Katie Gentile | John Jay College, CUNY (original) (raw)
Papers by Katie Gentile
Studies in Gender and Sexuality, Jan 2, 2023
Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society
This essay integrates queer, anti-Blackness, Indigenous, and psychoanalytic theories of temporali... more This essay integrates queer, anti-Blackness, Indigenous, and psychoanalytic theories of temporality to explore fetal personhood. It is argued that fetal personhood reflects a form of temporally-based affect regulation in which the fetus represents the promise and vulnerability of a tenuous future, rendering the uterus the only environment lawmakers seem to protect. In the face of the climate crisis, displacing promise and annihilation anxieties onto fetuses is a dangerous temporal system of affect regulation targeting BIPOC bodies with uteruses; a literal scorchedearth strategy designed to defend and buttress white, heteropatriarchal human exceptionalism, through a violent deployment of time. Keywords abortion Á fetal fetish Á temporality Á climate crisis Á human exceptionalism Á anti-Blackness Á heteropatriarchy Á psychoanalysis & Katie Gentile
espanolMientras que algunas universidades han adoptado la intervencion de observadores y practica... more espanolMientras que algunas universidades han adoptado la intervencion de observadores y practicas de justicia reparadora para abordar la conducta sexual inapropiada como un asunto comunitario, los institutos psicoanaliticos que se enfrentan a crisis de conducta sexual inapropiada han confiado por lo general en la tactica de probada eficacia de identificar al individuo neoliberal como el unico escenario de los problemas. Las estrategias exitosas utilizadas en las universidades pueden aplicarse al entorno psicoanalitico centrandose en la traicion institucional. Este enfoque sistemico, basado en la comunidad, descentraliza no solo los cuerpos individuales, sino tambien las subjetividades humanas. Aqui las instituciones se convierten no solo en contenedores para el afecto grupal o en red, como si el afecto mismo emanara de los individuos dentro de una institucion. La agencia y el afecto surgen a traves de redes, no de cuerpos individuales, y las instituciones son agentes activos en la ...
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 2021
This paper responds to Patricia Clough’s discussion of my “Kittens in the Clinical Space, Expandi... more This paper responds to Patricia Clough’s discussion of my “Kittens in the Clinical Space, Expanding Subjectivity through Dense Temporalities of Interspecies, Transcorporeal Becoming,” in this issue. Following Clough’s nimble intellectual play of theory and method, I revisit the ontological theory forwarded in my paper, but here it is buttressed more directly with critical race and Indigenous works. The technoecologies undergirding the shifting decisions of who gets to be considered “human” are discussed. Taking my approach of engaging within the tensegrities of dense temporalities, I move further into this as a method, a prefigurative endeavor where practices are simultaneously re-presenting established forms, ideally figuring them as fluid, changing processes responsive to the agencies of (re)colonizing and decolonizing, the human-more-than-human assemblage.
This essay is the introduction to the panel “Nonhuman Encounters: Animals, Objects, Affects, and ... more This essay is the introduction to the panel “Nonhuman Encounters: Animals, Objects, Affects, and the Place of Practice” featuring papers by Carla Freccero, Katie Gentile, Ann Pellegrini, Nathan Snaza, Donovan Schaefer, Nuar Alsadir, Francisco Gonzalez, Julietta Singh, Eleonora Fabião, Michelle Stephens, and Patricia Clough. Each essay responds to the question of these encounters in places of practice, including the clinical.
Subjectivity, 2013
In 2006, the US Center for Disease Control rolled out guidelines for 'preconception care,' instit... more In 2006, the US Center for Disease Control rolled out guidelines for 'preconception care,' institutionalizing the use of the public fetus as a fetish object in relation to which the cultural body can disavow and contain the post 9/11 contagion of annihilation anxiety. Integrating Bergson's ideas of duration with cultural and psychoanalytic theories of time and subjectivity, this article will examine these guidelines and the ways in which they become alluring as forms of traumatic repetition instilling hypervigilance as normality. The preconception care guidelines are a perfect example of Clarke's ideas of biomedicalization, as women's bodies emerge through practices of self and biomedical surveillance and risk management strategies in relation to the future fetus. This future orientation functions not only to disavow, displace and contain vulnerability, but also creates a future in order to attempt to go on being in the face of trauma and humiliation.
Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 2010
... Commentary on Article by Rheta Keylor and Roberta Apfel. Katie Gentile, Ph.D. ... (2005), The... more ... Commentary on Article by Rheta Keylor and Roberta Apfel. Katie Gentile, Ph.D. ... (2005), The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005), to name only a few, and countless books including almost anything by Nick Hornby such as Fever Pitch: A Fan's Life, 1998, or High Fidelity, 1996). ...
Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 2011
It is exciting to have the intellectual attention of two such thoughtful scholars. As all three o... more It is exciting to have the intellectual attention of two such thoughtful scholars. As all three of us seem to concur, there is a startling cultural trend ‘‘celebrating’’ pregnancy. Inevitably, we come to three differing conclusions about the emergence and potential functions of this trend and to what extent it signals something worrisome or is just part of a larger problem of a limitless free market mentality. This opportunity to respond to them allows me to use Lynne Zeavin’s and Lynne Layton’s (this issue) points to further expand and deepen my own ideas about the evolution of the cultural narrative of pregnancy and postpartum embodiment. My paper was an analysis of media images and stories, and Zeavin and Layton each responded to it in a different way. Zeavin used an apt clinical example to further her own thoughts about the media obsession with pregnancy, whereas Layton responded from her own use of cultural theory. Here I focus first on some of the questions raised by Zeavin and then respond to Layton’s alternative take on my observations about the media. In her response Zeavin writes that she sees this neo cult of domesticity not as a way to deal with an uncertain future but as an attempt to avoid the present and to erase time itself. Certainly when I describe the culture’s seeming obsession with pregnant celebrities, the constant blaring of terrorizing research studies about the risks of pregnancy, and the microscopic lens taken to women’s bodies 2 weeks after delivery, I am highlighting what I see as a dangerous and quite ambivalent relationship to time but not an attempt to erase it. I think what is happening is that there is an attempt to control time’s duration, the ways in which it unfolds. Duration is a concept described by French philosopher Henri Bergson, who is a subject of Grosz’s (2004) recent work on time. According to Grosz, ‘‘It is only the movement of time that ensures that not everything is given at once, that the universe is not over the moment it is born, that it occupies a duration, whose rhythms and speed, if they changed, would alter everything’’ (p. 246). Duration is not about succession, causation, or space, but it can be illuminated through images. It is the unfolding of becoming by accumulating pasts, while this becoming is also simultaneously an approach to the inevitable end—death. Rewriting the past (i.e., romanticizing domesticity) while wringing the life out of the present (i.e., erasing the evidence of having given birth) in favor of a plan for the future (i.e., the promise of the baby) functions to compress the past, present, and future in an attempt at planning for and controlling the future, what Grosz would describe as attempting to eliminate duration. Here I think not that
Psychotherapy and Politics International, 2005
This paper describes our efforts to organize a group of psychotherapists to apply their knowledge... more This paper describes our efforts to organize a group of psychotherapists to apply their knowledge toward social justice activism. This organizing required us to look at our surrounding US culture of consumer capitalism and reflect upon how its ideology worked with the Bush administration's exploitation of fear to garner public support for imperialist actions. We wanted to apply what we know about the unconscious dynamics of trauma and attachment to understand how citizens were being manipulated by the government and what they would be looking for in their national leaders. Lastly, we discuss the pressures on our evolving group from within as well as from the surrounding culture, and assess our successes and the places where we could have used from more reflection. While we focus on psychoanalysts, we suggest that particular group dynamics are intensified when members of a group are all culled from one profession.
Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 2011
Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 2009
The authors examined how witnessing community violence influenced social support networks and how... more The authors examined how witnessing community violence influenced social support networks and how these networks were associated with male-to-female intimate partner violence (IPV) in ethnically diverse male college students. The authors assessed whether male social support members themselves had perpetrated IPV (male network violence) and whether female social support members had been victimized by intimates (female network victimization). The results indicated an association between community violence and male network violence; both factors were significantly associated with higher levels of IPV. Furthermore, the relationship between community violence and IPV was partially mediated by male network violence. Additionally, the results indicated a moderated relationship such that male participants who reported the highest levels of exposure to community violence and male network violence were at highest risk for IPV. However, this relationship did not hold across all ethnicities and...
Psychoanalytic Dialogues - PSYCHOANAL DIALOGUES, 2006
In this discussion, I highlight the use of bodies in the place of worded language in Sonntag'... more In this discussion, I highlight the use of bodies in the place of worded language in Sonntag's clinical work with her patient Olivia. Loewald (1980) described the embodied aspects of primary process making the words of secondary process meaningful. As a survivor of sexual abuse and numerous medical invasions, Olivia does not have the capacity to meld primary and secondary process to create symbolization. Instead, she struggles to create meaning through a multiplicity of dissociated bodies and self-destructive behaviors. I describe the function of these dissociated bodies, in particular that of her puppy, and the imperative role Sonntag plays when she listens and communicates through Olivia's embodied language instead of interpreting through psychoanalytic words.
Eating Disorders, 2007
The bulk of eating disorder studies have focused on white, middle-upper class women, excluding et... more The bulk of eating disorder studies have focused on white, middle-upper class women, excluding ethnically and economically diverse women and men. Accordingly, our knowledge of prevalence rates and risk factors is reliant on this narrow literature. To expand upon the current literature, we examined eating disorders in ethnically diverse low-income, urban college students. We surveyed 884 incoming freshmen during an orientation class to assess the frequency of eating disorder diagnosis and the risk factors of child physical abuse and sexual abuse before and after age 13. We found 10% of our sample received an eating disorder diagnosis, 12.2% of the women and 7.3% of the men. The majority of these students were Latino/a or "other," with White women receiving the fewest diagnoses. For all women, both child physical abuse and both indices of sexual abuse contributed equally to the development of an eating disorder. For men only the sexual abuse indices contributed to an eating disorder diagnosis. These results indicate that ethnic minority populations do suffer from relatively high rates of self-reported eating disorders and that a history of trauma is a significant risk factor for eating disorders in these diverse populations of both women and men.
Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 2006
ABSTRACT
Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 2011
This article explores the explosion of images of pregnancy in the media since 9/11. Recent articl... more This article explores the explosion of images of pregnancy in the media since 9/11. Recent articles from The New York Times to academic journals have noted a marked increase in the representations of traditional gender roles since 2001, what the author here is comparing with the cult of domesticity that arose in the 19th century as an attempt at gaining
Studies in Gender and Sexuality, Jan 2, 2023
Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society
This essay integrates queer, anti-Blackness, Indigenous, and psychoanalytic theories of temporali... more This essay integrates queer, anti-Blackness, Indigenous, and psychoanalytic theories of temporality to explore fetal personhood. It is argued that fetal personhood reflects a form of temporally-based affect regulation in which the fetus represents the promise and vulnerability of a tenuous future, rendering the uterus the only environment lawmakers seem to protect. In the face of the climate crisis, displacing promise and annihilation anxieties onto fetuses is a dangerous temporal system of affect regulation targeting BIPOC bodies with uteruses; a literal scorchedearth strategy designed to defend and buttress white, heteropatriarchal human exceptionalism, through a violent deployment of time. Keywords abortion Á fetal fetish Á temporality Á climate crisis Á human exceptionalism Á anti-Blackness Á heteropatriarchy Á psychoanalysis & Katie Gentile
espanolMientras que algunas universidades han adoptado la intervencion de observadores y practica... more espanolMientras que algunas universidades han adoptado la intervencion de observadores y practicas de justicia reparadora para abordar la conducta sexual inapropiada como un asunto comunitario, los institutos psicoanaliticos que se enfrentan a crisis de conducta sexual inapropiada han confiado por lo general en la tactica de probada eficacia de identificar al individuo neoliberal como el unico escenario de los problemas. Las estrategias exitosas utilizadas en las universidades pueden aplicarse al entorno psicoanalitico centrandose en la traicion institucional. Este enfoque sistemico, basado en la comunidad, descentraliza no solo los cuerpos individuales, sino tambien las subjetividades humanas. Aqui las instituciones se convierten no solo en contenedores para el afecto grupal o en red, como si el afecto mismo emanara de los individuos dentro de una institucion. La agencia y el afecto surgen a traves de redes, no de cuerpos individuales, y las instituciones son agentes activos en la ...
Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 2021
This paper responds to Patricia Clough’s discussion of my “Kittens in the Clinical Space, Expandi... more This paper responds to Patricia Clough’s discussion of my “Kittens in the Clinical Space, Expanding Subjectivity through Dense Temporalities of Interspecies, Transcorporeal Becoming,” in this issue. Following Clough’s nimble intellectual play of theory and method, I revisit the ontological theory forwarded in my paper, but here it is buttressed more directly with critical race and Indigenous works. The technoecologies undergirding the shifting decisions of who gets to be considered “human” are discussed. Taking my approach of engaging within the tensegrities of dense temporalities, I move further into this as a method, a prefigurative endeavor where practices are simultaneously re-presenting established forms, ideally figuring them as fluid, changing processes responsive to the agencies of (re)colonizing and decolonizing, the human-more-than-human assemblage.
This essay is the introduction to the panel “Nonhuman Encounters: Animals, Objects, Affects, and ... more This essay is the introduction to the panel “Nonhuman Encounters: Animals, Objects, Affects, and the Place of Practice” featuring papers by Carla Freccero, Katie Gentile, Ann Pellegrini, Nathan Snaza, Donovan Schaefer, Nuar Alsadir, Francisco Gonzalez, Julietta Singh, Eleonora Fabião, Michelle Stephens, and Patricia Clough. Each essay responds to the question of these encounters in places of practice, including the clinical.
Subjectivity, 2013
In 2006, the US Center for Disease Control rolled out guidelines for 'preconception care,' instit... more In 2006, the US Center for Disease Control rolled out guidelines for 'preconception care,' institutionalizing the use of the public fetus as a fetish object in relation to which the cultural body can disavow and contain the post 9/11 contagion of annihilation anxiety. Integrating Bergson's ideas of duration with cultural and psychoanalytic theories of time and subjectivity, this article will examine these guidelines and the ways in which they become alluring as forms of traumatic repetition instilling hypervigilance as normality. The preconception care guidelines are a perfect example of Clarke's ideas of biomedicalization, as women's bodies emerge through practices of self and biomedical surveillance and risk management strategies in relation to the future fetus. This future orientation functions not only to disavow, displace and contain vulnerability, but also creates a future in order to attempt to go on being in the face of trauma and humiliation.
Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 2010
... Commentary on Article by Rheta Keylor and Roberta Apfel. Katie Gentile, Ph.D. ... (2005), The... more ... Commentary on Article by Rheta Keylor and Roberta Apfel. Katie Gentile, Ph.D. ... (2005), The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005), to name only a few, and countless books including almost anything by Nick Hornby such as Fever Pitch: A Fan's Life, 1998, or High Fidelity, 1996). ...
Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 2011
It is exciting to have the intellectual attention of two such thoughtful scholars. As all three o... more It is exciting to have the intellectual attention of two such thoughtful scholars. As all three of us seem to concur, there is a startling cultural trend ‘‘celebrating’’ pregnancy. Inevitably, we come to three differing conclusions about the emergence and potential functions of this trend and to what extent it signals something worrisome or is just part of a larger problem of a limitless free market mentality. This opportunity to respond to them allows me to use Lynne Zeavin’s and Lynne Layton’s (this issue) points to further expand and deepen my own ideas about the evolution of the cultural narrative of pregnancy and postpartum embodiment. My paper was an analysis of media images and stories, and Zeavin and Layton each responded to it in a different way. Zeavin used an apt clinical example to further her own thoughts about the media obsession with pregnancy, whereas Layton responded from her own use of cultural theory. Here I focus first on some of the questions raised by Zeavin and then respond to Layton’s alternative take on my observations about the media. In her response Zeavin writes that she sees this neo cult of domesticity not as a way to deal with an uncertain future but as an attempt to avoid the present and to erase time itself. Certainly when I describe the culture’s seeming obsession with pregnant celebrities, the constant blaring of terrorizing research studies about the risks of pregnancy, and the microscopic lens taken to women’s bodies 2 weeks after delivery, I am highlighting what I see as a dangerous and quite ambivalent relationship to time but not an attempt to erase it. I think what is happening is that there is an attempt to control time’s duration, the ways in which it unfolds. Duration is a concept described by French philosopher Henri Bergson, who is a subject of Grosz’s (2004) recent work on time. According to Grosz, ‘‘It is only the movement of time that ensures that not everything is given at once, that the universe is not over the moment it is born, that it occupies a duration, whose rhythms and speed, if they changed, would alter everything’’ (p. 246). Duration is not about succession, causation, or space, but it can be illuminated through images. It is the unfolding of becoming by accumulating pasts, while this becoming is also simultaneously an approach to the inevitable end—death. Rewriting the past (i.e., romanticizing domesticity) while wringing the life out of the present (i.e., erasing the evidence of having given birth) in favor of a plan for the future (i.e., the promise of the baby) functions to compress the past, present, and future in an attempt at planning for and controlling the future, what Grosz would describe as attempting to eliminate duration. Here I think not that
Psychotherapy and Politics International, 2005
This paper describes our efforts to organize a group of psychotherapists to apply their knowledge... more This paper describes our efforts to organize a group of psychotherapists to apply their knowledge toward social justice activism. This organizing required us to look at our surrounding US culture of consumer capitalism and reflect upon how its ideology worked with the Bush administration's exploitation of fear to garner public support for imperialist actions. We wanted to apply what we know about the unconscious dynamics of trauma and attachment to understand how citizens were being manipulated by the government and what they would be looking for in their national leaders. Lastly, we discuss the pressures on our evolving group from within as well as from the surrounding culture, and assess our successes and the places where we could have used from more reflection. While we focus on psychoanalysts, we suggest that particular group dynamics are intensified when members of a group are all culled from one profession.
Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 2011
Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 2009
The authors examined how witnessing community violence influenced social support networks and how... more The authors examined how witnessing community violence influenced social support networks and how these networks were associated with male-to-female intimate partner violence (IPV) in ethnically diverse male college students. The authors assessed whether male social support members themselves had perpetrated IPV (male network violence) and whether female social support members had been victimized by intimates (female network victimization). The results indicated an association between community violence and male network violence; both factors were significantly associated with higher levels of IPV. Furthermore, the relationship between community violence and IPV was partially mediated by male network violence. Additionally, the results indicated a moderated relationship such that male participants who reported the highest levels of exposure to community violence and male network violence were at highest risk for IPV. However, this relationship did not hold across all ethnicities and...
Psychoanalytic Dialogues - PSYCHOANAL DIALOGUES, 2006
In this discussion, I highlight the use of bodies in the place of worded language in Sonntag'... more In this discussion, I highlight the use of bodies in the place of worded language in Sonntag's clinical work with her patient Olivia. Loewald (1980) described the embodied aspects of primary process making the words of secondary process meaningful. As a survivor of sexual abuse and numerous medical invasions, Olivia does not have the capacity to meld primary and secondary process to create symbolization. Instead, she struggles to create meaning through a multiplicity of dissociated bodies and self-destructive behaviors. I describe the function of these dissociated bodies, in particular that of her puppy, and the imperative role Sonntag plays when she listens and communicates through Olivia's embodied language instead of interpreting through psychoanalytic words.
Eating Disorders, 2007
The bulk of eating disorder studies have focused on white, middle-upper class women, excluding et... more The bulk of eating disorder studies have focused on white, middle-upper class women, excluding ethnically and economically diverse women and men. Accordingly, our knowledge of prevalence rates and risk factors is reliant on this narrow literature. To expand upon the current literature, we examined eating disorders in ethnically diverse low-income, urban college students. We surveyed 884 incoming freshmen during an orientation class to assess the frequency of eating disorder diagnosis and the risk factors of child physical abuse and sexual abuse before and after age 13. We found 10% of our sample received an eating disorder diagnosis, 12.2% of the women and 7.3% of the men. The majority of these students were Latino/a or "other," with White women receiving the fewest diagnoses. For all women, both child physical abuse and both indices of sexual abuse contributed equally to the development of an eating disorder. For men only the sexual abuse indices contributed to an eating disorder diagnosis. These results indicate that ethnic minority populations do suffer from relatively high rates of self-reported eating disorders and that a history of trauma is a significant risk factor for eating disorders in these diverse populations of both women and men.
Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 2006
ABSTRACT
Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 2011
This article explores the explosion of images of pregnancy in the media since 9/11. Recent articl... more This article explores the explosion of images of pregnancy in the media since 9/11. Recent articles from The New York Times to academic journals have noted a marked increase in the representations of traditional gender roles since 2001, what the author here is comparing with the cult of domesticity that arose in the 19th century as an attempt at gaining