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.
Certainly, for anyone who is serious about the study of gender, or perhaps for any psychoanalyst in clinical practice today, Adrienne Harris's Gender as Soft Assembly is a must-read. Harris's thesis is deceptively simple. Gender is socially constructed, emerging in the context of personal interactions between self and others, mediated by family and society. What she means by “softly assembled” is just that—gender is not hard wired, with predictable unfolding from a given starting point, such as inborn sex. Rather, gender is softly packaged, with different patterns and contents, following multiple pathways to unfixed outcomes, serving different psychic and social functions, and influenced by a large number of variables, intraper-sonal and interpersonal, conscious and unconscious. With the word assembly, Harris emphasizes process, not structure.
In her arguments, Harris would put away the stalwart tools of psychoanalysis: developmental lines, which to her and others are too rigid and claim predictable blueprints for development. In this, I think she is being too hasty, as developmental lines are conceptual