Author : Mallory Renee Szymanski
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (14 download)
Book Synopsis Sexual Dysfunction as "the National Disease of America" by : Mallory Renee Szymanski
Download or read book Sexual Dysfunction as "the National Disease of America" written by Mallory Renee Szymanski and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1894, McClure's magazine declared neurasthenia "the national disease of America." In the late-nineteenth century, white neurasthenic men, across classes, shared a collective experience of fatigue and sexual anxiety that threatened their gendered self-perceptions. They learned to identify themselves as neurasthenic from ubiquitous cultural information available in newspapers, advertisements, the YMCA, and lay medical literature. Neurasthenia rhetoric defined manhood in terms of potential, it provided a framework for absolution of past moral failures (such as illicit sex or alcohol use), and it affirmed whiteness as a permanent marker of biological superiority that could not be dismantled at the sign of neurasthenic breakdown. Blending cultural and medical history methods, this project argues neurasthenia rhetoric normalized manly weakness as an unfortunate, yet legitimate experience for the most hardworking and civilized men. In other words, it circumscribed racialized and classed boundaries to include white men, however broken, sexually challenged, or emotionally fraught. Patients and doctors utilized this language in the clinic, and as a result, they legitimized otherwise illicit questions about what it meant to be a healthy, empowered, modern white man in an everchanging modern world.