The Subordination of the Feminine? Developing a Critical Feminist Approach to the Psychoanalysis of Organizations (original) (raw)
Related papers
2005
Women have always been alienated from the symbolic structure of the traditional Christian image of God. The symbolic is the realm of society and subjectivity has been governed by the Law of the Father. To discern the subjectivity of women, both Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray stress the necessity of changing the representational system of Christian symbols in phallocentric culture. Both Kristeva and Irigaray view religion as a possible vehicle for greater interaction between the Symbolic and the Semiotic/Imaginary. Both have carefully discerned the representation of the image of women in relation to religious languages. Christian patriarchal symbolic order is challenged by the Irigaraian imaginary and the Kristevan semiotic. Observing and comparing the works of Kristeva and Irigaray, this paper will find out how they reconceptualize and reconstruct the divine and women especially on their God-talk.
The recent turn to Lacan's work in critically-oriented Organization and Management Theory signals a welcome focus on one of the 20th century's most influential thinkers. This article introduces Lacan's thesis on gender, making a case for its importance for understanding organizations. We discuss two contrasting receptions to Lacan's Seminar XX, from pro-and anti-Lacanian feminists, offer our own interpretation which can be summed up as a Lacanian inspired parody of the phallic signifier, and argue that Lacanian theorists should turn Lacan's ideas back upon them/ ourselves to question critically our own positions. Further we review Lacan's seminar XVII and its analysis of four dominant discourses-the university, the master, the hysteric and the analyst. The advantages of the discourse of the hysteric for a Lacanian politics of gender, enabling us to undo our arguments from outside of our own gender and identity, are then identified. We thus advocate conceptual and empathetic (hysterical) bisexuality for critical scholarship within organization studies that already, perhaps unawares, is hysterical. This allows us to avoid, as much as possible, slipping into the frozen and sterile discourse of the master.
Feminism and Psychoanalysis (Freudian Critiques)
This entry will discuss psychoanalytic feminism, not feminist psychoanalysis . Psychoanalysis develops a theory of the unconscious that ineluctably links sexuality and subjectivity together. In doing so, it reveals the ways in which our sense of self - as well as our political loyalties and attachments - are influenced by unconscious drives and ordered by symbolic structures that are beyond the field of individual agency. It is commonly assumed that any relationship between feminism and psychoanalysis would have to be founded on perfidious ground. For example, in Sigmund Freud's lecture on ‘Femininity,’ while discussing the “riddle of femininity” (Freud 1968 [1933], 116) or of sexual differentiation, Freud impeaches women as “the problem” (113) all the while exculpating his female audience from this indictment by offering the hope that they are “more masculine than feminine” (117). We can see why many feminists have been wary both of the gendered biases contained in Freud's theories and of the overt content of his claims. This entry will explain how and why feminist theory has, nonetheless, undertaken a serious re-reading of Freud and developed careful analyses of his fundamental concepts, working out their limits, impasses, and possibilities. It can be seen through the writings of such feminist writers as Juliet Mitchell, Jacqueline Rose, Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray; Sigmund Freud’s work on psychoanalysis has offered feminists challenges, revolutionized theories, and patriarchal targets.
The article explores the political derivations of psychoanalytical discourse on femininity, starting from the impact of Lacanian positions on feminist thought. The consideration of a dimension of absolute otherness of female sexuality, irreducible to masculinity and to a phallic domain – not-all phallic –, theorized by Lacan in the 70s, opens up many complex issues for the politics of women's liberation. It is a matter of living the absolute difference without either radically excluding it from the speakable or letting it be part of a romantic imagery of the otherness that perpetuates sexual hierarchy and, consequently, female subordination. Taking up the proposal of such authors as Julia Kristeva or Silvia Tubert, we suggest that the Lacanian theory offers the conceptual tools to shift from exclusion to revolt , from the place of the Other as a pedestal for the Same to a political function of female otherness and of the " not-all " that it represents: a part of the Kultur and its difficulties, but not entangled in it to the point that it cannot bring any innovation.
PSYCHOANALYZING FEMINISM: A CRITIQUE OF SONS AND LOVERS
The relation between feminism and psychoanalysis began with Kate Millett's Sexual Politics which critiques Freud for his conviction in the inequality of sexes, his practice of sexualizing human relationships and his style of explaining aberrations in terms of complexes and envies. The feminist critique of Freud is continued in The Madwoman in the Attic: the Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar who locate the concept of social castration in the novels of nineteenth century women writers. By social castration, they mean lack of social power for women. They argue that these female writers identified themselves with the characters they detest. A combination of feminism and psychoanalysis is explored in Jacqueline Rose's work The Haunting of Sylvia Plath. Feminist exploration of Lacanian psychoanalysis began with Feminine Sexuality co-edited by Juliette Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose. They argue that subjectivity is assigned to a child at the moment of symbolic castration, the division between the Self and the other. It follows therefore that gendered subjectivity is constituted through castration with the phallus as the transcendental signifier, enabling the division. Mitchell and Rose argue that psychoanalysis offers feminism a theory of gendered subjectivity: a concept of the subject's resistance to rigid gender identities. In Sexuality in the Field of Vision, Rose emphasizes the unstable nature of gender identity and argues that femininity is neither simply achieved nor is ever complete. Both Mitchell and Rose focus on Lacanian re-reading of Freud where penis envy is referred not to the male sex organ, but to its symbolic and cultural meaning: the authority and power associated with the masculine. Lacan's term phallus symbolizes the privileges, power and authority entitled by the male in a patriarchal society.
Fear and envy: Sexual difference and the economies of feminist critique in psychoanalytic discourse
Science in Context, 1997
This essay examines Freud's construction of a mythical moment during early childhood, in which differences between male and female sexual identities are said to originate. It focuses on the way in which Freud divides fear and envy between the sexes, allocating the emotion of (castration) fear to men, and that of (penis) envy to women. On the one hand, the problems of this construction are pointed out, but on the other hand, it is shown that even a much-maligned myth may still provide food for thought.