Metamorphoses of Endymion and Selene: Dominance, Objectification, and Necrophilia

The aim of the research is to understand the transformations of the myth of Endymion and Selene from the Ancient World to the Contemporary Times with regard to the intersection of dominant femininity and objectified masculinity. The final goal is to show how these two macro-concepts have been represented according to a dialectical mechanism of cultural constants and variations of which the myth stands as a privileged plane of study. This connection will be explored in detail alongside with the eroticization of the sleeping and dead male body, to which its erotic agency is to be restored, by a woman who explicitly shows an erotic desire towards him. These two marginal desires are analysed from the point of view of the dialectic antagonistic to hegemony, and their expressive effects are examined in different media: literary, artistic, cinematographic. This relationship between the two lovers is marked by a significant presence of death that in the first part of the thesis is called female proto-necrophilia, while in the last part is named female necrophilia. The relationship that is in established between the two is a clear example of how anti-normative desires have undergone numerous attempts of neutralization and have increasingly become an expression of the medicalization of the uncanny. Female necrophilia is in fact the last step of a mythical romance that undermines the normative and hegemonic construction of ordinariness, but at the same time manifests its expressive and irrepressible power throughout the literature and arts of the Global North. To examine this in depth, the research is divided into five chapters.