Masculinity, Complex: A Historical Take

Abstract

The author recapitulates the history of the changes in second-wave feminist psychoanalytic thinking regarding masculinity, beginning with the critique of the Freudian-Lacanian position of phallic monism adumbrated by Juliet Mitchell. It traces the reversal brought about by the North American position, represented by Stoller and Chodorow, that emphasized the boy’s problem in breaking his primary identification with the mother. Continuing, the author summarizes her own critique of the oedipal model and have-have-not binary that it dictated as well as her own outline of preoedipal “homoerotic identificatory love” and the overinclusive nature of early identifications. In addition, she includes her understanding of the Oedipus as founded in the repudiation of passivity and its projection into the female “Other,” the daughter position. Along the way she points to how a number of other feminist psychoanalytic thinkers took the idea of postoedipal and overinclusive thinking further and in a more critical direction.

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