📓 The Sexual Psychology of Decadence.md by @luciana ☆

artículo de [[Melanie Hawthorne]]
Nietzsche’s procclamation of the death of God (1882) summarizes the cultural change, questioning of morality and secuality of his century
Decadent literature was the field which, brought about by this questioning and the tools used to try out answers, used sexuality as a means to explore social and political questions plus the eternal question: what is love?
Age of reason: free love and free thinking went together
The Enlightenment, with its gradual tearing apart of traditional religious authority, engendered questioning re. whoshould replace this traditional authority and where should values come from and who is authorized to formulate them.
- answerd came froms science, art (art fo art’s sake), and the vestiges of religions
- In terms of sexuality, the authority of the priest gave way to the authority of the police, science and doctors (Foucault)
- SCIENCE:
  - Origin of the dominant paradigms that condition the transformations of the social order during the nineteenth cent
  - application of reason to human problem= better social outcomes
  - Lombroso’s study of "physical traitsthat determine criminal actions"
    - prostitution is included in Lombroso’s definition of criminal
    - thus prostitution is deemed an inborn tendency, not a social product, which allows the treatment of prostitutes as criminal class
  - Homosexuality was discussed and problematized by a number of doctors:
    - Tardieu: attempted to diagnose homosexuals by forensic means through a number of humiliating and later discredited number of tests and signs, (such as inability to urinate in a straight line)
  - For the decadents the creation of this label (1869, Germany) provided a new type that challenged middle-brow culture. Examples: Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, Jean Lorrain
  - The treatment of male and female homosexuality diverged.
    - Germany: homosexuality was penalized
    - France: neither male nor female homosexuality were criminalized, though other prohibitions were invoked to limit activities such as cruising and cottaging
    - Lesbianism was often tolerated as a repertoire of sexual behaviors that included men
    - lesbianism was never crminalized in Britan, male homosexuality was penalized and carried strong penalties after 1885
    - Gay men fled to France or Italy to have more freedoms (decadent trope)
  - Sexology, the systematic study of sex was invented
    - Sexual behaviors were analyzed
    - Sexual ‘deviance’ was presented as pathology, but as one to be treated with empathy
    - Sexual inversion: sympathetic theory, "mistake of nature"
    - German sexologists advocated for homosexual rights and transgender issues (first sex reassignment surgery, 1930), target for the nazism
- Psychoanalisis: sexual expression as a form of psychology, uncoscous. Freud still distinguished between pathological and normal behaviours, but since the former were so frequent, it lead to a de-stigmatization
- focus on medican studies of the mind led to the decadent movement’s interest for mental states, the unconscious and mental landscapes
- Freud was a man of his time, one could not say that he influenced decadentism so much (as he did later modernism) because he was so embedded in his context, one could argue he was a decadent figure himself
- "Heterosexuality" (understood as unhealthy lust for the opposite sex) was also studied as a perversion, alongside other behaviors (fetishism, onanism, etc)