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
Results 1-3 of 52
... problem but a brilliant solution . A child's solution to the relational problem of sustaining the parent is lived excruciatingly on the child's body and in the meaning of that body to the child . The gender identity of some tomboys ...
... problem areas , formerly discrete domains of research and theory , are increasingly being treated as interdependent phenomena . ' As these developmental tasks are more and more seen as mutually coconstructing and as susceptible to mul ...
... problem spaces . This functional solution handles an emergent problem of informational overload by a streamlined reorganization , essentially a more economic system of per- ceptual categorization . In the domain of grammar we find a ...