Customer Reviews

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

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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!

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.