Who's That Girl? Who's That Boy?: Clinical Practice Meets Postmodern Gender Theory [Hardcover]

Lynne Layton (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0765701405 | ISBN-13: 978-0765701404 | Publication Date: April 1998

Informed by first-rate scholarship, the ideas (structuralism) and popular icons (Madonna) that define contemporary culture mingle synergistically with a powerfully concerned clinical sensibility.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Impressive. Who's That Girl? Who's That Boy? offers the most hopeful outlook to understanding gender identity in recent memory." -- Randi Kaufman, Sojourner, March 1999

"[An] erudite and sophisticated attempt to reconcile two important cultural forces that may sometimes seem at odds with each other. Layton has done an impressive job of synthesizing the work of many disparate theorists and adding to the literature of cultural criticism as well as clinical relational feminist psychoanalysis." -- Sheila Bienenfeld, The Women's Review of Books, October 1998 --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From the Back Cover

"This is a remarkable book. Lynne Layton engages some of the most abstract and challenging theorizing of our time and relates it to the way we live our lives, as reflected in popular culture and clinical practice. She gracefully bridges the most abstruse postmodern concepts with the popular iconography of film, music, and fiction. Her writing is critical but respectful, highly accessible but never simplistic,and personal. She speaks to the central struggles of women and men in our gender-confused times, with a voice that is both strong and sympathetic." (Stephen Mitchel, Ph.D.) --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 267 pages
• Publisher: Jason Aronson (April 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0765701405
• ISBN-13: 978-0765701404
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,141,416 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars multidisciplinary brilliance, September 25, 2008

By 

Fred E. Maus (Charlottesville VA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Who's That Girl? Who's That Boy?: Clinical Practice Meets Postmodern Gender Theory, Second Expanded Edition (Bending Psychoanalysis Book) (Paperback)

Layton has a triple citizenship in academic gender theory (with its reliance on Lacan and continentally-oriented theorists such as Judith Butler); Anglo-American psychoanalytic practice, with its emphasis on clinical experience and its respect for clients' longing for wholeness; and pop culture (Madonna, Blue Velvet ...). She is unusually gifted at clear, humane, politically-engaged writing; the book is full of thoughtful, insightful writing, including some of the very best writing on Madonna. She is particularly fine in articulating the tensions among different schools of psychonanalysis, always writing about this in a way that is conceptually lucid and personally committed. I wish there were more books by her to read!

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Challenging, didactic, never pedantic, August 25, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Who's That Girl? Who's That Boy?: Clinical Practice Meets Postmodern Gender Theory (Hardcover)

An enjoyable set of reversible one way mirrors where approachable and popular icons and genres are exhibits used to explain and to critique implications of cultural and psychoanalytic theories which themselves are employed by the author to understand the dominance of specific icons and the particular content of several cultural forms. On a practical level, the work is an effective counterpoint to the neo-scary pigeonholing of persons and, more specifically, psychotherapy patients, in biological categories which the author demonstrates succesfully are not biological at all.