Reporting in 1994 on the autoerotic fatality of Stephen Milligan, the UK Tory MP and Parliamentary Private Secretary to Jonathan Aitken, headlines proclaimed: 'Bizarre death of Lawmaker Shakes Tories' (Los Angeles Times, USA, 9 Feb 1994) and 'MP's bizarre death jolts Tories: Body of rising star discovered dressed only in stockings and suspenders' (The Independent, UK, 8 Feb 1994).
In cases where a solo practitioner of asphyxia dies, the phenomenon is usually described as an 'autoerotic fatality'; whereas a person who dies as a result of a partnered or group activity of this kind would be an 'erotic fatality'.
(7) Dietz discusses this case in a chronological, but historically un-nuanced, way; that is he treats it as if it is part of a seamless trajectory both with the producers and consumers of the Mayan artefact described above and with cases of autoerotic fatality described by pathologists and psychiatrists in the late-twentieth century.
A primary meaning of an autoerotic fatality, then, is as the revelation of lack of continence on the part of a subject.
I am interested, rather, on this point, in the cultural association made between effeminacy and shame that finds articulation in such cases of autoerotic fatality. It is unsurprising that non-normative practices, desires, identities, and gender performances that bring cultural ridicule on subjects, and risk producing shame in them and in those who love them, should find expression in the same ritualistic scene and space (since they are close neighbours in the outer reaches of Rubin's hierarchy diagram).
And, indeed, a fantasy of mastery that outlives accidental death is suggested here, since the secret will be preserved and will die with the subject of the autoerotic fatality.
The description of her death signals a shift in register from Bruce's colloquial first person to the impersonal reportage style of police report or 'Reuters column' (p206), marking the official inscription of Eva as an autoerotic fatality statistic.