Writing post-feminist history: female sexual dysfunction and biological psychiatry, 1960 to the present

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• Katherine Angel (University of Warwick)
• Thursday 13 May 2010, 16:30-18:00
• Seminar Room 2, History and Philosophy of Science, Department of.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Alex Broadbent.

‘Female Sexual Dysfunction’ (‘FSD’) is an umbrella term for diagnoses relating to desire, arousal, orgasm and pain that entered the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual III in 1980. Using medical, public, and feminist discourse about FSD , as well as material from the APA archives, my paper will address the view of DSM -III as having marked a categorical shift from a psychodynamic to a biological psychiatry, and of American psychiatry as a ‘globalising virus’. It will also suggest that the existing critical work on FSD misconstrues the contemporary landscape through its narrow focus on medico-pharmaceutical discourse; examining a wider range of sources instead reveals a more complex ontological register that problematises accounts of both a multifactorial medicine and of the ‘biological self’. It also urges one to think about medicine and psychiatry as themselves post-feminist. My paper will emphasise the importance of moving beyond analyses of FSD that take second-wave feminism for granted (as well as those focusing on the rise of biological psychiatry and Big Pharma), towards an analysis of the contemporary legacy of the embattled relationships between psychiatry, psychoanalysis and feminism in the post-war period.

This talk is part of the Departmental Seminars in History and Philosophy of Science series.

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