'Gender' tag archive

Interview Jean LaplancheThe other within Rethinking psychoanalysis RP: howdid you come to psychoanalysis? what made you want to be an analyst?laplanche: Itʼs a long story. I was studying philosophy in the 1940s and psychoanalysis was not as well known as it is now. It was something new and revolutionary. But I had two professors who […]

ʻWell, Iʼll think about women thenʼ, Juliet Mitchell proposed in 1963, suggesting a topic to research as she sat, the lone woman, on the editorial board of New Left Review – alongside her husband, Perry Anderson, the freshly minted editor of the journal. The inevitable response greeted Mitchellʼs startling proposal in such circles at that […]

Whilst the distinction between French and AngloAmerican feminism was always rather dubious (failing to be accurate, consistent or inclusive at the level of either national origin, language of choice or theoretical commitment; seeming to parcel feminist theory – or at least the feminist theory that mattered – out into two Western blocks from which the […]

Although texts dating from antiquity, particularly those of Aristotle, see the issue of sexual difference as one of a set of themes relating to sovereignty – domination of the other or self-control – it is generally recognized today that these domains are relatively separate. Questions concerning the differences between men and women have been left, […]

[We] do not recognize ourselves at the level of feeling, desire and the body, at the moments before the mirror, in the moments before the window, in the times that one turns to psychologists, to psychiatrists, to medical and legal professionals to negotiate what may well feel like the unrecognizability of oneʼs gender and hence […]

The incomplete materialism of French materialist feminism Alison stone According to one important and influential line of feminist interrogation of the category of sex, we only believe that there are two biological sexes because our thought and perception are constrained by the two-gender social system under which we currently live. [1] The French materialist feminists […]

Sexmat, revisited Stella sandford As a genre of intellectual production, ‘feminist theory’ emerged in the 1980s, hot on the heels of the criticisms of the white Eurocentrism and heterosexism of classic second-wave writing. The conjunction of these criticisms and the growing influence of various philosophical and psychoanalytic theoretical elements developed, in one strand of feminist […]

Recent cultural histories have gone to considerable lengths to define an ‘alternative modernity’ for China, going back to the commercial developments of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. [1] As delineated via the complex relationship between dominant Western and ‘other’ versions of modernity, its general form has been indicated by, for example, Dorothy Hodgson, […]

This is not my body Elisabeth lebovici Indeed there are not two genders, there is only one, the feminine, the ‘masculine’ not being a gender. For the masculine is not the masculine but the general. [1] These two sentences, written by Monique Wittig in 1983, pronounce a regime of visibility and invisibility for the feminine […]

Commentary the Question of caster semenya Mandy merck Caster Semenya, the South African runner, won the 800 metre gold medal at the World Championships. What did Pierre Weiss, head of the world athletics governing body, say in response to questions about her sex?The Times Sport Quiz, 26 December 2009 What indeed? The question of Caster […]

What is sex? Some feminists have harboured suspicions about this form of question, given its philosophical (or ‘metaphysical’ [1] ) pedigree. But philosophy no longer has the disciplinary monopoly on it. Indeed, with regard to sex, the more interesting task today is to pose and to attempt to answer the question from within a transdisciplinary […]