Children's Informal Ideas in Science

"This new and highly readable collection of psychoanalytic essays, which is edited by Agnieszka Piotrowska and Ben Tyrer, provides a timely look at the meanings of femininity and women's desire as articulated in cinema through a range stimulating and thought-provoking case studies and discussions. The book, which contains chapters from some notable authors in the field of feminist film scholarship and artistic and clinical practice (including Elizabeth Cowie, Bracha L. Ettinger, Vicky Lebeau and Caroline Bainbridge), deploy the ideas of Freud, Lacan, Klein, Riviere, Horney, Deutsch and Irigaray in order to unpack the complexities of the relationships between femininity, psychoanalysis and difference that will be of great interest to students and researchers who continue to tussle with the meanings of femininity in the contemporary cultural arena of cinema and beyond. The collection covers a lot of ground - revisiting older debates about the feminist politics of visual pleasure but adds a new layer of complexity to those earlier discussions by relating them to psychosocial and cultural concerns in contemporary contexts where the vexed relationship between intersectionality and psychoanalysis often comes to the fore. In so doing, the collection demonstrates its cultural and political relevance by paying attention to the unconscious dynamics of representation and to the raced and classed dimensions of cinematic experience and its relationship to wider processes of power and ideology." Candida Yates, Professor of Culture and Communication, Bournemouth University, UK

"This collective effort to think and rethink the psychoanalytic take on femininity could not come at a more appropriate time. Femininity and Psychoanalysis: Cinema, Culture, Theory purses different facets of this question in a formidably interesting way, following a wide range of authors and critical approaches. - A truly engaged and engaging volume." - Alenka Zupancic Professor of Philosophy and Psychoanalysis, Research Center of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, author of What is Sex?