{"title":"Desire and the City: The Freedom and Tyranny of Being Human","authors":"M. Clemente","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2021.1883851","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2021.1883851","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT For Freud, all desire is sexual desire. That includes the desire to know, philosophia, erotic love sublimated into the love of wisdom. Yet, as Nietzsche notes, the origin of such desire was, “like the beginning of everything great on earth, soaked in blood thoroughly and for a long time.” If all desire is, in some sense, erotic, all desire is also sadistic; even the most sublimated of desires is at bottom a desire for cruelty. It was in order to constrain human desire, insatiable, oppressive, cruel, that our ancestors instituted the first laws and created the first society. Yet one form of desire—female desire—is still felt by society to pose a serious threat. In this work, I examine the tension that exists between desire and civilization, the philosopher and the city, with the hope of better understanding what it means to live as sexual beings in community with others.","PeriodicalId":39339,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Gender and Sexuality","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/15240657.2021.1883851","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48984156","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Womb of One’s Own: Trauma, the Transcendent, and the Transference in the Borderline Phenomenon","authors":"Tiffany Houck-Loomis","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2021.1883846","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2021.1883846","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Fragmented narratives, half-phrases, silences, and affect states that populate the consulting room can be understood through Jung’s notion of the prospective function. These halting affect-laden phrases reveal the taboo around psychological integration in a certain population. Using Carl Jung, Donald Winnicott, Ann Ulanov, and James Grostein, this article analyzes the space of not-knowing or, said another way, of knowing from another source, a source for which the location is found in the void and emerges through desire. I term this knowing from another source yonic knowing. In this article, I discuss the current “epidemic” of those being diagnosed with borderline personality disorder in relation to the prospective function of fragmentation, arguing for a new kind of consciousness found within these dissociated states of being that emerges through the void","PeriodicalId":39339,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Gender and Sexuality","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/15240657.2021.1883846","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43432939","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Cost of Certainty","authors":"D. Goodman, Katie Goodman, Sophia Shieh","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2021.1883842","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2021.1883842","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Setting the stage for the “Psychology and the Other” special issue, this introductory article lays out the complex relationship between certainty and uncertainty and points to the critical importance of nourishing conversations that respect the human need for grounding and definition while also inviting movement to and beyond our boundaries.","PeriodicalId":39339,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Gender and Sexuality","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/15240657.2021.1883842","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44541499","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Engendering the Anti-Social Thesis: The Queerness of Pregnancy in Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts","authors":"Tyler Carson","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2021.1883848","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2021.1883848","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The vexed debate within the field of queer theory over what it means to be queer in the social world—the anti-social thesis—serves as this article’s conceptual and theoretical starting point, but also is that which, as I argue, The Argonauts seeks to disrupt. This article thereby mobilizes Nelson’s autobiographical memoir to question whether a departure from privileging only these negative modes of being—anti-sociality—is in order. I argue that The Argonauts offers three exciting lines of flight that build upon and extend contemporary debates in queer theory: (a) the queerness of pregnancy as a self-shattering experience; (b) the experience of becoming undone alongside one another; and (c) the queer ordinary as the lifelong task of finding spaces—whether they be political, cultural, or interpersonal—that are “good enough.”","PeriodicalId":39339,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Gender and Sexuality","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/15240657.2021.1883848","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49168544","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Entanglement of Being: Sexuality Inside and Outside the Binary","authors":"Robin R. Chalfin","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2021.1883847","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2021.1883847","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT When we ask what sex is, we ask what it means to be human. It is a simple yet powerfully disruptive and generative question with far-reaching implications. Fortifying perennial dualisms, the study of sexuality and gender is historically reified or rendered immaterial across the social and natural sciences. While considering often polarized perspectives at once, this article argues for a necessary tension in which sexual embodiment is understood as a fundamental entanglement of being. This perceptual shift requires a reconceptualization of philosophy’s central dualism between biological and environmental determinism and an interrogation of the space between the normative and nonnormative. In exploring the bases for a richly textured embodied sexuality both inside and outside discursive binaries, this article employs an interdisciplinary approach, drawing upon biological and evolutionary theories of sexuality and gender, philosophies of existence, deconstructionist critiques, and queering attention to the divergent otherized dimensions of sexuality.","PeriodicalId":39339,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Gender and Sexuality","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/15240657.2021.1883847","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42516515","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Discussion of “Phantom Penis: Extrapolating Neuroscience and Employing Imagination for Trans Male Sexual Embodiment”","authors":"A. Harris","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2020.1857527","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2020.1857527","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This discussion focuses on review of writing about phantom penis and phantom limb, considering how these data and research address the question of pleasure and sexuality in trans and gender-nonbinary persons. Implications of this work on phantom penis and prosthetic penis forms for thinking of brain structure, embodiment, and fantasy as sexuality are shaped and expressed in many different kinds of persons.","PeriodicalId":39339,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Gender and Sexuality","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/15240657.2020.1857527","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47876839","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Discussion of “Phantom Penis: Extrapolating Neuroscience and Employing Imagination for Trans Male Embodiment”","authors":"R. Hontscharuk, B. Alba, L. Schechter","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2020.1857530","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2020.1857530","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT As described by Straayer, the phantom penis in transgender men combines feelings of loss and potential and may contribute to self-authentication and pleasure following phalloplasty. To align their gender identity with their body, some transgender men choose to undergo a phalloplasty procedure. For the reconstructive surgeon, the goals of phalloplasty typically are summed as an aesthetically pleasing, sensate phallus with both tactile and erogenous sensation that is capable of standing micturition and penetrative intercourse. Many surgical techniques for phalloplasty have been described, with the radial forearm free flap being the most commonly used. To optimize erogenous sensation, nerve coaptation to the dorsal clitoral nerve in conjunction with burying the denuded clitoris at the base of the neophallus is often performed. While surgical technique contributes to sensory recovery, there is likely a complex interplay between physiology, anatomy, endocrinology, and psychology as they pertain to orgasm and sexuality following phalloplasty. The reconstructive surgeon should engage in a shared decision-making approach with their patient and attempt to optimize aesthetic and sensory outcomes in order to facilitate sexual function following surgery.","PeriodicalId":39339,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Gender and Sexuality","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/15240657.2020.1857530","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47087230","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Phantom Phenomena—An Introduction to “Phantom Penis: Extrapolating Neuroscience and Employing Imagination for Trans Male Sexual Embodiment”","authors":"P. McGeoch, V. Ramachandran","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2020.1857529","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2020.1857529","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This paper provides an introduction to the phenomena of phantom sensations. We recall the events that first led us to survey transsexual men about phantom penises and review some of our recent work in related areas as a primer to contextualizing the neuroscience underpinning Chris Straayer’s exploration of phantom penises. As we discuss, phantom phenomena have long been situated in the borderlands between psychiatry and neurology. With a consideration for subjective experience, which we argue is vital to scientific research, Straayer expands these spaces to incorporate trans theory, psychoanalysis, and cognitive psychology, thus advancing our understandings of what it is to be human.","PeriodicalId":39339,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Gender and Sexuality","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/15240657.2020.1857529","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44472799","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Phantom Phallus?","authors":"Patricia Gherovici","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2020.1842070","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2020.1842070","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Responding to Straayer’s article linking the phenomenon of phantom limbs to the experience of trans men, I highlight common features between neuroscience and psychoanalysis. My commentary questions a few claims made by Straayer. Applying psychoanalytic concepts, I refer to a short story by Christine Brooke-Rose and to a notorious case by Robert Stoller that has been neglected in psychoanalytic literature, a book-length study of a female patient who experienced having a phantom penis. This allows me to discuss the controversial notion of the phallus and bring it to bear on the original and stimulating thesis presented here.","PeriodicalId":39339,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Gender and Sexuality","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/15240657.2020.1842070","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41361164","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Reply to Discussions of Phantom Penis: Extrapolating Neuroscience and Employing Imagination for Trans Male Sexual Embodiment","authors":"Chris Straayer","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2020.1842076","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2020.1842076","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In this reply essay, I engage in dialogue with the authors of the eight papers submitted in response to my paper, “Phantom Penis: Extrapolating Neuroscience and Employing Imagination for Trans Male Sexual Embodiment.” I deeply appreciate the respondents’ contributions: a panoply of academic and professional perspectives to this discussion of the potential of phantom penis for transgender men’s embodiment and sexuality. Lehman points us to the ironic proliferation and regulation of penises in visual culture. Gherovici, Charlap, Harris, and Weil delve into psychoanalysis and philosophy, engaging concepts of mind, body, gender, sexuality, phallus, desire, affect, and subjectivity, extrapolated to trans phantom experience. Medical and neuroscientific perspectives are represented by Hontscharuk, Alba, and Schechter, by McGeoch and Ramachandran, and by Case, who all ground the discussion in bodily tissue and neural circuitry. The phenomenon of trans phantom penis is based in the physiology, psychically embodied, and culturally mediated. In an attempt to address bodily comfort and sexual pleasure for trans men, my paper pursues three phantoms: phantom penis presence, phantom penile erogenous sensation, and volitional phantom penis.","PeriodicalId":39339,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Gender and Sexuality","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/15240657.2020.1842076","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41703236","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}