Lynne Segal
Biographic Data
| ID | 3694539 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Lynne Segal |
| GIVEN NAMES | Lynne |
| FAMILY NAME | Segal |
| SIGNATURE | SEGAL L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Birkbeck, University of London |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 60 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 247 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 59 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1983 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Men, what is to be done about them
Embracing Complexity and the Need for Inclusive Belongings
It is an acutely tragic time for many Jewish people who have for decades shared Eyal Rozmarin’s commitment to working for peace in Israel/Palestine. Rozmarin importantly emphasizes the many ties that bind people, often unconsciously, to collectivities, especially the ways in which nation states, or birthplaces, provide identity narratives that unite, or sometimes, discomfort, us. However, it is not so uncommon for people to have fractured belongi…
Coda
How do we tackle the enduring prejudice against the very idea of old age, resulting in the habitual marginalisation and disparagement of the elderly by people of all ages, including old people themselves? It remains a challenge, especially knowing that women have always been aged by culture, and frequently discarded in their public and personal lives, far faster than men. However, in this wide-ranging collection the diverse authors help us to sub…
Caring in a careless world
Embedding Mothering at the Heart of Politics
Despite an ever-greater interest in mothering over the decade since 2009, it seems clear that accounts of maternal experiences today still routinely express fears of failure and chronic frustration. I connect this with time constraints arising from the long hours of paid work most mothers are now performing, alongside ongoing welfare cuts generally and the privatisation or outsourcing of public resources – especially since 2010. This tells me tha…
From carewashing to radical care
Care, in all its permutations, is the buzzword of the moment, its meanings draining away in its constant evocation. Here, we briefly expand on older and newer meanings of care in the wake of Covid-19. These include the increasingly blurred boundaries between what has been traditionally understood as “care work” versus “essential work”; desperate attempts by corporations to promote themselves as ‘caring’; and the adoption of reactionary rather tha…
Alan Sinfield (1941-2017)
The celebrated queer theorist and literary scholar, Alan Sinfield, died on 2 December 2017, aged seventy-five. From his early adulthood it was clear that Alan’s dynamic intellectual presence would leave its mark both within and well outside academia. His rebellious curiosity and innovative imagination were honed from childhood by his distinct educational ascent as a beneficiary of rapidly expanding postwar welfarism. Alan was born in Southgate, n…
How government continues to make us more miserable
Promoting dissident collectivities
It is a good moment to recall the significance of Alan Sinfield's work for the ever volatile theorizing and practices embracing the possibilities and limits of rethinking gender, sexualities and the dissident subcultures of the left committed to any form of radical egalitarianism. Whether exploring the potential and limits of subversive performativities, the abject place of the ‘feminine’ in gay and straight cultures alike, or the possible fit be…
Temporal Vertigo
“I don’t feel old,” most older informants proclaim. That affirmation tells us much about the stigma surrounding old age. It tells us also about the temporal vertigo we face as we age if contemplating the multiplicity of continuities and discontinuities over time. Ageing is of interest to those who have always been skeptical about any notion of the “true self,” allowing us to puzzle over how the account the old give of themselves—if anyone is stil…
Desert Island Texts
Who Do You Think You Are? Feminist Memoir Writing
journeys, I was exploring.Of course, I was once again probing issues I've addressed often enough before, though this time in a less theoretical, more personal voice, mapping out my own engagement in, distance from, the particular patterns, conflicts, alliances and misalliances, of that movement quickly labelled '2nd-wave feminism'.It was, as most of you'll know, a movement that later veered off into a jumble of popular and academic feminisms, mul…
All Ages and None
Helene Moglen's article is especially welcome, given the paucity of psychoanalytic reflection on ageing. She usefully describes possible ways of managing the losses of ageing through accessing the multiple, decentered self-states embedded in our personal histories. However, I have some queries on her use of contrasting psychic topologies. In particular I wonder whether she is sometimes in danger of seeing images of former selves as being associat…
After Judith Butler
Gender, War and Militarism
The gender dynamics of militarism have traditionally been seen as straightforward, given the cultural mythologies of warfare and the disciplining of 'masculinity' that occurs in the training and use of men's capacity for violence in the armed services. However, women's relation to both war and peace has been varied and complex. It is women who have often been most prominent in working for peace, although there are no necessary links between women…
Competing Masculinities (III)
‘Ugly’, indeed, unbelievably ugly, were all the fruits of white men’s four centuries of contact with Africa. Marlow’s depiction of the people of Africa in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was, in many ways, more sophisticated than that of his contemporaries and predecessors. He thought he could detect a kinship with the ‘black beast’ of Africa created by the European imagination; others could not. One way of delving deeper into the fractured features o…
The Good Father
Sometimes, in the life of every man, the weight of male tradition must prove burdensome. We are now used to hearing of some of these burdens: men die younger than women; they are more prone to coronary disease; they find it difficult to seek help when they need it — regarding illness, for example, as a sign of weakness: something to be denied. A small but significant number of men have publicly declared their commitment to breaking out of the tra…
Competing Masculinities (II)
For Angus Suttie desiring men rather than women was at first even more painful than growing up in a working-class family in Scotland in the fifties and sixties: ‘Society told me ... I was despicable, and so I thought everyone like me was despicable ... I despised them as I despised myself.’2 Most men may never be quite free of anxiety over whether they are man enough. But only some men are systematically oppressed by the dominant conceptions of m…
The Belly of the Beast (II)
‘I have never been free of the fear of rape,’ Susan Griffin declared in a memorable article in the radical Californian magazine Ramparts back in 1971, adding: ‘I never asked why men raped; I simply thought it one of the many mysteries of human nature.’ 1 Decades later, decades during which feminists have repeatedly asked the question, devoting books and articles to finding the answer — the puzzle of men’s cruelty to women remains only just a litt…
Competing Masculinities (I)
‘Being a man,’ we learn from Norman Mailer, ‘is the continuing battle of one’s life.’2 Like the Arthurian knight at arms, forever at war, with oneself, with women, with honour, the contemporary guardians of true manhood still believe that living one’s life as a man involves toughness, struggle and conquest. Man is forever at war because, as Mailer once again informs us, he ‘can hardly ever assume he has become a man’.3 To understand men’s contemp…
The Belly of the Beast (I)
‘Man is complicated’, Catherine Stimpson announces, introducing one of the early North American texts in ‘Men’s Studies’.3 The more we explore the social and historical dimensions of masculinity, the more it is revealed as heterogeneous and contradictory. It is defined primarily through a series of hierarchical relations: rejection and suppression of femininity and homosexual desire, command and control over (often seen as ‘protection of’) the ‘w…
Asserting Phallic Mastery
It is within the journals and texts of cultural studies, rather than those of psychology, that the ‘phallus’ has been most tirelessly tracked down as the ubiquitous symbolic representation of the penis, and hence of male power. One of the predominant influences on this work has been the writings of Jacques Lacan.
Shrinking the Phallus
Until recently the idea of masculinity, to the extent that it was discussed at all, seemed relatively straightforward. What was not written in the genes was, increasingly from the 1940s, understood to be bred in the social expectations of ‘sex roles’. Today, however, in the light of the complex input from psychoanalytic thinking and feminism, men and masculinity have become more mysterious, more perplexing and worrying. For some at least, ‘mascul…
Beyond Gender Hierarchy
Approaching her 70th year in 1982, the US novelist and critic Elizabeth Janeway wrote of the revolution she had witnessed in her own lifetime — a revolution centred on gender: ‘We were part of a reversal of history, an absolute shift in the quality of reality.’1 Born in 1913, the first half of her life had been a time when ‘hopes existed only in the masculine mode’: ‘We copied men in our dreams because there was no one else to copy.’2 What is mos…
Radical Happiness
Book synopsis: A passionate call to rediscover the political and emotional joy that emerges when we share our lives \n \nIn an era of increasing individualism, we have never been more isolated and dispirited. A paradox confronts us. While research and technology find new ways to measure contentment and popular culture encourages us to think of happiness as a human right, misery is abundant. \n \nSegal believes we have lost the art of “radical hap…
Slow Motion
In this revised classic text, Segal's overview of theories of masculinity considers continuities and change in hegemonic notions of masculinity and focuses on competing male identities, exemplified in
From carewashing to radical care
Care, in all its permutations, is the buzzword of the moment, its meanings draining away in its constant evocation. Here, we briefly expand on older and newer meanings of care in the wake of Covid-19. These include the increasingly blurred boundaries between what has been traditionally understood as “care work” versus “essential work”; desperate attempts by corporations to promote themselves as ‘caring’; and the adoption of reactionary rather tha…
Changing men
Gender, War and Militarism
The gender dynamics of militarism have traditionally been seen as straightforward, given the cultural mythologies of warfare and the disciplining of 'masculinity' that occurs in the training and use of men's capacity for violence in the armed services. However, women's relation to both war and peace has been varied and complex. It is women who have often been most prominent in working for peace, although there are no necessary links between women…
Only Contradictions on Offer
Segal addresses feminism's future at a time when political energies are apparently in decline. She explores the contradictory models of feminism operating in political and media representations: the dominance of gender questions and gender anxieties, including the marked concern with models of 'proper' masculinity, inevitably implicates feminists in the political arena. The decline in political engagement among feminists is in any case disturbing…
Cautionary Tales
Pornography and Violence
It is now conventional wisdom that there is overwhelming scientific evidence linking pornography with sexual violence. The link 'is considerably stronger than that for cigarette smoking and cancer', Everywoman announces in its introduction to the transcript of the public hearings organized by Minneapolis City Council in 1983 to collect the latest evidence on pornography and sexual violence in support of proposals for new legislation against porno…
Caustic Collisions
Slow Change or No Change
'Love Your Enemy?', revolutionary feminists mockingly named their political manifesto of 1979, expressing the accumulated rage of some feminists after a decade of women's liberation. In it they exhorted all feminists to abandon heterosexuality at once. (Leeds Revolutionary Feminist Group, 1981) Another decade on, and loving or hating one's 'enemy' seems largely irrelevant to whether one accepts subordination or struggles against it. We may well h…
Feminism and Class Politics
In December 1984 Angela Weir and Elizabeth Wilson, two founding members of Feminist Review, published an article assessing contemporary British feminism and its relationship to the left and to class struggle. They suggested that the women's movement in general, and socialist-feminism in particular, had lost its former political sharpness. The academic focus of socialist-feminism has proved more interested in theorizing the ideological basis of se…
Coda
How do we tackle the enduring prejudice against the very idea of old age, resulting in the habitual marginalisation and disparagement of the elderly by people of all ages, including old people themselves? It remains a challenge, especially knowing that women have always been aged by culture, and frequently discarded in their public and personal lives, far faster than men. However, in this wide-ranging collection the diverse authors help us to sub…
Temporal Vertigo
“I don’t feel old,” most older informants proclaim. That affirmation tells us much about the stigma surrounding old age. It tells us also about the temporal vertigo we face as we age if contemplating the multiplicity of continuities and discontinuities over time. Ageing is of interest to those who have always been skeptical about any notion of the “true self,” allowing us to puzzle over how the account the old give of themselves—if anyone is stil…
Desert Island Texts
IV. Freud and Feminism
Slow Motion
Book synopsis: In this revised classic text, Segal's overview of theories of masculinity considers continuities and change in hegemonic notions of masculinity and focuses on competing male identities, exemplified in black, ethnic, gay and anti-sexist groups. The contrast in power and privilege across these groups has led many to speak of 'masculinity in crisis
Whose Left? Socialism, Feminism and the Future
Political generations appear and disappear with astonishing speed. Thirty years ago, a budding anarchist and sixties student radical, I shared with certain others of my generation and class a politics of generalized anti-authoritarianism and free love. In Australia at the time, coming out of the rigid conformity of
Beyond the Fragments
Feminism and 'The Family'
Feminism and Class Politics
In December 1984 Angela Weir and Elizabeth Wilson, two founding members of Feminist Review, published an article assessing contemporary British feminism and its relationship to the left and to class struggle. They suggested that the women's movement in general, and socialist-feminism in particular, had lost its former political sharpness. The academic focus of socialist-feminism has proved more interested in theorizing the ideological basis of se…
Divided Loyalties
Lynne Segal Interviews Diane Abbott
Out of Apathy
Keith McClelland, Lynne Segal; OUT OF APATHY: A one day conference on 30 years of the British New Left. Organised by Oxford University Socialist Discussion
Slow Change or No Change
'Love Your Enemy?', revolutionary feminists mockingly named their political manifesto of 1979, expressing the accumulated rage of some feminists after a decade of women's liberation. In it they exhorted all feminists to abandon heterosexuality at once. (Leeds Revolutionary Feminist Group, 1981) Another decade on, and loving or hating one's 'enemy' seems largely irrelevant to whether one accepts subordination or struggles against it. We may well h…
Pornography and Violence
It is now conventional wisdom that there is overwhelming scientific evidence linking pornography with sexual violence. The link 'is considerably stronger than that for cigarette smoking and cancer', Everywoman announces in its introduction to the transcript of the public hearings organized by Minneapolis City Council in 1983 to collect the latest evidence on pornography and sexual violence in support of proposals for new legislation against porno…
Whose Left? Socialism, Feminism and the Future
Political generations appear and disappear with astonishing speed. Thirty years ago, a budding anarchist and sixties student radical, I shared with certain others of my generation and class a politics of generalized anti-authoritarianism and free love. In Australia at the time, coming out of the rigid conformity of
Slow Motion
Sex Exposed
Aids Review
Aids Review
Ignorance, fear, brutality and neglect are not the main themes of this new book on AIDS, but something a little more insidious: the liberal and above all scientific discourses ofAIDS. It is here, as well as in the many more obvious abuses, that power, discrimination, homophobia, racism and prejudice reside. It is good to see a new book from Cindy Patton, one of the leading and most tireless activists, thinkers and writers about AIDS in the US. He…
Changing men
Slow Motion
Book synopsis: In this revised classic text, Segal's overview of theories of masculinity considers continuities and change in hegemonic notions of masculinity and focuses on competing male identities, exemplified in black, ethnic, gay and anti-sexist groups. The contrast in power and privilege across these groups has led many to speak of 'masculinity in crisis
The New Censorship
Straight sex
Doing What Comes Socio-Culturally
Gender uncertainties and the limits of psychology 1
Repensando la heterosexualidad
Repensando la heterosexualidad: las mujeres con los hombres
IV. Freud and Feminism
Straight Sex
Masculinities . R. W. Connell Manhood in America
New Sexual Agendas
Preface - Notes on the Contributors - Reconsidering British fin de siecle sexology L.Hall - Thinking Sex Historically L.Bland & F.Mort - Psychoanalytic Challenges S.Frosh - Sexual Values Revisited J.Weeks - Sexual Revolutions R.W.Connell - Feminist Sexual Politics and The Heterosexual Predicament L.Segal - Conservative Agendas and Government Policy M.Durham - Sexuality and Medicine L.Tiefer - Preventing HIV/AIDS in Gay Men G.Hart - The Limitation…
Caustic Collisions
Sociology (46 works) · Gender Studies (35 works) · Political science (31 works) · Psychology (28 works) · Law (27 works) · Politics (21 works) · Feminism (20 works) · Philosophy (18 works) · Psychoanalysis (15 works) · Human sexuality (13 works)