Important thoughts on becoming and being a man, and on sexes and gender generally: 22.80€ (pb.)

Gunnar Kalsson’s new book Det maskulina projektet. Psykoanalytiska och fenomenologiska reflektioner (Symposion 2019) is a clearly thought contribution to the heated debates concerning the challenges of being a man and masculinity, but he has also formulated a consequent conceptual model on how to think about sexes and genders more generally. There is much to learn from his discussion, I think, and the book should be read not only by psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, but more broadly by people interested in gender questions. The model put forward by Karlsson will certainly receive counter arguments.

In the opening chapter, Karlsson presents and argues for his phenomenological approach to the questions of sex and gender. He translates this distinction into Swedish as ‘kön’ and ‘genus’. These concepts, and the terms signifying the concepts, are used quite differently in gender studies, feminist theorizing and queer studies, cultural studies, sociology, philosophy and psychoanalysis. Karlsson aims at a consequent usage by describing the phenomena in question only from a first-person perspective, i.e., phenomenologically. Thus ‘sex’ is no more the biological sex, the object of the natural sciences, but its experiential correlate, nor is ‘gender’ a discursive formation of social relations and cultural discourses, but its experiential correlate. Karlsson maintains, with good reason I think, that too often in the studies on sexes and genders, the ontological and epistemological problems have been bypassed, with the consequence of conceptual and terminological mess. Karlsson builds here on his earlier work.

One of the key ideas here is that the intentionality of a subject, i.e. directedness towards the intentional object, is not merely subjective but also open to the real world of the objects. Phenomenological intentionality, Karlsson emphasizes, contradicts both with naive objectivism as well as with purely subjective approaches. While the natural sciences conceive of the