Castration Desire

Theorizes an alternative form of masculinity in global literature that is less egocentric and more sustainable, both in terms of gendered and environmental power dynamics.As the #MeToo movement made all too clear, we require new tools for imagining alternative masculinities. Enter Castration Desire: Less Is More in Global Anglophone Fiction, which examines an array of contemporary novelists and filmmakers who are emblematic of a transnational phenomenon that Robinson Murphy calls "castration desire." Figures such as Japanese-British Kazuo Ishiguro, Irish-Canadian Emma Donoghue, Sri Lankan-Canadian Michael Ondaatje, South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho, and South African-Australian J.M. Coetzee present privileged characters who nonetheless pursue their own diminishment. Castration Desire examines how, in promulgating through their characters a less egocentric mode of thinking and acting, these transnational artists offer a blueprint for engendering a more other-oriented relationality. According to orthodox psychoanalysis, "castration" is always negative: to lose the "phallus" is to lose everything. Against this orthodox account, "castration desire" offers a "less is more" model of sustainable relationality on an imminently eco-apocalyptic earth. Additionally, this study extends and develops a zeitgeist that is currently unfolding in critical theory, bringing Leo Bersani's concept of "psychic utopia" together with Judith Butler's "radical egalitarianism," extending their shared critique of individualistic masculinity into the environmental humanities. Castration Desire thereby provides an alternative to rapacious consumption practices. In shifting criticism to a new way of thinking about the phase of literary history we are currently in, it also helps define where literary criticism is now, and where it is headed.