Contemporary Feminist Contributions to Debates around Gender and Sexuality: From Identity to Performance

Abstract

This paper reviews current feminist debates around gender and sexuality in relation to their relevance for group-analytic theory and practice. The long and contested engagement between feminists and (varieties of forms of) psychoanalysis highlights major areas of convergence of theoretical and practical concern: in particular around the attention to and construction of both gender and sexuality, and the relations between these. Contemporary feminist debates have shifted emphasis to discuss gender and sexuality as plural, fluid and situated, rather than as fixed identities. This attention to the ‘performative’ character of gender and sexuality has opened up new horizons for feminist analysis, which have attracted considerable attention within psychoanalytic circles. Group analysis, as a socially situated theory and practice, shares key political and intellectual premises with these feminist analyses, and so has much both to gain and to offer from this engagement.