The discourse of the seducer : pickup artists, subjectivity, and the hysteria of instrumentality

Abstract

The 'seduction community' is a subculture composed of men who actively cultivate a skillset that allows them to more effectively engage in sexual intercourse with women. Against the established academic narrative that the subculture has emerged out of late-modern capitalist rationalities, this thesis explores the influence of the seduction community's members' sexual ambivalence alongside the subculture's embeddedness in market-driven ideologies. This investigation involves a Lacanian discourse analysis, and examines the online video content of five prominent personalities in the worldwide seduction community. In doing so, this project intends to reveal the 'pickup artist's' understanding of himself in relation to the world in which he exists and to examine the sexual discord at the heart of his gendered project. This research troubles normative understandings of masculine speech-acts as materializing out of notions of dominance and entitlement, and allows that these speech-acts may emanate from a place that ultimately alludes to the production of a contingently gendered subject.

Date of Award	2018
Original language	English