FRIDAY, MAY 5th, 2023
A BLACK FEMINIST PSYCHOANALYTICS
MICHELLE STEPHENS, PHD
At the end of the 1980s, black feminist legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw wrestled with the problem of a female blackness lived as an invisible intersectionality. In her account, “mutually exclusive categories of experience and analysis,” prevented legal analysts from seeing “the compounded nature” and “multi-dimensionality of Black Women’s experiences.” However, Crenshaw’s goal went beyond identifying black female subjectivity as a complex, multi-dimensional unfolding of identity. At the same time, she also foregrounded and deployed a black feminist methodology that, over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, has made crucial interventions in understanding the dangers of a whiteness lived as a single-axis framework for subjectivity, and the alternative insights formed from living with difference as an embodied, enfleshed, black female subject. This presentation will introduce and explore some of the implications of this two-fold set of insights, especially for psychoanalytic conceptions of the gendered, sexed, and racialized subject.
MICHELLE STEPHENS is a psychoanalyst, a Professor of English and Latino and Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University, and the Founding and Executive Director of Rutgers’ Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice (ISGRJ). Originally from Jamaica, West Indies, she graduated from Yale University with a Ph.D. in American Studies. She is the author of Black Empire: The Masculine Global Imaginary of Caribbean Intellectuals in the United States, 1914 to 1962 (Duke University Press, 2005) and Skin Acts: Race, Psychoanalysis and The Black Male Performer (Duke University Press, 2014). Recently she has published articles on the intersections of race and psychoanalysis in such journals as JAPA, Contemporary Psychoanalysis, Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, and Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society.
Time: 7:30-9:30PM
Location: Zoom
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$50
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The Manhattan Institute is a NY State approved provider of continuing education hours for: LCSW, LMSW, LCAT, LMHC and Licensed Psychologists.




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