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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... constituted within the history of labor and exchange . There are the parameters of the session and the rhythms of an analytic day . Throughout the workday the analyst is caught up , organized , and reorganized in unique and shifting ...
... constituted as an attractor , an emergent pattern with particular qualities that depend on the context , the rate of change and movement . Gender as an attractor would be composed of or incor- porate a variety of subsystems , but this ...
... constituted ( see Stein , 1998a , for a powerful clinical application of this liminal , indeterminate aspect to sexuality and its origins in early dyadic life ) . This aspect of the early relational dyad inevitably contributes to the ...