309: Gender
Instructor
March 29 – June 14, 2023
Wednesdays, 7:00 – 8:25 pm
No class: 4/5
Co-requisites
Candidates must have or have had at least two cases in supervised psychoanalysis to be eligible for upper level courses.
Course Description
This course surveys psychoanalytic gender theories to offer a solid foundation in their basic tenets, controversies and clinical implications. It addresses questions like: What is gender—in both its normative and not normative iterations? What unconscious forces constitute it? Does the promise of ‘coherent gender’ do psychic work for us and if so, what kind? What ‘counts’ as the gendered body and how can we understand the relationship between its felt sense, the role of fantasy, the body’s materiality, and societal valuations of that gendered body? Why have some analytic theories disaggregated gender from psychosexuality? Do we need to suture these two back together and if so, how? Readings draw on canonical analytic works, pairing them with texts from other disciplines (e.g. queer theory, phenomenology, cultural theory, legal theory, film studies), and cultural objects. We will use them to help us explore gender’s unconscious underpinnings, map how gender is ‘softly assembled’, and why it is clinically helpful to understand it as always already intersectionally constituted. Third and Fourth Year students combined. Alternates with course 402.
Educational Objectives
Upon completion of this course, participants should be able to:
- discuss, compare and critique the dominant theoretical models in understanding the psychic processes out of which the phenomenological experience of gender, in both its typical and atypical iterations, accrues.
- describe the unconscious work required for normative gender to maintain its illusions of cohesion and coherence; and the unconscious work normative gender does socially.
- critique the tendency to regard gender as a singular and distinctive psychic phenomenon becoming able instead to demonstrate how all genders are synergistically interimplicated with other categories of difference like race, class, religion and sexual orientation.
Evaluation Method
Each student’s participation in class discussion and his or her demonstration of understanding of the course objectives and reading material is assessed in a written evaluation by the instructor(s).
Introduction
Concepts in gender theory are rapidly unfolding in our present. Now, more than ever, there is a lot to know. This course is a survey of psychoanalytic gender theory and provides a solid foundation in the basic concepts and controversies in this area. Following contemporary developments in the field, it offers a robust body of knowledge regarding gender’s unconscious complexity, best examined from a position separate from psychosexuality. During the course, you will develop the capacity to recognize how ubiquitously gender interweaves what happens in an analytic session even when the manifest content may appear to have no obvious relation to gender. Moreover, you will acquire a deep and sophisticated understanding of the kind of unconscious work that normative and non-normative gender does for us all. As we travel across analytic schools, we’ll encounter canonical as well as lesser known texts, and will work to flesh out the often hidden assumptions on which some of these theories rest. This will allow us to begin noticing what these theories make possible for us to conceptualize about our ourselves and
our patients, what they foreclose in our clinical thinking, and highlight the blind spots in our countertransference.
Psychoanalysis as a discipline has struggled to keep apace with evolving gender theory. Part of what makes this course demanding is that, as a subject matter, psychoanalytic gender theory requires of analysts a somewhat unusual set of conceptual tools. Gender, in its psychic constitution as well as its experiential dimensions, is especially porous to, and in dialectical tension with, other categories of difference. We will explore this intersectionality, and see how gender is always already interimplicated with sexual orientation, race, class status, ability, age, religion, and other diversities; and how you can begin to think about using that insight clinically. Because gender cannot be parsed out from other categories of difference, we’ll make a concentrated effort to note our resistances to thinking intersectionally. This is critical when it comes to gender and will be beneficial to many aspects of your training and clinical work overall.
A note on the readings: In addition to analytic texts, we’ll also read about gender from several other disciplines (sociology, film studies, queer theory, phenomenology, legal theory) as well as cultural objects (poems, YouTube clips). Because some of the theories we’ll encounter draw on thinking that comes to us from outside psychoanalysis, we will be confronted with language that may feel bewildering at times. The readings might seem dense and opaque. Don’t let the novelty discourage you—we’ll go through these terms in depth and over time, they’ll start revealing to us novel paths to thinking about unconscious
life.
One way to approach this class: Please read the papers before each session. The readings will serve as guideposts during the class, and we’ll discuss the main points the authors are trying to convey. But I would like to also encourage you to bring up associations that you have to the material. Gender is baked into the stuff of us and our society. It’s obvious to say, but every day, the gender binary reveals itself startlingly in our consulting rooms, in the news, in the arts, on social media, etc. Bring in your thoughts. I’ve found this class is most meaningful when it’s expansive in in content, and that can only happen with your contributions.
These articles are protected under relevant copyright regulations. They are available in the New York Psychoanalytic Society & Institute Electronic Reserve for your convenience, and for your personal use.
READINGS ARE CONFIRMED.
I. Gender: theoretical range, temporality and racial ontology
CLASS 1: March 29, 2023
REQUIRED READINGS
Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersections of race and sex. The University of Chicago Legal Forum, 140, 139-167.
González, F.J. (2013). Another Eden: Proto-Gay Desire and Social Precocity. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 14(2):112-121.
Watch: https://youtu.be/akOe5-UsQ2o
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXayhUzWnl0
II. Before ‘gender’; homosexuality
CLASS 2: April 12, 2023
REQUIRED READINGS
Eng, D. (2001). Heterosexuality in the Face of Whiteness: Divided Belief in M. Butterfly. In Racial Castration: Managing Masculinity in Asian America (pp. 137-166). Durham; London: Duke University Press.
Freud, S. (1920). Psychogenesis of a case of homosexuality in a woman, SE, XVIII: 145-172.
Read Poem: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/02/white-gays
III. Enter: Gender as Identity
CLASS 3: April 19, 2023
REQUIRED READINGS
Stoller, R.J. (1964). A Contribution to the Study of Gender Identity. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 45:220-226.
Forrester, J. (2017). Inventing Gender Identity: The Case of Agnes. In Thinking In Cases. Polity Press, pp 127-139.
Saketopoulou, A. (2011). Minding the Gap: Intersections Between Gender, Race, and Class in Work With Gender Variant Children. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 21:192-209.
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uf1c0tEGfrU
IV. Gender as Anatomy
CLASS 4: April 26, 2023
REQUIRED READINGS
Freud, S. (1925). Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIX (1923-1925): The Ego and the Id and Other Works, 241-258.
Salamon, G. (2010). Introduction. In G. Salamon, Assuming a Body. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 1-9. Chapter 3, The bodily ego and the contested domain of the material, pp. 13-42.
V. Normative Gender as Defense: Female vs Feminine, Male vs Masculine
CLASS 5: May 3, 2023
REQUIRED READINGS
Goldner, V. (1991). Toward a Critical Relational Theory of Gender. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 1:249-272.
Pellegrini, A. (1997). Femmes Futiles. In: Performance anxieties: Staging psychoanalysis, staging race. New York: Routledge.
Riviere, J. (1929). Womanliness as a Masquerade. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 10:303-313.
VI. Primary Femininity, and its Repudiation
CLASS 6: May 10, 2023
REQUIRED READINGS
Benjamin, J. (1991). Father and daughter: Identification with difference. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 1, 277-299.
Corbett, K. (2001). Faggot=Loser. Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 2:3-28.
VII. Gender and Sexuality Part I
CLASS 7: May 17, 2023
REQUIRED READINGS
Celenza, A. (2014). Erotic Revelations: Clinical applications and perverse scenarios. Introduction: Transcending binaries. New York: Routledge. pp 1-12.
Laplanche, J. (2003/2011). Gender, sex, and the sexual. In J. Fletcher (Ed.). Freud and the sexual: Essays 2000-2006 (pp. 159-202). New York: International Psychoanalytic Books.
VIII. Countertransference Trouble Part I
CLASS 8: May 24, 2022
REQUIRED READINGS
Gozlan, O. (2022). Adolescent Ruthlessness and the Transitioning Of The Analyst’s Mind. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 70(3):459–484.
Posadas, M. (2018). Tiresias and His Trouble with Ambiguity in Gender. The Undecidable Unconscious: A Journal of Deconstruction and Psychoanalysis 5, 93-106.
IX. The Anxiety of Regulation: Gender, Race, Class and Trauma
CLASS 9: May 31, 2022
REQUIRED READINGS
Corbett, K. (2017). Murder over a girl: justice, gender, junior high. New York: Picador.
(Students to purchase.)
X. Gender and Sexuality Part II
CLASS 10: June 7, 2023
REQUIRED READINGS
González, F.J. (2017). The Edge is a Horizon: Commentary on Hansbury. J. Amer. Psychoanal. Assn., 65(6):1061-1073.
Hansbury, G. (2018). The masculine vaginal: working with queer men’s embodiment on the transgender edge. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 65(6), 1009-1031.
XI. Countertransference Trouble Part II
CLASS 11: June 14, 2023
REQUIRED READINGS
Evzonas, N. Laufer, L. (2019). The Therapist’s Transition. Psychoanal. Rev., 106(5):385-416.
Hansbury, G. (2017). Unthinkable Anxieties: Reading Transphobic Countertransferences in a Century of Psychoanalytic Writing, Transgender Studies Quarterly, 4 (3-4), 384–404.