Sadism at the Limits: Crime, Violence, and the Historical Boundaries of Sexuality

Of all the sexual perversions coined by psychiatrists in the nineteenth century, homosexuality has attracted by the far the most attention from historians.  This paper argues that sadism played in fact a more critical role in the emergence of sexuality.  Before they focused on homosexuality, psychiatrists were indeed concerned with people who were driven by their sexual instinct to commit crimes that were far more atrocious than sodomy.  Already in the middle of the nineteenth century, about forty years before Richard von Krafft-Ebing officially coined “sadism,” French psychiatrists misread the work of the Marquis de Sade and found in him the paradigmatic example of someone who suffered from a perversion of the sexual instinct.  The transformation of Sade into a sadist marks the transition from a moral/religious discourse to a psychiatric discourse, from a concern with acts (and their possible criminality) to an investigation into the nature of the sexual instinct (and its potential violence).                After describing the emergence of sexuality by focusing on sadism, this paper jumps to the present and argues, more tentatively, that if sadism was chronologically the first perversion, it will perhaps also be the last one.  As “consent” is being established as the ultimate criterion for thinking about sex, the idea of a “consensual perversion” has become a contradiction in terms.  The removal of homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in the 1970’s is a consequence of this transformation.  Logically, perversions like fetishism, masochism, coprophilia or bestiality, should similarly escape the psychiatric gaze in the near future.  But sadism, which, unlike consensual S/M, is by definition non-consensual, might extricate itself with much more difficulty from the psychiatric discourse.