Sheila L Cavanagh
Biographic Data
| ID | 148440 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sheila L Cavanagh |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sheila L |
| FAMILY NAME | Cavanagh |
| SIGNATURE | CAVANAGH S L |
| AFFILIATIONS | York University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8393-2692 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 101 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 26 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Jacques Lacan and the Ravishing of Lol Stein by Marguerite Duras
This article is about a lecture Jacques Lacan gave in 1965 titled “Hommage fait à Marguerite Duras du ravissement de Lol v. Stein.” Lacan acknowledges his lack alongside the genius of Duras while also saying that she “knows, without me, what I teach.” Duras understands, perhaps better than Lacan, what he has been formulating relevant to feminine sexuality and object a (the nondescript Thing animating desire). She gives narrative form not only to …
Missing in Action: Where’s the Unconscious in Anti-Racist “Unconscious Bias Training”
This article carries out a psychoanalytic and political critique of recent attempts at fighting racism, focusing on antiracist “unconscious bias training” at universities and in international development. It claims that these regimes of institutional training depend on knowledge- and awareness-based education of university staff and international cooperants, thereby not only negating the significant psychoanalytic dimensions of racism, but also d…
The Matrixial Gaze: Transgender in Boys Don’t Cry
This article brings the feminist psychoanalysis of Bracha L. Ettinger to a reading of Kimberley Pierce’s landmark film Boys Don’t Cry. While many transgender studies scholars have critiqued the film from an intersectional lens, few have engaged important questions relevant to a transgender gaze from a feminist psychoanalytic angle. Feminist psychoanalytic theory offers insight into the gaze, the mirror, gender, sexual difference, temporality, tra…
Matrixial Subjectivity, Aesthetics, Ethics: Volume I 1990-2000
Transgender and the Other sexual difference in Vivek Shraya’s Trisha
Sociotherapy in the Time of Covid-19: A Critical Position Paper on the Importance of Sociology
This paper contends that sociotherapy, a sociologically informed approach to therapy, is a viable alternative to the diagnostic model recognized by the College of Registered Psychotherapists in Ontario (CRPO). The Psychotherapy Act (2007) along with the Regulated Health Professions Act (1991) gives the CRPO authorization to regulate the practice of psychotherapy and to control titles affiliated with the act of psychotherapy. I offer a discussion …
Medicalization and Masculinities
presents original interdisciplinary research concerning feminist theory, gender, power, and inequality, both globally and locally promotes theoretical and methodological debates within gender research
Psychic Life of Gender: Introducing a psycho-soma-technical approach to gender
PETERSEN are part of the FKK-funded project Medicine Man, which explores how everyday cultures and perceptions of middle age men's bodies unfold when masculinity is increasingly both mediatized and medicalized. Today large parts of intimate life, health and social relations have become mediatized: Bodies are monitored using mobile apps, communities are formed on social media, and intimate questions are increasingly the topic of TV-shows and inten…
Queer Theory, Psychoanalysis, and the Symptom: A Lacanian Reading
In Clinical Encounters in Sexuality Giffney and Watson have made an intricate tie between (at least) two divergent fields. This essay considers the sexual impasse between queer theory, including queer of color critique, and psychoanalysis, mapped out in the collection, in terms of the Lacanian sinthome. In Le Sinthome Lacan describes the sinthome as a jouissant fault point that enables something in/of the failed sexual relationship to work out. I…
Transcryptums
This article brings the psychoanalysis of Bracha L. Ettinger to the question of mourning in the television series Transparent. As evident in the television series, and in everyday life, there is a troubling metonymy linking trans* lives with death. The appeal to death is often in stark contrast to the way trans* people experience their transitions as giving form to a new and invigorating commitment to life. Despite this, there can be something ha…
Transgender, Hysteria, and the Other Sexual Difference: An Ettingerian Approach
This article uses the feminist-psychoanalytic scholarship of Bracha L. Ettinger to consider a relationship between the discourse of the hysteric and the discourse of transgender (trans*). Both discourses struggle to articulate a dimension of being that lacks symbolization in the socio-Symbolic. My contention is that trans* subjectivity is metonymically linked to the discourse of the hysteric, and that both demographics are attuned to what Ettinge…
Transpsychoanalytics
This issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly profiles the transgender turn in psychoanalytic theory, and the development of what I refer to as “transpsychoanalytics.” This transition has not been easy because psychoanalytic theorists and analysts have often represented trans* subjectivity and gender variance as pathological. Sigmund Freud's early writing on the “masculinity complex” and “penis envy,” for example, have been used to render fema…
The Somatechnics of Sexuality in Canada
Transsexuality as Sinthome: Bracha L. Ettinger and the Other (Feminine) Sexual Difference
This article uses Bracha L. Ettinger's theory of the matrixial borderspace in relation to Jacques Lacan's analytic of sexuation to argue that transsexuality isn't reducible to psychosis. Rather, transsexuality taps into an Other (feminine) sexual difference that is subjectifying and can be understood in relation to Ettinger's conception of metramorphosis and the matrixial. Transsexuality involves the somatization of the Other sexual difference an…
Affect, Performance, and Ethnographic Methods in Queer Bathroom Monologues
As a critical methodology, performance ethnography offers researchers a unique opportunity to tap into what I call queer social scientific remainders by using the dramatic staging of ethnographic material such that it can be disseminated to audiences in an arts-based dramatic forum. While ethnographers are often drawn to the atmosphere of the theatre and its capacity to give multidimensionality to their research, there is a lack of engagement wit…
Response from the author
This article is part of a review symposium of Sheila Cavanagh's book Queering bathrooms: gender, sexuality and the hygienic imagination, 2010, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 295 pp., £19.94 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-4426-10736 Notes 1. Previously, the great ‘toilet’ book of the twentieth century was Alexander Kira's The Bathroom, published in 1966 and 1967 and revised substantially in 1976. Few publications on the subject appeared between 19…
Queering Bathrooms: Gender, Sexuality, and the Hygienic Imagination
Cuerpos transexuales en las Olimpíadas: Las políticas del Comité Internacional Olímpico en relación con l@s atletas transexuales en los Juegos de Verano, Atenas 2004
Cuerpos transexuales en las Olimpíadas
Sex in the lesbian teacher's closet: The Hybrid Proliferation of Queers in School1
Using feminist, queer and postcolonial theories, this paper analyzes the public commentary and anxious concern about child-welfare in a recent lesbian teacher sex scandal in Vancouver, Canada, involving Jean Robertson. Arguing that the public and professional uproar is not really about child-protectionism so much as it is about the place of white teacher lesbianism in school culture, I ask new questions about how the regulation of teenage sexuali…
Transsexual Bodies at the Olympics: The International Olympic Committee's Policy on Transsexual Athletes at the 2004 Athens Summer Games
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has always been plagued by what queer theorist Judith Butler calls gender trouble. In 2000, the IOC discontinued their practice of sex-testing because medical experts could not agree on what defined a genetic female and so an adequate medical testing measure could not be found. In response to outside pressure, the IOC adopted a policy enabling transsexual athletes to compete in the 2004 Olympic Games. Thi…
Spinsters, Schoolmarms, and Queers: Female teacher gender and sexuality in medicine and psychoanalytic theory and history
This paper examines the social construction of white, female, spinster teacher personality profiles in the first half of the 20th century. Focusing on the psychological, medical, and psychoanalytic literature, I provide an overview of how white unmarried female teacher personalities were understood in order to provide a historical context for present day queer and transgender identities in North American schools. I identify four main personality …
Female-Teacher Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Ontario, Canada
[The Romans] created the cult of the Vestal Virgins, high-minded priestesses of the goddess Vesta, Guardian Angel of Mankind and Keeper of the Hearth. These priestesses were educated in special normal training schools, were forbidden to marry, were subjected to drastic moral codes, and were accorded social position of preeminence. Spinster teachers were hired so frequently in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that they eventually …
Sexing the Teacher
Research Article| March 01 2005 Sexing the Teacher: VOYEURISTIC PLEASURE IN THE AMY GEHRING SEX PANIC Sheila L. Cavanagh Sheila L. Cavanagh Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Social Text (2005) 23 (1 (82)): 111–134. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-23-1_82-111 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter Email Permissions Search Site Citation Sheila L. Cavanagh; Sexing the Teacher: VOYEURISTIC PLEASURE IN THE AMY GEHRI…
Upsetting Desires in the Classroom: School Sex Scandals and the Pedagogy of the Femme Fatale
The Gender of Professionalism and Occupational Closure: The management of tenure-related disputes by the 'Federation of Women Teachers' Associations of Ontario' 1918-1949
This article examines how the gender of professionalism is central to an understanding of occupational closure. Using the social history of the Federation of Women Teachers' Associations of Ontario (FWTAO) as an example, the author shows how the executive allegiance to the gender of professionalism incited a moral concern with rural women teachers employed in the elementary public school system in the early twentieth century, and how this concern…
Transsexual Bodies at the Olympics: The International Olympic Committee's Policy on Transsexual Athletes at the 2004 Athens Summer Games
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has always been plagued by what queer theorist Judith Butler calls gender trouble. In 2000, the IOC discontinued their practice of sex-testing because medical experts could not agree on what defined a genetic female and so an adequate medical testing measure could not be found. In response to outside pressure, the IOC adopted a policy enabling transsexual athletes to compete in the 2004 Olympic Games. Thi…
Transsexuality as Sinthome: Bracha L. Ettinger and the Other (Feminine) Sexual Difference
This article uses Bracha L. Ettinger's theory of the matrixial borderspace in relation to Jacques Lacan's analytic of sexuation to argue that transsexuality isn't reducible to psychosis. Rather, transsexuality taps into an Other (feminine) sexual difference that is subjectifying and can be understood in relation to Ettinger's conception of metramorphosis and the matrixial. Transsexuality involves the somatization of the Other sexual difference an…
Female-Teacher Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Ontario, Canada
[The Romans] created the cult of the Vestal Virgins, high-minded priestesses of the goddess Vesta, Guardian Angel of Mankind and Keeper of the Hearth. These priestesses were educated in special normal training schools, were forbidden to marry, were subjected to drastic moral codes, and were accorded social position of preeminence. Spinster teachers were hired so frequently in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that they eventually …
Transpsychoanalytics
This issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly profiles the transgender turn in psychoanalytic theory, and the development of what I refer to as “transpsychoanalytics.” This transition has not been easy because psychoanalytic theorists and analysts have often represented trans* subjectivity and gender variance as pathological. Sigmund Freud's early writing on the “masculinity complex” and “penis envy,” for example, have been used to render fema…
Upsetting Desires in the Classroom: School Sex Scandals and the Pedagogy of the Femme Fatale
Teacher Transsexuality: The Illusion of Sexual Difference and the Idea of Adolescent Trauma in the Dana Rivers Case
This article focuses on a media-induced school scandal involving a male to female transsexual teacher, Dana Rivers, who taught for a school board just outside Sacramento, California. Rivers was fired for allegedly talking to students about her sexuality and the importance of gender self-determination. I offer a psychoanalytic reading of the transphobic response on the part of parents lobbying for Rivers' dismissal and appraise the adolescent trau…
Affect, Performance, and Ethnographic Methods in Queer Bathroom Monologues
As a critical methodology, performance ethnography offers researchers a unique opportunity to tap into what I call queer social scientific remainders by using the dramatic staging of ethnographic material such that it can be disseminated to audiences in an arts-based dramatic forum. While ethnographers are often drawn to the atmosphere of the theatre and its capacity to give multidimensionality to their research, there is a lack of engagement wit…
Transcryptums
This article brings the psychoanalysis of Bracha L. Ettinger to the question of mourning in the television series Transparent. As evident in the television series, and in everyday life, there is a troubling metonymy linking trans* lives with death. The appeal to death is often in stark contrast to the way trans* people experience their transitions as giving form to a new and invigorating commitment to life. Despite this, there can be something ha…
Transgender, Hysteria, and the Other Sexual Difference: An Ettingerian Approach
This article uses the feminist-psychoanalytic scholarship of Bracha L. Ettinger to consider a relationship between the discourse of the hysteric and the discourse of transgender (trans*). Both discourses struggle to articulate a dimension of being that lacks symbolization in the socio-Symbolic. My contention is that trans* subjectivity is metonymically linked to the discourse of the hysteric, and that both demographics are attuned to what Ettinge…
Spinsters, Schoolmarms, and Queers: Female teacher gender and sexuality in medicine and psychoanalytic theory and history
This paper examines the social construction of white, female, spinster teacher personality profiles in the first half of the 20th century. Focusing on the psychological, medical, and psychoanalytic literature, I provide an overview of how white unmarried female teacher personalities were understood in order to provide a historical context for present day queer and transgender identities in North American schools. I identify four main personality …
The Gender of Professionalism and Occupational Closure: The management of tenure-related disputes by the 'Federation of Women Teachers' Associations of Ontario' 1918-1949
This article examines how the gender of professionalism is central to an understanding of occupational closure. Using the social history of the Federation of Women Teachers' Associations of Ontario (FWTAO) as an example, the author shows how the executive allegiance to the gender of professionalism incited a moral concern with rural women teachers employed in the elementary public school system in the early twentieth century, and how this concern…
Medicalization and Masculinities
presents original interdisciplinary research concerning feminist theory, gender, power, and inequality, both globally and locally promotes theoretical and methodological debates within gender research
Psychic Life of Gender: Introducing a psycho-soma-technical approach to gender
PETERSEN are part of the FKK-funded project Medicine Man, which explores how everyday cultures and perceptions of middle age men's bodies unfold when masculinity is increasingly both mediatized and medicalized. Today large parts of intimate life, health and social relations have become mediatized: Bodies are monitored using mobile apps, communities are formed on social media, and intimate questions are increasingly the topic of TV-shows and inten…
Sex in the lesbian teacher's closet: The Hybrid Proliferation of Queers in School1
Using feminist, queer and postcolonial theories, this paper analyzes the public commentary and anxious concern about child-welfare in a recent lesbian teacher sex scandal in Vancouver, Canada, involving Jean Robertson. Arguing that the public and professional uproar is not really about child-protectionism so much as it is about the place of white teacher lesbianism in school culture, I ask new questions about how the regulation of teenage sexuali…
Sexing the Teacher
Research Article| March 01 2005 Sexing the Teacher: VOYEURISTIC PLEASURE IN THE AMY GEHRING SEX PANIC Sheila L. Cavanagh Sheila L. Cavanagh Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Social Text (2005) 23 (1 (82)): 111–134. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-23-1_82-111 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter Email Permissions Search Site Citation Sheila L. Cavanagh; Sexing the Teacher: VOYEURISTIC PLEASURE IN THE AMY GEHRI…
The Gender of Professionalism and Occupational Closure: The management of tenure-related disputes by the 'Federation of Women Teachers' Associations of Ontario' 1918-1949
This article examines how the gender of professionalism is central to an understanding of occupational closure. Using the social history of the Federation of Women Teachers' Associations of Ontario (FWTAO) as an example, the author shows how the executive allegiance to the gender of professionalism incited a moral concern with rural women teachers employed in the elementary public school system in the early twentieth century, and how this concern…
Teacher Transsexuality: The Illusion of Sexual Difference and the Idea of Adolescent Trauma in the Dana Rivers Case
This article focuses on a media-induced school scandal involving a male to female transsexual teacher, Dana Rivers, who taught for a school board just outside Sacramento, California. Rivers was fired for allegedly talking to students about her sexuality and the importance of gender self-determination. I offer a psychoanalytic reading of the transphobic response on the part of parents lobbying for Rivers' dismissal and appraise the adolescent trau…
Upsetting Desires in the Classroom: School Sex Scandals and the Pedagogy of the Femme Fatale
Female-Teacher Gender and Sexuality in Twentieth-Century Ontario, Canada
[The Romans] created the cult of the Vestal Virgins, high-minded priestesses of the goddess Vesta, Guardian Angel of Mankind and Keeper of the Hearth. These priestesses were educated in special normal training schools, were forbidden to marry, were subjected to drastic moral codes, and were accorded social position of preeminence. Spinster teachers were hired so frequently in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that they eventually …
Sexing the Teacher
Research Article| March 01 2005 Sexing the Teacher: VOYEURISTIC PLEASURE IN THE AMY GEHRING SEX PANIC Sheila L. Cavanagh Sheila L. Cavanagh Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Social Text (2005) 23 (1 (82)): 111–134. https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-23-1_82-111 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter Email Permissions Search Site Citation Sheila L. Cavanagh; Sexing the Teacher: VOYEURISTIC PLEASURE IN THE AMY GEHRI…
Transsexual Bodies at the Olympics: The International Olympic Committee's Policy on Transsexual Athletes at the 2004 Athens Summer Games
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has always been plagued by what queer theorist Judith Butler calls gender trouble. In 2000, the IOC discontinued their practice of sex-testing because medical experts could not agree on what defined a genetic female and so an adequate medical testing measure could not be found. In response to outside pressure, the IOC adopted a policy enabling transsexual athletes to compete in the 2004 Olympic Games. Thi…
Spinsters, Schoolmarms, and Queers: Female teacher gender and sexuality in medicine and psychoanalytic theory and history
This paper examines the social construction of white, female, spinster teacher personality profiles in the first half of the 20th century. Focusing on the psychological, medical, and psychoanalytic literature, I provide an overview of how white unmarried female teacher personalities were understood in order to provide a historical context for present day queer and transgender identities in North American schools. I identify four main personality …
Sex in the lesbian teacher's closet: The Hybrid Proliferation of Queers in School1
Using feminist, queer and postcolonial theories, this paper analyzes the public commentary and anxious concern about child-welfare in a recent lesbian teacher sex scandal in Vancouver, Canada, involving Jean Robertson. Arguing that the public and professional uproar is not really about child-protectionism so much as it is about the place of white teacher lesbianism in school culture, I ask new questions about how the regulation of teenage sexuali…
Cuerpos transexuales en las Olimpíadas: Las políticas del Comité Internacional Olímpico en relación con l@s atletas transexuales en los Juegos de Verano, Atenas 2004
Cuerpos transexuales en las Olimpíadas
Queering Bathrooms: Gender, Sexuality, and the Hygienic Imagination
Response from the author
This article is part of a review symposium of Sheila Cavanagh's book Queering bathrooms: gender, sexuality and the hygienic imagination, 2010, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 295 pp., £19.94 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-4426-10736 Notes 1. Previously, the great ‘toilet’ book of the twentieth century was Alexander Kira's The Bathroom, published in 1966 and 1967 and revised substantially in 1976. Few publications on the subject appeared between 19…
Affect, Performance, and Ethnographic Methods in Queer Bathroom Monologues
As a critical methodology, performance ethnography offers researchers a unique opportunity to tap into what I call queer social scientific remainders by using the dramatic staging of ethnographic material such that it can be disseminated to audiences in an arts-based dramatic forum. While ethnographers are often drawn to the atmosphere of the theatre and its capacity to give multidimensionality to their research, there is a lack of engagement wit…
Transsexuality as Sinthome: Bracha L. Ettinger and the Other (Feminine) Sexual Difference
This article uses Bracha L. Ettinger's theory of the matrixial borderspace in relation to Jacques Lacan's analytic of sexuation to argue that transsexuality isn't reducible to psychosis. Rather, transsexuality taps into an Other (feminine) sexual difference that is subjectifying and can be understood in relation to Ettinger's conception of metramorphosis and the matrixial. Transsexuality involves the somatization of the Other sexual difference an…
Transpsychoanalytics
This issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly profiles the transgender turn in psychoanalytic theory, and the development of what I refer to as “transpsychoanalytics.” This transition has not been easy because psychoanalytic theorists and analysts have often represented trans* subjectivity and gender variance as pathological. Sigmund Freud's early writing on the “masculinity complex” and “penis envy,” for example, have been used to render fema…
The Somatechnics of Sexuality in Canada
Queer Theory, Psychoanalysis, and the Symptom: A Lacanian Reading
In Clinical Encounters in Sexuality Giffney and Watson have made an intricate tie between (at least) two divergent fields. This essay considers the sexual impasse between queer theory, including queer of color critique, and psychoanalysis, mapped out in the collection, in terms of the Lacanian sinthome. In Le Sinthome Lacan describes the sinthome as a jouissant fault point that enables something in/of the failed sexual relationship to work out. I…
Transcryptums
This article brings the psychoanalysis of Bracha L. Ettinger to the question of mourning in the television series Transparent. As evident in the television series, and in everyday life, there is a troubling metonymy linking trans* lives with death. The appeal to death is often in stark contrast to the way trans* people experience their transitions as giving form to a new and invigorating commitment to life. Despite this, there can be something ha…
Transgender, Hysteria, and the Other Sexual Difference: An Ettingerian Approach
This article uses the feminist-psychoanalytic scholarship of Bracha L. Ettinger to consider a relationship between the discourse of the hysteric and the discourse of transgender (trans*). Both discourses struggle to articulate a dimension of being that lacks symbolization in the socio-Symbolic. My contention is that trans* subjectivity is metonymically linked to the discourse of the hysteric, and that both demographics are attuned to what Ettinge…
Medicalization and Masculinities
presents original interdisciplinary research concerning feminist theory, gender, power, and inequality, both globally and locally promotes theoretical and methodological debates within gender research
Psychic Life of Gender: Introducing a psycho-soma-technical approach to gender
PETERSEN are part of the FKK-funded project Medicine Man, which explores how everyday cultures and perceptions of middle age men's bodies unfold when masculinity is increasingly both mediatized and medicalized. Today large parts of intimate life, health and social relations have become mediatized: Bodies are monitored using mobile apps, communities are formed on social media, and intimate questions are increasingly the topic of TV-shows and inten…
Sociotherapy in the Time of Covid-19: A Critical Position Paper on the Importance of Sociology
This paper contends that sociotherapy, a sociologically informed approach to therapy, is a viable alternative to the diagnostic model recognized by the College of Registered Psychotherapists in Ontario (CRPO). The Psychotherapy Act (2007) along with the Regulated Health Professions Act (1991) gives the CRPO authorization to regulate the practice of psychotherapy and to control titles affiliated with the act of psychotherapy. I offer a discussion …
The Matrixial Gaze: Transgender in Boys Don’t Cry
This article brings the feminist psychoanalysis of Bracha L. Ettinger to a reading of Kimberley Pierce’s landmark film Boys Don’t Cry. While many transgender studies scholars have critiqued the film from an intersectional lens, few have engaged important questions relevant to a transgender gaze from a feminist psychoanalytic angle. Feminist psychoanalytic theory offers insight into the gaze, the mirror, gender, sexual difference, temporality, tra…
Matrixial Subjectivity, Aesthetics, Ethics: Volume I 1990-2000
Transgender and the Other sexual difference in Vivek Shraya’s Trisha
Missing in Action: Where’s the Unconscious in Anti-Racist “Unconscious Bias Training”
This article carries out a psychoanalytic and political critique of recent attempts at fighting racism, focusing on antiracist “unconscious bias training” at universities and in international development. It claims that these regimes of institutional training depend on knowledge- and awareness-based education of university staff and international cooperants, thereby not only negating the significant psychoanalytic dimensions of racism, but also d…
Sociology (23 works) · Psychology (20 works) · Gender Studies (19 works) · Psychoanalysis (14 works) · Human sexuality (11 works) · Gender Studies (10 works) · Political science (10 works) · Epistemology (9 works) · Art (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works)