Abstract: This entry provides an outline of the various feminist critiques of Freudian psychoanalytic theory and discusses its political and ontological significance. In its broadest sense, “feminist critiques” of Freudian psychoanalysis offer a distinctively psychical understanding of sexual difference, providing inquiries into how we come to (mis)inhabit our bodies and our identities, an inquiry that is reducible to neither social nor biological classifications. Feminist attempts to both critique and reclaim Freudian psychoanalysis offer a rendering of the forces that impel us to make, break, and mend the bonds that hold us together. By offering an awareness of the formation of subjectivity and the fantasies of social life, feminist revisions of Freudian psychoanalysis in turn enable a feminist critique of patriarchal social relations, including the symbolic bonds and subjective forces that reinforce identity and bind sexed subjects to relations of dominance and subordination. From feminist psychoanalysis comes the concept of what it means to enter the social realm as a gendered subject.
Publication Year: 2016
Publication Date: 2016-04-21
Language: en
Type: other
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 2
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