12 - Sexual Dissidence and British Writing

Summary

In Sexual Dissidence (1991), Jonathan Dollimore traces the history of the word and the concept of perversion to show how what has become a predominantly sexual term started out as a term signifying deviance more broadly, literally ‘straying from the path’. Perversion is, in Dollimore’s words, ‘a concept bound up with insurrection’, it is about the challenging of authority, and hence political. He argues that ‘perversion is a concept that takes us to the heart of a fierce dialectic between domination and deviation, law and desire, transgression and conformity’. Perversion, while sexualised in modernity, has its roots in political dissidence. It is this politics that Dollimore is interested in recuperating from what he sees as the dominant narrative of perversion as pathology, predicated on Freud’s theories. For Freud, perversion in the broadest sense is ‘the abandonment of the reproductive function’. This refusal of reproduction renders perversion in its more limited, sexual understanding interesting for cultural materialist approaches, which want to critique social reproduction. Here, the sexual is clearly political.