Re: [A few definitions needed.]



> I'm reading Foucault's _History of Sexuality vol.1_ He mentions a few
terms
> I cannot find, nor define (because of my poor language background).
>
> mixoscopophiles
> presbyophiles
> zooerasts
>
> I'm reading Robert Hurley's translation, if any help (p 43).
>
> Jason.


> I wrote:
>
> if i remember the passage your talking about, he's just demonstrating the
> obscurity of some of the terms that began to be used to describe various
kinds
> of sexual perversion with the inauguration of sexological and
psychoanalytic
> discourses on sexuality. You're not supposed to know what those terms
mean,
> although im sure we could have some fun by guessing what the terms mean.
> (mixoscopophiles has something to do with liking to look at something
> ("phile"=love, "scopos"=look at); presbyophiles are probably sexually
> attracted to presbyterians (ha ha); zooerasts are probably people who
perform
> what we would now call bestiality.) At any rate, he's just demonstrating
how
> these new discourses cooked up all kinds of new terms to describe sexual
> conditions that hadnt had much attention paid to them before. Not only
were
> these new discourses inventing new names for things which "entomologized"
the
> pervert (Foucault's wonderful analogy), but they were busy reconceiving
these
> conditions as results of psychic disturbances, bad childhoods, case
histories,
> etc. It's kind of like when Foucault remarks famously, "the sodomite had
been
> a temporary abberration, the homosexual was now a species"; the same kinds
of
> sexual behaviours had always been around and had always being known about,
but
> there was a paradigm shift in the way they were described and conceived.
>
> am i making sense?

Phil, your making sense. I'd actually left out a few of the other terms
that I managed? to gloss:

zoophiles~bestiality?
gynecomasts~when boys develop breasts?
dyspareunist women~painful intercourse?

At any rate, here is the excerpt:

...there were Kraft-Ebing's zoophiles and zooerasts, Rohlderer's
auto-monosexualists; and later, mixoscophiles, gynecomasts, presbyophiles,
sexoesthetic inverts, and dyspareunist women (43).

I'll look up these authors on campus over the next week.

Jason.






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