Sex Drives: Fantasies of Facism in Literary Modernism

In her genuinely thought-provoking study Laura Frost chooses to examine Modernist writers who failed to succumb to fascist ideology, yet produced 'fictions of eroticized fascism.' The study is provocative and daring in the sense that there is an almost sheerly thematic link between the chosen authors.... I would also like to emphasize that the book will be an excellent teaching aid for undergraduate classes.

A brilliant exposition of the historical and political contexts of eroticized fascism that also unravels the democratic imagination's vanilla fantasies about its own sexual rectitude. This is a landmark book: astute, subtle, marvelously readable, and in no way politically reassuring.

Frost's new book is as a particularly succesful blend of broad cultural history and specific literary analyses, maintaining a necessary attachment to established fact without relinquishing her sensitivity to the nature of her texts as literary, as art. Frost takes as her central theme the use and abuse of the image of the 'sexualized fascist'.... Frost remains sensitive to her texts as literary works, and she is particularly good when giving herself space to delve into extended analysis.... The breadth of research makes for a consistently entertaining read and establishes a solid framework for one of her central theses, that liberal, democractic, western societies (particularly Britain, France, and the U.S.) have had and still have vested political interests in aligning so-called deviant sexualities with foreign political orders.... One of the most interesting and fertile aspects of Frost's study emerges, the role of pleasure in the process of sexualization (initially intended to be repulsive), of titillation in the reception of art which represents forces that were responsible for some of the century's darkest moments. This leads the reader to dark and difficult questions, but questions well worth the asking.

In Sex Drives, Laura Frost brilliantly addresses the most disturbing possible questions about the role of fascism in the construction of twentieth-century erotics and provides answers crucial to understanding many discourses that continue to inform sexuality today.

Laura Frost notes in her revelatory new book, Sex Drives: Fantasies of Fascism in Literary Modernism, postwar Nazi chic had less to do with the real thing than with liberalism's 'powerful investments in... defining proper and deviant desire.' The connection between fascism and perversity is itself a fantasy, Frost explains, since the actual Nazis were puritanical and radically detached. Their relationship to their victims was not at all like the intimate possibilities that can exist in s/m. Ascribing the bond between sexual master and slave to this emblem of evil was a very effective way to condemn sadomasochistic impulses (and for that matter, to make them even hotter). No wonder the '70s, with their deeply ambivalent fixation on transgressive sexuality, were also the heyday of Nazi chic.

Laura Frost's Sex Drives: Fantasies of Fascism in Literary Modernism is interested in the imaginative convergence of fascism and eroticism, the eroticizing of the fascist, particularly among writers and artists who ideologically had no sympathy with fascist politics.... Sex Drives contributes to several fields of critical analysis at once; feminist studies, queer theory, culture studies, and literary criticism.