Department Colloquium: Amia Srinivasan (University of Oxford)

Genealogies of Oppression: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and Liberation 

Like Simone de Beauvoir and generations of feminists before and after her, Sigmund Freud — the founder of psychoanalysis — argued that women were not born, but made. Should Freud's account of the origins of the hierarchical sex distinction — his genealogy of patriarchal gender — be read as an affront feminist sensibilities, or a confirmation of them? Can Freud's genealogy, with its explanatory emphasis on the unconscious, the infantile and the arational, be read as a feminist genealogy? More broadly, of what use, if any, is the psychoanalytic framework to contemporary projects of political liberation?