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.
‘How is a raven like a writing desk?’ The Mad Hatter's question is one example of a conundrum—a word puzzle or an unanswerable question, a riddle or an unfathomable mystery. This one was intended to be unanswerable, but many responses have been suggested, including ‘Because there is a “B” in “both”’, and ‘Because the notes for which they are noted are not noted for being musical notes’.1 Questions about masculinity and femininity may be just as puzzling and have made, over time, for some equally fanciful answers. In this collection, Dana Birksted-Breen tries to bring some sense to the history of non-sense.
One of the appealing things about this book is the clarity of its introduction. While the book covers some of the thorniest debates in psychoanalytic literature, it does so within a framework. In her introduction, Birksted-Breen summarises thinking since Freud on various topics related to gender in a way that spans the gaps between different cultures and theories. She lets us listen to each other in a context, and in this way helps makes a variety of authors' ideas clear, in a way each would not be if presented singly.
This book is not so much a collection of classic papers in the field as a response to such papers. It is a presentation of contemporary debates. The papers are mostly from the 1980s, and range from 1969 to 1990. A wide variety of theoretical perspectives is represented, including Kleinian writers, ego-psychologists and contemporary French thinkers, some previously untranslated. While the specialist in gender studies will have an easier time situating these papers amid contemporary debates, Birksted-Breen's introduction attempts to allow the general reader to do so.
The editor has divided the book into four sections: ‘The oedipus complex’, ‘The phallic question’, ‘The representation of the body’ and ‘Bisexuality’. Each of the topic headings has a complex history in the literature. Many of the articles summarise parts of this history, in a way that makes