Castration
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Flying anuses, speeding vaginas, there is no castration -- Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus |
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Castration (also referred as: gelding, neutering, orchiectomy, orchidectomy, and oophorectomy) is any action, surgical, chemical, or otherwise, by which a male loses the functions of the testes or a female loses the functions of the ovaries.
In psychoanalysis and literary theory
The concept of castration plays an important role in psychoanalysis; see, for example, castration anxiety.
Castration (as a metaphor) also plays an important role in psychoanalytically-influenced literary theory, for example Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence. Poetry can also be seen as castrating, with male poets either being castrated through being outdone by their male predecessors, or male poets (and even mere readers) being castrated by the force of the female sublime as conveyed to them through poetry.
See also
- Emasculation of a corpse in Germinal
- The Castration of Uranus
- The castration of Pierre Abelard
- Castrato, a castrated male singer
- Chemical castration
- Eunuch
- Auto-castration
- Birth control
- Castration anxiety
