Woman-centered perspectives on female psychosexuality.
Numerous contemporary analyses have challenged traditional models of female psychosexual development, identifying their norms as implicitly androcentric. Femaleness has been regarded as derivative or deviant, as less and "other" than maleness. Alternative, woman-centred, models emphasise three major aspects of female psychosexual development: affiliation (women and others), maternity (women as mothers), and alterity (women and otherness). For some theorists the affiliative/maternal emphasis constructs a model of healthy and desirable femaleness. For others it represents not only the outcome of millennia of female subordination but also provides a justification for perpetuation of that subordination. Whatever the resolution of these dilemmas, a woman-centred perspective of female psychosexual development is relevant to contemporary psychiatric thinking. This review will present such a perspective and raise some of those dilemmas.
Quadrio
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Department of Psychiatry, Prince of Wales Hospital, Randwick, New South Wales.
D005260:Female; D005783:Gender Identity; D018452:Homosexuality, Female / Q000523:psychology; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D009034:Mother-Child Relations; D011287:Prejudice; D011574:Psychoanalytic Theory; D011606:Psychosexual Development; D012945:Social Values; D014933:Women's Rights