The Body Reinvented: A Sadeian Grotesque Study of Gender

This paper investigates the three accounts of the libertine body in Marquis de Sade's works. The first section sketches the critique of the pathologised body by examining the construction of ‘sadism’ in Richard von Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis and juxtaposing it with the Sadeian, its fictional inspiration. The second section examines the construction of the libertine body through Simone de Beauvoir's essay ‘Must We Burn Sade?’, arguing that Sade's preoccupation with corporeal excess and cruelty reflects a desire for mutual recognition, aligning with her idea of agitation of flesh in The Second Sex. I interpret the revelation of striking carnality in Sadeian poetics of extremity as grotesque drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin's Rabelais and His World. The phenomenological reciprocity of the body is thus seen as a form of grotesque merger. However, the grotesque body does not satisfyingly account for the question of sexual difference. Hence, in the third section, I propose a closer focus on gender non-conformity of the libertine body through the lens of queer theory. This study reimagines difference as ‘difference-within’ rather than ‘difference-from’, challenging binary thinking and undoing the sexual difference.