This book uses an interdisciplinary approach to explore the ways in which sexual difference can be understood as an encounter with otherness through the abjected, investigating social discourses and unconscious anxieties around "monstrous" women throughout history and how they may challenge these characterizations. The author expands on Barbara Creed’s notion of the monstrous-feminine to give a specifically Lacanian analysis of different types of feminine monsters, such as Mary Toft, Andrea Yates, Lillith, and Medusa. Drawing on Lacan’s theory of "sexuation," the book interrogates characterizations of pregnant women during the Enlightenment, women who commit filicide, mothers in the psychoanalytic clinic, and women with borderline personality disorder. Chapters explore how encounters with a feminine subject in the Lacanian sense can manifest in misogynistic practices aimed at women, as well as how a Deleuzian notion of becoming-other may pose a challenge to their interpretation in a phallocentric meaning-making system. Creatively engaging the work of both Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze, the text goes beyond simply identifying misogynistic practices by probing the relational, unconscious dynamics between hegemonic groups and those designated as "other." Approaching the concept of the borderline from a critical and transdisciplinary perspective, this text will appeal to postgraduate students and researchers from Lacanian psychoanalysis, gender studies, cultural studies, and critical psychology.

This book takes a critical feminist approach to Lacan’s fundamental concepts, merging discourse and sexuation theories in a novel way for both psychoanalysis and feminism, and exploring the possibility of a feminist subject within a non-masculine logic. In Lacan and Critical Feminism, Carusi merges Lacan’s theories of discourse and sexuation, not only from a gender/sexuality angle, but also from a literary, feminist, and women’s studies framework. By drawing examples from literature, film, art, and socio-political movements to focus on discourse and sexuation, the text examines how tropes impact the subject’s positionality within any discourse mode. The book also uses women’s collective experience and action to illustrate ways that women have repositioned dominant narratives discursively. This text represents essential reading for researchers interested in the relationship between Lacan and feminist theory.

In this fascinating new book, Rosalinda Quintieri addresses some of the key questions of visual theory concerning our unending fascination with simulacra by evaluating the recent return of the life-size doll in European and American visual culture. Through a focus on the contemporary photographic and cinematic forms of this figure and a critical mobilisation of its anthropological complexity, this book offers a new critical understanding of this classical aesthetic motif as a way to explore the relevance that doubling, fantasy and simulation hold in our contemporary culture. Quintieri explores the figure of the inanimate human double as an "inhuman partner", reflecting on contemporary visuality as the field of a hypermodern, post-Oedipal aesthetic. Through a series of case studies that blur traditional boundaries between practices (photography, performance, sculpture, painting, documentary) and between genres (comedy, drama, fairy tale), Quintieri puts in contrast the new function of the double and its plays of simulations on the background of the capitalist injunction to enjoy. Engaging with new theories on post-Oedipal forms of subjectivity developed within the Lacanian orientation of psychoanalysis, Quintieri offers exciting analyses of still and moving photographic work, giving body to an original aesthetic model that promises to revitalise our understanding of contemporary photography and visual culture. It will appeal to psychoanalysts and researchers from Lacanian psychoanalysis, visual studies and cultural theory, as well as readers with an academic interest in the cultural history of dolls and the theory of the uncanny.

This innovative text addresses the lack of literature regarding intersectional approaches to psychoanalysis, underscoring the importance of thinking through race, class, and gender within psychoanalytic theory and practice. The book tackles the widespread perception of psychoanalysis today as a discipline detached from the progressive ideals of social responsibility, institutional psychotherapy, and community mental health. Bringing together a range of international contributions, the collection explores issues of class, politics, oppression, and resistance within the field of psychoanalysis in cultural, theoretical, and clinical contexts. It shows how, in contrast to this misperception, psychoanalysis has been attentive to these ideals from its origins, as well as demonstrating how it continues to be relevant today, through wide-ranging conceptual discussions of the anti-globalization, Black Lives Matter, and #MeToo movements. Written in an accessible style, Psychoanalysis, Politics, Oppression and Resistance will be essential reading for practicing psychoanalysts as well as academics and students in a range of humanities and social sciences fields.

While traditional feminist readings on antagonism have pivoted around the sole axis of sex and/or gender, a broader and intersectional approach to antagonism is much needed; this book offers an innovative, feminist, and discursive reading on the Lacanian concept of sexual position as a way to problematize the concepts of political antagonism and political subjects. Can Lacanian psychoanalysis offer new grounds for feminist politics? This discursive mediation of Lacan's work presents a new theoretical framework upon which to articulate proposals for intersectional political theory. The first part of this book develops the theoretical framework, and the second part applies it to the construction of woman’s identity in European politics and economy. It concludes with notes for a feminist political and economic praxis through community currencies and municipalism. The interdisciplinary approach of this book will appeal to scholars interested in the fields of psychoanalysis, feminisms, and political philosophy as well as multidisciplinary scholars interested in discourse theory, sexuality and gender studies, cultural studies, queer theory, and continental philosophy. Students at master's and PhD level will also find this a useful feminist introduction to Lacanian psychoanalysis, discourse, and gender.

This book offers a close analysis of the relationship between diets and identity in modern Western culture through the examination of popular texts including blogs, diet books, and websites. The relationship between consumerism and identity has been explored by scholars for decades now, but less has been said about how food and eating behaviors have been wrapped up in this relationship. Using Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, chapters investigate how diets and eating are used as a means to navigate individuals’ complex, unconscious desires and conflicts, and illustrate how diet and advertising industries use this to capitalize on the anxieties of the modern subject. The text’s psychoanalytic approach offers rare insight into the unconscious desires that dictate individuals’ choices around diets and lifestyle. By situating anxiety as the tension between jouissance and desire, the book promotes further understanding of individuals’ subjective and complex relationships with food. Through an understanding of the subject and symptoms from a psychoanalytic perspective, we can begin to think differently about the ways we come to eating and dieting. This book will be useful for scholars and postgraduate students studying Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, consumer psychology, mental health, the sociology of culture, and social and cultural anthropology.

Thirty-five years after her death, this book reassesses the Argentinian poet Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-72) in the light of recent publications of her 'complete' poetry and prose, diaries, and previously unavailable archive material.The essays in this volume explore Pizarnik's work from new angles: they examine her production as a literary critic, revealing her intense identificatory strategies as a reader, and the impact of such activities upon her own creative process. They also weigh up the influence of her ambiguous attitudes towards sexuality on her poetic personae, as well as the ways in which her concern with sex inspires her experimentation with humorous prose. New approaches are taken to key texts and themes: in the case of the much-studied work, 'La condesa sangrienta', through a detailed philosophical reading involving comparisons with Kafka, and, in the case of the theme of the split subject, through the lens of translation.By broadening the scope of Pizarnik studies, this book will act as a catalyst for further research into the work of this compelling poet.

This book analyzes the gendered transformation of magical figures occurring in Arthurian romance in England from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries. In the earlier texts, magic is predominantly a masculine pursuit, garnering its user prestige and power, but in the later texts, magic becomes a primarily feminine activity, one that marks its user as wicked and heretical. This project explores both the literary and the social motivations for this transformation, seeking an answer to the question, 'why did the witch become wicked?' Heidi Breuer traverses both the medieval and early modern periods and considers the way in which the representation of literary witches interacted with the culture at large, ultimately arguing that a series of economic crises in the fourteenth century created a labour shortage met by women. As women moved into the previously male-dominated economy, literary backlash came in the form of the witch, and social backlash followed soon after in the form of Renaissance witch-hunting. The witch figure serves a similar function in modern American culture because late-industrial capitalism challenges gender conventions in similar ways as the economic crises of the medieval period.

This book analyses various forms of liminality and transgression in different geographies and demonstrates how and why various physical and symbolic boundaries create liminality and transgression. Its focus is on comprehending the ways in which these borders and boundaries generate liminality and transgression rather than viewing them solely as issues. It provides case studies from the past and present, allowing readers to connect subjects, periods, and geographies. It consists of theoretical and empirical chapters that demonstrate how borders and liminality are interconnected. The book also benefits from the power of several visual essays by artists to complete the theoretical and empirical chapters which demonstrate different forms of liminality without need of much words. The book will be of interest to researchers and students working in the fields of urban and rural studies, urban sociology, cities and communities, urban and regional planning, urban anthropology, political science, migration studies, human geography, cultural geography, urban anthropology, and visual arts.

Why has the mask been such an enduring generic motif in horror cinema? This book explores its transformative potential historically across myriad cultures, particularly in relation to its ritual and mythmaking capacities, and its intersection with power, ideology and identity. All of these factors have a direct impact on mask-centric horror cinema: meanings, values and rituals associated with masks evolve and are updated in horror cinema to reflect new contexts, rendering the mask a persistent, meaningful and dynamic aspect of the genre’s iconography. This study debates horror cinema’s durability as a site for the potency of the mask’s broader symbolic power to be constantly re-explored, re-imagined and re-invented as an object of cross-cultural and ritual significance that existed long before the moving image culture of cinema.