This module focusses on the psychoanalytic case study as a distinct genre of writing in the Humanities and as a Social-Scientific method through which knowledge claims about gender and sexuality are constructed, contested, and reconfigured. Across the module, we will consider topics such as the history of hysteria as a female complaint; the gendered politics of the Oedipal schema; the relationship between gender identity and identification; the "queering" of desire; sexuality and the so-called "perversions"; and the binary organization of sex. Students will become familiar with psychoanalytic concepts and frameworks, and learn how to situate them historically and critically with reference to other discourses of sex, gender and sexuality (e.g. sexology, feminism, queer theory).
Structure:
An emphasis on the case study brings a methodological focus to the module and provides students with distinct reading and research skills. By spending consecutive weeks on a 'single' case, we develop familiarity with a set of reading and writing practices such as iterative and 'contrapuntal' reading; close and 'distant' reading; practices of 'writing through' and 'writing back'. We also incorporate a practical workshop on the 'Single Case Archive' which foregrounds the epistemological debates in the social sciences regarding case study methodology. With our methodological framing in place (weeks 1; 2; 3), we then move on to our cases.
We begin with one of Freud's 'big five' case studies, 'Dora' (weeks 4; 5; 7). From a close reading of Freud's primary text, we pay special attention to the principle of psychic bisexuality, the nature of the symptom, and the gendered dynamics of the counter-/transference. Over the subsequent two weeks we sample some of the psychoanalytic, feminist, and inter-textual readings of the case that have attempted to re-voice Ida Bauer and thus ensured 'Dora's' relevance to the field of gender and sexuality studies well beyond her 'treatment' with Freud.
We close with 'Agnes' (week 8; 9; 10). Agnes can be read as the first psycho-social case study of a transitioning person, as well as a kind of 'test case' in the studies of gender identity as they were evolving in the mid-twentieth century. In our examination of this case, we pay attention to the co-construction of 'Agnes' by multiple disciplines and disciplinary authorities (principally, Robert Stoller and Harold Garfinkle). Again, through practices of re-reading, we go on to explore the place of 'Agnes' in contemporary transgender debates.