CFP: Psychoanalysis and Feminism Today

Stasis announces a new call for papers for a thematic issue to be published in the winter of 2021: “Psychoanalysis and feminism today”.

We invite you to submit your papers. The deadline for submissions is 01.09.2021.

Nowadays, issues of symbolization of sex and sexual difference are becoming all the more relevant in politics and culture. They take a variety of forms, depending on the country where they arise. However, we may note general trends associated, on the one hand, with the processes of feminization of society, gender emancipation, emergence of queer culture and the new ethical turn (along with cancel culture), and, on the other hand, with the reaction of traditional patriarchal institutions and structures to these processes. In the modern world, where the problems of sexual difference, desire and language are taking a different form, we deem it important to philosophically rethink the very subject of psychoanalysis and feminism, as well as intersections and contradictions between them.

There is an overlapping between psychoanalysis and feminism in the questions "what does it mean to be a sexed subject?" and "how is a female subject constituted?" The very formulation of these questions draws both theories away from essentialism. Sex is not a predetermined notion—this is what psychoanalysis and feminism demonstrate in their theoretical, practical, and political stances.

In its questioning of sex, feminism discovers a theoretical and political problem that must be resolved on some utopian vector. Psychoanalysis sees unconscious subjective positions in linguistic structures based on certain configurations of desire and ways of regulating jouissance.

The end of the 19th century saw the rise of women's movements, which coincided with the invention of psychoanalysis. Throughout the 20th century, the history of the relationship between psychoanalysis and feminism went through various phases: from open theoretical antagonism to mutual recognition and borrowing of ideas. The complex interactions between these two theories have not only profoundly changed society, but have also greatly enriched the history of thought, including contributing to the emergence of such significant fields of knowledge as gender studies and queer theory.

Contrary to seeing psychoanalysis as a patriarchal theory, we believe that it collaborated with the female from the very start: it is women who became Sigmund Freud's first patients and who were the co-creators of his theoretical ideas. Today we are rediscovering the classic psychoanalytic works and concepts of Sabine Spielrein, Lou Salomé, Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, Helene Deutsch, Vera Schmidt, Francoise Dolto, and many others. Later, feminist interventions into psychoanalytic theory became a significant contribution to the history of psychoanalysis. Works by female authors such as Luce Irigaray, Juliet Mitchell, Jane Gallop, Jacqueline Rose, Helene Cixous, Julia Kristeva, etc. gave birth to a wide variety of ideas, where the teachings of Freud, Jacques Lacan, Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott and other psychoanalysts are being reconsidered from within the feminist epistemological and ontological framework.

Neither feminism nor psychoanalysis is a purely theoretical project—these are, first of all, practical enterprises engaged in their own ethics. Feminism began as a struggle for women's right to vote; the struggle for rights is its primordial domain. Psychoanalysis is, above all, a special type of social link aimed at exploring the unconscious. It emerged during the final formation of the modern nuclear family, its subject is the earliest relationships and attachments of the subject within the family structure. Feminism also has a long and rich history of problematizing the family institution and conceptually dividing the social field into private and public. The common focus of both theories turns out to be key today, when family structures are under pressure from the central processes of our time: from the neoliberalization of the economy to the global pandemic.

Thus, the editorial team of this issue, with productively differing opinions and views, raises the following questions:

- How do psychoanalysis and feminism coincide and/or diverge on political and social matters?

- Are the strategies of their theoretical and practical synthesis justified?

- What is "male" and "female" today? Do these positions exist outside the ideologies that form them, and can they be radically transformed in practice?

- How is the language and the symbolic in general understood within these two theories?

- How can these discourses interact when considering such specific phenomena of our time as:

mass feminist movements,

the new moral sensibilities,

the transgender and the queer,

domestic violence,

gender traditionalism,

new forms of romantic relationships?

Finally, how is psychoanalysis relevant in a society with a widespread "therapeutic culture"—and how can modern feminism position itself relative to it if, as Shulamith Firestone wrote in 1970, a feminist political organization in groups of growing awareness was to become a "progressive replacement" for psychotherapy?

We are announcing an open call for articles on these topics. Email your submissions to: stasis@eu.spb.ru

Editors of the Issue: Yana Markova, Elena Kostyleva, Lera Levchuk, Zoya Komarova, Oxana Timofeeva

http://stasisjournal.net/index.php/journal