Intersections Working Group: Julia Jarcho — Throw Yourself Away: Writing and Masochism

Jarcho proposes that we can best understand literature’s relationship to sex through a renewed focus on masochism.

In a series of readings that engage American and European works of fiction, drama, and theory from the late 19th through the early 21st centuries, critic and playwright Julia Jarcho argues that these works conceive writing itself as masochistic, and masochism as sexuality enacted in writing. Throw Yourself Away is distinctive in its sustained focus on masochism as an engine of literary production across multiple authors and genres. In particular, Jarcho shows that theater has played a central role in modern erotic fantasies of the literary.

Jarcho foregrounds writing as a project of distressed subjects: When masochistic writing is examined as a strategy of response to injurious social systems, it yields a surprisingly feminized — and less uniformly white — image of both masochism and authorship. Ultimately, Jarcho argues that a retheorized concept of masochism helps us understand literature itself as a sex act and shows us how writing can tend to our burdened, desirous bodies. With startling insights into such writers as Henry James, Henrik Ibsen, Mary Gaitskill, and Adrienne Kennedy, Throw Yourself Away furnishes a new masochistic theory of literature itself.

Julia Jarcho is a playwright and director and a scholar of modern theater, literature, and critical theory. Her newest book is Throw Yourself Away: Writing and Masochism (Sept. 2024, University of Chicago Press). Jarcho puts on plays with her NYC company, Minor Theater. Shows include Marie It’s Time (HERE, 2022), Pathetic (Abrons Arts Center 2019), Grimly Handsome (Incubator 2013/ Royal Court Theatre 2017), The Terrifying (Abrons 2017), Every Angel is Brutal (Clubbed Thumb 2016), Nomads (Incubator 2014), Dreamless Land (New York City Players/Abrons 2011), and American Treasure (13P 2009). Awards include an OBIE for Best New American Play (Grimly Handsome) and a Doris Duke Impact Award. Her book Minor Theater: Three Plays is available from 53rd State and her critical writing has appeared in ELH, Textual Practice, Critical Inquiry, Modern Drama, and in her first book Writing and the Modern Stage: Theater Beyond Drama (Cambridge University Press, 2017). She is the head of playwriting at Brown University.