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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... dynamic systems theory , chaos theory ) , this point of view privileges open systems , self - organization , and dynamic prospects for change and re - equilibration . I will use the terms somewhat interchangeably but I retain a fondness ...
... Dynamic Strange Attractor ? Thelen ( Thelen and Smith , 1994 ) has been working on the use of non- linear dynamic systems theory to model the development of symbolic thought . She connects her work in dynamic systems to that of ...
... dynamic skills theory — as an application of chaos theory . A dynamic systems theoreti- cal approach ( here , dynamic skills theory ) is used to examine the develop- ment of thought and feeling in the microprocesses of a family's ...