The Role of Fantasy in a Serial Sexual Offender: A Brief Review of the Literature and a Case Report

Abstract: Extensive research has attempted to elucidate the role of fantasy in sexual offending. In this paper, the authors summarize the main results of the literature, especially the contents, themes, dynamics, etiopathogenesis, and potential functions of fantasy in sexual offending. Further, the authors analyze the case of a serial sexual offender who assaulted 39 women. The forensic‐psychiatric assessment revealed that his fantasies of forced sex, sexual coercion, and dominance, which were linked to narcissistic personality organization and functioning, were the primary drive mechanism in his crimes, because he imagined himself in the role of the aggressor, identified with the power associated with the role of perpetrator, and was sexually aroused by such images of omnipotent control of the victim. In conclusions, the authors suggest that fantasies of sexual aggression, coercion, and dominance of women may stimulate grandiosity and omnipotence and, in a minority of cases, may lead to sexual offending.     

Ecologies of blood in Johannesburg vampire fiction

This essay reads two contemporary Johannesburg vampire narratives, the film Eternity (2010) and the graphic novel Rebirth (2012), as part of a body of fiction that sees post-apartheid Johannesburg as a laboratory for new forms of life. While recent Johannesburg science fiction has imagined the emergence of new and more fluid forms of being in Johannesburg, the vampire narrative employs a far older and more restrictive type of monster. By virtue of its intimate relationship to blood – with its mythical overtones of racial and national essence – and its peculiarly blank and limited form of being, the vampire is a productive figure for imagining whiteness. In this essay, I examine how the Johannesburg vampire registers the mutations of whiteness in the post-apartheid context. Located in a contaminated and contaminating city of hidden capillaries and networks, vampiric blood runs across and perforates the traditional blood bonds of race, family, and nation. Indeed, dependent on a precarious and potentially diseased resource, the Johannesburg vampire is always on the cusp of dissolving the very whiteness it figures. I am interested in the way in which these vampire narratives alternately reinforce and interrogate what I call the politics of prolongation; that is, in the ways in which their horizontal and entangled “haemopoetics” attempt to displace the genealogical poetics of blood that have traditionally suffused the colonial enterprise and its literature.     

Managing anxiety: neoliberal modes of citizen subjectivity,fantasy and child abuse in New Zealand

The neoliberal direction of social policy under New Zealand’s fifth National government (2008–) is demonstrated in its 2012 White Paper for Vulnerable Children. This document advocates increased monitoring and policing of welfare populations and the downgrading of child protection policy to a technical administrative system for managing ‘risky’ families. The White Paper’s release came soon after the coroner’s report into the deaths of the ‘Kahui twins’, which were treated by the media as a shocking case of child abuse, and exemplified the media’s use of a fantasy of a ‘savage’ Maori welfare underclass in reporting cases of child abuse. Drawing on Isin’s analysis of ‘governing through neurosis’, this article explores how these media and policy discourses reinforce normative patterns of neoliberal citizen subjectivity by offering compelling pathways out of anxiety that re-route citizens’ anxiety over child abuse in support of neoliberal modes of citizen subjectivity.     

马克思怎样评判民主主义——兼论理想信念与幻想信仰的本质区别

前苏联和东欧社会主义国家发生资本主义和平演变以后,民主主义思潮重新活跃起来,他们提出人类的未来不是社会主义取代资本主义,而是民主主义演变社会主义。要想真正搞清楚这种观点错在哪里,必须首先明确理想信念与幻想信仰的本质区别。在此基础上,本文通过回溯马克思对民主主义和空想社会主义的评判,着重考察民主主义信仰的三大目标和五项愿望从何而来,结果发现它们都来自五件落后的思想武器,其中三大目标只能有利于创造和普及机器生产力,但不利于创造和普及智能生产力,而其五项愿望则由于受到机器生产力的限制,因此注定成为"欺蒙人民"的幻想。本文在具备了上述理论前提之后,接着通过考察民主主义与资本主义的关系,根据资本主义形态的历史寿命和当今时代的基本特征,证明前苏联走上资本主义和平演变的道路是从"新幻想"跳回"旧幻想"。     

What's the big deal? Naturalisation and the politics of desire

This article takes the naturalisation process as a vantage point to consider how citizenship constitutes a site of emotional investment not only on the part of applicants and ‘new’ citizens but also on the part of the state. The premise of this article is that naturalisation is more than solely the admission of foreigners to the position and rights of citizenship, and it approaches naturalisation as a state practice that needs to be understood within a politics of desire. The article asks three questions: what makes naturalisation a thinkable and desirable means of acquiring citizenship? Second, what do practices of naturalisation tell us about ‘the state's attachment to particular embodiments of desirable citizens’ (S. Somerville, 2005 Somerville, S., 2005. Notes toward a queer history of naturalization. American quarterly, 7 (3), 659–675.[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], Notes toward a queer history of naturalization. American quarterly, 7 (3), 661)? Third, ‘who may desire the state's desire’ (J. Butler, 2002. Is kinship always already heterosexual? Differences, 13 (1), 22)? Using policy documents and auto-ethnographic material, the article examines practices through which the state selects its own objects of desire and produces them as citizens, while it also produces itself as desirable. The article concludes that naturalisation distinguishes desirable from less desirable citizens through fantasies of English proficiency and birthright citizenship. In addition, the staged performance of the citizenship ceremony assures the state of its desirability by subsuming ‘as if’ enactments of citizenship.     

Fantasy machine: philanthrocapitalism as an ideological formation

Philanthrocapitalism is promoted as a form of development funding that infuses philanthropy with the dynamism and innovation of capitalist enterprise. Millennium Promise is a philanthrocapitalist organisation based in New York, which finances the Millennium Villages Project (mvp) across 10 countries in sub-Saharan Africa. At the level of its discursive articulation Millennium Promise appears as a Foucauldian ‘anti-politics machine’: a mechanism of transnational governmentality devoted to the biopolitical production of entrepreneurial subjects organised in self-disciplining communities. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory and field research conducted in Uganda, I argue that philanthrocapitalism is better understood as an ideological formation, which mobilises a disavowed enjoyment of global inequality. In the case of Millennium Promise this enjoyment is structured by specific social fantasies: cause-related marketing campaigns invite Western consumers to enjoy their imagined distance from ‘African’ suffering; the mvp functions as a narcissistic mirror, which offers a reflection of capitalist society cleansed of its class antagonism; and, through the staging of messianic rituals, the mvp mobilises a shared enjoyment of pseudo-colonial relations of domination. I conclude that philanthrocapitalism is not an anti-politics machine but a fantasy machine, which demonstrates the limitations of Foucauldian critique, and forces us to confront our own relations to enjoyment.     

Fantasy depictions of child sexual abuse: The problem of ageplay in Second Life

Abstract

This paper explores the arguments put forward for prohibiting the possession of fantasy images of child sexual abuse within the Coroners and Justice Act 2009, and applies them to sexual ageplay in Second Life. Sexual ageplay is the virtual act of simulating child sexual abuse using animated child characters operated by consenting adult users. The arguments underpinning the legislation centre on the issue of harm and the relationship between online, virtual behaviour and real world contact offences. It is argued that extant research does not support a causal connection, although some work on fantasy offence planning and online paedophilia chat groups suggests a link. Due to the lack of empirical work in the area it is concluded that legislation to criminalise such behaviour on grounds of harm causation is currently unjustified, although prohibition of sexual ageplay for known sex offenders is recommended. Further research into the extent, use and effects of sexual ageplay is required.