Perversion the Social Relation

Michael P. Bibler teaches at Tulane University. This essay comprises part of his unpublishedlarger work "Cotton's Queer Relations: Homosexuality, Race, and Social Equalityin the Literature of the Southern Plantation, 1936-1968.**Bruce Fink is Professor of Psychology at Duquesne University and a practicing psychoanalyst.He is the author of The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance, thetranslator of several of Lacan's seminars, and the coeditor of two collections of paperson Lacan.Dennis Foster is the chairman of the English department at Southern Methodist University,where he holds the D. D. Frensley chair in English. Among other things, he haspublished Sublime Enjoyment, a critical study of the constitutive role of perversion inliterary représentations of American communal life (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1997).Octave Mannoni was an eminent psychoanalyst and theorist.E. L. McCallum teaches in the Department of English at Michigan State University. She isthe author of Object Lessons: How to Do Things with Fetishism (SUNY Press, 1998) andhas published articles in journals such as Camera Obscur a, The New Centennial Review,Genders, and Poetics Today.James Penney is currently a Lecturer in the Department of French at the University ofNottingham in England. His work has appeared in Paragraph, Journal for the Psychoanalysisof Culture and Society, and Umbra. His current project, The Structures of Love,deals with the politics of the transference and the psychosocial dynamics of radical socialchange.Molly Anne Rothenberg is Associate Professor of English at Tulane University and a practicingpsychoanalyst. She is the author of Rethinking Blake's Textuality (Columbia, Mo.:University of Missouri Press, 1993), and ner published psychoanalytic work includesarticles in journals such as Critical Inquiry, Camera Obscura, and Gender and Psychoanalysis.She is completing a book on psychoanalysis and ethics.