions involved in the medicalization of sexuality. The accepted papers will be grouped by subject, geographical area, historical period or historiographical approach as a function of the two-day program, and each group will be assigned a discussant who will Chair the session and open discussion of the papers presented. Abstracts and papers can be submitted and presented in English or French. There will not be official simultaneous translation during the conference. Participants are expected to understand both languages. Plans are in the works for editing the papers presented at the conference for a book to be published by a French publishing house specialized in multidisciplinary books.
Homosexuality and Sexology - a draft of an encyclopaedia entry.
It is a well-rehearsed argument, following Michel Foucault's assertion that sometime at the end of the nineteenth century sexology "produced" a "new species", that the foundation of sexology lay upon the construction of the homosexual (Foucault, 1978, p.43). Dissenters from Foucault's "productive" model have shown that there was a well-established homosexual subculture in places like the Port of Amsterdam that well predate this sexological construction of same-sex behaviour (v/d Meer, 1989), implying that homosexuality is diachronically universal in some senses (homosociality, same-sex practices, gender play, etc.). Others have argued that what the homosexual became after this sexological reconstruction (which included not only same-sex activity, but a model of homosexuality based on gender inversion, the 'perverse' sexual impulse, and the psychic life of this 'new species') was a significant rupture from these older homosexual practices and identities Hacking, 1983;. This "new species" reflexively interacted with the labels and concepts that sexologists used to describe them, becoming those labels in a performative sense. If nothing else, sexology helped produce an understanding of the homosexual that people who desired sex with the same sex could interact with: one that was outside of the usual religious, legal, medico-legal and venereological constructions of same sex activity -where it was seen as either something morally perilous, sinister, something to be visually located on the body of the prisoner in order to detect a crime, or as the vector of the spread of venereal diseases like syphilis, all of which posed a perceived threat to the ideology of the family in the nineteenth century (see Hekma, 1993. What it meant to be homosexual from the end of the nineteenth century gradually came to include an interaction with a series of different psycho-biological constructions, in addition to the ways that homosexual communities developed a series of homosexual identities and practices (for example, queens, leathermen, bears, Muscle Marys, etc.). The two happened in tandem. Homosexuals were not passive dupes of scientific research into sexual variations; but nor were they necessarily outside of the influence of the psychiatric construction of homosexuality as psychopathological by virtue of their life in an existing subculture, or later sexological constructions of sexual activity that included negotiating the spread of STIs. By looking at how sexology "produced" varieties of homosexuality, we are looking at the role of psychiatric power in reconstructing identity around concepts of "normality". This focus also requires due attention being paid to resistance . It was the resistance of homosexual rights groups, who have always been in dialogue with medical researchers of homosexuality (although nowadays it is more in terms of biomedical and epidemiological studies of STIs), that helped change the ways in which homosexual behaviour was pathologized .