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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... aspects and potential power of chaos theory or nonlinear dynamic systems theory as a theory of develop- ment . I ... aspect of sexuality or a defense against it . In two subsequent chapters I examine chaos theory as a way of modeling ...
... aspect of the environmental matrix in which gender and sexuality will arise and be constituted ( see Stein , 1998a , for a powerful clinical application of this liminal , indeterminate aspect to sexuality and its origins in early dyadic ...
... aspect of becoming a person . Thought as style , content , and emotion as regulated or unregulated components of psychic life - both are reflected in and altered through children's speech . It is here also that one can find a site for ...