Perversion in the 21st Century: A Psychoanalytic Conundrum

Abstract

“Modern society is perverse, not in spite of its puritanism or as if from a backlash provoked by its hypocrisy; it is in actual fact, and directly, perverse.” Thus spake Michel Foucault back in 1976, in the first volume of his critically acclaimed History of Sexuality. Rather than a trenchant reflection upon the social impact of regulatory power structures in Western civilization during the 1970s, this provocative declaration was Foucault’s idiosyncratic interpretation of the way in which the diversity of human sexual expressions had started to proliferate as distinct perversions, both at a symbolic taxonomical level and as real, embodied subjectivities, with the advent of sexological science in Europe during the second half of the nineteenth century.