Gothicizing Apotemnophilia: Live Burial, Secret Desire, and the Uncanny Body of the Amputee Wannabe
Gothicizing Apotemnophilia: Live Burial, Secret Desire, and the Uncanny Body of the Amputee Wannabe

Summary/Abstract: Until the publication of Carl Elliott’s “A New Way to be Mad”, few readers had heard of apotemnophilia. And yet a fairly sizeable group of people had been quietly and painfully living a Gothic nightmare, buried alive in an uncanny body simultaneously familiar and foreign, suffocated by a claustrophobic flesh crowded with one or perhaps two limbs too many, obsessed with a secret desire to become an amputee, and tortured by unanswered questions concerning identity and sexuality - questions lying at the core of human subjectivity, on the one hand, and the Gothic text, with its doublings and haunted spaces, on the other. What this paper attempts is to “gothicize” apotemnophilia by illustrating how the amputee wannabe’s lived experience mirrors the narrative of the Gothic, for the apotemnophile, like the Gothic text, challenges commonplace, inherited Enlightenment definitions of the healthy human body and mind while seeking to reconceive the human subject in terms other than those offered by liberal humanism.

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