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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... lived and ad- ventured alongside a depressed and shy girl . This identity was entirely secret , a fantasy of being a boy named John . This boy , who grew and aged as Sarah did , lived a self - determined , powerful , heroic life . He ...
... lived out as incorporations , as introjections , or as seamlessly inter- nalized aspects of self . Schafer did not explore the intersubjective di- mension of these processes , but his expansion of the concept of internalization ...
... lived excruciatingly on the child's body and in the meaning of that body to the child . The gender identity of some tomboys could be involved in such a project of material preservation . My patient Jamie's fantasies that she was ...