Through the generosity of the Alexandra and Martin Symonds Foundation, the Editors of Studies in Gender and Sexuality (SGS) award the 2013 Symonds Prize to Alyson K. Spurgas, M.A., for her “Interest, Arousal, and Shifting Diagnoses of Female Sexual Dysfunction, or: How Women Learn About Desire.” Spurgas is a Ph.D. candidate in both sociology and women's and gender studies at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Due to receive her doctorate in 2014, her dissertation is entitled “Circuits of Desire: Neuroimaging, Evolutionary Femininity, and Therapeutic Learning.”
SGS is committed to a view of knowledge as constructed, historically situated, and meriting the skepticism inherent in both ideology critique and deconstruction. Taking a Foucauldian approach to knowledge construction, Spurgas boldly addresses psychiatric diagnosis and its implications for the understanding, treatment, and well-being of women. Her focus is “the shift from Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder in Women (HSDD) to the new diagnosis, Female Sexual Interest/Arousal Disorder (SI/AD)” (this issue, p. 187). As she guides us through the arcana of diagnostic terminology, she teases out the theoretical underpinnings and cultural commitments that lead such works as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders to characterize women's desire in a surprisingly old-fashioned way.
Spurgas writes in the intellectual tradition that, although respectful of the scientific endeavor, refuses its prima facie claim to disinterested truth. In her view, cultural values and power positions inflect not only the ends but also the means of research. In this essay, she argues that medical and scientific research methods and language in effect eradicate “desire as a constitutive component of feminine sexuality” (this issue, p. 187) by positioning female desire in relation and reaction to male desire. Among the bodies of thought she probes are evolutionary psychology, behavioral biology, and clinical experimental psychology as they are taken up by the authors of the new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-5 (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). Peeling away language that tends to mystify, she demonstrates how these discourses render “feminine desire [either] uniquely enigmatic and mysterious or in need of direction” (this issue, p. 203).
Countering claims to a presumed objectivity—for example, the DSM's self-representation as “atheoretical”—she contends that these approaches systematically deny or ignore “cultural, social, psychodynamic, experiential, and phenomenological explanations” (this issue, p. 202) for the low desire they purport to reduce to an innate feminine nature. The result is a reification of “human desire … as neurobiological and teleological in its gender essentiality” (this issue, p. 201). Women's sexual receptivity is once again pathologized and biologized and tied to “genetic survival as espoused within evolutionary psychology” (this issue, p. 201) and is also “perpetuated [as such] through the language of the SI/AD diagnosis and its associated practices but not theorized at all” (this issue, p. 201). We could say, indeed, that Ms. Spurgas herein documents how the backlash against second-wave feminism powers current psychiatric constructions of women's sexuality.
Her discussant, Katherine Angel, Ph.D., agrees with Spurgas's argument. Dr. Angel is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Centre for the History of Emotions, Queen Mary, University of London. She is the author of Unmastered: A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell (Penguin/Allen Lane, 2012; Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013; Klett-Cotta/Tropen, 2013; De Bezige Bij, 2012). Extending Spurgas's argument, Angel voices concern that critiques of the psychiatric/DSM/pharmaceutical complex in fact tend to reinscribe “women as less desirous than men” (this issue, p. 206). However, this reinscription has tended to beget a criticism that, ironically, has the same effect. To argue, as some feminist critics do, that women's sexual difficulties should be read as understandable adaptations to sexual life under patriarchy, amounts to an erasure of the idiosyncratic “sexual suffering” women experience as individuals, for which they deserve psychotherapeutic help.
Such help is both near and just out of reach, as Dr. Angel suggests in a most interesting move. She points out a paradox in the way psychoanalysis is simultaneously employed and discredited in this debate. “Psychoanalysis has emerged as a necessary fulcrum in a wide range of disciplines eager to define themselves against that which psychoanalysis is thought to stand for” (this issue, p. 212). Given the misogyny of psychoanalysis, “a certain explosive stigma is attached to the act of interpreting and exploring individual women's sexual distress” (this issue, p. 213). In consequence, there emerges a one-dimensional view of what psychoanalysis can offer and an unintended discrediting of “the whole sphere of thinking about unconscious causes of symptoms” (this issue, p. 213). To the extent that the unconscious is rendered “no-go,” to that extent is discourse about the origin of suffering diluted. This dilution in turn prompts “recourse to a cultural trope” (this issue, p. 213) in which psychiatry's claim to scientific objectivity wins out against the purportedly wooly delusions of psychoanalysis.
Angel here indicates a difficulty in cultural as well as feminist theory: It is all very well to show that psychotherapies tend to reproduce normative heterosexuality. The problem, says Angel, is that we have not figured out how, within this strand of sexual discourse, to “address the suffering of individuals whose desire and pleasure happen to involve heterosexual penetration” (this issue, p. 214). Without a theory of the unconscious, intimates Angel, there is little to help women who are not satisfied with a view of their gender as low in desire, who in fact “experience their desire [in its presence or absence, fullness or thinness] as a problem” (this issue, p. 214). Sexual symptoms—wanting more sex, or missing the sex one used to have, or missing the desire one used to feel, or not wanting sex but wanting to want it—are not just cultural constructions, Angel points out. They are also “the fine-grained experiences and needs of individual women themselves” (this issue, p. 214). Angel's argument suggests the importance of a reevaluation, on the part of feminism and cultural studies, of clinical psychoanalysis and its value.
We hope you enjoy this award-winning essay and its discussion, and we invite you to apply for the Symonds Prize 2014, whose winner, like this year's, will receive publication in Studies in Gender and Sexuality and $500. You will find an announcement for the competition and application instructions at the end of this issue.