{"title":"Mask Up: Identifying Anger in Gender and Racial Formations","authors":"Paige Sweet","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2023.2243795","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2023.2243795","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In a passing observation made while reading Joan Riviere’s theory of womanliness as masquerade, Judith Butler comments that what is hidden in masquerade is not sexuality, but rage. It’s a provocative glance at how gender and anger converge. But the quickness with which the discussion moves on from this insight suggests that this rage must also be quickly covered over by the discourse of gender. It recalls to my mind Frantz Fanon’s description of the mask, which he uses to describe how Blackness emerges through a splitting produced by the white gaze. The kind of double consciousness that results (captured in his title, Black Skin, White Masks) emphasizes how Blackness is made to exist in relation to whiteness. The anger here resides in the negotiation with these white masks, which, for Fanon, is bound up with masculinity. Although “masks” signify differently for Fanon and feminist theorists, both accounts suggest that anger becomes entangled with gender and race in ways that appear on and through the body. I consider these theories of masks and masquerade alongside two clinical vignettes to ask how anger takes shape in and through racial and gendered formations, as well as to ask how clinical material exposes the limits of these theories. Might gender contain precipitates of anger, especially residues of a relation to a rageful parent? Through a relational lens, I explore the usefulness and limitations of masks and masquerade for identifying disowned anger in the surprising ways it converges a sense of embodiment.","PeriodicalId":39339,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Gender and Sexuality","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139364215","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":"Among Us: Reading and Writing with Muriel Dimen","authors":"Stephen Hartman","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2023.2243790","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2023.2243790","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Muriel Dimen penned many introductions to books and panels. In this essay that became the first chapter of Reading with Muriel Dimen/Writing with Muriel Dimen: Experiments in Theorizing a Field, I follow Dimen’s manner of hopscotching among self-reflection, mentoring, and theory building. I riff on Dimen’s call for a new genre of psychoanalytic text and read Dimen’s 1986 memoir/novel, Surviving Sexual Contradictions, finding Dimen fomenting revolution on the page as in the consulting room, where paradox and contradiction spark innovation in personal, interpersonal, and professional space. I challenge the genre of editor’s introduction to put personal narrative to political task (here, the story of my decision to shift the focus of this volume from collected works to collective writing). I place Dimen in conversation with authors whose lens trained on race during the years she pursued gender. In the vulnerability that Dimen bravely forded as she turned to the study of sexual boundary violations in her late work, I find permission to call for psychoanalytic publishing to go tilt-o-whirl in service of revolution in the field.","PeriodicalId":39339,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Gender and Sexuality","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139363534","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":"War Metaphors in Feminist Discourse: A Subversive Position against Ethical Violence","authors":"Florencia Reali","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2023.2243794","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2023.2243794","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT War metaphors are ubiquitous in feminism-related discourse, portraying activists as warriors against patriarchy. Recent research in critical discourse analysis shows positive and negative implications of using war metaphors in relation to political matters. The use of empowerment language reveals a subversive position taken by feminists in the construction of its own narrative. Building on Judith Butler’s idea of ethical violence, we examine the subversive position in feminist discourse as a form of response against the violent ethos that inhabits the symbolic construction of genders. This view is contrasted with Žižekian–Lacanian approaches to understand violence of exclusion as an effect of the Lacanian Real imposing a limit to the symbolic. The notion of sexuation and difference between gender and sex is analyzed from Butler´s and Lacanian perspectives. We distinguish between feminism and the Lacanian logic of the feminine, emphasizing the importance of situating the victim/warrior signifiers in terms of the function they fulfill for a speaking being. In the final section we propose an orientation toward devictimization of women in feminist discourse, in the spirit of recognition of the singularity and incompleteness of the subject in line with the logic of the Lacanian not-all.","PeriodicalId":39339,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Gender and Sexuality","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139363680","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 Racial Contract of White Masochism","authors":"Andrés Fabián Henao Castro","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2023.2243792","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2023.2243792","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In this article I critique Gilles Deleuze’s “Coldness and Cruelty” (1967), his introduction of Leopold Von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs (1870). Having rightly emphasized the contract as the most important political aspect of masochism, and precisely the feature that psychoanalysis, as a theory of sexuality, could not account for, I argue that Deleuze nonetheless fails to confront the racial contract that renders this masochism white. By failing to confront the racial contract that informs not only the social contract but also the sociality implicit in the masochistic contract, Deleuze idealizes masochism. Drawing from queer of color critique, and especially from the work of Amber Jamilla Musser, I show the ways in which anti-Blackness supplements the masochistic contract in the effort of the sexual parties to reach for that modality of desire that approximates death. Notwithstanding Deleuze’s powerful critique of the complementariness that psychoanalysis wrongly establishes between sadism and masochism, I conclude this article by showing how the racial contract makes it possible for sado-masochism to become complementary in this case.","PeriodicalId":39339,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Gender and Sexuality","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139363703","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":"“Lovesick Women”: A Historical Overview of Gendered Conceptualizations of Erotomania, and Their Influence on Responses to Stalking","authors":"Paul Bleakley, Gabriella Cupano","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2023.2243789","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2023.2243789","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Stalking is a relatively new crime, with the U.S. state of California becoming the first jurisdiction in the world to develop specific laws about such behaviors in the early 1990s. In turn, the state (including law enforcement) turned to existing research on fixated and obsessed behaviors to develop typologies to better understand this kind of offending, as a means to inform response to stalking. This article focuses on one subtype featured in the literature and, later, adopted in the modern categorization of stalking behaviors—the person experiencing erotomania. We explore the conceptual development of erotomania and the gendered lens through which “lovesickness” was treated in the past. We consider how this perspective influenced contemporary constructions of the condition and, from there, influenced the reproduction of negative gender stereotypes in the stalking profiles used to guide institutional responses in the early criminalization period and, even, into contemporary practice.","PeriodicalId":39339,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Gender and Sexuality","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139363498","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":"Psychoanalysis’s Perversions: Witches, Bitches, and Sluts","authors":"Thamy Ayouch","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2023.2211902","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2023.2211902","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Considered one of the three main structures of psychoanalytic psychopathology, perversion is quite an extensive category that is often based on behavior that is supposedly abnormal: nonhegemonic sexual practices and antisocial offenses or uncontrollable impulses. The epistemological and political controversy involved in the use of this term raises several questions, one of which is the moral reach of this notion coined by 19th-century psychiatry and passed on to mainstream psychoanalysis. This article aims to tackle the role sexuality naturalization plays in the psychoanalytic theorization of perversions, but also the extensiveness of this category. To address these questions, the author considers some current definitions of perversions in psychoanalytic psychopathology, to try to question some of their theoretical assumptions. When confronting these controversial definitions with Freud’s multilayered considerations about perversions, the author finds that it appears that Freud did not so much take up the category as he subverted it. Hence, in light of gender and sexuality deconstruction, and following Foucault’s injunction to “bodies and pleasures,” the author tries to show how psychoanalysis should remain perverse, in order to perpetuate Freud’s subversive approach to perversions.","PeriodicalId":39339,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Gender and Sexuality","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43677738","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":"Sex Addictions Faced With the Paradigm of Perversions","authors":"Vincent Estellon","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2023.2211905","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2023.2211905","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Looking back on the evolution of psychoanalytic definitions of perversion, this article uses contemporary clinical experience with chem-sex to explore the borders between sex addiction and a paradigm of perversion. Where is the dividing line now between “normal” and “pathological” insofar as perversion is concerned? If the limit is no longer located as much at the boundaries of genital and pregenital, nor does it apply to any consensual sexual conduct, should it be placed at the limits between life and death? In ways of functioning where enjoyment is found in the action of killing the other’s soul or, on the contrary, bringing to life an inanimate object, the author, with reference to three case studies, attempts to open some avenues for reflection about the modalities of therapeutic framework that come into play in such clinical encounters.","PeriodicalId":39339,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Gender and Sexuality","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46607897","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":"How Not to Become a Dominatrix: Moral Panic in the Supervision of a Social Psychology Dissertation on Heterosexual BDSM","authors":"P. Molinier","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2023.2211913","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2023.2211913","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article draws on standpoint theory, social psychology, psychoanalysis, and gender studies. Perversion is understood here as an insult aimed at controlling the (sexual) freedom of women, especially women conducting academic research on nonconforming sexualities. The author recounts the moral panic that accompanied her supervision of a Ph.D. on female domination in heterosexual BDSM. This dissertation was defended several years ago and is now published, thus allowing a retrospective reading. The candidate was rapidly identified with her research object by other professors and students in the psychology department, which aroused strong emotional reactions when she performed as Mistress Tarna in a Berlin dungeon. The author analyzes the consequences of this moral panic on the supervision of this academic work and questions the place of affect in both ethnographic fieldwork and the interactions between a Ph.D. supervisor and student.","PeriodicalId":39339,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Gender and Sexuality","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46961403","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":"Victoria is /for Victoria","authors":"Trish Salah","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2023.2204807","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2023.2204807","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT If the version of the multiverse we now find ourselves in arrives belatedly from the 20th century in the entanglements of physics and comic books, the afterwardness of culture wars, mid-credit scenes, and proliferating screen memories, is that just what signifying desire looks like a quarter of the way into the 21st? Fighting for the future, it seems we are never far from enjoying an unconscious that knows no “no,” nor time, nor contradiction. What of that shadowy feeling that falls across aspirations, like memory, but something older and farther away, something promised that remains intimately obscure?","PeriodicalId":39339,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Gender and Sexuality","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47321230","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":"Neo-Fetishism: Toward an Epistemological Hybrid at the Crossroads Between Psychoanalysis and the Social Sciences","authors":"Samuel Dock","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2023.2211904","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2023.2211904","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In this article, the author discusses the evolution of the concept of fetishism and calls attention to its epistemological lineage, where group and individual phenomena combine, and to its heuristic and methodological vocation. After this historical overview, he emphasizes Bernard Chervet’s observation that Freudian psychoanalysis has focused too much on the antitraumatic function and the erogenous function of the fetish object, and points to the cessation of metapsychological research on this theme. He explores the political stakes of the disappearance of fetishism from the clinical field under the cover of the “full elucidation” that Freud claimed to have reached. He presents the concept of “neo-fetishism” developed by the anthropologist Philippe Rigaut, the result of field work at the epicenter of new erotic cultures, which goes against the vanishing of fetishism in psychoanalysis. The author notes the importance of this putting the concept of fetishism back into play of and how it fits in to contemporary life, at the same time defining the limits of the social approach. He suggests that researchers take part in a transdisciplinary dialogue about fetishism and that psychoanalysts confront their dogmatic representations with live observation anchored in the actuality of current sexual practices.","PeriodicalId":39339,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Gender and Sexuality","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43191666","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}