Homosexuality: Thomas Mann and the Degenerate Sublime

Abstract

With a few exceptions, most early perversion theorists conceived of the perversions as pathologies that were either the direct result of the ramifications of modernity or else a cause for its further decline into decadence. Two similarly incompatible perceptions of sexual deviance exist in the current discourse on the perversions, as Lisa Downing argues: on the one hand, particularly in the context of deconstructive queer theory, perversions are cast as transgressive, destabilizing forces, associated with a revolutionary impulse and thus a radical rather than a liberal politics. On the other hand, perversion is seen as a rigid, conservative fixation, endlessly repeating a predetermined script.¹ Downing criticizes reductive and monolithic claims about the ‘nature’ of the ‘pervert’, no matter from which side of the analytic spectrum, for they ultimately reify experience into a category of being and deny specificity and difference. At stake in such claims ‘are both an ethical danger and an epistemological fallacy, which centre on reduction.