Sex Drives: Fantasies of Fascism in Literary Modernism

by Laura Frost

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801487644
Publisher:	Cornell University Press
Publication date:	11/13/2001
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.62(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Laura Frost is Associate Professor of English at Yale University.

What People are Saying About This

Carol Siegel

In Sex Drives, Laura Frost brilliantly addresses the most disturbing possible questions about the role of fascism in the construction of twentieth-century erotics and provides answers crucial to understanding many discourses that continue to inform sexuality today.

Laura Kipnis

A brilliant exposition of the historical and political contexts of eroticized fascism that also unravels the democratic imagination's vanilla fantasies about its own sexual rectitude. This is a landmark book: astute, subtle, marvelously readable, and in no way politically reassuring.

Editorial Reviews

Laura Frost's Sex Drives: Fantasies of Fascism in Literary Modernism is interested in the imaginative convergence of fascism and eroticism, the eroticizing of the fascist, particularly among writers and artists who ideologically had no sympathy with fascist politics.... Sex Drives contributes to several fields of critical analysis at once; feminist studies, queer theory, culture studies, and literary criticism.

Lambda Book Report - Thomas L. Long

In her genuinely thought-provoking study Laura Frost chooses to examine Modernist writers who failed to succumb to fascist ideology, yet produced 'fictions of eroticized fascism.' The study is provocative and daring in the sense that there is an almost sheerly thematic link between the chosen authors.... I would also like to emphasize that the book will be an excellent teaching aid for undergraduate classes.

www.Womenwriters.net

Frost's new book is as a particularly succesful blend of broad cultural history and specific literary analyses, maintaining a necessary attachment to established fact without relinquishing her sensitivity to the nature of her texts as literary, as art. Frost takes as her central theme the use and abuse of the image of the 'sexualized fascist'.... Frost remains sensitive to her texts as literary works, and she is particularly good when giving herself space to delve into extended analysis.... The breadth of research makes for a consistently entertaining read and establishes a solid framework for one of her central theses, that liberal, democractic, western societies (particularly Britain, France, and the U.S.) have had and still have vested political interests in aligning so-called deviant sexualities with foreign political orders.... One of the most interesting and fertile aspects of Frost's study emerges, the role of pleasure in the process of sexualization (initially intended to be repulsive), of titillation in the reception of art which represents forces that were responsible for some of the century's darkest moments. This leads the reader to dark and difficult questions, but questions well worth the asking.

--Sean Pryor, University of Sydney "Modernism/modernity"

In her genuinely thought-provoking study Laura Frost chooses to examine Modernist writers who failed to succumb to fascist ideology, yet produced 'fictions of eroticized fascism.' The study is provocative and daring in the sense that there is an almost sheerly thematic link between the chosen authors.... I would also like to emphasize that the book will be an excellent teaching aid for undergraduate classes.

-- "www.Womenwriters.net"

Laura Frost notes in her revelatory new book, Sex Drives: Fantasies of Fascism in Literary Modernism, postwar Nazi chic had less to do with the real thing than with liberalism's 'powerful investments in... defining proper and deviant desire.' The connection between fascism and perversity is itself a fantasy, Frost explains, since the actual Nazis were puritanical and radically detached. Their relationship to their victims was not at all like the intimate possibilities that can exist in s/m. Ascribing the bond between sexual master and slave to this emblem of evil was a very effective way to condemn sadomasochistic impulses (and for that matter, to make them even hotter). No wonder the '70s, with their deeply ambivalent fixation on transgressive sexuality, were also the heyday of Nazi chic.

--Richard Goldstein "The Village Voice"

Laura Frost's Sex Drives: Fantasies of Fascism in Literary Modernism is interested in the imaginative convergence of fascism and eroticism, the eroticizing of the fascist, particularly among writers and artists who ideologically had no sympathy with fascist politics.... Sex Drives contributes to several fields of critical analysis at once; feminist studies, queer theory, culture studies, and literary criticism.

--Thomas L. Long "Lambda Book Report"

From the Publisher

Laura Frost notes in her revelatory new book, Sex Drives: Fantasies of Fascism in Literary Modernism, postwar Nazi chic had less to do with the real thing than with liberalism's 'powerful investments in... defining proper and deviant desire.' The connection between fascism and perversity is itself a fantasy, Frost explains, since the actual Nazis were puritanical and radically detached. Their relationship to their victims was not at all like the intimate possibilities that can exist in s/m. Ascribing the bond between sexual master and slave to this emblem of evil was a very effective way to condemn sadomasochistic impulses (and for that matter, to make them even hotter). No wonder the '70s, with their deeply ambivalent fixation on transgressive sexuality, were also the heyday of Nazi chic.

The Village Voice - Richard Goldstein

Frost's new book is as a particularly succesful blend of broad cultural history and specific literary analyses, maintaining a necessary attachment to established fact without relinquishing her sensitivity to the nature of her texts as literary, as art. Frost takes as her central theme the use and abuse of the image of the 'sexualized fascist'.... Frost remains sensitive to her texts as literary works, and she is particularly good when giving herself space to delve into extended analysis.... The breadth of research makes for a consistently entertaining read and establishes a solid framework for one of her central theses, that liberal, democractic, western societies (particularly Britain, France, and the U.S.) have had and still have vested political interests in aligning so-called deviant sexualities with foreign political orders.... One of the most interesting and fertile aspects of Frost's study emerges, the role of pleasure in the process of sexualization (initially intended to be repulsive), of titillation in the reception of art which represents forces that were responsible for some of the century's darkest moments. This leads the reader to dark and difficult questions, but questions well worth the asking.

Modernism/modernity - Sean Pryor

"In Sex Drives, Laura Frost brilliantly addresses the most disturbing possible questions about the role of fascism in the construction of twentieth-century erotics and provides answers crucial to understanding many discourses that continue to inform sexuality today."

Carol Siegel

"A brilliant exposition of the historical and political contexts of eroticized fascism that also unravels the democratic imagination's vanilla fantasies about its own sexual rectitude. This is a landmark book: astute, subtle, marvelously readable, and in no way politically reassuring."

Laura Kipnis