Figures of Excess and Body Politics: Risks, Prejudices, and Repression of the Visibility 
of the Pleasures. Representations of Extreme Sexualities in Art and Culture of the 
Twentieth Century.
Key Words: Figures of excess, Extreme sexualities, Political correctness of the body, Visibility of 
the pleasures, Public and private sadism, Art and BDSM, Prohibition, Transgression, Eros and 
Thanatos, Cultural studies.
           
           Our thesis tries to show the relationship between the politics of the body, used for 
power as a means of construction and coercion of the bodies, of sex and of markind, and in 
contrast, how cultural creations which dominate us, Figures of excess imagine a manifestation 
of transgressory pleasures that put in doubt the same nature of the mechanisms in the abuse of 
power. These antagonistic forces practise in the battlefield, which is the body: therefore, and in 
the first place, it is necessary to contextualise the body in relation to the politics which were 
functioning in the different periods of the twentieth Century. The body occupies and lives in 
various places, not only in its private context, or in merely physical / mental states, but that it is 
also a subject and object in social, political cultural, scientific, medical and religious places, etc. 
This body is a seat of experimentation where certain bounderies work and control the 
sensations and intimate experiences , as well as public and collective ones , by means of laws 
rules, prohibitions and body etiquette ( good behaviour ) of the interaction between the 
individual and society , dictated by and insaturated in the political correctness of the body. This 
supposedly causes the loss of possession of private identity ; the individual feels watched , held 
, captive , manipulated , rejected for his body ; depending , on his wishes ( or desires) , but on 
the scrutinizing looks of others who define , build or destroy ideology , social , cultural or 
sexually.
           Secondly, we analise the artists, writers and thinkers who have questioned the 
social/cultural constructions of society and culture relating to sex, types, class , identity , race 
and or ideology determined from the hegemony of conservatism and fundamentalistic morals. 
Their creations we have defined as Representatives of Extreme Sexualities in Art. They are 
cultural creations that deal with the problems of identity, the experiences and Exchange of role 
types and the plurality of pleasures. They are a raw indication, clear or cloudy, of the sexual 
practices most secrets, stigmatized or ignored. Opposite the political repressors of the body, is 
only left the transgresion, the indication of the body, its desires, and its sexual practices in nor 
only private ambience, but public too.
           We remember the emblematic phrase of the feminists in May‘68, which was, “the 
political is personal”. From this parting shot in all different fields , connected marguialised in the 
institutionalized power, they iniciate and for cristalize the sexually liberated movements ( 
feminists, gays and lesbians, transexuals ) that transform radically the private management and 
intimacy of bodies and the visibility of the pleasures as a matter of public concern.