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Serial Masculinity: Psychopathology and Oedipal Violence in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho
- MFS Modern Fiction Studies
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 54, Number 2, Summer 2008
- pp. 378-397
- 10.1353/mfs.0.0014
- Article
- Additional Information
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This essay carries out an expressly gender-specific analysis of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, showing how the novel pathologizes modern masculinity by identifying its most characteristic traits as symptoms of a variety of psychopathologies, mental disorders and cognitive impairments. Traditional masculinity is read as a residual, ideologically motivated gender construct that – by endorsing and legitimizing the realization of certain, possibly genetic, male dispositions as a fixed set of behavioral norms and imperatives – promotes the genesis a type of male subjectivity that displays conspicuous similarities particularly to Asperger’s Syndrome and high-functioning autism.