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.
As Leticia Glocer Fiorini reminds us in this absorbing book on sexual difference, Freud was able to hold contradictory positions. Although he famously said “anatomy is destiny” (1923, 178), he
added the caveat, “It must be admitted, however, that in general our insight into these developmental processes in girls is unsatisfactory, incomplete and vague.” Moreover, he never abandoned his theory of psychic bisexuality. In this scholarly and conceptually rich work, Glocer Fiorini carefully dissects Freudian and post-Freudian theories of sexual difference, holding with Freud’s tolerance for paradox and apparent contradictions. Her aim in this book is to expand the field of inquiry through “deconstruction of the category of ‘sexual difference’ in psychoanalysis, clarification of logics supporting it, and debates around it.” (161) Written by an Argentinian psychoanalyst, this book was first published in Spanish in 2015, and adds to Glocer Fiorini’s corpus of work on femininity, sexual difference, sexed subjectivity, and the heterogenous aspects of sexuality, procreation and family composition in contemporary life. This work includes her co-edited volume On Freud’s “Femininity”: Turning Points and Critical Issues (2010), her book Deconstructing the Feminine: Psychoanalysis, Gender, and Theories of Complexity (2007) and many chapters and articles in both Spanish and English. She also co-edited On Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” (2009) in the IPA’s Contemporary Freud series.
In this book, Glocer Fiorini explores the construction of “sexed subjectivity” in the context of new social realities—increasing diversity in gender presentations assisted by medical technology that allows gender to be relativized beyond the “binary” of male-female; mind-boggling advances in reproductive technology that dissociate reproduction from sexuality and enable babies to be created with a multiplicity of contributors (e.g. donor gametes and donor wombs); and new “parentalities” (homosexual an