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It is difficult to know what to do with “perversion” today. As the Italian psychoanalyst Sergio Benvenuto writes at the beginning of his recent book on the subject, “Today, the mere use of the word perversion is perceived with growing suspicion and concern. It is not politically correct, especially in the United States” (2016, p. xiii). Indeed, as Benvenuto goes on to explain, there is a growing consensus among contemporary Anglophone clinicians that perversion is a problematic diagnostic concept insofar as it can be shown to merely reflect the moral judgments of a given time and place. Far from representing an objective pathology, perversion has become exemplary of psychology's “constructed” dimension, which is to say, that far from connoting a clear or definitive mental disturbance, perversion may be nothing more than a moralizing instrument of state power, one that camouflages prejudice in the language of pseudopsychology. As Dany Nobus has argued, the “definition of perversion as an aberration of the sexual instinct, in which the reproductive purpose of the human sexual function is literally perverted” poses considerable problems for any objective assessment of perversion because it defines, a priori, sexuality as necessarily oriented toward reproduction, thereby relegating everything that deviates from that standard as automatically perverse (, p. 6). This emphasis on sexual deviation is not only endemic to the word perversion itself—etymologically, “to pervert” (from the Latin pervertere) meant “to turn around,” “to turn upside down”—but emblematic of the ways that the diagnosis of perversion is used to sustain a narrow view of human sexuality. For this reason, Nobus writes that,
what we are encountering here is the intervention of a socio-cultural standard of ethico-legal acceptability, which has (often implicitly) confounded all of the purportedly value-free taxonomies of sexual perversion, whether sexological, psychiatric, or psychoanalytic. No matter how h