CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2013
| Author | Tracy, Ryan |
|---|---|
| Title | Masturbation As a Way of Life |
| Summary | This thesis explores how the concept of masturbation—both as a sexual act and as a pejorative speech act—is mobilized by Western anxieties about economic exchange, social order, subjectivity and self-reflection. I will trace a genealogy of masturbation over a range of Western discourses beginning from its origins as a master trope of the European Enlightenment. Combining the sexual histories of Thomas Laqueur, Michel Foucault, and others with the anthropological history of debt offered by David Graeber, I will show how the masturbation panic that swept European societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was fueled by contemporaneous philosophical and political worries about the nature of currency, credit, and the rule of law. In particular, masturbation would take on a symbolic relationship with the failure to pay one’s debts, the result of which would be social lostness and a fall into slavery. I will then show how these anxieties bear out in the political and philosophical theories of Rousseau and Hegel, demonstrating how, in each case, pleasure in the self is rendered as a dyadic self-enslavement that demands the intervention of a third term that will bring the subject into the sight of the law. For Rousseau, the third term will be the social contract; for Hegel, “The Priest” as a proxy for Absolute Spirit. I will thread Judith Butler’s critique of Hegel’s “slave subjectivity” and the subjective failure before the Law into structuralist psychoanalysis, showing how the psyche is figured by Freud and Lacan as a libidinal economy of exchange and endless debt which is formulated by a fundamentally anti-narcissistic imperative to reflect the law. Finally I will turn to the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, moving through her concept of “queer performativity” and her work with shame affect in order to reorient anti-masturbatory speech acts as a demand to be seen. This reorientation will follow the line between dyadic and structuralist forms of exchange, redrawing life and masturbation onto the same side of subjectivity. |
| Supervisor | Timar, Eszter |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2013/tracy_ryan.pdf |
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