Three in the Mirror of the Capitalist Unconscious: Slipknot's "Snuff", Ed Gein, and the Psychoanalytic-Political Economy of Becoming-the-Other
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This essay undertakes a sustained cultural-psychoanalytic and political reading of autogynephilia as both clinical construct and cultural symptom. Using three contemporary cultural nodes—the Slipknot music video “Snuff” (2009), Netflix’s Monster: The Ed Gein Story (2025), and a popular-psychology YouTube monologue by Veronika Stepanova titled “Муж носит женское бельё” (2025)—I argue that the male desire to become the feminine other must be read simultaneously as a psychical economy (Lacan), a modality of abjection (Kristeva), and a contested site of biopolitical struggle (Foucault; Preciado). I situate these texts within debates about Blanchard’s autogynephilia thesis and its robust critique in clinical and feminist scholarship, and I propose that autogynephilic enactments, far from being reducible to a paraphilia, function in late capitalist culture as embodied refusals of normative masculine sovereignty and as mediated attempts to re-inhabit the missing mother-function through prosthetic surfaces (clothes, skin, image). The essay blends close interpretive readings with theoretical syntheses, and it concludes with a political diagnosis: autogynephilic practice exposes the fragility of the gender binary as both psychic defence and capitalist technology.
Author: Panasiuk, Mariia
Language: English
Subfield: Clinical Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Gender equality
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7103750145
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