Jane Flax

Bio: Jane Flax is an academic researcher. The author has contributed to research in topics: Subversion & Feminism. The author has an hindex of 3, co-authored 3 publications receiving 1357 citations.

Postmodern Subjects, Postmodern BodiesThinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary WestYearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural PoliticsGender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

Abstract: Preface (1999) Preface (1990) 1. Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire I. 'Women' as the Subject of Feminism II. The Compulsory Order of Sex/Gender/Desire III. Gender: The Circular Ruins of Contemporary Debate IV. Theorizing the Binary, the Unitary and Beyond V. Identity, Sex and the Metaphysics of Substance VI. Language, Power and the Strategies of Displacement 2. Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix I. Structuralism's Critical Exchange II. Lacan, Riviere, and the Strategies of Masquerade III. Freud and the Melancholia of Gender IV. Gender Complexity and the Limits of Identification V. Reformulating Prohibition as Power 3. Subversive Bodily Acts I. The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva II. Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity III. Monique Wittig - Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex IV. Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions Conclusion - From Parody to Politics

The Conflict between Nurturance and Autonomy in Mother-Daughter Relationships and within Feminism

Abstract: After years of psychoanalytic investigation and practice, Freud admitted that he still could not answer the question, "What do women want?" Ironically, his own theoretical framework may have prevented him from answering this question because male development remained the model for general psychological processes and structures. In his later work, Freud realized the particular importance of the preoedipal period and the mother-daughter relationship for female development.3 However, he did not adequately analyze these factors nor did he integrate this awareness into his metapsychology. What women want is an experience of both nurturance4 and autonomy within an intimate relationship. What makes this wish so strong and, for many women, so unattainable, is that psychological development occurs within the patriarchal5 family-in which the mother is the primary nurturer and the father is the symbol of authority. The psychological difficulties that this arrangement causes are reinforced and compounded in later life by the inability of many men to be nurturers, an inability created as a result of patriarchal family structure, and by homophobia, which makes intimacy between women suspect. Women's need for nurturance is not neurotic, but it can lead to self-defeating behavior under certain conditions that will be discussed.

The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards a More Progressive Union

Abstract: The “Marriage” Of Marxism and Feminism has been like the marriage of husband and wife depicted in English common law: marxism and feminism are one, and that one is marxism.1 Recent attempts to integrate marxism and feminism are unsatisfactory to us as feminists because they subsume the feminist struggle into the “larger” struggle against capital. To continue our simile further, either we need a healthier marriage or we need a divorce.

A Critical Introduction

Abstract: This chapter begins by helping the reader to grasp the comprehensive nature of Nathaniel Berman's work, and the subtle perspective that he brings to the legal world when it is confronted by the passions to which nationalism and colonialism give rise. In his work, cultural Modernism interacts with the international law of Danzig; the fantasies surrounding Jerusalem with the concrete political and legal projects for that city; internationalist dreams with the institutional programs for Bosnia and Palestine; and the most industrious international bureaucracy with the most creative and audacious legal imagination. Berman makes use of all of the notions in the course of his work on "imperial ambivalences". His goal is to show that we cannot interpret the international law of the interwar period without understanding it as a site of Modernist cultural construction and contestation - rather than as a mere adjunct to, or reflection of, cultural developments external to it. Keywords:colonialism; cultural Modernism; imperial ambivalences; international law; Nathaniel Berman; nationalism

All hyped up and no place to go

Abstract: In this paper we think about the performance of sexual identities in space, and try to explore the notions of transgression and parody implicit in recent queer theory, particularly in the work of Judith Butler. To do this, we take a long hard look at two current dissident sexual identities—the hypermasculine ‘gay skinhead’ and the hyperfeminine ‘lipstick lesbian’. We describe their evolution as sexual‐outlaw styles of the 1990s, and assess the effects of their performance in spaces which are, we argue, actively constructed as heterosexual. Although we are ultimately unsure and unable to agree about what kinds of trouble these identities cause, and for whom, and where, we want to share our unease, our questions, our own troubles.

Bodies (and Spaces) do Matter: The limits of performativity

Abstract: This article explores the insights and limitations within geography of Judith Butler's concept of 'performativity'. As a processual, non-foundational approach to identity, many feminist and post-structuralist geographers have incorporated performativity into their work on the intersections between gender, sexuality, ethnicity, space and place. Yet few have explicitly undertaken a close and critical reading of Butler's theory. The author argues that performativity ontologically assumes an abstracted subject (i.e. abstracted as a subject position in a given discourse) and thus provides no space for theorizing conscious reflexivity, negotiation or agency in the doing of identity. Butler posits a subject abstracted from personal, lived experience as well as from its historical and geographical embeddedness. Uncritically transcribing this abstracted subject into geography limits how we can conceptualize the linkages between emerging identities, social change and spatially-embedded, intentional human practice. ...