Description
In her latest breakthrough study, Louise J. Kaplan leads us on a rare, literary foray into the minds of the per-verse: men and women governed by unconscious strategies which distort their behavior while regulating shameful, forbidden desires.
As she explores the dynamics of aberrant sexual and social behavior, Dr. Kaplan dispels the myth that perversion is the province of males alone. Just as male perversions caricature masculine ideals of virility, female perversions parody feminine models of submission and purity. Manifestations vary by sex: fetishism, transvestism, and exhibition-ism are male afflictions; while kleptomania, delicate self-cutting, and anorexia are female phenomena. But the author asserts that all perversions are expressions of socially normalized gender stereotypes, and that all are instruments of deception.
Disguised in the manifest performances of perversion are potentially crippling anxieties and mortification, repressed aggressive and sadistic impulses, and especially, cross-gender ambitions and desires. Thus, the per-verse strategy is insistent and irresistible, for if it were not played out, the person might be assailed by his or her own demons.
ISBN:9780385262330
