Perversion: transgressive sexuality and becoming-monster

Perversion is traditionally thought as acts that depart from traditional heterosexuality through object, aim or performance. This article excavates the ways in which thinking desire through perversion can renegotiate how we think the body and subjectivity. By actively repudiating dominant paradigms of sexuality it is possible to understand subjectivity as flux, perversion as political and the body defined by its capacity to dissipate and refigure socio-sexual limits. Perversion is not simply against the normal but comes to present a means by which subjectivity may become-otherwise according to Deleuze and Guattari. Considering woman’s historical definition as the ‘perverted’ version of the male (be it castrated, maternal or otherwise), actively engaging in becoming-perverse calls for all subjects to negotiate the political potentials and risks of defining sexual habituation. Occupying the non-dominant position does not necessarily align one with being pervert, however this article will suggest perversion can be used as a means by which those in othered positions, and indeed all subjects, can volitionally explore the position of the other. Perversion is not that which one is named but can be a sexual-political project one undertakes.