Psychoanalysis, the Body, and the Oedipal Plot

This is an important and complex text that offers a new understanding of the body in psychoanalysis, drawing on both clinical and theoretical understandings both Freudian and Lacanian. The reconsideration of somatization and symptom in this book opens new structures of plot for understanding the various itineraries of sexual desire and gender formation. This is an innovative and bracing work that opens up the links between psychoanalysis and literature in light of new understandings of sexuality and desire. -Judith Butler, author of Gender Trouble and The Psychic Life of Power Taking the body as a political and cultural archive, Fernanda Magallanes's clear and concise book accomplishes a noteworthy conceptual revolution. Emplotments of the Body thus questions the bread-and-butter issue of conventional psychoanalysis and disrupts the penis et circenses glibness of classical Oedipal theory. -Patricia Gherovici, Ph.D., psychoanalyst and author of Transgender Psychoanalysis: A Lacanian Perspective on Sexual Difference Through a close reading of psychoanalytic texts, Fernanda Magallanes makes Freud lie down on the couch of post-structural, feminist, queer, and trans theories. Paying attention to Freud's use of the story of Oedipus and to his bodily specificities, Magallanes unveils the patriarchal foundations of the Freudian narrative of the Greek myth. Instead of getting rid of Oedipus, Magallanes' interesting move is to save Oedipus from the Freudian norm giving him the chance to accept his own vulnerability and alterity. The result shakes the foundations both of psychoanalytic theory and practice. Magallanes's incisive essay deserves to play a central role in what I hope will become a movement of thought that will question the sexual and gender normativity of psychoanalytic discourses and practices. -Paul B. Preciado, author of Testo Junkie, The Countersexual Manifiesto and Pornotopia