introduction

Sigmund Freud defined perversions as: sexual activities which either extend beyond the regions of the body that are designed for sexual union, or linger over the intermediate relations to the sexual object which should normally be traversed rapidly on the path toward the final sexual aim. As Jonathan Dollimore argues so vividly in his history of Sexual Dissidence, if the theological genealogy of perversion opposes it to conversion, the author's essays are perverse. Only a century separates the Perversions from the constellation of texts which first sought to anatomize 'deviant' sexualities. In 1893, Richard von Krafft-Ebing published the earliest of what would become twelve editions of his medico-forensic study Psychopathia Sexualis. The possibility of a sexual politics at once Utopian and anti-idealist is crucial to these readings, which are as critical of the narcissistic projections of feminist and 'queer' cultures as those of their hegemonic counterparts.