Virginia Goldner
Biographic Data
| ID | 1718698 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Virginia Goldner |
| GIVEN NAMES | Virginia |
| FAMILY NAME | Goldner |
| SIGNATURE | GOLDNER V |
| AFFILIATIONS | Ackerman Institute for the Family |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 107 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1985 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Intro to “Romantic Bonds, Binds and Ruptures: Couples on the Brink
Après Coup of “Romantic Bonds, Binds, and Ruptures: Couples on the Brink
Dimen: The Body as Fate/The Body as Canvas
Muriel died in 2016 — more than 7 years ago. But it remains impossible for me, even now, to take up the ambitions and historic accomplishments of her paper without first declaring how much she woul
What’s in a Name
Sam Guzzardi’s essay bridges cultural, political, and clinical registers in his discussion of a dense and heartfelt treatment of a genderqueer subject, who comes increasingly into their multivalenced subjectivity as the years unfold. The therapy is rigorous, creative, and poignant
Pleasure Can Hurt: The Erotic Politics of Sexual Coercion
Sexual coercion is an unstable practice, often performed nervously on the boundary between flirtation and violation, flattery and coercion. While it is true that sexuality may sometimes be lived on a liminal fourth dimension, where it is immunized from morality by the press of (mutual) desire, it is also true that desire can be commandeered by all manner of malignancies which coopt the erotic into a traumatic register. This essay takes sexual coe…
Introduction to the Panel: “Time’s Up?”: The Psychodynamic Politics of Sexual Coercion and #MeToo
In deconstructing the alchemy of sexuality, awash in its painful pleasures, these papers consider how the eros of erotic pressure can default into the trauma of sexual coercion. They also consider how, from a feminist perspective, the “personal is (still) political,” but how, from a psychoanalytic perspective, the sheer messiness of sex makes it extremely difficult to hold it to account. In sexuality, surrender and submission live in very close q…
Sexual Harassment: Seeking the Pleasures of "Consent" Under Duress
Sexual harassment, unlike rape, is a project of leisurely objectification that depends, for its erotic charge, on the perversion of consent. Unlike rape, where consent is vanquished, or erotic mutuality, where it is ratified, the pleasure of sexual harassment is that “consent” is coerced, that is, it is “consent” under duress. Under these conditions, which slowly dismantle the personhood of the victim, the issue becomes one of reality testing. “J…
Rape Jokes: Laugh Till You Cry
Rape “jokes” are disturbing. We almost laugh, we cringe, some of us tear up. This essay deconstructs the psychic action of such material and the way an audience (or community) can find themselves reluctantly identifying with the affable, loquacious sociopath (think Bill Cosby). His victims become nothing more than roadkill, no match for the clever narcissist who never shuts up
Remembering Muriel
Muriel Dimen was singular—but also multiple. A brave risk taker, wearing her vulnerability. A mentor showing her uncertainty. She created a hybrid form of written address in which the formal and the colloquial, the public and the intimate, the erotic and the traumatic, the put-together and the broken-up shared the stage, speaking not as one but as multiples. The world without her feels like an endless absence
Predatory Priests, Silenced Victims: The Sexual Abuse Crisis and The Catholic Church
Through the Lens of Psychoanalysis: The Photographic Portraiture of Robert Giard—A Panel Discussion
In this transcript of a panel on the exhibit of Robert Giard’s portraits, Just as You Are, at the University of Toronto on May 4, 2012, 4 panelists approach the work politically and personally, aesthetically and psychoanalytically. Harris considers the tension in queer portraiture between intelligibility and liminality; Corbett discusses the artist’s and subjects’ frank engagement; Goldner addresses safety, vulnerability, and mutuality in the por…
Talking Sex, Talking Gender-A Roundtable
This is an edited transcript of a roundtable held in the Spring of 2012, at the invitation of the Toronto Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, where 4 of the most important psychoanalytic thinkers in the fields of gender and sexuality, Adrienne Harris, Virginia Goldner, Muriel Dimen, and Ken Corbett, came together to discuss the state of the field. Each of the participants prepared 1 question for each of the others. The discussion explored …
Trans: Gender in Free Fall
Transgender subjectivities are paradoxical in that they both undermine the gender binary and ratify it. The contradictions inherent in trans require that we consider trans as more of a process than a thing in itself, a gerund, rather than a noun or adjective, a continuous work in progress, rather than a static fact of the self. But despite cultural upheavals and increasing tolerance, we still want our gender straight up. While we approve and ofte…
The Sexual Abuse Crisis and the Catholic Church: Gender, Sexuality, Power and Discourse
Ironic Gender/Authentic Sex
Feminism and the postmodern turn have vaporized the commonsense materiality of gender and sexuality, both in theory and, for many, as lived experience. But where gender has moved to the ironic, sexuality still holds the space for the “authentic.” Gender now seems squarely positioned in a postmodern sensibility, but sexuality still veers between the modern and the postmodern. We can conceive and experience gender as being “made,” but sexuality ret…
Stephen Moved very, very Fast”—Margaret Black, 2001
Reading and Writing, Talking and Listening Introducing Studies in Gender and Sexuality
(2000). Reading and Writing, Talking and Listening Introducing Studies in Gender and Sexuality. Studies in Gender and Sexuality: Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 1-7
Boys Will Be Men: A Response to Terry Real's Paper
No abstract available for this article
Current Trends in Feminist Thought and Therapy: U.s.A
It is argued that the intellectual and cultural developments of post-modernism have disrupted the foundational theories of both feminist and systematic practice. As a result, these two critical traditions no longer stand in abstract opposition to one another, and can be better understood as compatible discourses in a stage of turmoil and transition
Sex, Power, and Gender: A Feminist Systemic Analysis of the Politics of Passion
This paper will present an analysis of the dynamics of sexual excitement in heterosexual relationships, including the connection between sexuality and gender. It will also document how passion can become the location for the struggle for power between men and women. These ideas will be illustrated via a single case, which will include discussion of the treatment strategy
Toward a critical relational theory of gender
This article analyzes and critiques the construct of gender as a psychoanalytic and cultural category. Without succumbing to a nonpsychoanalytic notion of androgyny, the argument developed here challenges the assumption that an internally consistent gender identity is possible or even desirable. Beginning with the idea that, from an analytic perspective, the construct of "identity"; is problematic and implausible, because it denotes and privilege…
Love and Violence: Gender Paradoxes in Volatile Attachments
This article presents a multidimensional, theoretical model for the understanding of relationships in which men are violent toward women. It argues that abusive relationships exemplify, in extremis, the stereotypical gender arrangements that structure intimacy between men and women generally. Moreover, it proposes that paradoxical gender injunctions create insoluble relationship dilemmas that can explode in violence. A multifaceted approach to tr…
Feminism and Family Therapy
Feminism has had a profound effect on contemporary culture and on thinking in most academic fields, including psychoanalysis. Interestingly, until very recently it had made virtually no impact on the theory and practice of family therapy. This paper proposes an explanation for this peculiar phenomenon and argues that family therapy has been considerably handicapped by its insularity from the feminist critique. Utilizing feminist scholarship in ps…
Toward a critical relational theory of gender
This article analyzes and critiques the construct of gender as a psychoanalytic and cultural category. Without succumbing to a nonpsychoanalytic notion of androgyny, the argument developed here challenges the assumption that an internally consistent gender identity is possible or even desirable. Beginning with the idea that, from an analytic perspective, the construct of "identity"; is problematic and implausible, because it denotes and privilege…
Trans: Gender in Free Fall
Transgender subjectivities are paradoxical in that they both undermine the gender binary and ratify it. The contradictions inherent in trans require that we consider trans as more of a process than a thing in itself, a gerund, rather than a noun or adjective, a continuous work in progress, rather than a static fact of the self. But despite cultural upheavals and increasing tolerance, we still want our gender straight up. While we approve and ofte…
Ironic Gender/Authentic Sex
Feminism and the postmodern turn have vaporized the commonsense materiality of gender and sexuality, both in theory and, for many, as lived experience. But where gender has moved to the ironic, sexuality still holds the space for the “authentic.” Gender now seems squarely positioned in a postmodern sensibility, but sexuality still veers between the modern and the postmodern. We can conceive and experience gender as being “made,” but sexuality ret…
Talking Sex, Talking Gender-A Roundtable
This is an edited transcript of a roundtable held in the Spring of 2012, at the invitation of the Toronto Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, where 4 of the most important psychoanalytic thinkers in the fields of gender and sexuality, Adrienne Harris, Virginia Goldner, Muriel Dimen, and Ken Corbett, came together to discuss the state of the field. Each of the participants prepared 1 question for each of the others. The discussion explored …
Sexual Harassment: Seeking the Pleasures of "Consent" Under Duress
Sexual harassment, unlike rape, is a project of leisurely objectification that depends, for its erotic charge, on the perversion of consent. Unlike rape, where consent is vanquished, or erotic mutuality, where it is ratified, the pleasure of sexual harassment is that “consent” is coerced, that is, it is “consent” under duress. Under these conditions, which slowly dismantle the personhood of the victim, the issue becomes one of reality testing. “J…
Sex, Power, and Gender: A Feminist Systemic Analysis of the Politics of Passion
This paper will present an analysis of the dynamics of sexual excitement in heterosexual relationships, including the connection between sexuality and gender. It will also document how passion can become the location for the struggle for power between men and women. These ideas will be illustrated via a single case, which will include discussion of the treatment strategy
Feminism and Family Therapy
Feminism has had a profound effect on contemporary culture and on thinking in most academic fields, including psychoanalysis. Interestingly, until very recently it had made virtually no impact on the theory and practice of family therapy. This paper proposes an explanation for this peculiar phenomenon and argues that family therapy has been considerably handicapped by its insularity from the feminist critique. Utilizing feminist scholarship in ps…
Love and Violence: Gender Paradoxes in Volatile Attachments
This article presents a multidimensional, theoretical model for the understanding of relationships in which men are violent toward women. It argues that abusive relationships exemplify, in extremis, the stereotypical gender arrangements that structure intimacy between men and women generally. Moreover, it proposes that paradoxical gender injunctions create insoluble relationship dilemmas that can explode in violence. A multifaceted approach to tr…
Sex, Power, and Gender: A Feminist Systemic Analysis of the Politics of Passion
This paper will present an analysis of the dynamics of sexual excitement in heterosexual relationships, including the connection between sexuality and gender. It will also document how passion can become the location for the struggle for power between men and women. These ideas will be illustrated via a single case, which will include discussion of the treatment strategy
Toward a critical relational theory of gender
This article analyzes and critiques the construct of gender as a psychoanalytic and cultural category. Without succumbing to a nonpsychoanalytic notion of androgyny, the argument developed here challenges the assumption that an internally consistent gender identity is possible or even desirable. Beginning with the idea that, from an analytic perspective, the construct of "identity"; is problematic and implausible, because it denotes and privilege…
Current Trends in Feminist Thought and Therapy: U.s.A
It is argued that the intellectual and cultural developments of post-modernism have disrupted the foundational theories of both feminist and systematic practice. As a result, these two critical traditions no longer stand in abstract opposition to one another, and can be better understood as compatible discourses in a stage of turmoil and transition
Boys Will Be Men: A Response to Terry Real's Paper
No abstract available for this article
Reading and Writing, Talking and Listening Introducing Studies in Gender and Sexuality
(2000). Reading and Writing, Talking and Listening Introducing Studies in Gender and Sexuality. Studies in Gender and Sexuality: Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 1-7
Stephen Moved very, very Fast”—Margaret Black, 2001
Ironic Gender/Authentic Sex
Feminism and the postmodern turn have vaporized the commonsense materiality of gender and sexuality, both in theory and, for many, as lived experience. But where gender has moved to the ironic, sexuality still holds the space for the “authentic.” Gender now seems squarely positioned in a postmodern sensibility, but sexuality still veers between the modern and the postmodern. We can conceive and experience gender as being “made,” but sexuality ret…
The Sexual Abuse Crisis and the Catholic Church: Gender, Sexuality, Power and Discourse
Trans: Gender in Free Fall
Transgender subjectivities are paradoxical in that they both undermine the gender binary and ratify it. The contradictions inherent in trans require that we consider trans as more of a process than a thing in itself, a gerund, rather than a noun or adjective, a continuous work in progress, rather than a static fact of the self. But despite cultural upheavals and increasing tolerance, we still want our gender straight up. While we approve and ofte…
Through the Lens of Psychoanalysis: The Photographic Portraiture of Robert Giard—A Panel Discussion
In this transcript of a panel on the exhibit of Robert Giard’s portraits, Just as You Are, at the University of Toronto on May 4, 2012, 4 panelists approach the work politically and personally, aesthetically and psychoanalytically. Harris considers the tension in queer portraiture between intelligibility and liminality; Corbett discusses the artist’s and subjects’ frank engagement; Goldner addresses safety, vulnerability, and mutuality in the por…
Talking Sex, Talking Gender-A Roundtable
This is an edited transcript of a roundtable held in the Spring of 2012, at the invitation of the Toronto Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis, where 4 of the most important psychoanalytic thinkers in the fields of gender and sexuality, Adrienne Harris, Virginia Goldner, Muriel Dimen, and Ken Corbett, came together to discuss the state of the field. Each of the participants prepared 1 question for each of the others. The discussion explored …
Predatory Priests, Silenced Victims: The Sexual Abuse Crisis and The Catholic Church
Rape Jokes: Laugh Till You Cry
Rape “jokes” are disturbing. We almost laugh, we cringe, some of us tear up. This essay deconstructs the psychic action of such material and the way an audience (or community) can find themselves reluctantly identifying with the affable, loquacious sociopath (think Bill Cosby). His victims become nothing more than roadkill, no match for the clever narcissist who never shuts up
Remembering Muriel
Muriel Dimen was singular—but also multiple. A brave risk taker, wearing her vulnerability. A mentor showing her uncertainty. She created a hybrid form of written address in which the formal and the colloquial, the public and the intimate, the erotic and the traumatic, the put-together and the broken-up shared the stage, speaking not as one but as multiples. The world without her feels like an endless absence
Sexual Harassment: Seeking the Pleasures of "Consent" Under Duress
Sexual harassment, unlike rape, is a project of leisurely objectification that depends, for its erotic charge, on the perversion of consent. Unlike rape, where consent is vanquished, or erotic mutuality, where it is ratified, the pleasure of sexual harassment is that “consent” is coerced, that is, it is “consent” under duress. Under these conditions, which slowly dismantle the personhood of the victim, the issue becomes one of reality testing. “J…
Pleasure Can Hurt: The Erotic Politics of Sexual Coercion
Sexual coercion is an unstable practice, often performed nervously on the boundary between flirtation and violation, flattery and coercion. While it is true that sexuality may sometimes be lived on a liminal fourth dimension, where it is immunized from morality by the press of (mutual) desire, it is also true that desire can be commandeered by all manner of malignancies which coopt the erotic into a traumatic register. This essay takes sexual coe…
Introduction to the Panel: “Time’s Up?”: The Psychodynamic Politics of Sexual Coercion and #MeToo
In deconstructing the alchemy of sexuality, awash in its painful pleasures, these papers consider how the eros of erotic pressure can default into the trauma of sexual coercion. They also consider how, from a feminist perspective, the “personal is (still) political,” but how, from a psychoanalytic perspective, the sheer messiness of sex makes it extremely difficult to hold it to account. In sexuality, surrender and submission live in very close q…
What’s in a Name
Sam Guzzardi’s essay bridges cultural, political, and clinical registers in his discussion of a dense and heartfelt treatment of a genderqueer subject, who comes increasingly into their multivalenced subjectivity as the years unfold. The therapy is rigorous, creative, and poignant
Dimen: The Body as Fate/The Body as Canvas
Muriel died in 2016 — more than 7 years ago. But it remains impossible for me, even now, to take up the ambitions and historic accomplishments of her paper without first declaring how much she woul
Intro to “Romantic Bonds, Binds and Ruptures: Couples on the Brink
Après Coup of “Romantic Bonds, Binds, and Ruptures: Couples on the Brink
Psychology (21 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Psychoanalysis (16 works) · Gender Studies (12 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Psychotherapy Techniques and Applications (9 works) · Human sexuality (8 works) · Epistemology (6 works) · Law (6 works) · Political science (6 works)