Applied Psychoanalysis
Jerome A. Winer in The Annual of Psychoanalysis, V. 21, 1993
At night in the villages of the Lese of northeastern Zaire, men and their children gather under leaf and bamboo roofs. As they warm themselves by the fire, their wives, sisters, and mothers come to sit at its edge in the hope that they will be able to hear the many stories the men are about to tell their children. The Lese stories shock even the trained anthropologist, for as the stories unfold it becomes clear that there are no happy endings, no princes and princesses who marry and live happily ever after. The stories seem to have little in common with the folktales that our own parents told us and that we tell our children today. Instead, the stories are, almost without exception, tragedies with unhappy endings and gruesome and violent plots. In one story, a woman's siblings suffocate her with diarrhea, and after she is buried she is exhumed and raped by a phallic spirit; she succeeds in castrating the spirit only to die another horrible death. In another story, an evil spirit enters into a man's body and causes it to explode.
gender and sex as performance
Patricia Gherovici in Please Select Your Gender, 2010
In her enormously inuential book, Gender Trouble, Judith Butler (1990) observed that contemporary feminism had “gotten in trouble” by becoming a “woman’s” movement, that is, by assuming that women were a uniform group with shared identity, interests, and goals. The critique of patriarchal culture made on behalf of the presumed universality of “women,” she argued, produced an “unwitting regulation and reication of gender relations” (pp. 5-6). It would reinforce the binary view of gender relations (in which culture builds masculine and feminine genders on male and female bodies), the very template from which feminism was trying to break away. She argued that making political claims in the name of women, thus treated as a seamless category, was a self-defeating gesture. This argument partly overlapped with Lacan’s formula: “Woman does not exist,” which means that, unlike masculinity, which is a universal function founded on the phallic exception of castration, woman is a nonuniversal (Lacan, 1998b, p. 7; p. 72).
Phalloplasty for an amputated phallus in intersex patients
Published in Arab Journal of Urology, 2012
Abdelmoneim Elhaggagy, Mohammed Elgammal, Mohamed Gadelmoula, Tarik Elgammal
Objective: To report our experience of phalloplasty using a radial forearm free-flap (RFF) and insertion of a penile prosthesis for the amputated phallus. Patients and methods: Phalloplasty was carried out in nine intersex patients with ambiguous genitalia as a result of female circumcision, with a consequent partial or complete excision of theirmicrophallus. Sixmonths later a penile prosthesiswas inserted in the periostium of the lower border of the symphysis pubis in the first six patients. Results: All patients were fully satisfied with the size and cosmetic appearance of their penis. One patient had a urinary fistula that was closed surgically. All of the patients are continent. The penile prosthesiswas implanted successfullywith no complications. Conclusions: Phalloplasty using a RFF and insertion of a penile prosthesis for the amputated phallus are technically feasible, with good clinical and functional outcomes.
Penile reconstruction in the male
Published in Arab Journal of Urology, 2013
Giulio Garaffa, Vincenzo Gentile, Gabriele Antonini, Petros Tsafrakidis, Amr Abdel Raheem, David J. Ralph
We describe and review the most recent techniques of male genital reconstruction, identifying relevant material with an unstructured PubMed-based search of previous reports, using the keywords ‘reconstruction’, ‘glans’, ‘shaft’, ‘lymphoedema’, ‘skin graft’, ‘scrotoplasty’, ‘urethroplasty’, and ‘penile prosthesis’. This search produced 22 reports that were analysed in this review. Split-thickness skin grafts are ideal for glans reconstruction, while full-thickness skin grafts should be used to cover defects on the shaft penis, as they tend to heal with less contracture. The radial artery-based free-flap phalloplasty is the technique of total phallic reconstruction associated with the highest satisfaction rates. Further research is required to identify an ideal reconstructive technique that would guarantee superior cosmetic and functional results, minimising donor site morbidity.
Questioning the Phallus: Jacques Lacan and Judith Butler
Published in Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 2020
This article engages with the relationship between Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and poststructuralist gender theory by comparing and contrasting the questioning of the symbolic phallus (function) undertaken by Jacques Lacan and Judith Butler. The debate takes place through Lacan’s 1958 paper “The Signification of the Phallus,” to which Butler responded critically in Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, published in 1990 and 1993, respectively. Lacan explains that the symbolic phallic function is the “anchor”’ from and around which the symbolic works and ties the discussion to the question of sexual difference by explaining that men and women are positioned differently in relation to it. Butler charges that Lacan’s schema is heteronormative—because it is limited to the male/female schema—and patriarchal because within that heteronormative framework it affirms the masculine perspective. Rather than follow the usual route taken by recent Lacanian scholarship on this issue and focus on Lacan’s later works, especially Seminar XX on female sexuality, I appeal to the contents of two works written in the same year (1958) as “The Signification of the Phallus”—Seminar V and “Guiding Remarks for a Convention on Female Sexuality”—to offer a qualified defense of Lacan that accepts that his early framework is heteronormative but questions the patriarchal charge by showing that within these pre-Seminar XX texts he explicitly works to undermine that logic.
Related Knowledge Centers
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