Violence, Society and Radical Theory by Pawlett William

Author:Pawlett, William.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing Ltd.
Published: 2013-04-25T04:00:00+00:00

Serial Killing and Sexual Reason

… manifest abnormality in the other relations of life can invariably be shown to have a background of abnormal sexual conduct … The highest and the lowest are always closest to each other in the sphere of sexuality (Freud 1991, Vol. 7, Three Essays: 75 orig. 1905).

Nothing is less certain today than sex, behind the liberation of its discourse … the ghost of desire haunts the defunct reality of sex. Sex is everywhere, except in sexuality (Baudrillard 1990a: 5).

According to Foucault’s History of Sexuality what had, for centuries, been considered relatively simple acts of bodily pleasure came, in modernity, to be understood as representing specific types of identity, types of desire, and types of person within the universal matrix of ‘sexuality’. The categorisations of types of sexual identity (homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual) and types of sexual desire (sadistic, masochistic, fetishisistic, necrophilic), marked out new scientific territory - the study of ‘man’ (Foucault 1970; 1979: 53-73). The equation of sex and truth was established, a disciplinary regime through which we all become the subjects of a “true sex” which is supposedly the key to understanding who and what we are (Foucault 1980: 6).

The production of sexual typologies also necessarily produces excessive figures whose desires exceed the definitions and limits of normality. Yet, for the scientific discourses of modernity there are, supposedly, no limits to the comprehension of human behaviour. Hence, the late 19th and early 20th centuries saw the proliferation of scientific typologies of ‘pathology’ describing those who failed to ‘fit’ within the new cultural requirements - the ordered routines of procreation, production and consumption - and absorbed them into categories of abnormality1 This allegedly limitless understanding of a universal creature - the human - is achieved through the individual being’s insertion into newly established categories of sexual normality and abnormality. Sexual reason then is tautological; its concepts posit the objects they purport to explain. Sexual reason aims at total understanding and total control and in imposing its universal code it generates a vivid array of abnormalities. This was the period when the ‘lustmurderer’ or ‘sex’ killer became the object of popular and academic fascination, a figure of extreme abnormality or pathology in the sphere of ‘sexuality’. Early sexologists, such as Richard Von Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902), produced innumerable case studies of the sexually “aberrant”: of lustmurderers, sadists and necrophiles. Some of these figures, such as Jack the Ripper (Case 17 in the 1997 reprint of Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis), achieved great notoriety. The figure of the ‘lustmurderer’, ‘sex’ or later, ‘serial’ killer has, since its emergence, been the stuff of popular entertainment and cultural titillation alongside and, at times, indistinguishable from medical diagnosis and scientific analysis. The iconic figure of Jack the Ripper enjoys a pre-eminent position in the annals of ‘sex’ crime. The subject of dozens of feature films and documentaries, ‘the Ripper’ is almost revered, the appalling mutilations of women’s bodies seems only to add to his entertainment value, as feminists have noted (Caputi 1988: 1-32).2 Figures such

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