ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on white male sexuality does not merely seek to free citizens from the enslaving passions of unregulated sexuality. It effectively liberates democratic discourse from racial contradictions by suppressing the extent to which whiteness, masculinity, and liberty are cathected to unfree black bodies. The pathology of masturbation makes recourse to an array of democratic terms 'solitary vice', 'self-indulgence', 'self-destruction', 'self-prostitution', 'self-fornication', 'self-abuse', 'self-pollution' that adumbrated the pitfalls of celebrating autonomy in a climate where the political infects the sexual. Identifying women as equally susceptible to the 'solitary vice', she insisted that women could also exercise the appropriate 'cure' of self-reliance, a radical gesture that placed women within a male political pathology even as it removed them from public culture by emphasizing the putatively presocial roles of wife and mother. Self-reliance offers no help to the slave; in fact, it legitimates continued enslavement.
