This chapter introduces readers to conceptions of matter and materiality that shape current conversations in material culture studies, sensitive to the rise of object biographies, commodity histories, fetishism, the new materialism, and the “multispecies” or “ontological” turn in anthropology.

For some, part of the attraction of lust killing is the opportunity to pose wearing the clothes of their victims. For the two discussed here, this would seem to be a dominant paraphilia. Both men showed evidence suggesting a role of stress in their killing. Commander of the largest military base in Canada, Colonel Russell Williams would seem to be a most unlikely sexual serial killer, particularly since his victims were women under his command. Williams graduated to killing via breaking into homes and stealing pairs of underwear. He built an enormous collection of these, all carefully curated. It is possible that the drug Prednisone played a role in his aberrant trajectory. Dennis Rader appeared similarly to be a respectable family man. There were several early experiences that he recalled (e.g. seeing his mother trapped) which might have played a role in his development.

A paraphilia is sexual behaviour that lies outside conventional bounds, such as exhibitionism. They are of interest in that lust killers commonly also exhibit paraphilias, and they can form an association with killing. Voyeurism sometimes features in association with lust killing, as a gateway activity. A fetish describes sexual arousal to an inanimate object, while a partialism describes sexual arousal to particular body features, such as feet. Serial lust killers often take objects (such as items of clothing) from their victims, in an attempt to recreate the killing, accompanied by masturbation. Sometimes a body part is taken, such as a breast. The term ‘picquerism’ refers to sexual arousal derived from cutting the skin. There are some features in common between non-lethal rape and lust killing. Rape sometimes serves as a gateway activity for lust killing. Some men are attracted to necrophilia without showing violence towards their target.

Some future lust killers had an early identifiable traumatic experience. By the time they become adult, the experience has been relabeled with some positive qualities and forms a target of desire. This appears to be something like fetishes and partialisms linked to objects. Harold Shipman witnessed the death of his mother in association with a medical injection of morphine. Later he sought to repeat the experience on his patients. Shipman is included here as an example of necrophilia, even though we don’t know that he had physical sexual contact. Albert Fish was witness to severe corporal punishment as a child and later inflicted this on others. Anatoly Slivko witnessed a police officer killing a dog and getting blood on his shoes. He also witnessed blood from a boy, a Young Pioneer, killed in a traffic accident. Later he killed a series of boys dressed in the uniform of Young Pioneers.

This chapter continues the theme of the last two in terms of imprinting on a particular object and event, but the two cases described are somewhat more speculative. They are paired together because of their similarity. Both killers were raised in very squalid conditions under the powerful influence of their mothers. Both were exposed to an animal carcass being strung up by their parents. Both subsequently strung up female victims in a manner comparable to the carcass, suggesting a transformation of something aversive into something attractive. Apart from killing two women, Gein dug up bodies of women,who bore some resemblance to his mother, and used body parts as fetish objects. Gein’s behaviour was not associated with dominance. Pickton was subject to harsh punishment as a boy. He was sometimes high on crack cocaine and his victims were sex workers in Vancouver, who were killed in the act of intercourse.

Surrealist writers and artists repeatedly turned to Eros (the life drive), as a concept and principle with which to explore the depths of dream and desire as well as a means to counter the prevailing tendency toward Thanatos (the death drive) in society. Using Sigmund Freud’s Civilisation and Its Discontents (1929) and Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilisation (1955) as two key theoretical texts to enable our understanding of Eros for this avant-garde circle, the chapter considers the ways in which the surrealists enacted a radical assault on bourgeois morality and totalitarian ideology by appealing to individual desires as a route to political consciousness and resistance. Looking at a range of media – text, object, photography, dance, exhibition practice – we find practitioners of Surrealism all shared a radical celebration of Eros both as a path to self-knowledge and as a means to harness the revolutionary potential of the life drive.

This essay explores the legacy and afterlife of François Macandal, a man who escaped enslavement on an eighteenth-century plantation in the French colony of Saint-Domingue. His fame as a poisoner and immortal rebel persist over time and space, reflecting transcaribbean associations of fetish making with spiritual and physical resistance on the plantation. Stories of Macandal and the fetish objects he crafted, also called macandals, continued to circulate in nineteenth-century Louisiana as one of many narratives of slave uprising and Revolution in the Americas. One example of the reach of Macandal’s story is the 1892 novel, Le Macandal: Épisode de l’Insurrection des Noirs à St. Domingue, published in New Orleans, Louisiana, by Marie-Joséphine Augustin. This work is part of a larger archive of how Macandal and his macandals shaped the literary realm. His story moves across genres arguing that Macandal is simultaneously the man, the fetish object, and the story in its many forms.