Sex, Paranoia, and Modern Masculinity explores how twentieth-century conceptions of paranoia became associated with the excessive or unregulated exercise of masculine intellectual tendencies. Through an extended analysis of Freudian metapsychology, Kenneth Paradis illustrates how paranoid ideation has been especially connected to the figure of the male body under threat of genital mutilation or emasculation. In this context, he also considers how both midcentury detective fiction (especially the work of Raymond Chandler) and contemporaneous autobiographies of male-to-female transsexuals negotiate the terms of this gendered understanding of psychopathology, thus articulating their own notions of moral value, individual autonomy, and effective agency.
| ISBN: | 9780791469330 |
| Publication date: | 15th November 2006 |
| Author: | Kenneth Paradis |
| Publisher: | SUNY Press an imprint of State University of New York Press |
| Format: | Hardback |
| Pagination: | 228 pages |
| Series: | SUNY Series in Psychoanalysis and Culture |
| Genres: |
Gender studies, gender groups Psychoanalytical and Freudian psychology Literary theory Semiotics / semiology |