Flesh and blood: The transformations of puberty for daughters and mothers.
Item
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Title
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Flesh and blood: The transformations of puberty for daughters and mothers.
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Identifier
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AAI3103184
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identifier
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3103184
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Creator
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Winkler, Karen.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Diana Diamond
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Date
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2003
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Psychology, Clinical | Women's Studies | Psychology, Developmental
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Abstract
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This dissertation locates puberty as a critical phase in the production of gender and sexuality for girls. I argue that feminist, psychoanalytic theory and scholarship have generally failed to recognize the place of girls' pubertal embodiment in the assumption of normative femininity and reproductive heterosexuality. I contend that Carol Gilligan's analysis of early adolescent girls' struggles around connection overlooks the pubertal body, and offer as a corrective a close reading of Simone de Beauvoir's visceral writing on "the crisis of puberty" and the problems of alienation, recognition, and subjectivity in female development. My work focuses on the embodied relations between daughters and mothers, and proposes maternal subjectivity as a key element of girls' experiences with their changing bodies. Mother-daughter intersubjective dynamics profoundly shape girls' intrapsychic lives and self-representations, as well as their sense of agency and sexual health. The phase of pre- and early adolescence is re-valued as a time when more flexible, over-inclusive gender and sexual identifications and desires hold sway, before these are foreclosed by cultural, social, and psychic forces that regulate more rigid, fixed, gender and sexual polarities.;Readings of psychoanalytic and feminist texts are illuminated by clinical and personal narratives, poems by mothers of adolescent daughters, and works of fiction, memoir, and film. Through these interdisciplinary readings, I theorize the ways daughters and mothers reciprocally respond to girls' developing bodies. My analysis suggests that the circulation of desire, identification, loss, and recognition between daughters and mothers just before and during puberty is crucial to girls' experience of gender, sexuality, and their bodies. I propose that the unrecognized and ungrievable loss of mother-daughter homoerotic attachment at puberty, and the daughter's bids for, and needs for, her mother's erotic recognition and confirmation of her body, are substrates of female subjectivity that have not been articulated clinically or theoretically within psychoanalysis. My work contributes to the feminist, psychoanalytic project of theorizing gender, sexuality, and the body, and adds to the growing literature within women's studies on maternal subjectivity, daughters and mothers, and girls' development and sexual health.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
