Sex, Paranoia, and Modern Masculinity, livre ebook

How modern conceptions of paranoia became associated with excessive or unregulated masculinity.

How modern conceptions of paranoia became associated with excessive or unregulated masculinity.

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.

Introduction: Paranoia and the sex of modern individuality

1. Modern narratives of paranoia

2. Freudian metapsychology and the sex of paranoia

3. Paranoia as Popular Heroism: Hard-boiled Moral Masculinity

4. Sex, Subjectivity and Male-to-Female Transsexual Autobiography

Notes
Bibliography
Index