{"title":"The Thing About the Other, or What We Can Hear in Leaving Neverland","authors":"David Denny","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2021.1913348","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2021.1913348","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article explores how what appears to be a weakness or limitation of the film Leaving Neverland—hearing only from the victims, being one-sided in its investigation, lack of empirical evidence, narratively episodic—proves to be the film’s greatest strength. More precisely, the film’s patient and hyper focus on the victim’s speaking, coupled with editing decisions to prolong certain points of emphasis, creates the uncanny effect that Jacques Lacan termed das ding, which, therein, has the effect of gesturing to another scene, indeed, the very scene that cannot be seen but that can be heard, and that thus implicates Michael Jackson’s guilt and the victims’ (real) trauma.","PeriodicalId":39339,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Gender and Sexuality","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/15240657.2021.1913348","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45185395","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 Necessary Elements: The Interactive Matrix of Abusive Relationships","authors":"K. Feiner","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2021.1913342","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2021.1913342","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This essay uses the film The Tale to illuminate the interactive matrix of abusive relationships, highlighting (a) the ways that perpetrators use offers of love and concern, and gaslighting and threats to establish a relationship with a child that, from its outset, is designed to the gratify perpetrators’ own sexual desires and (b) the characteristics that contribute to the child’s susceptibility to seduction trauma, including unmet needs—for attention, to be valued, seen, chosen, loved—as well as intrapsychic concerns, including defensive requirements and unconscious fantasies (e.g., primal scene and family romance fantasies). Additionally, the repercussions of seduction trauma are considered in relation to the self and object relationships that are configured through the interactions between the perpetrator and the survivor of abuse. These interactions include a mystifying intermingling of attuned, sensitive responsiveness, and manipulative control, as well as the simultaneous presence of threats and offers of love. These contribute to the way that childhood sexual abuse is experienced, represented internally, and remembered later.","PeriodicalId":39339,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Gender and Sexuality","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/15240657.2021.1913342","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41686781","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":"Beyond #MeToo: The Therapeutic Action of (Female) Agency and Après-Coup in The Tale1","authors":"Jill Gentile","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2021.1913345","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2021.1913345","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This essay considers Jennifer Fox’s largely autobiographical feature film The Tale from the vantage point of the #MeToo movement, which coincided with and contextualized its release. Fox’s fidelity to an actual story she wrote at age 13 enlists the viewer in deconstructing the binaries of unambiguous victim/perpetrator, victim/survivor, truth–fiction, memory–desire; omnipotence–agency; coercion–consent; then–now; psyche–soma; fantasy–reality; and patriarchal privilege–women’s voices. The film reveals the intersubjective dimension of truth as a contestation between desire and destruction of knowing (oneself, the other). It refuses any dichotomy between childhood fantasy and traumatic seduction, insisting on the perplexing reality and persistent effects of their ensnarement. Most powerfully, the film bears witness to the power and therapeutic action of (female) agency, and attests to the après-coup or afterwardsness of truth, as we witness the protagonist—between a voice of now and a voice of then—imaginatively rewrite her experience of the past in the present.","PeriodicalId":39339,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Gender and Sexuality","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/15240657.2021.1913345","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48328763","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":"Smooth Criminals: Mystified Desires and Their Pursuits in Leaving Neverland","authors":"E. Duarte","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2021.1913346","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2021.1913346","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The documentary Leaving Neverland details Michael Jackson’s alleged sexual activity with two young boys during the 1990s. While prior scholarship on early sexual trauma focuses on the immediate dyad, this article examines the role of the larger interpersonal field and the centrality of mystification among the protagonists in the film. It addresses how they mystified one another about what was wanted, who wanted it, and at whose expense, in the prelude to, onset of, and chronicity of the sexual relationships. In so doing, an expanded conception is offered of mystification as an emergent and ongoing quality of an interpersonal field, rather than a singular act performed by one person on another. Such a conception allows for a more nuanced and contextualized understanding of how child sexual trauma begins, continues, and remains secret for so long","PeriodicalId":39339,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Gender and Sexuality","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/15240657.2021.1913346","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45058847","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":"To Tell the Truth, (Re)Tell One’s Tale: On Pedophilia, Taboo Desire, and Seduction Trauma-- Introduction to The Tale and Leaving Neverland: A Panel on Two Films on Childhood Sexual Abuse","authors":"Jill Gentile, K. Feiner","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2021.1913341","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2021.1913341","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Our introduction is to a panel that considers two films, The Tale and Leaving Neverland. Both films feature adult protagonists reclaiming memories of their disavowed childhood sexual abuse, and both were released amid #MeToo and a proliferation of other films, TV shows, and memoirs depicting seduction trauma in the context of a family romance plotline. Together, they suggest features of a universally taboo story (of childhood sexual abuse), compounded by psychoanalysis’s primal taboo: incestuous desire. It is argued that though psychoanalysis recognizes the reality of sexual abuse, it nonetheless seems to discount, as did Freud, its ubiquity, and, too, may leave underexplored the incidence of pedophiliac fantasy. Further, and ironically in light of psychoanalysis’s history, it underestimates the survivor’s investment in her romantic fantasy, and its identification itself with her aggressor’s “grooming,” as a force that denies the real of her trauma. Both films depict the ongoing therapeutic action of après-coup, in the quest to (re)tell truth between memory–desire, omnipotence–agency, truth–fiction, and reparation–(imaginative) apology.","PeriodicalId":39339,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Gender and Sexuality","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/15240657.2021.1913341","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41434764","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":"Traumatic Knowing/Unknowing and the Return of the Disavowed in The Tale","authors":"Komal Choksi","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2021.1913343","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2021.1913343","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This speculative essay focuses on the defensive disavowal of childhood sexual abuse that is effected through the recursive intrapsychic and interpersonal operations of identification with and introjection of the aggressor that act in tandem to prohibit traumatic knowing. In the film The Tale, these operate cinematically at diegetic and metadiegetic levels, and are present in both symbolized and enacted forms. The deconstruction and reconstruction of traumatic reality is examined through the film’s oneiric interpolations of past and present time, reality and fantasy, and use of semiologic elements. The traumatic injury is remembered, repeated, and worked through, undergirded by the operations of nachträglichkeit and repetition compulsion.","PeriodicalId":39339,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Gender and Sexuality","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/15240657.2021.1913343","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41886530","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":"What Can a Woman Know? Subjectification, Desire, Perversion, and Possibility","authors":"M. Charles","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2021.1913344","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2021.1913344","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Creative works allow a discourse that can be collectively subjective, rather than denuding experienced meanings through attempts at objectification. Jennifer Fox’s film The Tale offers an encounter with the Real as informed by an Imaginary that shifts and transforms over time. She shows the objectification of one woman’s experience by tracing her ambivalent efforts to subjectify her own story. Asserting her own desire becomes possible as she recognizes how that desire became hidden under and subservient to the needs, desires, and limits of others. This film highlights how cultural pressures can make it difficult to find one’s own desire and to say no to the desire of the other. The film shows how the enigmatic message of maternal abjection has invited women to subjugate themselves in relation to a cultural injunction that demeans and devalues embodied experience in ways that can make “development” perverse rather than transformative.","PeriodicalId":39339,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Gender and Sexuality","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/15240657.2021.1913344","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47667130","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":"Therapeutic Fathering in the Absence of a Good Internal Father","authors":"Duje Culic","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2021.1913349","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2021.1913349","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In this short piece, I reflect on the paradox of having felt compelled to embody a good—and specifically paternal—figure for my clients in psychotherapy, despite never having internalized such a figure in the course of my childhood.","PeriodicalId":39339,"journal":{"name":"Studies in Gender and Sexuality","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/15240657.2021.1913349","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46307037","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 Feminine Yes: Return Me to Excess","authors":"Tracy Sidesinger","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2021.1883845","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2021.1883845","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This essay argues that the feminine principles of imagination, desire, and excess are necessary for the vitality of clinical work and society. Although longing is precisely the source of any new subjectivity, longing for what exceeds the requisite has in large part been considered taboo. Here, the Feminine Yes is synonymous with excess, and the primary purpose of this essay is to highlight the virtues of excess that have otherwise been overly restricted as if detrimental to life. Specifically, excess offers needed space to return to repressed content, to the not-yet, and to a primordial fount of possibility. Matriarchal structure is explored as a contemporary new foundation for psychoanalysis to this end. It is within matriarchal space that we find multiplicity without competitive hierarchies, value on affect over linearity, and, most importantly, Woman as an uncompromised model of desire in her own right, so frequently lacking in psychoanalysis.","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/10.1080/15240657.2021.1883845","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45969818","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":"On the Way to the Other: Dread, Wonder, Awe","authors":"Jerome A. Miller","doi":"10.1080/15240657.2021.1883850","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/15240657.2021.1883850","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Imagine a young child who shrinks from—but can’t take her eyes off—a Stranger who’s been invited into her home. This child’s dread-charged awe before the Stranger brings into focus the tension fundamental to our lives—our being torn between openness to the unprecedented future and the desire to protect ourselves from it. Dialoguing with Loewald, Freud, and Heidegger, I consider the radical anxiety the child experiences when exposed to the dreadful not—the absence of the needed. Dialoguing with Aristotle, I discuss how wonder draws the child into harmonious play with alterities that are intelligible to her. However, from the beginning the child is surrounded by alterities whose transcendence overwhelms her. We recoil from such transcendence because it fills us with dread, are drawn to it because it fills us with awe. Dread-charged awe in the face of the other, especially the human Other, is, I argue, the quintessential human experience.","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/10.1080/15240657.2021.1883850","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43506283","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}