Women, Sex, and Psyche Syllabus

Minozzo, A.C. (2020) Freud e o conhecimento-do-corpo – viajando pelos limites da linguagem via angústia. In: A. Parente and L.Silveira (2020) (eds) Freud e o Patriarcado - Leituras para os nossos tempos. São Paulo: Hedra., 2020

Abject Love examines the process by which bodies becomes labelled 'able-bodied' or 'disabled', and interrogates the constitution of these categories. Not all bodies are able-bodied, but all human beings have bodies that someday stop functioning. Inahara suggests that we cannot simply assume a natural division between the able-bodied and the disabled. This book explores the different ways in which we can theorise physical disability and argues, using the work of psychoanalytic and poststructuralist feminists, (including Judith Butler, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva), that the allocation of the category of disability is a process of abjection. The 'abject' is something that society constantly attempts to throw out because it unsettles carefully bounded conceptions of 'self'. Throughout the book the theoretical narrative is anchored in reading of cultural texts, particularly film, but also including art and performance.

“[E]ach of us enters the world through the body of a woman,—a carnal enigma that has virtually baffled our systems of understanding, rather than fleeing, condemning, or idealizing the body of the (m)other, we need to recognize her in ourselves,” writes Sprengnether (1990, pp. 245-46; our italics). Perhaps it is the recognition of her in us that is too threatening as a secret to be divulged, and perhaps it is the recognition of her in ourselves that revives the trauma of her loss. The body of the m(o)ther—the mother and the woman as the other—has always been under attack oscillating through visibility and invisibility; being attacked for being visible—unveiled-- and being attacked for being invisible--veiled. What is it to be a woman? Is a woman defined by her anatomy, by her physical body, or is what she wears part of the definition of womanhood? Freud’s (1925) question, “what does a woman want?” is not separate from the cultural discourse which identifies someone as a woman in her visibility and invisibility. And in line with Hélène Cixous’ (Cixous & Derrida, 2001) utilization of the incidental French connection between the two verbs savoir (to know) and voir (to see), how can we know what we do not see and how can we see what we do not know? In this paper, we will try to present a psychoanalytic reading of fantasies surrounding the chador, a veil-like outer garment worn in public by some Iranian women, treating it as a psychic object that comes to life in relation to others within a particular cultural context. Eschewing an Orientalist’s ideological position, we will attempt to examine the social and psychic function of dress, and the chador in particular, and the significance of the preoccupation with such clothing items in the fantasy for men and women. We will also argue that fixation with making the woman invisible and visible through chadoring and de-chadoring may be traced to a ‘fort-da’ movement of sending away and recalling the (m)other as posited by Freud (1920).