Sex, Paranoia, and Modern Masculinity

Download or read book Sex, Paranoia, and Modern Masculinity written by Kenneth Paradis and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.