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The American psychoanalyst Michael J. Diamond’s book Masculinity and Its Discontents could not have arrived at a more appropriate time. Diamond has been writing about gender and masculinity for much of his career, but his corpus has new resonances in the American present. Prior to the overturning of Roe v. Wade (a landmark 1973 decision of the US Supreme court protecting a woman’s right to bodily and medical autonomy including abortion), one could be forgiven for assuming that social progress would continue to be a linear and upward trajectory, given the advances the US has made to expand the enfranchisement of more and more groups of people over the last century. However, it is these very advances that left many unprepared to appreciate the lengths to which reactionary forces would try to undo them. Rarely have rights granted been withdrawn; progress turned back on itself may be better recognized by another moniker: the return of the repressed. Psychoanalysts know too well that under conditions of stress, regression and repetition of the past are always a possibility, warping our social surround and the perception of time. This recent event has had mind-bending effects, and “time-warped” the US to re-wage the battles of second-wave feminists. Receding from view, at least vis-à-vis American law, are the gains of third-wave feminism, queer theory, transfeminism, theorists of varied masculinities, and an understanding of how the intersections of class, race, gender and sexuality bear on all bodies differently. All of a sudden we seem to be back debating fundamental antagonisms between “men” and “women” that were thought to have been settled 50 years ago.
Ours, of course, is a community that knows intimately that there is no way the past doesn’t have myriad effects in the present, despite political narratives to the contrary. How should we think about the gendered past in present tense? Who are these men (and women) who seem obsessed with the need to curtail women’s rig