Recently added articles from Studies in Gender and Sexuality:
Editors' Note
Apr 01, 2007; ... With pride, we announce the first recipient of the annual Symonds Prize: Meg Jay, Ph.D., for "Melancholy Femininity and Obsessive-Compulsive Masculinity: Sex Differences in Melancholy Gender." Dr. Jay is Clinical Psychologist in Private Practice, Berkeley, California; Lecturer, University of ...
Melancholy Femininity and Obsessive-Compulsive Masculinity: Sex Differences in Melancholy Gender
Apr 01, 2007; ... The author offers a revision of melancholy gender (Butler, 1995) in which sex differences are theorized. Drawing on contemporary psychoanalytic feminist theory that emphasizes the mother's role as primary caretaker and as pre-Oedipal object for both boys and girls, the author suggests that, in ...
Toward Less Fixed Internal Transformations of Gender Commentary on: Melancholy Femininity and Obsessive-Compulsive Masculinity: Sex Differences in Melancholy Gender by Meg Jay, Ph.D.
Apr 01, 2007; ... While highly commending this cross-disciplinary exercise and agreeing with Jay and Butler that children may indeed mourn the loss of erotics with same-sex parents as they identify and develop in a gendered fashion, this author highlights, in both Butler and Jay's interesting further refinements ...
Melancholia, Ambivalent Presence and the Cost of Gender Commentary on Paper by Meg Jay
Apr 01, 2007; ... I would like to engage three aspects of Jay's argument: first, I want to suggest that there is an important distinction to be made between melancholia and depression, and that Butler's melancholy gender depends on this distinction, which emphasizes the social and political dimensions of ...
Straw Men, Straight Women, and the Role of Ambivalence in Melancholy Gender: Reply to Balsam and Salamon
Apr 01, 2007; ... When I submitted the final draft of "Melancholy Femininity, Obsessive-Compulsive Masculinity" to Studies in Gender and Sexuality, I was nine months pregnant with my first baby. As I was writing the paper, I wondered if I might feel differently about the whole thing-the notion of the mother as ...
Moments in Laplanche's Theory of Sexuality
Apr 01, 2007; ... This paper is a brief introduction to some of Laplanche's thinking, as well as a commentary on his essay that is published here. Some salient issues in Laplanche's theory are introduced, such as the decentering of the subject and the prioritizing of the other, the postulation of the "reality of ...
Gender, Sex, and the Sexual
Apr 01, 2007; ... Laplanche distinguishes the sexual [le sexuel] and the sexuated [le sexué]. He goes on to ask whether the current tendency to speak of gender identity merely a lexical change or something more profound. If it is a change, is it positive or the sign of a repression? If the latter, where is the ...
To Outdo or Undo? Siblings and Hysteria
Jan 01, 2007; ... In a form of oedipal sibling triangle (Sharpe and Rosenblatt, 1994), a child is recruited by a parent into a spousal position and becomes a primary oedipal rival and often prize for a sibling or siblings. I have found that such configurations are highly related to hysteria. Parents with ...
Sarah Bernhardt at the Jewish Museum/Sarah Bernhardt, Live: A Reply to Allen Ellenzweig
Jan 01, 2007; ... "Sarah Bernhardt at the Jewish Museum" reviews the recent retrospective exhibition on the life and career of the French actress Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923), who created several enduring models of femininity, including templates for tempestuous stage actress, theatrical producer and ...
Dangerous Liaisons: Introduction
Jan 01, 2007; ... This introduction is to a panel of papers on the analyst's experience of extreme states of danger and self-destructiveness in analysands. The provocations and clinical opportunities afforded by sexual practices, passivity, self-mutilation are considered. The demands on the analyst to enter, ...
Barebacking: Transformations, Dissociations, and the Theatre of Countertransference
Jan 01, 2007; ... When behavior is reported that objectively places the patient and others at risk and subjectively exposes the therapist to a vivid range of private experience, the challenge in maintaining a clinical stance is complicated to say the least. This complication is intensified to the degree that the ...
Attaining Meaning in the Face of Sexual Risk Taking and Risk-Taking Consequences
Jan 01, 2007; ... This paper looks at a clinical case in which a patient who engaged in sexual risk taking became infected with HIV in the course of his analysis. Health concerns and social stigma make contraction of HIV emotionally fraught for those infected and those close to them. Psychoanalysts working with ...
Smile of a Serial Killer
Jan 01, 2007; ... This essay traces a clinical case in which the danger in the analysand's destructiveness was deployed primarily through passivity and withdrawal. Problems of envy, fears of competition, and anxieties about loss and abandonment kept the treatment too frequently at impasse. The case is used to ...
The Bonds of Hate
Jan 01, 2007; ... This paper illustrates how patients with a history of severe childhood trauma develop aversive and malignant modes of attachment and relating. I contend that this demonstrative hating can become the only secure sense of connection with others that these patients are able to maintain. I believe ...
Feminist Treatment: Illness and Impasse in Todd Haynes's Safe
Oct 01, 2006; ... As it tells the story of a housewife who suffers from environmental illness, Haynes's 1995 film Safe asks if identities shaped by a relation to a particular form of physical disability or suffering are subject to the same forms of impasse and disidentification as are sexual differences ....
Introduction to Roundtable on Bringing the Plague
Oct 01, 2006; ... Postmodern psychoanalysis differs from the original practice of postmodern writers in a way that highlights the particular demand placed on psychoanalytic theory: to mediate between traditional practice and theoretical innovation. The argument is made here that it is postmodern theory to which ...
Are We Sure We Want to Call It a Plague?
Oct 01, 2006; ... For whom is this book written? And who is most likely to read it? The first question is easier to answer: Bringing the Plague challenges all clinical psychoanalysts to consider how postmodernism-particularly as articulated by constructivist epistemologies and poststructural criticism-alters ...
Psychoanalysis and the Social Order
Oct 01, 2006; ... This essay offers a comment on Bringing the Plague: Toward a Postmodern Psychoanalysis from the perspective of British object-relations psychoanalysis. It reviews the different histories of psychoanalysis in Britain and the United States, noting the continuing clinical focus of the field in ...
Damned If We Do, Damned If We Don't: On the Pragmatics of a Postmodern Psychoanalytic Stance
Oct 01, 2006; ... Bringing the Plague highlights the relation between postmodern theory and technique. I explore Layton's application of postmodernism's concern with the analyst's subjectivity and subject relation position in her discussion of a male analyst's treatment of a female patient. Arguing for a ...
Melancholy Without the Other
Oct 01, 2006; ... Over the course of its history, psychoanalysis has adopted various metaphors to express its understanding of the mind. Originally drawn to a "depth" model that echoed the revolutionary dynamics of the early 20th century, it shifted after World War II to a more relational account that was attuned ...