From mastery to analysis : theories of gender in psychoanalytic feminism /

Assuming at the outset that a liberating feminism requires a critical theory of gender and that an adequate psychoanalytic understanding of the subject can contribute significantly to such a critical theory, Elliot, using a Lacanian typology of forms of discourse, expounds, criticizes, and evaluates in terms of their promotion of a discourse of Analysis as contrasted with discourses of the Master, the Bureaucrat or the Hysteric the theorizing of such well-known, psychoanalytically informed feminist writers as Juliet Mitchell, Jacqueline Rose, Dorothy Dinnerstein, Nancy Chodorow, Luce Irigaray, and Julie Kristeva. Although contestable and certain to be contested, the author's representations and critical assessments of the discourses of these feminist-psychoanalytic theorists are relatively clear and accessible even to culture critics who do not share the terministic screens of the author or the subjects of her discourse. A worthwhile contribution to ongoing debates over "gender," the politics of engendering, the forces of gender oppression, and instrumentalities needed to eliminate such oppression. Graduate level.-B. Kaplan, Clark University