Professor of Geography Michael Williams

Pervert-Schizoid-Woman Professor of Geography Michael Williams

Touching on the fields of philosophy, critical theory, cultural studies, and queer theory, Pervert-Schizoid-Woman critiques the organization of Western economy, language, and desire. Author Michael Williams seeks to promote alternative frameworks for a posthumanist theory and practice of perverse selfhood and sociality. In this study, he identifies the capitalist economic system as structured by scarcity and supply/demand dynamics, discerning the paradoxical accumulation of debt as the essence of the assumed scarcity in the financial system. He also uncovers the profound isomorphism between the economics of scarcity and the castration and lack at the center of the psychoanalytic interpretation of gender, sexuality, and desire, concluding that the essential negativity in the scarcity of capitalism, the absence in the structure of language, and the castration in the network of desire are the sources of the dysfunctions in Western systems of finance, expression, and gender and sexuality.