Polymorphous Perversity

The gulf between the civil society and sexual desire never closes. "Desire emerges in multiple forms," writes gay theorist Guy Hocquenghem. "Just like heterosexual desire, homosexual desire is an arbitrarily frozen frame in an unbroken and polyvocal flux."^[32] Social processes continuously regulate sexuality and desire and are a crucial element of sexual liberation, but the creative, chaotic impetus of "polymorphous perversity" is equally powerful.

Early in his career, in Three Essays on Sexuality , Freud identified polymorphous perversity as undifferentiated sexual desire. Over the course of individual sexual development (culminating in the oedipal complex), "civilizing processes" shape this sexual desire into procreative genital sexuality or into "perversions" such as homosexuality. In these essays, Freud proposes that the positive achievements of "civilized society" are "to a great extent obtained through the suppression of what are known as the perverse elements of sexual excitation."^[33] Later, in Civilization and Its Discontents , Freud argued more forcefully that perverse sexual desire is fundamentally incompatible with "civilized" social life.^[34]

It is impossible to understand lesbian and gay life without understanding the profound role that perverse sexual activity, in addition to the utopian fantasies stirred by sexual desire itself, has had on our identities and social lives. Leo Bersani and Jonathan Dollimore have both recently explored "the perverse dynamic" in sexual life—particularly in a homosexual life.^[35] Through sexual perversity, gay men and lesbians have access to the "shock, disturbance, even loss, which is proper to ecstasy, to bliss," because the pleasures of sexual perversity encourage lesbians and gay men to escape from the normalized gender roles that compulsory heterosexuality dictates.^[36] Perversity makes us sexual outlaws.^[37] The "shattering" effects of sexual activity allow an individual to escape from stifling and socially sanctioned forms of generalized social hostility.^[38] It unsettles the individual self, thus dismembering the community. With its potential for disrupting socialized identities and rendering them precarious, perverse sexuality stimulates personal and social creativity.

In Homos , his most recent book, Bersani criticizes queer theory for rejecting identity as a political category. To do away with "homosexual" identity and replace it with a "queer" identity, Bersani argues, contributes to the potential erasure of homosexuality's erotic significance. Moreover, it is just as much a process of normalization—or, in Foucault's terminology, a disciplinary project—to create a queer identity as it is to fashion a gay or lesbian identity.^[39] More significantly, Bersani also warns that discrediting gay identity undercuts the ability to resist the Religious Right's war on homosexuality: "We have erased ourselves in the process of denaturalizing the epistemic and political regimes that constructed us."^[40]

Bersani's primary concern is that "critiques of homosexual identity have generally been desexualizing discourses," the net effect of which is to downplay or obscure the political significance of the sexual.^[41] For Bersani, "the perverse dynamic" (as Dollimore termed it) nurtures the "anticommunitarian impulses in homosexual desire," because perverse desire creates only momentary solidarities, temporary communities made up of ever shifting memberships and repeatedly shattering identities.

Bersani is deeply suspicious of the communitarian impulse in gay and lesbian life. He is suspicious, precisely, of the normalizing (or, to use his word, "redemptive") effects of community norms and moral codes. He believes that a sense of community stifles the shattering and liberatory impulses of the perverse. Rather than opening up homosexuals to the perverse as sublime, community sublimates or "civilizes" the perverse. Throughout Homos , Bersani defends the perverse dynamic for generating a flow of experiences that disrupt routine, communal patterns.

The social acceptance or normalizing of homosexuality is, in Bersani's analysis, inevitably a process of degaying and desexualizing. Bersani criticized Tony Kushner's play Angels in America for reassuring heterosexual America that homosexuals are morally sincere and culturally significant—and part of American history and society.^[42] Kushner responded to Bersani's criticism by reaffirming the importance of community, but only as a point of leverage—a necessary place to stand.

Kushner nevertheless concludes with a flight of utopian fantasy that appears to synthesize queer theory and Bersani's thinking:

A politics that seeks to dismantle normalizing categories of gender; that seeks to retrieve a history from violently enforced forgetting; a politics that seeks enfranchisement not only for new kinds of citizens, but for Sexuality itself, that seeks to introduce fucking and sucking, licking and smelling, kink, sleaze, clits and assholes and games people play with them, into the previously chaste Temple of Democracy; and even more daring still, a politics that seeks a synthesis between desire and transformation, that seeks some union between the deepest recesses and cavities of the human heart and body and soul, and the sacrifices and responsibilities building communities and movement, building progress and power entails: This politics … had better be capable of extravagance, had better not be tame.^[43]

Kushner's blend of communitarianism and perversity derives its energy from the historical tension between the fervid and perverse homoeroticism that courses through American culture and the equally deep American tradition of homophobia.