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Bridging the Social and the Symbolic: Toward a Feminist Politics of Sexual Difference

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2020

Emily Zakin
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Abstract

By clarifying the psychoanalytic notion of sexual difference (and contrasting it with a feminist analysis of gender as social reality), I argue that the symbolic dimension of psychical life cannot be discarded in developing political accounts of identity formation and the status of women in the public sphere. I discuss various bridges between social reality and symbolic structure, bridges such as body, language, law, and family. I conclude that feminist attention must be redirected to the unconscious since the political cannot be localized in, or segregated to, the sphere of social reality; sexual difference is an indispensable concept for a feminist politics.

Type
Research Article
Information
Hypatia , Volume 15 , Issue 3 , Summer 2000 , pp. 19 - 44
Copyright
Copyright © 2000 by Hypatia, Inc.

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