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"Castration Fiction."
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Murmur
\"[The author] invites us into the brilliant mind of Alec Pryor, a character inspired by Alan Turing. Turing, father of artificial intelligence and pioneer of radical new techniques to break the Nazi Enigma cipher during World War II, was later persecuted by the British state for 'gross indecency with another male' and forced to undergo chemical castration. Set during the devastating period before Turing's suicide, Murmur evokes an extraordinary life, the beauty and sorrows of love, and the nature of consciousness\" -- Provided by publisher.
BOOK
Castration for Pleasure: Exploring Extreme Castration Ideations in Fiction
The Eunuch Archive (EA) is an online community which includes individuals who read and write sexual fantasies with themes related to castration and eunuchs. Here we analyzed the 100 stories rated highest by EA readers among the >8800 currently posted. Our goal was to gain insights into commonalities within, and specifics of, castration sexual fantasies. Simply stated, we want to know what the authors (and readers) fantasize about and why. The most popular EA stories link sexual gratification and romantic partnership with genital abuse. They are characterized by the absence of consent for genital ablations and multiple SM-related paraphilias. Many stories feature attraction to, and ablation of, the genitals of pubescent or adolescent males. Some EA members have acted on their interests and been voluntarily castrated. Others wish to be. The most popular stories in the EA collection typically link the sacrifice via SM abuse to securing a permanent sexual partnership. The idea of sacrificing one’s genitals to build dyadic adhesion has been noted before in individuals with extreme castration ideations. Here we identify the common features of sexualized fantasies that are popular among individuals with exceptional interest in castration.
Journal Article
Reading Rape
Reading Rapeexamines how American culture talks about sexual violence and explains why, in the latter twentieth century, rape achieved such significance as a trope of power relations.
Through attentive readings of a wide range of literary and cultural representations of sexual assault--from antebellum seduction narratives and \"realist\" representations of rape in nineteenth-century novels toDeliverance, American Psycho, and contemporary feminist accounts--Sabine Sielke traces the evolution of a specifically American rhetoric of rape. She considers the kinds of cultural work that this rhetoric has performed and finds that rape has been an insistent figure for a range of social, political, and economic issues.
Sielke argues that the representation of rape has been a major force in the cultural construction of sexuality, gender, race, ethnicity, class, and indeed national identity. At the same time, her acute analyses of both canonical and lesser-known texts explore the complex anxieties that motivate such constructions and their function within the wider cultural imagination. Provoked in part by contemporary feminist criticism,Reading Rapealso challenges feminist positions on sexual violence by interrogating them as part of the history in which rape has been a convenient and conventional albeit troubling trope for other concerns and conflicts.
This book teaches us what we talk about when we talk about rape. And what we're talking about is often something else entirely: power, money, social change, difference, and identity.
eBook
LACAN AS A READER OF ANGELA CARTER’S THE BLOODY CHAMBER
In her modern classic The Bloody Chamber Angela Carter has reworkedmany classic tales of western culture, covering tales from Charles Perrault to Grimmbrothers. In her rewriting of these tale Carter does not merely reproduces these textsfor a modern audience but she adds a political, sexual, and psychological edge tothem. This article looks at three selected tales from this collection (The Tiger’s Bride,The Bloody Chamber, and The Lady of the House of Love) through the lens ofLacanian psychoanalytic theory in order to unveil their hidden psychologicalsignificance. By drawing on Lacanian key concepts such as ‘symbolic castration’ and‘dimension of ate’ this paper aims to shed light on the disavowed and unconsciousbeliefs that constitute the psychological subtext of these narratives and regulate theactions of their characters.
Journal Article
The sexual side of castration narratives: Fiction written by and for eunuchs and eunuch “wannabes”
The Eunuch Archive is an online community of individuals with exceptional interest in castration and penectomy. Here we examine themes related to genital ablation in a sample of fictional stories posted by members of the Eunuch Archive. Similarities between the contents of these stories and members' demographic information were found, suggesting that these stories may reflect some of the members' life experiences or personal fears. Common themes in both stories and personal histories of voluntarily castrated men were homosexuality, childhood abuse, and threats of castration. We found that 83% of stories were explicitly sexual, which was defined as containing physical or mental sexual arousal; sexual acts such as masturbation, oral sex, or penetrative sex; or attainment of orgasm. Fifty-one percent of stories described forced castrations, 34% involved minors, and 24% described orgasms related to genital ablation. Writing these stories may be therapeutic for the authors, as some members have claimed that writing them has allowed them to work through their extreme castration ideations without acting on them. Clinicians should be aware that there are men who express profound interest in genital ablation and their interests and/or concerns should be taken seriously.
Journal Article
Reading Hoffmann: Mythmaking and Uncanniness in Jean Lorrain's \Monsieur de Phocas\
The article examines the significance of E.T.A. Hoffmann's short story \"The Sand-Man\" (1816) for Jean Lorrain's novel Monsieur de Phocas (1901). The author argues that the Freudian imagery in Lorrain's novel derives from Hoffman's story, which was in fact the point of departure for Freud's analysis of the uncanny (1919). She notes how Lorrain uses \"Sand-Man\" imagery as a subtext for his novel and examines the affinities between Freud's reading of \"The Sand-Man\" and Lorrain's elaboration of its central motifs. The article sheds light on Monsieur de Phocas as a bridging text between the \"natural\" fantastic of the early nineteenth century and the \"inner\" fantastic of the fin de siècle, and illustrates the extent to which decadent literature engages in an inquiry on the human psyche.
Journal Article
Colonization as an Emasculating Experience: The Symbolic Castration of the Colonized Men in Pre/Partition Fiction
The colonizing powers have always been viewed as forces which render the colonized powerless. In the sub-continent also, colonization acted as an agent ofvanquishing the male power, and at the same time of damaging the myth of the male figure as a symbol of power. Thus puncturing the image of the male as all-powerful, the men of the sub-continent were reduced to diminutives and pigmies who may be viewed as notfar different from the cringing and crawling shadows one finds in Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. This chapter aims to discuss selected male characters in Pre / Partition fiction who were castrated (symbolically, if not otherwise) and divested of allsort of power, be it identity, faith or any other source of deriving strength. The research intends to read this castration as a kind of victimization which left the men not only incapacitated in the face of Partition’s violence but also left them boggled, weak, fearful, indecisive, and drained of all the positive attributes. So if the country, as a motherland, was considered to be raped through the process of colonization, as a fatherland, it was castrated. Castration meant the ripping out of all the spring of power and giving it away to someone else i.e. the colonizer. in other words, the country as a mother figure was raped because as a father figure it was castrated and thus rendered impotent and thereby incapable of protecting its honour, religion, communities, families and even its own self.
Journal Article
Strains of Utopia
When Dmitri Tiomkin thanked Johannes Brahms, Johann Strauss, Richard Strauss, and Richard Wagner upon accepting the Academy Award for his score of The High and the Mighty in 1954, he was honoring a romantic style that had characterized Hollywood's golden age of film composition from the mid-1930s to the 1950s. Exploring elements of romanticism in film scores of composers ranging from Erich Korngold to Bernard Herrmann, Caryl Flinn argues that films tended to link music to the sense of an idealized, lost past. Just as the score of Gone with the Wind captured the grandeur of the antebellum South, others prompted flashbacks or suggested moments of emotional intensity and sensuality. Maintaining that many films treated this utopian impulse as a female trait, Flinn investigates the ways Hollywood genre films--particularly film noir and melodrama--sustained the connection between music and nostalgia, utopia, and femininity. The author situates Hollywood film scores within a romantic aesthetic ideology, noting compositional and theoretical affinities between the film composers and Wagner, with emphasis on authorship, creativity, and femininity. Pointing to the lasting impact of romanticism on film music, Flinn draws from poststructuralist, Marxist, feminist, and psychoanalytic criticism to offer fresh insights into the broad theme of music as an excessive utopian condition.
eBook
\With These Repulsive Things Indissolubly Bound\: Kafka as Primal Scene
Kafka everywhere writes about, and evinces in his life, the impossibility of connecting with other people and the impossibility of separating from them. This essay shows how Kafka repeatedly formulates this double impossibility in terms of the fantasy of the primal scene, always in conjunction with the other primal fantasies, those of seduction and castration. It explores the inscription of the primal scene in three well-known short fictions (\"The Metamorphosis,\" \"A Country Doctor,\" and \"The Judgment\") and in two important letters. Before tracing their vicissitudes in these texts, the essay proposes a new way of conceptualizing the primal fantasies by way of identity (seduction), difference (castration), and the synthesis of identity and difference (primal scene). Finally, the essay proposes a new approach to the much-discussed marriage problem in Kafka's life, showing how marriage explicitly raises the specter of the primal scene in Kafka's letters to Felice Bauer, which develop the significance of this scene for Kafka's biography even to the point of presenting his fatal disease as one of its manifestations.
Journal Article
The Epistemology of the Mantelpiece: Subversive Ornaments in the Novels of Guy de Maupassant
This article examines episodes from three novels by Guy de Maupassant, \"Notre Cœur\" (1890), \"Bel-Ami\" (1885), and \"Pierre et Jean\" (1888), and analyses how mantelpieces and ornaments become a privileged topos for the fictional investigation of epistemology and the phenomenon of disavowal. Through a parallel treatment of Maupassant and several texts of psychoanalysis, the article suggests a version of Maupassant which differs from critical representations of Maupassant as a pessimistic hater of the bourgeoisie. He emerges instead as ethically more ambiguous, and aware that a certain amount of disavowal is inevitable and indeed necessary in any given community.
Journal Article