Female Masculinity

Psychoanalytic Psychology, 2001

Arising from the area of gender and sexuality, a revolution is taking place within psychoanalysis, one that has been developing for years and has recently burst forth more fully. It has spawned a landmark 1996 supplementary volume of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association; two new journals on gender and sexuality; and innumerable books, presentations, and articles. Generally, established institutes seem unaware of this revolution in a formal sense and have yet to change their required curriculums to accommodate it. Many male psychoanalysts, to judge by their lack of attendance at psychology-of-women or gender-related presentations or study groups, appear resistant, unaware that these changes will ultimately affect not only the way in which psychoanalysts think about women but about men. The changes are happening so fast and furious that even those immersed in them, who have brought about some of the most interesting results, have difficulty keeping up with the literature; as one psychoanalyst recently suggested, she was dancing as fast as

Psychoanalytic Review, 2024

Constellations, 1999

Feminists have often turned to psychological knowledge in search of an adequate theory of gender, despite the ambiguous relationship psychology, in all its manifestations, has always had with politics. Mainstream psychology, with its theorizing of "individual differences" and popularizing of behavioral technologies, has long been a target of radical critique-which has made not the slightest blip in the steady growth of psychological "expertise" that, since 1945, has saturated Western culture with programs for individual change and development. Such programs have even played a part in encouraging collective political aspirations for subjective growth and renewal. Nonetheless, psychology's disciplinary project-one of treating all social conflict as amenable to individual solutions through the acquisition of skills and enlightenment-points more in the direction of its welldocumented role in producing agents of pacification than to practical help for personal liberation. 1 It has been precisely psychology's task in the modern world, as Derrida (glossing Foucault) has commented, to mask "a certain truth of madness … a certain truth of unreason." 2 As academic psychology's disdained yet closest rival, psychoanalysis has had a somewhat different cultural trajectory. Far richer in contradiction, far gloomier in social outlook, far more contentious in cultural debate, psychoanalysis (at least, in its classical form) promises not solutions to social conflicts, but a heightened awareness of their tragic inevitability. Traditionally, it has preferred to flaunt, rather than disavow, the conservative side of its reflections on the links between subjectivity and the "maladies" of modernity. Its pessimism of the intellect produces its own paralyses for those who wish to transform the links it describes (and helps reinscribe) between knowledge and power, sexed identity and social hierarchy. Certainly, feminism's relationship with psychoanalysis has always, and rightly, been troubled. Enthusiasm for and denunciations of Freud have preoccupied feminist agendas in almost equal measure. Such polarization is hardly surprising, if we try dispassionately to figure the contradictions-the seductions and the disappointments-of psychoanalytic narratives as they have been applied to our understanding of sexual difference. For that is the terrain, perhaps unfortunately, on which we so often encounter them today, and which I will be covering here. I say unfortunately, because it is here that psychoanalysis has moved farthest from what some of us see as its central strength: its potentially subversive individualism. The narratives grounding psychoanalytic theories of sexual difference have looked far from subversive to

2018

The significance of the distinction drawn between sex or biological attributes and gender identity cannot be overstated. This distinction has been a crucial point of departure for feminist criticism of male dominance, for it shows that gender identity and sexual orientation are socially or historically defined and therefore changeable. One of the most decisive modes of how ideologies (patriarchal and phallocratic ideologies in this case) subject and qualify " individuals " so that they " recognize " themselves in them, is by telling them, making them recognize what is possible and impossible, by creating their sense of the mutability of what exists (Therborn, 1980). From a more theoretical point of view this line of demarcation has also brought into focus sexuality as an area in which systematic inequalities between men and women are played out. And rather than confine themselves to exploring and describing instances of power relations as they manifest themselves in cultural products with a " sexual theme " feminist theorists like J. Mitchell (1975) had tried to analyse and explain if possible how sexuality itself is constructed and implicated in wider ideological relations. In her endeavour Mitchell turned to psychoanalysis and as supporting evidence she drew upon Lévi-Stauss's anthropological studies. Her book " Psychoanalysis and Feminism " was unique when first published and broke new ground, if not by anything else, at least by the very deed of appropriating Freud's work, which had been the object of a sustained hostility, particularly among American radical feminism, claiming that " psychoanalysis is not a recommendation for a patriarchal society, but an analysis of one (Mitchell, 1975, p. xv). This ambiguity as to the value of psychoanalysis for feminism shows perhaps the pertinence of Foucault's assertion that a discourse cannot have a stable and uniform tactical function, but, as it consists of a multiplicity of discourse elements, it can be the stake of diverse strategies (Foucault, 1976, p. 133). What I shall try to examine is whether elements of psychoanalytic discourse can be unambiguously appropriated and used in order to make clearer and substantiate the very general and all-inclusive claim that gender identity and sexual relations and practices are psychically, socially and culturally defined. Also I shall examine the extent to which Freud managed to clarify the connection between the somatic and the psychical.

Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 2020

An open matrix of possibilities, gaps, intersections, dissonances, resonances, failures, or excesses of meaning emerges when the constituent elements of someone's gender and sexuality are not (or cannot be) constrained to monolithic meanings. These are the political, linguistic, epistemological, and figurative adventures and experiences of those of us who like to define ourselves (among many other possibilities) as female and aggressive lesbians, mystical fagots, fantasizers, drag queens and drag kings, clones, leathers, women in suits, feminist women or feminist men, masturbators, madwomen, divas, snap!, manly submissive guys, mythomaniacs, transsexuals, wannabes, poofs, truckers, men who define themselves as lesbians sleeping with men […], and all those who are able to love them, learn from them, and identify with them. (Kosofsky-Sedgwick, 1998, p. 115) 1 In these words, Eve Kosofsky-Sedgwick (1998) attempts to capture the flamboyant inclusiveness of the term "queer." Weirdness and eccentricity, insult reinvented and transformed into proud selfdetermination, activism, and political performance: the overarching and historically contingent "Queer" was capitalized, conceptualized, and introduced into the academic world by Teresa De Lauretis (1991) to epitomize the problematization of marginalized subjectivities. In this heterogenous field of "de-subjugated knowledge," 2 subjectification or subjectivation-that is, the process of becoming a subject-is understood as a complex interweave of sexuality, gender, class, and race, which encompasses an intersectional perspective that conceives all identity categories as an arsenal of oppressive strategies and subjection techniques to apply prevailing norms. Hence, Q/queer defines the gap from and resistance to the normative regime, thus becoming synonymous with identificatory, disciplinary, and epistemological multiplicity. This movement of thought that seeks to undermine repressive institutions and traditions by providing jubilant "counter texts" to hegemonic scenarios did not spare psychoanalysis, which was criticized for being an "integral part of the complex technology of social control and of the production of a grammar defining the identities of subaltern groups according to the specific interests and values of a dominant group" (see Minonne's comment on Ayouch's article, p. 612). In line with many other feminist and queer theorists, Paul B. Preciado (2019) argued that metapsychology constitutes a colonial and capitalist "techno-patriarchal" construction, 3 fostering an understanding of humanity based on the universalization of experiences specific to the white European bourgeoisie of the 20th century. As a consequence, alternative sex, gender, class, and race subjectivations remained unvoiced and invisible, which contributed to the traumatic reiteration and generational transmission of hierarchical norms. To fully grasp Preciado's argument, let us bear in mind that colonialism introduced the universal classification of populations in terms of the notion of "race," which replaced relations of socioeconomic superiority and inferiority established through domination in Eurocentric capitalism 4 with naturalized understandings of discrimination (Quijano, 2007). At the same time, European white settlers imported into a precolonial world that tolerated and even encouraged non-gendered, gynecratic, or egalitarian elements a rigid system of a biologically determined sexual dimorphism governed by male supremacy (Allen, 1986; Oyewùmi, 1997). So the "coloniality of power" does not just refer to racial classification or its euphemistic distinction of skin color (Quijano, 2007). It further constitutes a "coloniality of gender" or CONTACT Nicolas Evzonas, Ph.D.

This entry will discuss psychoanalytic feminism, not feminist psychoanalysis . Psychoanalysis develops a theory of the unconscious that ineluctably links sexuality and subjectivity together. In doing so, it reveals the ways in which our sense of self - as well as our political loyalties and attachments - are influenced by unconscious drives and ordered by symbolic structures that are beyond the field of individual agency. It is commonly assumed that any relationship between feminism and psychoanalysis would have to be founded on perfidious ground. For example, in Sigmund Freud's lecture on ‘Femininity,’ while discussing the “riddle of femininity” (Freud 1968 [1933], 116) or of sexual differentiation, Freud impeaches women as “the problem” (113) all the while exculpating his female audience from this indictment by offering the hope that they are “more masculine than feminine” (117). We can see why many feminists have been wary both of the gendered biases contained in Freud's theories and of the overt content of his claims. This entry will explain how and why feminist theory has, nonetheless, undertaken a serious re-reading of Freud and developed careful analyses of his fundamental concepts, working out their limits, impasses, and possibilities. It can be seen through the writings of such feminist writers as Juliet Mitchell, Jacqueline Rose, Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray; Sigmund Freud’s work on psychoanalysis has offered feminists challenges, revolutionized theories, and patriarchal targets.

2000

When assessing Butler's claims about the constructedness of practically everything. one might wonder how feminist philosophy ever got here. To help the reader understand this, I will briefly recount how the two "waves" of feminism arose and how Judith Butler fits into the feminist debate.

The relation between feminism and psychoanalysis began with Kate Millett's Sexual Politics which critiques Freud for his conviction in the inequality of sexes, his practice of sexualizing human relationships and his style of explaining aberrations in terms of complexes and envies. The feminist critique of Freud is continued in The Madwoman in the Attic: the Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar who locate the concept of social castration in the novels of nineteenth century women writers. By social castration, they mean lack of social power for women. They argue that these female writers identified themselves with the characters they detest. A combination of feminism and psychoanalysis is explored in Jacqueline Rose's work The Haunting of Sylvia Plath. Feminist exploration of Lacanian psychoanalysis began with Feminine Sexuality co-edited by Juliette Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose. They argue that subjectivity is assigned to a child at the moment of symbolic castration, the division between the Self and the other. It follows therefore that gendered subjectivity is constituted through castration with the phallus as the transcendental signifier, enabling the division. Mitchell and Rose argue that psychoanalysis offers feminism a theory of gendered subjectivity: a concept of the subject's resistance to rigid gender identities. In Sexuality in the Field of Vision, Rose emphasizes the unstable nature of gender identity and argues that femininity is neither simply achieved nor is ever complete. Both Mitchell and Rose focus on Lacanian re-reading of Freud where penis envy is referred not to the male sex organ, but to its symbolic and cultural meaning: the authority and power associated with the masculine. Lacan's term phallus symbolizes the privileges, power and authority entitled by the male in a patriarchal society.