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This Journal, founded by the psychoanalyst Karen Horney, has long sought to address the causes of feminism. In the current Journal issue, we further our feminist project in attending to the different voices of feminism, cogently charted by Muriel Dimen. She finds a First Step in Freud's successful initiative by providing a discourse that enabled female development and gender organization to be placed on the table in the first place. Freud's conclusions, unacceptable to Karen Horney and Clara Thompson, led to a palpable feminist critique arising from what they regarded to be a far-ranging cultural misogyny—what Dimen calls the Second Step. This critique has tended to evolve along two lines: so-called “difference” feminism—the perspective that insists women be granted status equivalent to that of men and appreciated for their innate differences—and “gender” feminism—the perspective that sharply critiques how gender itself is conceived. This leads to Dimen's Third Step: How do we interrogate the tension between the ameliorative impulse of difference feminism, on the one hand, and the critical impulse to destablize normalizing stereotypy, on the other. Specified through the discourse of postmodernism, Dimen reaches toward a vision of gender that is multiple, ambiguous, and variable in the extent to which it encodes the varieties of experience. Dimen provides clinical vignettes to illustrate her point of view.

Michelle Price continues our project. Like Dimen, Price is concerned with totalizing gender narratives that throw certain kinds of experiences into doubt and suspicion, experiences to which Price and Dimen refer as “out of gender.” Price, perhaps more explicitly than Dimen, calls on psychoanalysis to problematize not only gender, but the variety of totalizing narratives that monotonize the voice of subjectivity and, necessarily, of subjectivity itself.

From the postmodern critique of gender we longjump to an altogether different domain, one no less immediate to the p