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Readers interested in emergence, mind, mentalization, and symbolization should be intrigued by Harris's book. In its focus on how we come to experience ourselves as inhabiting a gendered body, Gender as Soft Assembly takes us to the depths of contemporary thinking that weaves multiple disciplines in the exploration of human psychic development. Harris challenges the traditional notions of gender development as a linear unfolding of uniform stages founded on the biological sex of the child. In place of the familiar predictable stages of development, she offers the reader the challenge of considering gender development as a self-organizing process that is fluid, creative, and not easily predictable. Harris's theory of the emergence of a gendered self is built on a scaffolding of attachment theory, developmental psychoanalysis, linguistics, queer theory, chaos theory, and feminist criticism. These theoretical elements of the scaffolding of gender emergence are seen as embedded in and influenced by historical time and culture. This theoretical scaffolding allows us to see that the emergent gendered self is neither a linear nor easily predictable developmental outcome. Specifically, according to Harris, emergent gender can be understood as a ‘soft assembly’ of interacting parts within a complex dynamic system. Harris borrows the term ‘soft assembly’ from the work of dynamic systems theorists Thelen and Smith (1994) who, Harris writes,
suggest that we think of subjective states in interpersonal experience as a kind of ‘softly assembled’ set of behavioral attractors, stable or unstable depending on the task and the environment and forming complex multidimensional systems of a particular task in a particular context. Variability is the expected condition, not the site of pathology.
In fact, within chaos theory (Piers 2000), it is suggested that ‘pathology’ is defined as ‘rigidity’. Harris goes on to state that, ‘pathology switches valences, in a sense taking up residen