The perverse polymorphous disposition in the sexuality, your manifestations and prohibitions: a dialogue between queer theory and psychoanalysis

• Grant number: 15/23207-5
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Effective date (Start): March 01, 2016
• Effective date (End): December 31, 2016
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Psychology
• Principal Investigator: Patricia Porchat Pereira da Silva Knudsen
• Grantee: Vinicius Martinucho Godeguezi
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Ciências (FC). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Bauru. Bauru , SP, Brazil

Abstract

This project aims to seek an approach and dialogue between psychoanalysis and queer theory, through the psychoanalytic concept of polymorphous perverse disposition and queer theory ideas about sexuality. Queer theory is a post-structuralist theory that emerged in the early 1990s and has as its main purpose the questioning and deconstruction of patterns socially established, especially regarding sexuality, gender, race, and any classification that culminates in the categorization of individuals as normal or deviant. Philosophically supported, especially in the work of Jacques Derrida and Michael Foucault, queer theory is often associated with feminist and LGBT militancy.However, according to some queer theorists, the theory can not be reduced to a defense of those sexual minorities, but it would be a deconstructionist action against the logic that shapes the sexual behavior, through questioning and historical contextualization of this logic. In this sense, queer theory´s conception of sexuality points out that it is classified, taught, and shaped from historical power devices that are intended to create a heteronormative and supposedly natural sexuality. Freud in his 1905 text, Three Essays for the Theory of Sexuality, develops a psychoanalytic theory of psychosexual development, criticizes the medical knowledge of his time about human sexual behavior, and proposes a new comprehension of this issue which in many ways is still important in our days. While proposing the idea of infantile sexuality with a perverse and polymorphous disposition, that has its demonstration repressed by barriers of shame and repugnance socially constructed, but which it is also a general and fundamental tendency of every human being, Freud has somehow revolutionized the assumptions that existed about human sexuality until that moment. In this sense, he managed to question the pathological feature of "perverse " sexual behavior, stating that all "normal" sexual behaviors have numerous perverse elements. However, even in the text of the Three Essays and also in later works, Freud introduces the concept of sublimation, which refers to a deviation from the target of sexual drive, that by having its erotic satisfaction barred, must seek its satisfaction on other non-sexual targets, enabling cultural realizations and having great importance in social life and in the establishment of civilization. The effort to approach queer theory and psychoanalysis in this project will be done through a comparison between the idea of a polymorphous perverse disposition of sexuality and its prohibitions, trying to understand if shame and repugnance barriers, cited by Freud, are equivalent to the historical power devices pointed out by queer theory. We also aim to seek what would be, in the psychoanalytical and queer theory´s views, the possible implications of the control of sexuality in society. (AU)