Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and (Male) Hysteria over John Bobbitt's Missing Manhood

Abstract

This article draws on feminist theory and psychoanalysis to analyze the media discourse surrounding the 1993 incident in which Lorena Bobbitt severed her husband's penis after he allegedly raped her. Touted as the ultimate example of “male bashing,” Lorena's literal emasculation of John was described in the media as a specific instance of feminism's more general emasculation of men. This framing, like castration anxiety itself, reveals the intimate connection of heterosexual masculine identity with the phallus as the privileged signifier of sexual difference and naturalized male power. Male hysteria over the Bobbitt case also illustrates a tired double standard in which isolated cases of female aggression are read as evidence of the routine victimization of White men rather than as evidence of men's power to voice their complaints in the media (while silencing women's) or as evidence of White men's privileged entitlement to sexual invulnerability.