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. |
From inside the book
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... argues that bodies , even in science , let alone in per- sonal life and in culture , resonate and are shaped by many forces of meaning making . Gender polarity moves from the culture by way of science and biological investigations and ...
... argues that language learning is both slower and faster than we imagined and that we need a multifactorial account ... argue against an exclusively rationalist understanding of symbolic thought . All these theo- Developmental ...
... argues against the idea of internal representations as things or reified structures . And Moran ( 1991 ) argues similarly in elaborating a version of chaos theory in which unconscious fantasy is termed a strange attractor , a scheme or ...