Knowing What You Want: Models of Sexual Desire and Dysfunction in Contemporary American Psychiatry
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
No booking required
Bloomsbury Research lecture
Dr Katharine Angel, Lecturer in Creative Writing, Birkbeck College
In this talk I will discuss the recent and contemporary debate around "Female Sexual Dysfunction" in American psychiatry, in particular the models of sexual desire in women that have been proposed in recent editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. I shall discuss recent attempts to emphasise desire in women as responsive rather than spontaneous, suggesting that this approach is both valuable and fraught with danger, and locating these attempts as well as the feminist critique of pharmaceuticals in the context of anxieties both about cultural attitudes towards sex and about psychiatry's psychoanalytic past.
Katherine Angel ,Author of Unmastered, A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell (Penguin, 2012, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013) http://www.katherineangel.com/
All welcome!