Deviant Bodies, Deviant Minds

Deviant Bodies, Deviant Minds
by Ashley-Elizabeth Best

Are modern definitions of sexual deviance distinctly different from historical definitions? Can a term, so integral to our sense of wrong and right, be less reliable than previously thought? Modern conceptions of sexual deviance revolve around the notion that one’s sexuality is a basis for one’s identity. However, in earlier periods this was not always the case. Meanings are not static and our sexual behaviours can, and are, re-written and continually re-read. The Marquis De Sade is often perceived as a ‘perverse’ man who was locked away as a pariah because of his erotically insane writing for twenty-nine of his seventy-four years. While his name became synonymous with sexually deviant behaviour, his written works offer insight into the construction of our definitions of what is deviant, perverse, abnormal and aberrant. Man produces the impressions in the Marquis’s metaphor and just as the man represents one side to the story, so does the body represent the other.
Relations between people have historically been regulating factors of societies. Efforts to organize social relationships according to categories diffuse into false dichotomies of normality versus aberration. Sexual relations are one of the most significant human interactions and thus sexual practices manifest to external observers as the ‘image’ of a society. Classification creates a language to identify, and through the process of socialization (whereby society dictates behavioural expectations) the term sexual deviance has drastically changed. In fact the word itself merely implies that which deviates from the norm, and its synonym, perverse, indicates “a broader opposition to what is expected or accepted.”1
The term sexual deviance has evolved from a temporary act of aberration to a signifier of an individual’s identity. Temporary deviant acts could, in the past, be societally regulated, but identifying a deviant mind as opposed to a deviant act is a relatively modern invention. When the deed in question is not a deviant act, but an indicator of a deviant identity, how does one regulate it?
The treatment of deviant behaviours in colonial America illustrates the regulatory attempts to channel sexual practices into the matrix of marriage and procreation. In the case of Samuel Terry of Springfield, Massachusetts, his attempts at sexual expression were not trumped but relocated to its ‘normalized’ setting. Puritan clergy “emphasized marriage as the only suitable outlet for sexual desire and warned against both masturbation and premarital sex.” In 1650 during Sunday sermon he stood on the church grounds “chafing his yard to provoke lust.” He received several lashes for masturbating in public. Again in 1661 he was required to pay five pounds over the birth of his first child with his wife of only five months. In eleven years he violated two deviant acts the church warned not to commit. Later in 1673 town courts fined Terry again for performing in an “immodest and beastly play.” Terry is an example of temporary sexual deviant behaviour and of channeling sexual expression to a normalized area: marriage. Terry garnered enough respect and trust from his community members that he was made constable and entrusted with foster children by the courts. With acceptance and payment for his transgressions he remained a citizen in good standing—his sexual actions did not define his identity.2 The transformative process of sex becoming a means to a person’s identity is a convoluted and contentious subject. Christianity in the middle ages produced a widespread normative model of an appropriate heterosexual partnership. “In pre-industrial European societies, sexual practices were primarily subjected to moral and religious problematization and categorized in relation to sin.” Religion prescribed sexual and gender roles by means of socially constructed repetitions of regular daily activities. Cultural expectations about fidelity within marriage, virginity, and abstinence became inscribed on the body and dictated how the body must perform. While Christianity “gave sex a special status by declaring it to be the original sin,” it also became a vehicle for creating further discourse on acceptable and non-acceptable practices pertaining to sex.3

Modern Culture views sex as one of the fundamental constituents of identity. Scientists in the 19th and 20th centuries believed sexual behaviour was the inevitable natural outcome of our biological make-up. With the influence of Charles Darwin, and many other scientists of the period, Victorian societies secularized. Instead of relying on religion, society turned anxiously to science to classify and explain the world around them.  As normal sexuality was continually being defined and re-defined, sexual abnormalities developed as categories for acts or desires that were not ‘normal’. Some categories for these classifications still exist today, like fetishism, necrophilia, urolagnia and algophilia. The talk of normalcy led to the business of deviance.3
Michel Foucault proposed that repression of sexuality since the 19th century has made sex one of the main features of human identities. Power-Knowledge is the attainment of power which develops through possession of knowledge. From the other side of the equation, power produces and reproduces the knowledge that creates the categories it then attempts to regulate and control. The categories, like the aforementioned deviant classifications, isolate normal from abnormal behaviours, and the utterance of the regulation appropriates certain acts as crimes and determines their relevance and presence within society. Foucault goes a step further by also suggesting that this process of repression, classification and abundant discourse of the subject is meant to create an opportunity for intervention. Through continued discourse power creates the subjects it is supposed to oppose and reject.4 Foucault commented on the coining of the term homosexual in 1870: “Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy to a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual now was a species.”4 The term sodomy had in earlier times been used to describe any act that was not heterosexual and even bestiality. The creation of the term homosexual created the homosexual through the isolation of specific actions that are deviant from the norm. Such attempts to be more ‘scientific’ by defining categories have only trapped individuals into defining their identities in relation to their physical acts.
The Marquis seemed to be onto to something. Our bodies mirror our cultural values, making bodies sites of deviance. The term sexual deviance has been boiled down from an over arching umbrella to a hat. Sexual deviance assumes a persistent personification that passes as real. You wear the hat, you are the hat. The body has become a site of boundaries, representing imposed limitations for constructing a heterosexual surface presentation of a culturally acceptable self. Our bodies have been expected to provide a means of self-identification, but when we rely on certain types of exclusionary classifications we risk becoming trapped by our own definitions of what our identity is to us.

1 Merck, Mandy. Perversions. London: Virago Press, 1993, 2.
2 D’Emilio, John, and Freedman, Estelle. Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America. New York: Harper and Row Publishers, 1988, 15-38.
3 Mottier, Veronique. Sexuality: A very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008, 25-33.
4 Foucault, Michel. “The History of Sexuality.” In The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by Vincent Leitch 1619-1670. New York: Norton, 2001.

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   James Behan says:

   December 21, 2009 at 11:16 pm

   Very good Ashley, way to pound social conditioning down another knotch. Sex is both interesting in theory, and in practice.