Sadism as social violence : from fin-de-siècle degeneration to the critiques of Nazi sexuality in Frankfurt School thought

This chapter examines the first uses of the word sadism at the end of the nineteenth century and the earlier visions of sexual cruelty as social violence that operated in psychiatric and criminological thought. In these texts, sadism stood as a sign for degeneration since fusions of sex and violence were imagined to belong in the barbarous stage of social evolution. In ‘civilized’ societies such desires could only be perverse. Early twentieth-century nationalist propaganda throughout Europe frequently invoked images of a barbarous ‘other’ whose brutal and cruel sexual desire threatened the virginity of a feminine icon of civilized nationhood.