The iconography of Asphyxiophilia: From fantasmatic fetish to forensic fact

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Volumn 27, Issue 3, 2004, Pages 1-15

  Downing, Lisa ^a   Nobus, Dany ^b  

^a QUEEN MARY UNIVERSITY OF LONDON   (United Kingdom)

^b BRUNEL UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61149461782     PISSN: 02648334     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3366/para.2004.27.3.1     Document Type: Article

References (29)

1. In most states of the USA, for example, the mode of death must be identified on the death certificate as either natural, accidental, suicidal or homicidal (usually abbreviated as NASH). See Amok Journal: Sensurround Edition. A Compendium of Psycho-Physiological Investigations, edited by Stuart Swezey (Los Angeles, Amok, 1995), 28.
2. The following sources will give the reader an idea of the diversity of methods documented: Autoerotic Fatalities, edited by Robert R. Hazelwood, Ann Wolbert Burgess and Park Elliot Dietz (Lexington, Lexington Books, 1983);
3. Stephen Leadbeatter, 'Dental Anaesthetic Death: An Unusual Autoerotic Episode', The American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology, 9 (1988), 60-3;
4. Riazul H. Imami and Miftah Kemal, 'Vacuum Cleaner Use in Autoerotic Death', The American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology, 9 (1988), 246-8;
5. Ronald L. O'Halloran and Park Elliot Dietz, 'Autoerotic Fatalities with Power Hydraulics', Journal of Forensic Sciences, 38 (1993), 359-64.
6. John Money defines the term as 'a sexual peculiarity in which sexuoerotic arousal and facilitation or attainment of orgasm are responsive to and dependent upon self-strangulation and asphyxiation up to, but not including, loss of consciousness' (see John Money, Gordon Wainwright and David Hingsburger, The Breathless Orgasm: A Lovemap Autobiography of Asphyxiophilia (Buffalo, Prometheus Books, 1991), 15-16). Other terms used to describe this phenomenon are 'hypoxyphilia', 'autoerotic asphyxia', 'sexual asphyxia' and 'Kotzwarraism', the latter after an eighteenth-century Czech composer who died of asphyxiation in the course of an erotic transaction with a prostitute.
7. Michel Foucault, 'Nietzsche, Freud and Marx' in Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954-1984: Volume Two: Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology, edited by James D. Faubion (New York, The New Press, 1998), 275.
8. In order to avoid replicating the very mechanism of exposure that we are critiquing, we have decided not to reproduce any of the images under discussion here in the body of this paper.
9. On Pierre Molinier, see Wayne Barewaldt, Pierre Molinier (New York, RAM Publications, 1996);
10. Pierre Molinier, edited by Jean-Luc Mercié (Genève, Bärtschi Salomon Editions, 1999).
11. On Fakir Musafar, see Kristine Ambrosia and Joseph Lanza, 'Fakir Musafar Interview', in Apocalypse Culture, edited by Adam Parfrey (Los Angeles, Feral House, 1987), 106-17
12. and Fakir Musafar, Spirit + Flesh, foreword by Mark Thompson (Santa Fe, Arena Editions, 2002).
13. See Heike Ruschmeyer, Maßlose Zeit: Bilder und Zeichnungen 1978-93 (Berlin, Staatliche Kunsthalle, 1993).
14. All photographs used were taken from Waldemar Weimann, Atlas der gerichtlichen Medizin (Berlin, Verlag Volk und Gesundheit, 1963).
15. The boldness of this claim might require some nuancing when taking into account, for instance, the specificities of gendered subject positions. Most of the (dead) practitioners of asphyxiophilia reported on in the available literature, and almost all the authors of the forensic textbooks in question, are male. Shortage of relevant case material means that work has still to be done on the ways in which the discourses surrounding asphyxiophilia might be differently constructed if the practitioner or the commentator were female. In the case of the artist Heike Ruschmeyer, our interest in her work, for the purposes of this article, lies only in the fact that she re-presents existing forensic images in the guise of art. The significance of her status as a specifically female artist falls outside of the remit of the present paper.
16. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol. 1: An Introduction, translated by Robert Hurley (London, Penguin, 1998), 51-73.
17. Eduard Kronengold and Richard Sterba, 'Two Cases of Fetishism', translated by Bettina Warburg, The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 5 (1936), 63-70.
18. For a case in which the asphyxiophiliac, a sixteen-year-old boy, had produced drawings of himself in a crouched position as if seen through a keyhole, see H.W. van Lunsen, 'Auto-erotische asfyxie: ervaringen met praktikanten van wurgseks en nabestaanden van slachtoffers', Nederlands Forensisch Tijdschrift, 10 (1991), 5-10.
19. Money's Preface to The Breathless Orgasm opens with the following - highly sensational - words: 'There was a monster in Nelson Cooper's life. Only later did he discover that it had a name: "asphyxiophilia." For most of his youth, this monster was unspeakable. Nelson was literally incapable of speaking about it.' In a letter by Nelson Cooper to the American Association of Sex Educators, Counsellors and Therapists, included at the end of the book, he writes - in tenus reminiscent of Money's own, hyperbolic, idiom - that 'to be at the mercy of a paraphilia is like being a slave to lust and ecstasy. It ' commands me. I have no will of my own when my paraphilia takes over.' He signs this letter 'The Asphyxiophiliac Still Living'. See Money, Wainwright and Hingsburger, The Breathless Orgasm, 11 and 171.
20. Robert R. Hazelwood, Ann Wolbert Burgess and A. Nicholas Groth, 'Death During Autoerotic Practice', Social Science and Medicine, 15 (1981), 129-33 (131).
21. For a Lacanian meditation upon the significance of this fantasy, see Dany Nobus, 'Une jouissance à couper le souffle: à propos d'un cas d'asphyxie auto-érotique', La cause freudienne. Revue de psychanalyse, 31 (1995), 117-23.
22. Caroline Evans and Lorraine Gamman, 'The Gaze Revisited or Reviewing Queer Viewing', in A Queer Romance: Lesbians, Gay Men and Popular Culture, edited by Paul Burston and Colin Richardson (London, Routledge, 1995), 45.
23. In the Glossary of Lovemaps Money defines 'Paraphilia' as 'a condition occurring in men and women of being compulsively responsive to and obligatively dependent upon an unusual and personally or socially unacceptable stimulus, perceived or in the imagery of fantasy, for optimal initiation and maintenance of erotosexual arousal and the facilitation or attainment of orgasm'. See John Money, Lovemaps: Clinical Concepts of Sexual/Erotic Health and Pathology, Paraphilia and Gender Transposition in Childhood, Adolescence and Maturity (New York, Irvington, 1986), 267.
24. See Jehuda Hiss, Sharon B. Rosenberg and Lester Adelson, 'Swinging in the Park: An Investigation of an Autoerotic Death', The American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology, 6 (1985), 250-5.
25. However, as photographs are not always considered sufficiently revealing, an officer might still be asked to assist. For an example, see Hazelwood, Wolbert Burgess and Groth, 'Death During Autoerotic Practice', 132.
26. J. C. Rupp, 'The Love Bug', Journal of Forensic Sciences, 18 (1973), 259-62.
27. Louis Althusser, 'A Letter on Art', in Lenin and Philosophy, and other essays, translated by Ben Brewster (London, New Left Books, 1971), 222.
28. Laura Mulvey, 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', Screen, 16: 3 (1975), 6-18 (11).
29. See Kaja Silvennan, 'Fassbinder and Lacan: A Reconsideration of Gaze, Look and Image', Camera Obscura, 19 (1984), 54-84.