Title

Reading, Writing, and the Whip

Authors

Amber Jamilla Musser, Washington University in St LouisFollow

Author's School

College of Arts and Sciences

Author's Department

Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies

Additional Affiliations

Assistant Professor, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program; Faculty with the Feminist Critical Analysis Seminar

Document Type

Journal Article

Publication Date

Fall 1-1-2008

Originally Published In

Musser, A. J.(2008). Reading, Writing, and the Whip. Literature and Medicine 27(2), 204-222. The Johns Hopkins University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/lm.0.0034

Abstract

Reading masochism as a literary phenomenon means exploring several layers of relationships—of literature and performance, of textuality and subjectivity—and the relationships among various practices of reading. I start with Krafft-Ebing and his practices of reading, examine the relationship between literature and practice, and end with an exploration of diagnosis and writing. Rousseau's Confessions exemplifies these rich layers, as a text with a life and readership of its own and as writing exercise, and exemplifies what Michel Foucault termed a "technology of the self." The link I am forging between Krafft-Ebing and Foucault's technologies of the self offers a reevaluation of Krafft-Ebing and pre-psychoanalytic studies of sexuality. History has not been kind to Psychopathia Sexualis. Historians of psychiatry describe this compendium of sexual perversity as a footnote in Krafft-Ebing's otherwise illustrious career as a leading Austrian psychiatrist...

Pages

204-222

Comments

Originally published in Literature and Medicine 27, no. 2 (Fall 2008) 204–222 © 2009 by The Johns Hopkins University Press, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/literature_and_medicine/v027/27.2.musser.html

Recommended Citation

Musser, Amber Jamilla, "Reading, Writing, and the Whip" (2008). Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies Research. 20.
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/wgss/20