Gendered Populations and Trauma Beyond Oedipus: Reply to Angel's Commentary

Abstract

In response to Angel's commentary on my essay, I elaborate on 3 primary points that she highlights. I extend her discussion of the convergence between feminist/antimedicalization critiques of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and clinical/experimental psychiatric research with regard to gender essentialism; I engage with her claim that feminist critiques of psychiatry have been stymied by their jettisoning of Freudian interpretation and their vilification of psychoanalysis (including in regards to their reluctance to consider psychogenic etiological explanations for gendered desire disparities); and I respond to her call to take seriously women's individual sexual suffering. I discuss psychoanalytic investigations of low desire and gendered sexual trauma outside of Freudian Oedipality and beyond reductive biological tropes, focusing instead on how feminine subjectivities and populations are formed as a result of bodies, psyches, relations, and power coming together in complicated ways. I conclude by considering some possibilities for honoring this complexity.

Notes

¹In my original essay, I discuss how the DSM is resolutely “antipsychoanalytic”—not to mention that its designers have called it an “atheoretical” and “apolitical” document (this is to emphasize its “objectivity”). I also discuss some of the problems with discarding psychoanalytic approaches to desire, and I mention a few variations of relational and object relational psychoanalysis as more suited to analyzing desire than strict Freudian interpretations (I do not explicate these theories in depth). I agree with Angel that the unconscious, and its relation to desire, must be theorized psychoanalytically, but I do not know that referring to Freud specifically is the best way to do this.

²Of course these are not two discrete groups of women. The fact that different women experience their own desire and the categories that constrain and produce it in such diverse ways points to the complexity of experience, the messiness of the lived discursive landscape, and the power of these sexual prescriptions.