Rethinking gendered perversion and degeneration in visions of sadism and masochism, 1886-1930

Journal of the History of Sexuality

Volumn 18, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 138-157

  Moore, Alison ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF QUEENSLAND   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; ECONOMICS; EDUCATION; ETHNOLOGY; GENDER IDENTITY; HISTORY; HUMAN RELATION; LEGAL ASPECT; LITERATURE; MASOCHISM; MEN'S HEALTH; MENTAL DISEASE; PERCEPTION; PHYSIOLOGY; PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECT; PSYCHOSEXUAL DISORDER; SADISM; SEXUAL BEHAVIOR; SEXUAL DYSFUNCTION; SOCIAL BEHAVIOR; SOCIAL CHANGE; SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY; SOCIAL STATUS; WOMEN'S HEALTH; WOMEN'S RIGHTS;

GENDER IDENTITY; HISTORY, 19TH CENTURY; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; INTERPERSONAL RELATIONS; LITERATURE, MODERN; MASOCHISM; MEN'S HEALTH; MENTAL DISORDERS; SADISM; SEXUAL BEHAVIOR; SEXUAL DYSFUNCTION, PHYSIOLOGICAL; SEXUAL DYSFUNCTIONS, PSYCHOLOGICAL; SOCIAL BEHAVIOR; SOCIAL CHANGE; SOCIAL CONDITIONS; SOCIAL CONFORMITY; SOCIAL PERCEPTION; WOMEN'S HEALTH; WOMEN'S RIGHTS;

EID: 63249109111     PISSN: 10434070     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (98)

1. John K. Noyes, The Mastery of Submission: Inventions of Masochism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997);
2. Carol Siegel, Male Masochism: Modern Revisions of the Story of Love (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995);
3. Suzanne R. Stewart, Sublime Surrender: Male Masochism at the Fin de Siècle (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998).
4. See Christopher Forth, The Dreyfus Affair and the Crisis of French Manhood (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004);
5. John Tosh, A Man's Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999);
6. John C. Fout, "Sexual Politics in Wilhelmine Germany: The Male Gender Crisis, Moral Purity, and Homophobia," Journal of the History of Sexuality 2, no. 3 (1992): 388-421.
7. Paula J. Caplan, The Myth of Women's Masochism (London: Methuen, 1985);
8. Michelle Massé, In the Name of Love: Women, Masochism and the Gothic (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992);
9. Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (New York: Pantheon, 1988);
10. Karen Lynch, "The Heterosexualisation of Sadism and Masochism," Hecate 29, no. 1 (2003): 34-47.
11. This article employs the term "normalcy" to designate the assumed state of those who believe they are normal or who define perversion without naming what is meant to be normal in opposition. "Normativity" in this article is used to refer to the discursive category this set of assumptions constitutes when viewed by historians of sexuality.
12. Sigmund Freud, "The Economic Problem of Masochism" (1924), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1953-74), 19:159-70;
13. Karen Horney, "The Problem of Feminine Masochism," Psychoanalytic Review 22 (1935): 241-57, reprinted in Psychoanalysis and Women, ed. Jean Baker Miller (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1973), 21-38;
14. Helene Deutsch, "The Significance of Masochism in the Mental Life of Women," part 1, "'Feminine' Masochism and Its Relation to Frigidity," International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 11 (1930): 48-61.
15. Marie Bonaparte, La sexualité de la femme, 3rd ed. (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1967);
16. Gregorio Marañon, L'évolution de la sexualité et les états intersexuels, trans. Sanjurjo d'Arellano (Paris: Gallimard, 1931).
17. "I regard sex as the central problem of life. And now that the problem of religion has practically been settled, and that the problem of labor has at least been placed on a practical foundation, the question of sex-with the racial questions that rest on it stands before the coming generations as the chief problem for solution" (Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. 1 [Philadelphia: Davis, 1905], preface).
18. Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis mit besonderer Berücksichtung der conträren Sexualempfindung, eine medizinisch-gerichtliche Studie für Ärzte und Juristen, 12th ed. (Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke, 1903). All quotations and page references are taken from the following English translation: Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis: With Especial Reference to the Antipathic Sexual Instinct: A Medico-Forensic Study, trans. Franklin S. Klaf (New York: Arcade, 1998), 4. This theme is echoed in the social hygiene movements in Germany and England, with their emphasis on the industrialized city as the home of prostitution and venereal disease. Thomas Laqueur notes that anxiety about sexual morality was a constant feature of the industrialization process; see his "Sexual Desire and the Market Economy during the Industrial Revolution," in Discourses of Sexuality: From Aristotle to AIDS, ed. Donna C. Stanton (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 211.
19. Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, 98.
20. Ibid., 3-4.
21. Ibid., 4, 1-2.
22. Harry Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature: Krafft-Ebing, Psychiatry, and the Making of Sexual Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 52-53.
23. Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, 99.
24. Ibid., 89.
25. Ibid., 80.
26. Ibid., 82.
27. Ibid., 90.
28. Ibid., 138. It is especially worth noting, as Noyes does, Krafft-Ebing's use of the term vorbelastet (genetically tainted) to describe the degenerate individual who is incapable of "performing the ritualised sublimation of the sexual instincts required by civilisation." Noyes adds that Max Nordau's theory of degeneracy, first appearing in Germany in 1892 and in England in 1895, was clearly part of the same discursive current (The Mastery of Submission, 63-65).
29. Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, 138.
30. Lord Drialys, Les délices du fouet, précé dé d'un essai sur la flagellation et le masochisme par Jean de Villiot (Paris: Charles Carrington, 1907), 24.
31. Jacques Descroix, La gynécocratie, ou la domination de la femme, précédée d'une étude sur le masochisme dans l'histoire et les traditions par Laurent Tailhade (Paris: Charles Carrington, 1902), 13-14.
32. As Ivan Crozier notes, however, Krafft-Ebing's explanation of the cause of masochism was grounded in a psychological and not a physical explanation, in contrast to many of his contemporaries ("Philosophy in the English Boudoir: Havelock Ellis, Love and Pain, and Sexological Discourses on Algolagnia," Journal of the History of Sexuality 13, no. 3 [2004]: 278).
33. Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, 25.
34. Émile Laurent, Sadisme et masochisme: Les perversions sexuelles, physiologie, psychologie, thérapeutique (Paris: Vigot, 1903), 193-94.
35. Descroix, La gynécocratie, xiii.
36. Ibid., 283.
37. Marius Boisson, La flagellomane: Étude philosophique des perversion modernes (Paris: H. Daragon, 1912), 63.
38. Ibid., 12.
39. Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, 130.
40. Boisson, La flagellomane, 39.
41. Ibid., 40.
42. Alphonse Gallais, Amour morbide: Aux griffes de Vénus, moeurs de la décadence parisienne (Paris: J. Fort, 1912), 37.
43. Ibid., 97.
44. Ibid., 178.
45. Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, 130.
46. Ibid., 131.
47. Ibid., 113.
48. Laurent, Sadisme et masochisme, 226.
49. Drialys, Les délices du fouet, 18-19.
50. Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, 54.
51. Ibid., 54.
52. Ibid., 57.
53. Laurent, Sadisme et masochisme, 83-91.
54. Ibid., 170.
55. Ibid., 128.
56. Ibid., 54.
57. Ibid., 6.
58. Ibid., 26-27.
59. Ibid., 26.
60. Ibid., 165.
61. Émile Zola, La bête humaine (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 163-65.
62. Émile Laurent, L'amour morbide: Étude de psychologie pathologique (Paris: Société d'éditions scientifiques, 1891), 4.
63. Ibid., viii (emphasis in original).
64. Ibid., 13.
65. Ibid., 29.
66. Alison M. Moore, "Female Sexual Frigidity in Fin-de-Siècle France, or How Absence Was Made into a Thing," in Pleasure and Pain at the Fin de Siècle, ed. David Evans (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), 191-204.
67. See, for instance, Alexandre Lacassagne, Vacher l'éventreur et les crimes sadiques (Paris: Masson, 1899);
68. Henri Monet, Les drames de grands chemins: L'éventreur: La vie mystérieuse et les crimes de Vacher (Paris: Librairie illustrée, 1897-98).
69. For instance, Ellis described a London solicitor, "regarded by his acquaintances as an ordinary and normal man of quiet habits," who was found drowned off the Cornish coast dressed in women's clothes and in bondage. "Among the effects at the hotel he was staying at were numerous refinements of the feminine toilette and feminine articles of dress." Ellis also described a Berlin judge who was "arrested in a suburban train for exposing his erect member to a girl with whom he was alone in a compartment" (Studies in the Psychology of Sex, excerpt reprinted in Sexology Uncensored: The Documents of Sexual Science, ed. Lucy Bland and Laura Doan [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988], 259-61).
70. Carolyn J. Dean, The Self and Its Pleasures: Bataille, Lacan, and the History of the Decentred Subject (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992), 32-33.
71. Panagiote Yocas, "L'influence de la guerre européenne sur la criminalité," Thèse pour le doctorat présentée et soutenue le vendredi 11 juin 1926, à 3 heures (Paris: Jouve, 1926), 44-46.
72. Ibid., 32-36.
73. Dean, The Self and Its Pleasures, 62.
74. Ibid., 206-7.
75. See Sigmund Freud, "A Child Is Being Beaten" (1919), in Freud Collected Papers, ed. John D. Sutherland, 5 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1957), 2:194. See also "The Economic Problem of Masochism" (1924), in ibid., 2:260-65.
76. Citing Freud, Bonaparte asserted that "a sadist is always at the same time a masochist" ("Some Biophysical Aspects of Sado-Masochism," in Essential Papers on Masochism, ed. Margaret Ann Fitzpatrick Hanly [New York: New York University Press, 1995], 433).
77. Sigmund Freud, "Character and Anal Erotism" (1908), in The Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (London: Vintage, 1995), 293-97.
78. Marie Bonaparte, "Le cas de Madame Lefebvre," Revue Française de Psychanalyse 1 (1927): 193-98.
79. Wilhelm Stekel, Die Geschlechtskälte der Frau (Eine Psychopathologie des weiblichen Liebeslebens), vol. 3, Störungen des Trieb- und Affektlebens (die parapathischen Erkrankungen) (1920; Berlin: Urban & Schwarzenberg, 1921). Quotations taken from Wilhelm Stekel, Frigidity in Woman in Relation to Her Love Life, trans. James S. Van Teslaar, 2 vols. (New York: Liveright, 1926), 1:108.
80. Ibid., 249.
81. Ibid., 250.
82. Ibid., 119, 123.
83. Ibid., 129.
84. Ibid., 130.
85. Bonaparte, La sexualité de la femme, 17.
86. Ibid., 21.
87. Sadismus und Masochismus für Ärzte und Kriminalogen dargestellt, vol. 8, Störungen des Trieb- und Affektlebens (die parapathischen Erkrankungen) (Berlin: Urban & Schwarzenberg, 1925). Quotations from Wilhelm Stekel, Sadism and Masochism: The Psychology of Hatred and Cruelty, trans. Louise Brink (New York: Washington Square, 1968), 59.
88. Ibid., 58.
89. In erotic texts of the interwar period, however, images of sadism as barbarism abounded, and images of the First World War referenced sadomasochistic perversion as an explanation for mass violence.
90. See Carolyn J. Dean, "The Great War, Pornography, and the Transformation of Modern Male Subjectivity," Modernism/Modernity 3, no. 2 (1996): 62-63.
91. Bonaparte, La sexualité de la femme, 12.
92. Ibid., 16.
93. Jean Walton, Fair Sex, Savage Dreams: Race, Psychoanalysis, Sexual Difference (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), 82-101.
94. Géza Róheim, "The Evolution of Culture," International Journal of Psychoanalysis 9 (1923): 387-41;
95. Bruno Bettelheim, Symbolic Wounds: Puberty Rites and the Envious Male (London: Thames & Hudson, 1955);
96. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1966), 116-17;
97. Julia Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l'horreur: Essai sur l'abjection (Paris: du Seuil, 1980), 86.
98. Laurent, Amour morbide, ix.