The stigma of mental illness shapes much recent discussion of female sexual problems, as does the legacy of the postwar critique of psychodynamic psychiatry.
In this article I discuss the emergence of Female Sexual Dysfunction (FSD) within
American psychiatry and beyond in the postwar period, setting out what I believe to be
important and suggestive questions neglected in existing scholarship. Tracing the
nomenclature within successive editions of the American Psychiatric Association’s
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), I consider
the reification of the term ‘FSD’, and the activism and scholarship that the rise of the
category has occasioned. I suggest that analysis of FSD benefits from scrutiny of a wider
range of sources (especially since the popular and scientific cross-pollinate). I explore
the multiplicity of FSD that emerges when one examines this wider range, but I also
underscore a reinscribing of anxieties about psychogenic aetiologies. I then argue that
what makes the FSD case additionally interesting, over and above other conditions with a
contested status, is the historically complex relationship between psychiatry and feminism
that is at work in contemporary debates. I suggest that existing literature on FSD has not
yet posed some of the most important and salient questions at stake in writing about
women’s sexual problems in this period, and can only do this when the relationship between
‘second-wave’ feminism, ‘post-feminism’, psychiatry and psychoanalysis becomes part of the
terrain to be analysed, rather than the medium through which analysis is conducted.
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