Affective conjunctions: Social norms, semiotic circuits, and fantasy

Abstract

Postfeminist and neoliberal discourses that characterize sexual meanings, messages, and mandates in a contemporary Western context invoke choice, liberation, and mastery to propel a perpetually performing female sexuality. Agency and autonomy have been co-opted as robust scaffolding for regulatory regimes, such that practices of mandatory self-objectification and self-surveillance are rebranded as playful practices arising from a range of preferences. We plot several intersecting theoretical coordinates, along which sexuality is usefully traced: affect scholarship, Lacanian and post-Lacanian feminist psychoanalysis, and feminist poststructuralism. This is followed by two elaborated examples from an ongoing research project on sexual agency and desire among young women. Our analysis traverses these varied but interconnected theoretical frames, arguing for their joint usefulness in thinking about how sexual messages and ideologies permeate and persist across social and psychic spaces, with both resistance and recapitulation at work. We join a body of feminist scholarship directed at expanding epistemic and empirical conversations beyond sexual empowerment/oppression oppositions by addressing the ways social meanings, symbolic representations, affects, and fantasy about sexuality cohere in subjectivities.

Sexually progressive and proficient: Pornographic syntax and postfeminist fantasies

“…The initiation from self-conscious girlhood to sexually adventurous womanhood stands outside of other influences, while at the same time being encased in exposure to a range of media messages, from porn to sexual expert advice on TV and Cosmo (Brown-Bowers et al., 2015; Gurevich, in prep. ; Gurevich et al., 2015). The transformation is presented as an evolution – overcoming timidity, reluctance and negative judgement to arrive at a position where a range of acts has been internalized as completely ordinary.…”

“…This article describes findings from a larger project on the cultural backdrop of sexual agency and desire among young women and men (see Brown-Bowers et al., 2015; Gurevich, in prep. ; Gurevich et al., 2015). Focusing here on young women’s sexual lexicon and repertoires in the context of pornography, postfeminism and sexual entrepreneurship, the approach reflects feminist scholarship that extends epistemic and empirical considerations beyond sexual emancipation/subjugation oppositions (e.g.…”

Managed Not Missing

“…A central precept of postfeminist ideology is that, “Using the vehicle of individualism, feminist tenets are both deployed and disavowed (McRobbie, 2004), such that sociopolitical analysis is silenced into a sanitized discourse of cheerful choices. The choices are represented as new and improved, while the messages remain conspicuously dated and homogenous” (Gurevich et al, in press, p. 15).…”

Mainstream Psychology And The Gender Binary: Toward An Account Of Becoming "Non-Binary"

“…I've taken a cue from Foucault (1970), who suggested approaching discourse "at different levels and with different methods" (p. xv), because it "is so complex a reality" (p. xv), and made use of a range of conceptual tools to organize the accounts of non-binary becoming I gathered throughout the interviews. My framework follows other recent experimentations with methodological pluralism (see Gurevich, Vasilovsky, Brown-Bowers, & Cosma, 2015). I've chosen psychosocial studies and relational psychoanalytic theories of gender for their resistance to foundationalist person-centered understandings of the modern self.…”