Three in the Mirror of the Capitalist Unconscious: Slipknot's "Snuff", Ed Gein, and the Psychoanalytic-Political Economy of Becoming-the-Other

This essay undertakes a sustained cultural-psychoanalytic and political reading of autogynephilia as both clinical construct and cultural symptom. Using three contemporary cultural nodes—the Slipknot music video “Snuff” (2009), Netflix’s Monster: The Ed Gein Story (2025), and a popular-psychology YouTube monologue by Veronika Stepanova titled “Муж носит женское бельё” (2025)—I argue that the male desire to become the feminine other must be read simultaneously as a psychical economy (Lacan), a modality of abjection (Kristeva), and a contested site of biopolitical struggle (Foucault; Preciado). I situate these texts within debates about Blanchard’s autogynephilia thesis and its robust critique in clinical and feminist scholarship, and I propose that autogynephilic enactments, far from being reducible to a paraphilia, function in late capitalist culture as embodied refusals of normative masculine sovereignty and as mediated attempts to re-inhabit the missing mother-function through prosthetic surfaces (clothes, skin, image). The essay blends close interpretive readings with theoretical syntheses, and it concludes with a political diagnosis: autogynephilic practice exposes the fragility of the gender binary as both psychic defence and capitalist technology.