The Discourse of the Seducer: Pickup Artists, Subjectivity, and the Hysteria of Instrumentality Christopher Lamerton (Email:
[email protected]) For the degree of Master of Research School of Social Sciences and Psychology Western Sydney University May 2018 _____________________ Michael Salter Sexualities and Gender Research, School of Social Sciences and Psychology Western Sydney University Principal Supervisor [ T y [ T y The Discourse of the Seducer: Pickup Artists, Subjectivity, and the Hysteria of Instrumentality Acknowledgements I would like to extend my thanks to the NIDA Lacan Study and Reading Group for being a forum in which many of the notions in this thesis were developed and elucidated. * I also extend my gratitude to the Sydney seduction community, who so warmly welcomed my interest, and offered theirs in return. i [ T y The Discourse of the Seducer: Pickup Artists, Subjectivity, and the Hysteria of Instrumentality All acts of bastardry are based on the fact of wishing to be someone’s Other. —Jacques Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis ii 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.