‘A Pool of Rrazor Bblades and Sperm’: A phantasy of white, heterosexual masculinity in Kurt Cobain’s Journals

Abstract

This article begins by situating Kurt Cobain’s Journals within the so-called crisis of white masculinity, which is deemed to characterize contemporary masculinities in North America. The article then identifies the central entry in the text as the one which all of the other entries either anticipate or reiterate to some degree. The autobiographic text is read, by way of a nuanced textual analysis of this particular entry, as an unconscious phantasy (as defined by Melanie Klein). That is, the article demonstrates how the writing in Journals seems to mimic the complex mental processes wherein meaning is generated; it demonstrates how the text stages and then attempts to mitigate an acute anxiety about the integrity and the consequences of a white, heterosexual, masculine identification.