Sex Drives

[Dave Monroe]

SEX DRIVES
Fantasies of Fascism in Literary Modernism
Laura Frost

$25.95s paper
2001, 208 pages, 6 x 9, 12 halftones
ISBN: 978-0-8014-8764-4  Quantity


Salvador Dalí's autobiography confesses that "Hitler turned me on in
the highest," while Sylvia Plath maintains that "every woman adores a
Fascist." Susan Sontag's famous observation that art reveals the
seamier side of fascism in bondage, discipline, and sexual deviance
would certainly appear to be true in modernist and postwar literary
texts. How do we account for eroticized representations of fascism in
anti-fascist literature, for sexual desire that escapes the bounds of
politics?

Laura Frost advances a compelling reading of works by D. H. Lawrence,
Virginia Woolf, Jean Genet, Georges Bataille, Marguerite Duras, and
Sylvia Plath, paying special attention to undercurrents of
enthrallment with tyrants, uniforms, and domination. She argues that
the first generation of writers raised within psychoanalytic discourse
found in fascism the libidinal unconscious through which to fantasize
acts—including sadomasochism and homosexuality—not permitted in a
democratic conception of sexuality without power relations. By
delineating democracy's investment in a sexually transgressive
fascism, an investment that persists to this day, Frost demonstrates
how politics enters into fantasy. This provocative and closely-argued
book offers both a fresh contribution to modernist literature and a
theorization of fantasy.

http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=3715

Table of Contents

http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/toc/Frost.sex.toc.pdf