Liminal Space, Sexuality, and the Language of #MeToo

Bibliographic Data

ID21630378
AuthorsVelleda C Ceccoli (0009-0006-1444-4210, New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume30
Issue3
Pages258-266
Publication date2020-05-03
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenuePsychoanalytic Dialogues (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1048-1885 • E-ISSN: 1940-9222
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/10481885.2020.1744960
OpenAlexW3034945000
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited7

MeToo has advanced the way that we think and speak of sexual abuses of power by creating a powerful social platform in which victims can function as a group, symbolizing what as psychoanalysts we consider unthinkable, while also striking at the inherent paradox that sexuality poses – how to account for the vagaries of human sexuality and its transgressive nature while holding individual and collective abuses of power accountable? My essay addresses such questions by focusing on the way that language fails to hold and symbolize sexuality due to its affective excess and its driven and enigmatic qualities, and advances the idea that the sexual is metabolized in action with an other and not through words and language. Further, that the boundary between what is permissible and what is not is negotiated on both conscious and unconscious levels of knowing, which I refer to as the liminal area of sexuality. I develop these ideas within a post-Lacanian framework and suggest that psychoanalysis must interface with other disciplines in order to bring depth to our consideration of sexuality at its most transgressive as well as to help stretch the symbolic function of language

Epistemology · Human sexuality · Liminality · Linguistics · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Transgressive · Unconscious mind · Anthropology · Gender Studies · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Philosophy · Psychology

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