Themed Set: Sexual Deviance

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We have from time to time in these pages glimpsed the scaffold as the paradoxical junction of death to eros — the “little death” writ large, as when St. Catherine of Siena orgasmically clutched the falling head of a political prisoner. Modernity has half-lost the sense with our medicalized executions, but through most of human history the scaffold has been a site of sheer carnality: spurting blood, clashing flesh, involuntary priapism.

Far more obvious is the propensity of illicit desire to send a person into the clutches of the carnifex in the first place; take, for example, the dozens of crimes on this site alone attributable to love triangles.

Power has always concerned itself deeply with sexuality (and vice versa!), defining and delimiting its forms with the scaffold as an ultimate albeit infrequent guarantor against unauthorized concupiscence. For our next few posts, we’ll meet some people who transgressed the lines in their worlds to their grief.

On this day..

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