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an academic told me about a psychoanalytic turn that’s apparently happening in the humanities/social sciences and somehow now I keep noticing little blips of it everywhere and can’t unsee it. amia srinivasan wrote in the LRB about it (Dec 2025):

What has returned of late is not the unconscious itself, but the felt need, in some quarters, for the unconscious and...

#meikuree talks #academia #I don’t know that I really find psychoanalytic frameworks useful though #amia srinivasan

The refusal of genocide’s repetition – ‘never again’ – becomes the mandate for its inverted return: yes, again, genocide. As a consequence, Palestinians are left to excavate the bodies of their dead from the ruins of war and rebury them in the open-air cemetery of Gaza. The difficulty of the task arises not just from its magnitude – how to grieve more than seventy thousand people, a third of that number children? – but also from an ongoing occupation that erodes the psychic conditions necessary for mourning. For Freud, the work of mourning requires time in which the ego can discover the reality of its loss, and then choose its own life, moving beyond the fixation that he calls ‘melancholia’. But under occupation, loss is continuous, the choice of life never a given, and so the time for mourning never arrives. What is occupation, the Palestinian writer Abdaljawad Omar asks, but a ‘perpetual deferral of mourning’?

Amia Srinivasan, "The Impossible Patient"

#from the river to the sea #readings #amia srinivasan

The Impossible Patient, Amia Srinivasan

#amia srinivasan #q #reads

What was i thinking lol maintaining a neat blog and all. That’s not me. Anyway. Started these.

#bell hooks #amia srinivasan #feminism is for everybody #the right to sex #bookblr #readblr #book club #gender ideology #feminist literature #boo reads

Were anti-porn feminists being hysterical? Censorious prudes? In the age of internet porn, DVDs and video cassettes, let alone centerfolds and seedy theaters, can be joked about as nostalgic throwbacks. It may seem to some, looking back, that feminist anti-porn campaigners must have been overtaken by anxiety about a mass culture that was becoming more open about sex, and that was quite capable of separating fantasy from fact. Feminists, anxious about sex under patriarchy found it easier, a group of pro-porn feminists wrote in 1983, “to attack the picture of what oppresses us than the mysterious, elusive . . . thing itself.” The implication is that anti-porn feminists were overestimating the power of porn: they had lost perspective. But what if the true significance of the perspective of anti-porn feminists lay not in what they were paying attention to, but when? What if they weren’t hysterical, but prescient?

It was my students who first led me to think about this question. Discussing the "porn question" is more or less mandatory in an introductory class on feminist theory. But my heart wasn't really in it. I imagined that the students would find the anti-porn position prudish and passé, just as I was trying hard to make them see the relevance of the history of feminism to the contemporary moment. I needn't have worried. They were riveted. Could it be that pornography doesn't merely depict the subordination of women, but actually makes it real, I asked? Yes, they said. Does porn silence women, making it harder for them to protest against unwanted sex, and harder for men to hear those protests? Yes, they said. Does porn bear responsibility for the objectification of women, for the marginalization of women, for sexual violence against women? Yes, they said, yes to all of it.

It wasn't just the women students talking; the men were saying yes as well, in some cases even more emphatically. One young woman pushed back, citing the example of feminist porn. "But we don't watch that," the men said. What they watched was the hardcore stuff, the aggressive stuff—what is now, on the internet, the free stuff. My male students complained about the routines they were expected to perform in sex; one of them asked whether it was too utopian to imagine sex that was loving and mutual and not about domination and submission. My women students talked about the neglect of women's pleasure in the pornographic script, and wondered whether it had something to do with the absence of pleasure in their own lives. "But if it weren't for pornography," one woman said, "how would we ever learn to have sex?"

Porn meant so much to my students; they cared so much about it. Like the anti-porn feminists of forty years ago, they had a heightened sense of porn's power, a strong conviction that porn did things in the world. Talking with my graduate teaching assistant after that seminar (she was a handful of years younger than me), I realized what should have been obvious from the start. My students belonged to the first generation truly to be raised on internet pornography. Almost every man in that class would have had his first sexual experience the moment he first wanted it, or didn't want it, in front of a screen. And almost every woman in the class would have had her first sexual experience, if not in front of a screen, then with a boy whose first sexual experience had been. In that sense, her experience too would have been mediated by a screen: by what the screen instructed him to do. While almost all of us today live in a world where porn is ubiquitous, my students, born in the final years of the last century, were the first to have come of age sexually in that world.

My students would not have stolen or passed around magazines or videos, or gathered glimpses here and there. For them sex was there, fully formed, fully interpreted, fully categorized—teen, gangbang, MILF, stepdaughter—waiting on the screen. By the time my students got around to sex IRL—later, it should be noted, than teenagers of previous generations—there was, at least for the straight boys and girls, a script in place that dictated not only the physical moves and gestures and sounds to make and demand, but also the appropriate affect, the appropriate desires, the appropriate distribution of power. The psyches of my students are products of pornography. In them, the warnings of the anti-porn feminists seem to have been belatedly realized: sex for my students is what porn says it is.

-Amia Srinivasan, The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century

#amia srinivasan #anti pornography #radical feminist theory #human sexuality

We inspect this supposedly natural thing, "sex," only to find that it is already laden with meaning. At birth, bodies are sorted as "male" or "female," though many bodies must be mutilated to fit one category or the other, and many bodies will later protest against the decision that was made. This originary division determines what social purpose a body will be assigned. Some of these bodies are for creating new bodies, for washing and clothing and feeding other bodies (out of love, never duty), for making other bodies feel good and whole and in control, for making other bodies feel free. Sex is, then, a cultural thing posing as a natural one. Sex, which feminists have taught us to distinguish from gender, is itself already gender in disguise.

There is another sense of the word "sex": sex as a thing we do with our sexed bodies. Some bodies are for other bodies to have sex with. Some bodies are for the pleasure, the possession, the consumption, the worshipping, the servicing, the validating of other bodies. "Sex" in this second sense is also said to be a natural thing, a thing that exists outside politics. Feminism shows that this too is a fiction, and a fiction that serves certain interests. Sex, which we think of as the most private of acts, is in reality a public thing. The roles we play, the emotions we feel, who gives, who takes, who demands, who serves, who wants, who is wanted, who benefits, who suffers: the rules for all this were set long before we entered the world.

Amia Srinivasan, The Right to Sex

#amia srinivasan #gender sexuality #feminism #my excerpts