Normalizing the Marquis de Sade

This chapter recognizes Iwan Bloch as the first sexual theorist since Ulrichs to rebuke sexual degeneration as a viable scientific hypothesis. Bloch accomplished this deconstruction via the invention of a new subfield of sexual science: historical sexology. Bloch's deconstructive stencil traced a logical pattern: if the sexual fantasies of Marquis de Sade—history's greatest sexual degenerate— could be normalized, then the authority of degeneration as an explanatory science would be destroyed once and for all. Bloch attempted to break out of the analytical realm of mainstream sexual science and embark on a new science of sexual diversity. His complexities allow for the perception of interpretive tension not simply between sexual scientists but within the scholarship of individual sexologists as well.