Reading and Writing,Talking and Listening Introducing Studies in Gender and Sexuality

This essay offers a brief history of how the stereotype “the female homosexual” was created through three installments of psychoanalytic theorizing, starting with Freud's (1920) case study. A second, brief history presents the various strands of critical theorizing that have identified “the female homosexual” as a stereotype. The essay then makes a contribution to current discussion of female homosexuality by suggesting an instinct theory that features ego instincts and sexual instincts interacting (as Freud' theory did before 1920). Reference is made to Takeo Doi's concept of amae (expectation of affection) and to amae as an ego instinct. This theory then is the framework for a clinical v ignette focused on a female homosexual's ego-instinctual needs.     

Relighting the Fire: Visualizing the Lesbian in Contemporary India

This article revisits the controversy surrounding Deepa Mehta's Fire (1996), India's first publicly released film depicting female same-sex desire. The film has become a touchstone for discussions of the representation of queer and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) lives in India. While the majority of critical accounts of the film have rejected the use of “lesbian” on the basis of its Anglo-American specificity, this article seeks to recast lesbians at the heart of Fire by filtering them through the lens of transnational protest, and by offering a close reading of the film's own play on religious and cultural symbolism. Viewed almost two decades after its release, in the light of the Delhi rape case of December 2012 and subsequent events, including the upholding of a law criminalizing gay sex in November 2013, the film now more than ever seems to offer a fantasy of the future, rather than a viable reality in the present day. Within Fire, the circumnavigation of heteronormative power and desire is certainly queer, but the film's labeling as “lesbian” subsequent to its release in India opened up an important public forum for a debate about female desire and independence that continues to resonate today. This article does not attempt to offer a conclusive argument about the use of the term “lesbian” to label the relationship between women that is depicted within the film, but it does examine the way in which the film itself visualizes desire between women, and in particular the use of Hindu narratives, imagery and motifs. The film's interpellation into lesbian politics is facilitated by the strong emphasis on a female-centered desire that is not defined by motherhood, that cannot be contained, and that demands to be seen.     

SIGN,SYMBOL, AND METALANGUAGE: AGAINST THE INTEGRATION OF SEMIOTICS AND SYMBOLIC INTERACTIONISM

Dean MacCannell's proposal for a “rapprochement” between symbolic interaction-ism and semiotics, in which the “generality” of symbolic interactionism's conception the sign is “raised” to that of semiotics, is examined. By turning exclusively to Saussurian semiotics, MacCannell does not adequately reflect the distinction between “natural” and “arbitrary” representation in Peirce's semiosis that is the most fruitful link with Mead's symbolic interactionism. Consequently, MacCannell's argument at the level of terminology is flawed. Rather than merging, the perspectives might benefit from a radical rethinking of representation. This would involve preserving the distinction between the “natural” and “arbitrary,” while at the same time recognizing that in mass society “arbitrary” representation has become a kind of “second-order” (Barthes) indexical metalanguage of membership within which symbolic interaction may occur. As Baudrillard claims, “commutation of signs” has replaced “interaction of symbols,” yet strains against an unfulfilled symbolic demand. Efforts should be directed at generating a theory of representation capable of addressing the tension that produces this symbolic demand.     

The Eroticism of the Maternal: So What If Everything Is About the Mother?

The “erotic” bond between the mother and the infant is often idealized as the epitome of the preoedipal, prerepressive utopia in the blissful image of the naked and sacred mother-infant dyad. This article problematizes such a utopian image by identifying the core fantasy underlying that which is maternal. My discussion looks at the mother both as the object of erotic fantasy and the subject who is doing the fantasizing. This study brings together two seemingly disparate theoretical notions, Lacanian feminist psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray's argument about our culture's relationship with the mother and Japanese psychoanalyst Takeo Doi's study of amae. I argue that what Irigaray calls “desire of/for the mother” and what Doi attempted to explain using the everyday Japanese word, amae, a wish to “depend and presume upon another's love or bask in another's indulgence,” are both what is understood in the clinical psychoanalytic language as maternal erotic transference.     

Andrii Liubka’s Carbide: Ukrainian democratic reforms through a dark glass

ABSTRACT

The Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine and its reforms are the topics of Andrii Liubka’s novel Karbid (Carbide, 2015). Employing Voltairean laughter and neo-Gothic aesthetics, Liubka presents the idea of European integration (one of the expected outcomes of the reforms) implemented practically by the corrupt elites of the imagined Transcarpathian town of Vedmediv as a money-laundering enterprise – an underground tunnel for smuggling drugs and people’s organs from Ukraine to Europe. The author proposes that the elites – most of whom are criminals – personify Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection in the novel and represent social spheres that need reform. Contrary to the Euromaidan goals, these comprador elites desire even stronger borders between Ukraine and the European Union, as these facilitate their shadow economy, and they subject the local population to economic and social decline, turning them into disposable human waste. By applying the concept of abjection in its psychoanalytic and social forms to Liubka’s tragicomic novel, the author argues that his text points to Ukraine’s struggle to define itself as “West” and shed its totalitarian legacy of the Soviet “East,” and brings attention to the conflict between the post-Euromaidan national strivings of Ukraine’s citizens and the rampant corruption that negates their efforts.     

Questioning the Phallus: Jacques Lacan and Judith Butler

ABSTRACT

This article engages with the relationship between Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and poststructuralist gender theory by comparing and contrasting the questioning of the symbolic phallus (function) undertaken by Jacques Lacan and Judith Butler. The debate takes place through Lacan’s 1958 paper “The Signification of the Phallus,” to which Butler responded critically in Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, published in 1990 and 1993, respectively. Lacan explains that the symbolic phallic function is the “anchor”’ from and around which the symbolic works and ties the discussion to the question of sexual difference by explaining that men and women are positioned differently in relation to it. Butler charges that Lacan’s schema is heteronormative—because it is limited to the male/female schema—and patriarchal because within that heteronormative framework it affirms the masculine perspective. Rather than follow the usual route taken by recent Lacanian scholarship on this issue and focus on Lacan’s later works, especially Seminar XX on female sexuality, I appeal to the contents of two works written in the same year (1958) as “The Signification of the Phallus”—Seminar V and “Guiding Remarks for a Convention on Female Sexuality”—to offer a qualified defense of Lacan that accepts that his early framework is heteronormative but questions the patriarchal charge by showing that within these pre-Seminar XX texts he explicitly works to undermine that logic.     

The Effects of Gender and Relationship Context Cues on Responsive Sexual Desire in Exclusively and Predominantly Androphilic Women and Gynephilic Men

Sexual desire may be “responsive,” emerging from sexual arousal to sexually competent cues. Cues that elicit sexual arousal and desire differ, however, by gender and direction of sexual attractions. Further, relationship context cues are thought to be important for responsive desire, but this has not been tested directly. The current study examined gynephilic men’s (n = 27) and exclusively (n = 23) and predominantly (n = 17) androphilic women’s dyadic and solitary responsive sexual desire, as well as genital and self-reported arousal, to audio narratives varying by gender (male, female) of the sexual partner and relationship context (stranger, friend, long-term relationship). Consistent with previous literature, gynephilic men’s solitary and dyadic desire were gender-specific (greater to female than to male sexual partners). Exclusively androphilic women’s dyadic desire differentiated less to cues of gender than gynephilic men’s, and their solitary desire did not differentiate by gender cues at all, replicating previous research. Androphilic women with some gynephilia reported a gender-nonspecific pattern of dyadic and solitary desire (i.e., responsive desire to both male and female narratives). No effect of relationship context was found for any groups. Results suggest that responsive sexual desire may be more closely associated with self-reported than genital arousal patterns.     

Wanting Mixed‐Sex Children: Separate Spheres,Rational Choice,and Symbolic Capital Motivations

Substantial research concludes that most Americans want to have “at least 1 boy and 1 girl,” yet few have empirically explored what drives this preference. The author used nationally representative data from the National Survey of Families and Households (N = 5,544) and generalized ordered logistic regression to evaluate 3 potential psychosocial frameworks motivating the mixed‐sex ideal using gender and family attitude variables. The results supported a “separate spheres” ideology, through which parents may view the interests, traits, skills, and roles of boys and girls in families as very different. Second, the results supported a rational choice orientation, whereby achieving this goal maximizes having a variety of needs met in old age. Third, the desire for 1 boy and 1 girl may be motivated by its symbolic capital as a status marker, representing the image of a “balanced,” ideal family. Based on beliefs about the nonsubstitutability of boys and girls, this ideal represents a form of gender inequality that persists in families.     

Gay-Friendly Psychoanalysis and the Abiding Pleasures of Prejudice

ABSTRACT

Psychoanalysts in North America have mostly rejected the theory that homosexuality in men is “caused” by developmental arrest. Most have also rejected the belief that the Oedipus Complex is the main determinant of adult sexuality (a belief that used to be the very foundation of psychoanalytic thinking). Today’s “gay-friendly” psychoanalysts deplore the mid-20th-century analysts who, in the name of bedrock Freudian principles, pathologized homosexuality and believed they could “cure” it. However, the author argues, this wholesale expulsion of a giant body of mainstream theory has two downsides: It pressures us to fudge our clinical perception when we encounter that rare patient who actually does fit the profile of the “sick” homosexual of the past. And it lets us elide the likelihood that fashionable moralism and self-interest may still be distorting our clinical judgment today.     

Site-Writing: She is Walking about in a Town Which She does not Know

ABSTRACT

Recently my writing has explored the position of the author, not only in relation to theoretical ideas, art objects, and architectural spaces but also to the site of writing itself. This interest has evolved into a project of “site-writing” that aims to spatialize criticism. “Site-writing” occurs when discussions concerning site specificity extend to involve art criticism, and the spatial qualities of writing and reading become as important in conveying meaning as the content of the criticism. This article suggests that this kind of criticism or critical spatial writing, in operating as mode of a practice in its own right, questions the terms of reference that relate the critic to the work positioned “under” critique. This is an active writing that constructs as well as traces the sites of relation between critic and work. Outlining the conceptual concerns that frame my project of “site-writing” with particular reference to current debates in art criticism, this article then draws on psychoanalytic theory to think through relationships between the spatial politics of internal psychical figures and external cultural geographies, drawing in particular on the work of psychoanalytic practitioners and theorists Jessica Benjamin and Jean Laplanche. Then, in “She is Walking about in a Town Which She Does Not Know,” this article demonstrates the practice of “site-writing” through an essay located on threshold spaces both real and fictional, exterior and interior which link and separate the critic from the work of the eight women artists included in Elles sont passées par ici, Loguivy de la Mer, Brittany, France, 2005.     

The Psychopolitics of Bisexuality

This article begins with the observation that multiple current uses of the term “bisexuality” render the practice of sexual desire for both men and women invisible. It then centers on the use of the term in contemporary psychoanalytic gender theory and argues that here, too, its use to mean the mix of male and female genitals or of masculinity and femininity renders bisexual desire invisible. Although theorists suggest that psychic bisexuality can work clinically to deconstruct gender polarities, the essay argues that any use of masculinity and femininity reinstates rather than challenges such polarities.     

What Does a Man Want? Reflections on “Surrealism Desire Unbound”

This paper is a critical review of the exhibition “Surrealism: Desire Unbound” at the Tate and Metropolitan Museums of Art. The author argues that the majority of the art represents a variety of perverse solutions to male gender anxiety, solutions that most often take the form of viewing the female body as a fetish object or as an object for sadistic drives. She interprets such aggression toward females as being a consequence of the era in which these works were created: Europe between two world wars. Female self-representation is juxtaposed with male-generated art and demonstrates how women artists reclaimed their gaze and desire.     

Eros in the field? Bourdieu's double account of socialized desire

In his later works, Bourdieu draws extensively on psychoanalytic approaches in accounting for his concept of socialized subjectivity as bound to the social world by an intense affective grip. This emotional turn holds potential for further developing Bourdieu's account of subjectivity as a formation of socialized desire. However, in accounting for this socialized desire, Bourdieu relapses into a dualism of subjective and objective structures, incompatible with the Merleau‐Pontyian roots of his practice theory. Tracing this problem to the antagonism between desire and culture in the psychoanalytic accounts that Bourdieu draws on, I propose that the psychoanalytic scholar Hans Loewald's account of Eros may enable a move beyond this impasse, offering a promising conceptual basis for taking further the account of socialized subjectivity and socialized desire in Bourdieu's practice theory.     

Coordinated Action in the Massively Multiplayer Online Game World of Warcraft

In tandem with the technological advancement of immersive virtual environments, digital games have evolved into complex social worlds where people play collaboratively to achieve individual‐ and group‐oriented goals. The massively multiplayer online games genre has received international attention for the large numbers of users that commit a significant amount of time and effort to online play. Play styles within such game worlds are diverse, but “raiding” is generally considered among gamers and scholars alike to be the most challenging form of collaborative play. Like other forms of social activity, raiding is predicated on players' abilities to successfully coordinate individual lines of action. Yet the vast majority of raiders are not physically copresent during their collaborative efforts. Using Couch's theory of coordinated action as an interpretive frame, we explore the computer‐mediated process of raiding in the massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft by analyzing ethnographic data and audio/visual recordings of gameplay. Our study expands Couch's theory of coordinated action in two ways. First, we demonstrate how individuals and groups simultaneously engage in multiple forms of coordinated activity (e.g., conflict and cooperation). Second, we reveal two semiotic layers of coordinated action—the “subject‐subject” (i.e., intersubjective) layer that is facilitated through the game's user interface, and the “subject‐object” layer that comprises players' interactions with the user interface itself. Our study thus considers the potential of Couch's theory for the study of computer‐mediated communication and nonhumans in interaction.     

Anti‐Racism in Movement: Afro‐Brazilian Afoxé and Contemporary Black Brazilian Struggles for Equality

This paper examines the Afro‐Brazilian afoxé as a form of cultural struggle that critically contests narratives and practices that reproduce racial inequality in contemporary Brazil. Through their afoxé in the interior of São Paulo, the Orùnmilá Cultural Center mobilizes Afro‐Brazilian knowledge and cultural practices to challenge culturalist treatments of Afro‐Brazilian “difference” in the management and representation of carnaval. I explore how such treatments reflect broader state‐orchestrated attempts to undermine black anti‐racism and the implementation of substantive policies to address racial inequality in various spheres, including education and culture. The afoxé and the Orùnmilá Center's broader work constitute an important, contemporary means through which black organizations in Brazil make visible and vocal public claims for representation and self‐determination. Such work pushes policy‐makers and academics to reinterpret the terms of black inclusion vis‐à‐vis subaltern or “other” cultures, historical experiences, perspectives, and participation in societal transformation.     

Working Nine to Nine: The New Women of Prime Time

Contemporary psychoanalytic gender theory has posited two psychic structures typical of the heterosexual family's gender arrangements: male defensive autonomy and female relational submissiveness. This essay looks at recent television shows that normalize defensive autonomy in women. These shows, and the young women they reach, are products of a “stalled” feminist revolution and an impoverished cultural imaginary that offers its subjects, male and female, only these two split positions.     

Affective Ankylosis and the Body in Fanon and Capécia

Frantz Fanon examines the function of affect to describe colonization as a mode of the production of the body. His idiosyncratic analysis adjusts prevailing conceptions of the body in affect theory, the psychoanalytic study of narcissism, and non-psychoanalytic theories of racialization. This article focuses on the temporality of retroaction that characterizes what he describes as “affective ankylosis,” and links this notion of affect to the process of racialization that organizes a body in the Lacanian mirror stage. Affect under colonial conditions detemporalizes the subject and petrifies a racial schema into a non-binary dual narcissism—leading to the conclusion that the black body is a version of, or name for, the white body. In the same clinical vein inaugurated by Fanon’s literary analysis, I contrast the affective ankylosis and one of its phenomenological manifestations, a neurotic “affective erethism,” to the imaginary exchange that the black Martinican novelist Mayotte Capécia recounts in her semi-autobiographical I Am a Martinican Woman, prefiguring therein the desire of the woman of color as excessive to those politics of the body that colonization renders unsubversive.     

Sexual Concerns and Counseling Needs of “Normal” Women Attending a Student Health Service Women's Clinic

Abstract

The responses of approximately 1000 female university students attending a Women's Health Service for gynecologic or contraceptive services are presented. A self-report questionnaire examined the frequency of sexual problems experienced by the respondents and their partners. The most common concerns expressed about themselves were orgasmic difficulties (74%), dyspareunia (58%), and body inhibitions (46%). Forty-five percent of these women expressed a desire for counseling. The most common concerns that the respondents perceived in their partners were premature ejaculation (46%), too much interest in sex (33%), and difficulty maintaining an erection (28%). Twenty percent of the women thought their partners would desire counseling. Specific types of counseling desired (e.g., individual, group, mixed group) were determined. Various self-help educational interests of the students were also evaluated. Substantial numbers of “normal” female university students expressed sexual concerns and desire for counseling services and educational aids.