WSTA03H3 Lecture 10: Reading Notes--Psychoanalytic and Cultural Feminism (Week 10)
11 Mar 2016
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Week #10 reading notes: psychoanalytic and cultural feminism. Circa 1970s: british, american and french feminists reinterpreted freud"s theory, patriarchal european family structures resulted in making girls. Open and boys guarded : ergo cultural + social effects of men"s emotional repression, fear of castration and ambivalence toward woman (need + not needing at the same time) Gendered personality structures: men"s ambivalent need of women"s emotionality + their simultaneous rejection of women as potential castrators, women submit to men for emotional connectedness, ergo women have children for emotional connectedness thus reinforcing the cycle. Women were relegated to subordinate family roles: handmaiden"s to men"s emotional needs. Freud men + women are made, not born. Psychoanalytic theory helps to show how sexual inequality and social organization of gender are reproduced: happens through transformations of consciousness in the psyche; not social and institutional only personal is political . Societies create beliefs about gender: through discourses and texts (and subtexts)
