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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... practice , pressure emanating from feminism and from queer theory . Another metaphor often brought to bear on thinking of the role of authority and rule in healing practices is that of prison , a metaphor that we owe principally to ...
... practices and sexual life . Social constructionism applied to psy- choanalysis illuminates the impact of history ... practice and clinical practice coexist and interact in uniquely meaningful ways . Using postmodernism clinically is not ...
... practices . As clinicians we have an increasing sensitivity to the indetermi- nate quality of affective and sometimes passionate exchanges in analytic life . More and more we can tolerate indeterminacy about whose mind , whose body ...