You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In 1895 Freud attempted his Project for a Scientific Psychology. His intention was to represent psychical processes quantitatively as an expression of their specific physiological analogs, but the project was a failure and he abandoned it. A century later, traveling the road not taken, Domenici and Lesser formulate their much more successful project, which they define as an attempt to contest and revitalize the psychoanalytic theory of sexuality by focusing on its essentialist assumptions and bias.
In Disorienting Sexuality, Domenici and Lesser have assembled a unique collection of papers which, in sum, question the hegemony of heterosexuality in the construction of gender-sexuality within the culture and its representatives in psychoanalysis.
This body of work follows in the path of a slow but steady revolution that has been brewing in the psychoanalytic world, focusing on the ways in which we analyze and conceptualize gender (Butler, 1990; Dimen, 1991; Goldner, 1991; Harris, 1991; Benjamin, 1995; Bassin, 1996). Informed by postmodern critiques, Foucault (1978, 1980), social constructionism, and feminist theory, collectively the papers might be said to ask whether we really need to keep on “doing sex and gender” as we have in the past, and do sex and gender necessarily have a mimetic relation to each other (Butler, 1990)?
The papers are by no means monolithic in their viewpoint; however, they converge in their largely consensual view that lesbian, gay,