In France in 1933, two sisters, presumed to be lovers, murdered the women who employed them as maids. Known as "the Papin affair," the incident inspired not only Jean Genet's 1947 The Maids but also an essay by Jacques Lacan that presents the sisters' crime as fueled by a narcissistic, homosexual drive that culminated in the assault. In this new investigation of the roots of the twentieth-century myth of the lesbian-as-madwoman, Christine Coffman argues that the female psychotic was the privileged object of Lacan's effort to derive a revolutionary theory of subjectivity from the study of mental illness. Examining Lacan's early writings, French surrealism, Djuna Barnes' Nightwood, and H.D.'s homoerotic fiction in light of feminist and queer theory, Insane Passions argues that the psychotic woman that fascinates modernist writers returns with a murderous vengeance in a number of late twentieth-century films--including Basic Instinct, Sister My Sister, Single White Female, and Murderous Maids. Marking the limit of social acceptability, the "psychotic lesbian" repeatedly appears as the screen onto which the violence and madness of twentieth-century life are projected.
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"In this astute and forceful book, Coffman teases out when women's paranoid aggression was a convenient fantasy that fueled various artistic and intellectual agendas, and when it marked a genuine crisis about the terms and enigmas of sexual identity itself." (Christopher Lane, Professor of English, Northwestern University )
About the Author
CHRISTINE E. COFFMAN is an assistant professor in the department of English at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.
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Front Cover | Front Flap | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Flap | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Inside This Book
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Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs):
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psychotic lesbian, paranoid crime, lesbian psychosis, lamour fou, concentric intimacy, lesbian vampirism, disavowed homosexuality, normal subjectivity, hallucinatory wishful psychosis, social psychosis, causalité psychique, queer woman, paternal symbolic, desire between women, lesbian passion, symbolic mandates, surrealist texts, retrospective projection, psychotic woman, surrealist practice, queer women, paranoid projection, paternal law, symbolic itself, feminine masochism Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Paint It Today, Sister My Sister, Murderous Maids, The Deranged, The Suspended Ball, Motives of Paranoid Crime, Name of the Father, Jacques Lacan, Christine Papin, Fayne Rabb, Penelope's Web, Matthew O'Connor, Sir Leoline, The Four Fundamental Concepts, Women of the Left Bank, New Critical, Violette Nozières, George Lowndes, Hermione Gart, Psycho-analytic Notes, Robin Vote, The Lost Steps, Fatal Women, Flesh Made Word, Lesbian Phallus New!
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Front Cover | Front Flap | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Flap | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
psychotic lesbian, paranoid crime, lesbian psychosis, lamour fou, concentric intimacy, lesbian vampirism, disavowed homosexuality, normal subjectivity, hallucinatory wishful psychosis, social psychosis, causalité psychique, queer woman, paternal symbolic, desire between women, lesbian passion, symbolic mandates, surrealist texts, retrospective projection, psychotic woman, surrealist practice, queer women, paranoid projection, paternal law, symbolic itself, feminine masochism Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Paint It Today, Sister My Sister, Murderous Maids, The Deranged, The Suspended Ball, Motives of Paranoid Crime, Name of the Father, Jacques Lacan, Christine Papin, Fayne Rabb, Penelope's Web, Matthew O'Connor, Sir Leoline, The Four Fundamental Concepts, Women of the Left Bank, New Critical, Violette Nozières, George Lowndes, Hermione Gart, Psycho-analytic Notes, Robin Vote, The Lost Steps, Fatal Women, Flesh Made Word, Lesbian Phallus New!
Books on Related Topics | Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Front Flap | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Flap | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Citations (learn more)
This book cites 100
books:
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- Jacques Lacan by Elisabeth Roudinesco on 14 pages
- Women of the Left Bank by Shari Benstock on 10 pages
- The Optical Unconscious (October Books) by Rosalind E. Krauss on 6 pages
- Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex by Judith Butler on 6 pages
- The History of Surrealism by Maurice Nadeau on 5 pages
See all 100 books this book cites
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