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For psychoanalysts interested either in matter of gender or in the intricacies of interdisciplinary projects involving psychoanalytic theory, this book could be both interesting and finally problematic. The book is notable for its nuanced, careful thinking and its
fresh immediate writing. Johnson practices a sensitive and loving disruptiveness. As in a good psychoanalytic inquiry, she is interested in creating conditions of safety in which she can unsettle the reader. She is very present as a reading/writing subject yet she keeps skipping out from the magisterial spot, suspicious of the kind of authoritative voice of the bossy commentator who puts everyone neatly into place. She is passionate and discerning and committed less to a set of ideas than to a way of working. Hers is a mode of analysis that keeps paradox in play. For analysts of many schools interested in the subjectivity of the analyst/interpreter, the paradox of many categories of experience of loving and being, the limits of binary modes of thought and analysis, it will be easy to imagine yourself into this writer's voice and skin. The permeability of voice, identity and skin is perhaps an interesting metaphoric construction given that this book of essays explores the hinges and blocks in and between matters of race, of gender and sexuality.
The essays in this book, collected from various sources and apparently revised over a decade, are bracketed by an introduction and at the end by a coda. The coda is part of Johnson's reaction to a murdered scholar—Mary Jo Frug, whose work was stopped literally midsentence. Eerily, Johnson, in working on Frug's papers, discovers that in the midst of a sentence about women's' relation to other women, Frug got up, went for a walk and was murdered. Johnson uses this frightening fact to meditate on the disruptions between and within women, the terrible costs of silences and silencing. Johnson sets a problem and then provides in the coda one possible way to proceed. The