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Pregnancy Envy and the Politics of Compensatory Masculinities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2005

Jacqueline Stevens
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Abstract

Dominant psychoanalytic paradigms locate the breast or penis/phallus as the touchstone for gender/sex/sexual development. This essay offers a critique of these accounts and an alternative theory of sexed forms of being: pregnancy envy and the kinship rules that result from this. The essay also provides an intellectual history of how previous efforts to theorize pregnancy envy, especially work by Ida Macalpine, were suppressed.This article has benefited from audiences at the Yale University Feminist Lesbian and Gay Workshop, the City University Lesbian and Gay Studies Workshop, and the University of Southern California Center on Feminist Research, as well as from comments by Marianne Constable, Lisa Ellis, Laura Green, James Martel, Hanna Pitkin, and Michael Rogin. Many thanks especially to the reviewers and editors for their extremely helpful suggestions, including the reference to Bruno Bettelheim (1962).

Type
Research Article
Information
Politics & Gender , Volume 1 , Issue 2 , June 2005 , pp. 265 - 296
Copyright
© 2005 The Women and Politics Research Section of the American Political Science Association

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