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.
With pride, we announce the first recipient of the annual Symonds Prize: Meg Jay, Ph.D., for “Melancholy Femininity and Obsessive—Compulsive Masculinity: Sex Differences in Melancholy Gender.” Dr. Jay is Clinical Psychologist in Private Practice, Berkeley, California; Lecturer, University of California, Berkeley; Fellow, American Psychoanalytic Association, 2003-2004
Many fine submissions came to us in this first year of the competition, made possible by the Alexandra and Martin Symonds Foundation. The Editors chose “Melancholy Femininity and Obsessive-Compulsive Masculinity: Sex Differences in Melancholy Gender” because of its scholarly excellence, its clarity and coherence, and its contribution to critical debate. We did not select Jay's essay because it expressed a point of view endorsed by Studies in Gender and Sexuality. Indeed, we are sure it will stir up trouble, which is precisely the point: We were more interested in the controversy it engages, the question of modernism versus postmodernism in psychoanalytic gender theory, which is one of the journal's central problematics. In furtherance of this interdisciplinary question, we invited two discussants, Rosemary Balsam, Ph.D., a psychoanalyst in private practice, and Gayle Salamon, Ph.D., a queer theorist, each of whom takes issue with Jay's clinically and empirically based argument for gendered differences in the expression of melancholy. To their sharp disagreements, Jay gives an equally potent and stimulating response.