Gender as Soft AssemblyGender as Soft Assembly weaves together insights from different disciplinary domains to open up new vistas of clinical understanding of what it means to inhabit, to perform, and to be, gendered. Opposing the traditional notion of development as the linear unfolding of predictable stages, Adrienne Harris argues that children become gendered in multiply configured contexts. And she proffers new developmental models to capture the fluid, constructed, and creative experiences of becoming and being gendered. According to Harris, these models, and the images to which they give rise, articulate not only with contemporary relational psychoanalysis but also with recent research into the origins of mentalization and symbolization. In urging us to think of gender as co-constructed in a variety of relational contexts, Harris enlarges her psychoanalytic sensibility with the insights of attachment theory, linguistics, queer theory, and feminist criticism. Nor is she inattentive to the impact of history and culture on gender meanings. Special consideration is given to chaos theory, which Harris positions at the cutting edge of developmental psychology and uses to generate new perspectives and new images for comprehending and working clinically with gender. |
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... structure in which much historically salient material accrues, becoming the host to many experiences not essentially tied to gender or to sexuality. I think of gender as always to be understood in material terms. I like the term ...
... structure in which much historically salient material accrues, becoming the host to many experiences not essentially tied to gender or to sexuality. I think of gender as always to be understood in material terms. I like the term ...
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... structures: mom–dad, boy–girl, gay–straight, connected–separate. These formations give coherence and heft to our experience. Simultaneously, we have to notice the great creative potential released when these polarities are deconstructed ...
... structures: mom–dad, boy–girl, gay–straight, connected–separate. These formations give coherence and heft to our experience. Simultaneously, we have to notice the great creative potential released when these polarities are deconstructed ...
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... Structure and the more straightforward descriptions of stages take a back seat. The emphasis on process, self-organization, and function is fundamental to developmental psychologists like Baldwin, Vygotsky, Werner, and, in certain ...
... Structure and the more straightforward descriptions of stages take a back seat. The emphasis on process, self-organization, and function is fundamental to developmental psychologists like Baldwin, Vygotsky, Werner, and, in certain ...
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... structures of power that can never be perfectly transparent to us, the analyst/theorist carries much that is unknown and unconscious into studying and working clinically. It is for this reason that the project of making theory must be ...
... structures of power that can never be perfectly transparent to us, the analyst/theorist carries much that is unknown and unconscious into studying and working clinically. It is for this reason that the project of making theory must be ...
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... , without depth or complexity. But the great potential in chaos theory is to see complexity and coherence and structure as outcomes of interaction, subtly but powerfully elaborated in early developmental interactions. This theory would not.
... , without depth or complexity. But the great potential in chaos theory is to see complexity and coherence and structure as outcomes of interaction, subtly but powerfully elaborated in early developmental interactions. This theory would not.
Contents
Timelines and Temporalities | |
Chaos Theory as a Model for Development | |
Gender Narratives in Psychoanalysis | |
Tomboys Stories | |
Genders Multidimensionality | |
Genders Emerge in Contexts | |
Chaos Theory as a Map to Contemporary Gender Theorists | |
Learning | |
Relational Mourning as Shared Labor | |
Endnotes | |
References | |
Subject Index | |
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