desublimate

English

Etymology

de- +‎ sublimate

Verb

1. (intransitive, physics) To undergo desublimation; to change directly from a gas to a solid.
2. (transitive, sociology) Make explicit that which has been sublimated or obscured because it is not socially acceptable.
   • 2005, Christopher Breu, Hard-boiled Masculinities, →ISBN, page 81:

     However, the question remains as to why the text does not desublimate the hard-boiled genre's investments around gender, sexuality, race, and nation with the same sort of scrupulous rigor that it demystifies the economic and social ideology of the form.

   • 2000, Allison Pease, Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity, →ISBN, page 85:

     The practice of pornography teaches its subjects to desublimate the sensuous apprehension.

   • 2012, Luke Howie, Witnesses to Terror, →ISBN, page 121:

     When we desublimate the things we have repressed, we create a space in which we feel liberated to be as monstrous as we wish.